The World as I Found It (10 page)

Ottoline could no more pick a sweetmeat from Arthur's gaping table than she could pick a paltry doll. Shy, gawky, hypersensitive about her as yet unfocused appearance, she grew steadily more pious, with a mother confessor and a thirst to help the poor, who on Arthur's lands were as plentiful as once the native partridges had been.

Arthur found her a frump and a nuisance and wished she would marry.

Instead of enjoying herself and finding herself a good match, Arthur said, all she did was waste her time praying, distributing food parcels and teaching footmen how to read. Unable to stand her chronic gloominess, Arthur finally packed her off to Italy with two chaperones. With its warmth, light and beauty, Italy marked the slow demise of her old life. Italy also marked her first affair. Ottoline became so bold that her chaperones, fearing for their reputations, fled, saying that they would pray for her.

She married in 1902, at the age of twenty-nine, and she changed as people do, in certain ways fundamentally, in other ways not at all. In her there was still much of Florence Nightingale. Art was her Crimea, and she was still the libidinal nurse, ministering to these penniless young scribblers and painters who manned the barricades against boors like Arthur.

Art was her creed, and people were her palette. In her mind, then, Ottoline was not a camp follower but, say, an artist of life. Skillfully arranging these colors and textures, the dull with the vibrant and the rough with the smooth, she hoped to create a salon that would rival that of Madame de Staël or George Sand. But still there were the critics, not the least of them being those whose careers she had most advanced, calling
her
an opportunist and adventuress. It made her furious! Was this mere self-promotion? she would ask herself. After all, who but a fool would be so generous toward artists who, as a class, were almost invariably ungrateful, self-centered and two-faced? Why, this was saint's work she was doing. But where, for God's sake, were the saints?

* * *

Russell complied with Ottoline's wishes. After putting away his clothes, he walked, grumbling, up to the house, where he heard the strum of a guitar and saw the party still gathered in the garden. I'm not prepared for this, he thought. With that, he slipped into the empty house to compose himself with a browse among the books he'd seen downstairs.

Furnished in a mode of calculated deshabille, the house was pure Ottoline, very inviting and eccentric. There was a wing where Ottoline and the family slept, and there was a paneled guest's gallery lined with bookshelves and furnished with a tumble of doggy-smelling chairs with arms rubbed smooth and cushions molded, like distinctive hats, by a succession of rumps. Meandering about this room, Russell wasn't looking for anything particular when he stopped before a wall hung with a sort of rogue's gallery of drawings and caricatures done by Studland's artists and habitués. Russell wasn't consciously looking for Lamb's work; somehow, Lamb's etched pencil portrait found him. He immediately recognized the style as Lamb's, and he knew from the subject's smug look that it was a self-portrait. Russell's stare was like a knife driven into the wall. And then he jumped—Lytton Strachey was standing right behind him. Spooky Lytton, so fond of looming. His large nostrils flared with the scent of prey as in a deep, strangely inflected voice he intoned:

Heavenly Henry … God hate him for being so gorgeous.

Lytton smiled. As usual, he was standing just a little too close, peering into Russell's face through circlets of horn rim that were much too small for his tall Chinese lantern of a head. Russell could hear the air whistling through his nose, could see his equine jaw working. Such a gaping, thoroughly homely man with this cadaverous skin and livid, patchy red beard. And now Russell felt Lytton stuff words in his mouth as he said with a sigh, God gives some the looks and some the brains, eh, Bertie?

Deflected Russell, And to some, like ourselves, he gives both.

Lytton snorted. He wasn't fooled by this dodge. Pointing to a drawing on the wall opposite, he said, There's the one Henry did of Ottoline.

Russell was noncommittal as he idled over. Umm…

Russell had known Lytton Strachey for over ten years, yet for all the young man's frivolousness in certain company, Russell never mistook for a moment his intellect, wit or social cunning. At thirty-two, Strachey was eight years younger than Russell, but they knew each other fairly well, both belonging to the Cambridge Conversazione Society, better known as the Apostles. Having numbered among their members the likes of Tennyson, Whitehead and Moore, the Apostles had, since 1820, secretly elected to their brotherhood Cambridge's most brilliant undergraduates. The brothers had no hesitation whatsoever in electing Lytton, nor in electing his good friends Leonard Woolf and Maynard Keynes. For a time, Russell hoped Strachey might become a protégé, but the appearance of Moore's
Principia Ethica
in 1903 burst that bubble. In a single stroke, most of the younger brethren went over to Moore, taking up his ethics just as resoundingly, it seemed to Russell, as they ignored his logic, which sought to assault the same mountain from the other side.

