Highland Fling (2 page)

‘Dear Albert, you are almost too brilliant. I wish I could help you to decide.’

‘No, Walter; it must come from within. What are you both doing this evening?’

‘Oh, good! Now, he’s going to ask us out, which is lovely, isn’t
it? Sally darling, because leaving Oxford this morning somehow ran away with all my cash. So I’ll tell you what, Albert, you angel, we’ll just hop over to Cartier’s to get Sally a ring (so lucky the one shop in London where I’ve an account), and then we’ll come back here to dinner at about nine. Is that all right? I feel like dining here tonight and I think we’ll spend our honeymoon here too, darling, instead of trailing round rural England. We certainly can’t afford the Continent; besides, it’s always so uncomfortable abroad except in people’s houses. Drink your sidecar, ducky, and come along.’

‘Cartier will certainly be shut,’ thought Albert, looking at their retreating figures; ‘but I suppose they’ll be able to kiss each other in the taxicab again.’

At half-past nine they reappeared as breathlessly as they had left, Sally wiping fresh marks of lipstick off Walter’s face and displaying upon her left hand a large emerald ring. Albert, who had eaten nothing since one o’clock, was hungry and rather cross; he felt exhausted by so much vitality and secretly annoyed that Walter, whom he regarded as the most brilliant of his friends, should be about to ruin his career by entering upon the state of matrimony. He thought that he could already perceive the signs of a disintegrating intellect as they sat at dinner discussing where they should go afterwards. Every nightclub in London was suggested, only to be turned down with:

‘Not there
again –
I couldn’t bear it!’

By the time they had finished their coffee Sally said that it was too early yet to go on anywhere, and that she, personally, was tired out and wanted to go home. So, to Albert’s relief, they departed once more, in a taxi.

The next morning Albert left for Paris. It had come to him during the night that he wished to be a great abstract painter.

Two years and two weeks later Albert Gates stood on a cross-Channel steamer, watching with some depression the cliffs of Dover, which looked more than ever, he thought, like Turner’s picture of them. The day was calm but mildly wet, it having, of course, begun to rain on that corner of a foreign field which is forever England – the Calais railway station. Albert, having a susceptible stomach, was thankful for the calm while resentful of the rain, which seemed a little unnecessary in July. He stood alone and quite still, unlike the other passengers, most of whom were running to and fro collecting their various possessions, asking where they could change money and congratulating each other on the excellence of the crossing. Every mirror was besieged by women powdering their noses, an action which apparently never fails to put fresh courage and energy into females of the human species. A few scattered little groups of French people had already assumed the lonely and defiant aspect of foreigners in a strange land. Paris seemed a great distance away.

Albert remembered how once, as a child, returning from some holiday abroad, he had begun at this juncture to cry very bitterly. He remembered vividly the feelings of black rage which surged up in him when his mother, realizing in a dim way that those tears were not wholly to be accounted for by seasickness, tiredness, or even the near approach of another term at school, began to recite a dreary poem whose opening lines were:

She did not realize that there are people, and Albert among them, to whom their native land is less of a home than almost any other.

He thought of the journey from Calais to Paris. That, to him, was the real homecoming. Paris, the centre of art, literature and all culture! The two years that he had just spent there were the happiest of his whole life, and now the prospect of revisiting England, even for a short time, filled him with a sort of nervous misery. Before those two years Albert had never known real contentment. Eton and Oxford had meant for him a continual warfare against authority, which to one of his highly-strung temperament was enervating in the extreme.

He had certainly some consolation in the shape of several devoted friends; but, although he was not consciously aware of it, these very friendships made too great a demand upon his nervous energy.

What he needed at that stage of his development was regular, hard and congenial work, and this he had found in Paris.

