'There was great awkwardness about the tenants. In the end Bridey went down and gave them a dinner and bonfire there which wasn't at all what they expected in return for their silver soup tureen.
'Poor Cordelia took it hardest. She had looked forward so much to being my bridesmaid - it was a thing we used to talk about long before I came out - and of course she was a very pious child, too. At first she wouldn't speak to me. Then on the morning of the wedding - I'd moved to Aunt Fanny Rosscommon's the evening before; it was thought more suitable - she, came bursting in before I was up, straight from Farm Street, in floods of tears, begged me not to marry, then hugged me, gave me a dear little brooch she'd bought, and said she prayed I'd always be happy. Always happy, Charles!
'It was an awfully unpopular wedding, you know. Everyone took mummy's side, as everyone always did - not that she got any benefit from it. All through her life mummy had all the sympathy of everyone except those she loved. They all said I'd behaved abominably to her. In fact, poor Rex found he'd married an outcast, which was exactly the opposite of all he'd wanted.
'So you see things never looked like going right. There was a hoodoo on us from the start. But I was still nuts about Rex.
'Funny to think of, isn't it?
'You know Father Mowbray hit on the truth about Rex at once, that it took me a year of marriage to see. He simply wasn't all there. He wasn't a complete human being at all. He was a tiny bit of one, unnaturally developed; something in a bottle, an organ kept alive in a laboratory. I thought he was a sort of primitive savage, but he was something absolutely modem and up-to-date that only this ghastly age could produce. A tiny bit of a man pretending he was the whole.
'Well, it's all over now.'
It was ten years later that she said this to me in a storm in the Atlantic.
[3]
I RETURNED to London in the spring of 1926 for the General Strike.
It was the topic of Paris. The French, exultant as always at the discomfiture of their former friends, and transposing into their own precise terms our mistier notions from across the Channel, foretold revolution and civil war. Every evening the kiosks displayed texts of doom, and, in the caf閟, acquaintances greeted one half-derisively with: 'Ha, my friend, you are better off here than at home, are you not?' until I and several friends in circumstances like my own came seriously to believe that our country was in danger and that our duty lay there. We were joined by a Belgian Futurist, who lived under the, I think, assumed name of Jean de Brissac la Motte, and claimed the right to bear arms in any battle anywhere against the lower classes.
We crossed together, in a high-spirited, male party, expecting to find unfolding before us at Dover the history so often repeated of late, with so few variations, from all parts of Europe, that I, at any rate, had formed in my mind a clear, composite picture of 'Revolution' - the red flag on the post office, the overturned tram, the drunken N.C.O.s, the gaol open and gangs of released criminals prowling the streets, the train from the capital that did not arrive. One had read it in the papers, seen it in the films, heard it at caf?tables again and again for six or seven years now, till it had become part of one's experience, at second hand, like the mud of Flanders and the flies of Mesopotamia.
Then we landed and met the old routine of the customs-shed, the punctual boat-train, the porters lining the platform at Victoria and converging on the first-class carriages; the long line of waiting taxis.
'We'll separate,' we said, and see what's happening. We'll meet and compare notes at dinner,' but we knew already in our hearts that nothing was happening; nothing, at any rate, which needed our presence.
'Oh dear, ' said my father, meeting me by chance on the stairs, 'how delightful to see you again so soon.' (I had been abroad fifteen months.) 'You've come at a very awkward time, you know. They're having another of those strikes in two days - such a lot of nonsense - and I don't know when you'll be able to get away.'
I thought of the evening I was forgoing, with the lights coming out along the banks of the Seine, and the company I should have had there - for I was at the time concerned with two emancipated American girls who shared a gar鏾nni鑢e in Auteuil - and wished I had not come.
We dined that night at the Caf?Royal. There things were a little more warlike, for the Caf?was full of undergraduates who had come down for 'National Service'. One group, from Cambridge, had that afternoon signed on to run messages for Trans-port House, and their table backed on another group's, who were enrolled as special constables. Now and then one or other party would shout provocatively over the shoulder, but it is hard to come into serious conflict back to back, and the affair ended with their giving each other tall glasses of lager beer.
