- Project Gutenberg's Joan and Peter, by H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
- This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most
- other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
- whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of
- the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at
- www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you'll have
- to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook.
- Title: Joan and Peter
- The story of an education
- Author: H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
- Release Date: February 17, 2020 [EBook #61426]
- Language: English
- Character set encoding: UTF-8
- *** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK JOAN AND PETER ***
- Produced by Richard Tonsing and the Online Distributed
- Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was
- produced from images generously made available by The
- Internet Archive)
- JOAN AND PETER
- [Illustration]
- THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
- NEW YORK · BOSTON · CHICAGO · DALLAS
- ATLANTA · SAN FRANCISCO
- MACMILLAN & CO., LIMITED
- LONDON · BOMBAY · CALCUTTA
- MELBOURNE
- THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, LTD.
- TORONTO
- JOAN AND PETER
- _THE STORY OF AN EDUCATION_
- BY
- H. G. WELLS
- Author of “Mr. Britling Sees It Through,” etc.
- New York
- THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
- 1921
- _All rights reserved_
- COPYRIGHT, 1918
- BY H. G. WELLS
- Set up and electrotyped. Published, September, 1918
- ------------------------------------------------------------------------
- CONTENTS
- CHAPTER PAGE
- I PETER’S PARENTAGE 1
- II STUBLANDS IN COUNCIL 13
- III ARTHUR OR OSWALD? 31
- IV FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF THE UNIVERSE 59
- V THE CHRISTENING 78
- VI THE FOURTH GUARDIAN 102
- VII THE SCHOOL OF ST. GEORGE AND THE VENERABLE BEDE 112
- VIII THE HIGH CROSS PREPARATORY SCHOOL 142
- IX OSWALD TAKES CONTROL 204
- X A SEARCHING OF SCHOOLMASTERS 255
- XI ADOLESCENCE 282
- XII THE WORLD ON THE EVE OF WAR 377
- XIII JOAN AND PETER GRADUATE 443
- XIV OSWALD’S VALEDICTION 544
- JOAN AND PETER
- THE STORY OF AN EDUCATION
- CHAPTER THE FIRST
- PETER’S PARENTAGE
- § 1
- Early one summer morning in England, in the year 1893 in the reign—which
- seemed in those days to have been going on for ever and to be likely to
- go on for evermore—of Queen Victoria, there was born a little boy named
- Peter. Peter was a novel name then; he was before the great crop of
- Peters who derived their name from Peter Pan. He was born with some
- difficulty. His father, who had not been to bed all night, for the
- trouble of the birth had begun overnight at about nine o’clock, was
- walking about in the garden in a dewy dawn, thinking the world very
- dreadful and beautiful, when he first heard Peter cry. Peter, he
- thought, made a noise like a little frightened hen that something big
- had caught.... Peter’s mother had been moaning but now she moaned no
- more, and Peter’s father stood outside and whispered “Oh, God! Oh! Damn
- them and _damn_ them! why don’t they _tell_ me?”
- Then the nurse put her head out of the window; it was a casement window
- with white roses about it; said “Everything’s all right. I’ll tell you
- when to come in,” and vanished again.
- Peter’s father turned about very sharply so that she should not see he
- was fool enough to weep, and went along the flagged path to the end of
- the garden, where was the little summerhouse that looked over the Weald.
- But he could not see the Weald because his tears blinded him. All night
- Peter’s father had been thinking what an imperfect husband he had always
- been and how he had never really told his wife how much he loved her,
- and how indeed until now he had never understood how very much he loved
- her, and he had been making good resolutions for the future in great
- abundance, in enormous abundance, the most remarkable good resolutions,
- and one waking nightmare after another had been chasing across his mind
- nightmares of a dreadful dark-grey world in which there would be no
- Dolly, no Dolly at all anywhere, even if you went out into the garden
- and whistled your utmost, and he would be a widower with only one little
- lonely child to console him. He could not imagine any other woman for
- him but Dolly.
- The last trailing vestige of those twilight distresses vanished when
- presently he saw Dolly looking tired indeed but pink and healthy, with
- her hair almost roguishly astray, and the room full of warm daylight
- from the dawn-flushed sky, full of fresh south-west air from the Sussex
- downs, full of the sense of invincible life, and young master Peter,
- very puckered and ugly and red and pitiful, in a blanket in the nurse’s
- arms, and Dr. Fremisson smirking behind her, entirely satisfied with
- himself and the universe and every detail of it.
- When Dolly had been kissed and whispered to they gave Peter to his
- father to hold.
- Peter’s father had never understood before that a baby is an exquisite
- thing.
- § 2
- The parents of Peter were modern young people, and Peter was no
- accidental intruder. Their heads were full of new ideas, new that is in
- the days when Queen Victoria seemed immortal and the world settled for
- ever. They put Peter in their two sunniest rooms; rarely were the
- windows shut; his nursery was white and green, bright with pretty
- pictures and never without flowers. It had a cork carpet and a rug
- displaying amusing black cats on pink, and he was weighed carefully
- first once a week and then once a month until he was four years old.
- His father, whom everybody called Stubbo, came of an old Quaker stock.
- Quakerism in its beginnings was a very fine and wonderful religion
- indeed, a real research for the Kingdom of Heaven on earth, a new way of
- thinking and living, but weaknesses of the mind and spirit brought it
- back very soon to a commoner texture. The Stubland family was among
- those which had been most influenced by the evangelical wave of the
- Wesleyan time. Peter’s great-grandfather, old Stubland, the
- West-of-England cloth manufacturer, was an emotional person with
- pietistic inclinations that nearly carried him over at different times
- to the Plymouth Brethren, to the Wesleyan Methodists, and to the
- Countess of Huntingdon’s connexion. Religion was his only social
- recreation, most other things he held to be sinful, and his surplus
- energies went all into the business. He had an aptitude for mechanical
- organization and started the Yorkshire factory; his son, still more
- evangelical and still more successful, left a business worth well over
- two hundred thousand pounds among thirteen children, of whom Peter’s
- father was the youngest. “Stublands” became a limited company with
- uncles Rigby and John as directors, and the rest of the family was let
- loose, each one with a nice little secure six hundred a year or
- thereabouts from Stubland debentures and Stubland ordinary shares, to do
- what it liked in the world.
- It wasn’t, of course, told that it could do what it liked in the
- world. That it found out for itself—in the teeth of much early
- teaching to the contrary. That early teaching had been predominantly
- prohibitive, there had been no end of “thou shalt not” and very little
- of “thou shalt,” an irksome teaching for young people destined to
- leisure. Mankind was presented waiting about for the Judgment Day,
- with Satan as busy as a pickpocket in a crowd. Also he offered
- roundabouts and cocoanut-shies.... This family doctrine tallied so
- little with the manifest circumstances and natural activity of the
- young Stublands that it just fell off their young minds. The keynote
- of Stubbo’s upbringing had been a persistent unanswered “Why _not_?”
- to all the things he was told not to do. “Why _not_ dance? Why _not_
- go to theatres and music-halls? Why _not_ make love? Why _not_ read
- and quote this exciting new poetry of Swinburne’s?”...
- The early ’nineties were a period of careless diastole in British
- affairs. There seemed to be enough and to spare for every one, given
- only a little generosity. Peace dwelt on the earth for ever. It was
- difficult to prove the proprietorship of Satan in the roundabouts and
- the cocoanut-shies. There was a general belief that one’s parents and
- grandparents had taken life far too grimly and suspiciously, a belief
- which, indeed, took possession of Stubbo before he was in trousers.
- His emancipation was greatly aided by his elder sister Phyllis, a girl
- with an abnormal sense of humour. It was Phyllis who brightened the
- Sunday afternoons, when she and her sister Phœbe and her brothers were
- supposed to be committing passages of scripture to memory in the attic,
- by the invention of increasingly irreligious Limericks. Phœbe would
- sometimes be dreadfully shocked and sometimes join in with great vigour
- and glory. Phyllis was also an artist in misquotation. She began by
- taking a facetious view of the ark and Jonah’s whale, and as her courage
- grew she went on to the Resurrection. She had a genius for asking
- seemingly respectful but really destructive questions about religious
- matters, that made her parents shy of instruction. The Stubland parents
- had learnt their faith with more reverence than intelligence from
- _their_ parents, who had had it in a similar spirit from their parents,
- who had had it from their parents; so that nobody had looked into it
- closely for some generations, and something vital had evaporated
- unsuspected. It had evaporated so completely that when Peter’s father
- and Peter’s aunts and uncles came in their turn as children to examine
- the precious casket, they not only perceived that there was nothing in
- it, but they could very readily jump to the rash conclusion that there
- never had been anything in it. It seemed just an odd blend of empty
- resonant phrases and comical and sometimes slightly improper stories,
- that lent themselves very pleasantly to facetious illustration.
- Stubbo, as he grew up under these circumstances, had not so much taken
- on the burthen of life as thrown it off. He decided he would not go into
- business—business struck him as a purely avaricious occupation—and after
- a pleasant year at Cambridge he became quite clear that the need of the
- world and his temperament was Art. The world was not beautiful enough.
- This was more particularly true of the human contribution. So he went
- into Art to make the world more beautiful, and came up to London to
- study and to wear a highly decorative blue linen blouse in private and
- to collect posters—people then were just beginning to collect posters.
- From the last stage of Quakerism to the last extremity of decoration is
- but a step. Quite an important section of the art world in Britain owes
- itself to the Quakers and Plymouth Brethren, and to the drab and grey
- disposition of the sterner evangelicals. It is as if that elect strain
- in the race had shut its eyes for a generation or so, merely in order to
- open them again and see brighter. The reaction of the revolting
- generation has always been toward colour; the pyrotechnic display of the
- Omega workshops in London is but the last violent outbreak of the Quaker
- spirit. Young Stubland, a quarter of a century before the Omega
- enterprise, was already slaking a thirst for chromatic richness behind
- the lead of William Morris and the Pre-Raphaelites. It took a year or so
- and several teachers and much friendly frankness to persuade him he
- could neither draw nor paint, and then he relapsed into decoration and
- craftsmanship. He beat out copper into great weals of pattern and he
- bound books grossly. He spent some time upon lettering, and learnt how
- to make the simplest inscription beautifully illegible. He decided to be
- an architect. In the meantime he made the acquaintance of a large circle
- of artistic and literary people, became a Fabian socialist, abandoned
- Stubland tweeds for fluffy artistically dyed garments, bicycled about a
- lot—those were the early days of the bicycle, before the automobile
- robbed it of its glory—talked endlessly, and had a very good time. He
- met his wife and married her, and he built his own house as a sample of
- what he could do as an architect.
- It was, with one exception, the only house he ever built. It was quite
- original in design and almost indistinguishable from the houses of a
- round dozen contemporaries of Mr. Charles Voysey. It was a little
- low-browed, white house, with an enormous and very expensive roof of
- green slates; it had wide, low mullioned casement windows, its rooms
- were eight feet high and its doors five foot seven, and all about it
- were enormous buttresses fit to sustain a castle. It had sun-traps and
- verandahs and a terrace, and it snuggled into the ruddy hillside and
- stared fatly out across the Weald from beyond Limpsfield, and it was
- quite a jolly little house to live in when you had learnt to be shorter
- than five feet seven inches and to dodge the low bits of ceiling and the
- beam over the ingle-nook.
- And therein, to crown the work of the builder, Peter was born.
- § 3
- Peter’s mother came from quite a different strand in the complicated web
- of British life. Her “people”—she was brought up to call them that—were
- county people, but old-fashioned and prolific, and her father had been
- the sixth son of a third son and very lucky to get a living. He was the
- Vicar of Long Downport and an early widower; his two sons had gone to
- Oxford with scholarships, and Dolly had stayed at home, a leggy,
- dark-eyed girl with a sceptical manner, much given to reading history.
- One of her brothers passed from Oxford into the higher division of the
- Civil Service and went to India; the other took to scornful, reactionary
- journalism, dramatic criticism, musical comedy lyrics, parody, and
- drink—which indeed is almost a necessity if a man is to stick to
- reactionary journalism; this story will presently inherit Joan from him;
- she had a galaxy of cousins who were parsons, missionaries,
- schoolmasters, and soldiers; one was an explorer; not one was in
- business. Her father was a bookish inattentive man who had just missed a
- fellowship because of a general discursiveness; if he could have
- afforded it he would have been very liberal indeed in his theology; and,
- like grains of pepper amidst milder nourishment, there were all sorts of
- sceptical books about the house: Renan’s _Life of Christ_, Strauss’s
- _Life of Christ_, Gibbon, various eighteenth century memoirs, Huxley’s
- Essays, much Victor Hugo, and a “collected” Shelley, books that his
- daughter read with a resolute frown, sitting for the most part with one
- leg tucked up under her in the chair, her chin on her fists, and her
- elbows on either side of the volume undergoing assimilation.
- Her reading was historical, and her tendency romantic. Her private
- day-dream through some years of girlhood was that she was Cæsar’s wife.
- She was present at all his battles, and sometimes, when he had had
- another of his never altogether fatal wounds, she led the army. Also,
- which was a happy thought, she stabbed Brutus first, and so her Cæsar,
- contrariwise to history, reigned happily with her for many, many years.
- She would go to sleep of a night dreaming of Mr. and Mrs. Imperator
- driving in triumph through the gates of Rome after some little warlike
- jaunt. Sometimes she drove. And also they came to Britain to drive out
- the Picts and Scots, and were quartered with her father in Long
- Downport, conquering Picts, Scots, Danes, and the most terrific
- anachronisms with an equal stoutness and courage. The private title she
- bestowed upon herself (and never told to any human being) was “The
- Imperatrix.”
- As she grew up she became desirous of more freedom and education. After
- much argument with her father she came up to an aunt in London, and went
- to study science in the Huxley days as a free student at the Royal
- College of Science. She saw her future husband at an art students’
- soirée, he looked tall and bright and masterful; he had a fine profile,
- and his blond hair poured nobly off his forehead; she did not dream that
- Peter’s impatience for incarnation put ideas into her head, she forgot
- her duty to Cæsar and imagined a devotion to art and beauty. They made a
- pretty couple, and she married amidst universal approval—after a slight
- dispute whether it was to be a religious or a civil marriage. She was
- married in her father’s church.
- In the excitement of meeting, appreciating and marrying Stubbo, she
- forgot that she had had a great pity and tenderness and admiration for
- her shy and impulsive cousin, Oswald Sydenham, with the glass eye and
- cruelly scarred face, who had won the V.C. before he was twenty at the
- bombardment of Alexandria, and who had since done the most remarkable
- things in Nyasaland. It had been quite typical heroism that had won him
- the V.C. He had thrown a shell overboard, and it had burst in the air as
- he threw it and pulped one side of his face. But when she married, she
- had temporarily forgotten Cousin Oswald. She was just carried away by
- Arthur Stubland’s profile, and the wave in his hair, and—life.
- Arthur was Stubbo’s Christian name because he had been born under the
- spell of “The Idylls of the King.”
- Afterwards when Oswald came home again, she thought the good side of his
- face, the side of his face that hadn’t been so seriously damaged by the
- Egyptian shell, looked at her rather queerly. But the wounded side
- remained a Sphinx-like mask.
- “Congratulations!” said Oswald, fumbling with the word.
- “Congratulations! I hope you’ll be happy, Dolly.”...
- She was far gone in rationalism before she met Arthur, and he completed
- her emancipation. Their ideas ran closely together. They projected some
- years of travel before they settled down. He wanted to see mediaeval
- Italy “thoroughly,” and she longed for Imperial Rome. They took just a
- couple of rooms in South Kensington and spent all the rest of their
- income in long stretches of holiday. They honeymooned in pleasant inns
- in South Germany; they did some climbing in the Tyrol and the
- Dolomites—she had a good head—they had a summer holiday on the Adriatic
- coast, and she learnt to swim and dive well, and they did one long
- knapsack tramp round and along the Swiss Italian frontier and then
- another through the Apennines to Florence.
- It was a perfectly lovely time. Everything was bright and happy, and
- they got on wonderfully together, except that——There was a shadow for
- her. She found it difficult to say exactly what the shadow was, and it
- is still more difficult for the historian to define it. She dismissed
- the idea that it had anything to do with Cousin Oswald’s one reproachful
- eye. She sometimes had a faint suspicion that it was her jilted Cæsar
- asking for at least a Rubicon to cross, but it is doubtful if she ever
- had any suspicion of Peter, waiting outside the doors of life. Yet the
- feeling of something forgotten, of something left out, grew throughout
- those sunny days. It was in some sweet meadows high up on the great hill
- above Fiesole, that she tried to tell Arthur of this vexatious feeling
- of deficiency.
- Manifestly she puzzled him, which was not to be wondered at since the
- feeling puzzled her. But it also had a queer effect of irritating him.
- “Arthur, if you always say I don’t love you,” she said, “when I tell you
- anything, then how can I tell you anything at all?”
- “Aren’t we having the loveliest times?” he asked.
- “Yes,” she said without complete conviction. “It isn’t that.”
- “You admit you love me. You admit you’re having the loveliest time!”
- She sat up with her elbows on her knees and her knuckles pressing her
- round, firm chin.
- “It’s just all one holiday,” she said.
- “I did some work last month.”
- He had planned three impossible houses and made a most amusing cardboard
- model of one of them. She disregarded this plea.
- “When we came up here people were working in the fields. Even that
- pretty little girl among the bushes was looking after sheep.”
- “By Jove! I wish I could paint her—and those Holman Hunt-faced sheep of
- hers. It’s tantalizing to be able to see—and yet not to have the—the
- expressive gift....”
- “Things are going on now, Arthur. Down there in the valley along that
- white road, people are going and coming.... There is a busy little train
- now.... Things are happening. Things are going to happen. And the work
- that goes on! The hard work! Today—there are thousands and thousands of
- men in mines. Out of this sunshine....”
- There was an interval. Arthur rolled over on his face to look at the
- minute railway and road and river bed far below at the bottom of a deep
- lake of pellucid blue air.
- “I don’t agree with you,” he said at last.
- “Too much is happening,” he said. “Noisy, vulgar fuss. Commercialism,
- competition, factory production. Does it make people happy? Look at that
- horrid little railway disturbing all this beautiful simple Tuscan
- life....”
- Another long pause.
- She made a further step. “But if something beautiful is being
- destroyed,” she tried, “we ought not to be here.”
- That also took a little time to soak in.
- Then he stirred impatiently.
- “Don’t we,” he asked, “protest? By the mere act of living our own lives?
- Don’t I, in my small way, try to do my share in the Restoration of
- Craftsmanship? Aren’t people of our sort doing something—something a
- little too unpretending to be obvious—to develop the conception of a
- fairer and better, a less hurried, less greedy life?”
- He raised an appealing face to her.
- She sat with knitted brows. She did not assent, but it was difficult to
- argue her disaccord.
- He took advantage of her pause.
- “Confess,” he said, “you would like to have me a business manager—of
- some big concern. Or a politician. You want me to be in the scrimmage.
- No!—lording it over the scrimmage. The real things aren’t _done_ like
- that, Dolly. The real things aren’t done like that!”
- She put her next thought out in its stark simplicity.
- “Are we doing any real thing in the world at all?”
- He did not answer for some seconds.
- Then he astonished her by losing his temper. It was exactly as if her
- question had probed down to some secret soreness deep within him. “Oh,
- _damn_!” he shouted. “And on this lovely morning! It’s too bad of you,
- Dolly!” It was as if he had bit upon a tender tooth. Perhaps a fragment
- of the stopping had come out of his Nonconformist conscience.
- He knelt up and stared at her. “You don’t love _this_, anyhow—whether
- you love me or not.”
- He tried to alter his tone from a note of sheer quarrelsomeness to
- badinage. “You Blue Conscience, you! You Gnawing Question! Are we doing
- anything real at all, you say. Is no one, then, to stand up and meet the
- sunlight for its own sake, when God sends it to us? No! You can’t unsay
- it now.” (Though she was not unsaying it. She was only trying for some
- more acceptable way of saying it over again.) “My day is spoilt! You’ve
- stuck a fever into me!”
- He looked about him. He wanted some vivid gesture. “Oh, come on!” he
- cried.
- He sprang up. He gesticulated over her. He banished the view with a
- sweep of rejection. “Let us go back to the inn. Let us take our traps
- back to stuffy old Florence. Let us see three churches and two
- picture-galleries before sunset! And take our tickets for home. We
- aren’t rushing and we ought to rush. Life is rush. This holiday has
- lasted too long, Dolly.”
- “‘Life is real! Life is earnest!’
- Simple joys are not its goal.”
- “Own, my Dolly! If only this afternoon we could find some solid serious
- lecture down there! Or an election. You’d love an election.... And
- anyhow, it’s nearly lunch time.”
- She knelt, took his hand, and stood up.
- “You mock,” she said. “But you know that what I want to say—isn’t
- that....”
- § 4
- He did know. But all the way back to England he was a man with an
- irritating dart sticking in his mind. And the discussion she had
- released that day worried him for months.
- He wanted it to be clear that their lives were on a very high level
- indeed. No mere idlers were they. Hitherto he said they had been keeping
- honeymoon, but that was only before they began life in earnest. Now they
- were really going to begin. They were going to take hold of life.
- House and Peter followed quite logically upon that.
- How easy was life in those days—at least, for countless thousands of
- independent people! It was the age of freedom—for the independent. They
- went where they listed; the world was full of good hotels, and every
- country had its Baedeker well up to date. Every cultivated home had its
- little corner of weather-worn guide books, a nest of memories, an
- _Orario_, an _Indicateur_, or a _Continental Bradshaw_. The happy
- multitude of the free travelled out to beautiful places and returned to
- comfortable homes. The chief anxiety in life was to get good
- servants—and there were plenty of good servants. Politics went on, at
- home and abroad, a traditional game between the Ins and Outs. The world
- was like a spinning top that seems to be quite still and stable.... Yet
- youth was apt to feel as Dolly felt, that there was something lacking.
- Arthur was quite ready to fall in with this idea that something was
- lacking. He was inclined to think that one got to the root of it by
- recognizing that there was not enough Craftsmanship and too much cheap
- material, too much machine production, and, more especially, too much
- aniline dye. He was particularly strong against aniline dyes. All
- Britain was strong against aniline dyes,—and so that trade went to
- Germany. He reached socialism by way of æsthetic criticism. Individual
- competition was making the world hideous. It was destroying
- individuality. What the world needed was a non-competitive communism for
- the collective discouragement of machinery. (Meanwhile he bought a
- bicycle.) He decided that his modest six hundred a year was all that he
- and Dolly needed to live upon; he would never work for money—that would
- be “sordid”—but for the joy of work, and on his income they would lead a
- simple working-man’s existence, free from the vulgarities of
- competition, politics and commercialism.
- Dolly was fascinated, delighted, terrified and assuaged by Peter, and
- Peter and a simple house free also from the vulgarities of modern
- mechanism kept her so busy with only one servant to help her, that it
- was only in odd times, in the late evening when the sky grew solemn or
- after some book had stirred her mind, that she recalled that once
- oppressive feeling of something wanting, something that was still
- wanting....
- CHAPTER THE SECOND
- STUBLANDS IN COUNCIL
- § 1
- But although Dolly did not pursue her husband with any sustained
- criticism, he seemed now to feel always that her attitude was critical
- and needed an answer. The feeling made him something of a thinker and
- something of a talker. Sometimes the thinker was uppermost, and then he
- would sit silent and rather in profile (his profile, it has already been
- stated, was a good one, and much enhanced by a romantic bang of warm
- golden hair that hung down over one eye), very picturesque in his
- beautiful blue linen blouse, listening to whatever was said; and
- sometimes he would turn upon the company and talk with a sort of
- experimental dogmatism, as is the way with men a little insecure in
- their convictions, but quite good talk. He would talk of education, and
- work, and Peter, and of love and beauty, and the finer purposes of life,
- and things like that.
- A lot of talk came the way of Peter’s father.
- Along the Limpsfield ridge and away east and west and north, there was a
- scattered community of congenial intellectuals. It spread along the
- ridge beyond Dorking, and resumed again at Haslemere and Hindhead, where
- Grant Allen and Richard Le Gallienne were established. They were mostly
- people of the same detached and independent class as the Stublands; they
- were the children of careful people who had created considerable
- businesses, or the children of the more successful of middle Victorian
- celebrities, or dons, or writers themselves, or they came from
- Hampstead, which was in those days a nest of considerable people’s
- children, inheritors of reputations and writers of memoirs, an hour’s
- ’bus drive from London and outside the cab radius. A thin flavour of
- Hampstead spread out, indeed, over all Surrey. Some of these newcomers
- lived in old adapted cottages; some of them had built little houses
- after the fashion of the Stublands; some had got into the real old
- houses that already existed. There was much Sunday walking and “dropping
- in” and long evenings and suppers. Safety bicycles were coming into use
- and greatly increasing intercourse. And there was a coming and going of
- Stubland aunts and uncles and of Sydenhams and Dolly’s “people.” Nearly
- all were youngish folk; it was a new generation and a new sort of
- population for the countryside. They were dotted among the farms and the
- estates and preserves and “places” of the old county family pattern. The
- “county” wondered a little at them, kept busy with horse and dog and
- gun, and, except for an occasional stiff call, left them alone. The
- church lamented their neglected Sabbaths. The doctors were not
- unfriendly.
- One of the frequent visitors, indeed, at The Ingle-Nook—that was the
- name of Peter’s birthplace—was Doctor Fremisson, the local general
- practitioner. He was a man, he said, who liked “Ideas.” The aborigines
- lacked Ideas, it seemed; but Stubland was a continual feast of them. The
- doctor’s diagnosis of the difference between these new English and the
- older English of the country rested entirely on the presence or absence
- of Ideas. But there he was wrong. The established people were people of
- fixed ideas; the immigrants had abandoned fixed ideas for discussion. So
- far from their having no ideas, those occasional callers who came
- dropping in so soon as the Stublands were settled in The Ingle-Nook
- before Peter was born, struck the Stublands as having ideas like
- monstrous and insurmountable cliffs. To fling your own ideas at them was
- like trying to lob stones into Zermatt from Macugnana.
- One day when Mrs. Darcy, old Lady Darcy’s daughter-in-law, had driven
- over, some devil prompted Arthur to shock her. He talked his extremest
- Fabianism. He would have the government control all railways, land,
- natural products; nobody should have a wage of less than two pounds a
- week; the whole country should be administered for the universal
- benefit; everybody should be educated.
- “I’m sure the dear old Queen does all she can,” said Mrs. Darcy.
- “I’m a democratic republican,” said Arthur.
- He might as well have called himself a Christadelphian for any idea he
- conveyed.
- Presently, seized by a gust of unreasonable irritation, he went out of
- the room.
- “Mr. Stubland talks,” said Mrs. Darcy; “_really_——” She paused. She
- hesitated. She spoke with a little disarming titter lest what she said
- should seem too dreadful. “He says such things. I really believe he’s
- more than half a Liberal. _There!_ You mustn’t mind what I say, Mrs.
- Stubland....”
- Dolly, by virtue of her vicarage training, understood these people
- better than Peter’s father. She had read herself out of the great
- Anglican culture, but she remembered things from the inside. She was
- still in close touch with numerous relations who were quite completely
- inside. Before the little green gate had clicked behind their departing
- backs, Arthur would protest to her and heaven that these visitors were
- impossible, that such visitors could not be, they were phantoms or bad
- practical jokes, undergraduates dressed up to pull his leg.
- “They know nothing,” he said.
- “They know all sorts of things you don’t know,” she corrected.
- “What _do_ they know? There isn’t a topic one can start on which they
- are not just blank.”
- “You start the wrong topics. They can tell you all sorts of things about
- the dear Queen’s grandchildren. They know things about horses. And about
- regiments and barracks. Tell me, Arthur, how is the charming young
- Prince of Bulgaria, who is just getting married, related to the late
- Prince Consort.”
- “Damn their Royal Marriages!”
- “If you say that, then they have an equal right to say, ‘damn your
- Wildes and Beardsleys and William Morrises and Swinburnes.’”
- “They read nothing.”
- “They read Mrs. Henry Wood. They read lots of authors you have never
- heard of, _nice_ authors. They read so many of them that for the most
- part they forget their names. The bold ones read Ouida—who isn’t half
- bad. They read every scrap they can find about the marriage of the
- Princess Marie to the Crown Prince of Roumania. Mrs. Bagshot-Fawcett
- talked about it yesterday. It seems he’s really a rarer and better sort
- of Hohenzollern than the young German Emperor, our sailor grandson that
- is. She isn’t very clear about it, but she seems to think that the
- Prince of Hohenzollern ought rightfully to be German Emperor.”
- “Oh, what _rot_!”
- “But perhaps she’s right. How do you know? _I_ don’t. She takes an
- almost voluptuous delight in the two marriage ceremonies. You know, I
- suppose, dear, that there were two ceremonies, a Protestant one and a
- Catholic one, because the Roumanian Hohenzollerns are Catholic
- Hohenzollerns. Of course, the dear princess would become a Catholic——”
- “Oh, _don’t_!” cried Peter’s father; “don’t!”
- “I had to listen to three-quarters of an hour of it yesterday. Such a
- happy and convenient occurrence, the princess’s conversion,
- but—archly—of course, my dear, I suppose there’s sometimes just a little
- _persuasion_ in these cases.”
- “Dolly, you go too far!”
- “But that isn’t, of course, the great interest just at present. The
- great interest just at present is George and May. You know they’re going
- to be married.”
- Arthur lifted a protesting profile. “My dear! _Who_ is May?” he tenored.
- “Affected ignorance! She is the Princess May who was engaged to the late
- Duke of Clarence, the Princess Mary of Teck. And now he’s dead, she’s
- going to marry the Duke of York. Surely you understand about that. He is
- your Future Sovereign. Mrs. Bagshot-Fawcett gets positively lush about
- him. It was George she always lurved, Mrs. Bagshot-Fawcett says, but she
- accepted his brother for Reasons of State. So after all it’s rather nice
- and romantic that the elder brother——”
- Arthur roared and tore his hair and walked up and down the low room.
- “What are these people to me?” he shouted. “What are these people to
- me?”
- “But there is twenty times as much about that sort of thing in the
- papers as there is about _our_ sort of things.”
- There was no disputing it.
- “We’re in a foreign country,” cried Arthur, going off at a tangent.
- “We’re in a foreign country. We English are a subject people.... Talk of
- Home Rule for Ireland!... Why are there no _English_ Nationalists? One
- of these days I will hoist the cross of St. George outside this cottage.
- But I doubt if any one on this countryside will know it for the English
- flag.”
- § 2
- Whatever is seems right, and it is only now, after five and twenty years
- of change, that we do begin to see as a remarkable thing the detached
- life that great masses of the English were leading beneath the canopy of
- the Hanoverian monarchy. For in those days the court thought in German;
- Teutonized Anglicans, sentimental, materialistic and resolutely “loyal,”
- dominated society; Gladstone was notoriously disliked by them for his
- anti-German policy and his Irish and Russian sympathies, and the old
- Queen’s selection of bishops guided feeling in the way it ought to go.
- But there was a leakage none the less. More and more people were
- drifting out of relationship to church and state, exactly as Peter’s
- parents had drifted out. The Court dominated, but it did not dominate
- intelligently; it controlled the church to no effect, its influence upon
- universities and schools and art and literature was merely deadening; it
- responded to flattery but it failed to direct; it was the court of an
- alien-spirited old lady, making much of the pathos of her widowhood and
- trading still on the gallantry and generosity that had welcomed her as a
- “girl queen.” The real England separated itself more and more from that
- superficial England of the genteel that looked to Osborne and Balmoral.
- To the real England, dissentient England, court taste was a joke, court
- art was a scandal; of English literature and science notoriously the
- court knew nothing. In the huge pacific industrial individualism of
- Great Britain it did not seem a serious matter that the army and navy
- and the Indian administration were orientated to the court. Peter’s
- parents and the large class of detached people to which they belonged,
- were out of politics, out of the system, scornful, or facetious and
- aloof. Just as they were out of religion. These things did not concern
- them.
- The great form of the empire contained these indifferents, the great
- roof of church and state hung over them. Royal visits, diplomatic
- exchanges and the like passed to and fro, alien, uninteresting
- proceedings; Heligoland was given to the young Emperor William the
- Second by Lord Salisbury, the old Queen’s favourite prime minister,
- English politicians jostled the French in Africa as roughly as possible
- to “larn them to be” republicans, and resisted the Home Rule aspirations
- and the ill-concealed republicanism of the “Keltic fringe”; one’s
- Anglican neighbours of the “ruling class” went off to rule India and the
- empire with manners that would have maddened Job; they stood for
- Parliament and played the game of politics upon factitious issues. Sir
- Charles Dilke, the last of the English Republicans, and Charles Stewart
- Parnell, the uncrowned King of Ireland, had both been extinguished by
- opportune divorce cases. (Liberal opinion, it was felt, must choose
- between the private and the public life. You could not have it both
- ways.) It did not seem to be a state of affairs to make a fuss about.
- The general life went on comfortably enough. We built our pretty
- rough-cast houses, taught Shirley poppies to spring artlessly between
- the paving-stones in our garden paths, begot the happy children who were
- to grow up under that roof of a dynastic system that was never going to
- fall in. (Because it never had fallen in.)
- Never before had nurseries been so pretty as they were in that glowing
- pause at the end of the nineteenth century.
- Peter’s nursery was a perfect room in which to hatch the soul of a
- little boy. Its walls were done in a warm cream-coloured paint, and upon
- them Peter’s father had put the most lovely pattern of trotting and
- jumping horses and dancing cats and dogs and leaping lambs, a carnival
- of beasts. He had copied these figures from books, enlarging them as he
- did so; he had cut them out in paper, stuck them on the wall, and then
- flicked bright blue paint at them until they were all outlined in a
- penumbra of stippled blue. Then he unpinned the paper and took it on to
- another part of the wall and so made his pattern. There was a big brass
- fireguard in Peter’s nursery that hooked on to the jambs of the
- fireplace, and all the tables had smoothly rounded corners against the
- days when Peter would run about. The floor was of cork carpet on which
- Peter would put his toys, and there was a crimson hearthrug on which
- Peter was destined to crawl. And a number of stuffed dogs and elephants,
- whose bead eyes had been carefully removed by Dolly and replaced with
- eyes of black cloth that Peter would be less likely to worry off and
- swallow, awaited his maturing clutch. (But there were no Teddy Bears
- yet; Teddy Bears had still to come into the world. America had still to
- discover the charm of its Teddy.) There were scales in Peter’s nursery
- to weigh Peter every week, and tables to show how much he ought to weigh
- and when one should begin to feel anxious. There was nothing casual
- about the early years of Peter.
- Peter began well, a remarkably fine child, Dr. Fremisson said, of nine
- pounds. Although he was born in warm summer weather we never went back
- upon that. He favoured his mother perhaps more than an impartial child
- should, but that was at any rate a source of satisfaction to Cousin
- Oswald (of the artificial eye).
- Cousin Oswald was doing his best to behave nicely and persuade himself
- that all this show had been got up by Dolly and was Dolly’s show—and
- that Arthur just happened to be about.
- “Look at him,” said Cousin Oswald as Peter regarded the world with
- unwinking intelligence from behind an appreciated bottle; “the Luck of
- him. He’s the Heir of the Ages. Look at this room and this house and
- every one about him.”
- Dolly remarked foolishly that Peter was a “nittle darum. ’E
- dizzerves-i-tall. Nevything.”
- “The very sunshine on the wall looks as though it had been got for him
- specially,” said Cousin Oswald.
- “It _was_ got for him specially,” said Dolly, with a light of amusement
- in her eyes that reminded him of former times.
- This visit was a great occasion. It was the first time Cousin Oswald had
- seen either Arthur or Peter. Almost directly after he had learnt about
- Dolly’s engagement and jerked out his congratulations, he had cut short
- his holiday in England and gone back to Central Africa. Now he was in
- England again, looked baked and hard, and his hair, which had always
- been stubby, more stubby than ever. The scarred half of him had lost its
- harsh redness and become brown. He was staying with his aunt, Dolly’s
- second cousin by marriage, Lady Charlotte Sydenham, not ten miles away
- towards Tonbridge, and he took to bicycling over to The Ingle-Nook every
- other day or so and gossiping.
- “These bicycles,” he said, “are most useful things. Wonderful things. As
- soon as they get cheap—bound to get cheap—they will play a wonderful
- part in Central Africa.”
- “But there are no roads in Central Africa!” said Arthur.
- “Better. Foot tracks padded by bare feet for generations. You could ride
- for hundreds of miles without dismounting....”
- “Compared with our little black babies,” said Cousin Oswald, “Peter
- seems immobile. He’s like a baby on a lotus flower meditating existence.
- Those others are like young black indiarubber kittens—all acrawl. But
- then they’ve got to look sharp and run for themselves as soon as
- possible, and he hasn’t.... Things happen there.”
- “I wonder,” said Arthur in his lifting tenor, “how far all this opening
- up of Africa to civilization and gin and Bibles is justifiable.”
- The one living eye glared at him. “It isn’t exactly like that,” said
- Oswald stiffly, and offered no occasion for further controversy at the
- moment.
- The conversation hung for a little while. Dolly wanted to say to her
- cousin: “He isn’t thinking of you. It’s just his way of generalizing
- about things....”
- “Anyhow this young man has a tremendous future,” said Oswald, going back
- to the original topic. “Think of what lies before him. Never has the
- world been so safe and settled—most of it that is—as it is now. I
- suppose really the world’s hardly begun to _touch_ education. In this
- house everything seems educational—pictures, toys, everything. When one
- sees how small niggers can be moulded and changed even in a missionary
- school, it makes one think. I wish I knew more about education. I lie
- awake at nights thinking of the man I might be, if I knew all I don’t
- know, and of all I could do if I did. And it’s the same with others.
- Every one who seems worth anything seems regretting his education wasn’t
- better. Hitherto of course there’s always been wars, interruptions,
- religious rows; the world’s been confused and poor, a thorough muddle;
- there’s never been a real planned education for people. Just scraps and
- hints. But we’re changing all that. Here’s a big safe world at last. No
- wars in Europe since ’71 and no likelihood in our time of any more big
- wars. Things settle down. And _he_ comes in for it all.”
- “I hope all this settling down won’t make the world too monotonous,”
- said Arthur.
- “You artists and writers have got to see to that. No, I don’t see it
- getting monotonous. There’s always differences of climate and colour.
- Temperament. All sorts of differences.”
- “And Nature,” said Arthur profoundly. “Old Mother Nature.”
- “Have you christened Peter yet?” Oswald asked abruptly.
- “He’s not going to be christened,” said Dolly. “Not until he asks to be.
- We’ve just registered him. He’s a registered baby.”
- “So he won’t have two godfathers and a godmother to be damned for him.”
- “We’ve weighed the risk,” said Arthur.
- “He might have a godfather just—_pour rire_,” said Oswald.
- “That’s different,” Dolly encouraged promptly. “We must get him one.”
- “I’d like to be Peter’s godfather,” said Oswald.
- “I will deny him no advantage,” said Arthur. “The ceremony—— The
- ceremony shall be a simple one. Godfather, Peter; Peter, godfather.
- Peter, my son, salute your godfather.”
- Oswald seemed trying to remember a formula. “I promise and vow three
- things in his name; first a beautiful mug; secondly that he shall be
- duly instructed in chemistry, biology, mathematics, the French and
- German tongues and all that sort of thing; and thirdly, that—what is
- thirdly? That he shall renounce the devil and all his works. But there
- isn’t a devil nowadays.”
- Peter having consumed his bottle to the dregs and dreamt over it for a
- space, now thrust it from him and turning towards Oswald,
- regurgitated—but within the limits of nursery good manners. Then he
- smiled a toothless, slightly derisive smile.
- “Intelligent ’e is!” crooned Dolly. “Unstand evlyfling ’e does....”
- § 3
- This conversation about Peter’s future, once it had been started,
- rambled on for the next three weeks, and then Oswald very abruptly saw
- fit to be called away to Africa again....
- Various interlocutors dropped in while that talk was in progress. Arthur
- felt his way to his real opinions through a series of experimental
- dogmas.
- Arthur’s disposition was towards an extreme Rousseauism. It is the
- tendency of the interrogative class in all settled communities. He
- thought that a boy or girl ought to run wild until twelve and not be
- bothered by lessons, ought to eat little else but fruit and nuts, go
- bareheaded and barefooted. Why not? Oswald’s disposition would have been
- to oppose Arthur anyhow, but against these views all his circle of ideas
- fought by necessity. If Arthur was Ruskinite and Morrisite, Oswald was
- as completely Huxleyite. If Arthur thought the world perishing for need
- of Art and Nature, Oswald stood as strongly for the saving power of
- Science. In this matter of bare feet——
- “There’s thorns, pins, snakes, tetanus,” reflected Oswald.
- “The foot hardens.”
- “Only the sole,” said Oswald. “And not enough.”
- “Shielded from all the corruptions of town and society,” said Arthur
- presently.
- “There’s no such corruptor as that old Mother Nature of yours. You
- daren’t leave that bottle of milk to her for half an hour but what she
- turns it sour or poisons it with one of her beastly germs.”
- “I never approved of the bottle,” said Arthur, bringing a flash of hot
- resentment into Dolly’s eyes....
