Earthly Powers (13 page)

       She did not hear the latter half of that. She picked on the grands hommes and repeated the phrase in distaste. "So, because the great men were like that, you must be like that too." Then belatedly she took in Oscar Wilde, remembering the scandal well enough. "If he was a great man, then it would be best for you to have ambitions to be a very little man. I cannot," she said, "believe, I cannot take this into my head."

       "I'm sorry, Mother. I do not know how long I could have kept this secret from you or from Father, but I wished it to be a secret. Now you have probed and asked and been given the truth you sought."

       Her tears were a sign that she was beginning to accept the unacceptable. "Your father," she said, "he must not know." And she muffled her sobs in a cologne-smelling square of cambric she took from her sleeve.

       "Father will know sometime," I said, "but let him rest in his ignorance for now. There is sometimes neither goodness nor beauty in truth."

       She could not resist crying aloud at that. "You try to be clever, you try to be the great man like Oscar Wilde. And you will end like him because you will think it clever to be what you say you are. Oh my God. What have I done, why should this happen to me?"

       "I have no doubt, Mother," I said with some coldness, "that Tom will make a good marriage and provide you with grandchildren. Hortense, too."

       "That innocent child. If you breathe, if you hint—" She looked very old now. "But all must know sooner or later. There will be scandal. The police. The newspapers." And then: "Poor Tom, serving his country, both his countries. And you being the great man with your scandalous books in London."

       "I am sorry, Mother, that the authorities have found me unfit to go and be slaughtered. I cannot help that either. I cannot help my heart being the way it is any more than I can help the other thing. It would solve so many problems, your unworthy wrongly made elder son dying for his country or countries. It may happen yet. The medical officers may be kinder or less kind to my poor heart next time. Next month, indeed. I report again next month. I hope everything will work out to your satisfaction."

       "Now you add viciousness and cruelty to the other wrong."

       "That's right, Mother. All my fault. There's a line from a poem I shall copy out neatly for you and frame." I gave it her as it was, in English: "'Gently dip, but not too deep.'" And then back to French with: "You asked for all this. I volunteered nothing. Tomorrow is the feast of the first martyr, but I shall be going to neither mass nor communion. I shall get the first train back to town. Whether you wish to see me again is entirely up to you."

       She heard noises I did not hear, holding herself straight the better to listen. "Guns," she said. "Across the Channel. Nothing but ruin, ruin. And Christmas ruined." She got up and looked at her face in my dressing-table mirror. "My face in ruins." It sounded less melodramatic in French. "I hope to God your father is already asleep. I am a bad actress."

       "A good mother, though," I said, "a good mother."

       She went out without bidding or kissing me good night, leaving it to me to get out of bed and turn the light off.

CHAPTER 16

Nineteen seventeen was, among other things, the year in which I began to make money. The medical board convened in Hounslow, to which I was summoned on January 16, found my heart still unacceptable and condemned me to the continued shameful life of a civilian. One of the medical officers, a patriot with a sewn-in whisky smell, insolently recommended that I take up "real war work," meaning the manufacture of guns and bullets, instead of merely trying to keep British culture alive. I told him that I proposed helping the country's morale by writing something humorous for the stage. They all shook their heads sadly.

       In my one room on Baron's Court Road, with a view of the tube trains clashing along aboveground, I wrestled with my piece. I was sustained, as before, by bully beef, army issue, sold to me by the office boy at the English Review. His uncle was a quartermaster sergeant in the Service Corps. I wrote, in very cold blood, never once even smiling at the cunning hilarity of my lines, a kind of French farce, not much of a tribute to the culture of my mother's native land. A married woman pretends to leave Paris for a few days in order to see her sick mother in Lille, but she actually spends the time with her lover in a little hotel in the Old Marais. Her husband, a singer with an artificial leg who she believes is performing in a concert in Dijon to raise money for soldier comforts, turns up with his mistress at the same hotel. The manager of the hotel has lost his voice as a consequence of the shock of hearing Big Bertha boom, his wife is huge and domineering but becomes gentle and amorous if you can find a particular trigger-point on her ample bottom and press it firmly. The sinning husband faints if he sees eggs, having been pecked by a hen as a child. The lover cannot bear to hear talk of rats. Say "All arks eventually reach their Ararats" and he starts to scream. At the end of the play the husband sings a song about rats and boiled eggs are served for breakfast. The landlord recovers his voice when Big Bertha booms again. There are epigrammatic cadenzas which have little to do with the action. I called this work, constructed in three brief acts, Jig a Jig Tray Bon. Reg Hardy at the Comedy Theatre loved the play but hated the title, which he thought vulgar. It was rechristened Parleyvoo.

