‘Ask the Surrealists. They are keen on action. Their magazine had a photograph on the cover the other day with the caption: One of our contributors insulting a priest.’
‘Exactly,’ said Moreland. ‘Violence — revolt — sweep away the past. Abandon bourgeois values. Don’t be a prisoner of outworn dogmas. I’m told on all sides that’s how one should behave, that I must live intensely. Besides, the abominable question of musical interpretation eternally bedevils a composer’s life. What could make one brood on action more than a lot of other people taking over when it comes to performance, giving the rendering of the work least sympathetic to yourself?’
‘You might say that happens in love, too, when the other person takes charge of the performance in a manner unsympathetic to yourself.’
‘All right,’ said Moreland, ‘love, then. Is it better to love somebody and not have them, or have somebody and not love them? I mean from the point of view of action — living intensely. Does action consist in having or loving? In having — naturally — it might first appear. Loving is just emotion, not action at all. But is that correct? I’m not sure.’
‘It is a question Barnby would consider absurd.’
‘Nevertheless, I put it to you. Can the mere haver be said to live more intensely than the least successful lover? That is if action is to live with intensity. Or is action only when you bring off both — loving and having — leaving your money on, so to speak, like a double-event in racing. Speaking for myself, I get the worst of all worlds, failing to have the people I love, wasting time over the others, whom I equally fail to have.’
‘You should commit a crime passionnel to liven things up.’
‘When I read about crimes passionnels in the papers,’ said Moreland, scraping his plate from which the last vestige of egg had already been long removed, ‘I am struck not by the richness of the emotions, but by their desperate poverty. On the surface, the people concerned may seem to live with intensity. Underneath, is an abject egotism and lack of imagination.’
‘Stendhal did not think so. He said he would rather his wife tried to stab him twice a year than greeted him every evening with a sour face.’
‘Still, he remained unmarried. I’ve no doubt my own wife will do both. Besides, Stendhal was equally keen on the glance, the kiss, the squeeze of the hand. He was not really taken in by the tyranny of action.’
‘But surely some crimes passionnels are fascinating. Suppose one of his girls murdered Sir Magnus Donners in fantastic circumstances — I leave the setting to your own fevered imagination.’
‘Now, Sir Magnus Donners,’ said Moreland. ‘Is he a man of action? In the eyes of the world, certainly. But does he, in fact, live intensely?’
‘Like Stendhal, he has never married.’
‘Hardly a sine qua non of action,’ said Moreland, now rubbing the plate with a lump of bread.
‘But a testing experience, surely. The baronet’s wife’s subsequent married life with the gamekeeper opens up more interesting possibilities than any of their adulterous frolics.’
‘D. H. Lawrence’s ideas about sexual stimulation,’ said Moreland, ‘strike me as no less unreal — no less artificial, if you prefer-than any attributed to Sir Magnus Donners. Suburban, narcissistic daydreams, a phallic never-never-land for middle-aged women. However, that is beside the point, which is that I grant, within the sphere of marriage and family life, Sir Magnus has not lived intensely. Setting marriage aside, on the other hand, he has built up a huge fortune, risen to all but the highest peaks in politics, appreciates the arts in a coarse but perfectly genuine manner, always has a succession of pretty girls in tow. Is he to be styled no man of action because he has never married? The proposition is absurd. After all, we are not married ourselves.’
‘And, what’s more, must cease to live intensely. It’s nearly three o’clock.’
‘So it is. How time flies.’
‘Raining, too.’
‘And the buses have stopped.’
‘We will return to action on another occasion.’
‘Certainly, we will.’
The interest of this conversation, characteristic of Moreland in a discursive mood, lay, of course, in the fact that he subsequently married Matilda Wilson, one of Sir Magnus’s ‘girls’. The modest account he gave during this discussion at the Hay Loft of his own exploits at that period probably did Moreland less than justice. He was not unattractive to women. At the same time, his own romantic approach to emotional relationships had already caused him to take some hard knocks in that very knockabout sphere. At the moment when we were eating bacon-and-eggs, neither Moreland nor I had yet heard of Matilda. In those days, I think, she had not even come the way of Sir Magnus himself. In fact, that was about the stage in her life when she was married to Carolo, the violinist, a marriage undertaken when she was very young, lasting only about eighteen months. However, ‘the great industrialist’ — as Barnby used to call Sir Magnus — was already by then one of Moreland’s patrons, having commissioned him not long before to write the incidental music for a highbrow film which had Donners backing. Barnby, too, was beginning to sell his pictures to Sir Magnus at about that date. Barnby often talked about ‘the great industrialist’, who was, therefore, a familiar figure to me — at least in song and story — although I had myself only seen Sir Magnus twice: once at a party of Mrs Andriadis, which I had attended quite fortuitously; a second time, spending a week-end with the Walpole-Wilsons, when I had been taken over to Stourwater. Later on, one heard gossip about a jolie laide (in contrast with the ‘pretty girls’ Moreland had adumbrated at the Hay Loft) with whom Sir Magnus used occasionally to appear. She was called Matilda Wilson, said to be an actress. Sir Magnus and Matilda had parted company — at least were no longer seen together in public — by the time Moreland first met her. Afterwards, when Matilda became Moreland’s wife, I used sometimes to wonder whether Moreland himself ever recalled that Hay Loft conversation. If so, rather naturally, he never returned to the subject.
I think it would be true to say of Moreland that, up to a point, he did live with intensity. He worked hard at seasons, at others, concentrated whole-heartedly on amusing himself. This was within the limitations of the diffidence that enclosed him in dealings with women. There could be no doubt that Matilda herself had taken the decision that they should marry. Barnby used to say that women always take that decision. In any case, Matilda liked taking decisions. This taste of hers suited them both at the beginning of their married life, because Moreland was wholly without it, except where his own work was concerned.
‘The arts derive entirely from taking decisions,’ he used to say. ‘That is why they make such unspeakably burdensome demands on all who practise them. Having taken the decisions music requires, I want to be free of all others.’
Moreland’s childhood — since I have spoken at some length of childhood — had been a very different affair from my own. In the first place, music, rather than military matters, had been regarded as the normal preoccupation of those round him in the house of his aunt who brought him up. I mean music was looked upon there not only as an art, but also as the familiar means of earning a livelihood. In my own home, the arts, to some very considerable extent respected, were not at all regarded in that essentially matter-of-fact, no-nonsense, down-to-earth manner. When my father was attached to a cavalry regiment at Brighton before we moved to Stonehurst, my parents might attend an occasional concert at the Pavilion; meet Mr Deacon there, afterwards visit his flat. They would even be aware that Mr Deacon was a ‘bad’ painter. At the same time, painting, ‘good’ or ‘bad’ — like music, sculpture, writing and, of course, acting — would immutably remain for them an unusual, not wholly desirable, profession for an acquaintance. Indeed, a ‘good’ painter, certainly a well-known ‘modern’ painter (even though ‘modernism’ in the arts was by no means frowned upon by my father), would be considered even more of a freak than Mr Deacon himself, since being ‘well-known’ was, by its very nature, something of a social aberration. It was in Mr Deacon’s Brighton flat that he produced those huge pictures that might have been illustrations to Miss Orchard’s lessons about the gods of Olympus. Mr Deacon, in the words of his great hero, Walt Whitman, used to describe them as ‘the rhythmic myths of the Greeks, and the strong legends of the Romans’. The Furies were probably never represented by his brush, because Mr Deacon shunned what Dicky Umfraville used always to call ‘the female form divine’.