The Balliols (76 page)

My months in Tahiti showed me them from another angle.

There can be no one who has not at some time wondered whether the discoveries of science have done more than improve material conditions; whether the working classes are any the happier for being educated; whether machinery has not taken away the joy of craftsmanship; whether negroes were not better off as slaves; whether a married woman is happier for being able to own property; whether the process of standardization has not spread so far that human beings are turned out in the same mould as the clothes they wear, and the food they eat; whether the medicine serves any purpose that maintains the life which has become a torment to its possessor. There can be no thinking person who has not at some time seen all human effort as the pouring of so much water through a sieve.

There are those for whom a classical education serves as an amulet against that feeling. But for those like myself whose education, owing to the war, ceased on their sixteenth birthday, who have learnt what they know of life from life itself, travel alone can give that long view which precludes an over absorption in which is immediate and close at hand. To travel, to live beside a primitive and distant people reveals as much as any close scrutiny of history, the mountain source from which has flowed the river by which we travel.

Tahiti, even at this late day, can tell us what the garden of Eden must have been; and all that is symbolized by Eden in terms of simplicity, candour, generosity; a love of life and living. Tahiti is to-day a fast vanishing paradise. In the same way that our biblical forefathers were driven from their Eden by a desire for worldly knowledge, so has worldliness corrupted the sweetness and simplicity of Tahitian life. The average native's idea of a good time is a dress copied from a Californian fashion plate, an afternoon of cocktails, a cinema in the evening and afterwards a drive along the beach in a closed Buick.
It is easy to sentimentalize the passing of Tahiti. But it is profitless; because though it is in simplicity that the truest excellence lies, there is set between the simplicity of the peasant, the simplicity of folk-lore, and the simplicity of a man such as Turgenev, the gradual evolution of centuries of thought. The only significant simplicity is based upon experience and growth. Life has to become complicated, sophisticated, obscure before the ultimate simplicity can be reached. For that reason it is profitless to regret those Englands of the past, feudal England, rural England, the England of the trowel and the needle; they had to be destroyed. The process of sophistication must run its course. Those who have seen Tahiti and have felt her magic, know from what conditions of Eden primitive man emerged, can guess to what similar conditions of Eden ultimately he will return; they know what manner of thing it was that was destroyed; they recognize that it was inevitable that it should have been destroyed; they know that it is impossible to turn back the clock; that it is idle to regret Tudor, Elizabethan or Hanoverian England; states of development that served their purpose; but beyond which we have now passed; that we have to accept the world we live in; and the world that lies ahead; in our case the age of the machines.

It is a question of the terms in which a man sees his life; his own life; the life of his friends; and of his country. Whether in terms of frustration or of purpose. When I stood beside Hugh Balliol's grave it would have been easy for me to have seen his life, the life of his family, the life for that matter of my entire generation as the pouring of so much water through a sieve. When I came back from my last long trip through the West Indies and Tahiti, I did not see it in that way, in terms of frustration; but of an inevitable process of building, destroying and rebuilding; that had a purpose. To build a sanctuary you must destroy a sanctuary. The Balliols are symbols of the particular manifestation of that process, in England, during the first quarter of the century.

Strictly speaking, with the death of Hugh Balliol that particular phase of the Balliols' story ended. A new story started then. Yet in the same way that the significance of a past government is illuminated by the first acts of a new government; since that new government is in reaction to that former one; since what is new is bred out of what was old; since Victorian England is as much explained by the contrasted gaiety of Edwardian England, as by its own chronicles, Helen Balliol, though she played so negligible a part in the main story of her family, is in a way a comment on, an explanation of, a corollary
to, that story. Looking at her one feels: Yes, this is what they did. She became this because of them. To understand them completely, one must look at her.

