Nocturne by Frank Swinnerton

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NOCTURNE

By FRANK SWINNERTON

1917

TO MARTIN SECKER

THIS "NOCTURNE"

INTRODUCTION BY H.G. WELLS

"'But do I see afore me, him as I ever sported with in his times of
happy infancy? And may I--_may_ I?'

"This May I, meant might he shake hands?"

--DICKENS, _Great Expectations_.

I do not know why I should be so overpoweringly reminded of the
immortal, if at times impossible, Uncle Pumblechook, when I sit down to
write a short preface to Mr. Swinnerton's _Nocturne_. Jests come at
times out of the backwoods of a writer's mind. It is part of the
literary quality that behind the writer there is a sub-writer, making a
commentary. This is a comment against which I may reasonably
expostulate, but which nevertheless I am indisposed to ignore.

The task of introducing a dissimilar writer to a new public has its own
peculiar difficulties for the elder hand. I suppose logically a writer
should have good words only for his own imitators. For surely he has
chosen what he considers to be the best ways. What justification has he
for praising attitudes he has never adopted and commending methods of
treatment from which he has abstained? The reader naturally receives his
commendations with suspicion. Is this man, he asks, stricken with
penitence in the flower of his middle-age? Has he but just discovered
how good are the results that the other game, the game he has never
played, can give? Or has he been disconcerted by the criticism of the
Young? The Fear of the Young is the beginning of his wisdom. Is he
taking this alien-spirited work by the hand simply to say defensively
and vainly: "I assure you, indeed, I am _not_ an old fogy; I _quite_
understand it." (There it is, I fancy, that the Pumblechook quotation
creeps in.) To all of which suspicions, enquiries and objections, I will
quote, tritely but conclusively: "In my Father's house are many
Mansions," or in the words of Mr. Kipling:

"There are five and forty ways
Of composing tribal lays
And every blessed one of them is right."

Indeed now that I come to think it over, I have never in all my life
read a writer of closely kindred method to my own that I have greatly
admired; the confessed imitators give me all the discomfort without the
relieving admission of caricature; the parallel instances I have always
wanted to rewrite; while, on the other hand, for many totally dissimilar
workers I have had quite involuntary admirations. It isn't merely that I
don't so clearly see how they are doing it, though that may certainly be
a help; it is far more a matter of taste. As a writer I belong to one
school and as a reader to another--as a man may like to make optical
instruments and collect old china. Swift, Sterne, Jane Austen, Thackeray
and the Dickens of _Bleak House_ were the idols of my youthful
imitation, but the contemporaries of my early praises were Joseph
Conrad, W.H. Hudson, and Stephen Crane, all utterly remote from that
English tradition. With such recent admirations of mine as James Joyce,
Mr. Swinnerton, Rebecca West, the earlier works of Mary Austen or Thomas
Burke, I have as little kindred as a tunny has with a cuttlefish. We
move in the same medium and that is about all we have in common.

This much may sound egotistical, and the impatient reader may ask when I
am coming to Mr. Swinnerton, to which the only possible answer is that I
am coming to Mr. Swinnerton as fast as I can and that all this leads as
straightly as possible to a definition of Mr. Swinnerton's position. The
science of criticism is still crude in its classification, there are a
multitude of different things being done that are all lumped together
heavily as novels, they are novels as distinguished from romances, so
long as they are dealing with something understood to be real. All that
they have in common beyond that is that they agree in exhibiting a sort
of story continuum. But some of us are trying to use that story
continuum to present ideas in action, others to produce powerful
excitements of this sort or that, as Burke and Mary Austen do, while
others again concentrate upon the giving of life as it is, seen only
more intensely. Personally I have no use at all for life as it is,
except as raw material. It bores me to look at things unless there is
also the idea of doing something with them. I should find a holiday,
doing nothing amidst beautiful scenery, not a holiday, but a torture.
The contemplative ecstacy of the saints would be hell to me. In the--I
forget exactly how many--books I have written, it is always about life
being altered I write, or about people developing schemes for altering
life. And I have never once "presented" life. My apparently most
objective books are criticisms and incitements to change. Such a writer
as Mr. Swinnerton, on the contrary, sees life and renders it with a
steadiness and detachment and patience quite foreign to my disposition.
He has no underlying motive. He sees and tells. His aim is the
attainment of that beauty which comes with exquisite presentation. Seen
through his art, life is seen as one sees things through a crystal lens,
more intensely, more completed, and with less turbidity. There the
business begins and ends for him. He does not want you or any one to do
anything.