As a result, Russell was inclined to feel chafed around Strachey, not only because of Strachey's allegiance to Moore but because of his now egregious homosexuality, which he and other Apostles of similar leanings, having taken Moore's Platonic aesthetics at the expense of his morals, had redubbed the “Higher Sodomy.” Left alone, with none to ignore or impress, Strachey could have given Russell hours of remarkable conversation, but amid the excitement and distraction of these young men it was hopeless: Strachey was like a stallion set loose among the mares.

Russell could feel Lytton probing as he studied Lamb's pencil sketch. Skillfully executed, with brassy, etchinglike strokes, this one was not mocking or cynical. This time Ottoline was transfigured, with a nimbus of dark hair setting off the prowlike chin and large, sensuous lips. Beyond flattering, thought Russell, wondering if it didn't suggest more than the usual involvement of a painter with his subject.

Carefully setting the hook, Lytton remarked, Excellent draftsmanship, don't you agree? God, he was a scandal at dinner last night. Oh, what a romp we had.

Who's that? asked Russell, affecting not to have heard.

Why, Henry, chirped Lytton.

The faint constriction of Russell's face told the fisher what he had been fishing for. With that, winsome Lytton drifted out through the french doors, saying moonily, Ahh, Lamb, Lamb. Who made thee?

Lytton didn't have to complete the line; Russell's mind did the rest, only his emending brain changed Blake's refrain from “God bless thee” to “God damn thee, Henry Lamb.”

Ottoline was stunned when Russell found her just after this and said to her accusingly, Lamb stayed down at my cottage, didn't he? He was just here, wasn't he?

Ottoline's eyes widened, as if to ask what the problem was. Yes, of course he did. I told you. He stayed there all last winter.

Right. But you neglected to say he was just here last night. In the place you reserve for your
special
guests —

Ottoline eyed him with pity. I think you're reading much more into it than is there. If I neglected to tell you, that's because Lamb
isn't
so important next to you. With a wronged look, she added, I've never taken you for the jealous type. You've certainly no reason to be.

Russell was asking for reassurance, and by now she knew exactly what to say. Russell was like a child, as grateful and relieved as Philip was when she told him the same tales.

Russell felt much better then. And for that next hour until they sat down to dinner, he was fine, fine. But as they were taking their places at the table, he found his seating card, not two or three, but
five
places down from Ottoline's, the more to emphasize that he was no one in particular—and this while that Cheshire, Lytton, sat to her right, opposite her cousin Adelaide.

Ottoline, disguising her trail, flashed him a sympathetic glance, but it did no good. She was not there for him, not now. Ottoline was her hard public self tonight, having strapped on not a dress but a mailed suit of social armor. This dinner was not mere play, it was her occupation, dead in earnest. Holding court at the head of the table, flushed and slightly sunburned, Ottoline was a dark, flashing sapphire, wearing a long blue velvet dress with a dove-colored panel and a mantilla of black lace. The cooks and serving maids had been deployed and given their instructions, and when she rang her diminutive brass bell, out with its accompanying sherry came the first course,
consommé froid à l'Indienne.
For her centerpiece that artist of life had arranged around her a bunch of young flowers, including Philip Ritchie, Jules Coolcomb, the young painter Duncan Grant and Lytton's latest, the crapulous first son of the earl of Farnsworth, who plucked his eyebrows and insisted on being called Eddie.

Down the table, meanwhile, trying to strike a youthful air, Russell was defiantly dressed in a new and, as it seemed under candlelight, glowing pink shirt. Despite his anxieties, he was trying to be gay, but in this ill-chosen shirt, with his neck funneled up in a high celluloid collar, he felt like a target in a penny-a-pitch stall. Lytton was the first to have a throw, saying, Well, aren't we looking
colorful
tonight.

Eddie, drinking since noon, went into titters, crumbs of bread sticking to his lips.