It was from the very last point of view that she would have herself seen herself. By age and by position she had lived apart from her brothers and her sisters. Born in the spring of 1908 her first vivid memory was the firing during a seaside holiday of a cricket pavilion by suffragettes. The declaration of war was the first public event that she remembered. She had been brought up in an atmosphere of conflict. Yet by the time that she was herself old enough to cross the threshold, the fighting was at an end. Women had earned their liberty. They sat in Parliament. Baldwin had promised votes to girls of twenty-one, which was more than Stella had expected in her lifetime. Central Europe was no longer a menace to England's peace. There was a League of Nations at Geneva. Such international dispute as still continued was directed against those who had been England's allies in the war; the French and the Americans. Helen had been brought up to see life in terms of fighting. By the time she was old enough to fight, there was no more fighting to be done. It had been done for her. She was faced with the question “What next?” Where Stella, Lucy, Ruth, Hugh, Francis, had been faced with tangible objectives, she had none. For Stella and Lucy, there had been “the Cause.” For Ruth there had been the survivals of Victorian morality. For Hugh the war. For Francis, the “Back to Normal” attitude; the attempt to force him into a world that was already an anachronism. They had all had something to fight against. There was opposition. There was an immediate objective that had given their life a purpose. For Helen there was not. She was offered without struggle the spoils of victory; a political existence, freedom from chaperons, the right to earn a living in what way she chose, to live her private life as freely as her brothers. There was the same law of morality for both. Standing among the spoils of battle it all seemed to her too easy. “What next?“ she asked herself.

From one point of view she was a typical product of her hour. She was pretty in the way that girls were pretty then; very thin, very made up, a drawled voice, her appearance altering from day to day in accordance with the demands of fashion. One day her eyebrows would be a smudge of mascara; the next plucked to a thin pale line. Technically she was a blonde, but the various treatments to which fashion demanded that her scalp should be subjected made her friends
doubtful on this point. One day her hair would be swinging like a soundless bell about her ears, the next it would be shingled and her hand would be fretfully stealing towards the nape of her neck in the hope of warming it. One day her hair would be darkly plastered like a boy's, with her ears showing, a parting at the side; the next it would be dragged forward over her forehead as though a gale were blowing it from behind. Small hats would be plumped on the back of her head with the hair dragged back under them as though she had been scalped or banged down over her eyes so that only the tip of her nose projected. Her photograph album was a mausoleum of faded fashions. High-necked jumpers, sham pearls, Russian boots. She never looked the same from one month to another. Yet she always looked precisely the same as the thousand and one other girls who thronged London's streets and restaurants and dance clubs; so that every time you met her you thought “Is it really she or not?”

In its way, too, her manner of living resembled theirs. She had no fixed abode. She lived in a dressing-case and trunk which when she was in funds, she parked in the flat some friend had lent her. It was always a different flat. But it seemed the same. It was furnished with the same chromium-plated furniture. Its library consisted of the same two hundred books. By the telephone there was a large Cecil Beaton photograph of a profile silhouetted against a bank of lilies. When she was poor the suit-case was transferred to her club. When she was insolvent to her parents' house. When she was in funds she rang up her friends and invited them to cocktail parties. When she was out of funds she rang them up and waited for them to invite her to lunch or dinner. Her parents were in the background; no one ever saw them. She was always in debt. But she never used tubes or buses. She would rather walk, even on a wet day, than that. She was always talking about a job, either as a dress designer or as a secretarial organizer of a charity, or as an interior decorator. She had just finished a job or was just going to begin one. But she never actually seemed to have one. Her conversation consisted of personalities; always Christian names. What Muriel was doing; Sylvia's latest; John and Marigold. “My dear, that won't last.” Of parties, personalities, clothes, debts. Externally she was like a thousand and one other girls running around London between 1926 and 1930. But there were differences, essential differences. She did not get drunk. She was not promiscuous. She did not borrow money from men. She did not talk about “my career.” She was a very tolerable athlete. She had not written a novel. She was extremely nice.

