Each had an upper stream of thought That made all seem as it was not.
PETER BELL THE THIRD.
LAWRIE, Beecroft and Co. had not a monopoly in culture. Our City Fathers provided us with an art gallery, to which, with praiseworthy regularity they added two Academy pictures every year; the Town-hall had been decorated by a Pre-Raphaelite, and there was a whole network of Free Libraries, all equipped with thousands of books in a uniform binding, and with the smell proper to Free Libraries. In the cold weather they were always very full, in the hot weather they were always very empty; but in the hot weather the accumulated smells of the winter were distilled and concentrated. For music we had two or three series of concerts during the winter months. They were chiefly patronised by Germans and Jews, and the English bragged about them. We had a College of Music, and a School of Art in connection with the municipal technical school. This institution was presided over by a Socialistic disciple of William Morris, who spent a great part of his free time in designing banners for Friendly Societies—Buffaloes, Free Foresters, Hearts of Oak—and cartoons for Labour journals. It was situated in a square which was typical of the town. In the centre of it stood a huge ugly Anglican church, and three sides of it were filled with a Presbyterian chapel, a Wesleyan chapel, a Baptist chapel, a Secular hall, a Maternity Hospital and a Dental Hospital. Down a by-street was the headquarters of the Salvation Army, and down another a larger Roman Catholic church. Quite near was the office in which Bennett Lawrie worked, and all [Pg 108]round were slums, public-houses, brothels, a wedge of infamy between the working centre and the outskirts. All round the Anglican church in the centre of the square ran a wide pavement on which were wooden benches. Here at night came hundreds of men, women and boys who had no resting-place. They spent half the night there until they were moved on by the police, when they went to a similar pavement with benches outside the Infirmary, meeting half-way their comrades in misery who had been moved on from that place—a sort of general post. In the day-time the square was always busy, for two main roads met in it, and tram-lines from four directions converged. Near at hand were many cheap shops, and the wives of the clerks came thither to make their daily purchases.
It was to this School of Art that Serge Folyat came as the result of his exhibition, which was an almost unredeemed failure. Beecroft banged the drum and old Lawrie blew the trumpet, but the local school of artists were contemptuous, and declared that the new genius could not draw. Serge quite agreed. He sold ten of his pictures, and went to see the disciple of William Morris and arranged to attend eight classes a week, four in the afternoon and four in the evening.
He found the school very amusing, though at first his position was a little difficult, for most of the students were very young and inclined to look askance at a man with a beard turning grey and his hair growing thin on the top of his head. The classes were very cheap, and he was able to pay for the first term himself and postponed discussion as to future ways and means, reckoning that in three months’ time his family would have digested and assimilated him, and added him to the already large number of habits which made their common existence tolerable. He worked very hard both at home and at the school, wrestling with the horrible difficulties of the human body. He had an intuitive feeling that he would never be able to draw hands, and he became very ingenious in concealing them.
The classes at the school were mixed. There were a few [Pg 109]serious students of both sexes, a great many who attended from the vanity of talent, and some to whom studying art was an occupation. A little hunchback with a malicious intense face had been there for thirteen years, and an old spinster of fifty-five had spent fifteen years without ever passing an examination or taking a single certificate. She was extremely hopeful, and one of the most cheerful persons in the school. On the whole it was not cheerful. It lacked spirit and enthusiasm. Many of the young men no doubt had a secret conviction that they had a great destiny, but they were rather ashamed of it, and only in rare moments of excitement did they dare to let it appear. Theodore Benskin, the Morrisian principal of the school, had been enthusiastic at twenty-five, but he had stopped there. However, he was a good teacher of a mechanical sort. His business was to turn out draughtsmen rather than artists, and he succeeded. Serge desired to become a draughtsman, and he followed Benskin’s directions, though all the while he had a feeling of the grotesque in what he was doing, and was inclined to think that a bushman’s drawings on the wall of a cave were of more value than all the finished studies turned out under Benskinian rules. However, he was nettled by the failure of his exhibition, and saw that it was quite useless to take keen pleasure in his work unless by the work he could communicate that pleasure to others. He had no concise theory of art beyond a conviction that unless it could create pleasure there was no excuse for it. As for making money by it, there were a thousand easier ways of doing that, ways that left more leisure and did not induce such profound depression. It was all very well, he thought, to gird, as did almost everybody he met, at the sordidness and grimness of the town in which they lived, but the most miserable of all the people in it were the supposed artists, the men who frequented the Arts Club. They were all men of talent, but none of them ever seemed to have used their gifts to any purpose. They were perpetually cursing the lack of appreciation of their fellow-citizens, but they had never made any really serious attempt to win them or to open up any new way for their minds. When it [Pg 110]came to the point their standards were those of the rich men, upon whose caprice they lived. Like everybody else in the town they put up with money as the sole channel of communication between one man and another. Serge used sometimes to try to talk to the waifs and strays on the benches outside the church in the square, but he found them nearly all brutalised and fuddled. They seemed to have no thought beyond the next meal, no programme beyond the next drink. They cadged.
