Anthony Powell - Soldier's Art

“I’ll ring up when I get to the station,” he said.

Priscilla’s behaviour had positively stimulated Mrs. Maclintick, greatly cheered her up.

“Whatever’s wrong with the girl?” she said. “Why does she want to go off like that? I believe she didn’t approve of me wearing these filthy old clothes. Got to, doing the job I do. No good dressing up as if you were going to a wedding. You know her, Moreland. What was it all about?”

“I haven’t the least idea,” said Moreland sharply.

He showed no wish to discuss Priscilla’s behaviour further. If, once or twice that evening, he had already brought a reminder of his behaviour when out with Matilda, now, by the tone he used, he recalled Maclintick out with Mrs. Maclintick. She may have recognised that herself, because she pursed her lips.

“Wonder what’s happened to Max,” she said. “He should have been along by now. That turn must be over. It’s a short one anyway, and he comes on early at the Madrid.”

“Probably gone to bed,” said Moreland.

Mrs. Maclintick agreed that must have happened.

“More sense than sitting about in a place like this,” she added, “especially if you’ve got to get up early in the morning like I have.”

“That’s not Max Pilgrim you’re talking about?” asked Stevens.

“He’s our lodger,” said Moreland.

Stevens showed interest. Moreland explained he had known Pilgrim for years.

“I’ve always hoped to see him do his stuff,” said Stevens. “There was a chance at this revival of his old songs at the Madrid — I suppose that’s what he was coming on here from. I read about it in the paper and wanted to go, but Priscilla wouldn’t hear of it. I can see now she hasn’t been herself all day. I ought to have guessed she might be boiling up for a scene. You should know how girls are going to behave after you’ve been with them for a bit. I see I was largely to blame. She said she’d seen Pilgrim before and he bored her to hell. I told her I thought his songs marvellous. In fact I used to try and write stuff like that myself.”

I asked if he had ever sold anything of that sort to magazines.

“Only produced it for private consumption,” he said, laughing. “The sole verses I ever placed was sentimental stuff in the local press. They wouldn’t have liked my Max Pilgrim line, if it could be called that.”

“Let’s hear some of it,” said Moreland.

He had evidently taken a fancy to Stevens, who possessed in his dealings that energetic, uninhibited impact which makes its possessor master of the immediate social situation; though this mastery always requires strong consolidating forces to keep up the initial success. Mr. Deacon used to say nothing spread more ultimate gloom at a party than an exuberant manner which has roused false hopes. Stevens did not do that. He could summon more than adequate powers of consolidation after his preliminary attack. The good impression he had made on Moreland was no doubt helped, as things stood, by Priscilla’s departure. Moreland wanted to forget about her, start off on a new subject. Stevens was just the man for that. Mention of his verse offered the channel. There were immediate indications that Stevens would not need much pressing about giving an example of his own compositions.

“For instance, I wrote something about my first unit when I was with them,” he said.

“Recite it to us.”

Stevens laughed, a merely formal gesture of modesty. He turned to me*

“Nicholas,” he said, “were you ever junior subaltern in your battalion?”

“For what seemed a lifetime.”

“And proposed the King’s health in the Mess on guest nights?”

“Certainly.”

“ Mr. Vice, the Loyal Toast — then you rose to your feet and said: Gentlemen, the King .”

“Followed by The Allied Regiments — such-and-such a regiment of Canada and such-and-such a regiment of Australia.”

“Do you mean to say this actually happened to you yourself, Nick?” asked Moreland. “You stood up and said Gentlemen, the King ?”

He showed total incredulity.

“I used to love it,” said Stevens. “Put everything I had into the words. It was the only thing I liked about the dump. I only asked all this because I wrote some lines called Guest Night .”

Stevens cleared his throat, then, without the least self-consciousness, began his recitation in a low, dramatic voice:

“On Thursday it’s a parade to dine,

The Allied Regiments and the King

Are pledged in dregs of tawny wine,

But now the Colonel’s taken wing.

Yet subalterns still talk and tease

(Wide float the clouds of Craven A

Stubbed out in orange peel and cheese)

Of girls and Other Ranks and pay.

If — on last night-scheme — B Coy, broke

The bipod of the borrowed bren:

The Sergeants’ Mess is out of coke:

And Gordon nearly made that Wren.

Along the tables of the Mess

The artificial tulips blow,

Tired as a prostitute’s caress

Their crimson casts no gladdening glow.

Why do those phallic petals fret

The heart, till coils — like Dannert wire –

Concentrically expand regret

For lost true love and found desire?

While Haw-Haw, from the radio,

Aggrieved, insistent, down the stair,

With distant bugles, sweet and low,

Commingles on the winter air.”

Stevens ceased to declaim. He smiled and sat back in his seat. He was certainly unaware of the entirely new conception of himself his own spoken verses had opened up for me. Their melancholy revealed quite another side of his nature, one concealed as a rule by aggressive cheerfulness. This melancholy was no doubt a logical counterpart, the reverse surface of the coin, one to be expected from high spirits of his own particular sort, bound up as they were with a perpetual discharge of personality. All the same, one never learns to expect the obvious. This contrast of feeling in him might have been an element that attracted Priscilla, something she recognised when they first met at Frederica’s; something more fundamentally melodramatic, even, than Lovell himself could achieve. We all expressed appreciation. Moreland was, I think, almost as surprised as myself.

“Not much like Max’s stuff though,” he said.

“All the same, Max Pilgrim was the source.”

“Nor very cheerful,” said Mrs. Maclintick. “I do believe you’re as morbid as Moreland is himself.”

Although she spoke in her accustomed spirit of depreciation, Stevens must have achieved his aim in making more or less of a conquest, because she smiled quite kindly at him after saying that. Moved by her complaisance, or, more likely, by the repetition of his own lines, his face registered self-pity.

“I wasn’t feeling very cheerful at the time,” he said. “That unit I went to as a one-pipper fairly got me down.”

Then, immediately, one of those instantaneous changes of mood, that were so much a part of him, took place.

“Would you like to hear one of the bawdy ones?” he asked.

Before anyone could reply, another officer, a big captain with a red face and cropped hair, like Stevens also wearing battle-dress, passed our table. Catching sight of Stevens, this man began to roar with laughter and point.

“Odo, my son,” he yelled. “Fancy seeing your ugly mug here.”

“God, Brian, you old swine.”

“I suppose you’ve been painting the town red, and, like me, have got to catch the night train back to the bloody grind again. I’ve been having a pretty wet weekend, I can tell you.”

“Come and have a drink, Brian. There’s lots of time.”

“Not going to risk being cashiered for W.O.A.S.A.W.L.”

“What on earth’s that he said?” asked Mrs. Maclintick.