Rupert Brooke, Old Bill, the Unknown Soldier thus three fond women saw him, but Basil breakfasting late in Poppet Green’s studio fell short and wide of all these ideals. He was not at his best that morning, both by reason of his heavy drinking with Poppet’s friends the night before and the loss of face he was now suffering with Poppet in his attempts to explain his assertion that there would be no war. He had told them this the night before, not as a speculation, but as a fact known only to himself and a half a dozen leading Germans; the Prussian military clique, he had told them, were allowing the Nazis to gamble just as long as their bluff was not called; he had had this, he said, direct from von Fritsch. The Army had broken the Nazi Party in the July purge of 1936; they had let Hitler and Goering and Goebbels and Ribbentrop remain as puppets just as long as they proved valuable. The Army, like all Armies, was intensely pacifist; as soon as it became clear that Hitler was heading for war, he would be shot. Basil had expounded this theme not once but many times, over the table of the Charlotte Street restaurant, and because Poppet’s friends did not know Basil, and were unused to people who claimed acquaintance with the great, Poppet had basked in vicarious esteem. Basil was little used to being heard with respect and was correspondingly resentful at being reproached with his own words.
“Well,” Poppet was saying crossly, from the gas stove. “When does the Army step in and shoot Hitler?”
She was a remarkably silly girl, and, as such, had commanded Basil’s immediate attention when they met, three weeks earlier, with Ambrose Silk. With her Basil had spent the time he had promised to Angela at Cannes; on her he had spent the twenty pounds Angela had sent him for the journey. Even now, when her fatuous face pouted in derision, she found a soft place in Basil’s heart.
Evidence of her silliness abounded in the canvases, finished and unfinished, which crowded the studio. Eighty years ago her subjects would have been knights in armour, ladies in wimples and distress; fifty years ago “nocturnes”; twenty years ago Pierrots and willow trees; now, in 1939, they were bodiless heads, green horses and violet grass, seaweed, shells and funguses, neatly executed, conventionally arranged in the manner of Dali. Her work in progress on the easel was an overlarge, accurate but buttercup-coloured head of the Aphrodite of Melos, poised against a background of bull’s-eyes and barley-sugar.
“My dear,” Ambrose had said, “you can positively hear her imagination creaking as she does them, like a pair of old, old corsets, my dear, on a harridan.”
“They’ll destroy London. What shall I do?” asked Poppet plaintively. “Where can I go? It’s the end of my painting. I’ve a good mind to follow Parsnip and Pimpernell” (two great poets of her acquaintance who had recently gone to New York).
“You’ll be in more danger crossing the Atlantic than staying in London,” said Basil. “There won’t be any air raids on London.”
“For God’s sake don’t say that.” Even as she spoke the sirens wailed. Poppet stood paralyzed with horror. “Oh God,” she said. “You’ve done it. They’ve come.”
“Faultless timing,” said Basil cheerfully. ‘That’s always been Hitler’s strong point.”
Poppet began to dress in an ineffectual fever of reproach. “You said there wouldn’t be a war. You said the bombers would never come. Now we shall all be killed and you just sit there talking and talking.”
“You know I should have thought an air raid was just the thing for a surréaliste; it ought to give you plenty of compositions limbs and things lying about in odd places you know.”
“I wish I’d never met you. I wish I’d been to church. I was brought up in a convent. I wanted to be a nun once. I wish I was a nun. I’m going to be killed. Oh, I wish I was a nun. Where’s my gas-mask? I shall go mad if I don’t find my gas-mask.”
Basil lay back on the divan and watched her with fascination. This is how he liked to see women behave in moments of alarm. He rejoiced, always, in the spectacle of women at a disadvantage: thus he would watch, in the asparagus season, a dribble of melted butter on a woman’s chin, marring her beauty and making her ridiculous, while she would still talk and smile and turn her head, not knowing how she appeared to him.
“Now do make up your mind what you’re frightened of,” he urged. “If you’re going to be bombed with high explosive run down to the shelter; if you’re going to be gassed, shut the skylight and stay up here. In any case I shouldn’t bother about that respirator. If they use anything it’ll be arsenical smoke and it’s no use against that. You’ll find arsenical smoke quite painless at first. You won’t know you’ve been gassed for a couple of days; then it’ll be too late. In fact for all we know we’re being gassed at this moment. If they fly high enough and let the wind carry the stuff they may be twenty miles away. The symptoms when they do appear are rather revolting…”
But Poppet was gone, helter-skelter, downstairs, making little moaning noises as she went.
Basil dressed and, only pausing to paint in a ginger moustache across Poppet’s head of Aphrodite, strolled out into the streets.
The normal emptiness of Sunday in South Kensington was made complete that morning by the air raid scare. A man in a tin helmet shouted at Basil from the opposite pavement, “Take cover, there. Yes, it’s you I’m talking to.”
Basil crossed over to him and said in a low tone, “M.I.9.”
“Eh?”
“M.I.9.”
“I don’t quite twig.”
“But you ought to twig,” said Basil severely. “Surely you realize that members of M.I.9 are free to go everywhere at all times?”
“Sorry, I’m sure,” said the warden. “I was only took on yesterday. What a lark getting a raid second time on!” As he spoke the sirens sounded the All Clear. “What a sell!” said the warden.
It seemed to Basil that this fellow was altogether too cheerful for a public servant in the first hours of war; the gas scare had been wasted on Poppet; in her panic she had barely listened; it was worthy of a more receptive audience. “Cheer up,” he said. “You may be breathing arsenical smoke at this moment. Watch your urine in a couple of days’ time.”
“Coo. I say, what did you say you was?”
“M.I.9.”
“Is that to do with gas?”
“It’s to do with almost everything. Good morning.”
He turned to walk on but the warden followed. “Wouldn’t we smell it or nothing?”
“No.”
“Or cough or anything?”
“No.”
“And you think they’ve dropped it, just in that minute, and gone away leaving us all for dead?”
“My dear fellow, I don’t think so. It’s your job as a warden to find out.”
“Coo.”
That’ll teach him to shout at me in the street, thought Basil.
After the All Clear various friends of Poppet’s came together in her studio.
“I wasn’t the least frightened. I was so surprised at my own courage I felt quite giddy.”
“I wasn’t frightened, I just felt glum.”
“I felt positively glad. After all we’ve all said for years that the present order of things was doomed, haven’t we? I mean it’s always been the choice for us between concentration camp and being blown up, hasn’t it? I just sat thinking how much I preferred being blown up to being beaten with rubber truncheons.”
“I was frightened,” said Poppet.
“Dear Poppet, you always have the healthiest reactions. Erchman really did wonders for you.”
“Well I’m not sure they were so healthy this time. D’you know, I found myself actually praying.”
“I say, did you? That’s bad.”
“Better see Erchman again.”
“Unless he’s in a concentration camp.”
“We shall all be in concentration camps.”