Among the students at the school was a young man whom Serge had marked out from the very first moment. He was short, and had a large head, dark hair, bright eyes, and he was always merry. He had a joke for everyone, and he was always in love with one or other of the girl-students. Benskin was proud of him, for he won all possible prizes and was always solidly working. His name was Basil Haslam, brother of that spotty-faced youth who was Frederic’s boon companion. They made acquaintance quickly but did not become friends until they both entered for a competition for a prize, the subject being a sea-piece. Haslam won it, and protested with Benskin that Folyat’s was the best, because Folyat knew about the sea and he didn’t.
He was delighted when Serge told him that he had been a sailor.
“Ah! That’s it,” he said. “That’s it. I’ve never been anything. I can just draw but I don’t understand about men and how they live.”
“That’s not very difficult,” replied Serge. “They are much the same everywhere. They are all born in the same way, and death has not many variations. What lies in between is largely a matter of eating, drinking, and sleeping.”
“And loving.”
“Just a few get as far as that. Not many.”
“But all of them seem to think about getting married.”
“That has surprisingly little to do with love. How much love do you get in your own house?”
“Not much. But then they think I’m queer. My father’s a doctor. He wanted me to be a doctor, but I’ve [Pg 111]got a hundred-and-fifty of my own, so I can do what I like. I shall go to London as soon as I’m through here. It’s no good being a painter here. They all think it’s a joke, a sort of excuse for doing nothing.”
“I know. They think pictures are produced automatically—like everything else.”
“Old Benskin’s automatic enough.”
“Exactly. He can work just as he can go to sleep, almost without knowing that he’s doing it. It’s a matter of habit. He’s almost forgotten how he used to despise that sort of thing.”
“Do you think he ever did?”
“Of course, or his work wouldn’t be as good as it is.”
“I can’t understand people ceasing to be keen.”
“I can. You only need to wobble a very little to come down on the wrong side. Then you’re done for—in Hell. And after a bit you find that you quite like it, except in awful moments when you realise that after all it is Hell and that you might so easily have been in Heaven.”
“I know what you mean. You mean that the whole thing rests with yourself. But it’s rotten luck when you’re weak and can’t help doing the wrong thing though you see the right thing the whole time.”
“But we’re all like that. We only go to Hell when we do the wrong thing and pretend that it’s the right.”
“How did you find that out?”
“By a careful study of Hell and its inhabitants.”
“Then you don’t mean the Hell one’s people talk about?”
“No. I mean here and now, the world as it is. I’m not interested in any other.”
“Neither am I. Hurray!”
This conversation was the first of many. Haslam used to wait for Serge and walk with him as far as their roads lay together. He was an ambitious young man with his eyes set on the road to London, not so much because he was eager for fame and material rewards as because he was hotly impatient of art which stopped short at Benskin and Beecroft.
[Pg 112]
“But,” Serge would say, “Benskin and Beecroft will both die.”
“I know, but there’ll be a new Beecroft and a new Benskin by that time.”
“That’s true. We shall never be rid of them.”
“I expect London is crammed full of Benskins and Beecrofts.”
“Maybe, but there are more of the other sort there too.”
“If I don’t reach London by the time I’m twenty-seven I shall throw up the sponge.”
“Why twenty-seven?” asked Serge, smiling.
“Oh! if a man hasn’t done something by the time he’s twenty-seven he never will.”
“I’m a good deal more than that. . .”
“But you’ve done everything. You’ve made yourself. You’re not really any older than I am, and everybody here is so horribly old.”
“Yes, they all come to a bad and perfectly respectable end.”
Haslam swung his fist in the air and shouted indignantly:
“Respectable! Respectable! Give me a list of any ten men living in respectable suburban villas and I warrant you there’ll be more dishonesty and cowardly misdoing in their lives than in ten of the so-called criminal classes. I don’t understand it. I do rotten things myself—who doesn’t?—but I can’t shut my eyes to them when they’re done. Take my brother. He’s a beastly idiot or an idiotic beast, always getting into scrapes and shuffling out of them. By the time he’s thirty he’ll still be doing the same things, but he’ll have learned how to prevent them coming to the surface. He’ll marry, settle down, enjoy a comfortable income, be a pillar of the Church and a smug, hard Pharisee like all the rest, with all his tracks carefully covered up and his conscience having a splendid time going over them.”