- Oswald regretted his illustration.
- “Old Mother Nature is a half-wit,” he said. “She’s distraught. You
- overrate the jade. She’s thinking of everything at once. All her affairs
- got into a hopeless mess from the very start. Most of her world is
- desert with water running to waste. A tropical forest is three-quarters
- death and decay, and what is alive is either murdering or being
- murdered. It’s only when you come to artificial things, such as a
- ploughed field, for example, that you get space and health and every
- blade doing its best.”
- “I don’t call a ploughed field an artificial thing,” said Arthur.
- “But it is,” said Oswald.
- Dr. Fremisson was dragged into this dispute. “A ploughed field,” he
- maintained, “is part of the natural life of man.”
- “Like boots and reading.”
- “I wouldn’t say that,” said Dr. Fremisson warily. He had the usual
- general practitioner’s belief that any education whatever is a terrible
- strain on the young, and he was quite on the side of Rousseau and Arthur
- in that matter. Moreover, as a result of his professional endeavours he
- had been forced to a belief that Nature’s remedies are the best.
- “I’d like to know just what does belong to the natural life of man and
- what is artificial,” said Oswald. “If a ploughed field belongs then a
- plough belongs. And if a plough belongs a foundry belongs—and a coal
- mine. And you wouldn’t plough in bare feet—not in those Weald Clays down
- there? You want good stout boots for those. And you’d let your ploughman
- read at least a calendar? Boots and books come in, you see.”
- “You’re a perfect lawyer, Mr. Sydenham,” said the doctor, and pretended
- the discussion had become fanciful....
- “But you’ll not leave him to go unlettered until he is half grown up!”
- said Oswald to Dolly in real distress. “It’s so easy to teach ’em to
- read early and so hard later. I remember my little brother....”
- “I am the mother and I muth,” said Dolly. “When Peter displays the
- slightest interest in the alphabet, the alphabet it shall be.”
- Oswald felt reassured. He had a curious confidence that Dolly could be
- trusted to protect his godchild.
- § 4
- One day Aunt Phyllis and Aunt Phœbe came down.
- Both sisters participated in the Stubland break back to colour, but
- while Aunt Phyllis was a wit and her hats a spree Aunt Phœbe was
- fantastically serious and her hats went beyond a joke. They got their
- stuffs apparently from the shop of William Morris and Co., they had
- their dresses built upon Pre-Raphaelite lines, they did their hair
- plainly and simply but very carelessly, and their hats were noble
- brimmers or extravagant toques. Their profiles were as fine almost as
- Arthur’s, a type of profile not so suitable for young women as for
- golden youth. They were bright-eyed and a little convulsive in their
- movements. Beneath these extravagances and a certain conversational
- wildness they lived nervously austere lives. They were greatly delighted
- with Peter, but they did not know what to do with him. Phyllis held him
- rather better than Phœbe, but Phœbe with her chatelaine amused him
- rather more than Phyllis.
- “How happy a tinker’s baby must be,” said Aunt Phœbe, rattling her
- trinkets: “Or a tin-smith’s.”
- “I begin to see some use in a Hindoo woman’s bangles,” said Aunt
- Phyllis, “or in that clatter machine of yours, Phœbe. Every young mother
- should rattle. Make a note of it, Phœbe dear, for your book....”
- “Whatever you do with him, Dolly,” said Aunt Phœbe, “teach him anyhow to
- respect women and treat them as his equals. From the Very First.”
- “Meaning votes,” said Aunt Phyllis. “Didums _want_ give um’s mummy a
- _Vote_ den.”
- “Never let him touch butcher’s meat in any shape or form,” said Aunt
- Phœbe. “Once a human child tastes blood the mischief is done.”
- “Avoid patriotic songs and symbols,” prompted Aunt Phyllis, who had
- heard these ideas already in the train coming down.
- “And never buy him toy soldiers, drums, guns, trumpets. These things
- soak deeper into the mind than people suppose. They make wickedness
- domestic.... Surround him with beautiful things. Accustom him——”
- She winced that Arthur should hear her, but she spoke as one having a
- duty to perform.
- “Accustom him to the nude, Dolly, from his early years. Associate it
- with innocent amusements. Retrieve the fall. Never let him wear a hat
- upon his head nor boots upon his feet. As soon tie him up into a
- papoose. As soon tight-lace. A child’s first years should be one long
- dream of loveliness and spontaneous activity.”
- But at this point Peter betrayed signs that he found his aunts
- overstimulating. He released his grip upon the thimble-case of the
- chatelaine. His face puckered, ridges and waves and puckers of pink
- fatness ran distractedly over it, and he threw his head back and opened
- a large square toothless mouth.
- “Mary,” cried Dolly, and a comfortable presence that had been hovering
- mistrustfully outside the door ever since the aunts appeared, entered
- with alacrity and bore Peter protectingly away.
- “He must be almost entirely lungs,” said Aunt Phœbe, when her voice
- could be heard through the receding bawl. “Other internal organs no
- doubt develop later.”
- “Come out to the stone table under the roses,” said Dolly. “We argue
- there about Peter’s upbringing almost every afternoon.”
- “Argue, I grant you,” said Aunt Phœbe, following her hostess and
- dangling her chatelaine from one hand as if to illustrate her remarks,
- “but argue rightly.”
- When Oswald came over in the afternoon he was disposed to regard the two
- aunts as serious reinforcements to Arthur’s educational heresies.
- Phyllis and Phœbe were a little inclined to be shy with him as a strange
- man, and he and Arthur did most of the talking, but they made their
- positions plain by occasional interpolations. Arthur, supported by their
- presence, was all for letting Peter grow up a wild untrammelled child of
- nature. Oswald became genuinely distressed.
- “But education,” he protested, “is as natural to a human being as nests
- to birds.”
- “Then why force it?” said Phyllis with dexterity.
- “Even a cat boxes its kittens’ ears!”
- “A domesticated cat,” said Phœbe. “A _civilized_ cat.”
- “But I’ve seen a wild lioness——”
- “Are we to learn how to manage our young from lions and hyenas!” cried
- Phœbe.
- They were too good for Oswald. He saw Peter already ruined, a fat,
- foolish, undisciplined cub.
- Dolly with sympathetic amusement watched his distress, which his living
- half face betrayed in the oddest contrast to his left hand calm.
- Arthur had been thinking gracefully while his sisters tackled their
- adversary. Now he decided to sum up the discussion. His authoritative
- manner on these occasions was always slightly irritating to Oswald. Like
- so many who read only occasionally and take thought as a special
- exercise, Arthur had a fixed persuasion that nobody else ever read or
- thought at all. So that he did not so much discuss as adjudicate.
- “Of course,” he said, “we have to be reasonable in these things. For men
- a certain artificiality is undoubtedly natural. That is, so to speak,
- the human paradox. But artificiality is the last resort. Instinct is our
- basis. For the larger part the boy has just to grow. But We watch his
- growth. Education is really watching—keeping the course. The human error
- is to do too much, to distrust instinct too much, to over-teach,
- over-legislate, over-manage, over-decorate——”
- “No, you _don’t_, my gentleman,” came the voice of Mary from the shadow
- under the old pear tree.
- “Now I wonder——” said Arthur, craning his neck to look over the rose
- bushes.
- “Diddums then,” said Mary. “Woun’t they lettim put’tt in ’s mouf?
- _Oooh!_”
- “Trust her instinct,” said Dolly, and Arthur was restrained.
- Oswald took advantage of the interruption to take the word from Arthur.
- “We joke and sharpen our wits in this sort of talk,” he said, “but
- education, you know, isn’t a joke. It might be the greatest power in the
- world. If I didn’t think I was a sort of schoolmaster in Africa....
- That’s the only decent excuse a white man has for going there.... I’m
- getting to be a fanatic about education. Give me the schools of the
- world and I would make a Millennium in half a century.... You don’t mean
- to let Peter drift. You say it, but you can’t mean it. Drift is waste.
- We don’t make half of what we _could_ make of our children. We don’t
- make a quarter—not a tenth. They could know ever so much more, think
- ever so much better. We’re all at sixes and sevens.”
- He realized he wasn’t good at expressing his ideas. He had intended
- something very clear and compelling, a sort of ultimatum about Peter.
- “I believe in Sir Francis Galton,” Aunt Phœbe remarked in his pause;
- saying with stern resolution things that she felt had to be said. They
- made her a little breathless, and she fixed her eye on the view until
- they were said. “Eugenics. It is a new idea. A revival. Plato had it.
- Men ought to be bred like horses. No marriage or any nonsense of that
- kind. Just a simple scientific blending of points. Then Everything would
- be different.”
- “Almost too different,” Arthur reflected....
- “When I consider Peter and think of all one could do for him——” said
- Oswald, still floundering for some clenching way of putting it....
- § 5
- One evening Dolly caught her cousin looking at her husband with an
- expression that stuck in her memory. It was Oswald’s habit to sit if he
- could in such a position that he could rest the obliterated cheek of his
- face upon a shadowing hand, his fingers on his forehead. Then one saw
- what a pleasant-faced man he would have been if only he had left that
- Egyptian shell alone. So he was sitting on this occasion, his elbow on
- the arm of the settle. His brow was knit, his one eye keen and steady.
- He was listening to his host discoursing upon the many superiorities of
- the artisan in the middle ages to his successor of today. And he seemed
- to be weighing and estimating Arthur with some little difficulty.
- Then, as if it was a part of the calculation he was making, he turned to
- look at Dolly. Their eyes met; for a moment he could not mask himself.
- Then he turned to Arthur again with his expression restored to polite
- interest.
- It was the most trivial of incidents, but it stayed, a mental burr.
- § 6
- A little accident which happened a few weeks after Oswald’s departure
- put the idea of making a will into Arthur’s head. Dolly had wanted to
- ride a bicycle, but he had some theory that she would not need to ride
- alone or that it would over-exert her to ride alone, and so he had got a
- tandem bicycle instead, on which they could ride together. Those were
- the days when all England echoed to the strains of
- “_Di_sy, _Di_sy, tell me your answer true;
- I’m arf _crizy_
- All fer the love of you-oo ...
- Yew’d look sweet
- Upon the seat
- Of-a-bicycle-mide-fer-two.”
- A wandering thrush of a cockney whistled it on their first expedition.
- Dolly went out a little resentfully with Arthur’s broad back obscuring
- most of her landscape, and her third ride ended in a destructive spill
- down Ipinghanger Hill. The bicycle brake was still in a primitive stage
- in those days; one steadied one’s progress down a hill by the art, since
- lost to mankind again, of “back-pedalling,” and Dolly’s feet were
- carried over and thrown off the pedals and the machine got away.
- Arthur’s nerve was a good one. He fought the gathering pace and steered
- with skill down to the very last bend of that downland descent. The last
- corner got them. They took the bank and hedge sideways and the crumpled
- tandem remained on one side of the bank and Arthur and Dolly found
- themselves torn and sprained but essentially unbroken in a hollow of wet
- moss and marsh-mallows beyond the hedge.
- The sense of adventure helped them through an afternoon of toilsome
- return....
- “But we might both have been killed that time,” said Arthur with a
- certain gusto.
- “If we had,” said Arthur presently, expanding that idea, “what would
- have become of Peter?”...
- They had both made simple wills copied out of _Whitaker’s Almanack_,
- leaving everything to each other; it had not occurred to them before
- that two young parents who cross glaciers together, go cycling together,
- travel in the same trains, cross the seas in the same boats, might very
- easily get into the same smash. In that case the law, it appeared,
- presumed that the wife, being the weaker vessel, would expire first, and
- so Uncle Rigby, who had relapsed more and more stuffily into evangelical
- narrowness since his marriage, would extend a dark protection over
- Peter’s life. “Lucy wouldn’t even feed him properly,” said Dolly. “She’s
- so close and childlessly inhuman. I can’t bear to think of it.”
- On the other hand, if by any chance Dolly should show a flicker of life
- after the extinction of Arthur, Peter and all his possessions would fall
- under the hand of Dolly’s shady brother, the failure of the family, a
- being of incalculable misdemeanours, a gross, white-faced literary man,
- an artist in parody (itself a vice), who smelt of tobacco always, and
- already at thirty-eight, it was but too evident, preferred port and old
- brandy to his self-respect.
- “We ought to remake our wills and each appoint the same guardian,” said
- Arthur.
- It was not very easy to find the perfect guardian.
- Then as Arthur sat at lunch one day the sunshine made a glory of the
- little silver tankard that adorned the Welsh dresser at the end of the
- room.
- “Dolly,” he said, “old Oswald would like this job.”
- She’d known that by instinct from the first, but she had never expected
- Arthur to discover it.
- “He’s got a sort of fancy for Peter,” he said.
- “I think we could trust him,” said Dolly temperately.
- “Poor old Oswald,” said Arthur; “he’s a tragic figure. That mask of his
- cuts him off from so much. He idolizes you and Peter, Dolly. You don’t
- suspect it, but he does. He’s our man.”
- CHAPTER THE THIRD
- ARTHUR OR OSWALD?
- § 1
- Destiny is at times a slashing sculptor. At first Destiny seemed to have
- intended Oswald Sydenham to be a specimen of the schoolboy hero; he made
- record scores in the school matches, climbed trees higher than any one
- else did, and was moreover a good all-round boy at his work; he was
- healthy, very tall but strong, dark, pleasant-looking, and popular with
- men and women and—he was quite aware of these facts. He shone with equal
- brightness as a midshipman; he dared, he could lead. Several women of
- thirty or thereabouts adored him—before it is good for youth to be
- adored. He had a knack of success, he achieved a number of things; he
- judged himself and found that this he had done “pretty decently,” and
- that “passing well.” Then Destiny decided apparently that he was not
- thinking as freshly or as abundantly as he ought to do—a healthy,
- successful life does not leave much time for original thinking—and
- smashed off the right side of his face. In a manner indeed quite
- creditable to him. It was given to few men in those pacific days to get
- the V.C. before the age of twenty-one.
- He lay in hospital for a long spell, painful but self-satisfied. The
- nature of his injuries was not yet clear to him. Presently he would get
- all right again. “V.C.,” he whispered. “At twenty. Pretty decent.”
- He saw himself in the looking-glass with half his face bandaged, and
- there was nothing very shocking in that. Then one day came his first
- glimpse of his unbandaged self....
- “One must take it decently,” he said to himself again and again through
- a night of bottomless dismay.
- And, “How can I look a woman in the face again?”
- He stuck to his bandages as long as possible.
- He learnt soon enough that some women could not look him in the face
- anyhow, and among them was one who should have hidden her inability from
- him at any cost.
- And he was not only disfigured; he was crippled and unserviceable; so
- the Navy decided. Something had gone out of his eyesight; he could no
- longer jump safely nor hit a ball with certainty. He could not play
- tennis at all; he had ten minutes of humiliation with one of the nurses,
- protesting all the time. “Give me another chance and I’ll begin to get
- into it. Let me get my eye in—my only eye in. Oh, the devil! give a chap
- a chance!... Sorry, nurse. Now!... _Damn!_ It’s no good. Oh God! it’s no
- good. What shall I do?” Even his walk had now a little flavour of
- precaution. But he could still shoot straight up to two or three hundred
- yards.... These facts formed the basis for much thinking on the part of
- a young man who had taken it for granted that he was destined to a
- bright and leading rôle in the world.
- When first he realized that he was crippled and disabled for life, he
- thought of suicide. But in an entirely detached and theoretical spirit.
- Suicide had no real attraction for him. He meant to live anyhow. The
- only question therefore was the question of what he was to do. He would
- lie awake at nights sketching out careers that did not require
- athleticism or a good presence. “I suppose it’s got to be chiefly using
- my brains,” he decided. “The great trouble will be not to get fat and
- stuffy. I’ve never liked indoors....”
- He did his best to ignore the fact that an honourable life before him
- meant a life of celibacy. But he could not do so. For many reasons
- arising out of his temperament and the experiences those women
- friendships had thrust upon him, that limitation had an effect of
- dismaying cruelty upon his mind. “Perhaps some day I shall find a blind
- girl,” he said, and felt his face doubtfully. “Oh, damn!” He perceived
- that the sewing up of his face was a mere prelude to the sewing up of
- his life. It distressed him beyond measure. It was the persuasion that
- the deprivation was final that obsessed him with erotic imaginations.
- For a time he was obsessed almost to the verge of madness.
- He had moods of raving anger on account of this extravagant and
- uncontrollable preoccupation. He would indulge secretly in storms of
- cursing, torrents of foulness and foul blasphemies that left him
- strangely relieved. But he had an unquenchable sense of the need of a
- fight.
- “I’ll get square with this damned world somehow,” he said. “I won’t be
- beaten.”
- There were some ugly and dismal aspects in his attempt not to be beaten,
- plunges into strange mires with remorse at the far side. They need not
- deflect our present story.
- “What’s the whole beastly game about anyhow?” he asked. “Why are we made
- like this?”
- Meanwhile his pride kept up a valiant front. No one should suspect he
- was not cheerful. No one should suspect he felt himself to be a thing
- apart. He hid his vicious strain—or made a jest of it. He developed a
- style of humour that turned largely on his disfigurement. His internal
- stresses reflected a dry bitterness upon the world.
- It was a great comfort presently to get hints that here and there other
- souls had had to learn lessons as hard as his own. One day he chanced
- upon the paralyzed Heine’s farewell to beauty. “Perhaps,” he said, “I’ve
- only got by a short cut to where a lot of people must come out sooner or
- later. Every one who lives on must get bald and old—anyhow.” He took a
- hint from an article he found in some monthly review upon Richard
- Crookback. “A crippled body makes a crippled mind,” he read. “Is that
- going to happen to me?”
- Thence he got to: “If I think about myself now,” he asked, “what else
- _can_ happen? I’ll go bitter.”
- “Something I can do well, but something in which I can forget myself.”
- That, he realized, was his recipe.
- “Let’s find out what the whole beastly game _is_ about,” he decided—a
- large proposition. “And stop thinking of _my_ personal set-back
- altogether.”
- But that is easier said than done.
- § 2
- He would, he decided, “go in for science.”
- He had read about science in the magazines, and about its remorseless
- way with things. Science had always had a temperamental call upon his
- mind. The idea of a pitiless acceptance of fact had now a greater
- fascination than ever for him. Art was always getting sentimental and
- sensuous—this was in the early ’eighties; religion was mystical and
- puritanical; science just looked at facts squarely, and would see a
- cancer or a liver fluke or a healing scar as beautiful as Venus.
- Moreover it told you coldly and correctly of the skin glands of Venus.
- It neither stimulated nor condemned. It would steady the mind. He had an
- income of four hundred a year, and fairly good expectations of another
- twelve hundred. There was nothing to prevent him going in altogether for
- scientific work.
- Those were the great days when Huxley lectured on zoology at South
- Kensington, and to him Oswald went. Oswald did indeed find science
- consoling and inspiring. Scientific studies were at once rarer and more
- touched by enthusiasm a quarter of a century ago than they are now, and
- he was soon a passionate naturalist, consumed by the insatiable craving
- to know how. That little, long upper laboratory in the Normal School of
- Science, as the place was then called, with the preparations and
- diagrams along one side, the sinks and windows along the other, the row
- of small tables down the windows, and the ever-present vague mixed smell
- of methylated spirit, Canada balsam, and a sweetish decay, opened vast
- new horizons to him. To the world of the eighteen-eighties the story of
- life, of the origin and branching out of species, of the making of
- continents, was still the most inspiring of new romances. Comparative
- anatomy in particular was then a great and philosophical “new learning,”
- a mighty training of the mind; the drift of biological teaching towards
- specialization was still to come.
- For a time Oswald thought of giving his life to biology. But biology
- unhappily had little need of Oswald. He was a clumsy dissector because
- of his injury, and unhandy at most of the practical work, he had to work
- with his head on one side and rather close to what he was doing, but it
- dawned upon him one day as a remarkable discovery that neither personal
- beauty nor great agility are demanded from an explorer or collector. It
- was a picture he saw in an illustrated paper of H. M. Stanley traversing
- an African forest in a litter, with a great retinue of porters, that
- first put this precious idea into his head. “One wants pluck and a
- certain toughness,” he said. “I’m tough enough. And then I shall be out
- of reach of—Piccadilly.”
- He had excellent reasons for disliking the West End. It lured him, it
- exasperated him, it demoralized him and made him ashamed. He got and
- read every book of African travel he could hear of. In 1885 he snatched
- at an opportunity and went with an expedition through Portuguese East
- Africa to Nyasa and Tanganyika. He found fatigue and illness and
- hardship there—and peace of nerve and imagination. He remained in that
- region of Africa for three years.
- But biology and Africa were merely the fields of human interest in which
- Oswald’s mind was most active in those days. Such inquiries were only a
- part of his valiant all-round struggle to reconstruct the life that it
- had become impossible to carry on as a drama of the noble and
- picturesque loves and adventures of Oswald Sydenham. His questions led
- him into philosophy; he tried over religion, which had hitherto in his
- romantic phase simply furnished suitable church scenery for meetings and
- repentances. He read many books, listened to preachers, hunted out any
- teacher who seemed to promise help in the mending of his life,
- considered this “movement” and that “question.” His resolve to find what
- “the whole beastly game was about,” was no passing ejaculation. He
- followed the trend of his time towards a religious scepticism and an
- entire neglect of current politics. Religion was then at the nadir of
- formalism; current politics was an outwardly idiotic, inwardly
- dishonest, party duel between the followers of Gladstone and Disraeli.
- Social and economic questions he was inclined to leave to the
- professors. Those were the early days of socialist thought in England,
- the days before Fabianism, and he did not take to the new teachings very
- kindly. He was a moderate man in æsthetic matters, William Morris left
- him tepid, he had no sense of grievance against machinery and aniline
- dyes, he did not grasp the workers’ demand because it was outside his
- traditions and experiences. Science seemed to him more and more plainly
- to be the big regenerative thing in human life, and the mission
- immediately before men of energy was the spreading of civilization, that
- is to say of knowledge, apparatus, clear thought, and release from
- instinct and superstition, about the world.
- In those days science was at its maximum of aggressive hopefulness. With
- the idea of scientific progress there was also bound up in many British
- minds the idea of a racial mission. The long Napoleonic wars had cut off
- British thought from the thought of the continent of Europe, and this
- separation was never completely healed throughout the nineteenth
- century. In spite of their world-empire the British remained remarkably
- self-centred and self-satisfied. They were a world-people, and no other
- people were. They were at once insular and world-wide. During the
- nineteenth century until its last quarter there was no real challenge to
- their extra-European ascendancy. A man like Sydenham did not so much
- come to the conclusion that the subjugation and civilization of the
- world by science and the Anglican culture was the mission of the British
- Empire, as find that conclusion ready-made by tradition and
- circumstances in his mind. He did not even trouble to express it; it
- seemed to him self-evident. When Kipling wrote of the White Man’s
- Burden, Briton was understood. Everywhere the British went about the
- world, working often very disinterestedly and ably, quite unaware of the
- amazement and exasperation created in French and German and American
- minds by the discovery of these tranquil assumptions.
- So it was with Oswald Sydenham for many years. For three years he was in
- the district between Bangweolo and Lake Nyasa, making his headquarters
- at Blantyre, collecting specimens and learning much about mankind and
- womankind in that chaos of Arab slavers, Scotch missionaries, traders,
- prospectors, native tribes, Zulu raiders, Indian store-keepers, and
- black “Portuguese”; then, discovering that Blantyre had picked up a
- nickname from the natives of “Half Face” for him, he took a temporary
- dislike to Blantyre, and decided to go by way of Tanganyika either to
- Uganda or Zanzibar, first sending home a considerable collection of
- specimens by way of Mozambique. He got through at last to Uganda, after
- some ugly days and hours, only to learn of a very good reason why he
- should return at once to the southern lakes. He heard that a new British
- consul was going up the Zambesi to Nyasaland with a British protectorate
- up his sleeve, and he became passionately anxious to secure a position
- near the ear of this official. There were many things the man ought to
- know at once that neither traders nor mission men would tell him.
- To get any official position it was necessary for Oswald to return to
- London and use the influence of various allied Sydenhams. He winced at
- the thought of coming back to England and meeting the eyes of people who
- had known him before his disfigurement, but the need to have some sort
- of official recognition if he was to explain himself properly in
- Nyasaland made it necessary that he should come. That was in the summer
- of 1889.
- He went down to visit his uncle at Long Downport while the “influences”
- brewed, and here it was he first met Dolly. He did not know it, but now
- his face was no longer a shock to the observer. The injured side which
- had been at first mostly a harsh, reddish blank scar with a glass eye,
- had not only been baked and weather-worn by Africa, but it had in some
- indefinable way been assimilated by the unmutilated half. It had been
- taken up into his individuality; his renascent character possessed it
- now; it had been humanized and become a part of him; it had acquired
- dignity. Muscles and nerves had reconstructed some of their relations
- and partially resumed abandoned duties. If only he had known it, there
- was nothing repulsive about him to Dolly. Though he was not a pretty
- man, he had the look of a strong one. The touch of imagination in her
- composition made her see behind this half vizor of immobilized
- countenance the young hero who had risked giving his life for his
- fellows; his disfigurement did but witness the price he had paid. In
- those days at home in England one forgot that most men were brave. No
- one had much occasion nor excuse for bravery. A brave man seemed a
- wonderful man.
- He loved Dolly with a love in which a passion of gratitude was added to
- the commoner ingredients. Her smiling eyes restored his self-respect. He
- felt he was no longer a horror to women. But could it be love she felt
- for him? Was not that to presume too far? She gave him friendliness. He
- guessed she gave him pity. She gave him the infinite reassurance of her
- frank eyes. Would it not be an ill return to demand more than these
- gracious gifts?
- The possibility of humiliation—and of humiliating Dolly—touched a vein
- of abject cowardice in his composition. He could not bring himself to
- the test. He tried some vague signalling that she did not seem to
- understand. His time ran out and he went—awkwardly. When he returned for
- a second time, he returned to find that Arthur’s fine profile had
- eclipsed his memory.
- § 3
- After the visit that made him a godfather, Oswald did not return again
- to England until his godson had attained the ripe age of four years. And
- when Oswald came again he had changed very greatly. He was now almost
- completely his new self; the original good-looking midshipman, that
- sunny “type,” was buried deep in a highly individualized person, who had
- in England something of the effect of a block of seasoned ship’s timber
- among new-cut blocks of white deal. He had been used and tested. He had
- been scarred, and survived. His obsession had lifted. He had got himself
- well under control.
- He was now acquiring a considerable knowledge of things African, and
- more particularly of those mysterious processes of change and adventure
- that were presented to the British consciousness in those days as
- “empire building.”
- He had seen this part of Africa change dramatically under his eyes. When
- first he had gone out it was but a dozen years from the death of
- Livingstone, who had been the first white man in this land. In
- Livingstone’s wake had come rifles, missionaries, and the big game
- hunter. The people of the Shire Highlands were now mostly under the rule
- of chiefs who had come into the country with Livingstone as Basuto
- porters, and whom he had armed with rifles. The town of Blantyre had
- been established by Scotch missionaries to preserve Livingstone’s memory
- and his work. Things had gone badly for a time. A certain number of lay
- helpers to the Church of Scotland Mission had set up as
- quasi-independent sovereigns, with powers of life and death, about their
- mission stations; many of them had got completely out of hand and were
- guilty of much extortion and cruelty. One of them, Fennick, murdered a
- chief in a drunken bout, got himself killed, and nearly provoked a
- native war only a year or so before Oswald’s arrival. Arab adventurers
- from Zanzibar and black Portuguese from the Zambesi were also pushing
- into this country. The Yao to the north and the Angoni-Zulus to the
- south, tribes of a highly militant spirit, added their quota to a
- kaleidoscope of murder, rape, robbery and incalculable chances, which
- were further complicated by the annexational propaganda of more or less
- vaguely accredited German, Belgian, Portuguese and British agents.
- Oswald reached Tanganyika in the company of a steamboat (in portable
- pieces) which had been sent by the Scotch missionaries by way of the
- Zambesi and Lake Nyasa; he helped with its reconstruction, and took a
- considerable share in fighting the Arab slavers between Nyasa and
- Tanganyika. One of his earliest impressions of African warfare was the
- figure of a blistered and wounded negro standing painfully to tell his
- story of the fight from which he had escaped. “You see,” the Scotch
- trader who was translating, explained, “he’s saying they had just spears
- and the Arabs had guns, and they got driven back on the lagoon into the
- reeds. The reeds were dry, and the Arabs set them on fire. That’s how
- he’s got his arm and leg burns, he says. Nasty places. But they’ll heal
- all right; he’s a vegetarian and a teetotaller—usually. Those reeds burn
- like thatch, and if the poor devils ran out they got stabbed or shot,
- and if they went into the water the crocodiles would be getting them. I
- know that end of the lake. It’s fairly alive with crocodiles. A perfect
- bank holiday for the crocodiles. Poor devils! Poor devils!”
- The whole of Africa, seen in those days from the viewpoint of Blantyre,
- was the most desolating spectacle of human indiscipline it is possible
- to conceive. Everywhere was the adventurer and violence and cruelty and
- fever, nowhere law and discipline. The mission men turned robbers, the
- traders became drunkards, the porters betrayed their masters. Mission
- intrigued against mission, disobeyed the consuls, and got at hopeless
- loggerheads with the traders and early planters. Where there is no
- control, there is no self-control. Thirst and lust racked every human
- being; even some of the missionaries deemed it better to marry native
- women than to burn. In his own person Oswald played microcosm to human
- society. He had his falls and bitter moments, but his faith in science
- and civilization, human will and self-control, stumbled to its feet
- again. “We’ll get things straight here presently,” he said. Of himself
- as of Nyasaland. “Never say damned till you’re dead.”
- His first return to England not only gave him a futile dream of Dolly to
- keep him clean and fastidious in Africa, but restored his waning belief
- in an orderly world. Seen from that distant point, the conflicts in
- Africa fell into a proper perspective as the froth and confusion before
- the launching of a new and unprecedented peace. Africa had been a black
- stew of lust, bloodshed and disease since the beginnings of history.
- These latter days were but the last flare-up of an ancient disorder
- before the net of the law and the roads and railways, the net of the
- hospitals and microscopes and anthropologists, caught and tamed and
- studied and mastered the black continent. He got his official
- recognition and went back to join this new British agent, Mr. Harry
- Johnston, in Nyasaland and see a kind of order establish itself and grow
- more orderly and secure, over the human confusion round and about the
- Shire Highlands. He found in his chief, who presently became
- Commissioner and Administrator (with a uniform rather like an Admiral’s
- for state occasions), a man after his own heart, with the same
- unquenchable faith in the new learning of science and the same belief in
- the better future that opened before mankind. The Commissioner, a little
- animated, talkative man of tireless interest and countless interests,
- reciprocated Oswald’s liking. In Central Africa one is either too busy
- or too tired and ill to do much talking, but there were one or two
- evenings when Oswald was alone with his chief and they could exchange
- views. Johnston had a modern religious philosophy that saw God chiefly
- through the valiant hearts of men; he made Oswald read Winwood Reade’s
- _Martyrdom of Man_, which had become, so to speak, his own theological
- point of departure. It was a book of sombre optimism productive of a
- kind of dark hopefulness—“provided we stick it”—that accorded well with
- the midday twilight of the Congo forests into which Oswald was presently
- sent. It marched with much that Oswald had been thinking out for
- himself. It did not so much tell him new things as crystallize his own
- thoughts.
- Two ideas were becoming the guiding lights of Oswald Sydenham’s thought
- and life. One was the idea of self-devotion to British Imperial
- expansion. The British Empire was to be the instrument of world
- civilization, the protectress and vehicle of science; the critical
- examination of Imperialism in the light of these pretensions had still
- to come. He had still to discover that science could be talked in other
- languages than English, and thought go on behind brown and yellow
- foreheads. His second idea was that the civilizing process was
- essentially an educational process, a training in toleration and
- devotion, the tempering of egotism by wide ideas. Thereby “we shall get
- things straighter presently. We shall get them very straight in the long
- run.”...
- Directly after Oswald’s second visit to England, the one in which he
- became Peter’s godfather, a series of campaigns against the
- slave-raiding Arab chiefs, who still remained practically independent in
- the Protectorate, began. Oswald commanded in a very “near thing” in the
- Highlands, during which he held a small stockade against the Yao with
- six Sikhs and a few Atonga for three days, and was finally rescued when
- his ammunition had almost given out; and after that he was entrusted
- with a force of over three hundred men in the expedition that ended in
- the capture and hanging of old Mlozi. He fought in steamy heat and
- pouring rain, his head aching and his body shivering, and he ended his
- campaigning with a first experience of blackwater fever. It struck him
- as an unutterably beastly experience, although the doctor assured him he
- had been let down lightly. However, this was almost the end of the
- clearing-up fighting in the Protectorate, and Oswald could take things
- easily for a time. Thereafter the work of pacification, road-making, and
- postal and telegraphic organization went on swiftly and steadily.
- But these days of peaceful organization were ended by a disagreeable
- emotional situation. Oswald found himself amused and attracted by a
- pretty woman he despised thoroughly and disliked a good deal. She was
- the wife of a planter near Blantyre. So far from thinking him an ugly
- and disfigured being, she made it plain to him that his ugliness was an
- unprecedented excitement for her. Always imprisoned in his mind was the
- desire to have a woman of his very own; at times he envied even the Yao
- warriors their black slave mistresses; and he was more than half
- disposed to snatch this craving creature in spite of the lies and tricks
- and an incessant chattering vanity that disfigured her soul, and end all
- his work in Africa, to gratify, if only for some lurid months, his
- hunger for a human possession. The situation took him by surprise in a
- negligent phase; he pulled up sharply when he was already looking down a
- slippery slope of indignity and dishonour. If he had as yet done no
- foolish things he had thought and said them. The memory of Dolly came to
- him in the night. He declared to himself, and he tried to declare it
- without reservation, that it was better to sit for a time within a yard
- of Dolly’s inaccessible goodness than paint a Protectorate already
- British enough to be scandal-loving, with the very brightest hues of
- passion’s flame-colour. He ran away from this woman.
- So he came back—by no means single-mindedly. There were lapses indeed on
- the slow steamer journey to Egypt into almost unendurable torments of
- regret. Of which, however, no traces appeared when he came into the
- presence of Dolly and his godson at The Ingle-Nook.
- § 4
- Peter took to Oswald and Oswald took to Peter from the beginning.
- Peter, by this time, had Joan for a foster-sister. And also he had
- Nobby. Nobby was a beloved Dutch doll, armless and legless, but adored
- and trusted as no other doll has ever been in the whole history of dolls
- since the world began. He had been Peter’s first doll. One day when he
- was playing tunes with Nobby on the nursery fender, one exceptionally
- accented note splintered off a side of Nobby’s smooth but already much
- obliterated countenance. Peter was not so much grieved as dismayed, and
- Arthur was very sympathetic and did his best to put things right with a
- fine brush and some black paint. But when Peter saw Oswald he met him
- with a cry of delight and recognition.
- “It’s Nobby!” he cried.
- “But who’s Nobby?” asked Oswald.
- “_You_—Nobby,” Peter insisted with a squeak, and turned about just in
- time to prevent Arthur from hiding the fetish away. “Gimme my Nobby!” he
- said.
- “Nobby is his private god,” Dolly hastened to explain. “It is his
- dearest possession. It is the most beautiful thing in the world to him.
- Every night he must have Nobby under his pillow....”
- Oswald stood with his wooden double in his hand for a moment, recognized
- himself at a glance, thought it over, and smiled his grim, one-sided
- smile.
- “I’m Nobby right enough,” he said. “Big Nobby, Peter. He takes you off
- to Dreamland. Some day I’ll take you to the Mountains of the Moon.”
- So far Joan, a black-headed, black-eyed doll, had been coyly on the edge
- of the conversation, a little disposed to take refuge in the skirts of
- Mary. Now she made a great effort on her own account. “Nobby,” she
- screamed; “big, _Big_ Nobby!” And, realizing she had made a success, hid
- her face.
- “Nobby to you,” said Oswald. “Does _that_ want a godfather too? It’s my
- rôle....”
- § 5
- The changes in the Stubland nursery, though they were the most apparent,
- were certainly not the greatest in the little home that looked over the
- Weald. Arthur had been unfaithful to Dolly—on principle it would seem.
- That did not reach Oswald’s perceptions all at once, though even on his
- first visit he felt a difference between them.
- The later ’nineties were the “Sex Problem” period in Great Britain. Not
- that sex has been anything else than a perplexity in all ages, but it
- was just about this time that that unanswerable “Why not?”—that
- bacterium of social decay, spreading out from the dark corners of
- unventilated religious dogmas into a moribund system of morals, reached,
- in the case of the children of the serious middle-classes of Great
- Britain, this important field of conduct. The manner of the question and
- the answer remained still serious. Those were the days of “The Woman Who
- Did” and the “Keynote Series,” of adultery without fun and fornication
- for conscience’ sake. Arthur, with ample leisure, a high-grade bicycle,
- the consciousness of the artistic temperament and a gnawing secret
- realization, which had never left him since those early days in
- Florence, that Dolly did not really consider him as an important person
- in the world’s affairs, was all too receptive of the new suggestions.
- After some discursive liberal conversations with various people he found
- the complication he sought in the youngest of three plain but passionate
- sisters, who lived a decorative life in a pretty little modern cottage
- on the edge of a wood beyond Limpsfield. The new gale of emancipation
- sent a fire through her veins. Her soul within her was like a flame. She
- wrote poetry with a peculiar wistful charm, and her decorative methods
- were so similar to Arthur’s that it seemed natural to conclude they
- might be the precursors of an entirely new school. They put a new
- interest and life into each other’s work. It became a sort of
- collaboration....
- The affair was not all priggishness on Arthur’s part. The woman was
- honestly in love; and for most men love makes love; there is a pride and
- fascination for them in a new love adventure, in the hesitation, the
- dash, the soft capture, the triumph and kindness, that can manage with
- very poor excuses. And such a beautiful absence of mutual criticism
- always, such a kindly accepting blindness in passionate eyes!
- At first Dolly did not realize how Arthur was rounding off his life. She
- was busy now with her niece, her disreputable elder brother’s love
- child, as well as Peter; she did not miss Arthur very much during his
- increasing absences. Then Arthur, who wished to savour all the aspects
- of the new situation, revealed it to her one August evening in general
- terms by a discourse upon polygamy.
- Dolly’s quick mind seized the situation long before Arthur could state
- it.
- She did not guess who her successful rival was. She did not know it was
- the younger Miss Blend, that familiar dark squat figure, quick and
- almost crowded in speech, and with a peculiar avidity about her manner
- and bearing. She assumed it must be some person of transcendant and
- humiliating merit; that much her romantic standards demanded. She was
- also a little disgusted, as though Arthur had discovered himself to be
- physically unclean. Her immediate impulse was to arrest a specific
- confession.
- “You forget instinct, Arthur dear,” she said, colouring brightly. “What
- you say is perfectly reasonable, wonderfully so. Only—it would make me
- feel sick—I _mean_ sick—if, for example, I thought _you_——”
- She turned away and looked at the view.
- “Are you so sure that is instinct? Or convention?” he asked, after a
- pause of half comprehension.
- “Instinct—for certain.... Lovers are one. Whither you go, _I_ go—in the
- spirit. You can’t go alone with another woman while I—while I—— In those
- things.... Oh, it’s inconceivable!”
- “That’s a primitive point of view.”
- “Love—lust for the matter of that.... They _are_ primitive things,” said
- Dolly, undisguisedly wretched.
- “There’s reason in the control of them.”
- “Polygamy!” she cried scornfully.
- Arthur was immensely disconcerted.
- He lit a cigarette, and his movements were slow and clumsy.
- “Ideas may differ,” he said lamely....
- He did not make his personal confession after all.
- In the middle of the night Arthur was lying awake thinking with unusual
- violence, and for the first time for a long while seeing a question from
- a standpoint other than his own. Also he fancied he had heard a sound of
- great significance at bedtime. That uncertain memory worried him more
- and more. He got up now with excessive precautions against noise and
- crept with extreme slowness and care to the little door between his room
- and Dolly’s. It was locked.
- _Then she had understood!_
- A solemn, an almost awe-stricken Arthur paddled back to his own bed
- through a pool of moonlight on the floor. A pair of pallid, blue-veined
- feet and bright pyjama legs and a perplexed, vague continuation upward
- was all the moon could see.
- § 6
- It was, it seemed to Arthur, a very hard, resolute and unapproachable
- Dolly who met him at the breakfast-table on the brick terrace outside
- the little kitchen window. He reflected that the ultimate injury a wife
- can do to a husband is ruthless humiliation, and she was certainly
- making him feel most abominably ashamed of himself. She had always, he
- reflected, made him feel that she didn’t very greatly believe in him.
- There was just a touch of the spitfire in Dolly....
- But, indeed, within Dolly was a stormy cavern of dismay and indignation
- and bitter understanding. She had wept a great deal in the night and
- thought interminably; she knew already that there was much more in this
- thing than a simple romantic issue.
- Her first impulses had been quite in the romantic tradition: “Never
- again!” and “Now we part!” and “Henceforth we are as strangers!”
- She had already got ten thousand miles beyond that.
- She did not even know whether she hated him or loved him. She doubted if
- she had ever known.