'You should have been in Budapest when Horthy marched in' said Jean. 'That was politics.'
A party was being given that night in Regent's Park for the 'Black Birds' who had newly arrived in England. One of us had been asked and thither we all went.
To us, who frequented Bricktop's and the Bal N鑗re in the Rue Blomet, there was nothing particularly remarkable in the spectacle; I was scarcely inside the door when I heard an unmistakable voice, an echo from what now seemed a distant past.
'No,' it said, 'they are not animals in a zoo, Mulcaster, to be goggled at. They are artists, my dear, very great artists, to be revered.'
Anthony Blanche and Boy Mulcaster were at the table where the wine stood.
'Thank God here's someone I know,' said Mulcaster, as I joined them. 'Girl brought me. Can't see her anywhere.'
'She's given you the slip, my dear, and do you know why? Because you look ridiculously out of place, Mulcaster. It isn't your kind of party at all; you ought not to be here; you ought to go away, you know, to the Old Hundredth or some lugubrious dance in Belgrave Square.'
'Just come from one, ' said Mulcaster. 'Too early for the Old Hundredth. I'll stay on a bit. Things may cheer up.'
'I spit on you,' said Anthony. 'Let me talk to you, Charles.' We took a bottle and our glasses and found a comer in another room. At our feet five members of the 'Black Birds' orchestra squatted on their heels and threw dice.
'That one, ' said Anthony, 'the rather pale one, my dear, conked Mrs Arnold Frickheimer the other morning on the nut, my dear, with a bottle of milk.'
Almost immediately, inevitably, we began to talk of Sebastian.
'My dear, he's such a sot. He came to live with me in Marseille last year when you threw him over, and really it was as much as I could stand. Sip, sip, sip like a dowager all day long. And so sly. I was always missing little things, my dear, things I rather liked; once I lost two suits that had arrived from Lesley and Roberts that morning. Of course, I didn't know it was Sebastian - there were some rather queer fish, my dear, in and out of my little apartment. Who knows better than you my taste for queer fish? Well, eventually, my dear, we found the pawnshop where Sebastian was p-p-popping them and then he hadn't got the tickets; there was a market for them, too, at the bistro.
'I can see that puritanical, disapproving look in your eye, dear Charles, as though you thought I had led the boy on. It's one of Sebastian's less lovable qualities that he always gives the impression of being l-1-led on - like a little horse at a circus. But I assure you I did everything. I said to him again and again, "Why drink? If you want to be intoxicated there are so many much more delicious things." I took him to quite the best man; well, you know him as well as I do, Nada Alopov and Jean Luxmore and everyone we know has been to him for years - he's always in the Regina Bar - and then we had trouble over that because Sebastian gave him a bad cheque - a s-s-stumer, my dear - and a whole lot of very menacing men came round to the flat thugs, my dear - and Sebastian was making no sense at the time and it was all most unpleasant.'
Boy Mulcaster wandered towards us and sat down, without encouragement, by my side.
'Drink running short in there,' he said, helping himself from our bottle and emptying it. 'Not a soul in the place I ever set eyes on before - all black fellows.'
Anthony ignored him and continued: 'So then we left Marseille and went to Tangier, and there, my dear, Sebastian took up with his new friend. How can I describe him? He is like the footman in Warning Shadows - a great clod of a German who'd been in the Foreign Legion. He got out by shooting off his great toe. It hadn't healed yet. Sebastian found him, starving as tout to one of the houses in the Kasbah, and brought him to stay with us. It was too macabre. So back I came, my dear, to good old England - Good old England,' he repeated, embracing with a flourish of his hand the Negroes gambling at our feet, Mulcaster staring blankly before him, and our hostess who, in pyjamas, now introduced herself to us.
'Never seen you before,' she said. 'Never asked you. Who are all this white trash, anyway? Seems to me I must be in the wrong house.'
