chap they are talking about – Temple.’
‘Oh? I do not know anything about him. But I am glad he set fire to his school; it sounds spirited. Most of these people are so wet.’
At a little distance the bell-like voice called out, ‘Plage, Plage, come and sit with us, and tell us about our new neighbour. Plage knows him well.’
‘He has, I am afraid, no settled system of any sort,’ said Plage, ‘so that his conduct must not be strictly scrutinised. His affections are social and generous, perhaps; but his desire for imaginary consequence predominates over his attention to truth.’
‘He is also a frightful snob.’
‘He says that he has been at Munich, a fiction so easily detected that it is wonderful how he should have been so inconsiderate as to hazard it.’
‘He told me that he had visited the Isles of Langerhans too.’
‘The trouble with him …’ began Spado trenchantly, but he was overborne and no more could be heard except ‘Nihil tetigit quod non ornavit’ again and, ‘It is one of these little showy talents that fizzle out in a flood of decoration. He reminds me of Sert.’
‘We will not attend to poor jealous Spado. They all say that he is good but they all admit he is an ass; which is very strange.’
‘Why do you find it strange? What makes you think there is any relation between painting and common intelligence?’
Spado repeated, ‘One of these talents that fizzle out in decoration,’ and an electric light, turned on by some lower switch, suddenly illuminated Richard, while a couple of even later guests came swarming up the stairs, peering upwards and hooting: retreat was impossible, and with as even a countenance as he could manage he opened the door and walked in. It was strange to see how the voices paired with the faces and how their knowing looks were all dissembled. Judas Julia smiled at him; his hosts looked welcoming; and it occurred to him that people often spoke like this behind his back.
He had suspected for some time that he was not doing very well, but this whole-hearted, unequivocal confirmation went far beyond the worst of his dim, vague apprehension. (As for their praise, he did not reckon it any comfort; he scarcely noticed it – there was not one of them whose good opinion of his work meant anything at all.)
Yet now from this remote impartial view what surprised him was not the way some of them ganged up on him while they let still more offensive youths get away with more, but rather the tolerance of others; for indeed he must have been a monster at that stage.
Such elaborate, unnecessary poses, such attitudes … through the prodigious distance he could still see some of them. He beheld them without any tenderness, for the person back there was so disguised by fermenting youth, so drunk with it and removed from his ordinary nature, that he could feel little responsibility; he looked at them rather with astonishment, for he could no longer make out what some of the attitudes were meant to signify. Perhaps they were literally meaningless, like those profound looks of the young, in which it is hoped that someone else will supply the significance: perhaps they only meant that to épater les bourgeois was the highest aim in life.
It was this ferment that caused him to depart from his natural solitude and to dread the loneliness that he had always accepted: he was a natural solitary, and he had little social talent or discrimination. How much was nature and how much circumstance? He had been brought up alone and he had passed many of his formative years without the ordinary contacts; yet on the other hand his father, with a totally different upbringing, had much the same want of tact. Whatever the cause, the result was much the same: he danced with the grace of a half-taught bear. Just as homosexuals often find life in a heterosexual society difficult because the heterosexual culture is concerned with handing on heterosexual experience, discussing heterosexual attitudes and providing literary bases for conduct, so that the homosexual has no great corpus of information and accepted attitudes to draw upon but is obliged to work out everything for himself from the start (a task beyond the capacity of most), so the solitary finds life in a gregarious society laborious and baffling. He is not provided with some of the natural qualities of the rest, and he does not understand the wider sense of the common social rules but clings to them as arbitrary formulæ: though indeed the comparison is not very just, for the solitary is rarely as committed to his solitude as the pederast to his boys. Yet however lame the comparison, Richard certainly found reality difficult to make out, and he certainly floundered more than most.
The world in which he lived, it is true, was concerned more with things of the spirit than was the Stock Exchange; but this did not make it all of a piece nor prevent it from being pretty phoney in a great many of its aspects – there were the inevitable hordes of silly and dirty people in search of a literary justification for silliness and dirt, the uncircumcised Jews and the white Negroes, as well as the lechers – and there was a strong sense of class distinction, which ran, apart from a few obvious inversions, upon exactly the same lines as those which divided Easton Colborough into its unnumbered castes. Indeed it would have been necessary to escape from England altogether to escape from this pressure: he was more conscious of it now, and he coped with it as well as he could, with little regard for honesty and without much skill … he must often have made himself ridiculous, and he certainly made himself disliked.
Yet though his prating, his dogmatism, his violence and his affectation rather told against him in gatherings of more than a few people, he could be agreeable in a simple relationship, a tête à tête; and upon the whole he enjoyed those last years of play. He was, in some respects, an undifferentiated youth, scarcely to be distinguished from the herd of his contemporaries, who all looked very much alike; and in the same way the greater part of his young women (the principal source of his joys and pains) were undifferentiated girls. Though indeed there were some lovely exceptions. He had abounding health and vitality and the energy usual at his age; the smell of the streets and the plane trees were aphrodisiac, and he was as amorous as a dove. Love had come late to him, but this was obviously through no irremediable block, for the emotion was very strong – a great turbulence of spirit; yet it was less an exclusive desire for any one girl than for all nubile womankind and although the affectionate and sentimental side of his nature attempted to disguise this from him in fact he often behaved with so shocking a degree of two-faced promiscuity that it was surprising that he was able to maintain his conviction that he was an excellent and virtuous man.
He rarely knew any of them well: he was barely acquainted with them as people, and indeed most of them were vague enough to be mistaken for one another in the dark. Perhaps there is not often much friendship between young men and women, and certainly there cannot be much intimacy of mind where each is preoccupied by a rôle. He did not know many of them, and now in the course of a somewhat caddish enumeration he found that many of them he could not remember except as part of a picture: their names, unbacked by any definite character, had faded, and they were replaced by the shape of hands, body, face and colour. A likely wench may be told by the jut of her bum: it really meant her likeliness, no doubt; but it was very true in another sense. He saw the lovely pearly buttocks of a round blonde girl, nacreous in the light of dawn, and himself so drained of desire that he could consider them then as objectively as he did now – a question then of light and surface; now of identification. Did not know them: and what is more, although he was passionate and sentimental he doubted whether he had even really liked the most part of them.
It was a rather subhuman activity: but most of these grapplings had another end as well – at this period he was a great talker, and his loquacity suffered from a night alone. How much he talked, and what balls; and when mendacity sickened him, he fell into the other extreme of candour; but he never would be quiet or continent. There were only two things which showed that he was capable of reticence at all: from superstitious motives as well as from piety he did not speak much of his occasional