So happy had he been there that it is doubtful whether he would ever have exchanged, even for a few days, the only place where he had known complete well-being for a city which had always seemed to him cold and unsympathetic, but for two circumstances. One was that Walter and Sally had written even more persuasively than usual to beg that he would stay with them in their London flat. He had not seen them since that evening when they dined with him at the Ritz, and Walter was the one person whom he had genuinely missed and found irreplaceable.

The other circumstance – the one that really decided him – was that he had recently shown his pictures to a London art
dealer of his acquaintance, who had immediately offered to give him an exhibition the following autumn. As this was a man of some influence in the London world of art, owning the particularly pleasant Chelsea Galleries where the exhibition would be held, Albert felt that here was an opportunity not to be missed. He arranged therefore to bring over his pictures immediately, intending to store them and look about for a studio where he himself could stay until the exhibition should be over, late in October. Paris was becoming hot and stuffy and he felt that a change of air would do him good. Also, he was really very much excited at the prospect of seeing Walter again.

Presently the ship approached the quay, and sailors began adjusting a gangway at the very spot where Albert stood. Inconsequently he remembered the landing of the Normans – how William the Conqueror, springing first from the boat, seized in his hands a sod of English soil. It would be hard to do that nowadays. Impossible even to be the first to land, he thought, as he was brushed from the gangway by a woman of determined features laden with hand luggage which she used as a weapon.

In the train he found himself sharing a carriage with two idiotic girls who were coming home from a term at some finishing school in Paris. They were rather obviously showing off on his account. After talking at some length of their clandestine affairs with two French officers, which appeared to consist solely in passing notes to them when visiting the Louvre on Thursday afternoons, but which they evidently regarded as the height of eroticism, they broached the subject of Art. It appeared that once a week they had spent two hours at some
atelier
drawing the death mask of Beethoven, the Venus of Milo and other better known casts in smudgy charcoal. These depressing efforts were now produced from a portfolio and pinned on to the opposite seat which was unoccupied. Albert learnt from their chatter that when a drawing was finished by a
pupil at the
atelier
, ‘Madame’ would come round and add
‘Quelques petits accents bien à leur place’
; in other words, the finishing touch. The pupil would then fix it and put it carefully away in a portfolio.

Presently one of the girls said:

‘I think I must go on with my art, I might make quite a lot of money. You know, Julia once made two pounds by painting lampshades for her mother’s dining-room, and I’m quite as good as she is.’

The other one remarked that she thought Art was marvellous.

They then began to play vulgar jazz tunes on a portable gramophone, a noise which Albert found more supportable than their chatter.

As the train drew near London he felt homesick and wretched. He longed to be back in his studio in Paris surrounded by his own pictures. It was a curious and rather squalid little abode, but he had been happy there and had grown attached to it. His neighbours had all been poor and friendly, and in spite of having seen practically none of his English friends and few French people of his own class for two years, he had not for a moment felt lonely.

Now he began to wish that he had never left it; the pouring rain outside the carriage and the young artists opposite him had plunged him into a state of the deepest gloom. The idea of seeing Walter again began to terrify him. Walter! How could one tell what changes a year of matrimony may not have wrought. Considering these things, Albert fell asleep in his corner.

When the train stopped at Victoria he got out drowsily, but was only half-awake until suddenly thrown into a most refreshing rage by the confiscation, from his registered luggage, of a copy of
Ulysses
which Walter had particularly asked him to procure.

‘Sir!’ he cried violently to the uninterested official, ‘I am Albert Gates, an artist and seriously-minded person. I regard
that work as literature of the highest order, not as pornography, and am bringing it to London for the enlightened perusal of my friend Monteath, one of your most notable, if unrecognized poets. Does this unutterable country, then, deny its citizens, not only the bodily comforts of decent food and cheap drink, but also the consolations of intellect?’

At this point, observing that his audience consisted of everybody on the platform except the one individual to whom he addressed himself, he followed his porter to a taxi and was soon on his way to Walter’s flat in Fitzroy Square.