Mr. Swinnerton is not alone among recent writers in this clear, detached
objectivity. We have in England a writer, Miss Dorothy Richardson, who
has probably carried impressionism in fiction to its furthest limit. I
do not know whether she will ever make large captures of the general
reader, but she is certainly a very interesting figure for the critic
and the amateur of fiction. In _Pointed Roofs_ and _Honeycomb_, for
example, her story is a series of dabs of intense superficial
impression; her heroine is not a mentality, but a mirror. She goes about
over her facts like those insects that run over water sustained by
surface tension. Her percepts never become concepts. Writing as I do at
the extremest distance possible from such work, I confess I find it
altogether too much--or shall I say altogether too little?--for me. But
Mr. Swinnerton, like Mr. James Joyce, does not repudiate the depths for
the sake of the surface. His people are not splashes of appearance, but
living minds. Jenny and Emmy in this book are realities inside and out;
they are imaginative creatures so complete that one can think with ease
of Jenny ten years hence or of Emmy as a baby. The fickle Alf is one of
the most perfect Cockneys--a type so easy to caricature and so hard to
get true--in fiction. If there exists a better writing of vulgar
lovemaking, so base, so honest, so touchingly mean and so touchingly
full of the craving for happiness than this that we have here in the
chapter called _After the Theatre_, I do not know of it. Only a
novelist who has had his troubles can understand fully what a dance
among china cups, what a skating over thin ice, what a tight-rope
performance is achieved in this astounding chapter. A false note, one
fatal line, would have ruined it all. On the one hand lay brutality; a
hundred imitative louts could have written a similar chapter brutally,
with the soul left out, we've loads of such "strong stuff" and it is
nothing; on the other side was the still more dreadful fall into
sentimentality, the tear of conscious tenderness, the redeeming glimpse
of "better things" in Alf or Emmy that would at one stroke have
converted their reality into a genteel masquerade. The perfection of Alf
and Emmy is that at no point does a "nature's gentleman" or a "nature's
lady" show through and demand our refined sympathy. It is only by
comparison with this supreme conversation that the affair of Keith and
Jenny seems to fall short of perfection. But that also is at last
perfected, I think, by Jenny's final, "Keith.... Oh, Keith!..."

Above these four figures again looms the majestic invention of "Pa."
Every reader can appreciate the truth and humour of Pa, but I doubt if
any one without technical experience can realise how the atmosphere is
made and completed and rounded off by Pa's beer, Pa's needs, and Pa's
accident, how he binds the bundle and makes the whole thing one, and
what an enviable triumph his achievement is.

But the book is before the reader and I will not enlarge upon its merits
further. Mr. Swinnerton has written four or five other novels before
this one, but none of them compare with it in quality. His earlier books
were strongly influenced by the work of George Gissing; they have
something of the same fatigued greyness of texture and little of the
artistic completeness and intense vision of _Nocturne_. He has also made
two admirable and very shrewd and thorough studies of the work and lives
of Robert Louis Stevenson and George Gissing. Like these two, he has had
great experience of illness. He is a young man of so slender a health,
so frequently ill, that even for the most sedentary purposes of this
war, his country will not take him. It was in connection with his
Gissing volume, for which I possessed some material he needed, that I
first made his acquaintance. He has had something of Gissing's
restricted and grey experiences, but he has nothing of Gissing's almost
perverse gloom and despondency. Indeed he is as gay a companion as he is
fragile. He is a twinkling addition to any Christmas party, and the
twinkle is here in the style. And having sported with him "in his times
of happy infancy," I add an intimate and personal satisfaction to my
pleasant task of saluting this fine work that ends a brilliant
apprenticeship and ranks Swinnerton as Master. This is a book that will
not die. It is perfect, authentic, and alive. Whether a large and
immediate popularity will fall to it I cannot say, but certainly the
discriminating will find it and keep it and keep it alive. If Mr.
Swinnerton were never to write another word I think he might count on
this much of his work living, as much of the work of Mary Austen, W.H.
Hudson, and Stephen Crane will live, when many of the more portentous
reputations of to-day may have served their purpose in the world and
become no more than fading names.

