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PARTISAN REVIEW
even Ottoline Morrell herself. A faint look of distressed beauty about
the haggard eyes, an occasional turn of the head on that swanlike
neck were all that remained to recall her famed beauty, and even
these reminded one too much of the Lavery portraits. No, decidedly,
she thought it was all too easily described by one of Mrs. Searle's own
favourite words-"grotesque." Of the famous charm too, there were
only rare flashes, and how like condescension it was when it came, as
in some ornate fairy story of the 'nineties when the princess gives one
glimpse of heaven to the poor poet as her coach passes by. That may
have been how Rupert Brooke and Flecker liked things, but it wouldn't
have done to-day_ That crabbed irony and soured,
ill
natured malice,
those carefully administered snubs to inferiors and juniors, could
that have been the wit that had made her the friend of Firbank and
Lytton Strachey? It seemed impossible that people could have tol–
erated such arrogance, have been content with such triviality_ It was
unfair, probably, to judge a galleon by a washed up wreck. There
was no doubt that at some period Miranda Searle had strayed, was
definitely
detraquee.
Even her old friends in Oxford had dropped her,
finding the eccentricity, the egotism, the rudeness insupportable. But
to Elspeth it seemed that such a decline could not be excused by per–
sonal grief, other mothers had had only sons killed in motor accidents
and had lived again, other women had been confined to provincial
lives and had kept their charity.
It
was monstrous that a man of the
intellectual calibre of Henry Searle, a man whose work was so im–
portant should be chained to this living corpse. She had heard stories
already of Mrs. Searle's secret drinking and had been told of some
of the humiliating episodes in which she had involved her husband,
but it was not until this visit to their Somerset cottage that she had real–
ized how continuous, how slowly wearing his slavery must be. On
the very first night she had heard from her bedroom a voice raised in
obscenities, a maundering whine. She had guessed-how right she had
been-that this was one of the famous drinking bouts.
It
had enabled
her to see clearly why it was that Henry Searle was slowly with–
drawing from University life, why the publication of the last volume
of Peacock's letters was delayed from year to year, why the projected
life of Mary Shelley remained a dream. It was her duty, she had
decided then, to aid him in fighting the incubus, her duty to English
letters, her return for all the help he had given to her own labours. But