Driving up Grosvenor Place he was struck, as people so often are when returning from an absence abroad, by the fundamental conservatism of London. Everything looked exactly the same as it had looked the very day that he left, two years before. The streets were wet and shiny, as they had been then; the rain fell in the same heart-rending drizzle, as though it had never for a moment stopped doing so, and never would again. The same Rolls-Royces contained hard-faced fashionable women in apparently the identical printed chiffon dresses and picture-hats of two years before, fashionable, but never
chic
.

He thought how typical it is of Englishwomen that they should always elect to dress in printed materials. A passion for fussy detail without any feeling for line or shape.

‘And those picture-hats which have been worn year after year, ever since the time of Gainsborough and which inevitably destroy all smartness, they seem still to be blossoming upon all heads, in this repulsive town. If ever I marry, God send it may be a woman of taste.’

Albert disliked women, his views on the sex coinciding with those of Weininger – he regarded them as stupid and unprincipled; but certain ones that he had met in Paris made up for this by a sort of worldly wisdom which amused him, and a talent for clothes, food and
maquillage
which commanded his real and ungrudging admiration.

These and other reflections continued to occupy his mind, until, looking out of the window, he saw that the taxi had already arrived in Charlotte Street. He was now seized with the miserable feeling of nervousness which always assails certain people when they are about to arrive at a strange house, even though it should belong to a dear friend of whose welcome they are inwardly assured. He began to torture himself with doubts. Suppose Walter had not received the telegram announcing the day of his arrival, and they were spending a weekend in the country? Or, worse than that – for he could easily go to an hotel if it were necessary – suppose they had really not wanted him at all, or had put off some visit on his account, or – but at this moment the taxi stopped abruptly opposite a green front door which was almost immediately opened by Walter. At the sight of his friend’s welcoming face, Albert’s doubts vanished completely.

‘My dear!’ cried Walter, ‘my dear boy, my darling Albert.
How
we have been looking forward to this! Oh, how nice to see you again after all these years! Quickly! quickly – a cocktail. You must be dying for one. And here’s Sally, who’s been spending the whole day arranging flowers in your bedroom.’

‘I do hope you won’t die of discomfort here,’ said Sally. ‘Did Walter prepare you in the least bit for what you’re going to suffer? There are no servants, my dear, except an idiot boy. You know, the sort that murders butlers in the evening papers, but he’s quite sweet really, and as we haven’t a butler we think it’s fairly safe. Cocktail for you?’

The room into which Walter and Sally led the way was so lovely that Albert, who had half expected the usual green horror with sham eighteenth-century flower pictures, was thrown into a state of almost exaggerated rapture. For a London drawing-room it was a particularly good shape, with large windows and cheerful outlook. The walls were covered with silver tissue a little tarnished; the curtains and chair covers were of white
satin, which the grime of London was rapidly turning a lovely pearl colour; the floor and ceiling were painted a dull pink. Two huge vases of white wax flowers stood one each side of the fireplace; over the mantelpiece hung a Victorian mirror, framed in large white shells and red plush. Albert, as he walked about this exquisite room, praising and admiring, felt blissfully happy; the depression which had been gathering force ever since he left his studio that morning now left him for good.

He had always experienced in Walter’s company a feeling of absolute ease and lack of strain. He now found, rather to his surprise, that the presence of Sally did nothing to impair their relationship; she gave him no sensation either of intruding or of being intruded upon. Walter and Sally together seemed almost like one person, and Albert realized at once how wrong he had been to oppose their union.

‘How I should like,’ he said, looking at her lovely face, ‘to paint a portrait of Sally.’

‘Well, why not? She’d love to sit for you, I know, and we’ve got a room with a perfectly good north light at the back of the house. Albert,
do
.’

‘My dear, impossible. I can’t work in London, you know. People think it an affectation, but I assure you that it is no such thing. I might even go so far as to say that I’m incapable of working in this country at all; a question, I suppose, of nerves.’