“I don’t think it matters to any man,” said Serge, “what his brother is and is not.”
“I know what you mean. It isn’t worth while letting out at brutes like my brother, but it’s a great comfort to be able to do it occasionally.”
[Pg 113]
“Good Lord! My dear, we can’t do anything. We must all stew in our own juice. I’d have a lively time of it if I began to worry about my brother Frederic’s morals. I have quite enough to do to look after my own.”
“That’s all very well. I don’t mind my brother’s morals so much, but what I can’t swallow is that he will loathe art. . .”
“Art will survive that. Art is the concern of free men. Men who have made themselves prisoners cannot understand it, and men always hate what they cannot understand, until they realise that the few great principles of the world were founded without any consideration for their vanity. Then they can laugh. The artists, I imagine, are free men, and they write, paint, make music, because more direct action is almost impossible for them in a world made captive by lies, shams, and hypocrisies. When all men and all women are free there will be no art, for there will be no need for it. Life itself will be enough. It will be so splendid.”
“I don’t believe that.” Haslam became suddenly despondent. “If there isn’t to be anything but life, what’s the good of anything?”
“The answer to that is—everything. The few men who attain freedom must tell the joy of it for the rest and for those who come after them. Spiritual evolution is slow, like every other natural process. Every true artist raises the imaginative level of humanity, but imaginative art is a small thing compared with the imaginative life. It is easier. Some men have to choose between the two. They nearly always choose wrongly.”
There was a long silence, Haslam strode along by Serge’s side. At last he said:
“You are queer. One moment you make me want to shout with joy, and the next you drag me down to the depths and I want to cry. You seem to believe in such big things, but you don’t seem to believe in men at all.”
“In most men, not at all.”
“And women?”
“Even less in women. They are always seeing things with men’s eyes, always appealing to them by their [Pg 114]debased instincts. Clever women are even worse. They try to escape the dilemma by appealing to men’s intellects. I hate intellect. Fine women are always driving fine men into the arms of fools, or worse. The world is in a mess simply because ninety-nine people out of a hundred make a mess of their love affairs.”
“But if there is such a thing as spiritual evolution it must all come right in the end.”
“That’s no comfort to me. I shan’t see it. This world will have been snuffed out millions of years before then. It will have served its purpose, and most of us will have missed our opportunity.”
“I hope I shan’t.”
“I hope you won’t.”
They parted, and Serge made his way to St. Paul’s School, where he had promised to attend the final rehearsal of The Rose and the Ring. There he found his father sitting half-way down the room which was lit only with one gas-jet and was empty save for Jessie Clibran-Bell at the piano under the rudely-constructed stage—barrels and planks—and many rows of school desks, which were desks and forms combined, with the desks turned down and the ink-wells removed. On the walls were pictures of elephants, tigers and rhinoceroses, texts, the tonic sol-fa, and two or three oleographs representing Biblical scenes—Elisha and the Bears, Saul Listening to David’s Harping, and the Foolish Virgins. The walls themselves were distempered a bleak grey, and were rather dirty. A harmonium stood against the wall opposite the door, and above this was a glass case containing a stuffed squirrel that had lost its fur and one glass eye. Serge asked his father what it might be doing there. Francis disclaimed responsibility for the conduct of the week-day school and surmised that it was used for an object-lesson in natural history.
“Better than nothing,” he said, but he did not seem to be at all interested.
Serge plunged with a question:
“I’ve been thinking a good deal since I came here. Why don’t you send my mother away for a time?”
[Pg 115]
“She wouldn’t go.”
“Why not go with her?”
“Where to?”
“Anywhere. It doesn’t matter.”
“Are we very stick-in-the-mud?”
“It isn’t that. But why not go away—or leave Fern Square? Minna tells me that neither you nor my mother have been the same since James died. . . . It must have been a shock to you.”
“It was.”
“You don’t mind my mentioning it?”
“Not at all.”
Serge waited and hoped for more to come, but nothing did. Francis was in his most taciturn mood; he kept humming and buzzing to himself like a great bee, and fingering the amethyst cross on his waistcoat. Serge took another plunge.
“How much is this living worth?”
“Three hundred.”
“How much was St. Withans worth?”
“Six-fifty.”
Serge made no comment. Presently he asked:
“Did you know what you were coming to?”
“Perfectly.”
“Did my mother?”
“I told her.”
“Are you sorry?”
“What’s the good?”
