As I watched him, two things happened: one mysterious, the other miraculous.
The first was a consciousness of power which gradually possessed me. The dignity he had so abjectly abandoned became mine. The will-power that had deserted him entered into me. He was revealing the depths of himself. I would reveal nothing. I would live up to his creed. I would remain silent, watching him, till the very excess of his fury reduced him to impotence. And then I would go.
The second—and the miraculous—thing which happened was this. I saw a white mistiness behind him, from which emerged a vision of my mother in all the loveliness that had haunted my childhood. She was more real than the frenzied figure between us. I ceased to see or hear it. I felt we were alone, and that she was revealing why she had left him.
At last gestures and snarls were substituted for words. His passion ceased to be articulate. I waited till silence seemed like a third person in the room, then I turned and went to the door. Just as I opened it, he spoke in a voice that was hardly a whisper.
“Ivor!”
I hurried into the hall, flung on an overcoat and seized a hat.
“Ivor!”
I went out, shutting the front door noiselessly behind me.
C
The next morning I instructed a lawyer to ascertain the amount due to me under the will of my mother’s relative. I did not write to my father and he did not know where I was. . . .
I spent whole nights wandering about the streets. My inner world was in ruins. The god I had worshipped had become a gorilla. When I contrasted what I had imagined him to be with what he was, I experienced a terrible interior laughter which frightened me. This fearless, impressive, cultured man, who had kindled the fire of emulation in me, was a mask, a fake, a lie! Just a cheap fraud—a façade with a cesspool behind it. That was what I had worshipped. I had made his creed mine. It was to be my weapon in the world. It had splintered in my hand. I had nothing. I was naked and empty. All I possessed was the deep certainty that to trust another, to believe in another, to admire another was childish romanticism.
Everything seemed to be revealed in a new and a terrible clarity. Where once I had seen faces, I now saw masks. To me—now—courage was inverted fear. Dignity was a pose: culture a sham. The bestial was the real. It was that which was behind everything else. When all else collapsed, it remained. There it stood—writhing and leering and vomiting filth.
Every memory I had of him was tainted. I hated him with a curious cold hatred. He had robbed me of my chance with the world. The lovely had become suspect. He had made a perfume a lie and a stink real. He had fouled my imagination, frozen my emotions, corrupted my thoughts into spies. He had left me with this ghost of a creed—never to believe, through fear of being always deceived. . . .
Somehow the weeks became months—and then came the war.
An immense curiosity gnawed me. Civilisation? We were to fight for civilisation. And what was that? What it seemed? Or was that, too, a façade? Fine words drifted down every wind—Honour, Glory, Patriotism, Honour. Yes, it sounded all right. And youth was going to die for it.
I joined the army in August, 1914.
I was in training for several months, then I had a few days’ leave before going to the front. I stayed in an hotel in London. The first night I talked to a priest. He was going the next day, and for some reason I told him my story. He listened in silence till I had finished, then he said:
“Write to your father, tell him you are going to France, and ask if he wants to see you.”
“All right,” I replied, “if that’s what you think.”
I wrote the letter, there and then, and posted it.
In the morning the priest came to my room to say good-bye. He gave me a book which I read months later in the trenches. Then he went away, and I never saw him again.
The next day I received my father’s answer. It consisted of one word: “No.” So I knew he had patched up the façade and hidden himself behind it again.
My last night in London I got drunk, for the first time. And I slept with a prostitute, also for the first time. Then I went to fight for civilisation.
Before I had been in France a month, my father fell dead in the street. But that was only the death of his body. For me, he had died on the night of our quarrel—and half of me had died with him. He had left me everything, but that did not interest me. I had all the money I wanted.
Three years in France, then I was wounded, but I went back just before the Armistice and stayed in the army till 1920. It was something to do.
Then I travelled for some time, trying to find out what was left of me. I discovered there was nothing. I had seen what civilisation was—behind the façade.
Two worlds had ended for me.
I returned to London and picked up with an artist, who told me of an experiment in communal living which was going to be made at 77, Potiphar Street, Chelsea. A Captain Frazer was financing it. The artist suggested I should join it. So I took the rooms at the top of this house.
I suppose that was somewhere in 1922.
D
You, whoever you are, who read this must realise that it is written under great difficulties. I write only at night, but, even so, it is possible that Mrs. Frazer will appear at any minute to ask if I need anything. Also I am given a sleeping-draught, but this has little effect, for I sleep as much as possible during the day. Then they keep bringing me letters, or telling me the names of people who have called to inquire—and how surprised these visitors are to discover that I have had rooms here for years. Rendell has met several of them—my publisher, my agent, Rosalie, Vera. At least, I am almost certain that one of the women was Rosalie. Mrs. Frazer watched her arrival. She happened to be looking out of the study window and saw a taxi draw up. Nearly a minute elapsed before a woman got out, glanced right and left, then seemed about to re-enter the taxi and drive away. But, finally, she approached the house slowly, hesitated again, then almost ran to the top of the steps. I am certain it was Rosalie.
All this disturbs me. It brings ghosts from my old life thronging round me. Also, something queer is happening to me in a deep interior manner. Moments of intense inner excitement flash up in me, raising me to a new level of consciousness. I feel exalted and afraid. A new surging abundant life possesses me, a life which quickens and annihilates. My body seems to become as huge as the earth. I have to touch myself to become aware of my actual shape.
Nevertheless, somehow I must go on with this manuscript. I must show how I became the Ivor Trent whom the people downstairs are clamouring to see.
It must have been the end of 1922 when I first came to this house. I only came because my artist friend suggested it. Indifference paralysed me. I had no background, no past, no roots. My father had robbed me of everything represented by the words childhood, boyhood, youth. I had no intimate personal life, no memories. Behind me was a void.
But this personal life is not the only one: there is the life of the world surrounding us. Instinctively we believe a number of things concerning it. We hear grand words about it—Justice, Freedom, Honour—and we assume they represent realities. Well, the war revealed that it is a Jungle. The grand words are a façade.
Still, 77 Potiphar Street was interesting. It was full of odd people. Captain Frazer’s experiment was a failure from its inception, but it was something to watch, and that was all I wanted—something to watch. Of course, I was tired of it in a month or two, but then I met Elsa.