DECEMBER, 1917

CONTENTS

PART ONE: EVENING

CHAPTER

I. SIX O'CLOCK

II. THE TREAT

III. ROWS

IV. THE WISH

PART TWO: NIGHT

V. THE ADVENTURE

VI. THE YACHT

VII. MORTALS

VIII. PENALTIES

IX. WHAT FOLLOWED

X. CINDERELLA

PART THREE: MORNING

XI. AFTER THE THEATRE

XII. CONSEQUENCES

PART ONE

EVENING

CHAPTER I: SIX O'CLOCK

i

Six o'clock was striking. The darkness by Westminster Bridge was
intense; and as the tramcar turned the corner from the Embankment Jenny
craned to look at the thickly running water below. The glistening of
reflected lights which spotted the surface of the Thames gave its rapid
current an air of such mysterious and especially sinister power that she
was for an instant aware of almost uncontrollable terror. She could feel
her heart beating, yet she could not withdraw her gaze. It was nothing:
no danger threatened Jenny but the danger of uneventful life; and her
sense of sudden yielding to unknown force was the merest fancy, to be
quickly forgotten when the occasion had passed. None the less, for that
instant her dread was breathless. It was the fear of one who walks in a
wood, at an inexplicable rustle. The darkness and the sense of moving
water continued to fascinate her, and she slightly shuddered, not at a
thought, but at the sensation of the moment. At last she closed her
eyes, still, however, to see mirrored as in some visual memory the
picture she was trying to ignore. In a faint panic, hardly conscious to
her fear, she stared at her neighbour's newspaper, spelling out the
headings to some of the paragraphs, until the need of such protection
was past.

As the car proceeded over the bridge, grinding its way through the still
rolling echoes of the striking hour, it seemed part of an endless
succession of such cars, all alike crowded with homeward-bound
passengers, and all, to the curious mind, resembling ships that pass
very slowly at night from safe harbourage to the unfathomable elements
of the open sea. It was such a cold still night that the sliding windows
of the car were almost closed, and the atmosphere of the covered upper
deck was heavy with tobacco smoke. It was so dark that one could not see
beyond the fringes of the lamplight upon the bridge. The moon was in its
last quarter, and would not rise for several hours; and while the
glitter of the city lay behind, and the sky was greyed with light from
below, the surrounding blackness spread creeping fingers of night in
every shadow.

The man sitting beside Jenny continued to puff steadfastly at his pipe,
lost in the news, holding mechanically in his further hand the return
ticket which would presently be snatched by the hurrying tram-conductor.
He was a shabby middle-aged clerk with a thin beard, and so he had not
the least interest for Jenny, whose eye was caught by other beauties
than those of assiduous labour. She had not even to look at him to be
quite sure that he did not matter to her. Almost, Jenny did not care
whether he had glanced sideways at herself or not. She presently gave a
quiet sigh of relief as at length the river was left behind and the
curious nervous tension--no more lasting than she might have felt at
seeing a man balancing upon a high window-sill--was relaxed. She
breathed more deeply, perhaps, for a few instants; and then, quite
naturally, she looked at her reflection in the sliding glass. That hat,
as she could see in the first sure speedless survey, had got the droops.
"See about you!" she said silently and threateningly, jerking her head.
The hat trembled at the motion, and was thereafter ignored. Stealthily
Jenny went back to her own reflection in the window, catching the
clearly-chiselled profile of her face, bereft in the dark mirror of all
its colour. She could see her nose and chin quite white, and her lips as
part of the general colourless gloom. A little white brooch at her neck
stood boldly out; and that was all that could be seen with any
clearness, as the light was not directly overhead. Her eyes were quite
lost, apparently, in deep shadows. Yet she could not resist the delight
of continuing narrowly to examine herself. The face she saw was hardly
recognisable as her own; but it was bewitchingly pale, a study in black
and white, the kind of face which, in a man, would at once have drawn
her attention and stimulated her curiosity. She had longed to be pale,
but the pallor she was achieving by millinery work in a stuffy room was
not the marble whiteness which she had desired. Only in the sliding
window could she see her face ideally transfigured. There it had the
brooding dimness of strange poetic romance. You couldn't know about that
girl, she thought. You'd want to know about her. You'd wonder all the
time about her, as though she had a secret.... The reflection became
curiously distorted. Jenny was smiling to herself.