Francis dropped his amethyst cross and laid his foot on his right knee and began thrusting his finger inside his elastic-sided boot. It was a very old boot and much worn at the heel. Seeing that made Serge notice for the first time that his father’s clothes were shabby, out of shape and dusty. He began to cast back in his memory, and with some difficulty he was able to picture his father and mother as a young man and woman—he in knee-breeches and silk stockings and silver buckles to his shoes, and she in a full gown of flowered silk cut low on her pretty shoulders—walking arm in arm in the gardens at St. Withans, and then that was blotted out with recollections [Pg 116]not so pleasing, his father silent and his mother talking, talking, talking, then crying, then talking again; then meals taken in a cold atmosphere of restraint. He could remember jolly walks with his father, and scenes of great tenderness with his mother, and the last day when he sobbed his heart out and he was driven with his chest away and away until the Vicarage and then the church-tower were lost from sight. He could recognise himself in the small boy in all those memories, but in the man and woman of those days he could not see the taciturn old man—for he was old—sitting by his side, or the foolish old woman in Fern Square with her blankly sorrowful face and her pathetic chatter of “the gentry” and “common people.” He found that he had much affection for both, was rather surprised to find it, and was amused to discover himself casting about for some melodramatic event which should account for their listlessness and indifference to each other, their daughters, everything and everybody. Francis was a good man; the ex-convict of that first dismal day had said so. Mrs. Folyat was a good woman; more than one woman in the parish had borne witness to that.—Nothing had happened. They had dodged everything, like so many others. For them (Serge thought) as for so many others, life had always been round the corner—round the corner. The words lilted in his mind like a refrain, and he said aloud:
“Round the corner.”
“Eh?” said Francis, startled out of his reverie.
“I should think it over if I were you,” replied Serge, “about going away, I mean. To be quite frank with you, I find my mother a little dull.”
“Dull? I wouldn’t say dull. Not dull. No. We’re quiet people, that’s all, quiet people. She lived in a very quiet place when she was young. I was curate then. Did I ever tell you about the murder that happened there? I will some day.”
A head was thrust through the curtain, hurried whispers were exchanged with Jessie Clibran-Bell and she began to thump out some very indifferent music that would have served admirably for a child’s game of musical-chairs.
[Pg 117]
“Was it a good murder?” asked Serge.
“It was a horrible murder.”
The curtain was drawn. It showed some reluctance and had to be assisted by the King. Gertrude was the Fairy Gruffanuff, and Bennett Lawrie was Prince Bulbo, with a tenor song much too high for his light baritone voice.
The entertainment was very indifferent in quality, but it seemed to give great pleasure to the performers, especially to Bennett Lawrie, the Bottom of the company. He acted with extraordinary intensity. He seemed to have hypnotised himself into the belief that he was actually a Prince, so that he was extremely comic and yet very pathetic. His legs were very thin, large at the knees and more than a little bowed, and in his pink tights they looked enormously long—a figure of fun, and yet he was compelling and quixotically heroic. He was right out of the picture, and nothing else in it seemed to exist for him. When he was on the stage nothing else existed for his audience of two. He had naturally the gift of making his personality surge over the footlights into the auditorium, and he seemed to exult in the exercise of his power without in the least caring what he did with it. Serge admired him, but on the whole disliked his exhibition. He whispered to his father:
“Sheer blatant egoism.”
“Who?”
“That boy.”
“He’s very funny. Queer, he never says a word when he comes to the house. He is preternaturally solemn and always looks as though he were on the point of bursting into tears.”
“I’ve seen many young men like that here. I fancy they don’t get enough to eat.”
Bennett appeared on the stage again, and Francis began to shake with laughter at his antics. A moment later and he was brushing a tear-drop from his nose.
When the rehearsal was over Serge went out and bought a bottle of port at the public-house next door but one to the church, a cake and some biscuits, and took them in to the actors assembled in the green-room—one of the [Pg 118]two small class-rooms of the school. He found Gertrude in tears and threatening to throw up her part, Frederic shouting at her, Bennett Lawrie supporting her, and the whole company looking very odd and unreal with the paint thick on their faces or melting down into their collars. Francis was making himself amiable and telling everybody in turn that he had never enjoyed any performance so well.
Minna, wearing an absurd golden wig, said:
“I’m sure Serge didn’t like it.”
“I was interested,” he replied.
And indeed he had found it absorbing to see how much these people, when they were pretending to be some one else, revealed their characters as they rarely did in ordinary life. He was immensely sorry for them all without exactly knowing why. Without knowing why, he excepted Minna. He had a curious faith in Minna. In Gertrude he believed not at all. She was in love with Bennett Lawrie. That much was clear, but she was in love idiotically. In the green-room he heard her covering Bennett with gross flattery which he gulped down fatuously.