- Her state of mind was an extraordinary patchwork. Every possibility in
- her being was in a state of intense excitement. She was swayed by a
- violently excited passion for him that was only restrained by a still
- more violent resolve to punish and prevail over him. He had never seemed
- so good-looking, so pleasant-faced, so much “old Arthur”—or such a
- fatuous being. And he was watching her, watching her, watching her,
- obliquely, furtively, while he pretended awkwardly to be at his ease.
- What a scared _comic_ thing Arthur could be! There were moments when she
- could have screamed with laughter at his solicitous face.
- Meanwhile some serviceable part of her mind devoted itself to the table
- needs of Joan and Peter.
- Peter was disposed to incite Joan to a porridge-eating race. You just
- looked at Joan and began to eat fast very quietly, and then Joan would
- catch on and begin to eat fast too. Her spoon would go quicker and
- quicker, and make a noise—whack, whack, whack! And as it was necessary
- that she should keep her wicked black eyes fixed on your plate all the
- time to see how you were getting on, she would sometimes get an empty
- spoon up, sometimes miss her mouth, sometimes splash. But Mummy took a
- strong hand that morning. There was an argument, but Mummy was unusually
- firm. She turned breakfast into a drill. “Fill spoon. ’Tention! Mouf.
- Withdraw spoon.” Not bad fun, really, though Mummy looked much too stern
- for any liberties. And Daddy wasn’t game for a diversion. Wouldn’t look
- at a little boy....
- After breakfast Arthur decided that he was not going to be bullied. He
- got out his bicycle and announced in a dry, offhand tone that he was
- going out for the day.
- “So long, Guv’nor,” said Dolly, as off-handedly, and stood at the door
- in an expressionless way until he was beyond the green road gate.
- Then she strolled back through the house into the garden, and stood for
- a time considering the situation.
- “So I am to bring up two babies—and grow old, while _this_ goes on!” she
- whispered.
- She went to clear the things off the breakfast-table, and stood
- motionless again.
- “My God!” she said; “why wasn’t I born a man?”
- And that, or some image that followed it, let her thoughts out to Africa
- and a sturdy, teak-complexioned figure with a one-sided face under its
- big sun-helmet....
- “Why didn’t I marry a man?” she said. “Why didn’t I get me a mate?”
- § 7
- These were the primary factors of the situation that Oswald, arriving
- six weeks later, was slowly to discover and comprehend. As he did so he
- felt the self-imposed restraints of his relations to Arthur and Dolly
- slip from him. Arthur was now abundantly absent. Never before had Oswald
- and Dolly been so much alone together. Peter and Joan in the foreground
- were a small restraint upon speech and understanding.
- But now this story falls away from romance. Romance requires that a
- woman should love a man or not love a man; that she should love one man
- only and go with the man of her choice, that no other consideration,
- unless it be duty or virtue, should matter. But Dolly found with
- infinite dismay that she was divided.
- She loved certain things in Oswald and certain things in Arthur. The
- romantic tradition which ruled in these matters, provided no
- instructions in such a case. The two men were not sufficiently
- contrasted. One was not black enough; the other not white enough. Oswald
- was a strong man and brave, but Arthur, though he lived a tame and
- indolent life, seemed almost insensible to danger. She had never seen
- him afraid or rattled. He was a magnificent rock climber, for example;
- his physical nerve was perfect. Everything would have been so much
- simpler if he had been a “soft.” She was sensitive to physical quality.
- It was good to watch Arthur move; Oswald’s injuries made him clumsy and
- a little cautious in his movements. But Oswald was growing into a
- politician; he had already taken great responsibilities in Africa; he
- talked like a prince and like a lover about his Atonga and his Sikhs,
- and about the white-clad kingdom of Uganda and about the fantastic
- gallant Masai, who must be saved from extermination. That princely way
- of thinking was the fine thing about him; there he outshone Arthur. He
- was wonderful to her when he talked of those Central African kingdoms
- that were rotting into chaos under the influence of the Arab and
- European invasions, chaos from which a few honest Englishmen might yet
- rescue a group of splendid peoples.
- He could be loyal all through; it was his nature. And he loved her—as
- Arthur had never loved her. With a gleam of fierceness. As though there
- was a streak of anger in his love.
- “Why do you endure it?” he fretted. “Why do you endure it?”
- But he was irritable, absurd about many little things. He could lose his
- temper over games; particularly if Arthur played too.
- Yet there was a power about Oswald. It was a quality that made her fear
- him and herself. She feared for the freedom of her spirit. If ever she
- became Oswald’s she would become his much more than she had ever been
- Arthur’s. There was something about him that was real and commanding, in
- a sense in which nothing was real about Arthur.
- She had a dread, which made her very wary, that one day Oswald would
- seize upon her, that he would take her in his arms and kiss her. This
- possibility accumulated. She had a feeling that it would be something
- very dreadful, painful and enormous; that it would be like being
- branded, that therewith Arthur would be abolished for her.... At the
- thought she realized that she did not want Arthur to be abolished. She
- had an enormous kindliness for Arthur that would have been impossible
- without a little streak of humorous superiority. If Oswald threatened
- her with his latent mastery, Arthur had the appeal of much dependence.
- And apart from Oswald or Arthur, something else in her protested, an
- instinct or a deeply-rooted tradition. The thought of a second man was
- like thinking of the dislocation of her soul. It involved a nightmare of
- overlapping, of partial obliteration, of contrast and replacement, in
- things that she felt could have no honour or dignity unless they are as
- simple and natural as inadvertent actions....
- The thing that swayed her most towards Oswald, oddly enough, was his
- mutilated face. That held her back from any decision against him. “If I
- do not go with him,” she thought, “he will think it is that.” She could
- not endure that he should be so wounded.
- Then, least personal and selfish thought of all, was the question of
- Joan and Peter. What would happen to them? In any case, Dolly knew they
- would come to her. There was no bitter vindictiveness in Arthur, and he
- shirked every responsibility he could. She could leave him and go to
- Uganda and return to them. She knew there would be no attempt to deprive
- her of Peter. Oswald would be as good a father as Arthur. The children
- weighed on neither side.
- Dolly’s mind had become discontinuous as it had never been discontinuous
- before. None of these things were in her mind all the time; sometimes
- one aspect was uppermost and sometimes another. Sometimes she was ruled
- by nothing but vindictive pride which urged her to put herself on a
- level with Arthur. At times again her pride was white and tight-lipped,
- exhorting her above all things not to put herself on a level with
- Arthur. When Oswald pressed her, her every impulse was to resist; when
- he was away and she felt her loneliness—and his—her heart went out to
- him.
- She had given herself to Arthur, that seemed conclusive. But Arthur had
- dishonoured the gift. She had a great sense of obligation to Oswald. She
- had loved Oswald before she had ever seen Arthur; years ago she had
- given her cousin the hope and claim that burnt accusingly in his eye
- today.
- “Come with me, Dolly,” he said. “Come with me. Share my life. This isn’t
- life here.”
- “But could I come with you?”
- “If you dared. Not to Blantyre, perhaps. That’s—respectable. Church and
- women and chatter. Blantyre’s over. But there’s Uganda. Baker took a
- wife there. It’s still a land of wild romance. And I must go soon. I
- must get to Uganda. So much is happening. Muir says this Soudanese
- trouble won’t wait.... But I hang on here, day after day. I can’t leave
- you to it, Dolly. I can’t endure that.”
- “You _have_ to leave me,” she said.
- “No. Come with me. This soft grey-green countryside is no place for you.
- I want you in a royal leopard skin with a rifle in your hand. You are
- pale for want of the sun. And while we were out there _he_ could divorce
- you. He would divorce you—and marry some other copper puncher. Some
- Craftswoman. And stencil like hell. Then we could marry.”
- He gripped her wrists across the stone table. “Dolly, my darling!” he
- said; “don’t let me go back alone.”
- “But what of Peter and Joan?”
- “Leave them to nurses for a year or so and then bring them out to the
- sun. If the boy stays here, he will grow up—some sort of fiddling
- artist. He will punch copper and play about with book-binding.”
- She struggled suddenly to free her wrists, and he gripped them tighter
- until he saw that she was looking towards the house. At last he realized
- that Arthur approached.
- “Oh, _damn_!” said Oswald....
- § 8
- Dolly cut this knot she could not untie, and as soon as she had cut it
- she began to repent.
- Indecision may become an unendurable torment. On the one hand that dark
- strong life in the African sunblaze with this man she feared in spite of
- his unconcealed worship, called to a long-suppressed vein of courage in
- her being; on the other hand was her sense of duty, her fastidious
- cleanness, this English home with its thousand gentle associations and
- Arthur, Arthur who had suddenly abandoned neglect, become attentive,
- mutely apologetic, but who had said not a word, since he had put himself
- out of court, about Oswald.
- He had said nothing, but he had become grave in his manner. Once or
- twice she had watched him when he had not known she watched him, and she
- had tried to fathom what was now in his mind. Did he want her?
- This and that pulled her.
- One night in the middle of the night she lay awake, unable to sleep,
- unable to decide. She went to her window and pressed her forehead
- against the pane and stared at the garden in a mist of moonlight. “I
- must end it,” she said. “I must end it.”
- She went to the door that separated her room from Arthur’s, and unlocked
- it noisily. She walked across the room and stood by the window. Arthur
- was awake too. He leant up upon his elbow and regarded her without a
- word.
- “Arthur,” she said, “am I to go to Africa or am I to stay with you?”
- Arthur answered after a little while. “I want you to stay with me.”
- “On my conditions?”
- “I have been a fool, Dolly. It’s over....”
- They were both trembling, and their voices were unsteady.
- “Can I believe you, Arthur?” she asked weakly....
- He came across the moonlight to her, and as he spoke his tears came.
- Old, tender, well-remembered phrases were on his lips. “Dolly! Little
- sweet Dolly,” he said, and took her hungrily into his arms....
- There remained nothing now of the knot but to tell Oswald that she had
- made her irrevocable decision.
- § 9
- Arthur was eloquent about their reconciliation. What became of her rival
- Dolly never learnt, nor greatly cared; she was turned out of Arthur’s
- heart, it would seem, rather as one turns a superfluous cat out of
- doors. Arthur alluded to the emotional situation generally as “this
- mess.” “If I’d had proper work to do and some outlet for my energy this
- mess wouldn’t have happened,” he said. He announced in phrases only too
- obviously derivative that he must find something _real_ to do.
- “Something that will take me and use me.”
- But Dolly was manifestly unhappy. He decided that the crisis had
- overtaxed her. Oswald must have worried her tremendously. (He thought it
- was splendid of her that she never blamed Oswald.) The garden, the
- place, was full now of painful associations—and moreover the rejected
- cat was well within the range of a chance meeting. Travel among
- beautiful scenery seemed the remedy indicated. Their income happened to
- be a little overspent, but it only added to his sense of rising to a
- great emotional emergency that he should have to draw upon his capital.
- They started upon a sort of recrudescence of their honeymoon, beginning
- with Rome.
- Aunt Phyllis and Aunt Phœbe came to mind the house and Joan and Peter.
- Aunt Phœbe was writing a little wise poetical book about education,
- mostly out of her inner consciousness, and she seized the opportunity of
- this experience very gladly....
- Dolly was a thing of moods for all that journey.
- At times she was extravagantly hilarious, she was wild, as she had never
- been before. She would start out to scamper about a twilit town after a
- long day’s travel, so that it was hard for Arthur to keep pace with her
- flitting energy; she would pretend to be Tarantula-bitten in some
- chestnut grove and dance love dances and flee like a dryad to be pursued
- and caught. And at other times she sat white and still as though she had
- a broken heart. Never did an entirely virtuous decision give a woman so
- much heartache. They went up Vesuvius by night on mules from Pompeii,
- and as they stood on the black edge of the crater, the guide called her
- attention to the vast steely extent of the moonlit southward sea.
- She heard herself whisper “Africa,” and wondered if Arthur too had
- heard.
- And at Capri Arthur had a dispute with a boatman. The boat was taken at
- the Marina Grande. The boatman proposed the tour of the island and all
- the grottos, and from the Marina Grande the project seemed reasonable
- enough. The sea, though not glassy smooth, was quite a practicable sea.
- But a point had to be explained very carefully. The boatman put it in
- slow and simple Italian with much helpful gesture. If the wind rose to a
- storm so that they would have to return before completing this “giro,”
- they would still pay the same fee.
- “Oh quite,” said Arthur carelessly in English, and the bargain was made.
- They worked round the corner of the island, under the Salto di Tiberio,
- that towering cliff down which the legend says Tiberius flung his
- victims, and as soon as they came out from under the lee of the island
- Arthur discovered a cheat. The gathering wind beyond the shelter of the
- cliffs was cutting up the blue water into a disorderly system of
- tumbling white-capped waves. The boat headed straight into a storm. It
- lifted and fell and swayed and staggered; the boatman at his oar
- dramatically exaggerated his difficulties. “He knew of this,” said
- Arthur savagely. “He thinks we shall want to give in. Well, let’s see
- who gives in first. Let’s put him through his program and see how he
- likes it.”
- Arthur had taken off his hat, and clutched it to save it from the wind.
- He looked very fine with his hair blowing back. “Buona aria,” he said,
- grinning cheerfully to the boatman. “Bellissima!”
- The boatman was understood to say that the wind was rising and that it
- was going to be worse presently.
- “Bellissima!” said Arthur, patting Dolly’s back.
- The boatman was seized with solicitude for the lady.
- Dolly surveyed the great cliffs that towered overhead and the frothy
- crests against which the boat smacked and lifted. “Bellissima,” she
- agreed, smiling at the boatman’s consternation. “Avanti!”
- The boat plunged and ploughed its way for a little while in silence. The
- boatman suggested that things were getting dangerous. Could the signora
- swim?
- Arthur assured him that she could swim like a fish.
- And the capitano?
- Arthur accepted his promotion cheerfully and assured the boatman that
- his swimming was only second to Dolly’s.
- The boatman informed them that he himself could scarcely swim at all. He
- was not properly a seafaring man. He had come to Capri for his health;
- his lungs were weak. He had been a stonemason at Alessandria, but the
- dust had been bad for his lungs. He could not swim. He could not manage
- a boat very well in stormy weather. And he was an orphan.
- “_Io_ Orfano!” cried Arthur, greatly delighted, and stabbing himself
- with an elucidatory forefinger. “Io Orfano anche.”
- The boatman lapsed into gloom. In a little while they had beaten round
- the headland into view of the Faraglione, that big outstanding rock
- which is pierced by a great arch, upon the south-eastern side of the
- island. The passage through this Arco Naturale was in the boatman’s
- agreement. They could see the swirl of the waters now through that
- natural gateway, rising, pouring almost to the top of the arch and then
- swirling down to the trough of the wave. The west wind whipped the
- orphan’s blue-black curls about his ears. He began to cry off his
- bargain.
- “We go through that arch,” said Arthur, “or my name is not Stubland.”
- The boatman argued his case. The wind was rising; the further they went
- the more they came into the weather. He had not the skill of a man born
- to the sea.
- “You made the bargain,” said Arthur.
- “Let us return while we are still safe,” the boatman protested.
- “Go through the arch,” said Arthur. The boatman looked at the arch, the
- sky, the endless onslaught of advancing waves to seaward and Arthur, and
- then with a gesture of despair turned the boat towards the arch.
- “He’s frightened, Arthur,” said Dolly.
- “Serve him right. He won’t try this game again in a hurry,” said Arthur,
- and then relenting: “Go through the arch and we will return....”
- The boatman baulked at the arch twice. It was evident they must go
- through just behind the crest of a wave. He headed in just a moment or
- so too soon, got through on the very crest, bent double to save his
- head, made a clumsy lunge with his oar that struck the rock and threw
- him sideways. Then they were rushing with incredible swiftness out of
- the arch down a blue-green slope of water, and the Faraglione rose again
- before Dolly’s eyes like a thing relieved after a moment of intense
- concentration. But suddenly everything was sideways. Everything was
- askew. The boat was half overturned and the boatman was sitting
- unsteadily on the gunwale, clutching at the opposite side which was
- rising, rising. The man, she realized, was going overboard, and Arthur’s
- swift grab at him did but complete the capsize. The side of the boat was
- below her where the floor should be, and that gave way to streaming
- bubbling water into which one man plunged on the top of the other....
- Dolly leapt clear of the overturned boat, went under and came up....
- She tossed the wet hair from her head and looked about her. The
- Faraglione was already thirty yards or more away and receding fast. The
- boat was keel upward and rolling away towards the cliff. There were no
- signs of Arthur or the boatman.
- What must she do? Just before the accident she had noted the Piccola
- Marina away to the north-west. That would mean a hard swim against the
- waves, but it would be the best thing to do. It could not be half a mile
- away. And Arthur? Arthur would look after himself. He would do that all
- right. She would only encumber him by swimming around. Perhaps he would
- get the man on to the boat. Perhaps people had seen them from the
- Piccola Marina. If so boats would come out to them.
- She struck out shoreward.
- How light one’s clothes made one feel! But presently they would drag.
- (Never meet trouble half-way.) It was going to be a long swim. Even if
- there should be no current....
- She swam....
- Then she had doubts. Ought she to go back and look for Arthur? She could
- not be much good to him even if she found him. It was her first duty to
- save herself. Peter was not old enough to be left. No one would care for
- Joan and him as she could care for them. It was a long enough swim
- without looking for Arthur. It was going to be a very long swim....
- She wished she could get a glimpse of Arthur. She looked this way and
- that. It would be easier to swim side by side. But in this choppy sea he
- might be quite close and still be hidden.... Best not to bother about
- things—just swim.
- For a long time she swam like a machine....
- After a time she began to think of her clothes again. The waves now
- seemed to be trying to get them off. She was being tugged back by her
- clothes. Could she get some of them off? Not in this rough water. It
- would be more exhausting than helpful. Clothes ought to be easier to get
- off; not so much tying and pinning....
- The waves were coming faster now. The wind must be freshening. They were
- more numerous and less regular.
- Splash! That last wave was a trencherous beast—no!—treacherous beast....
- Phew, ugh! Salt in the mouth. Salt in the eyes. And here was another,
- too soon!... Oh _fight_!
- It was hard to see the Piccola Marina. Wait for the lift of the next
- wave.... She was going too much to the left, ever so much too much to
- the left....
- One must exert oneself for Peter’s sake.
- What was Arthur doing?
- It seemed a long time now since she had got into the water, and the
- shore was still a long way off. There was nobody there at all that she
- could see.... Boats drawn high and dry. Plenty of boats. Extraordinary
- people these Italians—they let stonemasons take charge of boats.
- Extortionate stonemasons.... She was horribly tired. Not in good
- fettle.... She looked at the Faraglione over her shoulder. It was still
- disgustingly near and big. She had hardly swum a third of the way yet.
- Or else there was a current. Better not think of currents. She had to
- stick to it. Perhaps it was the worst third of the way she had done. But
- what infinite joy and relief it would be just to stop swimming and
- spread one’s arms and feet!
- She had to stick to it for little Peter’s sake. For little Peter’s sake.
- Peter too young to be left....
- Arthur? Best not to think about Arthur just yet. It had been silly to
- insist on the Arco Naturale....
- What a burthen and bother dress was to a woman! What a leaden
- burthen!...
- She must not think. She must not think. She must swim like a machine.
- Like a machine. One.... Two.... One.... Two.... Slow and even.
- She fell asleep. For some moments she was fast asleep. She woke up with
- the water rising over her head and struck out again.
- There was a sound of many waters in her ears and an enormous indolence
- in her limbs against which she struggled in vain. She did struggle, and
- the thought that spurred her to struggle was still the thought of Peter.
- “Peter is too young to be left yet,” sang like a refrain in her head as
- she roused herself for her last fight with the water. Peter was too
- young to be left yet. Peter, her little son. But the salt blinded her
- now; she was altogether out of step with the slow and resolute rhythm of
- the waves. They broke foaming upon her and beat upon her, and presently
- turned her about and over like a leaf in an eddy.
- CHAPTER THE FOURTH
- FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF THE UNIVERSE
- § 1
- Peter could not remember a time when Joan was not in his world, and from
- the beginning it seemed to him that the chief fact was Mary. “Nanny,”
- you called her, or “Mare-_wi_,” or you simply howled and she came. She
- was omnipresent; if she was not visible then she was just round the
- corner, by night or day. Other figures were more intermittent, “Daddy,”
- a large, loud, exciting, almost terrific thing; “Mummy,” who was soft
- and made gentle noises but was, in comparison with Mary, rather a fool
- about one’s bottle; “Pussy,” and then the transitory smiling
- propitiatory human stuff that was difficult to remember and name
- correctly. “Aunties,” “Mannies” and suchlike. But also there were
- inanimate persons. There were the brass-headed sentinels about one’s cot
- and the great brown round-headed newel post. His name was Bungo-Peter;
- he was a king and knew everything, he watched the stairs, but you did
- not tell people this because they would not understand. Also there was
- the brass-eyed monster with the triple belly who was called
- Chester-Drawers; he shammed dead and watched you, and in the night he
- creaked about the room. And there was Gope the stove, imprisoned in the
- fender with hell burning inside him, and there was Nobby. Nobby was the
- protector of little boys against Chester-Drawers, stray bears, the Thing
- on the Landing, spider scratchings and many such discomforts of nursery
- life. Of course you could also draw a deep breath and yell for
- “Mare-_wi_,” but she was apt not to understand one’s explanation and to
- scold. It was better to hold tight to Nobby. And also Nobby was lovely
- and went whack.
- Moreover if you called “Mare-_wi_,” then when the lights came Joan would
- sit up in her cot and stare sleepily while you were being scolded. She
- would say that she _knew_ there weren’t such things. And you would be
- filled with an indefinable sense of foolishness. Behind an impenetrable
- veil of darkness with an intervening floor space acrawl with bears and
- “burdlars” she could say such things with impunity. In the morning one
- forgot. Joan in the daytime was a fairly amusing companion, except that
- she sometimes tried to touch Nobby. Once Peter caught her playing with
- Nobby and pretending that Nobby was a baby. One hand took Nobby by the
- head, and the other took Joan by the hair. That was the time when Peter
- had his first spanking, but Joan was careful not to touch Nobby again.
- Generally Joan was passable. Of course she was an intrusion and in the
- way, but if one wanted to march round and round shouting “Tara-ra-ra,
- ra-ra, ra-ra, Tara _boom_ de ay,” banging something, a pan or a drum,
- with Nobby, she could be trusted to join in very effectively. She was
- good for noise-marches always, and they would not have been any fun
- without her. She had the processional sense, and knew that her place was
- second. She talked also in a sort of way, but it was not necessary to
- listen. She could be managed. If, for example, she touched Peter’s
- bricks he yelled in a soul-destroying way and went for her with a brick
- in each hand. She was quick to take a hint of that sort.
- It was Arthur’s theory that little children should not be solitary.
- Mutual aid is the basis of social life, and from their earliest years
- children must be accustomed to co-operation. They had to be trained for
- the co-operative commonwealth as set forth in the writings of Prince
- Kropotkin. Mary thought differently. So Arthur used to go in his
- beautiful blue blouse and sit in the sunny nursery amidst the toys and
- the children, inciting them to premature co-operations.
- “Now Peter put a brick,” he used to say.
- “Now Joan put a brick.”
- “Now Dadda put a brick.”
- Mary used to watch proceedings with a cynical and irritating expression.
- “Peter’s tower,” Peter would propose.
- “_Our_ tower,” Arthur used to say.
- “Peter knock it over.”
- “No. No one knock it over.”
- “Peter put _two_ bricks.”
- “Very well.”
- “Dadda not put any more bricks. No. Peter finish it.”
- “Na-ow!” from Joan in a voice like a little cat. “_Me_ finish it.”
- Arthur wanted to preserve against this original sin of individualism. He
- got quite cross at last imposing joyful and willing co-operation upon
- two highly resistant minds.
- Mary’s way was altogether different. She greatly appreciated the fact
- that Dolly and Arthur had had the floor of the nursery covered with cork
- carpet, and that Arthur at the suggestion of Aunt Phœbe had got a
- blackboard and chalks in order to instil a free gesture in drawing from
- the earliest years. With a piece of chalk Mary would draw a line across
- the floor of the nursery, fairly dividing the warmth of the stove and
- the light of the window.
- “That’s your bit, Peter,” she would say, “and that’s your bit, Joan.
- Them’s your share of bricks and them’s yours. Now don’t you think of
- going outside your bit, either of you, whatever you do. Nohow. Nor touch
- so much as a brick that isn’t yours.”
- Whereupon both children would settle down to play with infinite
- contentment.
- Yet these individualists were not indifferent to each other. If Joan
- wanted to draw on the blackboard with chalk, then always Peter wanted to
- draw on the blackboard with chalk at the same time, and here again it
- was necessary for Mary to mark a boundary between them; and if Peter
- wanted to build with bricks then Joan did also. Each was uneasy if the
- other was not in sight. And they would each do the same thing on
- different sides of their chalk boundary, with a wary eye on the other’s
- proceedings and with an endless stream of explanation of what they were
- doing.
- “Peter’s building a love-i-lay house.”
- “Joan’s building, oh!—a lovelay-er house. Wiv a cross on it.”
- “Why not build one lovely house for both of you?” said Arthur, still
- with the Co-operative Commonwealth in mind.
- Neither child considered that his proposal called for argument. It went
- over their heads and vanished. They continued building individually as
- before, but in silence lest Arthur should be tempted to intervene again.
- § 2
- Joan was a dancer from the age of three.
- Perhaps she got some hint from Dolly, there is no telling; but anyhow
- she frisked and capered rhythmically by a kind of instinct whenever
- Dolly played the piano. So Dolly showed her steps and then more steps.
- Peter did not take to dancing so readily as Joan and his disposition was
- towards burlesque. Joan danced for the love of dancing, but Peter was
- inventive and turned his dances into expression. He invented the Fat
- Dance, with a pillow under his pinafore, the Thin Dance, with a concave
- stomach and a meagre expression, the One Leg dance and the Bird Dance,
- this latter like the birds about the crumbs in winter time. Also the
- Tipsy Dance, bacchic, which Arthur thought vulgar and discouraged. Dolly
- taught Joan the Flower Dance, with a very red cap like a pistil, and
- white silk skirt petals upheld by her arms. These she opened slowly, and
- at last dropped and then drooped. This needed a day of preparation.
- Peter produced his first remembered æsthetic judgment on a human being
- on this occasion.
- “_Pritty_ Joan,” he said with conviction, as she stood flushed and
- bright-eyed after the dance, and with that he went and kissed her.
- “He’s beginning young,” said Arthur.
- It is what all parents say, and it is true of all children. But parents
- keep on saying it....
- Before he was fully four Peter was conducting an æsthetic analysis of
- his world. He liked some of the tunes Dolly played and disapproved of
- others. He distributed “pritty” lavishly but by no means
- indiscriminately over the things of the world. “Oh pritty fo’wers,” was
- the primordial form of these expanding decisions. But he knew that Nobby
- was not pretty.
- Arthur did his best to encourage and assist these budding appreciations.
- One evening there was a beautiful still sunset. The sun went down, a
- great flattening sphere of reddening gold sinking into vast levels of
- blue over the remoter hills. Joan had already been carried off to bed,
- but Arthur seized upon Peter and stood him in the window seat. “Look,”
- said Arthur. Peter looked intently, and both his parents sat beside him,
- watching his nice little round head and the downy edge of his intent
- profile.
- “Look,” said Arthur, “it goes. It goes. It’s going ... going ...
- going....”
- The sun became a crescent, a red scimitar, a streak of fire.
- “Ah!” said Arthur, “it’s gone.”
- Came an immense pause.
- “Do it _adain_, Dadda,” said Peter with immense approval. “Do it
- adain....”
- § 3
- The theory of Ideals played almost as important a part in the early
- philosophy of Peter as it did in the philosophy of Plato. But Peter did
- not call them “Ideals,” he called them “toys.” Toys were the simplified
- essences of things, pure, perfect and manageable; Real Things were
- troublesome, uncontrollable, over complicated and largely irrelevant. A
- Real Train, for example, was a poor, big, clumsy, limited thing that was
- obliged to go to Red Hill or Croydon or London, that was full of stuffy
- unnecessary strangers, usually sitting firmly in the window seats, that
- you could do nothing satisfactory with at all. A Toy Train was your very
- own; it took you wherever you wanted, to Fairyland or Russia or
- anywhere, at whatever pace you chose. Then there was a beautiful rag
- doll named “Pleeceman,” who had a comic, almost luminous red nose, and
- smiled perpetually; you could hit Joan with him and make her squawk and
- yet be sure of not hurting her within the meaning of the law; how
- inferior was the great formless lump of a thing, with a pale uneventful
- visitor’s sort of face we saw out of the train at Caterham! Nobody could
- have lifted him by a leg and waved him about; and if you had shied him
- into a corner, instead of all going just anyhow and still smiling, he
- would probably have been cross and revengeful. How inferior again was
- the Real Cow, with its chewing habits, its threatening stare and moo and
- its essential rudeness, to Suzannah, the cow on the green board. Perhaps
- the best real things in the world were young pigs....
- But this much is simply to explain how it was that Peter was grateful
- but not overwhelmed to find that there was also a real Nobby in
- existence as well as his beloved fetish. And this Nobby was, as real
- things went, much better than one could have expected him to be. Peter’s
- heart went out to him from the very first encounter, and never found
- reason to relinquish him again.
- Nobby wasted a good lot of time that might have been better employed in
- play, by talking to Mummy; and when a little boy set himself to rescue
- his friend from so tepid an occupation, Mary showed a peculiar
- disposition to thwart one. “Oh! _leave_ them alone,” she said, with the
- tart note in her voice. “I’m sure they don’t want either of you.”
- Still Mummy didn’t always get Nobby, and a little boy and girl could
- hear him talk and play about with him. When he told really truly things
- it was better than any one else telling stories. He had had all sorts of
- experiences; he had been a sailor; _he knew what was inside a ship_.
- That had been a growing need in Peter’s life. All Peter’s ships had been
- solid hitherto. And Nobby had been in the same field, practically
- speaking, with lions ever so many times. Lions, of course, are not
- nearly so dreadful as bears in a little boy’s world; bears are the most
- dreadful things in the world (especially is this true of the black,
- under-bed bear, _Ursus Pedivorus_) but lions are dreadful enough. If one
- saw one in a field one would instantly get back over the stile again and
- go home, Mary or no Mary. But one day near Nairobi, Nobby had come upon
- a lion in broad daylight right in the middle of the path. Nobby had
- nothing but a stick. “I was in a hurry and I felt annoyed,” said Nobby.
- “So I just walked towards him and waved my stick at him, and shouted to
- him to get out of my way.”
- “_Yes?_” breathless.
- “And he went. Most lions will get away from a man if they can. Not
- always though.”
- A pause. There was evidently another story to that. “Tell us,” said
- Mummy, more interested even than the children.
- Big Nobby made model African villages out of twigs and suchlike nothings
- in the garden, and he brought down Joan and Peter boxes of Zulu warriors
- from London to inhabit them. Also he bought two boxes of “Egyptian camel
- corps.” One wet day he “made Africa” on the nursery floor. He made
- mountains out of books and wood blocks, and put a gold-mine of gold
- paper therein; he got in a lot of twigs of box from the garden and made
- the most lovely forest you can imagine; he built villages of bricks for
- the Zulus; he put out the animals of Peter’s Noah’s ark in the woods.
- “Here’s the lion,” he said, propping up the lion against the tree
- because of its broken leg.
- “Gurr Woooooah!” said Joan.
- “Exactly,” said Nobby, encouraging her.
- “Waar-oooh. Waaaa!” said Joan, presuming on it.
- “Bang!” said Peter. “You’re _dead_, Joan,” and stopped any more of that.
- § 4
- Then one day an extraordinary thing happened. It was towards lunch-time,
- and Mary was bringing Joan and Peter home from a walk in the woods. Joan
- was tired, but Peter had been enterprising and had run on far ahead; he
- was trotting his fat legs down the rusty lane that ran through the
- bushes close to the garden fence when he saw Nobby’s lank form coming
- towards him from the house, walking slowly and as if he couldn’t see
- where he was going. Peter was for slipping into the bushes and jumping
- out at him and saying “Boo.” Then he saw Nobby stop and stand still and
- stare back at the house, and then, most wonderful and dreadful! this
- great big grown-up began to sob and cry. He said “Ooo-er!” just as Peter
- did sometimes when he felt unendurably ill-used. And he kept raising his
- clenched fists as if he was going to shake them—and not doing so.
- “I will go to Hell,” said Nobby. “I will go to Hell.”
- In a passion!
- (Peter was shocked and ashamed for Nobby.)
- Then Nobby turned and saw Peter before Peter could hide away from him.
- He stopped crying at once, but there was his funny face all red and
- shiny on one side.
- “Hullo, old Peter boy,” said Nobby. “I’m off. I’m going right away. Been
- fooled.”
- So that was it. But hadn’t he Africa and lions and elephants and black
- men to go to, a great Real Play Nursery instead of a Nursery of Toys?
- Why make a fuss of it?
- He came to Peter and lifted him up in his arms. “Good-bye, old Peter,”
- he said. “Good-bye, Peter. Keep off the copper punching.” He kissed his
- godson—how wet his face was!—and put him down, and was going off along
- the path and Peter hadn’t said a word.
- He wanted to cry too, to think that Nobby was going. He stared and then
- ran a little way after his friend.
- “Nobby,” he shouted; “good-bye!”
- “Good-bye, old man,” Nobby cried back to him.
- “Good-bye. Gooood-bye-er.”
- Then Peter trotted back to the house to be first with the sad but
- exciting news that Nobby had gone. But as he came down from the green
- wicket to the house he looked up and saw his father at the upstairs
- window, gazing after Nobby with an unusual expression that perplexed
- him, and in the little hall he found his mother, and she had been crying
- too, though she was pretending she hadn’t. They knew about Nobby.
- Something strange was in the air, perceptible to a little boy but
- utterly beyond his understanding. Perhaps Nobby had been naughty. So he
- thought it best to change the subject, and began talking at once about a
- wonderful long bicycle with no less than three men on it—not two, Mummy,
- but three—that he had seen upon the highroad. They had thin white silk
- shirts without sleeves, and rode furiously with their heads down. Their
- shirts were blown out funnily behind them in the middles of their backs.
- They went like _that_!...
- All through the midday meal nobody said a word about Nobby....
- Nobody ever did say anything about Nobby again. When on a few occasions
- Peter himself talked appreciatively of Nobby nobody, unless it was Joan
- now and then, seemed the least bit interested....
- One side consequence of Oswald’s visit had been the dethronement of the
- original Nobby. The real Nobby had somehow thrust the toy Nobby into the
- background. Perhaps he drifted into the recesses of some box or
- cupboard. At any rate when Peter thought of him one day he was nowhere
- to be found. That did not matter so much as it would have done a couple
- of months before. Now if the bears and “burdlars” got busy in the
- night-nursery Peter used to pretend that the pillow was the real Nobby,
- the Nobby who wasn’t even afraid of lions and had driven off one with a
- stick. A prowling bear hadn’t much chance against a little boy who
- snuggled up to _that_ Nobby.
- § 5
- Mummy was rather dull in those days, and Daddy seemed always to be
- looking at her. Daddy had a sort of inelasticity in his manner too.
- Suddenly Aunt Phyllis and Aunt Phœbe appeared, and it was announced that
- Daddy and Mummy were going off to Italy. It was too far for them to take
- little boys and girls, they said, and besides there were, oh! _horrid_
- spiders. And Peter must stay to mind the house and Joan and his aunts;
- it wasn’t right not to have some man about. He was to have a sailor suit
- with trousers also, great responsibilities altogether for a boy not much
- over four. So there was a great kissing and going off, and Joan and
- Peter settled down to the rule of the aunts and only missed Mummy and
- Daddy now and then.
- Then one day something happened over the children’s heads. Mary had red
- eyes and wouldn’t say why; the aunts had told her not to do so.
- Phyllis and Phœbe decided not to darken the children’s lives by wearing
- mourning, but Mary said that anyhow she would go into black. But neither
- Joan nor Peter took much notice of the black dress.
- “Why don’t Mummy and Daddy come back?” asked Peter one day of Aunt
- Phœbe.
- “They’ve travelled to such wonderful places,” said Aunt Phœbe with a
- catch in her voice. “They may not be back for ever so long. No. Not till
- Peter is ever so big.”
- “Then why don’t they send us cull’d poce-cards like they did’t first?”
- said Peter.
- Aunt Phœbe was so taken aback she could answer nothing.
- “They just forgotten us,” said Peter and reflected. “They gone on and
- on.”
- “Isn’t Nobby ever coming back either?” he asked, abruptly, displaying a
- devastating acceptance of the new situation.
- “But who’s Nobby?”
- “That’s Mr. Oswald Sydenham,” said Mary.
- “He’s coming back quite soon,” said Aunt Phœbe. “He’s on his way now.”
- “’Cos he _promised_ me a lion skin,” said Peter.
- § 6
- Aunts Phyllis and Phœbe found themselves two of the four guardians
- appointed under Arthur’s will.
- It had been one of Arthur’s occasional lapses into deceit that he
- destroyed the will which made Oswald the sole guardian of Joan—so far as
- he could dispose of Joan—and Peter, without saying a word about it to
- Dolly. He had vacillated between various substitutes for Oswald up to
- the very moment when he named the four upon whom he decided finally, to
- his solicitor. Some streak of jealousy or pride, combined with a doubt
- whether Oswald would now consent to act, had first prompted the
- alteration. Instead he had decided to shift the responsibility to his
- sisters. Then a twinge of compunction had made him replace Oswald. Then
- feeling that Oswald might still be out talked or out voted by his
- sisters, he had stuck in the name of Dolly’s wealthy and important
- cousin, Lady Charlotte Sydenham. He had only seen her twice, but she had
- seemed a lady of considerable importance and strength of character.
- Anyhow it made things fairer to the Sydenham side.
- But Phyllis and Phœbe at once assumed, not without secret gladness, that
- the burthen of this responsibility would fall upon them. Oswald Sydenham
- was away in the heart of Africa; Lady Charlotte Sydenham was also
- abroad. She had telegraphed, “Unwell impossible to return to England six
- weeks continue children’s life as hitherto.” That seemed to promise a
- second sleeping partner in the business.
- The sisters decided to continue The Ingle-Nook as the children’s home,
- and made the necessary arrangements with Mr. Sycamore, the family
- solicitor, to that end.
- They discussed their charges very carefully and fully. Phyllis was for a
- meticulous observance of Arthur’s known or assumed “wishes,” but Phœbe
- took a broader view. Mary too pointed out the dangers of too literal an
- adhesion to precedent.
- “We want everything to go on exactly as it did when _they_ were alive,”
- said Phyllis to Mary.
- “Things ’ave got to be different,” said Mary.
- “Not if we can help it,” said Aunt Phyllis.
- “They’ll _grow_,” said Mary after reflection.
- Phœbe became eloquent in the evening.
- “We are to have the advantages of maternity, Phyllis, without—without
- the degradation. It is a solemn trust. Blessed are we among women,
- Phyllis. I feel a Madonna. We _are_ Madonnas, Phyllis. Modern Madonnas.
- Just Touched by the Wings of the Dove.... These little souls dropped
- from heaven upon our knees.... Poor Arthur! It is our task to guide his
- offspring to that high destiny he might have attained. _Look_, Phyllis!”
- With her flat hand she indicated the long garden path that Dolly had
- planned.
- Phyllis peered forward without intelligence. “What is it?” she asked.
- Phyllis perceived that Phœbe was flushed with poetical excitement. And
- Phœbe’s voice dropped mystically to a deep whisper. “Don’t you see?
- _White lilies!_ A coincidence, of course. But—Beautiful.”
- “For a child with a high destiny, I doubt if Peter is careful enough
- with his clothes,” said Phyllis, trying to sound a less Pre-Raphaelite
- note. “He was a perfect little Disgrace this afternoon.”
- “The darling! But I understand.... Joan too has much before her,
- Phyllis. As yet their minds are blank, _tabula rasa_; of either of them
- there is still to be made—_anything_. Peter—upon this Rock I set—a New
- Age. When women shall come to their own. Joan again. Joan of Arc.
- Coincidences no doubt. But leave me my fancies. Fancies—if you will. For
- me they are no fancies. Before the worlds, Phyllis, we were made for
- this.”
- She rested her chin on her hand, and stared out into the blue twilight,
- a brooding prophetess.
- “Only a woman can understand a woman,” she said presently. “Not a Word
- of this, Phyllis, to Others.”
- “I wish we had bought some cigarettes this afternoon,” said Phyllis.
- “The little red glow,” reflected Phœbe indulgently. “It helps. But I
- don’t want to smoke tonight. It would spoil it. Smoke! Let the Flame
- burn clear awhile.... We will get in cigarettes tomorrow.”
- § 7
- Joan and Peter remained unaware of the great destinies before them. More
- observant persons than they were might have guessed there were deep
- meanings in the way in which Aunt Phœbe smoothed back their hair from
- their foreheads and said “Ah,” and bade them “Mark it well” whenever she
- imparted any general statement, but they took these things merely as her
- particular way of manifesting the irrational quality common to all
- grown-up people. Also she would say “Dignity! Your mission!” when they
- howled or fought. It was to the manuscript that grew into a bigger and
- bigger pile upon what had been Arthur’s writing-desk in Arthur’s
- workroom, that she restricted her most stirring ideas. She wrote there
- daily, going singing to it as healthy young men go singing to their
- bathrooms. She splashed her mind about and refreshed herself greatly.
