Graecen became exasperated with himself for wasting his time like this … Following up these fatuous chains of possibility. What the devil did it matter which way they wheelec him? He pictured them wheeling the old man’s body across the Graeco-Roman section. Young Stubbs would obviously be the one to wheel him.… He frowned at himself and drew his mind back to the task in hand.
All this time his eye had been travelling across the sedate columns of the newspaper searching for a review of Syrinx. He was eating buttered toast, his face growing more and more innocent and childish as he felt the butter trickle to his chin. He got out a handkerchief and started absently to dab it. Could he say that life had gained in value from the possibility of its extinction? He knotted his brows in a scowl and cracked the top of the egg. In one way, yes. Everything had been thrown into dark relief — as though he had woken one morning and found the whole world inked in at the edges by a fall of snow. It had informed his critical sense — that was rather an awful phrase. And yet his feelings neither rose nor fell at the idea. Why?
Even his poetry — had it shown any inclination to strike a deeper note? No, it was just the same. He remembered that his work had been described by a young critic in a little review as “pre-atomic, non-radioactive, non-conducting bilge”. It had annoyed him considerably. “Lord Graecen sticks to the rut of rentier poetry”, was another phrase from the same article. Was he honestly so bad?
When torpid winter covers
The city and its lovers,
The cold finality of snow
Whitens the signs and clear defines
The way mortality must go.
It was all of a range, but he liked it. Of course the demonic element he admired so much in Emily Brontë, that was missing. But was it, as the young men said, cake without currants? It seemed on the contrary rather full of plums. At any rate Yeats had printed one in an anthology; and old Lord Alfred had once invited him to Hove where, he said, he would teach him the elements of the sonnet. It was rather condescending of him, really, but Graecen had thanked him profusely.
“Ah,” he said, for his eye, travelling slowly down the penultimate page had struck the title “England’s Cricketer-Poet”. There it was to be sure, written with all the overflowing admiration of old Conklin. He noted the usual references to his title, his scholarship, and his cricket. Conklin did not like his poets effeminate. With a certain indignation, however, he read: “It has become increasingly clear that a new Gordon Bottomley is amongst us. Lord Graecen is definitely in the great tradition of Lord Alfred Douglas, Roland Tuft, Canon Alec Smudge, and Loyola Tipstaff, any of whose lines are worth a bookful of today’s harsh clangour, which, to the uninformed, passes for poetry.” Graecen made an irritated gesture in the air and spilt some butter on his tie. “Here!” he said plaintively, addressing Conklin, “you can’t say that.” It was obviously crass. One hated adverse criticism — but could one bear to be damned by this sort of praise? He read on, however, with growing bitterness.
The bell on the outside door clinked and he saw Hogarth enter, stooping low in his baggy grey trousers, his arms full of books. “Hogarth,” he said delightedly, “Hogarth.” The newcomer lowered his grizzled taurine head and started towards him, with all the caution of a big man who fears that he will overturn something. “Well,” he said, “I was thinking about you — wondering why you hadn’t rung me up.” Graecen was childishly delighted to see his old friend. “Sit down, my dear fellow,” he said. “It’s very nice — dear me — very nice indeed.”
Hogarth sat down slowly, battling, it seemed, with something like the centrifugal force, and unloaded his books on to the table, placing his stained pork-pie hat on top of them. He regarded Graecen with sardonic affection. His small keen eyes took in Graecen’s appearance: the buttered toast in one hand, the handkerchief in the other, the book open on his knee. “Richard,” he said sternly, “you are reading your own work again.” Graecen blushed like a girl. Hogarth always adopted a tone of savage irony for the sheer pleasure of teasing him.
To do him justice, Graecen’s character demanded something more barbed than the conventional responses; and Hogarth, whose dominant character was almost the exact antithesis of his, found himself to be almost complementary in feeling and outlook. They got on admirably; fulfilling indeed Hogarth’s theory of psychic union between two essentially polar types. He had named them “dominant” and “recessive”.
He sat now, regarding his thumbs for a moment, and got his breath. It was obvious that he was a little out of breath. Graecen cherished him with his glances, for he had not seen Hogarth for several weeks. The familiarity of the picture pleased him. Hogarth’s large shoulders were clad in an old tweed coat patched with leather at the elbows. His grey trousers had shrunk in the wash, and their nether ends exposed his thick ankles whose socks hung down about his shoes. His face was like one of those carved Austrian pipe-heads — large bony features which were only kept alive by the small pointed eagerness of his eyes. They were rather fine and changed their colour, the eyes; they were engaged on a perpetual enquiry. When Hogarth laughed they disappeared into small commas like the eyes of pigs. When he opened them very wide, as he did when there was a question to ask, they seemed to become younger, to shine with a beauty and candour of their own.
“Well,” he said, ordering tea, and starting to charge his great blockish pipe with tobacco, “I’ve been running to get away from Boyd.”
Graecen registered a rather fussy interest. Boyd was a friend of his. He was wondering how much he should tell Hogarth. “Boyd wants me to do the preface for his book on psychoanalysis and art. He takes both seriously.” Hogarth sounded gloomy and irritable. “The book is farcical. There is an analysis of Poe’s Raven which would make your hair stand on end. You know the Freudian tie-up between the symbol of the bird and the penis?” Graecen did not, but he blinked and nodded rapidly, moistening his lips with his tongue. “Well, the Raven with its mournful ‘Nevermore’ is a terrible confession of Poe’s impotence.” Graecen said “Dear me” twice, with sympathy. He knew nothing about psycho-analysis, but he could never bring himself to be disrespectful about anything. Hogarth lit up with seven gargantuan puffs. “He has traced a strong interest in masturbation running through Dickens; the choice of names like Mr. Pickwick and Sam Weller are only thinly disguised symbols … Dicky, what’s the matter?”
Graecen felt suddenly unhappy again; he had remembered the sentence. “I’ve resigned from the Antiquities,” he said in a small voice. He had a desire to confide a number of things in Hogarth — among them even old Conklin’s article; but they had all got jammed together at the entrance of his mind and he did not know which he could get out first. His face looked round and ingenuous. His lower lip trembled ever so slightly.
“You’re run down,” said Hogarth.
Graecen nodded and handed the paper across the table to his friend, pointing with his finger to the offensive passage in the review; yet before Hogarth had time to read it he added, rather out of breath, “I’m supposed to have only a few months to live.” It sounded absurd. They looked at each other for a second and both laughed, Hogarth gruffly and Graecen in a high boyish register.