“Long?” Gerald stammered. “Of course it’s long! Been writing it for four whole months.”
“Ought to be good,” said Home gravely.
“It’s awful,” grinned Gerald, “but, you see. …”
“Quite,” said Horton busily. “Now, I’ll. …”
“Hello!” said Horton, for Gerald was not. Horton threw the typescript to me to read. Of course, it was mad. The New Voice published most of it, and then Heinemann’s published it in the autumn of 1916 and ran it into three editions while people were still disentangling their eyes from the paper wrapper, which showed a woman with purple eyes crucifying a pleasant young man.
The Savage Device is open before me as I write, and its opening lines are: “The history of Felix Burton is the history of an ideal and a vision. They had nothing to do with one another except that the pursuit of the vision hardened him and blooded him for the attainment of the ideal. The ideal was aristocratic, in the sense that it was a striving after nobility in life: the vision was a contradiction, as scientific as it was mystic. The ideal was, of course, defeated: the vision, of course, defeated him. The ideal was purity: the vision had something to do with pain. …”
The “vision,” so far as one could see, had everything to do with pain; in fact it was pain, and the vision might or might not come afterwards. (And I detest that word “mystic.”) The book was exciting and interesting because of a strange mixture of high romance, desperate villainy and an abysmal bitterness. The war came in, naturally. Gerald’s hero had minority ideas about the war—letting the landed gentry down again! As for the pain … Young Burton’s idea of it had not to do with pain as a fact, but as the most sublime among drugs. You know? “In fact,” Gerald wrote, “it is the only drug that cannot debase a man. It can kill him, but there are worse ways of dying than being killed.” It was full of quotations like that, but Gerald threw them at you with a dash sadly lacking in the originals. Young Burton was, of course, going to die in the war.
Young Burton, it appeared, had studied the major and minor tortures of crime and martyrdom. There was a long description of tortures, if you liked that kind of thing. I have seen Gerald’s books on them, with illustrations … very interesting. Then young Burton had come across the old, old idea that after a certain limit of pain there is a definite state of bliss and definite and glorious visions of a real reality which men by ordinary are too sodden or too timorous to see. But poor old Gerald, try as he would, couldn’t make The Savage Device a novel of ideas: it remained a novel of adventure, with an inhuman interest. Young Burton went everywhere in the world, having adventures, getting magnificently hurt—South Sea stuff—studying the effect of pain on men’s minds. A Chinese bandit helped him to quite a number of visions.
Then he plucked Ava Foe from a “dive” in San Francisco, she became Mrs. Burton, and then he had every opportunity for judging the visionary qualities of mental pain. That part was fiendishly well written, the hell that Ava Burton gave him. But young Burton’s ideal of purity was, naturally enough, schoolboy stuff: fine in parts, but stuff. The only part of it that was good was that it was, somehow, purity. On the sexual side young Burton deserved almost all he got from his, one thought, unnecessarily callous young wife. In Ava Foe, I couldn’t help thinking after the coming of the green hat, Gerald had let himself go about Iris. I realised then how he must first have worshipped and then hated his twin sister. What on earth, one wondered, could she have done to him to make him hate her like that? Ava wasn’t in the least like her, of course, but Ava might quite well have been like any sister to any brother who hated her. But this fierce, devilish, medieval passion—why? Yet I should have guessed something of the reason after Iris had told me that young Burton was “Boy,” Gerald’s hero of before the war. But it never occurred to me to connect Iris’s casually dropped “Boy” with the legendary Boy Fenwick of Careless-Days-Before-the-War fame. He will have his place, that dead Boy Fenwick. A deep place.
“Felix Burton’s” idea of what a man should be to live nobly—he was full of those large strivings of Young Men which were in vogue in the Careless-Days-Before-the-War—seemed to take the form of wanting to found a new race of something like potent eunuchs. Young Burton was, of course, without the lusts of the body. Ava Foe wasn’t. Nor did young Burton want any of your waste of time in graceful lovemaking; he wanted a sort of ruthless companionship, with occasional patches of mating; he did not want to procreate gracefully, but with a sort of furious absentmindedness. Imagine Ava—Iris! Imagine Gerald himself drawing the woman of his nightmares, that soft possible woman of lonely dreams, detesting her for destroying him … and for destroying Boy! One wondered, in reading, if Gerald had ever known a woman. The dark knight of purity … the fallen knight of purity, but how fallen!
III
I did not see Gerald whilst I was shaking the dust of Shepherd’s Market forever off my feet, for he was still asleep. I left Shepherd’s Market. The hearty-looking man and the thin wizened man who said “Oi!” and the little bent old man with the bloodshot eyes gave me farewell.
That afternoon I snatched