Trying not to smile, but delighted in spite of herself, Ottoline said, I think it's very becoming, Lytton. If you can wear a cape, Bertie can certainly wear a pink shirt if he likes.

Eminently fair, said Lytton, raising his glass as Eddie, smirking, whispered something behind his artfully drawn napkin. A
nice
choice.

Well, on that account, replied Russell icily, I thank you.

On any other night, Russell would easily have fended this off, but instead he fought back with brute intellect. Current expenditures for dreadnoughts in relation to German naval expansion? Home rule for Ireland? The failure of Robert Scott's polar expedition? Was there anything under the sun he did not know or did not have an opinion on? He was brilliant, but it was the brilliance of anger—the light he gave off was too hot and white for people who had drunk several glasses of wine. They didn't want a tutorial; they wanted to be merry. Besides, Russell was a hopeless latecomer to Ottoline's life. Oh, said the looks, such a crashing bore he was! Tiresome how he missed the private jokes and references. Irritating how he had to be filled in on names and nicknames and old stories, when the party was straining to hear the latest morsels from London. Russell was jealous not just of Lamb but of Ottoline's past. In his urge to consume her, to internalize her as his creation, he chafed at the idea that she had a whole life prior to him. Anxiously, he remarked — he thought terribly aptly — I feel as if I'm in the midst of a Russian novel where everyone has three names! But this was greeted with looks of genteel incomprehension and the conversation turned elsewhere.

For the life of him, he couldn't get his footing with these people. Where his own jokes ignominiously misfired, theirs were thought wildly amusing. No sooner would he sink his teeth into a topic than Ottoline would say, But Bertie, we're talking about suffragism now.

Soon, he was grabbing at straws. When Lytton — someone — mentioned Nietzsche, that then fashionable subject, he jumped on it, launching off on a discussion of “Homer's Contest”:

Even early on, we hear Nietzsche talking about the generative, life-giving properties of conflict. Envy, for the Greek, is a virtue — it spurs him on to greatness. But Socrates, you see, is just too much for the Athenians. Because he towers above the rest — because he
ends
the contest—they scotch him, feed him the hemlock. Oh, yes, Nietzsche does raise an interesting point. But what I detest is how he revels in the contest, especially at this rather advanced stage of history. And it's anything
but
generative or life giving — it merely feeds this hateful Darwinism of contending peoples and nations, militarism and all the rest. If you ask me, it's exceedingly savage and destructive.

As is life, chided Lytton. Nietzsche's raising laurels, not distributing alms to the ordinary. Besides, he's really speaking of individuals, not nations.

Oh, yes, added Eddie, looking up sloppily from his port. The Superman and so forth.

True, said Russell, directing his comment solely to Lytton, since it was only Lytton he was contesting. This may be true of Nietzsche's
intentions,
but what of the results? People do not read so discriminatingly. The egotist will find his truth, and the militarist his. The result in both cases is predictably brutal. Not only do the strong subjugate the weak, but the strong grapple with the strong to the general destruction of all. And of course for Nietzsche the weak don't count anyway. For him, millions of ordinary lives are not worth one Napoleon — or, I presume, one Nietzsche. Hateful, megalomaniacal thinking. It only justifies the idea that the great feed upon the ordinary, that history, like an infernal factory, is designed to produce certain great
products
— Christ, Beethoven's Ninth, the aeroplane.

Sensing the general restlessness, Lytton spoke for the table as he remarked with a dry smile, Speaking of
great products,
we may have to banish you, old man, if you persist in being much more brilliant tonight.

Oh, hardly! scoffed Russell. And then he laughed,
hoof hoof.
But he was gored. Sitting at the head of the table like Helen herself, even Ottoline, the prize of this contest, was staring him down as he gulped from his goblet, wanting to die.

It was downhill after that. He remembered them playing charades, starting with Lytton, who did a rakish Leda and the Swan. Gloriously beating the air with his wings, Lytton had them thinking he was not Zeus buggering Leda but Christ impaled on the cross. Eddie was shrieking with laughter. Russell could not bear it. Pleading sleep, he left, but not before seeing Ottoline as Marie Antoinette. Here was a cozy image to take to bed — this one rivaled Lamb's fresco of Whore Mary. Ottoline gesturing. Eating yards of cake, then merrily cradling her severed head as they called out: