II
“There was a cocktail for you,” said Hilary gloomily, “but I drank it, in case it grew warm.” I thanked him politely for the idea. “It wasn’t an idea, really,” said Hilary gloomily. “It was an impulse.”
It is not, therefore, impossible to understand how it came about that there were not a few people, youngish people, who considered Mr. Townshend to be a tiresome man. They said: “He is very nice, but frankly, isn’t he rather tiresome?” I supposed he was rather tiresome.
Hilary was a man of various ages; when nothing was going well with him, he would look no more than forty; when everything was going well with him, he would look about forty-five; when he was crossing a road, that is to say when he was thinking, he looked about fifty. This last was, I believe, his age.
Hilary was a man who had convinced himself and everyone else that he had neither use nor time for the flibberty-gibberties of life. He collected postage-stamps and had sat as Liberal Member for an Essex constituency for fifteen years. To be a Liberal was against every one of his prejudices, but to be a Conservative was against all his convictions. He thought of democracy as a drainpipe through which the world must crawl for its health. He did not think the health of the world would ever be good. When travelling he looked porters sternly in the face and over-tipped them. His eyes were grey and gentle, and they were suspicious of being amused. I think that Hilary treasured a belief that his eyes were cold and ironic, as also that his face was of a stern cast. His face was long, and the features somehow muddled. It was a kind face.
Hilary is the last in direct line of the Townshends, who have held Magralt, a Tudor manor on the Essex coast, since a Townshend deserted to Henry Tudor on Bosworth Field. The Townshends of Magralt have always been soldiers, “and that,” Guy, first and last, a soldier, will say, “is the only reason one can see why Hilary is a politician by profession and the foremost stamp-collector in Chesterfield Street by the sweat of his brow.” But one has to report that Hilary was once, before witnesses, perfectly beastly to an American gentleman who said that Blucher had arrived in time for the Battle of Waterloo.
But it was on the question of marriage that the two friends would indulge the sharpest difference of opinion; or rather, Hilary’s wasn’t an opinion, it was a lurking Silence.
“Suppose you die,” said Guy de Travest. “You might. You are ten years older than me in years alone. You may receive your call to higher things at any moment. Look how I beat you at squash the other day! Let us suppose, then, that you are as good as dead. Unmarried, childless. You have done nothing. You are nothing. You leave nothing. Except, of course, what was left to you—”
“Less,” said Hilary.
“Your memory, then, goes down as that of a sickening philatelist. Whereas, had anyone of your ancestors had a chance of a bit of war like ours, he would have died a Major-General!”
“A Field-Marshal, Guy. You forget that the Townshends have the reputation of having lost more of their soldiers’ lives than any other service-family in England.” And so it would go on forever, Guy contending that as Hilary was nothing in himself it was disloyal of him not to wed and bring forth direct heirs, while Hilary’s attitude would be one of benevolently beckoning to the sombre heights of Cumberland, where sat the house of Curle-Townshend, heirs-apparent to Magralt and all its fiefs.
Anyone, as Hilary was once goaded into muttering, would have thought that Guy’s own marriage was the happiest in the world; at worst, anyone might have thought that it was a happy marriage, as marriages go. Guy, it was said, adored his wife. Guy, it was said, never spoke to his wife except in public and as he passed through her room in the morning towards his bath, when he said “Good morning.” It was Lady de Travest who volunteered this information. “I do not see,” said Lady de Travest in her slow soft voice, “why one should forever conceal the fact that one’s husband is cruel to one. It is nothing for one to be ashamed of, is it?” Moira de Travest was a quiet woman, with slow graces of movement, statuesque, exceedingly handsome in what you might call a public way, with a dark, restrained smile in the blue eyes under the hair that shone like black silver. Suddenly she would give a very loud laugh, and then her eyes would shine boyishly for a second. She had many intimate friends among women, and at times she was rather brilliant in a manlike way. Foreign Ambassadors liked to be with her. Mr. de Laszlo, M.V.O., painted her. Women novelists had tea with her. Twice a year she would say that a day must come when she must take a lover, but she gave one a profound sense that there was nothing in the world she could endure less. But, whatever it was that had gone wrong between those two ten years before, they had a son, a boy of sixteen, at Eton, and Guy de Travest would remain by his marriage without question of separation or divorce. That was cruel of him, Moira’s friends said, but Guy was a very catholic gentleman, and he loved his son beyond all things. In the earlier pages of country house albums one might come on photographs of Guy and Moira arm-in-arm, yellow Viking and black silver. They did not seem to have aged at all since then, but maybe Lady de Travest was a little more statuesque and her eyes would shine more and more boyishly.
