He couldn’t understand what Jean saw in Brand anyway. A striking-looking fellow, no doubt about it, with his Roman nose and his yellow hair; but there was something queer and cold about him; you could never think of him as a friend. Mansie had met him first at a YMCA dance. It was in the men’s cloakroom, Mansie was standing before the looking-glass putting the finishing touches to his necktie, and some fellows were discussing the Insurance Act. ‘What do you say to that, Brand?’ someone had asked. Mansie turned round at that moment, and he saw a tall, lanky young man raising his head, which had been bowed over a dancing-pump that he was pulling on. ‘I think it’s claptrap,’ came the reply in a falsetto voice, but Mansie was so astonished by the beauty of the briefly upturned face, which was now bent over the other pump, that he continued to stare in a trance at the smooth flaxen hair presented objectively to him, its fairness and the even masses in which it lay reminding him somehow of butter. Afterwards he saw Brand dancing; he was a very bad dancer and seemed to talk to his partners all the time. It was not until near the end of the dance that Brand strolled up, stood beside him, and made some remark about the heat. ‘Lots of nice girls here,’ Mansie said, not knowing what else to say; but Brand replied, ‘I’m not interested in females, I’m here to make converts.’ Females! thought Mansie, so it must have been Socialism that he was spouting to them! and as a new dance was just beginning he rushed away.
But next Sunday afternoon at the YMCA Brand fastened on to him, seemed in fact to have taken quite a fancy to him, and although Mansie didn’t really care much for the fellow, no doubt about it he was a dashed handsome figure to be seen with. But though Brand was a brilliant success in the Church Literary Society, he didn’t make a really deep impression on Mansie until that evening in late spring when they went to see Arms and the Man. And it wasn’t because Brand laughed at all the right places, looking round him contemptuously, that Mansie was impressed; what struck him was a sentence that Brand dropped carelessly as they were walking to the tramcar; he said, ‘I think I’ll have to write a play too.’ Then Mansie realised all at once that Brand lived in a completely different world from him. For to Mansie the writing of a book or play, even one he could understand, was a mysterious act, he simply didn’t understand how it was done; and yet here was a fellow who after being at a play one could make neither head nor tail of simply said: ‘I’ll have to write a play too!’ Mansie felt excited, yet was resolved not to show it, but to reply in the same tone. ‘You should, Brand,’ he said. ‘I think you really should.’
Brand was in fact very handsome, and that was probably enough to give Jean an immediate respect for him; but what won her final approval was the fact that he carried his handsome looks almost scornfully, as though he ignored them; for that seemed to her the perfection of good taste. And so it might have been had he merely ignored them, magnanimously declining to employ them to his advantage; but it would be nearer the truth to say that he was completely oblivious of them, and that they were thrown away on him and so bereft of all meaning. They were like a thankless gift that he was always trying to forget, that he even did his best to deface; for he had so little respect for his exquisite features that he was continually knitting his brow like a schoolboy and twisting his mouth into peevish lines that deserved to look mean, and would have done so in any face less perfectly formed. When he did this, such treatment of a rare physical miracle gave one a sense of ingratitude, even of desecration; nevertheless it was ineffectual, for no matter how he scowled, the lines instead of disfiguring his face merely fell effortlessly into new patterns of symmetry, one more interesting than the other. No, he could not escape from the beauty that had been so unwelcomely thrust upon him.
But though he could not rid himself of it he could refuse to impregnate it with life. So his face was like the photographed faces of actors which seem to be mutely begging for a rôle to bring them to life and add expression and character, no matter of what tinge, to those unemployed features with their tell-tale vacancy. And Brand’s face sometimes struck one as that of a man waiting for his rôle, a rôle that should have been his life, a rôle that he would never find. His talk, too, was as trite as that of actors or popular preachers who after declaiming as though in another world, ‘I am dying, Egypt, dying,’ or ‘Ho! every one that thirsteth, come ye to the waters’ have nothing left to utter in private but the stale clichés of political and social snobbery. It shocks one that they should do so with such flat conviction. But what shocks one still more is the recognition that after all they are merely acting another part, an innate and compulsory part which has no connection whatever with Antony or Hamlet or Othello, with Christ or Paul. The conversation of Brand seemed to belong to a part such as this, a part which did not suit him, which was false and even badly played, and yet had been imposed upon him so imperatively that he would have to act it all his life. But his words had also the sonorous emptiness that is so often found in the conversation of men who spend their lives advertising commodities which they have not made and will never use, but who nevertheless become mechanically rapturous upon the virtues of those commodities whenever a prospective buyer comes in sight. It had that false and portentously edifying conviction; but also, somewhat incongruously, a touch of the flat assurance of a school-teacher imparting to his class information that means hardly anything to him; securely supported in a sense of right when he asserts that Milton is the greatest English poet after Shakespeare (although Milton bores him), or that man’s chief end is to glorify God (although he has never in his life felt the slightest impulse to glorify God). And Brand was a school-teacher.
So it was only in their form that Brand’s opinions differed from those of a gentlemanly actor or an unctuous business man. He had been brought up in a Socialist family; his father was an atheistic Marxian; and only when he was twenty-five did David discover Christianity. The discovery was so novel that the ideas he encountered seemed novel too, not unlike those of Ibsen and Shaw, and in his mind Christ was enthroned between those two contemporary idols as a great advanced thinker; a position which, Brand was really convinced in his heart, conferred fresh glory on the New Comer, though he was fond of saying – to impress people with his brilliance – that Jesus was the most advanced and revolutionary of them all. Yet he felt that he had done Jesus a favour in promoting Him to such company, and so he spoke of Him with involuntary condescension; but then he spoke of everything with involuntary condescension – it may have been because he spent so much of his time in teaching. And besides, the people he had to teach now were Christians, and they simply did not know the rudiments of their own subject! So he had to make the matter as simple as possible.
Yet it may be that he could not help making it simple; for a man who has to simplify knowledge for several hours a day to suit minds of twelve or thirteen often ends by simplifying everything; he may acquire such a love for simplification that only simplified ideas give him pleasure. And in fact the more elementary a truth was the more pleasure Brand found in uttering it; and if he could impart to it a sort of flashing triteness he himself was dazzled, as though he had achieved an epigram. So when he came across the axiom, ‘God is love,’ it was not the statement itself that thrilled him, but the tellingly terse form in which it was couched; and he did not see anything blasphemous in this treatment of a saying which all the wisdom of the world is insufficient to comprehend. For a school-teacher of the conventional kind may not only admire simplified statements; he is capable of falling in love with them simply as statements. He falls in love with them as the commercial traveller falls in love with gypsum, clinkers, or asbestos jointing; for though he can make no more personal use of them than the commercial traveller of those wares, yet they are the things that give meaning to his deliberate and rational activity as a human being. But his love is less humble and passionate than the love of a commercial traveller for asbestos jointing; for he has a monopoly of his goods and the commercial traveller has not, and he can pass them on to the recipient without being obliged to exercise the arts of persuasion, whereas his commercial brother has to summon all his eloquence, has to plead, to propitiate, to dazzle. So when Brand