As soon as the tramcar had passed the bridge, lighted windows above the
shops broke the magic mirror and gave Jenny a new interest, until, as
they went onward, a shopping district, ablaze with colour, crowded with
loitering people, and alive with din, turned all thoughts from herself
into one absorbed contemplation of what was beneath her eyes. So
absorbed was she, indeed, that the conductor had to prod her shoulder
with his two fingers before he could recover her ticket and exchange it
for another. "'Arf asleep, some people!" he grumbled, shoving aside the
projecting arms and elbows which prevented his free passage between the
seats. "Feyuss please!" Jenny shrugged her shoulder, which seemed as
though it had been irritated at the conductor's touch. It felt quite
bruised. "Silly old fool!" she thought, with a brusque glance. Then she
went silently back to the contemplation of all the life that gathered
upon the muddy and glistening pavements below.

ii

In a few minutes they were past the shops and once again in darkness,
grinding along, pitching from end to end, the driver's bell clanging
every minute to warn carts and people off the tramlines. Once, with an
awful thunderous grating of the brakes, the car was pulled up, and
everybody tried to see what had provoked the sense of accident. There
was a little shouting, and Jenny, staring hard into the roadway, thought
she could see as its cause a small girl pushing a perambulator loaded
with bundles of washing. Her first impulse was pity--"Poor little
thing"; but the words were hardly in her mind before they were chased
away by a faint indignation at the child for getting in the tram's way.
Everybody ought to look where they were going. Ev-ry bo-dy ought to look
where they were go-ing, said the pitching tramcar. Ev-ry bo-dy.... Oh,
sickening! Jenny looked at her neighbour's paper--her refuge. "Striking
speech," she read. Whose? What did it matter? Talk, talk.... Why didn't
they do something? What were they to do? The tram pitched to the refrain
of a comic song: "Actions speak louder than words!" That kid who was
wheeling the perambulator full of washing.... Jenny's attention drifted
away like the speech of one who yawns, and she looked again at her
reflection. The girl in the sliding glass wouldn't say much. She'd think
the more. She'd say, when Sir Herbert pressed for his answer, "My
thoughts are my own, Sir Herbert Mainwaring." What was it the girl in
_One of the Best_ said? "You may command an army of soldiers; but you
cannot still the beating of a woman's heart!" Silly fool, she was. Jenny
had felt the tears in her eyes, burning, and her throat very dry, when
the words had been spoken in the play; but Jenny at the theatre and
Jenny here and now were different persons. Different? Why, there were
fifty Jennys. But the shrewd, romantic, honest, true Jenny was behind
them all, not stupid, not sentimental, bold as a lion, destructively
experienced in hardship and endurance, very quick indeed to single out
and wither humbug that was within her range of knowledge, but innocent
as a child before any other sort of humbug whatsoever. That was why she
could now sneer at the stage-heroine, and could play with the mysterious
beauties of her own reflection; but it was why she could also be led
into quick indignation by something read in a newspaper.

Tum-ty tum-ty tum-ty tum, said the tram. There were some more shops.
There were straggling shops and full-blazing rows of shops. There were
stalls along the side of the road, women dancing to an organ outside a
public-house. Shops, shops, houses, houses, houses ... light,
darkness.... Jenny gathered her skirt. This was where she got down. One
glance at the tragic lady of the mirror, one glance at the rising smoke
that went to join the general cloud; and she was upon the iron-shod
stairs of the car and into the greasy roadway. Then darkness, as she
turned along beside a big building into the side streets among rows and
rows of the small houses of Kennington Park.

iii

It was painfully dark in these side streets. The lamps drew beams such a
short distance that they were as useless as the hidden stars. Only down
each street one saw mild spots starting out of the gloom, fascinating in
their regularity, like shining beads set at prepared intervals in a body
of jet. The houses were all in darkness, because evening meals were laid
in the kitchens: the front rooms were all kept for Sunday use, excepting
when the Emeralds and Edwins and Geralds and Dorises were practising
upon their mothers' pianos. Then you could hear a din! But not now. Now
all was as quiet as night, and even doors were not slammed. Jenny
crossed the street and turned a corner. On the corner itself was a small
chandler's shop, with "Magnificent Tea, per 2/- lb."; "Excellent Tea, per
1/8d. lb"; "Good Tea, per 1/4d. lb." advertised in great bills upon its
windows above a huge collection of unlikely goods gathered together like
a happy family in its tarnished abode. Jenny passed the dully-lighted
shop, and turned in at her own gate. In a moment she was inside the
house, sniffing at the warm odour-laden air within doors. Her mouth drew
down at the corners. Stew to-night! An amused gleam, lost upon the dowdy
passage, fled across her bright eyes. Emmy wouldn't have thanked her for
that! Emmy--sick to death herself of the smell of cooking--would have
slammed down the pot in despairing rage.