It is very much easier to find faults than to point out qualities; to explain why you dislike than why you like a person. The moment you start saying nice things about a person, people lose interest in her. There is no quicker way of putting one person off another than by cracking that other up. Personally when I want two people to like each other, I am diplomatically disparaging. “I think you should meet him. I don't know that you'll like him. He's not really your cup of tea. He's … but, oh well, you'll see. There's something, I don't know what, about him.” With such an introduction the meeting is likely to be a success. As far, at any rate, as they are concerned. For you yourself will probably lose both friendships. They will compare notes. “I thought you were going to be awful.” “Did you really? I thought you were, too.” “What made you think that?” “The things so-an-so said about you.” “So he ran me down to you, did he? He ran you down to me all right.” “Did he? There's a pretty friend for you.” It is wiser not to attempt introductions.

It is not easy to explain what it was about Helen Balliol that made you like her, that made you happy with her, that made you feel she was a thoroughly nice person. She was a good listener, which in her case did not mean that she had nothing to say for herself, but that she was genuinely interested in what you had to say, in what you had been doing, in what you were planning to do. She was a friend. She had pretty ways. She had a way now and then of looking very straight at you when you were speaking. Very often when a woman fixes you with a long, slow look, it does not mean that she is trying to gaze into your soul, but that she is short-sighted and is trying to focus you correctly. But Helen was not short-sighted. She had also an amusing baby-talk habit of talking about herself in the third person. “I'm afraid Helen's done something rather silly. She got a letter this morning from her father.…” It sounds childish, and rather tiresome, but actually it was appealing, as though she were saying, “Now, what are we to do about this person?” For it was in that way that she thought about herself; someone about whom something should be done, but what she did not know.

Like many others of her contemporaries, she was at a loose end, with no arranged, clearly presented goal. She was ambitious to the extent that she wanted to make something of her life. But she had what the majority of her contemporaries lacked, a practical sense of her limitations. She did not delude herself with the illusion of “a career.” She did not see herself as a great novelist or actress, as a society hostess. She did not see herself making fortunes as a dress
designer, or interior decorator. She did not see herself pleading in court or farming a constituency.

“It's all very well,” she once said, “to talk about all the openings there are for women nowadays. But are there so many; for a girl like me, that's to say? I could pick up three or four pounds a week, somewhere, I expect. And there are a great many girls to whom the ability to earn that makes all the difference between slavery and liberty, being under the thumb or not under the thumb of a parent, guardian or husband. But for a girl like myself whose father can perfectly well afford me an allowance and doesn't attach any conditions to it, what point is there in my giving up all the best hours of my best years to a work that doesn't really interest me, and that's only keeping out of a job some girl who really needs my job? There are the important posts, of course, the real careers. But I'm not really built for that kind of thing. I'm not good enough. Besides, there'd be always the feeling at the back of everything I did, ‘I'll probably get married some day. Then I'll drop all this.' The only people who really make successes are the people who know that they stand or fall by what they do.”

It was a point of view that showed how far the world had travelled since the time when Stella Balliol had worked in a London office. To Stella the fact that a woman could find a job at all was a proof of woman's independence, of her right to equality with man. Now that that equality had been granted, the office desk had lost its importance as a symbol. A weekly envelope was only valuable if it fulfilled an intrinsic function. There was no point now in a girl working merely for the sake of being able to say she worked.

Helen had no illusions about herself. She knew that she was the kind of girl whose life would be fulfilled or spoiled by marriage. It was in the choice of a husband that her main issue lay.
There
would be for her the big decision. It was the nature of that decision that would explain her, and would explain too, her relations to the family chronicle to which her own story was the postscript. I wondered how soon she would fall in love; with what kind of man; and in what spirit. She was barely twenty-one. She was at a loose end. It was guidance, chiefly, that she missed. She wanted to have a way pointed out to her and her feet set on it. It seemed probable that she would fall in love with someone considerably older than herself.