- She wrote in a large hand, punctuating chiefly with dashes. She had
- conceived her book rather in the manner of the prophetic works of the
- admired Mr. Ruskin—with Carlylean lapses. It was to be called _Hail
- Bambino and the Grain of Mustard Seed_. It was all about the
- tremendousness of children.
- The conscientious valiance of Aunt Phœbe was very manifest in the
- opening. “Cæsar,” the book began, “and the son of Semele burst strangely
- into this world, but Jesus, Mohammed, Confucius, Newton, Darwin, Robert
- Burns, were born as peacefully as you or I. Nathless they came for such
- ends—if indeed one can think of any ending thereto!—as blot out the
- stars. Yesterday a puling babe—for Jesus puled, Mohammed puled, let us
- not spare ourselves, Newton, a delicate child, puled most
- offensively—Herod here and bacteria there, infantile colic, tuberculosis
- and what not, searched for each little life, in vain, and so today
- behold springing victoriously from each vital granule a tree of
- Teaching, of Consequence, that buds and burgeons and shoots and for ever
- spreads so that the Gates of Hell may not prevail against it! Here it is
- the Tree of Spirituality, here the Tree of Thought, predestined
- intertwiner with the Tree of Asgard, here in our last instance a
- chanting Beauty, a heartening lyrical Yawp and Whirlaboo. And forget it
- not, whatever else be forgotten, the Word of the Wise, ‘_as the twig is
- bent the tree inclines_.’ So it is and utterly that we realize the
- importance of education, the pregnant intensity of the least urgency,
- the hint, the gleam, the offering of service, to these First Tender
- Years.”
- Here Aunt Phœbe had drawn breath for a moment, before she embarked upon
- her second paragraph; and here we will leave Aunt Phœbe glowing amidst
- her empurpled prose.
- Joan and Peter took the substitution of Aunt Phœbe muttering like a
- Sibyl overhead and Aunt Phyllis, who was really amusing with odd
- drawings and twisted paper toys and much dancing and running about, in
- the place of Daddy and Mummy, with the stoical acceptance of the very
- young. About Daddy and Mummy there hung a faint flavour of departure but
- no sense of conclusive loss. No clear image and expectation of a return
- had been formed. No day of definite disappointment ever came. After all
- the essential habitual person, Mary, was still there, and all the little
- important routines of child-life continued very much as they had always
- done.
- Yet there was already the dawn of further apprehensions in Peter’s mind
- at least. One day Peter picked up a dead bird in the garden, a bird dead
- with no injuries manifest. He tried to make it stand up and peck.
- “It ain’t no good, Master Peter; it’s dead,” said Mary.
- “What’s dead?” said Peter.
- “_That_ is.”
- “_Gone_ dead,” said Peter.
- “And won’t ever go anything else now—except smell,” said Mary.
- Peter reflected. Later he revisited the dead bird and was seen in
- profound meditation over it. Then he repaired to Aunt Phyllis and
- confided his intention of immortality.
- “Peter,” he said, “not go dead—nohow.”
- “Of course not,” said Aunt Phyllis. “He’s got too much sense. The idea!”
- This was reassuring. But alone it was not enough.
- “Joan not go dead,” he said. “No.”
- “Certainly she shan’t,” said Aunt Phyllis and awaited further decisions.
- “Pussy not go dead.”
- “Not until ninety times nine.”
- “Aunt Phyllis not go dead. Marewi not go dead.”
- He reflected further. He tried, “Mummy and Daddy not go dead....”
- Then after thought, “When are Daddy and Mummy coming back again?”
- Aunt Phyllis told a wise lie. “Some day. Not for a long time. They’ve
- gone—oh, ever so far.”
- “Farther than ever so,” said Peter.
- He reflected. “When they come back Peter will be a Big Boy. Mummy and
- Daddy ’ardly know ’im.”
- And from that time, Daddy and Mummy ceased to be thought of further as
- immediate presences, and became hero and heroine in a dream of tomorrow,
- a dream of returning happiness when life was dull, of release and
- vindication when life was hard, a pleasant dream, a hope, a basis for
- imaginative anticipations and pillow fairy tales, sleeping Parents like
- those sleeping Kings who figure in the childhood of nations, like King
- Arthur or Barbarossa. Sometimes it was one parent and sometimes it was
- the other that dominated the thought, “When Mummy comes back.... When
- Daddy comes back.”
- Joan learnt very soon to say it too.
- § 8
- Death was too big a thing for Peter to comprehend. He had hardly begun
- yet with life. And he had made not even a beginning with religion. He
- had never been baptized; he had learnt no prayers at his mother’s knee.
- The priceless Mary had come to the Stublands warranted a churchwoman,
- but as with so many of her class, her orthodoxy had been only a
- professional uniform to cloak a very keen hostility and contempt for the
- clergy, and she dropped quite readily into the ways of a household in
- which religion was entirely ignored. The first Peter heard of religion
- was at the age of four and a half, and that was from a serious friend of
- Mary’s, a Particular Baptist, who came for a week’s visit to The
- Ingle-Nook. The visitor was really distressed at the spiritual outlook
- of the two children. She borrowed Peter for a “little walk.” She thought
- she would begin with him and try Joan afterwards. Then as plainly and
- impressively as possible she imparted the elements of her faith to Peter
- and taught him a brief, simple prayer. “He’s a Love,” she told Mary,
- “and so Quick! It’s a _shime_ to keep him such a little heathen. I
- didn’t say that prayer over twice before he had it Pat.”
- Mary was rather moved by her friend’s feelings. She felt that she was
- going behind the back of the aunts, but nevertheless she saw no great
- harm in what had happened. The deaths of Arthur and Dolly had shaken
- Mary’s innate scepticism; she had a vague feeling that there might be
- grave risks, well worth consideration, beyond the further edge of life.
- Aunt Phyllis was the first of the responsible people overhead to
- discover what had happened. Peter loved his prayer; it was full of the
- most beautiful phrases; no words had ever so filled his mouth and mind.
- There was for example, “For Jesus Krice sake Amen.” Like a song. You
- could use it anywhere. Aunt Phyllis found him playing trains with his
- bricks in the nursery one afternoon. “_Hoo!_ Chuff-Chuff. Chuff-Chuff.
- Change for Reigate, change for London. For Jesus Krice sake Amen.”
- Aunt Phyllis sat down in the little chair. “Peter,” she said, “who is
- this Jesus Krice?”
- Peter was reluctant to give information. “I know all about ’im,” he
- said, and would at first throw no other light on the matter.
- Then he relented and told a wonder. He turned his back on his brick
- train and drew close to Aunt Phyllis. His manner was solemn and
- impressive exactly as Mary’s friend’s had been; his words were as slow
- and deliberate. “Jesus Krice could go dead and come alive again,” he
- said, “over and over, whenever He wanted to.”
- And having paused a moment to complete the effect of this marvel, Peter
- turned about again, squatted down like a little brown holland mushroom
- with a busy little knob on the top, and resumed his shouting. “_Hoo!_
- Chuff-Chuff. Chuff-Chuff. Chuff.”
- § 9
- One day Mary with an unaccustomed urgency in her manner hurried Joan and
- Peter out of the garden and into the nursery, and there tidied them up
- with emphasis. Joan showed fight a bit but not much; Peter was thinking
- of something else and was just limp. Then Mary took them down to the
- living-room, the big low room with the ingle-nook and the dining-table
- in the far bay beside the second fireplace. There they beheld a large
- female Visitor of the worst sort. They approached her with extreme
- reluctance, impelled by Mary’s gentle but persistent hand. The Visitor
- was sitting in the window-seat with Aunt Phyllis beside her. And Aunt
- Phœbe was standing before the little fireplace. But these were
- incidental observations; the great fact was the Visitor.
- She was the largest lady that Peter had ever seen; she had a plumed hat
- with black chiffon and large purple bows and a brim of soft black stuff
- and suchlike things, and she wore a large cape in three tiers and a
- large black feather boa that hissed when she moved and disseminated
- feathers. Her shoulders were enormously exaggerated by a kind of vast
- epaulette, and after the custom of all loyal Anglicans in those days her
- neck was tightly swathed about and adorned with a big purple bow.
- Everything she wore had been decorated and sewn upon, and her chequered
- skirts below were cut out by panels and revelations of flounced purple.
- In the midst of this costume, beneath the hat and a pale blonde fuss of
- hair, was set a large, pale, freckled, square-featured face with two
- hard blue eyes and a fascinating little tussock of sandy hair growing
- out of one cheek that instantly captured the eye of the little boy. And
- out of the face proceeded a harsh voice, slow, loud, and pitched in that
- note of arrogance which was the method of the ruling class in those
- days. “So _these_ are our little Wards,” said the voice, and as she
- spoke her lips wrinkled and her teeth showed.
- She turned to Phyllis with a confidential air, but spoke still in the
- same clear tones. “Which is the By-blow, my dear, the Boy or the Gel?”
- “Lady Charlotte!” exclaimed Phyllis, and then spoke inaudibly,
- explaining something.
- But Peter made a note of “By-blow.” It was a lovely word.
- “Not even in Black. They ought to wear Black,” he heard the big lady
- say.
- Then he found himself being scrutinized.
- “Haugh!” said the big lady, making a noise like the casual sounds
- emitted by large wading birds. “They both take after the Sydenhams,
- anyhow. They might be brother and sister!”
- “Practically they are,” said Aunt Phœbe.
- Lady Charlotte confuted her with an unreal smile. “Practically _not_,”
- she said decisively.
- There was a little pause. “Well, Master Stubland,” said the Visitor
- abruptly and quite terrifyingly. “What have _you_ got to say for
- yourself?”
- As Peter had not yet learnt to swear freely, he had nothing to say for
- himself just at that moment.
- “Not very Bright yet,” said Lady Charlotte goadingly. “I suppose they
- have run wild hitherto.”
- “It was poor Arthur’s wish——” began Aunt Phyllis.
- “We must alter all that now,” Lady Charlotte interrupted. “Tell me your
- name, little boy.”
- “Peter Picktoe,” said Peter with invention. “You going to stop here
- long?”
- “So you’ve found your tongue at last,” said Lady Charlotte. “That’s only
- your nickname. What’s your proper name?”
- “Can we go out in the garden now, Auntie?” said Peter; “and play at
- By-blows?”
- “Garden now,” said Joan.
- “He’s Brighter than you seem to think,” said Aunt Phœbe with gentle
- sarcasm.
- “Commina _Garden_,” said Joan, tugging at Peter’s pinafore.
- “But I must ask him his name first,” said Lady Charlotte, “and,” with
- growing firmness, “he must tell it me. Come! What is your name, my
- dear?”
- “Peter,” prompted Mary.
- “Peter,” said Peter, satisfied that it was a silly game and anxious to
- get it over and away from this horror as soon as possible.
- “And who gave you that name?”
- “Nobody; it’s mine,” said Peter.
- “Isn’t the poor child even _beginning_ to learn his Catechism?” asked
- Lady Charlotte.
- “Yes, the garden,” said Aunt Phœbe to Mary, and the scene began to close
- upon the children as they moved gardenward. Joan danced ahead. Peter
- followed thoughtfully before Mary’s gentle urgency. What was that last
- word? “Cattymism?” Then a fresh thought occurred to him.
- “Mary,” said Peter, in an impassioned and all too audible undertone;
- “look. She’s got a Whisker. _Here!_ Troof!”
- “It was my brother’s _wish_,” Phyllis was explaining as the children
- disappeared through the door....
- “It isn’t the modern way to begin so early with rote-learning,” said
- Aunt Phœbe; “the little fellow’s still not five.”
- “He’s a pretty good size.”
- “Because we haven’t worried his mind yet. Milk, light, play, like a
- happy little animal.”
- “We must change all that now,” said Lady Charlotte Sydenham with
- conviction.
- CHAPTER THE FIFTH
- THE CHRISTENING
- § 1
- Lady Charlotte Sydenham was one of those large, ignorant, ruthless,
- low-church, wealthy, and well-born ladies who did so much to make
- England what it was in the days before the Great War. She was educated
- with the utmost care by totally illiterate governesses who were ladies
- by birth, chiefly on the importance and privileges of her social
- position, the Anglican faith and Mrs. Strickland’s “Queens of England”;
- she had French from a guaranteed Protestant teacher and German from a
- North German instructress (Lutheran Protestant), who also taught her to
- play the piano with the force and precision of a crack regiment of
- cavalry. Subsequently she had improved her mind by reading memoirs and
- biographies of noble and distinguished people and by travel amidst
- obvious scenery and good foreign hotels. She had married at
- two-and-thirty when things were beginning to look rather doubtful for
- her.
- Old Mr. Sydenham, who had made his money and undermined his health in
- India in the John Company days, had been fifty-four, and from the very
- outset she had been ever so much too much for him. At sixty-five he had
- petered out like an exhausted lode. She had already got an abject
- confidential maid into thorough training, and was fully prepared for
- widowhood. She hung out big black bonnets and expensive black clothes
- upon her projections, so as to look larger than ever, and took her place
- and even more than her place, very resolutely, among the leaders of the
- county Anglicans.
- She had early mastered the simple arts of county family intercourse. Her
- style in contradiction was very good, her insults were frequently witty,
- she could pretend to love horses, there was no need for her to pretend
- to despise and hate tradesmen and working people, and she kept herself
- well-informed upon the domestic details of the large and spreading
- family of the “Dear Queen.” She was very good at taking down impertinent
- people, and most people struck her as impertinent; she could make a
- young man or a plain girl or a social inferior “feel small” quicker (and
- smaller) than almost any one in that part of Surrey. She was a woman
- without vices; her chief pleasure was to feel all right and important
- and the centre of things, and to that her maid as a sort of grand
- Vizieress, her well-disciplined little household and her choice of
- friends ministered. The early fear of “Romanists” in which she had been
- trained had been a little dispelled by the wider charities of maturity,
- but she held secularists and socialists in an ever-deepening abhorrence.
- They planned, she knew, to disturb the minds of the lower classes, upset
- her investments, behead the Dear Queen, and plunge the whole world into
- vice and rapine and Sabbath-breaking. She interested herself in such
- leisure as the care of her own health and comfort left her, in movements
- designed to circumvent and defeat the aims of these enemies of God and
- (all that was worth considering in) Man. She even countenanced quite
- indulgent charities if they seemed designed to take the wind out of the
- sails of socialism. She drove about the district in a one-horse carriage
- and delivered devastating calls.
- Such was the lady whom Arthur had made one of the four guardians of his
- little son and niece. He had seen her twice; he had rather liked a short
- speech of five sentences she made at a Flower Show, and he had heard her
- being extremely rude to a curate. He believed her to be wealthy and
- trustworthy and very well suited to act as a counter influence to any
- extravagant tendencies there might be in Aunt Phœbe. Also she was
- Dolly’s cousin, and appointing her had seemed a sort of compensation for
- altering his will without Dolly’s knowledge. Besides, it had been very
- unlikely that she would ever act. And he had been in a hurry when he
- altered his will, and could not think of any one else.
- Now Lady Charlotte was not by any means satisfied by her visit to The
- Ingle-Nook. The children looked unusually big for their years and
- disrespectful and out of hand. It was clear they had not taken to her.
- The nurse, too, had a sort of unbroken look in her eye that was
- unbecoming in a menial position. The aunts were odd persons; Phyllis was
- much too disposed to accentuate the father’s wishes, and Lady Charlotte
- had a most extraordinary and indecent feeling all the time she was
- talking to her that Aunt Phœbe wasn’t wearing stays. (Could the woman
- have forgotten them, or was it deliberate? It was like pretending to be
- clothed when you were really naked.)
- Their conversation had been queer, most queer. They did not seem to
- realize that she was by way of being a leader in the county and
- accustomed to being listened to with deference. Nearly everything she
- said they had quietly contradicted or ignored. The way in which the
- children were whisked away from her presence was distinctly
- disrespectful. She had a right, it was her duty, to look at them well
- and question them clearly about their treatment, to see that they had
- proper treatment, and it was necessary that they should fully understand
- her importance in their lives. But those two oddly-dressed young
- women—youngish women, rather, for probably they were both over
- thirty—did not themselves seem to understand that she was naturally the
- Principal Guardian.
- Phyllis had been constantly referring to the wishes of this Stubland
- person who had married George Sydenham’s Dolly. Apparently the woman
- supposed that those wishes were to override every rational consideration
- for the children’s welfare. After all, the boy was as much Dolly’s child
- as a Stubland, and as for the girl, except that the Stublands had been
- allowed to keep her, she wasn’t a Stubland at all. She wasn’t anything
- at all. She was pure Charity. There was not the slightest obligation
- upon Any one to do Anything for her. Making her out to be an equal with
- a legitimate child was just the subversive, wrong-headed sort of thing
- these glorified shoddy-makers, the Stublands, would do. But like to
- like. Their own genealogy probably wouldn’t bear scrutiny for six
- generations. She ought to be trained as a Maid. There were none too many
- trained Maids nowadays. But Arthur Stubland had actually settled money
- on her.
- There was much to put right in this situation, a great occasion for a
- large, important lady to impress herself tremendously on a little group
- of people insultingly disposed to be unaware of her. The more she
- thought the matter over the more plainly she saw her duty before her.
- She did not talk to servants; no lady talks to servants; but it was her
- habit to think aloud during the ministrations of Unwin, her maid, and
- often Unwin would overhear and reply quite helpfully.
- “It’s an odd job I’ve got with these two new Wards of mine,” she said.
- “They put too much on you, m’lady,” said Unwin, pinning.
- “I shall do what is Right. I shall see that what is Right is done.”
- “You don’t spare yourself enough, m’lady.”
- “I must go over again and again. Those women don’t like me. I disturb
- them. They’re up to no good.”
- “It won’t be the first Dark Place, m’lady, you’ve thrown light into.”
- The lady surveyed her reflection in the glass with a knowing expression.
- She knitted her brows, partly closed one eye, and nodded slowly as she
- spoke.
- “There’s something queer about the boy’s religious instruction. It’s
- being kept back. Now why did they get embarrassed when I asked _who_
- were the godparents? I ought to have followed that up.”
- “My godfathers and godmothers wherein I was made,” murmured Unwin, with
- the quiet satisfaction of the well-instructed.
- “Properly it’s the business of the godparents. I have a right to know.”
- “I suppose the poor boy _has_ godparents, m’lady,” said Unwin, coming up
- from obscure duties with the skirt.
- “But of _course_ he has godparents!”
- “Pardon me, m’lady, but not _of course_.”
- “But what do you mean, Unwin?”
- “I hardly like to say it, m’lady, of relations, ’owever distant, of
- ours. Still, m’lady——”
- “Don’t Chew it about, Unwin.”
- “Then I out with it, m’lady. ’Ave they been baptized, m’lady, either of
- them? ’Ave they been baptized?”
- § 2
- Before a fortnight was out Lady Charlotte had made two more visits to
- The Ingle-Nook, she had had an acrimonious dispute upon religious
- questions with Phœbe, and she was well on her way to the terrible
- realization that these two apparently imbecile ladies in the shapeless
- “arty” dresses were really socialists and secularists—of course, like
- all other socialists and secularists, “of the worst type.” It was
- impossible that those two unfortunate children should be left in their
- aunts’ “clutches,” and she prepared herself with a steadily increasing
- determination and grandeur to seize upon and take over and rescue these
- two innocent souls from the moral and spiritual destruction that
- threatened them. Once in her hands, Lady Charlotte was convinced it
- would not be too late to teach the little fellow a proper respect for
- those in authority over him and to bring home to the girl an adequate
- sense of that taint upon her life of which she was still so shockingly
- unaware. The boy must be taught not to call attention to people’s
- physical peculiarities, and to answer properly when spoken to; a certain
- sharpness would not be lost upon him; and it was but false kindness to
- the girl to let her grow up in ignorance of her disadvantage. Sooner or
- later it would have to be brought home to her, and the later it was the
- more difficult would it be for her to accept her proper position with a
- becoming humility. And a thing of immediate urgency was, of course, the
- baptism of both these little lost souls.
- In pursuit of these entirely praiseworthy aims Lady Charlotte was
- subjected to a series of very irritating rebuffs that did but rouse her
- to a greater firmness. On her fourth visit she was not even allowed to
- see the children; the specious excuse was made that they were “out for a
- walk,” and when she passed that over forgivingly and said: “It does not
- matter very much. What I want to arrange today is the business of the
- Christening,” both aunts began to answer at once and in almost identical
- words. Phœbe gave way to her sister. “If their parents had wanted them
- Christened,” said Aunt Phyllis, “there was ample time for them to have
- had it done.”
- “_We_ are the parents now,” said Lady Charlotte.
- “And two of us are quite of the parents’ mind.”
- “You forget that I also speak for my nephew Oswald,” said Lady
- Charlotte.
- “But _do_ you?” said Aunt Phyllis, with almost obtruded incredulity.
- “Certainly,” said Lady Charlotte, with a sweeping, triumphant gesture, a
- conclusive waving of the head.
- “You know he is on his way back from Uganda?” Aunt Phyllis remarked with
- an unreal innocence.
- Lady Charlotte had not known. But she stood up gallantly to the blow. “I
- know he will support me by insisting upon the proper treatment of these
- poor children.”
- “What can a man know about the little souls of children?” cried Phœbe.
- But Aunt Phyllis restrained her. “I have no doubt Mr. Sydenham will have
- his own views in the matter,” said Phyllis.
- “I have no doubt he will,” said Lady Charlotte imposingly....
- Even Mary showed the same disposition to insolence. As Lady Charlotte
- was returning along the little path through the bushes that ran up to
- the high road where her carriage with the white horse waited, she saw
- Mary and the children approaching. Peter saw Lady Charlotte first and
- flew back. “Lady wiv de Whisker!” he said earnestly and breathlessly,
- and dodged off into the bushes. Joan hesitated, and fled after him. By a
- detour the fluttering little figures outflanked the great lady and
- escaped homeward.
- “Come _here_, children!” she cried. “I want you.”
- Spurt on the part of the children.
- “They are really most distressingly Rude,” she said to Mary. “It’s
- inexcusable. Tell them to come back. I have something to say to them.”
- “They won’t, Mum,” said Mary—though surely aware of the title.
- “But I tell you to.”
- “It’s no good, Mum. It’s shyness. If they won’t come, they won’t.”
- “But, my good woman, have you _no_ control?”
- “They always race ’ome like that,” said Mary.
- “Then you aren’t fit to control them. As one of the children’s
- guardians, I—— But we shall see.”
- She went her way, a stately figure of passion.
- “Orty old Ag,” said Mary, and dismissed the encounter from her mind.
- § 3
- “You got your rights like anybody, m’lady,” said Unwin.
- It was that phrase put it into Lady Charlotte’s head to consult her
- solicitor. He opened new vistas to her imagination.
- Lady Charlotte’s solicitor was a lean, long, faded blond of forty-five
- or so. He was the descendant of five generations of Lincoln’s Inn
- solicitors, a Low Churchman, a man of notoriously pure life, and very
- artful indeed. He talked in a thin, high tenor voice, and was given to
- nibbling his thumbnail and wincing with his eyes as he talked. His
- thumbnail produced gaps of indistinctness in his speech.
- “Powers of a guardian, m’lady. Defends upon whafower want exercise over
- thinfant.”
- “I do _wish_ you’d keep your thumb out of your mouth,” said Lady
- Charlotte.
- “Sorry,” said Mr. Grimes, wincing and trying painfully to rearrange his
- arm. “Still, I’d like to know—position.”
- “There are three other guardians.”
- “Generous allowance,” said Mr. Grimes. “Do you all act?”
- “One of us is lost in the Wilds of Africa. The others I want to consult
- you about. They do not seem to me to be fit and proper persons to be
- entrusted with the care of young children, and they do not seem disposed
- to afford me a proper share in the direction of affairs.”
- “Ah!” said Mr. Grimes, replacing his thumb. “Sees t’point t’Chacery.”
- Lady Charlotte disregarded this comment. She wished to describe Aunts
- Phyllis and Phœbe in her own words.
- “They are quite extraordinary young women—not by any stretch of language
- to be called Ladies. They dress in that way—like the pictures in the
- Grosvenor Gallery.”
- “Æsthetic?”
- “I could find a harsher word for it. They smoke. Not a nice thing for
- children to see. I suspect them strongly of vegetarianism. From
- something one of them said. In which case the children will not be
- properly nourished. And they speak quite openly of socialism in front of
- their charges. Neither of the poor little creatures had been bought a
- scrap of mourning. Not a scrap. I doubt if they have even been made to
- understand that their parents are dead. But that is only the beginning.
- I am totally unable to ascertain whether either of the poor mites has
- been christened. Apparently they have not....”
- Mr. Grimes withdrew his thumb for a moment. “You are perfectly within
- yer rights—insisting—knowing”—thumb replaced—“all thlese things.”
- “Exactly. And in having my say in their general upbringing.”
- “How far do they prevent that?”
- “Oh; they get in my way. They send the children out whenever they feel I
- am coming. They do not listen to me and accept any suggestions I make.
- Oh!—sniff at it.”
- “And you want to make ’em?”
- “I want to do my duty by those two children, Mr. Grimes. It is a charge
- that has been laid upon me.”
- Mr. Grimes reflected, rubbing his thumb thoughtfully along the front of
- his teeth.
- “They are getting no religious instruction whatever,” said Lady
- Charlotte. “None.”
- “Hot was the ’ligion father?” said Mr. Grimes suddenly.
- Lady Charlotte was not to be deterred by a silly and inopportune
- question. She just paused for an instant and reddened. “He was a member
- of the Church of England,” she said.
- “Even if he wasn’t,” said Mr. Grimes understandingly, but with thumb
- still in place, “Ligion necessary t’welfare. Case of Besant Chil’n
- zample. Thlis is Klistian country.”
- “I sometimes doubt it,” said Lady Charlotte.
- “Legally,” said Mr. Grimes.
- “If the law did its duty!”
- “You don’t wanner goatallaw fewcan ’void it?” asked Mr. Grimes, grasping
- his job.
- Lady Charlotte assumed an expression of pained protest, and lifted one
- black-gloved hand. Mr. Grimes hastily withdrew his thumbnail from his
- mouth. “I am saying, Lady Charlotte, that what you want to do is to
- assert your authority, if possible, without legal proceedings.”
- He was trying to get the whole situation clear in his mind before he
- tendered any exact advice. Most children who are quarrelled over in this
- way gravitate very rapidly into the care of the Lord Chancellor; to that
- no doubt these children would come; but Lady Charlotte was a prosperous
- lady with a lot of fight in her and a knack of illegality, and before
- these children became Wards in Chancery she might, under suitable
- provocation, run up a very considerable little bill for expenses and
- special advice in extracting her from such holes as she got herself
- into. It is an unjust libel upon solicitors that they tempt their
- clients into litigation. So far is this unjust that the great majority
- will spare neither time nor expense in getting a case settled out of
- court.
- Nor did Lady Charlotte want to litigate. Courts are uncertain,
- irritating places. She just wanted to get hold of her two wards, and to
- deal with them in such a way as to inflict the maximum of annoyance and
- humiliation upon those queer Stubland aunts. And to save the children
- from socialism, secularism, Catholicism, and all the wandering wolves of
- opinion that lie in wait for the improperly trained.
- But also she went in fear of Oswald. Oswald was one of the few human
- beings of whom she went in awe. He was always rude and overbearing with
- her. From the very first moment when he had seen her as his uncle’s new
- wife, he had realized in a flash of boyish intuition that if he did not
- get in with an insult first, he would be her victim. So his first words
- to her had been an apparently involuntary “O God!” Then he had pretended
- to dissemble his contempt with a cold politeness. Those were the days of
- his good looks; he was as tall and big as he was ever to be, and she had
- expected a “little midshipmite,” whom she would treat like a child, and
- possibly even send early to bed. From the first she was at a
- disadvantage. He had a material hold on her too, now. He was his uncle’s
- heir and her Trustee; and she had the belief of all Victorian women in
- the unlimited power of Trustees to abuse their trust unless they are
- abjectly propitiated. He used to come and stay in her house as if it was
- already his own; the servants would take their orders from him. She was
- assuring Grimes as she had assured the Stubland aunts that he was on her
- side; “The Sydenhams are all sound churchmen.” But even as she said this
- she saw his grim, one-sided face and its one hard intent eye pinning
- her. “Acting without authority again, my good aunt,” he would say.
- “You’ll get yourself into trouble yet.”
- That was one of his invariable stabs whenever he came to see her. Always
- he would ask, sooner or later, in that first meeting:
- “Any one bagged you for libel yet? _No!_ Or insulting behaviour? Some
- one will get you sooner or later.”
- “Anything that _I_ say about people,” she would reply with dignity, “is
- True, Oswald.”
- “They’ll double the damages if you stick _that_ out.”...
- And she saw him now standing beside the irritating, necessary Grimes,
- sardonically ready to take part against her, prepared even to give those
- abominable aunts an unendurable triumph over her....
- “I want no vulgar litigation,” she said. “Everything ought to be done as
- quietly as possible. There is no need to ventilate the family affairs of
- the Sydenhams, and particularly when I tell you that one of the children
- is——” She hesitated. “Irregular.”
- The thumb went back, and Mr. Grimes’ face assumed a diplomatic
- innocence. “Whascalled a love-shild?”
- “Exactly,” said Lady Charlotte, with a nod that forbade all research for
- paternity. If Joan were assumed to be of Stubland origin, so much the
- better for Lady Charlotte’s case. “Everything must be done quietly and
- privately,” she said.
- “Sactly,” said Mr. Grimes, and was reminded of his thumb by her eye. He
- coughed, put his arm down, and sat up in his chair. “_They_ have
- possession of the children?” he said.
- “Should I be here?” she appealed.
- “_Ah!_ That gives the key of the situation.... Would _they_ litigate?”
- “Why should they?”
- “If by chance you got possession?”
- “That would be difficult.”
- “But not impossible? Perhaps something could be managed. With my
- assistance. Once or twice before I have had cases that turned on the
- custody of minors. Custody, like possession, is nine points of the law.
- Then _they_ would have to come into court.”
- “We want nobody to come into court.”
- “Exactly, m’lady. I am pointing out to you how improbable it is that
- they will do so. I am gauging their disinclination.”
- The attitude of Mr. Grimes relaxed unconsciously until once more the
- teeth and thumbnail were at their little play again.
- He continued with thoughtful eyes upon his client’s expression.
- “Possibly _they_ wouldn’t li’e ’nquiry into character.”
- “Oh, _do_ take that thumb away!” cried Lady Charlotte. “And _don’t_
- lounge.”
- “I’m sorry, m’lady,” said Mr. Grimes, sitting up. “I was saying,
- practically, do we know of any little irregularities, anything—I won’t
- say actually immoral, but _indiscreet_, in these two ladies’ lives?
- Anything they wouldn’t like to have publicly discussed. In the case of
- most people there’s a Something. Few people will readily and cheerfully
- face a discussion of Character. Even quite innocent people.”
- “They’re certainly very lax—very. They smoke. Inordinately. I saw the
- cigarette stains on their fingers. And unless I am very much mistaken,
- one of them—well”—Lady Charlotte leant forward towards him with an air
- of scandalous condescension—“she wears no stays at all, Mr. Grimes—none
- at all! No! She’s a very queer young woman indeed in my opinion.”
- “M’m!... No visitors to the house—no _gentlemen_, for example—who might
- seem a little dubious?”
- Lady Charlotte did not know. “I will get my maid to make
- enquiries—discreetly. We certainly ought to know that.”
- “The elder one writes poetry,” she threw out.
- “We must see to that, too. If we can procure some of that. Nowadays
- there is quite a quantity—of _very_ indiscreet poetry. Many people do
- not realize the use that might be made of it against them. And even if
- the poetry is not indiscreet, it creates a prejudice....”
- He proceeded to unfold his suggestions. Lady Charlotte must subdue
- herself for a while to a reassuring demeanour towards the aunts at The
- Ingle-Nook. She must gain the confidence of the children. “And of the
- children’s maid!” he said acutely. “She’s rather an important factor.”
- “She’s a very impertinent young woman,” said Lady Charlotte.
- “But you must reassure her for a time, Lady Charlotte, if the children
- are to come to you—ultimately.”
- “I can make the sacrifice,” the lady said; “if you think it is my duty.”
- Meanwhile Mr. Grimes would write a letter, a temperate letter, yet “just
- a little stiff in tone,” pointing out the legal and enforceable right of
- his client to see and have free communication with the children, and to
- be consulted about their affairs, and trusting that the Misses Stubland
- would see their way to accord these privileges without further evasion.
- § 4
- The Stubland aunts were not the ladies to receive a solicitor’s letter
- calmly. They were thrown into a state of extreme trepidation. A
- solicitor’s letter had for them the powers of an injunction. It was
- clear that Lady Charlotte must be afforded that reasonable access, that
- consultative importance to which she was entitled. Phyllis became
- extremely reasonable. Perhaps they had been a little disposed to
- monopolize the children. They were not the only Madonnas upon the tree.
- That was Phyllis’s response to this threat. Phœbe was less disposed to
- make concessions. “Those children are a sacred charge to us,” she said.
- “What can a woman of that sort know or care for children? Lapdogs are
- _her_ children. Let us make such concessions as we must, but let us
- _guard essentials_, Phyllis.... As the apples of our eyes....”
- In the wake of this letter came Lady Charlotte herself, closely
- supported by the faithful Unwin, no longer combative, no longer actively
- self-assertive, but terribly suave. Her movements were accompanied by
- unaccustomed gestures of urbanity, done chiefly by throwing out the open
- hand sideways, and she made large, kind tenor noises as reassuring as
- anything Mr. Grimes could have wished. She astonished Aunt Phyllis with
- “Ha’ow are the dear little things today?”
- Mary was very mistrustful, and Aunt Phyllis had to expostulate with her.
- “You see, Mary, it seems she’s the children’s guardian just as we are.
- They _must_ see a little of her....”
- “And _ha-ow’s_ Peter?” said Lady Charlotte.
- “Very well, thank you, Lady Charlotte,” said Mary.
- “Very well, thank you lazy Cha’lot,” said Peter.
- “That’s right. We shall soon get along Famously. And how’s my little
- Joan?”
- Joan took refuge behind Mary.
- “Pee-Bo!” said Lady Charlotte tremendously, and craned her head.
- Peter regarded the lady incredulously. He wanted to ask a question about
- the whisker. But something in Mary’s grip upon his wrist warned him not
- to do that. In this world, he remembered suddenly, there are Unspeakable
- Things. Perhaps this was one of them.... That made it all the more
- fascinating, of course.
- Lady Charlotte was shown the nursery; she stayed to nursery tea. She
- admired everything loudly.
- “And so these are your Toys, lucky Peter. Do you play with them all?”
- “Joan’s toys too,” said Joan.
- “Such a Pretty Room!” said Lady Charlotte with gestures of approval.
- “Such a Pretty Outlook. I wonder you didn’t make it the Drawing-Room.
- Isn’t it a pretty room, Unwin?”
- “Very pritty, m’lady.”
- Very skilfully she made her first tentative towards the coup she had in
- mind.
- “One day, Mary, you must bring them over to Tea with _me_,” she said....
- “I do so want the dear children to come over to me,” she said presently
- in the garden to aunts Phyllis and Phœbe. “If they would come over quite
- informally—with their Mary. Just to Tea and scamper about the
- shrubbery....”
- Mary and Unwin surveyed the garden conversation from the nursery window,
- and talked sourly and distrustfully.
- “Been with ’er long?” asked Mary.
- “Seven years,” said Unwin.
- “Purgat’ry?” said Mary.
- “She ’as to be managed,” said Unwin.
- § 5
- The day of the great coup of Lady Charlotte was tragic and painful from
- the beginning. Peter got up wicked. It was his custom, and a very bad
- one, to bang with his spoon upon the bottom of his little porringer as
- he ate his porridge. It had grown out of his appreciation of the noise
- the spoon made as he dug up his food. Now, as Mary said, he
- “_d’librately ’ammered_.” How frequently had not Mary told him he would
- do it “once too often!” This was the once too often. The porridge plate
- cracked and broke, and the porridge and the milk and sugar escaped in
- horrid hot gouts and lumps over tablecloth and floor and Peter’s knees.
- It was a fearful mess. It was enough to cow the stoutest heart. Peter, a
- great boy of five, lifted up his voice and wept.
- So this dire day began.
- Then there was a new thin summer blouse, a glaring white silk thing, for
- Peter, and in those days all new things meant trouble with him. It was
- put on after a hot fight with Mary; his head came through flushed and
- crumpled. But Joan accepted her new blouse as good as gold. Then for
- some reason the higher powers would not let us go and look at the
- kittens, the dear little blind kittens in the outhouse. There were six
- of them, all different, for the Ingle-Nook cat was a generous,
- large-minded creature. Only after a dispute in which Joan threatened to
- go the way of Peter was “just a glimpse” conceded. And they were softer
- and squealier and warmer than anything one had ever imagined. We wanted
- to linger. Mary talked of a miracle. “Any time,” she said, “one of them
- kitties may eat up all the others. Any time. Kitties often do that. But
- it’s always the best one does it.”
- We wanted to stay and see if this would happen. No! We were dragged
- reluctantly to our walk.
- Was it Peter’s fault that when we got to the edge of the common the
- fence of Master’s paddock had been freshly tarred? Must a little boy
- test the freshness of the paint on every fence before he wriggles half
- under it and stares at Wonderland on the other side? If so, this was a
- new law.
- But anyhow here we were in trouble once more, this beastly new white
- blouse “completely spoilt,” Mary said, and Mary in an awful stew. The
- walk was to be given up and we were to go home in dire disgrace and
- change....
- Even Aunt Phyllis turned against Peter. She looked at him and said, “_O
- Peter!_ _What_ a mess!”
- Then it was that sorrow and the knowledge of death came upon Joan.
- She was left downstairs while Peter was hauled rather than taken
- upstairs to change, and in that atmosphere of unrest and disaster it
- seemed a sweet and comforting thing to do to go and look at the kittens
- again. But beyond the corner of the house she saw old Groombridge, the
- Occasional Gardener, digging a hole, and beside him in a pitiful heap
- lay five wet little objects and close at hand was a pail. Dark
- apprehension came upon Joan’s soul, but she went up to him nevertheless.
- “What you been doing to my kittays?” she asked.
- “I drownded five,” said old Groombridge in a warm and kindly voice. “But
- I kep’ the best un. ’E’s a beauty, ’E is.”
- “But why you drownded ’em?” asked Joan.
- “Eh! you got to drown kittens, little Missie,” said old Groombridge.
- “Else ud be too many of um. But ollays there’s one or so kep’. Callum
- Jubilee I reckon. ’Tis all the go this year agin.”
- Joan had to tell some one. She turned about towards the house, but long
- before she could find a hearer her sorrowful news burst through her.
- Aunt Phœbe writing Ruskinian about the marvellous purity of childish
- intuitions was suddenly disturbed by the bitter cry of Niobe Joan going
- past beneath the window. Joan had a voluminous voice when she was fully
- roused.
- “They been ’n dwouwnded my kittays, Petah. They been ’n dwouwnded my
- kittays.”
- § 6
- It seemed to Mary that Lady Charlotte’s invitation came as a “perfect
- godsend.” It was at once used to its utmost value to distract the two
- little flushed and tearful things from their distresses. Great
- expectations were aroused. That very afternoon they were to go out to
- tea to Chastlands, a lovely place; they were to have a real ride in a
- real carriage, not a cab like the station-cab that smells of straw, but
- a carriage; and Mary was coming too, she was going to wear her best hat
- with the red flower and enjoy herself “no end,” and there would be cake
- and all sorts of things and a big shrubbery to play in and a flower
- garden—oh! miles bigger than our garden. “Only you mustn’t go picking
- the flowers,” said Mary. “Lady Charlotte won’t like that.”
- Was Auntie Phyllis coming too?
- No, Auntie wasn’t coming too; she’d _love_ to come, but she couldn’t....
- It all began very much as Mary had promised. The carriage with the white
- horse was waiting punctually at two o’clock on the high road above the
- house. There was a real carpet, green with a yellow coat-of-arms, on the
- floor of the carriage, and the same coat-of-arms on the panel of the
- door; the brass door-handle was so bright and attractive that Mary had
- to tell Joan to keep her greedy little hands off it or she would fall
- out. They drove through pine woods for a time and then across a great
- common with geese on it, and then up a deep-hedged, winding, uphill road
- and so to an open road that lay over a great cornfield, and then by a
- snug downland village of thatched white cottages very gay with flowers.
- And so to a real lodge with a garden round it and a white-aproned
- gate-keeper, which impressed Mary very favourably.
- “It’s a sort of park she has,” said Mary.
- As they drew near the house they were met by a very gay and smiling and
- obviously pretty lady, in a dress of blue cotton stuff and flowers in
- her hat. She had round blue eyes and glowing cheeks and a rejoicing sort
- of voice.
- “Here they are!” she cried. “Hullo, old Peter! Hullo, old Joan! Would
- you like to get out?”
- They would.