       I finished it on February 1, the day when unrestricted submarine warfare began. The full dress rehearsal was held on March 11, when British troops occupied Baghdad. The play opened, along with the Russian Revolution, on March 12. When, on April 6, the United States declared war on Germany, much applause was accorded the specially inserted pro-American gags. On April 13, the search for the patron's wife's trigger-point was presented in terms of the Battle of Arras and the taking of Vimy Ridge. When the Third Battle of Ypres began at the beginning of that hot July, the play seemed likely to run as long as The Bing Boys if not Chu Chin Chow. I was making money and writing a new play in a more commodious apartment where, like Mr Ivor Novello, I served cocktails in a silk dressing gown. This was at Albany Mansions. I also had a new lover, Rodney Selkirk, who played the part of the singing husband and for whom the role had, in a sense, been created. He was himself in real life a husband and also a father. He had joined the Artists' Rifles in August 1914, run a concert party at Mauberge, had a pelvic bone splintered at Mons, lost his left leg on the Marne. He bravely made comedy out of his new stiff walk in Grigson's farce Teeny Weeny Winny, that ran for six weeks at the Lyric in the autumn of 1916 and in which I saw the returned hero act for the first time. He pretended to his wife that a wound in the prostate rendered him totally incapable of a husband's office. He was three years older than myself, talented, witty, charming, ugly. We spent many Sunday nights together, he having usually feigned to his wife a troops concert in the North or Midlands. Real life, like drama, has few devices for the encompassing of clandestine sin. Sin? Such nonsense.

       The British theatre is full of homosexuals and also of Catholics, and sometimes the two areas of conviction seem to conjoin with none of the gloomy Cartesian misgivings that had led to my apostasy. Albert Wiscomb, who played the lover in my farce, arrived cheerfully late at one of the evening rehearsals with "Sorry, darlings. I went to have my pan scraped and it tsook rather a tsime"—the latter phrase done simperingly and uproariously suggesting a load of sin which that small and elegant body seemed singularly unfitted to bear. Wiscomb was a happy and lucky pederast who loved lacy altar boys. I spoke to him one early evening in his dressing room while he was making carefully up.

       "You confess it?"

       "Sins of impurity, dear? Oh yes. I don't specify, of course, and I'm always properly penitent. I mean, we have to try, don't we? But no more than try. Can't go against our nature, can we?"

       "That's not how it was put to me."

       "Yes, but you're a great fusspot and everything has to be just right for you, doesn't it? Me, I'm not fussy, and I don't think the Almighty is, either." And he carefully gave himself black eyebrows. Me, I could not take it so easy.

       My father came up to see the play, catching the last train back to Battle immediately afterwards. He thought it vulgar but he laughed. My mother did not come, but she wrote to me in English just before Easter: I have tried hard to keep to myself the shock. Your father I am certain suspects nothing and thinks we saw little of you at Christmas and hear little from you because you are busy working to become famous in the great but bad city. I must warn you again to say no word of what you say you are to Hortense, though I fear you must have said something since she mentioned a book about a man who loves a boy in Venice and she had known of such things before. It is a German book. I think she must leave that school because the nuns are more on the side of the Germans than should be allowed. You are still my son and I love you with all a mother's heart but I think you must stay away from home until I can live with the shock. I pray that it is only a temporary thing as is sometimes so with boys in English schools and that it will end soon. Tom has been on a short leave and it was a comfort to have him. He says he is to be a permanent gas instructor at Boyce Barracks in Aldershot. It is now Easter and I pray for the miracle that you will say I will change and be pleasing to God and make my duty. We are all well though I have little fainting fits which I am sure come from the shock. I send you my love. I pray for you.