In the kitchen a table was laid; and Emmy stretched her head back to
peer from the scullery, where she was busy at the gas stove. She did not
say a word. Jenny also was speechless; and went as if without thinking
to the kitchen cupboard. The table was only half-laid as usual; but that
fact did not make her action the more palatable to Emmy. Emmy, who was
older than Jenny by a mysterious period--diminished by herself, but kept
at its normal term of three years by Jenny, except in moments of some
heat, when it grew for purposes of retort,--was also less effective in
many ways, such as in appearance and in adroitness; and Jenny comprised
in herself, as it were, the good looks of the family. Emmy was the
housekeeper, who looked after Pa Blanchard; Jenny was the roving blade
who augmented Pa's pension by her own fluctuating wages. That was
another slight barrier between the sisters. Nevertheless, Emmy was quite
generous enough, and was long-suffering, so that her resentment took the
general form of silences and secret broodings upon their different
fortunes. There was a great deal to be said about this difference, and
the saying grew more and more remote from explicit utterance as thought
of it ground into Emmy's mind through long hours and days and weeks of
solitude. Pa could not hear anything besides the banging of pots, and he
was too used to sudden noises to take any notice of such a thing; but
the pots themselves, occasionally dented in savage dashes against each
other or against the taps, might have heard vicious apostrophes if they
had listened intently to Emmy's ejaculations. As it was, with the
endurance of pots, they mutely bore their scars and waited dumbly for
superannuation. And every bruise stood to Emmy when she renewed
acquaintance with it as mark of yet another grievance against Jenny. For
Jenny enjoyed the liberties of this life while Emmy stayed at home.
Jenny sported while Emmy was engaged upon the hideous routine of kitchen
affairs, and upon the nursing of a comparatively helpless old man who
could do hardly anything at all for himself.

Pa was in his bedroom,--the back room on the ground-floor, chosen
because he could not walk up the stairs, but must have as little trouble
in self-conveyance as possible,--staggeringly making his toilet for the
meal to come, sitting patiently in front of his dressing-table by the
light of a solitary candle. He would appear in due course, when he was
fetched. He had been a strong man, a runner and cricketer in his youth,
and rather obstreperously disposed; but that time was past, and his
strength for such pursuits was as dead as the wife who had suffered
because of its vagaries. He could no longer disappear on the Saturdays,
as he had been used to do in the old days. His chair in the kitchen, the
horse-hair sofa in the sitting-room, the bed in the bedroom, were the
only changes he now had from one day's end to another. Emmy and Jenny,
pledges of a real but not very delicate affection, were all that
remained to call up the sorrowful thoughts of his old love, and those
old times of virility, when Pa and his strength and his rough
boisterousness had been the delight of perhaps a dozen regular
companions. He sometimes looked at the two girls with a passionless
scrutiny, as though he were trying to remember something buried in
ancient neglect; and his eyes would thereafter, perhaps at the mere
sense of helplessness, fill slowly with tears, until Emmy, smothering
her own rough sympathy, would dab Pa's eyes with a harsh handkerchief
and would rebuke him for his decay. Those were hard moments in the
Blanchard home, for the two girls had grown almost manlike in abhorrence
of tears, and with this masculine distaste had arisen a corresponding
feeling of powerlessness in face of emotion which they could not share.
It was as though Pa had become something like an old and beloved dog,
unable to speak, pitied and despised, yet claiming by his very dumbness
something that they could only give by means of pats and half-bullying
kindness. At such times it was Jenny who left her place at the table and
popped a morsel of food into Pa's mouth; but it was Emmy who best
understood the bitterness of his soul. It was Emmy, therefore, who would
snap at her sister and bid her get on with her own food; while Pa
Blanchard made trembling scrapes with his knife and fork until the mood
passed. But then it was Emmy who was most with Pa; it was Emmy who hated
him in the middle of her love because he stood to her as the living
symbol of her daily inescapable servitude in this household. Jenny
could never have felt that she would like to kill Pa. Emmy sometimes
felt that. She at times, when he had been provoking or obtuse, so shook
with hysterical anger, born of the inevitable days in his society and in
the kitchen, that she could have thrown at him the battered pot which
she carried, or could have pushed him passionately against the
mantelpiece in her fierce hatred of his helplessness and his occasional
perverse stupidity. He was rarely stupid with Jenny, but giggled at her
teasing.

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