- “Would they like to see the garden?”
- They would.
- And a little bit of “chockky” each?
- Glances for approval at Mary and encouraging nods from Mary. They would.
- They got quite big pieces of chocolate and pouched them solemnly, and
- went on with grave, unsymmetrical faces. And the bright lady took them
- each by a hand and began to talk of flowers and birds and all the things
- they were going to see, a summerhouse, a croquet-poky lawn, a little old
- pony stable, a churchy-perchy, and all sorts of things. Particularly the
- churchy-perchy.
- Mary dropped behind amicably.
- So accompanied it was not very dreadful to meet the great whisker-woman
- herself in a white and mauve patterned dress of innumerable flounces and
- a sunshade with a deep valance to it, to match. She didn’t come very
- near to the children, but waved her hand to them and crowed in what was
- manifestly a friendly spirit. And across the lawn they saw a marvel, a
- lawn-mower pushed by a man and drawn by a little piebald pony in boots.
- “He puts on his booty-pootys when little boys have to take them off, to
- walk over the grassy green carpet,” said the blue cotton lady.
- Peter was emboldened to address Lady Charlotte.
- “Puts on ’is booty-pootys,” he said impressively.
- “_Wise_ little pony,” said Lady Charlotte.
- They saw all sorts of things, the stables, the summerhouse, a little
- pond with a swan upon it, a lane through dark bushes, and so they came
- to the church.
- § 7
- Lady Charlotte had decided to christen both the children.
- She was not sure whether she wanted to take possession of them
- altogether, in spite of Mr. Grimes’ suggestion. Her health was
- uncertain, at any time she might have to go abroad; she was liable to
- nervous headaches to which the proximity of captive and possibly
- insurgent children would be unhelpful, and her two pet dogs were past
- that first happy fever of youth which makes the presence of children
- acceptable. And also there was Oswald—that woman had said he was coming
- home. But christened Lady Charlotte was resolved those children should
- be, at whatever cost. It was her duty. It would be an act of the
- completest self-vindication, and the completest vindication of sound
- Anglican ideas. And once it was done it would be done, let the
- Ingle-Nook aunts rage ever so wildly.
- Within a quarter of a mile of Chastlands stood a little church among
- evergreen trees, Otfield Church, so near to Chastlands and so far from
- Otfield that Lady Charlotte used to point out, “It’s practically my
- Chapel of Ease.” Her outer shrubbery ran to the churchyard wall, and she
- had a gate of her own and went to church through a respectful avenue of
- her own rhododendrons and in by a convenient door. Wiscott, the curate
- in charge, was an agreeable, easily trodden-on young man with a wife of
- obscure origins—Lady Charlotte suspected a childhood behind some retail
- shop—and abject social ambitions. It was Wiscott whose bullying Arthur
- had overheard when he conceived his admiration for Lady Charlotte. Lady
- Charlotte had no social prejudices; she liked these neighbours in her
- own way and would entertain them to tea and even occasionally to lunch.
- The organ in Otfield church was played in those days by a terrified
- National schoolmistress, a sound, nice churchwoman of the very lowest
- educational qualifications permissible, and the sexton, a most
- respectful worthy old fellow, eked out his income as an extra hand in
- Lady Charlotte’s garden and was the father of one of her housemaids.
- Moreover he was the husband of a richly grateful wife in whose
- rheumatism Lady Charlotte took quite a kindly interest. All these things
- gave Lady Charlotte a nice homelike feeling in God’s little house in
- Otfield; God seemed to come nearer to her there and to be more aware of
- her importance in His world than anywhere else; and it was there that
- she proposed to hold the simple ceremony that should snatch Peter and
- Joan like brands from the burning.
- Her plans were made very carefully. Mrs. Wiscott had a wide and winning
- way with children, and she was to capture their young hearts from the
- outset and lead them to the church. Mary, whom Lady Charlotte regarded
- as doubtfully friendly, was to be detached by Unwin and got away for a
- talk. At the church would be the curate and the organist and the sexton
- and his daughter and Cashel, the butler, a very fine type of the more
- serious variety of Anglican butlers, slender and very active and earnest
- and a teetotaler. And to the children it would all seem like a little
- game.
- Mr. Wiscott had been in some doubt about the ceremony. He had baptized
- infants, he had baptized “those of riper years,” but he had never yet
- had to deal with children of four or five. The rubric provides that for
- such the form for the Public Baptism of Infants is available with the
- change of the word “infant” to “child” where occasion requires it, but
- the rubric says nothing of the handling of the children concerned. He
- consulted Lady Charlotte. Should he lift up Peter and Joan in succession
- to the font when the moment of the actual sprinkling came, or should he
- deal with them as if they were adults? Lady Charlotte decided that he
- had better lift. “They are only little mites,” said Lady Charlotte.
- Now up to that point the ceremony went marvellously according to plan.
- It is true that Mary wasn’t quite got out of the way; she was obliged to
- follow at a distance because the children in spite of every hospitality
- would every now and then look round for her to nod reassuringly to them;
- but when she saw the rest of the party going into the little church she
- shied away with the instinctive avoidance of the reluctant church woman,
- and remained remotely visible through the open doorway afar off in the
- rhododendron walk conversing deeply with Unwin. They were conversing
- about the unreasonableness of Unwin’s sister-in-law in not minding what
- she ate in spite of her indigestion.
- The children, poor little heathens! had never been in church before and
- everything was a wonder. They saw a gentleman standing in the midst of
- the church and clad in a manner strange to them, in a surplice and
- cassock, and under it you saw his trousers and boots—it was as if he
- wore night clothes over his day clothes—and immediately he began to read
- very fast but yet in a strangely impressive manner out of a book. They
- had great confidence now in Mrs. Wiscott, and accompanied her into a pew
- and sat up neatly on hassocks beside her. The gentleman in the white
- robe kept on reading, and every now and then the others, who had also
- got hold of books, answered him. At first Peter wanted to laugh, then he
- got very solemn, and then he began to want to answer too: “wow wow wow,”
- when the others did. But he knew he had best do it very softly. There
- was reverence in the air. Then everybody got up and went and stood, and
- Mrs. Wiscott made Joan and Peter stand, round about the font. She stood
- close beside Joan and Peter with her hands very reassuringly behind
- them. From this point Peter could see the curate’s Adam’s apple moving
- in a very fascinating way. So things went on quite successfully until
- the fatal moment when Mr. Wiscott took Peter up in his arms.
- “Come along,” he said very pleasantly—not realizing that Peter did not
- like his Adam’s apple.
- “He’s going to show you the pretty water,” said Mrs. Wiscott.
- “_Naw!_” said Peter sharply and backed as the curate gripped his arm,
- and then everything seemed to go wrong.
- Mr. Wiscott had never handled a sturdy little boy of five before. Peter
- would have got away if Mrs. Wiscott, abandoning Joan, had not picked him
- up and handed him neatly to her husband. Then came a breathless struggle
- on the edge of the font, and upon every one, even upon Lady Charlotte,
- came a strange sense as though they were engaged in some deed of
- darkness. The water splashed loudly. It splashed on Peter’s face and
- Peter’s abundant voice sent out its S. O. S. call: “Mare-_wi_!”
- Mr. Wiscott compressed his lips and held Peter firmly, hushing
- resolutely, and presently struggled on above a tremendous din towards
- the sign of the cross....
- But Joan had formed her own rash judgments.
- She bolted down the aisle and out through the open door, and her voice
- filled the universe. “They dwounding Petah. They dwounding Petah—like
- they did the kittays!”
- Far away was Mary, but turning towards her amazed.
- Joan rushed headlong to her for sanctuary, wild with terror.
- “I wanna be _kep_, Marewi,” she bawled. “I wanna be _kep_!”
- § 8
- But here Mary was to astonish Lady Charlotte. “Why couldn’t they tell
- _me_?” she asked Unwin when she grasped the situation.
- “It’s all right, Joan,” she said. “Nobody ain’t killing Peter. You come
- alongo me and see.”
- And it was Mary who stilled the hideous bawling of Peter, and Mary who
- induced Joan to brave the horrors of this great experience and to desist
- from her reiterated assertion: “Done _wan_’ nergenelman t’wash me!”
- And it was Mary who said in the carriage going back:
- “Don’t you say nothing about being naughty to yer Aunt Phyllis and I
- won’t neether.”
- And so she did her best to avoid any further discussion of the matter.
- But in this pacific intention she was thwarted by Lady Charlotte, who
- presently drove over to The Ingle-Nook to see her “two little
- Christians” and how Aunt Phœbe was taking it. She had the pleasure of
- explaining what had happened herself.
- “We had them christened,” she said. “It all passed off very well.”
- “It is an outrage,” cried Aunt Phœbe, “on my brother’s memory. It must
- be undone.”
- “That I fear can _never_ be,” said Lady Charlotte serenely, folding her
- hands before her and smiling loftily.
- “Their Little White Souls!” exclaimed Aunt Phœbe, and then seizing a
- weapon from the enemy’s armoury: “_I shall write to our solicitor._”
- § 9
- Even Lady Charlotte quailed a little before a strange solicitor; she
- knew that even Grimes held the secret of many tremendous powers; and
- when Mr. Sycamore introduced himself as having “had the pleasure of
- meeting your nephew, Mr. Oswald Sydenham, on one or two occasions,” she
- prepared to be civil, wary, and evasive to the best of her ability. Mr.
- Sycamore was a very good-looking, rosy little man with silvery hair,
- twinkling gold spectacles, a soft voice and a manner of imperturbable
- urbanity. “I felt sure your ladyship would be willing to talk about this
- little business,” he said. “So often a little explanation between
- reasonable people prevents, oh! the most disagreeable experiences.
- Nowadays when courts are so very prone to stand upon their dignity and
- inflict quite excessive penalties upon infractions—such as this.”
- Lady Charlotte said she was quite prepared to defend all that she had
- done—anywhere.
- Mr. Sycamore hoped she would never be put to that inconvenience. He did
- not wish to discuss the legal aspects of the case at all, still—there
- was such a thing as Contempt. He thought that Lady Charlotte would
- understand that already she had gone rather far.
- “Mr. Sycamore,” said Lady Charlotte, heavily and impressively, “at the
- present time I am ill, seriously ill. I ought to have been at Bordighera
- a month ago. But law or no law I could not think of those poor innocent
- children remaining unbaptized. I stayed—to do my duty.”
- “I doubt if any court would sustain the plea that it was your duty,
- single-handed, without authorization, in defiance it is alleged of the
- expressed wishes of the parents.”
- “But _you_, Mr. Sycamore, know that it was my duty.”
- “That depends, Lady Charlotte, on one’s opinions upon the efficacy of
- infant baptism. Opinions, you know, vary widely. I have read very few
- books upon the subject, and what I have read confused me rather than
- otherwise.”
- And Mr. Sycamore put his hands together before him and sat with his head
- a little on one side regarding Lady Charlotte attentively through the
- gold-rimmed spectacles.
- “Well, anyhow you wouldn’t let children grow up socialists and
- secularists without _some_ attempt to prevent it!”
- “Within the law,” said Mr. Sycamore gently, and coughed behind his hand
- and continued to beam through his glasses....
- They talked in this entirely inconsecutive way for some time with a
- tremendous air of discussing things deeply. Lady Charlotte expressed a
- great number of opinions very forcibly, and Mr. Sycamore listened with
- the manner of a man who had at last after many years of intellectual
- destitution met a profoundly interesting talker. Only now and then did
- he seem to question her view. But yet he succeeded in betraying a
- genuine anxiety about the possible penalties that might fall upon Lady
- Charlotte. Presently, she never knew quite how, she found herself
- accusing Joan of her illegitimacy.
- “But my dear Lady Charlotte, the poor child is scarcely responsible.”
- “If we made no penalties on account of illegitimacy the whole world
- would dissolve away in immorality.”
- Mr. Sycamore looked quite arch. “My dear lady, surely there would be one
- or _two_ exceptions!”...
- Finally, with a tremendous effect of having really got to the bottom of
- the matter, he said: “Then I conclude, Lady Charlotte, that now that the
- children are baptized and their spiritual welfare is assured, all you
- wish is for things to go on quietly and smoothly without the Miss
- Stublands annoying you further.”
- “Exactly,” said Lady Charlotte. “My one desire is to go abroad—now that
- my task is done.”
- “You have every reason to be satisfied, Lady Charlotte, with things as
- they are. I take it that what I have to do now is to talk over the Miss
- Stublands and prevent any vindictive litigation arising out of the
- informality of your proceedings. I think—yes, I think and hope that I
- can do it.”
- And this being agreed upon Mr. Sycamore lunched comfortably and departed
- to The Ingle-Nook, where he showed the same receptive intelligence to
- Aunt Phœbe. There was the same air of taking soundings in the deep
- places of opinion.
- “I understand,” he said at last, “that your one desire is to be free
- from further raids and invasions from Lady Charlotte. I can quite
- understand it. Practically she will agree to that. I can secure that. I
- think I can induce her to waive what she considers to be her rights. You
- can’t unbaptize the children, but I should think that under your care
- the effect, whatever the effect may be, can be trusted to wear off....”
- And having secured a similar promise of inaction from the Miss
- Stublands, Mr. Sycamore returned to London, twinkling pleasantly about
- the spectacles as he speculated exactly what it was that he had so
- evidently quite satisfactorily settled.
- CHAPTER THE SIXTH
- THE FOURTH GUARDIAN
- § 1
- It was just a quarter of a year after the death of Dolly and Arthur
- before Oswald Sydenham heard of the event and of Arthur’s will and of
- the disputes of his three fellow guardians in England. For when the
- stonemason boatman staggered and fell and the boat turned over beneath
- the Arco Naturale, Oswald was already marching with a long string of
- porters and armed men beyond the reach of letters and telegrams into the
- wilderness.
- He was in pursuit of a detachment of the Sudanese mutineers who, with a
- following of wives, children and captives, were making their way round
- through the wet forest country north of Lake Kioga towards the Nile
- province. With Sydenham was an able young subaltern, Muir, the only
- other white man of the party. In that net of rivers, marsh and forest
- they were destined to spend some feverish months. They pushed too far
- eastward and went too fast, and they found themselves presently not the
- pursuers but the pursued, cut off from their supports to the south. They
- built a stockade near Lake Salisbury, and were loosely besieged. For a
- time both sides in the conflict were regarded with an impartial
- unfriendliness by the naked blacks who then cultivated that primitive
- region, and it was only the looting and violence of the Sudanese that
- finally turned the scale in favour of Sydenham’s little force. Sydenham
- was able to attack in his turn with the help of a local levy; he took
- the Sudanese camp, killed twenty or thirty of the mutineers, captured
- most of their women and gear, and made five prisoners with very little
- loss to his own party. He led the attack, a tall, lean, dreadful figure
- with half a face that stared fiercely and half a red, tight-skinned,
- blind mask. Two Sudanese upon whom his one-sided visage came suddenly,
- yelled with dismay, dropped their rifles and started a stampede. Black
- men they knew and white men, but this was a horrible red and white man.
- A remnant of the enemy got away to the north and eluded his pursuit
- until it became dangerous to push on further. They were getting towards
- the district in which was the rebel chief Kabarega, and a union of his
- forces with the Sudanese fugitives would have been more than Sydenham
- and Muir could have tackled.
- The government force turned southward again. Oswald had been suffering
- from fatigue and a recurrence of blackwater fever, a short, sharp spell
- that passed off as suddenly as it came; but it left him weak and
- nervously shaken; for some painful days before he gave in he ruled his
- force with an iron discipline that was at once irrational and
- terrifying, and afterwards he was carried in a litter, and Muir took
- over the details of command. It was only when Oswald was within two
- days’ journey of Luba Fort upon Lake Victoria Nyanza that his letters
- reached him.
- § 2
- During all this time until he heard of Dolly’s death, Oswald’s heart was
- bitter against her and womankind. He had left England in a fever of
- thwarted loneliness. He did his best to “go to Hell” even as he had
- vowed in the first ecstasy of rage, humiliation and loss. He found
- himself incapable of a self-destructive depravity. He tried drinking
- heavily and he could never be sure that he was completely drunk; some
- toughness in his fibre defeated this overrated consolation. He attempted
- other forms of dissipation, and he could not even achieve remorse,
- nothing but exasperation with that fiddling pettiness of sexual
- misbehaviour which we call Vice. He desired a gigantic sense of
- desolation and black damnation, and he got only shame for a sort of
- childish nastiness. “If this is Sin!” cried Oswald at last, “then God
- help the Devil!”
- “There’s nothing like Work,” said Oswald, “nothing like Work for
- forgetfulness. And getting hurt. And being shot at. I’ve done with this
- sort of thing for good and all....”
- “What a fool I was to come here!...”
- And he went on his way to Uganda.
- The toil of his expedition kept his mind from any clear thinking about
- Dolly. But if he thought little he felt much. His mind stuck and raged
- at one intolerable thought, and could not get beyond it. Dolly had come
- towards him and then had broken faith with the promise in her eyes, and
- fled back to Arthur’s arms. And now she was with Arthur. Arthur was with
- her, Arthur had got her. And it was intolerably stupid of her. And yet
- she wasn’t stupid. There she was in that affected little white cottage
- with its idiotic big roof, waiting about while that fool punched copper
- or tenored about æsthetics. (Oswald’s objection to copper repoussé had
- long since passed the limits of sanity.) Always Dolly was at Arthur’s
- command now. Until the end of things. And she might be here beside her
- mate, with the flash in her eyes, with her invincible spirit, sharing
- danger, fever and achievement; empire building, mankind saving....
- Now and then indeed his mind generalized his bitter personal
- disappointment with a fine air of getting beyond it. The Blantyre woman
- and that older woman of his first experiences who had screamed at the
- sight of his disfigured face, were then brought into the case to
- establish a universal misogyny. Women were just things of sex,
- child-bearers, dressed up to look like human beings. They promised
- companionship as the bait on the hook promises food. They were the cheap
- lures of that reproductive maniac, herself feminine, old Mother Nature;
- sham souls blind to their own worthless quality through an inordinate
- vanity and self-importance. Ruthless they were in their distribution of
- disappointment. Sterile themselves, life nested in them. They were the
- crowning torment in the Martyrdom of Man.
- Thus Oswald in the moments when thought overtook him. And when it came
- to any dispute about women among the men, and particularly to the
- disposal of the women after the defeat of the mutineers near Lake
- Salisbury, it suited his humour to treat them as chattels and to note
- how ready they were to be treated as chattels, how easy in the transfer
- of their affections and services from their defeated masters to their
- new owners. This, he said, was the natural way with women. In Europe
- life was artificial; women were out of hand; we were making an inferior
- into a superior as the Egyptian made a god of the cat. Like cat worship
- it was a phase in development that would pass in its turn.
- The camp at which his letters met him was in the Busoga country, and all
- day long the expedition had been tramping between high banks of
- big-leaved plants, blue flowering salvias, dracenas and the like, and
- under huge flowering trees. Captain Wilkinson from Luba Fort had sent
- runners and porters to meet them, and at the halting-place, an open
- space near the banana fields of a village, they found tea already set
- for them. Oswald was ill and tired, and Muir took over the bothers of
- supervision while Oswald sat in a deck chair, drank tea, and opened his
- letters. The first that came to hand was from Sycamore, the Stubland
- solicitor. Its news astonished him.
- _Dear Sir_, wrote Mr. Sycamore.
- _I regret to have to inform you of the death of my two clients, your
- friends Mr. and Mrs. Arthur Stubland. They were drowned by a boat
- accident at Capri on the third of this month, and they probably died
- within a few minutes of each other. They had been in Italy upon a
- walking tour together. There were no witnesses of the accident—the
- boatman was drowned with them—and the presumption in such cases is that
- the husband survived the wife. This is important because by the will of
- Mrs. Stubland you are nominated as the sole guardian both of the son and
- the adopted daughter, while by the will of Mr. Stubland you are one of
- four such guardians. In all other respects the wills are in identical
- terms...._
- At this point Oswald ceased to read.
- He was realizing that these words meant that Dolly was dead.
- § 3
- Oswald felt very little grief at the first instant of this realization.
- We grieve acutely for what we have lost, whether it be a reality or a
- dream, but Dolly had become for Oswald neither a possession nor a hope.
- In his mind she was established as an intense quarrel. Whatever he had
- to learn about her further had necessarily to begin in terms of that.
- The first blow of this news made him furious. He could not think of any
- act or happening of Dolly’s except in terms of it being aimed at him.
- And he was irrationally angry with her for dying in such a way. That she
- had gone back to Arthur and resumed his embraces was, he felt, bad
- enough; but that she should start out to travel with Arthur alone, to
- walk by Arthur’s side exactly as Oswald had desired her to walk by his
- side—he had dreamt of her radiant companionship, it had seemed within
- his grasp—and at last to get drowned with Arthur, that was the thing to
- strike him first. He did not read the rest of the letter attentively. He
- threw it down on the folding table before him and hit it with his fist,
- and gave his soul up to a storm of rage and jealousy.
- “To let that fool drown her!” he cried. “She’d do anything for him....
- “And I might go to _Hell_!...
- “Oh, _damn_ all women!...”
- It was not a pretty way of taking this blow. But such are the
- instinctive emotions of the thwarted male. His first reception of the
- news of Dolly’s death was to curse her and all her sex....
- And then suddenly he had a gleam of imagination and saw Dolly white and
- wet and pitiful. Without any intermediate stage his mind leapt straight
- from storming anger to that....
- For a time he stared at that vision—reproached and stunned....
- Something that had darkened his thoughts was dispelled. His mind was
- illuminated by understanding. He saw Dolly again very clearly as she had
- talked to him in the garden. It was as if he had never seen her before.
- For the first time he realized her indecision. He understood now why it
- was she had snatched herself back from him and taken what she knew would
- be an irrevocable step, and he knew now that it was his own jealous
- pride that had made that step irrevocable. The Dolly who had told him of
- that decision next morning was a Dolly already half penitent and
- altogether dismayed. And if indeed he had loved her better than his
- pride, even then he might have held on still and won her. He remembered
- how she had winced when she made her hinting confession to him. No
- proud, cold-hearted woman had she been when she had whispered, “Oswald,
- now you must certainly go.”
- It was as plain as daylight, and never before had he seen it plain.
- He had left her, weak thing that she was, because she was weak, for this
- fellow to waste and drown. And it was over now and irrevocable.
- “Men and women, poor fools together,” he said. “Poor fools. Poor fools,”
- and then at the thought of Dolly, broken and shrinking, ashamed of the
- thing she had done, at the thought of the insults he had slashed at her,
- knowing how much she was ashamed and thinking nevertheless only of his
- own indignity, and at the thought of how all this was now stilled
- forever in death, an overwhelming sense of the pitifulness of human
- pride and hatred, passion and desire came upon him. How we hated! how we
- hurt one another! and how fate mocked all our spites and hopes! God sold
- us a bargain in life. Dolly was sold. Arthur the golden-crested victor
- was sold. He himself was sold. The story had ended in this pitiless
- smacking of every one of the three poor tiresome bits of self-assertion
- who had acted in it. It was a joke, really, just a joke. He began to
- laugh as a dog barks, and then burst into bitter weeping....
- He wept noisily for a time. He blubbered with his elbows on the table.
- His Swahili attendant watched him with an undiminished respect, for
- Africa weeps and laughs freely and knows well that great chiefs also may
- weep.
- Presently his tears gave out; he became very still and controlled,
- feeling as if in all his life he would never weep again.
- He took up Mr. Sycamore’s letter and went on reading it.
- “_In all other respects the wills are in identical terms_,” the letter
- ran. “_In both I am appointed sole executor, a confidence I appreciate
- as a tribute to my lifelong friendship with Mr. Stubland and his
- parents. The other guardians are Miss Phyllis and Miss Phœbe Stubland
- and your aunt-in-law, Lady Charlotte Sydenham._”
- “Good heavens!” cried Oswald wearily, as one hears a hopelessly weak
- jest. “But _why_?”
- “_I do not know if you will remember me, but I have had the pleasure of
- meeting you on one or two occasions, notably after your admirable paper
- read to the Royal Geographical Society. This fact and the opinion our
- chance meetings have enabled me to form of you, emboldens me to add
- something here that I should not I think have stated to a perfect
- stranger, and that is my impression that Mr. Stubland was particularly
- anxious that you should become a guardian under his will. I knew Mr.
- Stubland from quite a little boy; his character was a curious one, there
- was a streak of distrust and secretiveness in it, due I think to a
- Keltic strain that came in from his mother’s side. He altered his will a
- couple of days before he started for Italy, and from his manner and from
- the fact that Mrs. Stubland’s will was not also altered, I conclude that
- he did so without consulting her. He did so because for some reason he
- had taken it into his head that you would not act, and he did so for no
- other reason that I can fathom. Otherwise he would have left the former
- will alone. Under the circumstances I feel bound to tell you this
- because it may materially affect your decision to undertake this
- responsibility. I think it will be greatly to the advantage of the
- children if you do. I may add that I know the two Miss Stublands as well
- as I knew their brother, and that I have a certain knowledge of Lady
- Charlotte, having been consulted on one occasion by a client in relation
- to her. The Misses Stubland were taking care of The Ingle-Nook and
- children—there is a trustworthy nurse—in the absence of the parents up
- to the time of the parents’ decease, and it will be easy to prolong this
- convenient arrangement for the present. The children are still of tender
- age and for the next few years they could scarcely be better off. I
- trust that in the children’s interest you will see your way to accept
- this duty to your friend. My hope is enhanced by the thought that so I
- may be able later to meet again a man for whose courage and abilities
- and achievements I have a very great admiration indeed._
- _I am, dear Sir,_
- _Very truly yours,_
- _George Sycamore._”
- “Yes,” said Oswald, “but I can’t, you know.”
- He turned over Sycamore’s letter again, and it seemed no longer a jest
- and an insult that Arthur had made him Peter’s guardian. Sycamore’s
- phrases did somehow convey the hesitating Arthur, penitent of the
- advantages that had restored him Dolly and still fatuously confident of
- Oswald’s good faith.
- “But I can’t do it, my man,” said Oswald. “It’s too much for human
- nature. Your own people must see to your own breed.”
- He sat quite still for a long time thinking of another child that now
- could never be born.
- “Why didn’t I stick to her?” he whispered. “Why didn’t I hold out for
- her?”
- He took up Sycamore’s letter again.
- “But why the devil did he shove in old Charlotte?” he exclaimed. “The
- man was no better than an idiot. And underhand at that.”
- His eye went to a pile of still unopened letters. “Ah! here we are!” he
- said, selecting one in a bulky stone-grey envelope.
- He opened it and extracted a number of sheets of stone-grey paper
- covered with a vast, loose handwriting, for which previous experience
- had given Oswald a strong distaste.
- _My dear Nephew_, her letter began.
- _I suppose you have already heard the unhappy end of that Stubland
- marriage. I have always said that it was bound to end in a tragedy...._
- “Oh Lord!” said Oswald, and pitched the letter aside and fell into deep
- thought....
- He became aware of Muir standing and staring down at him. One of the
- boys must have gone off to Muir and told him of Oswald’s emotion.
- “Hullo,” said Muir. “All right?”
- “I’ve been crying,” said Oswald drily. “I’ve had bad news. This fever
- leaves one rotten.”
- “Old Wilkinson has sent us up a bottle of champagne,” said Muir. “He’s
- thought of everything. The cook’s got curry powder again and there’s a
- basket of fish. We shall dine tonight. It’s what you want.”
- “Perhaps it is,” said Oswald.
- § 4
- After dinner, the best dinner they had had for many weeks, a dinner
- beautifully suggestive to a sick man of getting back once more to a
- world in which there is enough and comfort, Oswald’s tongue was loosened
- and he told his story. He was not usually a communicative man but this
- was a brimming occasion; Muir he knew for a model of discretion, Muir
- had been his colleague, his nurse and his intimate friend to the
- exclusion of all others, for three eventful months, and Muir had already
- made his confidences. So Oswald told about Dolly and how his scar and
- his scruples had come between them, and what he thought and felt about
- Arthur, and so to much experimental wisdom about love and the bitterness
- of life. He mentioned the children, and presently Muir, who had the firm
- conscientiousness of the Scotch, brought him back to Peter.
- “He was a decent little chap,” said Oswald. “He was tremendously like
- Dolly.”
- “And not like that other man?” said Muir sympathetically.
- “No. Not a bit.”
- “I’m thinking you ought to stand by him for all you’re worth.”
- Oswald thought.
- “I will,” he said....
- The next morning life did not seem nearly so rounded and kindly as it
- had been after his emotional storm of the evening before; he was angry
- and jealous about Dolly and Arthur again, and again disposed to regard
- his guardianship as an imposition, but he felt he had given his word
- overnight and that he was bound now to stand by Joan and Peter as well
- as he could. Moreover neither Lady Charlotte nor the sisters Stubland
- were really, he thought, people to whom children should be entrusted.
- His party reached Luba’s the next evening, and he at once arranged to
- send a cable to Mr. Sycamore accepting his responsibility and adding:
- “Prefer children should go on as much as possible mother’s ideas until
- my return.”
- CHAPTER THE SEVENTH
- THE SCHOOL OF ST. GEORGE AND THE VENERABLE BEDE
- § 1
- So for a time this contest of the newer England of free thought,
- sentimental socialism, and invested profits (so far as it was embodied
- in the Stubland sisters) and the traditional landowning, church-going
- Tory England (so far that is as Lady Charlotte Sydenham was able to
- represent it), for the upbringing of Joan and Peter was suspended, and
- the Stubland sisters remained in control of these fortunate heirs of the
- ages. The two ladies determined to make the most of their opportunity to
- train the children to be, as Aunt Phœbe put it, “free and simple, but
- fearlessly advanced, unbiassed and yet exquisitely cultivated,
- inheritors of the treasure of the past purged of all ancient defilement,
- sensuous, passionate, determined, forerunners of a superhumanity”—for
- already the phrases at least of Nietzsche were trickling into the
- restricted but turbid current of British thought.
- In their design the Stubland sisters were greatly aided by the sudden
- appearance of Miss Murgatroyd in the neighbourhood, and the rapid and
- emphatic establishment of the School of Saint George and the Venerable
- Bede within two miles of The Ingle-Nook door.
- Miss Murgatroyd was a sturdy, rufous lady with a resentful manner, as
- though she felt that everything and everybody were deliberately getting
- in her way, and an effort of tension that passed very readily from anger
- to enthusiasm and from enthusiasm to anger. Her place was in the van.
- She did not mind very much where the van was going so long as she was in
- it. She was a born teacher, too, and so overpoweringly moved to teach
- that what she taught was a secondary consideration. She wanted to do
- something for mankind—it hardly mattered what. In America she would have
- been altogether advanced and new, but it was a peculiarity of
- middle-class British liberalism at the end of the nineteenth century
- just as it was of middle-class French liberalism a hundred years before,
- that it was strongly reactionary in colour. In the place of Rousseau and
- his demand for a return to the age of innocence, we English had Ruskin
- and Morris, who demanded a return to the Middle Ages. And in Miss
- Murgatroyd there was Rousseau as well as Ruskin; she wanted, she said,
- the best of everything; she was very comprehensive; she epitomized the
- movements of her time.
- A love disappointment—the man had fled inexplicably to the ends of the
- earth and vanished—had exacerbated in Miss Murgatroyd a passion for the
- plastic affections of children; she had resolved to give herself wholly
- to the creation of a new sort of school embodying all the best ideals of
- the time. She saw herself a richly-robed, creative prophetess among the
- clustering and adoring young.
- She had had a certain amount of capital available, and this she had
- expended upon the adaptation of a pleasant, many-roomed, modern house
- that looked out bravely over the valley of the Weald about a mile and
- three-quarters from The Ingle-Nook, to the necessities of a
- boarding-school, and here she presently accumulated her scholars. She
- furnished it very brightly in art colours and Morris patterns; wherever
- possible the woodwork was stained a pleasing green and perforated with
- heart-shaped holes; there were big, flat, obscurely symbolical
- colour-prints by Walter Crane, reproductions in bright colours of the
- works of Rossetti and Burne Jones and Botticelli, and a full-size cast
- of the Venus of Milo. The name was Ruskinian in spirit with a touch of
- J. R. Green’s _Short History of the English People_.
- Miss Murgatroyd was indiscriminately receptive of new educational ideas;
- she meant to miss nothing; and some of these ideas were quite good and
- some were quite silly; and nearly every holiday she went off with a
- large notebook and much enthusiasm to educational congresses and
- conferences and summer schools and got some more. One that she acquired
- quite early, soon after the battle of Omdurman, was to put all her girls
- and most of her boys into Djibbahs—loose, pretty garments that were
- imitated from and named after the Dervish form of shirt. Hers was one of
- the first of those numerous “djibbah schools” that still flourish in
- England.
- Also she had a natural proclivity towards bare legs and sandals and
- hatlessness, and only a certain respect for the parents kept the school
- from waves of pure vegetarianism. And she did all she could to carry her
- classes out of the class-rooms and into the open air....
- The end of the nineteenth century was a happy and beautiful time for the
- bodies of the children of the more prosperous classes. Children had
- become precious. Among such people as the Stublands one never heard of
- such a thing as the death of a child; all their children lived and grew
- up. It was a point upon which Arthur had never tired of insisting.
- Whenever he had felt bored and wanting a brief holiday he had been
- accustomed to go off with a knapsack to study church architecture, and
- he had never failed to note the lists of children on the monuments.
- “There you are again,” he would say. “Look at that one: ‘and of Susan
- his wife by whom he had issue eleven children of whom three survived
- him.’ That’s the universal story of a woman’s life in the sixteenth and
- seventeenth century. Nowadays it would read, ‘by whom he had issue three
- children who all survived him.’ And you see here, she died first, worn
- out, and he married again. And here are five more children, and three
- die in infancy and childhood. There was a frightful boom in dying in
- those days; dying was a career in itself for two-thirds of the children
- born. They made an art of early death. They were trained to die in an
- edifying manner. Parents wrote books about their little lost saints.
- Instead of rearing them——”....
- Miss Murgatroyd’s school was indeed healthy and pretty and full of
- physical happiness, but the teaching and mental training that went on in
- it was of a lower quality. Mental strength and mental balance do not
- show in quite the same way as their physical equivalents. Minds do not
- grow as bodies do, through leaving the windows open and singing in the
- sun.
- § 2
- Aunt Phœbe was an old acquaintance of Miss Murgatroyd. They had met at
- Adelboden during one of the early Fabian excursions in Switzerland.
- Afterwards Miss Murgatroyd had been charmed by Aunt Phœbe’s first book,
- a little thin volume of bold ideas in grey covers and a white back,
- called, _By-thoughts of a Stitchwoman_. In it Aunt Phœbe represented
- herself rather after the fashion of one of those richly conceived women
- who sit and stitch in the background of Sir Frederick Leighton’s great
- wall paintings at South Kensington, “The Industrial Arts applied to
- Peace” and “The Industrial Arts Applied to War” (her needlework was
- really very bad indeed) and while she stitched she thought. She thought
- outrageously; that was the idea; and she represented all the quiet
- stitching sex as thinking as outrageously. Miss Murgatroyd had a kindred
- craving for outrageous thinking, and the book became the link of a great
- intellectual friendship. They vied with one another in the extremity of
- their opinions and the mystical extravagance of their expressions. They
- maintained a tumescent flow of thought that was mostly feeling and
- feeling that was mostly imitation, far over the heads of the nice little
- children, who ran about the bright and airy school premises free from
- most of the current infections of body and spirit, and grew as children
- do grow under favourable circumstances, after the manner of Nature in
- her better moods, that is to say after the manner of Nature ploughed and
- weeded and given light and air.
- So far as Aunt Phœbe was concerned, the great thoughts were confined to
- one or two intimates and—a rather hypothetical circle—her readers. Her
- mental galumphings were a thing apart. A kind of shyness prevented her
- with strangers and children. But Miss Murgatroyd was impelled by a sense
- of duty to build up the character of her children by discourse, more
- particularly on Sundays. On Sunday mornings the whole school went to
- church; in the afternoon it had a decorous walk, or it read or talked,
- and Miss Mills, the junior assistant, read aloud to the little ones; in
- the evening it read or it drew and painted, except for a special half
- hour when Miss Murgatroyd built its character up. That was her time.
- Thus, for example, she built it up about Truth.
- “Girls,” she began, “I want to talk to you a little this evening about
- Truth. I want you to think about Truth, to concentrate your minds upon
- it and see just all it means and can mean to us. You know we must all
- tell the Truth, but has it ever occurred to you to ask _why_ we must
- tell the Truth? I want you to ask that. I want you to be aware of why
- you have to be good in this way and that. I do not want you to be
- unthinkingly good. I want you to be
- ’Not like dumb, driven cattle!
- Be a hero in the strife!’
- or a heroine as the case may be. And so, why do we tell the Truth? Is it
- because if we did not do so people would be deceived and things go
- wrong? Partly. Is it because if we did not do so, people would not trust
- us? Also yes, partly. But the real reason, girls and boys, is this, the
- real reason is that Lying Lips are an Abomination to the Lord, they are
- disgusting to Him, and so they ought to be disgusting to us. That is the
- real reason why we should tell the truth. Because it is a thing
- offensive and disgraceful, and if we did not do so, then we should tell
- a Lie.
- (“Doris, _do_ stop plaiting your sister’s hair, please. There is a time
- for all things.)
- “I hope there is no one here who can bear to think calmly of telling a
- Lie; and yet every time you do not tell the Truth manfully and bravely
- you do that. It is an offence so dreadful that we are told in Scripture
- that whosoever calleth his brother a liar—no doubt without sufficient
- evidence—is in danger of Hell Fire. I hope you will think of that if
- ever you should be tempted at any time to tell a Lie.
- “But now I want you to think a little of what is Truth. It is clear you
- cannot tell the truth unless you know what truth is. Well, what is
- truth? One thing, I think, will occur to you all at once as part at
- least of the answer. Truth is straightness. When we say a ruler is true
- we mean that it is straight, and when we say a wall or a corner is out
- of truth we mean that it isn’t straight. And, in vulgar parlance, when
- we say a man is a straight man we mean one whose acts and words are
- true. And another thing of which our great teacher Ruskin so often
- reminds us is, that Truth is Simplicity. True people are always simple,
- and simple people are usually too simple to be anything but true. Truth
- never explains. It never argues. When I have to ask a girl—and sometimes
- I have to ask a girl—did she or did she not do this or that, then if she
- answers me simply and straightly Yes or No, I feel I am getting the
- truth, but if she answers back, ’that depends,’ or ’Please, Miss
- Murgatroyd, may I explain just how it was?’ then I know that there is
- something coming—something else coming, and not the straight and simple,
- the homespun, simple, valiant English Truth at all. Yes and No are the
- true words, because as Plato and Aristotle and the Greek philosophers
- generally taught us in the Science of Logic long ago, and taught it to
- us for all time, a thing either is or else it is not; it is no good
- explaining or trying to explain, nothing can ever alter that now for
- ever. Either you _did_ do the thing or you didn’t do the thing. There is
- no other choice. That is the very essence of Logic; it would be
- impossible to have Logic without it.”...
- So Miss Murgatroyd building up in her pupils’ minds by precept and
- example, the wonderful art and practice of English ratiocination.
- § 3
- At first Joan and Peter did not see very much of Miss Murgatroyd. She
- moved about at the back of things, very dignified and remote, decorative
- and vaguely terrible. Their business lay chiefly with Miss Mills.
- Miss Mills was also an educational enthusiast, but of a milder, gentler
- type than Miss Murgatroyd; she lacked Miss Murgatroyd’s confidence and
- boldness; she sometimes doubted whether everything wasn’t almost too
- difficult to teach. She was no blind disciple of her employer. She had a
- suppressed sense of academic humour that she had acquired by staying
- with an aunt who kept a small Berlin-wool shop in Oxford, and once or
- twice she had thought of the most dreadful witticisms about Miss
- Murgatroyd. Though she had told them to no one, they had kept her ears
- hot for days. Often she wanted quite badly to titter at the school; it
- was so different from an ordinary school. Yet she liked wearing a
- djibbah and sandals. That was fun. She had no educational
- qualifications, but year by year she was slowly taking the diploma of
- Associate of the London College of Preceptors. It is a kindly college;
- the examinations for the diploma may be taken subject by subject over a
- long term of years. She used to enjoy going up to London for her diploma
- at Christmas and Midsummer. Her great difficulty was the arithmetic. The
- sums never came right.
- Miss Murgatroyd was usually very severe upon what she called the Fetish
- of Examinations; she herself had neither degree nor diploma, it was a
- moral incapacity, and she admitted that she could as soon steal as pass
- an examination; but it was understood that Miss Mills pursued this
- qualification with no idea whatever of passing but merely “for the sake
- of the stimulus.” She made a point of never preparing at all (“cramming”
- that is) for any of the papers she “took.” This put the thing on a
- higher level altogether.
- She had already done the Theory and Practice of Education part of the
- diploma. For that she had read parts of _Leonard and Gertrude_, and she
- had attended five lectures upon Froebel. Those were days long before the
- Montessori System, which is now so popular with our Miss Millses; the
- prevalent educational vogues in the ’nineties were Kindergarten and
- Swedish drill (the Ling System). Miss Mills was an enthusiast for the
- Kindergarten. She began teaching Joan and Peter queer little practices
- with paper mats and paper-pattern folding, and the stringing of beads.
- As Joan and Peter had been doing such things for a year or so at home as
- “play,” their ready teachability impressed her very favourably. All the
- children who fell under Miss Mills got a lot of Kindergarten, even
- though some of them were as old as nine or ten. They had lots of little
- songs that she made them sing with appropriate action. All these little
- songs dealt with the familiar daily life—as it was lived in South
- Germany four score years ago. The children pretended to be shoemakers,
- foresters, and woodcutters and hunters and cowherds and masons and
- students wandering about the country, and they imitated the hammering of
- shoes, the sawing of stone or the chopping down of trees, and so forth.
- It had never dawned upon Miss Mills that such types as these were rare
- objects upon the Surrey countryside. In the country about her there were
- no masons because there was no stone, no cowherds because there were no
- cows on the hills and the cows below grazed in enclosed fields, trees
- and wood were handled wholesale by machinery, and people’s boots came
- from Northampton or America, and were repaired in London. If any one had
- suggested songs about golf caddies, jobbing gardeners, or
- traction-engines, or steam-ploughs, or sawmills, or rate-collectors, or
- grocers’ boys, or season-ticket holders, or stockbrokers from London
- stealing rights-of-way, or carpenters putting up fences and
- trespass-notice boards, she would have thought it a very vulgar
- suggestion indeed.
- Kindergarten did not occupy all the time-table of Miss Mills. She
- regarded kindergarten as a special subject. She also taught her class to
- read, she taught them to write, she imparted the elements of history and
- geography, she did not so much lay the foundations of mathematics as
- accumulate a sort of rubble on which Mr. Beldame, the visiting
- mathematical master (Tuesdays and Thursdays), was afterwards to build.
- Here again Joan and Peter were fortunate. Peter had learnt his alphabet
- before he was two; Joan had not been much later with it, and both of
- them could read easy little stories already before they came under Miss
- Mills’ guidance. That English spelling was entirely illogical, had not
- troubled them in the least. Insistence upon logical consistency comes
- later in life. Miss Mills never discovered their previous knowledge. She
- had heard of a method of teaching to read which was called the “Look and
- Say Method,” and the essence of it was that you never learnt your
- letters. It was devised for the use of those older children who go to
- elementary schools from illiterate homes, and who are beginning to think
- for themselves a little. From the first by this method the pupils learnt
- the letters in combination.
- “Now, Peter,” Miss Mills would say, “this is ’to.’ Look and say—to.”
- “To,” said Peter.
- “Now I put this little squiggle to it.”
- (“P,” said Peter privately).
- “And it is ’top’.”
- “Top,” said Peter.
- “And now _this_ is ’co.’ What is this? Look and say.”
- Peter regarded “cop” for a moment. He knew c-o-p was the signal for
- “cop,” just as S.O.S. is the signal for “help urgently needed,” but he
- knew also it was forbidden to read out the letters of the signal.
- “Cop,” said Peter, after going through the necessary process of thought.
- His inmost feeling about the matter was that Miss Mills did not know her
- letters, but had some queer roundabout way of reading of her own, and
- that he was taking an agreeable advantage of her....
- Then Miss Mills taught Peter to add and subtract and multiply and
- divide. She had once heard some lectures upon teaching arithmetic by
- graphic methods that had pleased her very much. They had seemed so
- clear. The lecturer had suggested that for a time easy sums might be
- shown in the concrete as well as in figures. You would first of all draw
- your operation or express it by wood blocks, and then you would present
- it in figures. You would draw an addition of 3 to 4, thus:
- ┌──────┐
- ┌──────┐ ┌──────┐ ├──────┤
- ├──────┤ ├──────┤ ├──────┤
- ├──────┤ added to ├──────┤ makes this heap ├──────┤
- └──────┘ ├──────┤ ├──────┤
- └──────┘ ├──────┤
- ├──────┤
- └──────┘
- And then when your pupil had counted it and verified it you would write
- it down:
- 3 + 4 = 7
- But Miss Mills, when she made her notes, had had no time to draw all the
- parallelograms; she had just put down one and a number over it in each
- case, and then her memory had muddled the idea. So she taught Joan and
- Peter thus: “See,” she said, “I will make it perfectly plain to you.
- Perfectly plain. You take three—so,” and she drew
- ┌───┐
- │ │
- │ 3 │
- │ │
- └───┘
- “and then you take four—so,” and she drew
- ┌───┐
- │ │
- │ 4 │
- │ │
- └───┘
- “and then you see three plus four makes seven—so:
- ┌───┐ ┌───┐ ┌───┐
- │ │ │ │ │ │
- │ 3 │ + │ 4 │ = │ 7 │
- │ │ │ │ │ │
- └───┘ └───┘ └───┘
- “Do you see now how it must be so, Peter?”
- Peter tried to feel that he did.
- Peter quite agreed that it was nice to draw frames about the figures in
- this way. Afterwards he tried a variation that looked like the face of
- old Chester Drawers:
- ┌───┐ ┌───┐
- │ │ │ │
- │ 3 │ ┼ │ 4 │
- │ │ ║ │ │
- └───┘ ┼ └───┘
- ▼
- ┌───┐
- │ │
- │ 7 │
- │ │
- └───┘
- But for some reason Miss Mills would not see the beauty of that. Instead
- of laughing, she said: “Oh, no, that’s _quite_ wrong!” which seemed to
- Peter just selfishly insisting on her own way.
- Well, one had to let her have her own way. She was a grown-up. If it had
- been Joan, Peter would have had his way....
- Both Joan and Peter were much addicted to drawing when they went to the
- School of St. George and the Venerable Bede. They had picked it up from
- Dolly. They produced sketches that were something between a scribble and
- an inspired sketch. They drew three-legged horses that really kicked and
- men who really struck hard with arms longer than themselves, terrific
- blows. If Peter wanted to make a soldier looking very fierce in profile,
- he drew an extra eye aglare beyond the tip of the man’s nose. If Joan
- wanted to do a pussy-cat curled up, she curled it up into long spirals
- like a snake. Any intelligent person could be amused by the sketches of
- Joan and Peter. But Miss Mills discovered they were all “out of
- proportion,” and Miss Murgatroyd said that this sort of thing was “mere
- scribbling.” She called Peter’s attention to the strong, firm outlines
- of various drawings by Walter Crane. She said that what the hands of
- Joan and Peter wanted was discipline. She said that a drawing wasn’t a
- drawing until it was “lined in.” She set the two children drawing pages
- and pages of firm, straight lines. She related a wonderful fable of how
- Giotto’s one aim in life was to draw a perfect freehand circle. She held
- out hopes that some day they might draw “from models,” cones and cubes
- and suchlike stirring objects. But she did not think they would ever
- draw well enough to draw human beings. Neither Miss Mills nor Miss
- Murgatroyd thought it was possible for any one, not being a professional
- artist, to draw a human being in motion. They knew it took years and
- years of training. Even then it was very exhausting to the model. They
- thought it was impertinent for any one young to attempt it.
- So Joan and Peter got through their “drawing lessons” by being as
- inattentive as possible, and in secret they practised drawing human
- beings as a vice, as something forbidden and detrimental and delightful.
- They drew them kicking about and doing all sorts of things. They drew
- them with squinting eyes and frightful noses. Sometimes they would sort
- of come like people they knew. They made each other laugh. Peter would
- draw nonsense things to amuse the older girls. When he found
- difficulties with hands or feet or horses’ legs he would look secretly
- at pictures to see how they were done. He thought it was wrong to do
- this, but he did it. He wanted to make his pictures alive-er and liker
- every time; he was unscrupulous how he did it. So gradually the two
- children became caricaturists. But in their school reports there was
- never anything about their drawing except “Untidy,” or, in the case of
- Joan, “Could do better if she would try.”
- Peter was rather good at arithmetic, in spite of Miss Mills’
- instruction. He got sums right. It was held to be a gift. Joan was less
- fortunate. Like most people who have been badly taught, Miss Mills had
- one or two foggy places in her own arithmetical equipment. She was not
- clear about seven sevens and eight eights; she had a confused, irregular
- tendency to think that they might amount in either case to fifty-six,
- and also she had a trick of adding seven to nine as fifteen, although
- she always got from nine to seven correctly as sixteen. Every learner of
- arithmetic has a tendency to start little local flaws of this sort,
- standing sources of error, and every good, trained teacher looks out for
- them, knows how to test for them and set them right. Once they have been
- faced in a clear-headed way, such flaws can be cured in an hour or so.
- But few teachers in upper and middle-class schools in England, in those
- days, knew even the elements of their business; and it was the custom to
- let the baffling influence of such flaws develop into the persuasion
- that the pupil had not “the gift for mathematics.” Very few women indeed
- of the English “educated” classes to this day can understand a fraction
- or do an ordinary multiplication sum. They think computation is a sort
- of fudging—in which some people are persistently lucky enough to guess
- right—“the gift for mathematics”—or impudent enough to carry their
- points. That was Miss Mills’ secret and unformulated conviction, a
- conviction with which she was infecting a large proportion of the
- youngsters committed to her care. Joan became a mathematical gambler of
- the wildest description. But there was a guiding light in Peter’s little
- head that made him grip at last upon the conviction that seven sevens
- make always forty-nine, and eight eights always sixty-four, and that
- when this haunting fifty-six flapped about in the sums it was because
- Miss Mills, grown-up teacher though she was, was wrong.
- Mr. Robert Mond, who has done admirable things for the organized study
- and organized rearing of infants, once told me that a baby was the
- hardest thing in the world to kill. If it were not, he said, there would
- be no grown-up people at all. “But a lot,” he added, “get their
- digestions spoilt, mind you, or grow up rickety.”... Still harder is it
- to kill a child’s intelligence. There is something heroic about the
- fight that every infant mind has to make against the bad explanations,
- the misleading suggestions, the sheer foolishness in which we adults
- entangle it. The dawning intelligence of Peter, like a young Hercules,
- fought with the serpentine muddle-headedness of Miss Mills in its
- cradle, and escaped—remarkably undamaged.... Joan’s, too, fought and
- escaped, except perhaps for a slight serpentine infection. She was
- feminine and flexible; she lacked a certain brutality of conviction that
- Peter possessed.
- § 4
- But the regular teaching was the least important thing in the life of
- the School of St. George and the Venerable Bede. It existed largely in
- order to be put on one side.
- Miss Murgatroyd had the temperament of a sensational editor. Her school
- was a vehicle for Booms. Every term there was at least one fundamental
- change.
- The year when Joan and Peter joined the school was the year of the
- Diamond Jubilee, and Miss Murgatroyd had a season of loyalty. The
- “Empire” and a remarkable work called _Sixty Years a Queen_ dominated
- the school; Victoria, that poor little old panting German widow, was
- represented as building up a great fabric of liberty and order, as
- reconciling nations, as showing what a woman’s heart, a mother’s
- instinct, could do for mankind. She was, Miss Murgatroyd conveyed, the
- instigator of such inventions as the electric light and the telephone;
- she spread railways over the world as one spreads bread with butter; she
- inspired Tennyson and Dickens, Carlyle and William Morris to their
- remarkable efforts. The whole world revered her. All this glow of
- personal loyalty vanished from the school before the year was out; the
- Queen ceased to be mentioned and the theme of Hand Industry replaced
- her. Everything was to be taught by hand and no books were to be used.
- Education had become too bookish. “Rote learning” was forbidden
- throughout the establishment and “textbooks” were to be replaced by
- simple note-books made by the children themselves. Then two bright girls
- came to the school whose father was French, and, by a happy accident, a
- little boy also joined up who had been very well trained by a French
- governess. All three spoke French extremely well. Miss Murgatroyd was
- inspired to put the school French on a colloquial footing, and the
- time-table was reconstructed with a view to the production of _Le
- Bourgeois Gentilhomme_ on St. George’s Day, the anniversary day of the
- school.
- A parent who could paint was requisitioned as a scene-painter, the stage
- was put up in the main schoolroom, and those who could take no other
- part were set to help make the costumes and distribute programs at the
- performance....
- These things happened over the heads of Joan and Peter very much as the
- things in the newspaper used to happen over our heads before the Great
- War got hold of us. They went about their small lives amidst these
- things and with a vast indifference to all such things. They played
- their little parts in them—the realities of life were not there.
- To begin with, Mary used to take them to school; but after a year and a
- half of that it occurred to Aunt Phyllis that it would cultivate
- self-reliance if they went alone. So Mary only went to fetch them when
- there was need of an umbrella or some such serious occasion. The path
- ran up through the bushes to the high road past the fence of Master’s
- paddock where Peter had once covered himself with tar. Then they had to
- go along the high road with a pine-wood to the right—a winding path
- amidst the trees ran parallel to the road—and presently with a pine-wood
- to the left, which hid the hollow in which the parents of young Cuspard
- had made their abode and out of which young Cuspard would sometimes
- appear, a ginger-haired, hard-breathing youngster, bareheaded and
- barefooted and altogether very advanced, and so to the little common
- where there would be geese or a tethered pony. Joan and Peter crossed
- this obliquely by the path, which was often boggy in wet weather, and
- went along by the Sheldrick’s holly hedge to the open crest of heather
- from which one could run down to the school. One could see the
- playground and games going on long before one could get down to them.
- And if it were not too stormy the school flag with its red St. George
- and the Dragon on white would be flying. There were no indications of
- the Venerable Bede on the Flag, but Joan had concluded privately that he
- was represented by the red knob at the top of the flagstaff. For a year
- and more Joan thought that the Venerable Bede was really a large old
- bead of profound mystical significance.
- Joan and Peter varied with the seasons, but except when Joan wore a
- djibbah they were dressed almost alike; in high summer with bare legs
- and brown smocks and Heidelberg sandals, and in winter like rolls of
- green wool stuck on leather gaiters. When they grew beyond the smock
- stage, then they both wore art green blouses with the school emblem of
- St. George on the pockets, but Joan wore a dark blue gym skirt and Peter
- had dark blue knickerbockers simply. The walk altered a little every
- day. Now the trees were dark and the brambles by the roadside wet and
- wilted, now all the world was shooting green buds except for the pines,
- now the pines were taking up the spring brightness, now all the world
- was hot and dusty and full of the smell of resin, and now again it was
- wet and misty and with a thousand sorts of brightly coloured fungus
- among the pine stems. Joan and Peter learnt by experience that throwing
- pine-cones hurts, and reserved them for the Cuspard boy who had never
- mastered this lesson. Peter started a “Mooseum” of fungi in the
- playroom, and made a great display of specimens that presently dried up
- or deliquesced and stank. When the snow came in the winter the Cuspard
- boy waylaid them at the corner with a prepared heap of snowballs and
- fell upon them with shrieks of excitement, throwing so fast and wildly
- and playing the giddy windmill so completely that it was quite easy for
- Joan and Peter to close in and capture his heap. Whereupon he fled
- toward the school weeping loudly that it was his heap and refusing to be
- comforted.
- But afterwards all three of them made common cause against a treacherous
- ambuscade behind the Sheldrick holly hedge.
- It was on these journeyings that Joan began to hear first of the
- marvellous adventures of Uncle Nobby and Bungo Peter. She most liked
- Bungo Peter because he had such a satisfying name; Peter never told her
- he was really the newel knob at home, but she always understood him to
- be something very large and round and humorous and richly coloured.
- Sometimes he was as big as the world and sometimes he was a suitable
- playmate for little children. He was the one constant link in a
- wandering interminable Saga that came like a spider’s thread endlessly
- out of Peter’s busy brain. It was a story of quests and wanderings,
- experiments and tasks and feuds and wars; Nobby was almost always in it,
- kind and dreadfully brave and always having narrow escapes and being
- rescued by Bungo Peter. Daddy and Mummy came in and went out again,
- Peter and Joan joined in. For a time Bungo Peter had a Wonderful Cat
- that would have shamed Puss-in-boots. Sometimes the story would get
- funny, so funny that the two children would roll along the road, drunken
- with laughter. As for example when Bungo Peter had hiccups and couldn’t
- say anything else whatever you asked him.
- After a time Joan learned the trick of the Saga and would go on with it
- in her own mind as a day-dream. She invented that really and truly Bungo
- Peter loved her desperately and that she loved Bungo Peter; but she
- knew, though she knew not why nor wherefore, that this was a thing Peter
- must never be told.
- Sometimes she would try to cut in and make some of the saga herself.
- “Lemme tell _you_, Petah,” she used to squeal. “You just lemme tell
- _you_.” But it was a rare thing for Peter to give way to her; sometimes
- he would not listen at all to what she had to say about Bungo Peter; he
- would smite her down with “No, he didn’t do nuffin of the sort, not
- reely,” and sometimes when she had thought of a really good thing to
- tell about him, Peter would take it away from her and go on telling
- about it himself, as for instance when she thought of “Lightning-slick,”
- that Bungo Peter used to put on his heels.
- Peter listened to her poor speeding-up with “Lightning-slick” for a
- while.
- Then he said: “And after that, Joan, after that——”
- “Oh! _lemme_ go on, Petah. _Do_ lemme go on. The fird time he was runned
- after by anyfing it was this.”
- “He put it on his bicycle wheels,” said Peter, getting bored by her,
- “instead of oil.”
- “He put it on his bicycle wheels instead of oil,” said Joan, accepting
- the idea, “and along came a Tiger.” (She had already done a Mad Dog and
- a Bear.)
- But after that Peter took over altogether while she was waving about
- rather helplessly and breathlessly with “the _Forf_ time Bungo Peter
- used Lightning-slick, the forf time—” and hesitating whether to make it
- a snake or an elephant, Peter could stand it no longer.
- “But you don’t know what Bungo Peter did the _Forf_ time, Joan—you don’t
- _reely_ and I do. Bungo Peter told me. Bungo Peter wanted the holidays
- to come, so Bungo Peter went and put Lightning-slick on the axles of the
- Erf.”
- “What good was that?”
- “It went fast. It went faster and faster. The Erf. It regular spun
- round. And the sun rose and the sun set jest in an hour or so. ’Cos it
- _would_, Joan. It _would_. Yes, it _would_. There wasn’t any time for
- anyfing. People got up and had their breckfus—and it was bedtime. People
- went out for walks and got b’nighted. Then when the holidays came Bungo
- Peter just put a stick in the place and stopped it going fast any more.”
- “Put a stick in _what_ place?”
- “Where the Erf goes round. And _then_, then the days were as long as
- long. They lasted—oo, ’undreds of ’ours, heaps.”
- “Didn’t they get ’ungry?” said Joan, overcome by this magnificent
- invention.
- “They ’ad _free_ dinners every day, sometimes four, and ’s many teas as
- they wanted. Out-of-doors. Only you see they didn’t ’ave to go to bed,
- ’ardly ever. See, Joan?...”
- There had to be a pause of blissful contemplation before their minds
- could go on to any further invention.
- “I believe if I had the fings I could make Lightning-slick,” said Peter
- with a rising inflection of the voice.
- He _did_ believe. As soon as it was really said he believed it. Joan,
- round-eyed with admiration, believed too....
- This Saga of Bungo Peter did not so much end as die out, when Aunt
- Phyllis got little bicycles for her charges after Joan’s seventh
- birthday, and they began to ride to school. You cannot tell legends on a
- bicycle.
- § 5
- Mr. Sheldrick was a large, loose painter man held together by a very
- hairy tweed suit, and the Sheldricks were a large, loose family not so
- much born and brought up as negligently let loose into the world at the
- slightest provocation by a small facetious mother. It was Mr. Sheldrick
- who painted the scenery for the school play productions, and it was the
- Sheldricks who first put it into Miss Murgatroyd’s head that children
- could be reasonably expected to act. The elder Sheldricks were so to
- speak the camels and giraffes of Miss Murgatroyd’s school, but the
- younger ones came down to dimensions that made them practicable
- playmates for Joan and Peter. Every now and then there would be a
- Sheldrick birthday (and once Mr. Sheldrick sold a picture) and then
- there would be a children’s tea-party. It was always a dressing-up
- tea-party at the Sheldricks. The Sheldrick household possessed a big
- chest full of pieces of coloured stuff, cloaks, fragmentary wigs,
- tinsel, wooden swords and the like; this chest stood on the big landing
- outside the studio and it was called the “dressing-up box.” It was an
- inexhaustible source of joy and a liberal education to the Sheldricks
- and their friends.
- There were grades of experience in these dressing-up parties. At the
- lowest, when you were just a “little darling” fit only for gusty
- embraces—Joan was that to begin with and Peter by dint of a resolute
- angularity was but battling his way out of it—you put on a preposterous
- hat or something and ran about yelling, “Look at meeeeee!” Then you
- rose—Peter rose almost at once and saw to it that Joan rose too, to Dumb
- Crambo.
- In Dumb Crambo one half of the party, the bored half, is “in.” It
- chooses a word, such as “sleep,” it tells the “outs” that it rhymes with
- “sneep,” and the “outs” then prepare and act as rapidly as possible,
- “deep,” “creep,” “sheep,” and so on until they hit upon the right word.
- There was always much rushing about upon the landing, a great
- fermentation of ideas, a perpetual “I say, let’s——,” imagination,
- contrivance, co-operation. So rapidly, joyfully and abundantly, with a
- disarming effect of confusion, the Sheldricks at their tea-parties did
- exactly what Miss Mills believed she was doing in her slow, elaborate,
- remote-spirited Kindergarten lessons, in which she was perpetually
- saying, “No; no, dear, that isn’t right!” or “Now let us all do it over
- again just once more and get it perfect.” It was Peter who discovered
- that these strange ritual-exercises of Miss Mills’ were really a rigid
- version of the Sheldrick entertainments, and tried to introduce
- novelties of gesture and facial play and slight but pleasing variations
- in the verses. He got a laugh or so. But Miss Mills soon put a stop to
- these experiments.
- From Dumb Crambo the Sheldrick dressing-up games rose to scenes from
- history and charades. Then Mrs. Sheldrick was moved to write a
- children’s play about fairies and bluebells and butterflies and an
- angel-child who had died untimely, a play that broke out into a wild
- burlesque of itself even at its first rehearsals. Then came a wave of
- Shakespearian enthusiasm that was started by the two elder Sheldricks
- and skilfully fostered by Daddy Sheldrick, who was getting bored by Dumb
- Crambo and charades. After a little resistance the younger ones fell in
- with the new movement and an auspicious beginning was made with
- selections from _A Midsummer Night’s Dream_. Miss Murgatroyd was first
- made aware of this new development by a case of discipline. The second
- Sheldrick girl was charged with furtively learning passages of
- Shakespeare by heart instead of pretending to attend to Miss Mills’
- display of a total inability to explain the method used in the
- extraction of the square root. Had it been any other playwright than
- Shakespeare, things might have gone hard with the Sheldrick girl, but
- “Shakespeare is different.”
- Miss Murgatroyd, perceiving there was more in this than a mere question
- of discipline, came to see one of the Sheldrick performances, was
- converted, and annexed the whole thing. The next term of school life she
- made a Shakespeare Boom, and she astonished the world and herself by an
- altogether charming production of _A Midsummer Night’s Dream_. In those
- days the histrionic possibilities of young children were unsuspected by
- the parents and schoolmasters who walked over them. Romeo was still
- played in England by elderly men with time-worn jowls and reverberating
- voices, and Juliet by dear old actresses for whom the theatre-going
- public had a genuine filial affection. England had forgotten how young
- she was in the days of good Queen Elizabeth.
- Both Joan and Peter took a prominent part in Miss Murgatroyd’s
- production because, in spite of nearly four years of Miss Mills, they
- still had wonderfully good memories. Peter made a dignified Oberon and
- also a delightfully quaint Thisbe, and Joan was Puck. She danced a
- dance. She danced in front of the Queen Titania after the Fairy song. It
- was a dance in which she ceased to be human and became a little brown
- imp with flashing snake’s eyes and hair like a thunder-cloud. It had
- been invented years ago by poor dead and drowned Dolly, and the
- Sheldricks had picked it up again from Joan and developed and improved
- it for her.
- § 6
- But the Sheldricks were not always acting Shakespeare. There were phases
- in those tea-parties when a kind of wildness came into their blood and
- the blood of those they entertained that called for something more
- violent than dressing-up or acting. Then in summertime they had a great
- scampering and hiding in the garden, it was the sort of garden where you
- can run across the beds and charge through the shrubs, and in winter
- they played “Ogre” or “Darkness Ogre” indoors. In Ogre some one—it was
- usually Mr. Sheldrick—was Ogre, and the little corner room out of the
- hall was his Den. And you hid. In the Sheldrick’s house you could hide
- anywhere except in the studio or the pantry and china closet; you could
- hide in Mrs. Sheldrick’s wardrobe or in the linen cupboard over the
- hot-water pipes (until it got too hot for you) or under anybody’s bed in
- anybody’s room. And the Ogre came after you and caught you—often by the
- foot you had left out carelessly beyond the counterpane—and took you to
- his Den, and there you were a prisoner until some brave soul came
- careering across the hall to touch your hand and rescue you and set you
- free again. The Ogre was never safe against rescues until every one was
- caught, and everybody never was caught; sooner or later came a gaol
- delivery, and so the game began all over again and went on until a meal
- or something released the Ogre or the Ogre struck work. Nobody was so
- good an Ogre as Mr. Sheldrick; there was such a nice terribleness about
- him, and he had a way of chanting “Yumpty-Ow. Yumpty-Ow,” as he came
- after you.
- Of course every house is not suitable for Ogre. Intelligent children who
- understand the delights of Ogre classify homes into two sorts. There are
- the commonplace homes we most of us inhabit with one staircase, and
- there are the glorious homes with two, so that you can sneak down one
- while the Ogre hunts for you up the other. The Sheldrick home had two
- entirely separate staircases and a long passage between them, and a sort
- of loop-line arrangement of communicating bedrooms. And also, though
- this has nothing to do with Ogre, it was easy to get out upon the
- Sheldrick roof.
- “Darkness Ogre” was more exciting in a dreadful kind of way than Ogre.
- It was only played in winter, and all the blinds and curtains were drawn
- and all the lights put out. You didn’t need to hide. You just got into a
- corner and stood still, holding your breath. And the Ogre took off his
- boots and put on felt slippers, and all the noise he made was a rustle
- and a creak, and you were never sure that it was him—unless he betrayed
- himself by whispering “Yumpty-Ow.” He creaked rather more than most, but
- that was a matter for delicate perceptions. There were frightful moments
- when you could hear him moving about and feeling about in the very room
- where you stood frozen, getting nearer and nearer to you. You had to
- bite your knuckles not to scream.
- Once when they were playing Darkness Ogre, Peter was in a corner of Mrs.
- Sheldrick’s room with Sydney Sheldrick, the third of the Sheldrick
- sisters, and they were crowding up very close together. And suddenly
- Sydney put her arms round Peter and began to kiss his ears and cheek.
- Peter resisted, pushed her away from him. “Ssh,” said Sydney. “You be my
- little sweetheart.” Peter resisted this proposal with vigour. Then they
- heard the Ogre creaking down the passage. Sydney drew Peter closer to
- her, but Peter struggled away from her and made a dash for the further
- door. He was almost caught. He escaped because somebody else started
- into flight from the corner of the landing outside the studio and drew
- the Ogre off the scent.
- Afterwards Peter avoided secluded corners when Sydney was about.
- But somehow he could not forget what had happened. He kept on thinking
- of Sydney for a time, and after that she seemed always to be a little
- more important than the rest of his older schoolmates. Perhaps it was
- because she took more notice of him. She wanted to help his work, and
- she would ruffle his hair or pinch his ear as she went past him. She
- wore a peculiar long jersey so that you could distinguish her from the
- others quite a long way off. She had level brows and a radiant smile,
- her shoulders were strong and her legs and feet were very pretty. He
- noted how well she walked. She always seemed to be looking at Peter.
- When he shut his eyes and thought of her he could remember her better
- than he could other people. He did not know whether he liked her or
- disliked her more than the others; but he perceived that she had in some
- way become exceptional.
- § 7
- Young Winterbaum was another of Miss Murgatroyd’s pupils who made a
- lasting impression on Peter. He was dark-eyed and fuzzy-haired, the
- contour of his face had a curious resemblance to that of a sheep, and
- his head was fixed on in a different way so that he looked more skyward
- and down his face at you. His expression was one of placid
- self-satisfaction; his hands twisted about, and ever and again he
- pranced as he walked. He had a superfluity of gesture, and his voice was
- a fat voice with the remotest possible hint of a lisp. He had two little
- round, jolly, frizzy, knock-about sisters who ousted Joan and Peter from
- their position as the little darlings of the school. The only boy in the
- school who at all resembled him was young Cuspard, but young Cuspard had
- not the same bold lines either in his face or conduct; he was
- red-haired, his nose was a snout instead of a hook, and instead of
- rather full, well-modelled lips he had that sort of loose mouth that
- blows. Young Winterbaum said his nose had the Norman arch, and that it
- showed he was aristocratic and one of the conquerors of England. He was
- second cousin to a peer, Lord Contango. It was only slowly that Peter
- came to apprehend the full peculiarity of young Winterbaum.
- The differences in form and gesture of the two boys were only the
- outward and visible signs of profound differences between their
- imaginations. For example, the heroes of Peter’s romancings were
- wonderful humorous persons, Nobbys and Bungo Peters, and his themes
- adventures, struggles, quests that left them neither richer nor poorer
- than before in a limitless, undisciplined, delightful world, but young
- Winterbaum’s hero was himself, and he thought in terms of achievement
- and acquisition. He was a King and the strongest and bravest and richest
- of all Kings. He had wonderful horses, wonderful bicycles, wonderful
- catapults and an astonishing army. He counted these things. He walked
- from the other direction to school, and though no one knew it but
- himself, he walked in procession. Guards went before him and behind him,
- and ancient councillors walked beside him. And always he was going on to
- fresh triumphs and possessions.
- He had a diplomatic side to him. He was prepared to negotiate upon the
- matter of kingship. One day he reached the crest above the school while
- it was still early, and found Joan and Peter sitting and surveying the
- playground, waiting for the first bell before they ran down. He stood
- beside Peter.
- “All this is my Kingdom,” he said, waving both his arms about over the
- Weald. “I am King of all this, I have a great army.”
- “Not over this part,” said Peter modestly but firmly.
- “You be King up to here,” said young Winterbaum. “You have an army too.”
- “_I_ want a kingdom too,” said Joan.
- Young Winterbaum proposed a fair division of Peter’s kingdom between
- Joan and Peter.
- Peter let Joan have what young Winterbaum gave her. It took some moments
- to grasp this new situation. “My kingdom,” he said suddenly, “goes right
- over to those ponds there and up to the church.”
- “You can’t,” said young Winterbaum. “_I’ve_ claimed that.”
- Peter grunted. It did not seem worth while to have a kingdom unless
- those ponds were included.
- “But if you like I’ll give your people permission to go over all that
- country whenever they like.”
- Peter still felt there was a catch in it somewhere.
- “I’ve got a hundred and seven soldiers,” said young Winterbaum. “And six
- guns that shoot.”
- Joan was surprised and shocked to hear that Peter had five hundred
- soldiers.
- “Each of my soldiers, each one, counts as a thousand men,” said young
- Winterbaum, getting ahead again.
- Then the first bell rang and suspended the dispute. But Peter went down
- to the school with a worried feeling. He wished he had thought of
- claiming all Surrey as his kingdom first. It was a lamentable oversight.
- He was disposed to ask the eldest Sheldrick girl whether young
- Winterbaum really had a _right_ to claim all the Weald. There was a
- reason in these things....
- Young Winterbaum had an extraordinary knack of accentuating possessions.
- Joan and Peter were very pleased and proud to have bicycles; the first
- time they arrived upon them at the school young Winterbaum took
- possession of them and examined them thoroughly. They were really good
- bicycles, excellent bicycles, he explained, and new, not second-hand;
- but they were not absolutely the best sort. The best sort nowadays had
- wood rims. He was going to have a bicycle with wood rims. And there
- ought to be a Bowden brake in front as well as behind; the one in front
- was only a spoon brake. It was a pity to have a spoon brake; it would
- injure the tyre. He doubted if the tubing was helical tubing. And the
- bell wasn’t a “King of the Road.” It was no good for Peter to pretend it
- had a good sound, “the King of the Road” had a better sound. When young
- Winterbaum got his bicycle _his_ bell was going to be a “King of the
- Road, 1902 pattern.”...
- Young Winterbaum was always doing this with things, bringing them up
- into the foreground of life, grading them, making them competitive and
- irritating. There was no getting ahead of him. He made Peter feel that
- the very dust in the Winterbaum dustbin was Grade A. Standard I. while
- The Ingle-Nook was satisfied with any old makeshift stuff.
- Young Winterbaum’s clothes were made by Samuelson’s, the best boys’
- tailor in London; there was no disputing it because there was an
- advertisement in _The Daily Telegraph_ that said as much; he was in
- trousers and Peter had knickerbockers; he wore sock suspenders, and he
- had his name in gold letters inside his straw hat. Also he had a
- pencil-case like no other pencil-case in the school. He was always
- proposing a comparison of pencil-cases.
- His imagination turned precociously and easily to romance and love and
- the beauty of women. He read a number of novelettes that he had borrowed
- from his sister’s nurse. He imparted to Peter the idea of a selective
- pairing off of the species, an idea for which _A Midsummer Night’s
- Dream_ had already prepared a favourable soil. It was after he had seen
- Joan dance her dance when that play was performed and heard the
- unstinted applause that greeted her, that he decided to honour her above
- all the school with his affections. Previously he had wavered between
- the eldest Sheldrick girl because she was the biggest, tallest and
- heaviest girl in the school (though a formidable person to approach) and
- little Minnie Restharrow who was top in so many classes. But now he knew
- that Joan was “it,” and that he was in love with her.
- But some instinct told him that Peter had to be dealt with.
- He approached Peter in this manner.
- “Who’s your girl, Peter?” said young Winterbaum. “Who is your own true
- love? You’ve got to have some one.”
- Peter drew a bow at a venture, and subconscious processes guided the
- answer. “Sydney Sheldrick,” he said.
- Young Winterbaum seemed to snatch even before Peter had done speaking.
- “I’m going to have Joan,” he said. “She dances better than any one.
- She’s going to be, oh!—a lovely woman.”
- Peter was dimly aware of an error. He had forgotten Joan. “I’m going to
- have Joan too,” he said.
- “You can’t have two sweethearts,” said young Winterbaum.
- “I _can_. I’m going to. I’m different.”
- “But Joan’s mine already.”
- “Get out,” said Peter indignantly. “You can’t have her.”
- “But she’s mine.”
- “Shut it,” said Peter vulgarly.
- “I’ll fight you a duel for her. We will fight a real duel for her.”
- “You hadn’t better begin,” said Peter.
- “But I mean—you know—a duel, Peter.”
- “Let’s fight one now,” said Peter, “’f you think you’re going to have
- Joan for _your_ girl.”
- “We will fight with swords.”
- “Sticks.”
- “Yes, but _call_ them swords. And we shall have to have seconds and a
- doctor.”
- “Joan’s my second.”
- “You can’t have Joan. _My_ second’s the Grand Duke of Surrey-Sussex.”
- “Then mine’s Bungo-Peter.”
- “But we’ve got no sticks.”
- “I know where there’s two sticks,” said Peter. “Under the stairs. And we
- can fight in the shrubbery over by the fence.”
- The sticks were convenient little canes. “They ought to have hilts,”
- said young Winterbaum. “You ever fenced?”
- “Not much,” said Peter guardedly.
- “I’ve often fenced with my cousin, the honourable Ralph—you know. Like
- this—guard. One. Two. You’ve got to have a wrist.”
- They repaired to the field of battle. “We stand aside while the seconds
- pace out the ground,” explained young Winterbaum. “Now we shake hands.
- Now we take our places.”
- They proceeded to strike fencer-like attitudes. Young Winterbaum
- suddenly became one of the master swordsmen of the world, but Peter was
- chiefly intent on where he should hit young Winterbaum. He had got to
- hit him and hurt him a lot, or else he would get Joan. They crossed
- swords. Then young Winterbaum feinted and Peter hit him hard on the arm.
- Then young Winterbaum thrust Peter in the chest, and began to explain at
- once volubly that Peter was now defeated and dead and everything
- conclusively settled.
- But nobody was going to take away Peter’s Joan on such easy terms.
- Peter, giving his antagonist no time to complete his explanation,
- slashed him painfully on the knuckles. “I’m _not_ dead,” said Peter,
- slashing again. “I’m not dead. See? Come on!”
- Whereupon young Winterbaum cried out, as it were with a trumpet, in a
- loud and grief-stricken voice. “Now I shall _hurt_ you. That’s too
- much,” and swiped viciously at Peter’s face and raised a weal on Peter’s
- cheek. Whereupon Peter, feeling that Joan was slipping from him, began
- to rain blows upon young Winterbaum wherever young Winterbaum might be
- supposed to be tender, and young Winterbaum began to dance about
- obliquely and cry out, “Mustn’t hit my legs. Mustn’t hit my legs. Not
- fair. Oo-oh! my knuckles!” And after one or two revengeful slashes at
- Peter’s head which Peter—who had had his experiences with Joan in a
- rage—parried with an uplifted arm, young Winterbaum turned and ran—ran
- into the arms of Miss Murgatroyd, who had been attracted to the
- shrubbery by his cries....
- It was the first fight that had ever happened in the school of St.
- George and the Venerable Bede since its foundation.
- “He said I couldn’t fight him,” said Peter.
- “He went on fighting after I’d pinked him,” said young Winterbaum.
- Neither of them said a word about Joan.
- So Miss Murgatroyd made a great session of the school, and the two
- combatants, flushed and a little heroic, sat on either side of her
- discourse. She said that this was the first time she had ever had to
- reprove any of her pupils for fighting. She hoped that never again would
- it be necessary for her to do so. She said that nothing we could do was
- quite so wicked as fighting because nothing was so flatly contradictory
- to our Lord’s commandment that we should love one another. The only
- fight we might fight with a good conscience was the good fight. In that
- sense we were all warriors. We were fighters for righteousness. In a
- sense every one was a knight and a fighter, every girl as well as every
- boy. Because there was no more reason why girls should not fight as well
- as boys. Some day she hoped this would be recognized, and girls would be
- given knighthoods and wear their spurs as proudly as the opposite sex.
- Earth was a battlefield, and none of us must be dumb driven cattle or
- submit to injustice or cruelty. We must not think that life was made for
- silken ease or self-indulgence. Let us think rather of the Red Indian
- perpetually in training for conflict, lean and vigorous and breathing
- only through his nose. No one who breathed through his or her open mouth
- would ever be a fighter.
- At this point Miss Murgatroyd seemed to hesitate for a time. Breathing
- was a very attractive topic to her, and it was drawing her away from her
- main theme. She was, so to speak, dredging for her lost thread in the
- swift undertow of hygienic doctrine as one might dredge for a lost
- cable. She got it presently, and concluded by hoping that this would be
- a lesson to Philip and Peter and that henceforth they would learn that
- great lesson of Prince Kropotkin’s that co-operation is better than
- conflict.
- Neither of the two combatants listened very closely to this discourse.
- Peter was wrestling with the question whether a hot red weal across
- one’s cheek is compatible with victory, and young Winterbaum with the
- still more subtle difficulty of whether he had been actually running
- away or merely stepping back when he had collided with Miss Murgatroyd,
- and what impression this apparently retrograde movement had made on her
- mind and upon the mind of Peter. Did they understand that sometimes a
- swordsman _had_ to go back and could go back without the slightest
- discredit?...
- § 8
- After this incident the disposal of Joan ceased to be a topic for
- conversation between young Winterbaum and Peter, and presently young
- Winterbaum conveyed to Peter in an offhand manner that he adored Minnie
- Restharrow as the cleverest and most charming girl in the school. She
- was indeed absolutely the best thing to be got in that way. She was, he
- opined, cleverer even than Miss Murgatroyd. He was therefore, he
- intimated, in love with Minnie Restharrow. It was a great passion.
- So far as Peter was concerned, he gathered, it might be.
- All the canons of romance required that Peter, having fought for and won
- Joan, should thereupon love Joan and her only until he was of an age to
- marry her. As a matter of fact, having disposed of this invader of his
- private ascendancy over Joan, he thought no more of her in that
- relationship. He decided, however, that if young Winterbaum was going to
- have a sweetheart he must have one too, and mysterious processes of his
- mind indicated Sydney Sheldrick as the only possible person. It was not
- that Peter particularly wanted a sweetheart, but he was not going to let
- young Winterbaum come it over him—any more than he was going to let
- young Winterbaum be King of more than half of Surrey. He was profoundly
- bored by all this competitiveness, but obscure instincts urged him to
- keep his end up.
- One day Miss Murgatroyd was expatiating to the mother of a prospective
- pupil upon the wonderful effects of coeducation in calming the passions.
- “The boys and girls grow up together, get used to each other, and
- there’s never any nonsense between them.”
- “And don’t they—well, take an interest in each other?”
- “Not in that way. Not in any _undesirable_ way. Such as they would if
- they had been morbidly separated.”
- “But it seems almost unnatural for them not to take an interest.”
- “Experience, I can assure you, shows otherwise,” said Miss Murgatroyd
- conclusively.
- At that moment two figures, gravely conversing together, passed across
- the lawn in the middle distance; one was a well-grown girl of thirteen
- in a short-skirted gymnasium dress, the other a nice-looking boy of ten,
- knickerbockered, bare-legged, sandalled, and wearing the art green
- blouse of the school. They looked the most open-air and unsophisticated
- children of modernity it was possible to conceive. This is what they
- were saying:
- “Sydney, when I grow up I’m going to marry you. You got to be my
- sweetheart. See?”
- “You darling! Is that what you have to tell me? I didn’t think you loved
- me a little bit.”
- “I’m going to marry you,” said Peter, sticking to the facts of the case.
- “I’d hug you. Only old Muggy is looking out of the window. But the very
- first chance I get I’ll kiss you. And you’ll have to kiss me back, mind,
- Peter.”
- “Where some one can’t see us,” Peter stipulated.
- “Oh! I _love_ spooning,” said the ardent Sydney. “’Member when I kissed
- you before?...”
- “The girls refine the boys and the whole atmosphere is just a _family_
- atmosphere,” Miss Murgatroyd was explaining at the window.
- CHAPTER THE EIGHTH
- THE HIGH CROSS PREPARATORY SCHOOL
- § 1
- From the time when he was christened until he was ten, Lady Charlotte
- Sydenham remained only a figure in the remotest background of Peter’s
- life. Once or twice he saw her in the downstairs room at The Ingle-Nook
- with his aunts bristling defensively beside her, and once she came to
- the school, and each time she looked at him with a large, hard, hostile
- smile and said: “And ha-ow’s Peter?” and then with a deepening
- disapproval: “Ha-ow’s Joan?” But that did not mean that Lady Charlotte
- had done with Joan and Peter, nor that she had relinquished in the
- slightest degree her claims to dominate their upbringing. She was just
- letting them grow up a little “according to their mother’s ideas, poor
- woman,” and biding her time. She wrote every now and then to Aunts
- Phyllis and Phœbe, just to remind them of her authority, and she wrote
- two long and serious letters to Oswald about what was to be done. He
- answered her briefly in such terms as: “Let well alone. Religion comes
- later.” Oswald had never returned to England. He had been in Uganda now
- for five long years, and her fear of him was dying down. She was
- beginning to think that perhaps he did not care very much for Joan and
- Peter. He had had blackwater fever again. Perhaps he would never come
- home any more.
- Then in the years 1901 and 1902 she had been much occupied by a special
- campaign against various London socialists that had ended in a libel
- case. She was quite convinced that all socialists were extremely immoral
- people, she was greatly alarmed at the spread of socialism, and so she
- wrote and employed a secretary to write letters to a number of people
- marked “private and confidential,” warning them against this or that
- prominent socialist. In these she made various definite statements
- which, as her counsel vainly tried to argue, were not to be regarded as
- statements of fact so much as illustrations of the tendency of socialist
- teaching. She was tackled by a gentleman in a red necktie named Bamshot,
- of impregnable virtue, in whom her free gift of “numerous illegitimate
- children” had evoked no gratitude. Her efforts to have him “thoroughly
- cross-examined” produced no sympathy in either judge or jury. All men,
- she realized, are wicked and anxious to shield each other. She left the
- court with a passionate and almost uncontrollable desire to write more
- letters about Bamshot and more, worse than ever, and with much nastier
- charges. And it was perhaps a subconscious effort to shift the pressure
- of this dangerous impulse that turned her mind to the state of spiritual
- neglect in which Joan and Peter were growing out of childhood.
- A number of other minor causes moved her in the same direction. She had
- had a violent quarrel about the bill with the widow of an Anglican
- clergyman who kept her favourite pension at Bordighera; and she could
- still not forgive the establishment at Pallanza that, two years before,
- had refused to dismiss its head-waiter for saying “Vivent les Boers!” in
- her hearing. She had been taking advice about a suitable and thoroughly
- comfortable substitute for these resorts, and meanwhile she had stayed
- on in England—until there were oysters on the table. Lady Charlotte
- Sydenham had an unrefined appetite for oysters, and with oysters came a
- still less refined craving for Dublin stout. It was an odd secret
- weakness understood only by her domestics, and noted only by a small
- circle of intimate friends.
- “I don’t seem to fancy anything very much today, Unwin,” Lady Charlotte
- used to say.
- “I don’t know if you’d be tempted by a nice oyster or two, m’lady.
- They’re very pick-me-up things,” the faithful attendant would suggest.
- “It’s September now, and there’s an R in the month, so it’s safe to
- venture.”
- “Mm.”
- “And if I might make so bold as to add a ’arf bottle of good Guinness,
- m’lady. It’s a tonic. Run down as you are.”
- Without oysters neither Lady Charlotte nor Unwin would have considered
- stout a proper drink for a lady. And indeed it was not a proper drink
- for Lady Charlotte. A very little stout sufficed to derange her
- naturally delicate internal chemistry. Upon the internal chemistry of
- Lady Charlotte her equanimity ultimately depended. There is wrath in
- stout....
- Then Mr. Grimes, who had never ceased to hope that considerable
- out-of-court activities might still be developed around these two little
- wards, had taken great pains to bring Aunt Phœbe’s _Collected Papers of
- a Stitchwoman (Second Series)_ and her little precious volume _Carmen
- Naturæ_ before his client’s notice.
- These books certainly made startling reading for Lady Charlotte. She had
- never seen the first “Stitchwoman” papers, she knew nothing of
- Swinburne, Ruskin, Carlyle, the decadents, nothing of the rich
- inspirations of the later Victorian period, and so the almost luscious
- richness of Aunt Phœbe’s imagination, her florid verbiage, her note of
- sensuous defiance, burst almost devastatingly upon a mind that was
- habituated to the ordered passions and pearly greys of Mrs. Henry Wood’s
- novels _More Leaves, Good Words_, and _The Quiver_.
- “’With what measure ye mete,’” she read, “’so shall it be meted unto you
- again,’ and the Standard that Man has fixed for woman recoils now upon
- his head. Which standard is it to be,—His or Hers? No longer can we
- fight under two flags. Wild oats, or the Immaculate Banner? Question to
- be answered shrewdly, and according to whether we deem it is Experience
- or Escape we live for, now that we are out of Eden footing it among the
- sturdy, exhilarating thistles. What will ye, my masters?—pallid man
- unstained, or seasoned woman? Judgment hesitates. Judgment may indeed
- hesitate. I, who sit here stitching, mark her hesitation,
- myself—observant. Is it too bold a speculation that presently golden
- lassies as well as golden lads will sow their wild oats bravely on the
- slopes of life? Is it too much to dream of that grave mother of a
- greater world, the Woman of the Future, glancing back from the glowing
- harvest of her life to some tall premonition by the wayside?—her One
- Wild Oat! the crown and seal of her education!”
- “Either she means nothing by that,” said Lady Charlotte, “or she means
- just sheer depravity. Wild Oat, indeed! Really! To call it _that!_ With
- Joan on her hands already!”
- And here again is a little poem from _Carmen Naturæ_, which also
- impressed Lady Charlotte very unfavourably:
- THE MATERIALIST SINGS
- Put by your tangled Trinities
- And let the atoms swing,
- The merry magic atoms
- That trace out everything.
- These ancient gods are fantasies,
- Mere Metaphors and Names;
- But I can feel the Vortex Ring
- Go singing through my veins.
- No casket of a pallid ghost,
- But all compact of thrills,
- My body beats and throbs and lives,
- My Mighty Atom wills.
- “I _don’t_ know what the world is coming to,” said Lady Charlotte. “In
- other times a woman who ventured to write such blasphemy would have been
- Struck Dead....”
- “Thrills again!” said Lady Charlotte, turning over the offending pages.
- “In a book that any one may read. Exposing her thrills to any Bagman who
- chooses to put down three and sixpence for the pleasure. Imagine it,
- Unwin!”
- Unwin did her best, assuming an earnest expression....
- Other contributory influences upon Lady Charlotte’s state of mind were
- her secret anxiety for the moral welfare of the realm now that Queen
- Victoria had given place to the notoriously lax Edward VII., and the
- renascence of sectarian controversies in connexion with Mr. Balfour’s
- Education Act. Anglicanism was rousing itself for a new struggle to keep
- hold of the nation’s children, the Cecils and Lord Halifax were ranging
- wide and free with the educational dragnet, and Lady Charlotte was a
- part of the great system of Anglicanism. The gale that blows the ships
- home, lifts the leaves.... But far more powerful than any of these
- causes was the death of a certain Mr. Pybus, who was Unwin’s
- brother-in-law; he died through an operation undertaken by a plucky
- rather than highly educated general practitioner, to remove a neglected
- tumour. This left Unwin’s sister in want of subsidies, and while Unwin
- lay in bed one night puzzling over this family problem, it occurred to
- her that if her sister could get some little girl to mind——...
- § 2
- Mr. Grimes was very helpful and sympathetic when Lady Charlotte
- consulted him. He repeated the advice he had given five years ago, that
- Lady Charlotte should not litigate but act, and so thrust upon the other
- parties the onus of litigation. She should obtain possession of the two
- children, put them into suitable schools—“I don’t see how we can put
- that By-blow into a school,” Lady Charlotte interpolated—and refuse to
- let the aunts know where they were until they consented to reasonable
- terms, to the proper religious education of the children, to their
- proper clothing, and to their separation. “Directly we have the
- engagement of the Misses Stubland not to disturb the new arrangement,”
- said Mr. Grimes, “we shall have gained our point. I see no harm in
- letting the children rejoin their aunts for their holidays.”
- “That woman may corrupt them at any time,” said Lady Charlotte.
- “On that point we can watch and enquire. Of course, the boy might stay
- at the school for the holiday times. There is a class of school which
- caters for that sort of thing. That we can see to later.”...
- Mr. Grimes arranged all the details of the abduction of Joan and Peter
- with much tact and imagination. As a preliminary step he made Lady
- Charlotte write to Aunt Phœbe expressing her opinion that the time was
- now ripe to put the education of the children upon a rational footing.
- They were no longer little children, and it was no longer possible for
- them to go on as they were going. Peter was born an English gentleman,
- and he ought to go to a good preparatory school for boys forthwith;
- Joan’s destinies in life were different, but they were certainly
- destinies for which play-acting, running about with bare feet, and
- dressing like a little savage could be no sort of training. Lady
- Charlotte (Mr. Grimes made her say) had been hoping against hope that
- some suggestion for a change would come from the Misses Stubland. She
- could not hope against hope for ever. She must therefore request a
- conference, at which Mr. Grimes could be present, for a discussion of
- the new arrangements that were now urgently necessary. To this the
- Misses Stubland replied evasively and carelessly. In their reply Mr.
- Grimes, without resentment, detected the hand of Mr. Sycamore. They were
- willing to take part in a conference as soon as Mr. Oswald Sydenham
- returned. They had reason to believe he was on his way to England now.
- Lady Charlotte, still guided by Mr. Grimes, then assumed a more
- peremptory tone. She declared that in the interests of both children it
- was impossible for things to go on any longer as they had been going.
- Already the boy was ten. The plea that nothing could be done until Mr.
- Sydenham returned was a mere delaying device. The boy ought to go to
- school forthwith. Lady Charlotte was extremely sorry that the Misses
- Stubland would not come to any agreement upon this urgent matter. She
- could not rest content with things in this state, and she would be
- obliged to consider what her course of action—for the time had come for
- her to take action—must be.
- With the way thus cleared, Mr. Grimes set his forces in motion. “Leave
- it to me, Lady Charlotte,” he said. “Leave it to me.” A polite young man
- appeared one morning seated in a chariot of fire outside the road gate
- of the School of St. George and the Venerable Bede. He was in one of
- those strange and novel portents, a “motor-car.” This alone made him
- interesting and attractive, and it greatly impressed young Winterbaum to
- discover that the visitor had come about Joan and Peter. Young
- Winterbaum went out to scrutinize the motor-car and its driver, and see
- if there was anything wrong about it. But it was difficult to
- underestimate.
- “It’s a petrol car,” he said. “Belsize.... Those are fine lamps.”
- Miss Murgatroyd gathered that the guardians of Joan and Peter found it
- necessary to interview the children, and had sent the car to fetch them.
- “Miss Stubland said nothing of this when I saw her the day before
- yesterday,” said Miss Murgatroyd. “We do not care for interruptions in
- the children’s work.”
- The young man explained that the case was urgent. “Lady Charlotte has
- been called away. And she must see the children before she goes out of
- England.”
- There was something very reassuring about the motor-car. They departed
- cheerfully to the ill-concealed envy and admiration of young Winterbaum.
- The young man had red hair, a white, freckled face, and a costly and
- remarkable made-up necktie of green plush. The expression of his pale
- blue eyes was apprehensive, and ever and again he blew. His efforts at
- conversation were fragmentary and unilluminating. “I got to take you for
- a long ride,” he said, seating himself between Peter and Joan. “A lovely
- long ride.”
- “Where?” said Joan.
- “You’ll see in a bit,” said the young man.
- “We going to Chastlands?” asked Peter.
- “No,” said the young man.
- “Then where are we going?” said Peter.
- “These here cars’ll do forty—fifty miles an hour,” said the young man,
- changing the subject.
- In a little while they had passed beyond the limits of Peter’s knowledge
- altogether, and were upon an unknown road. It was astonishing how the
- car devoured the road. You saw a corner a long way off and then
- immediately you were turning this corner. The car went as swiftly up the
- hills as down. It said “honk.” The trees and hedges flew by as if one
- was in a train, and behind we trailed a marvellous cloud of dust. The
- driver sat before us with his head sunken between his hunched-up
- shoulders; he never seemed to move; he was quite different from the
- swaying, noble coachman with the sun-red face, wearing a top hat with a
- waist and a broad brim, who sat erect and poised his whip and drove Lady
- Charlotte’s white horse.
- § 3
- For a time the road ran undulating between high hedges and tall trees
- and through villages, and all along to the right of it were the steep,
- round-headed Downs. Then came a little town, and the automobile turned
- off into a valley that cut the Downs across and opened out more and
- more, and then came heathery common and a town, and then lanes and many
- villages, flat meadows and flatter, poplars, and then another town with
- a bridge, and then across long levels of green a glimpse of the big
- tower of Windsor Castle. “This is Runnymede, where Magna Carta was
- signed,” said the young man suddenly. “And that’s Windsor, where the
- King lives—when he isn’t living somewhere else, as he usually does....
- He’s a _’ot_ un is the King.... See the chap there sailing a boat?”
- They went right into Windsor and had a glimpse of the great gates of the
- Castle and the round tower very near to them, and then they turned down
- a steep, narrow, paved street and so came into a district of little mean
- villas in rows and rows. And outside one of these the car stopped.
- “Here we are,” said the young man.
- “Where are we?” asked Peter.
- “Where we get out,” said the young man. “Time we had a feed.”
- “Dinnah,” said Joan, with a bright expression, and prepared to descend.
- A small, white-faced, anxious woman appeared at the door. She was
- wearing amiability as one wears a Sabbath garment. Moreover, she had a
- greyish-black dress that ended in a dingy, stiff buff frilling at the
- neck and wrists.
- “You Mrs. Pybus?” asked the young man.
- “I been expecting you a nour,” said Mrs. Pybus, acquiescing in the name.
- “Is this the young lady and gentleman?”
- That again was a question that needed no answer. The group halted
- awkwardly on the doorstep for a few seconds. “And this is Miss Joan?”
- said Mrs. Pybus, with a joyless smile. “I didn’t expect you to be ’arf
- yr’ size. And what a short dress they put you in! You must ’ave regular
- shot up. Makes you what I call leggy....”
- This again was poor as a conversational opening.
- “’Ow old might you be, dearie?” asked Mrs. Pybus.
- “I’m eight,” said Joan. “But I’ll be nine soon.”
- The young man for inscrutable reasons found this funny. He guffawed.
- “She’s eight,” he said to the world at large; “but she’ll be nine soon.
- That’s good, that is!”
- “If you’re spared, you shud say,” said Mrs. Pybus. “You’re a big eight,
- any’ow. ’Ow old are _you_, dear?”
- Peter was disliking her quietly with his hands in his pockets. He paused
- for a moment, doubting whether he would answer to the name of “dear.”
- “Ten,” he said.
- “Just ten?” asked the young man as if alert for humour.
- Peter nodded, and the young man was thwarted.
- “I suppose you’ll be ready for something to eat,” said Mrs. Pybus.
- “’Adn’t you better come in?”
- They went in.
- The room they entered was, perhaps, the most ordinary sort of room in
- England at that time, but it struck upon the observant minds of Joan and
- Peter as being strange and remarkable. They had never been before in an
- ordinary English living-room. It was a small, oblong room with a faint
- projection towards the street, as if it had attempted to develop a bow
- window and had lacked the strength to do so. On one side was a fireplace
- surmounted by a mantelshelf and an “overmantel,” an affair of
- walnut-wood with a number of patches of looking-glass and small brackets
- and niches on which were displayed an array of worthless objects made to
- suggest ornaments, small sham bronzes, shepherdesses, sham Japanese
- fans, a disjointed German pipe and the like. In the midst of the
- mantelshelf stood a black marble clock insisting fixedly that the time
- was half-past seven, and the mantelshelf itself and the fireplace were
- “draped” with a very cheap figured muslin that one might well have
- supposed had never been to the wash except for the fact that its pattern
- was so manifestly washed out. The walls were papered with a florid pink
- wallpaper, and all the woodwork was painted a dirty brownish-yellow
- colour and “grained” so as to render the detection of dirt impossible.
- Small as this room was there had been a strenuous and successful attempt
- to obliterate such floor space as it contained by an accumulation of
- useless furniture; there were flimsy things called whatnots in two of
- its corners, there was a bulky veneered mahogany chiffonier opposite the
- fireplace, and in the window two ferns and a rubber plant in
- wool-adorned pots died slowly upon a rickety table of bamboo. The walls
- had been a basis for much decorative activity, partly it would seem to
- conceal or minimize a mysterious skin disease that affected the
- wallpaper, but partly also for a mere perverse impulse towards litter.
- There were weak fret work brackets stuck up for their own sakes and more
- or less askew, and stouter brackets entrusted with the support of more
- “ornaments,” small bowls and a tea-pot that valiantly pretended they
- were things of beauty; there were crossed palm fans, there was a steel
- engraving of Queen Victoria giving the Bible to a dusky potentate as the
- secret of England’s greatness; there was “The Soul’s Awakening,” two
- portraits of George and May, and a large but faded photograph of the sea
- front at Scarborough in an Oxford frame. A gas “chandelier” descended
- into the midst of this apartment, betraying a confused ornate
- disposition in its lines, and the obliteration of the floor space was
- completed by a number of black horsehair chairs and a large table, now
- “laid” with a worn and greyish-white cloth for a meal. Such were the
- homes that the Victorian age had evolved by the million in England, and
- to such nests did the common mind of the British resort when it wished
- to meditate upon the problems of its Imperial destiny. Joan and Peter
- surveyed it open-mouthed.
- The table was laid about a cruet as its central fact, a large, metallic
- edifice surmounted by a ring and bearing weary mustard, spiritless
- pepper, faded cayenne pepper, vinegar and mysteries in bottles. Joan and
- Peter were interested in this strange object and at the same time
- vaguely aware of something missing. What they missed were flowers; on
- this table there were no flowers. There was a cold joint, a white jug of
- beer and a glass jug of water, and pickles. “I got cold meat,” said Mrs.
- Pybus, “not being sure when you were coming.” She arranged her guests.
- But she did not immediately begin. She had had an idea. She regarded
- Peter.
- “Now, Peter,” she said, “let me ’ear you say Grice.”
- Peter wondered.
- “Say Grice, dearie.”
- “Grice,” said Peter.
- The young man with the red hair was convulsed with merriment. “That’s
- good,” he said. “That’s reely Good. Kids _are_ amusing.”
- “But I tole you to say Grice,” said Mrs. Pybus, ruffled.
- “I said it.”
- The young man’s voice squeaked as he explained. “He doesn’t know _’ow_
- to say Grace,” he said. “Never ’eard of it.”
- “Is it a catch?” asked Peter.
- The young man caught and restrained a fresh outburst of merriment with
- the back of his hand, and then explained again to Mrs. Pybus.
- “’E’s a perfec’ little ’eathen,” said Mrs. Pybus. “I _never_ did.
- They’ll teach you to say grice all right, my boy, before you’re very
- much older. Mark my words.” And with a sort of businesslike reverence
- Mrs. Pybus gabbled her formula. Then she proceeded to carve. As she
- carved she pursed her lips and frowned.
- The cold meat was not bad, but the children ate fastidiously, and Joan,
- after her fashion, left all her fat. This attracted the attention of
- Mrs. Pybus. “Eat it up, dearie,” said Mrs. Pybus. “Wiste not, want not.”
- “I don’t eat fat.”
- “But you _must_ eat fat,” said Mrs. Pybus.
- Joan shook her head.
- “We’ll ’ave to teach you to eat fat,” said Mrs. Pybus with a dangerous
- gentleness. For the time, however, the teaching was not insisted upon.
- “Lovely bits! Enough to feed a little dog,” said Mrs. Pybus, as she
- removed Joan’s plate to make way for apple tart.
- The conversation was intermittent. It was as if they waited for some
- further event. The young man with the red hair spoke of the great world
- of London and the funeral of Lord Salisbury.
- “’E was a great statesman, say what you like,” said the young man with
- red hair.
- He also spoke of Holbein’s attempt to swim the channel.
- “They say ’e oils ’imself all over,” said the young man.
- “Lor’!” said Mrs. Pybus.
- “It can’t be comfortable,” said the young man; “say what you like.”
- Presently the young man broke a silence by saying: “These here Balkans
- seem to be giving trouble again.”
- “Troublesome lot they are,” said Mrs. Pybus.
- “Greeks and Macedonians and Turks and Bulgarians and such. It fair makes
- my head spin, the lot of them. Servians there are too, and Montenegroes.
- Too many of ’em altogether. Cat and dog.”
- “Are them the same Greeks that used to be so clever?” asked Mrs. Pybus.
- “_Used_ to be,” said the young man with a kind of dark scorn, and
- suddenly began to pick his teeth with a pin.
- “They can’t even speak their own language now—not properly. Fair
- rotten,” the young man added.
- He fascinated Joan. She had never watched anything like him. But Peter
- just hated him.
- § 4
- Upon this scene there presently appeared a new actor. He was preluded by
- a knocking at the door, he was ushered in by Mrs. Pybus who was opening
- and shutting her mouth in a state of breathless respect; he was received
- with the utmost deference by the young man with red hair. Indeed, from
- the moment when his knocking was heard without, the manner and bearing
- of the red-haired young man underwent the most marvellous change. An
- agitated alacrity appeared in his manner; he stood up and moved
- nervously; by weak, neck-ward movements of his head he seemed to
- indicate he now regretted wearing such a bright green tie. The newcomer
- appeared in the doorway. He was a tall, grey-clad, fair gentleman, with
- a face that twitched and a hand that dandled in front of him. He grinned
- his teeth at the room. “So thassem,” he said, touching his teeth with
- his thumbnail.
- He nodded confidentially to the red-haired young man without removing
- his eyes from Joan and Peter. He showed still more of his teeth and
- rattled his thumbnail along them. Then he waved his hand over the table.
- “Clear all this away,” he said, and sat down in the young man’s chair.
- Mrs. Pybus cleared away rapidly, assisted abjectly by the young man.
- Mr. Grimes seemed to check off the two children. “You’re Joan,” he said.
- “I needn’t bother about you. You’re provided for. Peter. Peter’s our
- business.”
- He got out a pocket-book and pencil. “Let’s look at you, Peter. Just
- come out here, will you?”
- Peter obeyed reluctantly and suspiciously.
- “No stockings. Don’t they wear stockings at that school of yours?”
- “Not when we don’t want them,” said Peter. “No.”
- “’Mazes me you wear anything,” said Mr. Grimes. “S’pose it’ll come to
- that. Let’s see your hat.”
- “Haven’t got a hat,” said Peter. “Wouldn’t wear it if I had.”
- “_Wouldn’t_ you!” said Mr. Grimes. “H’m!”
- “Nice little handful,” said Mr. Grimes, and hummed. He produced a paper
- from the pocket-book and read it, rubbing his teeth with the point of
- his pencil.
- “Lersee whassor outfit we wan’,” said Mr. Grimes. “H’m.... H’m....
- H’m....”
- He stood up briskly. “Well, young man, we must go out and get you some
- clothes and things. What’s called a school outfit. We’ll have to go in
- that motor-car again. Quickest way. Get your hat. But you haven’t got a
- hat.”
- “Me come too,” said Joan.
- “No. You can’t come to a tailor’s, and that’s where we’re going. Little
- girls can’t come to tailors, you know,” said Mr. Grimes.
- Peter thought privately that Mr. Grimes was just the sort of beast who
- would take you to a tailor’s. Well, he would stick it out. This couldn’t
- go on for ever. He allowed himself to be guided by Mr. Grimes to the
- door. He restrained an impulse to ask to be allowed to sit beside the
- driver. One doesn’t ask favours of beasts like Grimes.
- Joan went to the window to watch the car and Mr. Grimes’ proceedings
- mistrustfully.
- “I got a nice picture-book for you to look at,” said Mrs. Pybus, coming
- behind her. “Don’t go standing and staring out of the window, dearie.
- It’s an idle thing to stare out of windows.”
- Joan had an unpleasant feeling that she had to comply with this. Under
- the initiative of Mrs. Pybus she sat up to the table and permitted a
- large book to be opened in front of her, feigning attention. She kept
- her eye as much as possible on the window. She was aware of Peter
- getting into the car with Mr. Grimes. There was a sudden buzzing of
- machinery, the slam of a door, and the automobile moved and vanished.
- She gave a divided attention to the picture-book before her, which was
- really not properly a picture-book at all but an old bound volume of the
- _Illustrated London News_ full of wood engravings of royal processions
- and suchlike desiccated matter. It was a dusty, frowsty volume,
- damp-stained at the edges. She tried to be amused. But it was very grey
- and dull, and she felt strangely uneasy. Every few minutes she would
- look up expecting to see the car back outside, but it did not return....
- She heard the red-haired young man in the passage saying he thought he’d
- have to be getting round to the railway-station, and there was some
- point explained by Mrs. Pybus at great length and over and over again
- about the difference between the Great Western and the South Western
- Railway. The front door slammed after him at last, and Mrs. Pybus was
- audible returning to her kitchen.
- Presently she came and looked at Joan with a thin, unreal smile on her
- white face.
- “Getting on all right with the pretty pictures, dearie?” she asked.
- “When’s Peter coming back?” asked Joan.
- “Oh, not for a longish bit,” said Mrs. Pybus. “You see, he’s going to
- school.”
- “Can I go to school?”
- “Not _’is_ school. He’s going to a boy school.”
- “Oh!” said Joan, learning for the first time that schools have sexes.
- “Can I go out in the garden?”
- “It isn’t much of a garden,” said Mrs. Pybus. “But what there is you’re
- welcome.”
- It wasn’t much of a garden. Rather it was a yard, into which a lean-to
- scullery, a coal shed, and a dustbin bit deeply. Along one side was a
- high fence cutting it off from a similar yard, and against this high
- fence a few nasturtiums gingered the colour scheme. A clothes-line
- stretched diagonally across this space and bore a depressed pair of
- black stockings, and in the corner at the far end a lilac bush was
- slowly but steadily and successfully wishing itself dead. The opposite
- corner was devoted to a collection of bottles, the ribs of an umbrella,
- and a dust-pan that had lost its handle. From beneath this curious
- rather than pleasing accumulation peeped the skeleton of a “rockery”
- built of brick clinkers and free from vegetation of any sort. An unseen
- baby a garden or two away deplored its existence loudly. At intervals a
- voice that sounded like the voice of an embittered little girl cut
- across these lamentations:
- “Well, you shouldn’t ’ave _broke_ yer bottle,” said the voice, with a
- note of moral demonstration....
- Joan stayed in this garden for exactly three minutes. Then she returned
- to Mrs. Pybus, who was engaged in some dim operations with a kettle in
- the kitchen. “Drat this old kitchener!” said Mrs. Pybus, rattling at a
- damper.
- “Want to go ’ome,” Joan said, in a voice that betrayed emotion.
- Mrs. Pybus turned her meagre face and surveyed Joan without excessive
- tenderness.
- “This _is_ your ’ome, dearie,” she said.
- “I live at Ingle-Nook,” said Joan.
- Mrs. Pybus shook her head. “All that’s been done away with,” she said.
- “Your aunts ’ave give you up, and you’re going to live ’ere for
- good—’long o’ me.”
- § 5
- Meanwhile Mr. Grimes, with a cheerful kindliness that Peter perceived to
- be assumed, conveyed that young gentleman first to an outfitter, where
- he was subjected to nameless indignities with a tape, and finally sent
- behind a screen and told to change out of his nice, comfortable old
- clothes and Heidelberg sandals into a shirt and a collar and a grey
- flannel suit, and hard black shoes. All of which he did in a mute,
- helpless rage, because he did not consider himself equal to Mr. Grimes
- and the outfitter and his staff (with possibly the chauffeur thrown in)
- in open combat. He was then taken to a hairdresser and severely clipped,
- which struck him as a more sensible proceeding; the stuff they put on
- his head was indeed pleasingly aromatic; and then he was bought some
- foolery of towels and things, and finally a Bible and a prayer-book and
- a box. With this box he returned to the outfitter’s, and was quite
- interested in discovering that a pile of things had accumulated on the
- counter, ties, collars and things, and were to be packed in the box for
- him forthwith. A junior assistant was doing up his Limpsfield clothes in
- a separate parcel. So do we put off childish things. That parcel was to
- go via Mr. Grimes to The Ingle-Nook.
- A memory of certain beloved sea stories came into Peter’s head. “This my
- kit?” he asked Mr. Grimes abruptly.
- “You might call it your kit,” said Mr. Grimes.
- “Am I going on a battleship?” asked Peter.
- Mr. Grimes—and the two outfitting assistants in sympathy—were loudly
- amused.
- “You’re going to High Cross School,” said Mr. Grimes, emerging from his
- mirth. “Firm treatment. Sound Church training. Unruly boys not objected
- to.”
- “I didn’t know,” said Peter.
- They returned to the automobile, and after a mile or so of roads and
- turnings stopped outside a gaunt brace of drab-coloured semi-detached
- villas standing back behind a patch of lawn, and having a walled
- enclosure to the left and an overgrown laurel shrubbery to the right.
- “Here’s High Cross School,” said Mr. Grimes, a statement that was
- rendered unnecessary by a conspicuous black and gold board that rose
- above the walled enclosure. They descended.
- “Wonther which ithe houth,” mused Mr. Grimes, consulting his teeth, and
- then suddenly decided and led Peter towards the right hand of the two
- associated doors. “This,” said Mr. Grimes, as they waited on the
- doorstep, “is a _real_ school.... No nonsense about it,” said Mr.
- Grimes.
- Peter nodded with affected intelligence.
- They were ushered by a slatternly maid-servant into the presence of a
- baldish man with a white, puffy face and pale grey eyes, who was wearing
- a university gown and seemed to be expecting them. He was standing
- before the fireplace in the front parlour, which had a general air of
- being a study. There were an untidy desk facing the window and
- bookshelves in the recess on either side of the fireplace. Over the
- mantel was a tobacco-jar bearing the arms of some college, and reminders
- of Mr. Mainwearing’s university achievements in the form of a college
- shield and Cambridge photographs.
- “Well,” said Mr. Grimes, “here’s your young man,” and thrust Peter
- forward.
- “So you’ve come to join us?” said Mr. Mainwearing with a sort of clouded
- amiability.
- “Join what?” said Peter.
- Mr. Mainwearing raised his eyebrows. “High Cross School,” he said.
- “I’m at the School of St. George and the Venerable Bede,” said Peter.
- “So how can I?”
- “No,” said Mr. Grimes; “you’re joining here now.”
- “But I can’t go to _two_ schools.”
- “Consequently you’re coming to _this_ one,” said Mr. Grimes.
- “It’s very sudden,” said Peter.
- “What’s this about the School of Saint What’s-his-name?” asked Mr.
- Mainwearing of Mr. Grimes.
- “It’s just a sort of fad school they’ve been sending him to,” Mr. Grimes
- explained. “We’re altering all that. It’s a girls’ school, and he’s a
- growing boy. It’s a school where socialism and play-acting are school
- subjects, and everybody runs about with next to nothing on. So his
- proper guardians have decided that’s got to stop. And here we are.”
- Mr. Mainwearing regarded Peter heavily while this was going on.
- “Done any square root yet?” he asked suddenly.
- Peter had not.
- “Know the date of Magna Carta?”
- Peter did not. “It was under John,” he said.
- “I wanted the date,” said Mr. Mainwearing. “What’s the capital of
- Bulgaria?”
- Peter did not know.
- “Know any French irregular verbs?”
- Peter said he didn’t.
- “Got to begin at the beginning,” said Mr. Mainwearing. “Got your
- outfit?”
- “We’ve just seen to that,” said Mr. Grimes. “There’s one or two things
- I’d like to say to you—”
- He glanced at Peter.
- Mr. Mainwearing comprehended. He came and laid one hand on Peter. “Time
- you saw some of your schoolfellows,” he said.
- Under his guiding pressure Peter was impelled along a passage, through
- an archway, across an empty but frowsty schoolroom in which one solitary
- small boy sat and sobbed grievously, and so by way of another passage to
- a kind of glass back-door from which steps went down to a large
- gravelled space, behind the high wall that carried the black and gold
- board. In the corner were parallel bars. A group of nine or ten boys
- were standing round these bars; they were all clad in the same sort of
- grey flannels that Peter was wearing, and they had all started round at
- the sound of the opening of the door. One shock-headed boy, perhaps a
- head taller than any of the rest, had a great red mouth beneath a red
- nose.
- “Boys!” shouted Mr. Mainwearing; “here’s a new chum. See that he learns
- his way about a bit, Probyn.”
- “Yessir!” said the shock-headed boy in a loud adult kind of voice.
- Mr. Mainwearing gave Peter a shove that started him down the steps
- towards the playground, and slammed the door behind him.
- Most of these boys were bigger than any boys that Peter had ever known
- before. They looked enormous. He reckoned some must be fifteen or
- sixteen—quite. They were as big as the biggest Sheldrick girl. Probyn
- seemed indeed as big as a man; Peter could see right across the
- playground that he had a black smear of moustache. His neck and wrists
- and elbows stuck out of his clothes.
- Peter with his hands in his new-found pockets walked slowly towards
- these formidable creatures across the stony playground. They regarded
- him enigmatically. So explorers must feel, who land on a strange beach
- in the presence of an unknown race of men.
- § 6
- “Come on, fathead!” said Probyn as he drew near.
- Peter had expected that tone. He affected indifference.
- “What’s your name?” asked Probyn.
- “Stubland,” said Peter. “You Probyn?”
- “Stubland,” said Probyn. “Stubland. What’s your Christian name?”
- “Peter. What’s yours?”
- Probyn disregarded this counter question markedly. “Simon Peter, eh!
- Your father got you out of the Bible, I expect. Know anything of
- cricket, Simon Peter?”
- “Not much,” said Simon Peter.
- “Can you swim?”
- “No.”
- “Can you fight?”
- “I don’t know.”
- “What’s your father?”
- Peter didn’t answer. Instead, he fixed his attention upon a fair-haired
- boy of about his own size who was standing at the end of the parallel
- bars. “What’s _your_ name?” he asked.
- The fair boy looked at Probyn.
- “Damn it!” said Probyn. “I asked _you_ a question, Mr. Simon Peter.”
- Peter continued disregardful. “Hasn’t this school got a flagstaff?” he
- asked generally.
- Probyn came closer to him and gripped him by the shoulder. “I asked you
- a question, Mr. Simon Peter. What is your father?”
- It was a question Peter could not answer because for some obscure reason
- he could not bring himself to say that his father was dead. If ever he
- said that, he knew his father would be dead. But what else could he say
- of his father? So he seemed to shrink a little and remained mute. “We’ll
- have to cross-examine you,” said Probyn, and shook him.
- The fair boy came in front of Peter. It was clear he had great
- confidence in Probyn. He had a fat, smooth, round face that Peter
- disliked.
- “Simon Peter,” he said. “Answer up.”
- “What is your father?” said Probyn.
- “What’s your father?” repeated the fair boy, and then suddenly flicked
- Peter under the nose with his finger.
- But this did at least enable Peter to change the subject. He smote at
- the fat-faced boy with great vigour and missed him. The fat-faced boy
- dodged back quickly.
- “Hullo!” said Probyn. “Ginger!”
- “That chap’s not going to touch my nose,” said Peter. “Anyhow.”
- “Touch it when I like,” said the fat-faced boy.
- “You won’t.”
- “You want to _fight?_” asked the fat-faced boy, conscious of popular
- support.
- Peter said he wasn’t going to have his nose flicked anyhow.
- “Flick it again, Newton,” said Probyn, “and see.”
- “I’ll show you in no time,” said Newton.
- “Why!—I’d lick you with one hand,” continued Newton.
- Peter said nothing. But he regarded his antagonist very intently.
- “Skinny little snipe,” said Newton. “Whaddyou think you’d do to me?”
- “Hit him, Newton,” said a cadaverous boy with freckles.
- “Hit him, Newton. He’s too cocky,” said another. “Flick his silly nose
- again and see.”
- “I’ll hit him ’f’e wants it,” said Newton, and buttoned up his jacket in
- a preparatory way.
- “Hit him, Newton,” other voices urged.
- “Let him put up his fists,” said Newton.
- “Do that when I please,” said Peter rather faintly.
- Newton had seemed at first just about Peter’s size. Now he seemed very
- much larger. All the boys seemed to have grown larger. They were
- gathering in a vast circle of doom round a minute and friendless Peter.
- Probyn loomed over him like a figure of fate. Peter wondered whether he
- need have hit at Newton. It seemed now a very unwise thing indeed to
- have done. Newton was alternately swaying towards him and swaying away
- from him, and repeating his demand for Peter to put his hands up. He
- seemed on the verge of flicking again. He was going to flick. Probyn
- watched them both critically. Then with a rapid movement of the mind
- Peter realized that Newton’s face was swaying now well within his range;
- the moment had come, and desperately, with a great effort and a wide and
- sweeping movement of the arm, he smote hard at Newton’s cheek. Smack. A
- good blow. Newton recoiled with an expression of astonishment.
- “You—swine!” he said.
- Two other boys came running across the playground, and voices explained,
- “New boy.... Fight....”
- But curiously enough the fight did not go on. Newton at a slightly
- greater distance continued to loom threateningly, but did no more than
- loom. His cheek was very red. “I’ll break your jaw, cutting at me like
- that,” he said. “You swine!” He used foul and novel terms expressive of
- rage. He looked at Probyn as if for approval, but Probyn offered none.
- He continued to threaten, but he did not come within arm’s length again.
- “Hit him back, Newton,” several voices urged, but with no success.
- “Wait till I start on him,” said Newton.
- “Buck up, young Newton,” said Probyn suddenly, “and stop jawing. You
- began it. _I’m_ not going to help you. Make a ring, you chaps. It’s a
- fair fight.”
- Peter found himself facing Newton in the centre of an interested circle.
- Newton was walking crab fashion athwart the circle, swaying with his
- fists and elbows high. He was now acting a dangerous intentness. “Come
- on,” he said terribly.
- “Hit him, Newton,” said the cadaverous boy. “Don’t wait for him.”
- “You started it, Newton,” Probyn insisted. “And he’s hit you fair.”
- A loud familiar sound, the clamorous ringing of a bell, struck across
- the suspended drama. “That’s tea,” said Newton eagerly, dropping his
- fists. “It’s no good starting on him now.”
- “You’ll have to fight him later,” said Probyn. “Now he’s hit you.”
- “It’s up to you, Newton,” said the cadaverous boy, evidently following
- Probyn’s lead.
- “Cavé. It’s Noser,” said a voice.
- There was a little pause.
- “Toke!” cried Probyn.
- “Toke, Simon Peter,” said the cadaverous boy informingly....
- Peter found himself no longer in focus. Every one was moving towards the
- door whence Peter had descended to the playground, and at this door
- there now stood a middle-aged man with a large nose and a sly
- expression, surveying the boys.
- Impelled by gregarious instincts, Peter followed the crowd.
- He did not like these hostile boys. He did not like this shabby-looking
- place. He was quite ready to believe that presently he would have to go
- on fighting Newton. He was not particularly afraid of Newton, but he
- perceived that Probyn stood behind him. He detested Probyn already. He
- was afraid of Probyn. Probyn was like a golliwog. He knew by instinct
- that Probyn was full of disagreeable possibilities for him, and that it
- would be very hard to get away from Probyn. And what did it all mean?
- Was he never going back to Limpsfield again?
- The bell had had exactly the tone of the tea bell at Miss Murgatroyd’s
- school. It might have been the same bell. And it had made his heart
- homesick for the colour and brightness of the School of St. George and
- the Venerable Bede, and for the friendly garden and familiar rooms of
- Ingle-Nook. For the first time he realized that he had fallen into this
- school as an animal falls into a trap, that his world had changed, that
- home was very far away....
- And what had they done to Joan?...
- Had he to live here always?...