       The new play I wrote had as its setting a dentist's waiting room. I had already travestied my mother's country as a place of silly fornication and intrigue; now I was to make people laugh at my father's profession. The comedy was a loose adaptation of Moliere's Le Médecin Malgré Lui, and its germ was my own corporal work of mercy on the Battle ostler. It opened, with Charles M. Brewster in the lead, at the Criterion on October 24, the day on which the Austrians defeated the Italians with great severity at Caporetto. It was successful. Soon (on November 7, in fact, the day of the Bolshevik Revolution) the Daily Mail honoured me by mentioning the new comedy in its editorial: "We can assure the Kaiser that the principle of a tooth for a tooth will be fulfilled to the limit, and there will be no Mr Toomey to sweeten the extractions with laughter." My play was in fact called A Tooth for a Tooth—a title I considered grim, if not blasphemous, but Brewster, as actor-manager, insisted on it.

       I was already working on a new comedy as Christmas approached. Willie Maugham had had, in 1908, four plays running in London at the same time, prompting a Bernard Partridge cartoon in Punch that showed Will Shakespeare not too happy about his namesake's success. I was not so ambitious. I still regarded myself as a novelist making plays somewhat cynically for money, and three plays would be, for the time being anyway, quite enough. I was working in my silk dressing gown on the day when the Russo-German armistice was signed, smoking cigarettes continually and refreshing myself with an endless stream of green tea. It was eleven in the morning. Who should come to the door but my sister Hortense.

       She was just seventeen and very pretty. We embraced fondly. She was dressed as a smart young lady and not as a schoolgirl. She had brought luggage with her. "You're staying?" I said.

       "May I? For a few days, anyway. Then we can go home together for Christmas."

       "I am not," I said, "going home for Christmas. I have a play to write. I have two plays to touch up with topical references."

       She sat on the settee, yellow with black stripes, and bumped herself up and down to relish its springiness. "Golly, you are doing well," she said, taking it all in. "The rewards of literature." She pronounced this with a German accent, so I took it to be a phrase used by one of her nuns.

       "No, dearest Hortense," I said. "The wages of prostitution, if you know the term."

       "I know the term all right." She looked at me sparkling. It evoked in her sweet innocent young mind images of wholesome sexual freedom and female elegance. She had probably read Mrs Warren's Profession without understanding it.

       "That," I said sternly, "is a lubricious look. I mean that I'm sacrificing my talents in the service of a very doubtful art but a highly commercial craft."

       "Will you take me to see your plays?"

       "Of course, and also to smart places for lunch and dinner. And to the Café Royal too if you're a good girl."

       She said, as I'd expected, "I didn't think good girls went to the Café Royal."

       "Sweetest little sister, won't Mother be annoyed at your not going straight home? And, moreover, staying with your bad brother? For I am bad, you know. I'm celebrating my first year out of the Church."

       "I knew," she said. "I knew when you said you were ill last Christmas. Sister Agathe said there was a lot of terrible atheism these days among young men, and it was all because of the war. But they'll get over it, she said, when the war's over."

       "And when does the knowledgeable Sister Agathe think the war will be over?"

       "Oh, she says next summer the German army will try one more great offensive and it will be the last, and the English and French and Americans and Canadians and Australians will either push back or they won't, and everything will depend on this great offensive, she says."

       "Would you like tea or coffee and biscuits or a glass of sherry or something?" I asked.

       "I'd like you to show me my room and then I'll unpack and bathe and change, and then it will be time for lunch." She was very sure of herself, little minx, and I said so. "Minsk, Sister Gertrude says it really is. She says it's German for hussy. Hallo, this is all very tremendous luxury." She meant the master bedroom, the door of which was open and which we had to pass on the way to the little spare one. Then she saw something it would have been better for her not to have seen, namely Rodney's spare, original really, artificial leg, lying on the right side of the bed as if to establish, like the living leg of the old manorial lords, a droit du seigneur. It was more comfortable, Rodney said, than his later one, or Mark Two, better cushioned where it met the fleshy stump, but, with the gradual subsidence of the tissues of that part, it had become a little too short. He did not normally keep it here but at home. Why was it here now and in that particular place? Was it really there or is memory speaking false? I think it really was there, the Mark One, an ingenious structure of straps, springs and metal, with a rich red leather cushion, a little darkened by sweat, for the thighstump. It caught Hortense's eye at once.