'A time of national emergency,' said Mulcaster. 'Anything may happen.'
'Is the party going well?' she asked anxiously. 'D'you think Florence Mills would sing? We've met before,' she added to Anthony.
'Often, my dear, but you never asked me tonight.'
'Oh dear, perhaps I don't like you. I thought I liked everyone.'
'Do you think,' asked Mulcaster, when our hostess had left us, 'that it might be witty to give the fire alarm?'
'Yes, Boy, run away and ring it.'
'Might cheer things up, I mean.'
'Exactly.'
So Mulcaster left us in search of the telephone.
'I think Sebastian and his lame chum went to French Morocco,' continued Anthony. 'They were in trouble with the Tangier police when I left them. The Marchioness has been a positive pest ever since I came to London, trying to make me get into touch with them. What a time that poor woman's having! It only shows there's some justice in life.'
Presently Miss Mills began to sing and everyone, except the crap players, crowded to the next room.
'That's my girl,' said Mulcaster. 'Over there, with that black fellow. That's the girl who brought me.'
'She seems to have forgotten you now.'
'Yes. I wish I hadn't come. Let's go somewhere.' Two fire engines drove up as we left and a host of helmeted figures joined the throng upstairs.
'That chap, Blanche,' said Mulcaster, 'not a good fellow. I put him in Mercury once.'
We went to a number of night clubs. In two years Mulcaster seemed to have attained his simple ambition of being known and liked in such places. At the last of them he and I were kindled by a great flame of patriotism.
'You and I ' he said, 'were too young to fight in the war. Other chaps fought, millions of them dead. Not us. We'll show them. We'll show the dead chaps we can fight, too.'
'That's why I'm here,' I said. 'Come from overseas, rallying to old country in hour of need.'
'Like Australians.'
'Like the poor dead Australians.'
'What you in?'
'Nothing yet. War not ready.'
'Only one thing to join - Bill Meadows' show Defence Corps. All good chaps. Being fixed in Bratt's.'
'I'll join.'
'You remember Bratt's?'
'No. I'll join that, too.'
'That's right. All good chaps like the dead chaps.'
So I joined Bill Meadows' show, which was a flying squad, protecting food deliveries in the poorest parts of London. First I was enrolled in the Defence Corps, took an oath of loyalty, and was given a helmet and truncheon; then I was put up for Bratt's Club and, with a number of other recruits, elected at a committee meeting specially called for the occasion. For a week we sat under orders in Bratt's and thrice a day we drove out in a lorry at the head of a convoy of milk vans. We were jeered at and sometimes pelted with muck but only once did we go into action.
We were sitting round after luncheon that day when Bill Meadows came back from the telephone in high spirits.
'Come on,' he said. 'There's a perfectly good battle in the Commercial Road.'
We drove at great speed and arrived to find a steel hawser stretched between lamp posts, an overturned truck and a policeman, alone on the pavement, being kicked by half a dozen youths. On either side of this centre of disturbance, and at a little distance from it, two opposing parties had formed. Near us, as we disembarked, a second policeman was sitting on the pavement, dazed, with his head in his hands and blood running through his fingers; two or three sympathizers were standing over him; on the other side of the hawser was a hostile knot of young dockers. We charged in cheerfully, relieved the policeman, and were just falling upon the main body of the enemy when we came into collision with a party of local clergy and town councillors who arrived simultaneously by another route to try persuasion. They were our only victims, for just as they went down there was a cry of 'Look out. The coppers,' and a lorry-load of police drew up in our rear.
The crowd broke and disappeared. We picked up the peace-makers (only one of whom was seriously hurt), patrolled some of the side streets looking for trouble and finding none, and at length returned to Bratt's. Next day the General Strike was called off and the country everywhere, except in the coal fields, returned to normal. It was as though a beast long fabled for its ferocity had emerged for an hour, scented danger, and slunk back to its lair. It had not been worth leaving Paris.
Jean, who joined another company, had a pot of ferns dropped on his head by an elderly widow in Camden Town and was in hospital for a week.
