I
Sometimes I would see Gerald in the Café Royal. I would be dining, with Hilary maybe, and in the distance, cut as with a sharp knife in the tapestry of smoke and grubby faces, would be Gerald, darkly alone, a glass of whisky on the marble-top before him. One wouldn’t attempt to join him, for it made Gerald shy, desperate, if anyone sat with him while drinking. He hated being “messed about,” did Gerald; and if you joined him he would presently mutter something about an appointment (Gerald with an appointment!), leave his drink unfinished and go and order one somewhere else; and as I understood he hadn’t much money I did not like to drive him to that. Maybe, though, he was less shy with me than with anyone. “I like you,” he once said—oh, darkly!
One never knew, as he sat there or as he strode about the streets, careless as a fakir impelled always towards a terrible and nameless penance, what he could be thinking of. Maybe he was thinking of nothing. Once I saw him come out of a Cinema Theatre with a look on his face as though he had been tortured. He always looked, you know, like something. You noticed him.
He had a grey suit. It was thin as paper, but still defiantly retained a little of that casual elegance which not even Gerald could wholly divorce from the combination of a good tailor and a lean Englishman. He never had but one other suit that I ever saw, a brown affair, but he bartered that with a boot-mender in Shepherd’s Market in exchange for mending his shoes. And he had a hat. That was a hat. And never was Gerald seen wearing an overcoat, no matter whether it blew, rained, snowed or froze. See him any winter evening striding down Half-Moon Street in the biting rain, his thin grey suit blackening with it, the jacket held by one button with deep creases into his waist, the shapes of his knuckles stuck through his trouser pockets, that hat—there, but for the grace of God, went the most lovable man I ever met.
“Gerald—I say, Gerald! Why don’t you wear a coat on a day like this? Gerald, aren’t you an ass!”
“Coat?” Thoughtful he was always, and his dark, sunk eyes would pierce the pavement or the sky with unutterable contempt. “Coat!” And he would repeat the word softly until, you understand, he had grasped the enormous idea, when he would say softly, savagely: “What the hell d’you mean, ‘coat’?” and away he would go, towards that terrible and nameless penance of his.
Well, the flourish goes, the gesture is gone, to the limbo that yawns for all such vanities in the very second of their birth. The Cavalier of Low Creatures was never, to be sure, hailed as more than a zero. But, even as the ground is not the limit of a man’s fall, as you may see in the picture with the trail of flame, so zero is not the limit of a man’s nothingness; for what is that which is nothing but so completely nothing that it may not have even the mark of nothing? It is, to be sure, zero without the formative circle round it.
That solitary drunkard, that soiled ascetic! Those nightmare women, soft as the grass of Parnassus, marvellously acquiescent, possible. Aphrodite, Ariadne, Anaïtis, white as marble, silent as marble, silent and acquiescent, possible, as only goddesses could be, the goddesses of soiled dreams, as no woman born of woman could ever be. …
And yet one might have been wrong in imagining the malcontents of the solitary drunkard’s mind. God only knows, of course, with what nightmare fancies the man plagued himself. Boys have them, and grow out of them; men, at least, do not admit even to themselves that they have not grown out of them, men do not admit even to themselves that while they indulge in continence they may suddenly find themselves stumbling in the burning darkness among the vile rubbish-heaps of desire.
That women walked in all the delicious beauty of the unattainable through Gerald’s tortured mind, I know now. But I did not know it then, for never was a man so secret with another man as Gerald, never was a man so little given to discussing with another those inevitable matters of desire and concupiscence which only by being discussed can be seen in a proper and proportionate light. They should be aired, those secret silly things, that they may be seen for what they are. In the old days there was a god in a garden, and people would do their best to make pretty fancies out of their lusts, naming them to gods, satyrs, fawns, nymphs, sirens, sylphs; they, at least, got rid of them somehow. But now that we see them plainly for what they are, the nasty little enemies of our assault on nobility, a conspiracy founded by Saint Paul has smashed the god in the garden and hidden the pieces under the bed.
Gerald, who never spoke but he swore, was the cleanest-mouthed man I ever met with; while from his book one had gathered that there was one main idea in Gerald’s mind; this was purity. It was to do with that one brilliant-childish romance of his that, about seven years before the coming of the green hat, I had first met Gerald. Then, for more than five years, I had not seen nor heard of him, had forgotten him, when one day a lean, dangerous hawk of a young man coming out of the Hammam Baths in Jermyn Street suddenly stopped me. I knew later that he must have been in an agony of shyness, but at the time he merely looked intensely furious. I, not recognising him, thought he was going to hit me, and gaped at him.
Bitterly and darkly he told me that someone had told him there was a flat to be let above me in Shepherd’s Market. “I’m staying here at the moment,” he muttered, looking indignantly at the Hammam Baths. Several minutes passed before I could place him, for he had been in uniform that first time, in that transfiguring long-waisted grey coat of the Brigade of Guards.
Gerald appeared suddenly, in the winter of 1915, at the office of Horton’s New Voice. Now that Horton has left England on his adventure in un-individualism one does not hear much of The New Voice, but at that time and for long before The New Voice was, of course, a power, and Horton was a Power. Quite apart from Horton’s personal quality, you knew he was a Power because several of the greatest of the intelligent writers of our time kept on bitterly pointing out to their million readers what a futile man Horton was. Quite a number of the men whose names you can “conjure with” now—it would be fun to meet that man who is always in the street conjuring with names!—had begun by writing for Horton’s paper; but they had always gotten on his nerves by the time they had become the greatest of the intelligent writers of our time, and, since Horton was an honest man, he told them so, and he told them why, and he told them off, and they were furious. But the most inspired among the greatest of the intelligent writers of our time revenged themselves by republishing their New Voice stuff in book-form and omitting to mention The New Voice as the first medium of publication. That was discourteous of them.
We were correcting proofs when Gerald appeared. It was a Monday afternoon, and on Monday afternoons any of Horton’s writers who wished could turn up and correct either his own or someone else’s proofs and then go and have tea at the A.B.C. And Talk.
“Hello!” said Horton. “Hello!”
“Defence of the Realm,” murmured Home.
We were not prepared for Gerald. We had, of course, seen soldiers before; indeed, there was one in the room at the moment, the philosopher Home, who was to be killed a year or so later. But Gerald was a Figure, he was martial. The herald of the dominion of hell upon earth, that was Gerald. Take one small, frowsty room, the staff (Miss Veale) addressing wrappers at a desk by the window, Horton blue-pencilling at the other desk by the door, four of us sitting cramped round correcting proofs on bound annuals of The New Voice on our knees, smoking, muttering—enter six-foot-two of the Brigade of Guards with a face as dark as night and the nose of a hawk and the eyes of one who has seen Christ crucified in vain. The panoply of war sat superbly on Gerald. He looked a soldier in the real rather than in the technical sense of the word: he looked, you know, as though he had accepted death and was just living anyhow in the meanwhile. Ah, see him then! Not even Gerald’s malevolent slackness in attire could make that long-waisted grey coat with the red-silk lining sit on him but imperially. Not Gerald’s the common-or-garden chubby face of a Guard’s subaltern. Gerald was no chap. He glowered at us.
“Eh,” he stammered. “I say … I’ve been told you people. …”
“He’s heard about us,” said Home sympathetically. “Sit down, boy. On the floor, I’m afraid.”
Gerald began a fierce scowl at him—then grinned. Dear Gerald!
“Well?” smiled Horton. Always courteous was Horton, in manner.
“Heard,” muttered Gerald, “that you didn’t care what you published. …”
“Oh!” said Horton. “Well, we don’t care how good it is, if that’s what you mean.”
You couldn’t guess that Gerald was so shy that he could scarcely speak. You thought he stammered just because he stammered, not because he was so shy that he could scarcely get a word out. A man had no right to look like Gerald, an ensign of the fallen Prince of Light, and be shy; but that was always Gerald’s trouble, he never was given the credit for being shy, he put himself between you and any sympathy with him, he made it clear that he didn’t want your infernal sympathy. Just then, for instance, he looked as though he had strayed into The New Voice to send us all to blazes on general principles. And Horton looked as though he was quite prepared to go. Horton preferred bad-tempered men.
“There’s this,” Gerald muttered, and lugged out an enormous typescript from the deep pocket of his grey coat. “Novel,” he scowled at Horton. “Thought perhaps. …” and he planted the thing with a thump on Horton’s desk. Horton grinned. Horton had had much too much to do with professional novelists to think that a novel by a subaltern of Grenadiers was necessarily unreadable. “Bit long, isn’t it?” he smiled.
“Long?” Gerald stammered. “Of course it’s long! Been writing it for four whole months.”
“Ought to be good,” said Home gravely.
“It’s awful,” grinned Gerald, “but, you see. …”
“Quite,” said Horton busily. “Now, I’ll. …”
“Hello!” said Horton, for Gerald was not. Horton threw the typescript to me to read. Of course, it was mad. The New Voice published most of it, and then Heinemann’s published it in the autumn of 1916 and ran it into three editions while people were still disentangling their eyes from the paper wrapper, which showed a woman with purple eyes crucifying a pleasant young man.
The Savage Device is open before me as I write, and its opening lines are: “The history of Felix Burton is the history of an ideal and a vision. They had nothing to do with one another except that the pursuit of the vision hardened him and blooded him for the attainment of the ideal. The ideal was aristocratic, in the sense that it was a striving after nobility in life: the vision was a contradiction, as scientific as it was mystic. The ideal was, of course, defeated: the vision, of course, defeated him. The ideal was purity: the vision had something to do with pain. …”
The “vision,” so far as one could see, had everything to do with pain; in fact it was pain, and the vision might or might not come afterwards. (And I detest that word “mystic.”) The book was exciting and interesting because of a strange mixture of high romance, desperate villainy and an abysmal bitterness. The war came in, naturally. Gerald’s hero had minority ideas about the war—letting the landed gentry down again! As for the pain … Young Burton’s idea of it had not to do with pain as a fact, but as the most sublime among drugs. You know? “In fact,” Gerald wrote, “it is the only drug that cannot debase a man. It can kill him, but there are worse ways of dying than being killed.” It was full of quotations like that, but Gerald threw them at you with a dash sadly lacking in the originals. Young Burton was, of course, going to die in the war.
Young Burton, it appeared, had studied the major and minor tortures of crime and martyrdom. There was a long description of tortures, if you liked that kind of thing. I have seen Gerald’s books on them, with illustrations … very interesting. Then young Burton had come across the old, old idea that after a certain limit of pain there is a definite state of bliss and definite and glorious visions of a real reality which men by ordinary are too sodden or too timorous to see. But poor old Gerald, try as he would, couldn’t make The Savage Device a novel of ideas: it remained a novel of adventure, with an inhuman interest. Young Burton went everywhere in the world, having adventures, getting magnificently hurt—South Sea stuff—studying the effect of pain on men’s minds. A Chinese bandit helped him to quite a number of visions.
Then he plucked Ava Foe from a “dive” in San Francisco, she became Mrs. Burton, and then he had every opportunity for judging the visionary qualities of mental pain. That part was fiendishly well written, the hell that Ava Burton gave him. But young Burton’s ideal of purity was, naturally enough, schoolboy stuff: fine in parts, but stuff. The only part of it that was good was that it was, somehow, purity. On the sexual side young Burton deserved almost all he got from his, one thought, unnecessarily callous young wife. In Ava Foe, I couldn’t help thinking after the coming of the green hat, Gerald had let himself go about Iris. I realised then how he must first have worshipped and then hated his twin sister. What on earth, one wondered, could she have done to him to make him hate her like that? Ava wasn’t in the least like her, of course, but Ava might quite well have been like any sister to any brother who hated her. But this fierce, devilish, medieval passion—why? Yet I should have guessed something of the reason after Iris had told me that young Burton was “Boy,” Gerald’s hero of before the war. But it never occurred to me to connect Iris’s casually dropped “Boy” with the legendary Boy Fenwick of Careless-Days-Before-the-War fame. He will have his place, that dead Boy Fenwick. A deep place.
“Felix Burton’s” idea of what a man should be to live nobly—he was full of those large strivings of Young Men which were in vogue in the Careless-Days-Before-the-War—seemed to take the form of wanting to found a new race of something like potent eunuchs. Young Burton was, of course, without the lusts of the body. Ava Foe wasn’t. Nor did young Burton want any of your waste of time in graceful lovemaking; he wanted a sort of ruthless companionship, with occasional patches of mating; he did not want to procreate gracefully, but with a sort of furious absentmindedness. Imagine Ava—Iris! Imagine Gerald himself drawing the woman of his nightmares, that soft possible woman of lonely dreams, detesting her for destroying him … and for destroying Boy! One wondered, in reading, if Gerald had ever known a woman. The dark knight of purity … the fallen knight of purity, but how fallen!