Hilary and Guy were friends. Inseparable, they were inimical. They agreed on nothing, nor had they one taste in common. But maybe it is in a similar tempering of a sense of conduct that Englishmen, regardless of all overt differences, will find their deepest friendships. Conduct was for Guy and Hilary one of three facts, the other two being birth and death. And it is they and their opposites who must finally make the storms of life. Warriors of conduct and enemies of conduct—there is the issue that has still to find its final battlefield. Hilary’s Liberalism, in that issue, would come crashing about his heart; of his head he would take no account, for it is not by the head that one decides in ultimate moments. Guy, tall as a tree, Guy the latter-day “thunder-god of dandies,” would make a flaming figure, standing against the afterglow of the fires of an old religion called aristocracy. But Guy was far from being of those Tories, of whom Mr. Galsworthy has written with such cruel sympathy in Fraternity and The Patrician, who are obsessed by an illusion of their own exclusive right to national captaincy. Guy did not think that the hope for England or the world lay in himself or his caste. He was not a clever man; but his contempt for politics was born of a conviction that there was no hope of curing the diseases of life and society by anything that anybody of men could do. Men individually must clean themselves within, questing for and grasping what cleanness there was in them. There was a frozen storm in Guy’s eyes, and they were very clean. But, of course, he was not very clever.
Those two men are for me symbols of an England that I love. I am not sure that I can explain what that England is. I am not sure that I would like to explain it even to myself, as, maybe for the same reason, I would not like to read Jane Austen with a mental measure. I am not sure that there ever was such an England. The soil, to be sure, is there, the clouds across the sun, the teasing humours of the island seasons: the halls, the parklands, the spacious rooms, they are there. But the figures that sweep across them—are these that we see, all? Are there no others, lost somewhere, calmly ready to show themselves—are these that we see, all? These healthy, high-busted women with muscles like those of minotaurs, these girls who are either stunned with health or pale with the common vapours of common dancing-halls, these stout, graceless ones here, those too slender, bloodless ones there, these things that have no voice between a shout and a whisper, these things that have yielded to democracy nothing but their dignity—are these that we see, all? These rather caddish young men who have no vision between a pimply purity and vice, who are without the grace with which to adorn ignorance or the learning with which to make vulgarity tolerable, these peasant-minded noblewomen, these matrons who appear to have gained in youth what they have lost in dignity, these toiling dancers, these elderly gentlemen with their ungallant vices—are these that we see, all? Or was there never such an England? Were the parklands and the spacious rooms never peopled but by nincompoops let loose by wealth among the graces of learning and fashion? Was there never such an England as I myself once saw in the magic of a spring morning in London? It was no more than the passing picture of Guy de Travest walking by the sulky side of Piccadilly, as he must always do to pass between his house in Belgrave Square to his club in Saint James’s Street, to which a few gentlemen will still absently resort. I saw Guy walking against the broken sunlight of the Green Park, and then I did not see Guy. It was as though from one step to another he had walked into a dimension wherein the desires of his heart melted his person into the England of his heart, and he was rendered invisible in the ambience of the Green Park and against the ancient landscape of Saint James’s.