- It struck Mr. Noakley, the assistant master with the large nose, as he
- watched the boys at tea, that the new boy had a face like a doll, but
- really that face with its set, shining, expressionless eyes was only the
- mask, the very thin mask, that covered a violent disposition to
- blubber....
- Well, no one was going to see Peter blub. No one was going to hear him
- blub....
- Tonight perhaps in bed.
- He had still to realize the publicity of a school dormitory....
- He knew he couldn’t box, but he had seen something in Newton’s eyes that
- made him feel that Newton was not invincible. He would grip his fists in
- a very knobby way and hit Newton as hard as he could in the face.
- Oh!—_frightfully_ hard....
- Peter was not eating very much. “Bags I your slice of Toke,” said the
- cadaverous boy.
- “Take the beastly stuff,” said Peter.
- “Little spoilt mammy coddle,” thought old Nosey Noakley. “We aren’t good
- enough for him.”
- § 7
- So it was that Mr. Grimes, acting for Lady Charlotte, set about the
- rescue of Joan and Peter from, as she put it, “the freaks, faddists and
- Hill-Top philosophies of the Surrey hills,” and their restoration to the
- established sobrieties and decorums of English life. Very naturally this
- sudden action came as an astonishing blow to the two advanced aunts. At
- nine o’clock that evening Miss Murgatroyd was called down to see Miss
- Phyllis Stubland, who had ridden over on her bicycle. “Where are the
- children?” asked Aunt Phyllis.
- “You sent for them,” said Miss Murgatroyd.
- “Sent for them!”
- “Yes. I remember now. The young man said it was Lady Charlotte Sydenham.
- Didn’t you know? She is going abroad tomorrow or the next day.”
- “Sent for them!” Aunt Phyllis repeated....
- Two hours later Aunt Phyllis was telling the terrible news to Mary. Aunt
- Phœbe was in London for the night to see Mr. Tree play _Richard II_, and
- there were no means of communicating with her until the morning. The
- Ingle-Nook was much too Pre-Raphaelite to possess a telephone, and Aunt
- Phœbe was sleeping at the flat of a friend in Church Row, Hampstead.
- Next morning a telegram found her still in bed.
- “Children kidnapped by Lady Charlotte consult Sycamore Phyllis”
- said the telegram.
- “_No!_” cried Aunt Phœbe sharply.
- Then as the little servant-maid was on the point of closing the door,
- “Tell Miss Jepson,” Aunt Phœbe commanded....
- Miss Jepson found Aunt Phœbe out of bed and dressing with a rapid
- casualness. It was manifest that some great crisis had happened. “An
- outrage upon all women,” said Aunt Phœbe. “I have been outraged.”
- “My dear!” said Miss Jepson.
- “Read that telegram!” cried Aunt Phœbe, pointing to a small ball of pink
- paper in the corner of the room.
- Miss Jepson went over to the corner with a perplexed expression, and
- smoothed out the telegram and read it.
- “A _Bradshaw_ and a hansom!” Aunt Phœbe was demanding as she moved
- rapidly about the room from one scattered garment to another. “No
- breakfast. I can eat nothing. Nothing. I am a tigress. A maddened
- tigress. Maddened. Beyond endurance. Oh! Can you reach these buttons,
- dear?”
- Miss Jepson hovered about her guest readjusting her costume in
- accordance with commonplace standards while Aunt Phœbe expressed herself
- in Sibylline utterances.
- “Children dedicated to the future.... Reek of ancient corruptions....
- Abomination of desolation.... The nine fifty-three.... Say half an
- hour.... Remonstrance.... An avenging sword.... The sword of the Lord
- and of Gideon.”
- “Are you going to this Mr. Sycamore?” asked Miss Jepson suddenly.
- Aunt Phœbe seemed lost for a time and emerged with, “Good God!—_No!_
- This is an occasion when a woman must show she can act as a man. This
- tries us, Amanda. I will have no man in this. No man at all! Are women
- to loll in hareems for ever while men act and fight? When little
- children are assailed?...”
- “Chastlands,” said Aunt Phœbe to the cabman, waving Miss Jepson’s
- _Bradshaw_ in her hand.
- The man looked stupid.
- “Oh! Charing Cross,” she cried scornfully. “The rest is beyond you.”
- And in the train she startled her sole fellow-traveller and made him get
- out at the next station by saying suddenly twice over in her loud, clear
- contralto voice the one word “_Action_.” She left Miss Jepson’s
- _Bradshaw_ in the compartment when she got out.
- She found Chastlands far gone in packing for Lady Charlotte’s flight
- abroad. “I demand Lady Charlotte,” she said. She followed up old Cashel
- as he went to announce her. He heard her coming behind him, but his
- impression of her was so vivid that he deemed it wiser not to notice
- this informality. And besides in his dry, thin way he wanted to hear why
- she demanded Lady Charlotte. He perceived the possibilities of a
- memorable clash. He was a quiet, contemplative man who hid his humour
- like a miser’s treasure and lived much upon his memories. Weeks after a
- thing had happened he would suddenly titter, in bed, or in church, or
- while he was cleaning his plate. And none were told why he tittered.
- For a moment Aunt Phœbe hovered on the landing outside the Chastlands
- drawing-room.
- “I can’t see her,” she heard Lady Charlotte say, with something like a
- note of terror. “It is impossible.”
- “Leave her to me, me Lady,” said a man’s voice.
- “Tell her to wait, Cashel,” said Lady Charlotte.
- Aunt Phœbe entered, trailing her artistic robes. Before her by the
- writing-table in the big window stood Lady Charlotte, flounced,
- bonneted, dressed as if for instant flight. A slender, fair, wincing man
- in grey stood nearer, his expression agitated but formidable. They had
- evidently both risen to their feet as Aunt Phœbe entered. Cashel made
- insincere demonstrations of intervention, but Aunt Phœbe disposed of him
- with a gesture. A haughty and terrible politeness was in her manner, but
- she sobbed slightly as she spoke.
- “Lady Charlotte,” she said, “where are my wards?”
- “They are _my_ wards,” said Lady Charlotte no less haughtily.
- “Excuse me, Lady Charlotte. Permit me,” said Mr. Grimes, with soothing
- gestures of his lean white hands.
- “Please do not intervene,” said Aunt Phœbe.
- “Mr. Grimes, madam, is my solicitor,” said Lady Charlotte. “You may go,
- Cashel.”
- Cashel went reluctantly.
- Mr. Grimes advanced a step and dandled his hands and smiled
- ingratiatingly. Italian and Spanish women will stab, he had heard, and
- fishwives are a violent class. Otherwise he believed all women, however
- terrible in appearance, to be harmless. This gave him courage.
- “Miss Stubland, I believe,” he said. “These young people, young Stubland
- and his foster-sister to wit, are at present in my charge—under
- instructions from Lady Charlotte.”
- “Where?” asked Aunt Phœbe.
- “Our case, Miss Stubland, is that they were not being properly educated
- in your charge. That is our case. They were receiving no sound moral and
- religious training, and they were being brought up in—to say the least
- of it—an eccentric fashion. Our aim in taking them out of your charge is
- to secure for them a proper ordinary English bringing up.”
- “Every word an insult,” panted Aunt Phœbe. “Every word. What have you
- done with them?”
- “Until we are satisfied that you will consent to continue their training
- on proper lines, Miss Stubland, you can scarcely expect us to put it in
- your power to annoy these poor children further.”
- Mr. Grimes’ face was wincing much more than usual, and these involuntary
- grimaces affected Aunt Phœbe in her present mood as though they were
- deliberate insults. He did not allow for this added exasperation.
- “Annoy!” cried Aunt Phœbe.
- “That is the usual expression. We are perfectly within our rights in
- refusing you access. Having regard to your manifest determination to
- upset any proper arrangement.”
- “You refuse to let me know where those children are?”
- “Unless you can get an order against us.”
- “You mean—go to some old judge?”
- Mr. Grimes gesticulated assent. If she chose to phrase it in that way,
- so much the worse for her application.
- “You won’t—— You will go on with this kidnapping?”
- “Miss Stubland, we are entirely satisfied with our present course and
- our present position.”
- Lady Charlotte endorsed him with three great nods.
- Aunt Phœbe stood aghast.
- Mr. Grimes remained quietly triumphant. Lady Charlotte stood quietly
- triumphant behind him. For a moment it seemed as if Aunt Phœbe had no
- reply of any sort to make.
- Then suddenly she advanced three steps and seized upon Mr. Grimes. One
- hand gripped his nice grey coat below the collar behind, the other, the
- looseness of his waistcoat just below the tie. And lifting him up upon
- his toes Aunt Phœbe shook him.
- Mr. Grimes was a lean, spare, ironical man. Aunt Phœbe was a
- well-developed woman. Yet only by an enormous effort did she break the
- instinctive barriers that make a man sacred from feminine assault. It
- was an effort so enormous that when at last it broke down the dam of
- self-restraint, it came through a boiling flood of physical power. It
- came through with a sort of instantaneousness. At one moment Mr. Grimes
- stood before Lady Charlotte’s eyes dominating the scene; at the next he
- was, as materialists say of the universe, “all vibrations.” He was a
- rag, he was a scrap of carpet in Aunt Phœbe’s hands. The appetite for
- shaking seemed to grow in Aunt Phœbe as she shook.
- From the moment when Aunt Phœbe gripped him until she had done shaking
- him nobody except Lady Charlotte made an articulate sound. And all that
- Lady Charlotte said, before astonishment overcame her, was one loud
- “Haw!” The face of Mr. Grimes remained set, except for a certain
- mechanical rattling of the teeth in a wild stare at Aunt Phœbe; Aunt
- Phœbe’s features bore that earnest calm one may see upon the face of a
- good woman who washes clothes or kneads bread. Then suddenly it was as
- if Aunt Phœbe woke up out of a trance.
- “You make—you make me forget myself!” said Aunt Phœbe with a low sob,
- and after one last shake relinquished him.
- Mr. Grimes gyrated for a moment and came to rest against a massive
- table. He was still staring at Aunt Phœbe.
- For a moment the three people remained breathing heavily and
- contemplating the outrage. At last Mr. Grimes was able to
- raise a wavering, pointing finger to gasp, “You have—you
- have—yes—indeed—forgotten yourself!”
- Then, as if he struggled to apprehend the position, “You—you have
- assaulted me.”
- “Let it be—let it be a warning to you,” said Aunt Phœbe.
- “That is a threat.”
- “Agreed,” panted Aunt Phœbe with spirit, though she had not meant to
- threaten him at all.
- “If you think, madam, that you can assault me with impunity——”
- “I shouldn’t have thought it—before I took hold of you. A bag of
- bones.... Man indeed!” And then very earnestly—“_Yes._”
- She paused. The pause held all three of them still.
- “But why—oh, why!—should I bandy words with such a thing as you?” she
- asked with a sudden belated recovery of her dignity. “_You—_”
- She sought her word carefully.
- “Flibber-gib!”
- And forgetting altogether the mission upon which she had come, Aunt
- Phœbe turned about to make her exit from the scene. It seemed to her,
- perhaps justly, that it was impossible to continue the parley further.
- “Legalized scoundrel!” she said over her shoulder, and moved towards the
- door. In that first tremendous clash of the New Woman and the Terrific
- Old Lady, it must be admitted that the New Woman carried off, so to
- speak, the physical honours. Lady Charlotte stood against the fireplace
- visibly appalled. Only when Aunt Phœbe was already at the door did it
- occur to Lady Charlotte to ring the bell to have her visitor “shown
- out.” Her shaking hand could scarcely find the bell handle. For the rest
- she was ineffective, wasting great opportunities for scorn and dignity.
- She despised herself for not having a larger, fiercer solicitor. She
- doubted herself. For the first time in her life Lady Charlotte Sydenham
- doubted herself, and quailed before a new birth of time.
- Upon the landing appeared old Cashel, mutely respectful. He showed out
- Aunt Phœbe in profound silence. He watched her retreating form with
- affectionate respect, stroking his cheek slowly with two fingers. He
- closed the door.
- He stood as one who seeks to remember. “Flibber-jib,” he said at last
- very softly, without exultation or disapproval. He simply wanted to have
- it exactly right. Then he went upstairs to have a long, mild, respectful
- look at Mr. Grimes, and to ask if he could do anything for him....
- § 8
- Aunt Phœbe’s return to The Ingle-Nook blended triumph and perplexity.
- “I could never have imagined a man so flimsy,” she said.
- “But where are the children?” asked Aunt Phyllis.
- “If all men are like him—then masculine ascendancy is an imposture.”
- (“Yes, but where are the children?”)
- “So a baulked tigress might feel.”
- Aunt Phyllis decided to write to Mr. Sycamore.
- § 9
- Mr. Mainwearing was the proprietor of a private school for young
- gentlemen, not by choice but by reason of the weaknesses of his
- character. It was card-playing more than anything else that had made him
- an educator. And it was vanity and the want of any sense of proportion
- that had led to the card-playing.
- Mr. Mainwearing’s father had been a severe parent, severe to the pitch
- of hostility. He had lost his wife early, and he had taken a grudge
- against his only son, whose looks he did not like. He had sent him to
- Cambridge with a bitter assurance that he would do no good there; had
- kept him too short of money to be comfortable, spent most of his
- property—he was a retired tea-broker—in disappointing and embittering
- jaunts into vice, and died suddenly, leaving—unwillingly, but he had to
- leave it—about three thousand pounds to his heir. Young Mainwearing had
- always been short of pocket-money, and for a time he regarded this
- legacy as limitless wealth; he flashed from dingy obscurity into
- splendour, got himself coloured shirts and remarkable ties, sought the
- acquaintance of horses, slipped down to London for music-halls and
- “life.” When it dawned upon him that even three thousand pounds was not
- a limitless ocean of money, he attempted to maintain its level by
- winning more from his fellow undergraduates. Nap and poker were the
- particular forms of sport he affected. He reckoned that he was, in a
- quiet way, rather cleverer than most fellows, and that he would win. But
- he was out in his reckoning. He left Cambridge with a Junior Optime in
- the Mathematical Tripos and a residuum of about seven hundred pounds. He
- was a careful cricketer, and he had liked football at school in his
- concluding years when he was big enough to barge into the other chaps.
- Surveying the prospect before him, he decided that a school was the best
- place for him, he advertised himself as “of gentlemanly appearance” and
- “good at games,” and he found his billet in a preparatory school at
- Brighton. Thence he went to a big grammar school, and thence came to the
- High Cross School to remain first as assistant, then as son-in-law and
- partner, and now as sole proprietor. Mrs. Mainwearing was not very
- useful as a helpmeet, as she was slightly but not offensively defective
- in her mind; still one must take life as one finds it. She was, at any
- rate, regular in her habits, and did not interfere with the housekeeper,
- a worthy, confidence-creating woman, much tipped by the tenderer sort of
- parent.
- Of course Mr. Mainwearing had no special training as a teacher. He had
- no ideas about education at all. He had no social philosophy. He had
- never asked why he was alive or what he was up to. Instinct, perhaps,
- warned him that the answer might be disagreeable. Much less did he
- inquire what his boys were likely to be up to. And it did not occur to
- him, it did not occur to any one in those days, to consider that these
- deficiencies barred him in any way from the preparation of the genteel
- young for life. He taught as he had been taught; his teachers had done
- the same; he was the last link of a long chain of tradition that had
- perhaps in the beginning had some element of intention in it as to what
- was to be made of the pupil. Schools, like religions, tend perpetually
- to forget what they are for. High Cross School, like numberless schools
- in Great Britain in those days, had forgotten completely; it was a
- mysterious fated routine; the underlying idea seemed to be that boys
- must go to school as puppies have the mange. Certain school books
- existed, God alone knew why, and the classes were taken through them. It
- was like reading prayers. Certain examination boards checked this
- process in a way that Mr. Mainwearing felt reflected upon his honour,
- and like all fundamentally dishonest people he was inclined to be touchy
- about his honour. But parents wanted examination results and he had to
- give in. Preparation for examinations dominated the school; no work was
- done in the school that did not lead towards an examination paper; if
- there had been no examinations, no work would have been done at all. But
- these examinations might have been worse than they were. The examiners
- were experienced teachers and considerate for their kind. They respected
- the great routine. The examiners in classics had, at best, Babu Latin
- and less Greek, and so they knew quite well how to set a paper that
- would enable the intelligent candidate to conceal an entire incapacity
- for reading, writing, or speaking a classical language; the examiners in
- mathematics knew nothing of practical calculations, and treated the
- subject as a sort of Patience game; the foreign language examiners stuck
- loyally to the grammar; in drawing the examiners asked you to copy
- “copies,” they did not, at any rate, require you to draw things; and
- altogether the “curse of examinations” might have pressed on Mr.
- Mainwearing harder than it did. Suppose the language papers had been
- just long passages to translate into and out of English, and that the
- mathematical test had been all problems, and the drawing test had been a
- test of drawing anything! What school could have stood the strain?
- To assist him in the work of his school Mr. Mainwearing had gathered
- about him a staff of three. He had found a young man rather of his own
- social quality, but very timid, a B.A. Cantab. by way of the botanical
- special; then there was Noakley, a rather older, sly creature, with a
- large overbalancing nose, who had failed to qualify years ago as an
- elementary assistant schoolmaster and so had strayed into the uncharted
- and uncertificated ways of a private school; and finally there was Kahn,
- an Alsatian, who taught languages and the piano. With these three and
- the active assistance of Mrs. Rich, the housekeeper, the school
- maintained its sluggish routines.
- The boys slept in two long rooms that had been made by knocking through
- partitions in the two upper floors, and converted into dormitories by
- the simple expedient of crowding them with iron bedsteads and small
- chests of drawers. It was the business of Noakley—who had a separate
- room on the top floor—to arouse the boys at seven with cries and
- violence for the business of the day. But there was a tacit
- understanding between him and the boys not to molest each other until
- about twenty minutes past.
- It was a rule, established by Mr. Mainwearing in a phase of hygienic
- enthusiasm some years before, that on fine mornings throughout the year
- the boys should go for a sharp run before breakfast. It was a modern and
- impressive thing to do and it cost him nothing. It was Noakley’s duty to
- accompany them on this run. He was unable to imagine any more loathsome
- duty. So that he had invented a method of supplementing the rains of
- heaven by means of a private watering-pot. His room was directly above
- Mr. Mainwearing’s, and Mr. Mainwearing slept with his window shut and
- his blinds down, and about seven-fifteen or so every morning the curious
- passer-by might have seen a lean, sly man with an enormous nose, his
- mouth wide open and his tongue out with effort, leaning far out of an
- upper bedroom of High Cross School and industriously and carefully
- watering the window and window-sill of the room two storeys below him.
- Later, perhaps, a patient observer might have been rewarded by the
- raising of Mr. Mainwearing’s blind and a glimpse of Mr. Mainwearing,
- unshaven and in a white cotton nightgown, glancing out at the
- weather....
- So generally the morning began with a tedious, sticky, still sleepy hour
- called Early Prep. in the schoolroom on the ground floor. It was only
- during Kahn’s alternate week of morning duty that the run ever occurred.
- Then it wasn’t a run. It began as a run and settled down as soon as it
- was out of sight of the school to a sulky walk and a muttered monologue
- by Kahn in German—he never spoke any language but German before
- breakfast—about his “magen.”
- Noakley’s method in early prep. was to sit as near to the fire as
- possible in the winter and at the high desk in summer, and to leave the
- boys alone so long as they left him alone. They conversed in undertones,
- made and threw paper darts at one another, read forbidden fiction, and
- so forth. Breakfast at half-past eight released them, and there was a
- spell of playground before morning school at half-past nine. At
- half-past nine Mr. Mainwearing and Mr. Smithers, the botanical Cantab,
- appeared in the world, gowned and a little irritable, and prayers and
- scripture inaugurated the official day. Mr. Mainwearing’s connexion was
- a sound Church connexion, and he opened the day with an abbreviated
- Matins and the collect and lessons for the day. Then the junior half of
- the school went upstairs to the second class-room with Mr. Smithers,
- while Mr. Mainwearing dealt tediously with Chronicles or Kings.
- Meanwhile Kahn and Noakley corrected exercise-books in the third
- class-room, and waited their time to take up their part in the great
- task of building up the British imperial mind. By eleven o’clock each of
- the four class-rooms was thoroughly stuffy and the school was in full
- swing; Mr. Mainwearing, who could not have translated a new satire by
- Juvenal to save his life, was “teaching” Greek or Latin or history, Mr.
- Smithers was setting or explaining exercises on the way to quadratic
- equations or Euclid Book II., which were the culminating points of High
- Cross mathematics; Kahn, hoarse with loud anger, was making a personal
- quarrel of the French class; and Noakley was gently setting the feet of
- the younger boys astray in geography or arithmetic or parsing. This was
- the high-water mark of the day’s effort.
- After the midday dinner, which was greasy and with much too much potato
- in it, came a visible decline. In the afternoon Mr. Mainwearing would
- start a class upon some sort of exercises, delegate Probyn to keep
- order, and retire to slumber in his study; Smithers and Kahn, who both
- suffered from indigestion, would quarrel bitterly with boys they
- disliked and inflict punishments; Noakley would sleep quietly through a
- drawing class on the tacit understanding that there was no audible
- misbehaviour, and that the boys would awaken him if they heard Mr.
- Mainwearing coming.
- Mr. Mainwearing, when he came, usually came viciously. He would awaken
- in an evil temper and sit cursing his life for some time before he could
- rouse himself to a return to duty. He would suddenly become filled with
- suspicions, about the behaviour of the boys or the worthiness of his
- assistants. He would take his cane and return with a heavy scowl on his
- face through the archway to his abandoned class.
- He would hear a murmur of disorder, a squeak of “cavé!” and a hush.
- Or he would hear Probyn’s loud bellow: “Shut up, young Pyecroft. Shut
- it, I say!—or I’ll report you!”
- He would appear threateningly in the doorway.
- “What’s he doing, Probyn?” he would ask. “What’s he doing?”
- “Humbugging about, Sir. He’s _always_ humbugging about.”
- The diffused wrath of Mr. Mainwearing would gather to a focus. If there
- were no little beasts like young Pyecroft he wouldn’t be in this
- infernal, dull, dreary hole of a school.
- “_I’ll_ teach you to humbug about, Pyecroft,” he would say. “Come out,
- Sir!”
- “Please, Sir!”
- Roar. “Don’t _bandy_ words with me, you little Hound! Come out, I say!”
- “Please——!” Young Pyecroft would come out slowly and weeping. Mr.
- Mainwearing would grip him hungrily.
- “_I’ll_ teach you to humbug about. (Cut.) I’ll teach you! (Cut.) I can’t
- leave this class-room for a moment but half a dozen of you must go
- turning it upside down.” (Cut.)
- “Wow!”
- “Don’t answer _me_, Sir!” (Cut.) “Don’t answer me.” (Cut.) “_Now_, Sir?”
- Pyecroft completely subdued. Pyecroft relinquished.
- “Now, are there any more of you?” asked Mr. Mainwearing, feeling a
- little better.
- Then he would hesitate. Should he take the set work at once, or should
- he steal upstairs on tiptoe to catch out one of the assistants? His
- practice varied. He always suspected Noakley of his afternoon sleep, and
- was never able to catch him. Noakley slept with the class-room door
- slightly open. His boys could hear the opening of the class-room door
- downstairs. When they did they would smack down a book upon the desk
- close beside him, and Noakley would start teaching instantly like an
- automaton that has just been released. He didn’t take a second to
- awaken, so that he was very hard indeed to catch.
- The school remained a scene of jaded activities until four, when a bell
- rang for afternoon prayers under Mr. Mainwearing in the main schoolroom.
- Then the boys would sing a hymn while Kahn accompanied on a small
- harmonium that stood in the corner of the room. While prayers were going
- on a certain scattered minority of the boys were speculating whether
- Kahn or Smithers would remember this or that task that had been imposed
- in a moment of passion, weighing whether it was safer to obey or forget.
- Kahn and Smithers would return to the class-rooms reluctantly to gather
- in the harvest of their own wrath, but now for a little time Noakley was
- free to do nothing. Noakley hardly ever imposed punishments. When he was
- spoken to upon the subject he would put his nose down in a thoughtful
- manner and reply in a tone of mild observation: “The boys, they seem to
- _mind_ me somehow.”
- Meanwhile the released boys dispersed to loaf about the playground and
- the outhouses and playing-field until tea at five. Sometimes there was a
- hectic attempt at cricket or football in the field in which Mr.
- Mainwearing participated, and then tea was at half-past five. When Mr.
- Mainwearing participated he liked to bat, and he did not like to be
- bowled out. Noakley was vaguely supposed to superintend tea and evening
- prep., and the boys, after a supper of milk and biscuits, were packed
- off to bed at half-past eight. It was much too early to send the bigger
- boys to bed, but “Good God!” said Mr. Mainwearing; “am I to have _no_
- peace in my day?” And he tried to ease his conscience about what might
- go on in the dormitories after bedtime by directing Noakley to “exercise
- a general supervision,” and by occasionally stealing upstairs in his
- socks.
- Wednesday and Saturday were half-holidays, and in the afternoon the boys
- wore flannels or shorts, according to the season, and played pick-up
- cricket or football or hockey in a well-worn field at the back of the
- school, or they went for a walk with Noakley or Smithers. On Sundays
- they wore top hats and pseudo-Eton jackets, and went to church in the
- morning and the evening. In the afternoon Smithers took Scripture
- wearily for an hour, and then went for a walk with Noakley. And on
- Sunday evening they wrote home carefully supervised letters saying how
- happy they were and how they were all in the best of health and about
- “examinational prospects,” and how they hoped they were making
- satisfactory progress and suchlike topics. But they never gave any
- account of the talk that went on during the playground loafing, nor of
- the strange games and ceremonies over which Probyn presided in the
- dormitories, nor of the exercises of Mr. Mainwearing’s cane. There was
- no library, and the boys never read anything except school books and
- such printed matter as they themselves introduced into the school. They
- never read nor drew nor painted nor made verses to please themselves.
- They never dreamt of acting or singing. Their only training in the use
- of their hands was at cricket, and they never looked at a newspaper.
- Occasionally Smithers gave a lesson in botany, but there was no other
- science teaching. Science teaching requires apparatus and apparatus
- costs money, and so far as the prospectus went it was quite easy to call
- the botany “science.”...
- § 10
- In this manner did High Cross School grind and polish its little batch
- of boys for their participation in the affairs of the greatest, most
- civilized and most civilizing empire the world has ever seen.
- It was, perhaps, a bad specimen of an English private school, but it was
- a specimen. There were worse as well as better among the schools of
- England. There were no doubt many newer and larger, many cleaner, many
- better classified. Some had visiting drill-sergeants, some had chemistry
- cupboards, some had specially built gymnasia, some even had school
- libraries of a hundred volumes or so.... Most of them had better housing
- and better arranged dormitories. And most of them were consistently
- “preparatory,” stuck to an upward age-limit, and turned out a boy as
- soon as he became a youth to go on to business or medicine or the public
- schools. Mr. Mainwearing’s school was exceptional in this, that it had
- to hold on to all it could get. He had a connexion with one or two
- solicitors, an understanding—Mr. Grimes was one of his friends—and his
- school contained in addition to Peter several other samples of that
- unfortunate type of boy whose school is found for him by a solicitor.
- Some stayed at Windsor with Mr. Mainwearing during the holidays. In that
- matter High Cross School was exceptional. But the want of any
- intellectual interest, of any spontaneous activities of the mind at all
- in High Cross School, was no exceptional thing.
- Life never stands altogether still, but it has a queer tendency to form
- stationary eddies, and very much of the education of middle-class and
- upper-class youth in England had been an eddy for a century. The still
- exquisite and impressionable brains of the new generation came tumbling
- down the stream, curious, active, greedy, and the eddying schools caught
- them with a grip of iron and spun them round and round for six or seven
- precious years and at last flung them out....
- § 11
- Into this vicious eddy about Mr. Mainwearing’s life and school came the
- developing brain of Master Peter Stubland, and resented it extremely. At
- first he had been too much astonished by his transfer from Limpsfield to
- entertain any other emotion; it was only after some days at High Cross
- School that he began to realize that the experience was not simply
- astonishing but uncongenial, and indeed hateful.
- He discovered he hated the whole place. Comprehended within this general
- hatred were particular ones. He hated Newton. The fight remained in
- suspense, neither boy knew anything of scientific fisticuffs, neither
- had ever worn a boxing-glove, and both were disposed to evade the hard,
- clear issue of the ring. But Newton continued to threaten and grimace at
- him, and once as he was passing Peter on the staircase he turned about
- and punched him in the back.
- For Newton Peter’s hatred was uncomplicated; for Probyn and a second boy
- nearly as big, a fair, sleepy boy named Ames, Peter had a feeling that
- differed from a clear, clean hatred; it had an element of disgust and
- dread in it. Probyn, with Ames as an accessory and Newton as his pet
- toady, dominated the school. It is an unnatural and an unwholesome thing
- for boys and youths of various ages to be herded as closely together as
- they were in High Cross School; the natural instinct of the young is
- against such an association. In a good, big school whose atmosphere is
- wholesome, boys will classify themselves out in the completest way; they
- will not associate, they will scarcely speak with boys outside their own
- year. There is a foolish way of disposing of this fact by saying that
- boys are “such Snobs.” But indeed they are kept apart by the fiercest
- instinct of self-preservation. All life and all its questions are
- stirring and unfolding in the young boy; in every sort of young creature
- a natural discretion fights against forced and premature developments.
- “Keep to your phase,” says nature. The older boys, perplexed by novel
- urgencies and curiosities, are embarrassed by their younger fellows;
- younger boys are naturally afraid of older ones and a little disposed to
- cringe. But what were such considerations as these to a man like
- Mainwearing? He had never thought over, he had long since forgotten, his
- own development. Any boy, old or young, whose parents could pay the
- bill, was got into the school and kept in the school as long as
- possible. None of the school work was interesting; there were constant
- gaps in the routine when there was nothing to do but loaf. It was
- inevitable that the older boys should become mischievous louts; they
- bullied and tormented and corrupted the younger boys because there was
- nothing else to do; if there had been anything else to do they would
- have absolutely disregarded the younger boys; and the younger boys did
- what they could to propitiate these powerful and unaccountable giants.
- The younger boys “sucked up” to the bigger boys; they became, as it
- were, clients; they were annexed by patrons. They professed unlimited
- obedience in exchange for protection. Newton, for instance, called
- himself Probyn’s “monkey”; Pyecroft was Ames’s. Probyn would help Newton
- with his sums, amuse himself by putting him to the torture (when Newton
- was expected to display a doglike submission) or make him jealous by
- professing an affection for other small boys.
- Peter came into this stuffy atmosphere of forced and undignified
- relationships instinct, though he knew it not, with a passionate sense
- of honour. From the very beginning he knew there was something in these
- boys and in their atmosphere that made them different from himself,
- something from which he had to keep himself aloof. There was a word
- missing from his vocabulary that would have expressed it, and that word
- was “Cad.” But at the School of St. George and the Venerable Bede they
- were not taught to call any people “cads.”
- He was a boy capable of considerable reserve. He did not, like young
- Winterbaum, press his every thought and idea upon those about him. He
- could be frank where he was confident, but this sense of difference
- smote him dumb. Several of his schoolfellows, old Noakley, and Mr.
- Mainwearing, became uncomfortably aware of an effect of unspoken comment
- in Peter. He would receive a sudden phrase of abuse with a thoughtful
- expression, as though he weighed it and compared it with some exterior
- standard. This irritated a school staff accustomed to use abusive
- language. Probyn, after Peter had hit Newton, took a fancy to him that
- did not in the least modify Peter’s instinctive detestation of the red
- nostrils and the sloppy mouth and the voluminous bellow. Peter became
- rapidly skilful in avoiding Probyn’s conversation, and this monstrously
- enhanced his attraction for Probyn. Probyn’s attention varied between
- deliberate attempts to vex and deliberate attempts to propitiate. He
- kept alive the promise of a fight with Newton, and frankly declared that
- Peter could lick Newton any day. Newton was as distressed as a cast
- mistress.
- One evening the cadaverous boy discovered Peter drawing warriors on
- horseback. He reported this strange gift to Ames. Ames came demanding
- performances, and Peter obliged.
- “He _can_ draw,” said Ames. “George and the Dragon, eh? It’s _good_.”
- Probyn was shouted to, and joined in the admiration.
- Peter drew this and that by request.
- “Draw a woman,” said Ames, and then, as the nimble pencil obeyed,
- “No—not an old woman. Draw—you know. Draw a savage woman.”
- “Draw a girl bathing—like they are in _Ally Sloper’s Half-Holiday_,”
- said Probyn. “Just with light things on.”
- “Draw a heathen goddess,” said Ames. “With nothing on at all.”
- Peter said he couldn’t draw goddesses.
- “Go on,” said Ames. “Draw a savage woman.”
- Peter, being pressed, tried a negress. They hung over him insisting upon
- details.
- “Get _out_, young Newton!” cried Probyn. “Don’t come hanging round here.
- He’s drawing things.”
- Ames pressed further requests.
- “Shan’t draw any more,” said Peter with a sudden disinclination.
- “Go it, Simon Peter,” said Ames, “don’t be a mammy-good.”
- “Gaw! if I could draw!” said Probyn.
- But Peter had finished drawing.
- § 12
- No further questions were asked Peter about his father, but on Sunday
- night, when home-letter time came round, any doubt about the soundness
- of his social position was set at rest by Mr. Mainwearing himself.
- Home-letters from High Cross School involved so many delicate
- considerations that the proprietor made it his custom to supervise them
- himself. He distributed sheets of paper with the school heading, and
- afterwards he collected them and addressed them himself in his study.
- “You, Stubland, must write a letter to your aunt,” he said loudly across
- the room, “and tell her how you are getting on.”
- “Aunt Phyllis?” said Peter.
- “No, no!” Mr. Mainwearing answered in clear tones. “Your aunt, Lady
- Charlotte Sydenham.”
- Respectful glances at Peter, and a stare of admiration from Probyn.
- After a season of reflection Peter held up his hand. “Please, Sir, I
- don’t write letters to Lady Charlotte.”
- “You must begin.”
- Still further reflection. “I want to write to my Aunt Phyllis.”
- “Nonsense! Do as I tell you.”
- Peter reflected again for some minutes. He was deeply moved. He
- controlled a disposition to weep. (No one was going to see Peter blub in
- this school—ever.) Then Mr. Mainwearing saw him begin to write, with
- intervals of deep thought. But the letter was an unsatisfactory one.
- “_Dear Aunt Phyllis_,” it began—in spite of instructions.
- “_This is a very nice school and I like it very much. I have no
- pocket-money. We eat Toke. Please come and take me away now. Your
- affectionate nephew_
- “PETER.”
- Then Peter rubbed his eyes and it made his finger wet, and there was a
- drop of eye wet fell on the paper, but he did not blub. He did not blub,
- he knew, because he had made up his mind not to blub, but his face was
- flushed almost like that of a boy who has been blubbing.
- Mr. Mainwearing came and read the letter. “Come, come,” he said, “this
- won’t do,” which was just what Peter had expected. “This is obstinacy,”
- said Mr. Mainwearing.
- He got Peter a fresh sheet of paper and stood over him. “Write as I tell
- you,” said Mr. Mainwearing.
- The other boys listened as this letter was dictated to a quiet but
- obedient Peter:
- “_Dear Lady Charlotte_,
- “_I arrived safely on Wednesday at High Cross School_, _which I like
- very much. I had a long ride in an automobile. Mr. Grimes bought me
- a splendid bat. Mr. Mainwearing has examined me upon my attainments,
- and believes that with effort I shall make satisfactory progress
- here. We play cricket here and do modern science as well as our
- classical studies. I hope you may never be disappointed by my
- efforts after all your kindness to me._
- “_Your affectionate nephew_,
- “PETER STUBLAND.”
- In the night Peter woke up out of an ugly and miserable dream, and his
- eyes were wet with tears. He believed he was caught at High Cross School
- for good and all. He believed that all the things he hated and dreaded
- were about him now for ever.
- § 13
- From the first Mr. Mainwearing had been prepared for Peter’s antagonism.
- He had been warned by Mr. Grimes that Peter might prove “a little
- difficult.” The letter to Aunt Phyllis confirmed this impression he had
- already formed of a fund of stiff resistance in his new pupil. “I shall
- have to talk to that young man,” he said.
- The occasion was not long in coming.
- It came next morning in the general Scripture lesson. The boys were
- reading the Gospel of St. Matthew verse by verse, and in order to check
- inattention Mr. Mainwearing, instead of allowing the boys to read in
- rotation, was dodging the next verse irregularly from boy to boy. “Now,
- Pyecroft,” he would say; “Now—Rivers.”
- He was always ready to pick up a nickname and improve upon it for the
- general amusement. “Now, Simonides,” he said.
- No answer.
- “Simonides!”
- Peter, with his New Testament open before him, was studying the map of
- Africa on the end wall. That was Egypt and that was the Nile, and down
- that you went to Uganda, where all the people dressed in white and Nobby
- walked fearlessly among lions.
- Peter became aware of a loud shout of “Sim-on-i-des!”
- It was apparently being addressed to him by Mr. Mainwearing. He returned
- at a jump to Europe and High Cross School.
- “Wool-gathering again,” said Mr. Mainwearing. “Thinking of the dear old
- Agapemone, eh? We can’t have that here, young man. We can’t allow that
- here. We must quicken that proud but sluggish spirit of yours. With the
- usual stimulus. Come out, sir.”
- He moved towards the cane, which hung from a nail beside the high desk.
- Obliging schoolfellows explained to Peter. “He spoke to you three
- times.” “He’s going to swish you.” “You’ll get it.”
- Peter went very white and sat very tight.
- “Now, young man,” said Mr. Mainwearing, flicking the cane. “Step out,
- please....
- “Come out here, sir.”
- No answer from Peter.
- “Stubland,” roared Mr. Mainwearing. “Come out at once.”
- There came a break in the traditions of High Cross School.
- Peter rose to his feet. It seemed he was going to obey. And then he said
- in a voice, faint and small but perfectly clear, “I ain’t going to be
- caned. No.”
- There was a great pause. There was as it were silence in Heaven. And
- then, his footsteps echoing through that immensity of awe, Mr.
- Mainwearing advanced upon Peter. Peter with a loud undignified cry fled
- along the wall under the map of Palestine towards the door.
- “Stop him there, Ames!” cried Mr. Mainwearing.
- Ames was slow to understand.
- Mr. Mainwearing put down the cane on the mantelshelf and became very
- active; he leapt a desk clumsily, upset an inkpot, and collided with
- Ames at the door a moment after Peter had vanished. On the landing
- outside Peter hesitated, and then doubled downstairs to the boot-hole.
- For a moment Mr. Mainwearing was at fault. “Hell!” he said. All the
- class-room heard him say “Hell!” All the school treasured that cry in
- its heart for future use. “Young—,” said Mr. Mainwearing. It was long a
- matter for secret disputation in the school what particularly choice
- sort of young thing Mr. Mainwearing had called Peter. Then he heard a
- crash in the boot-hole and was downstairs in a moment. Peter was out in
- the area, up the area steps as quick as a scared grey mouse, and then he
- made his mistake. He struck out across the open in front of the house.
- In a dozen strides Mr. Mainwearing had him.
- “I’ll thrash you, Sir,” said Mr. Mainwearing, swinging the little body
- by the collar, and shaking him as a dog might shake a rat. “I’ll thrash
- you. I’ll thrash you before the whole school.”
- But two people had their blood up now.
- “I’ll tell my uncle Nobby,” yelled Peter. “I’ll tell my uncle Nobby.
- He’s a soldier.”
- Thus disputing they presently reappeared in the lower class-room. Peter
- was tremendously dishevelled and still kicking, and Mr. Mainwearing was
- holding him by the general slack of his garments.
- “Silence, Sir, while I thrash you,” said Mr. Mainwearing, and he was red
- and moist.
- “My uncle, he’s a soldier. He’s a V.C. You thrash me and he’ll kill you.
- He’ll kill you. He’ll _kill_ you.”
- “Gimme my cane, some one,” said Mr. Mainwearing.
- “He’ll _kill_ you.”
- Nobody got the cane. “Probyn,” cried Mr. Mainwearing, “give me my cane.”
- Probyn hesitated, and then said to young Newton, “You get it.” Young
- Newton had been standing up, half offering himself for this service. He
- handed the cane to Mr. Mainwearing.
- “You touch me!” threatened Peter, “you _touch_ me. He’ll kill you,” and
- taking advantage of the moment when Mr. Mainwearing’s hand was extended
- for the cane he scored a sound kick on the master’s knee. Then by an
- inspired wriggle he sought to involve himself with Mr. Mainwearing’s
- gown in such a manner as to protect his more vulnerable area.
- But now Mr. Mainwearing was in a position to score. He stuck his cane
- between his teeth in an impressive and terrible manner, and then got his
- gown loose and altered his grip on his small victim. Now for it! The
- school hung breathless. _Cut._ Peter became as lively as an eel. _Cut._
- There were tears in his voice, but his voice was full and clear.
- “He’ll kill you. He’ll come here and kill you. I’ll burn down the
- school.”
- “You will, will you?”
- _Cut._ A kick. _Cut._ Silent wriggles.
- “Five. Six. Seven. Eight. Nine. Ten,” counted Mr. Mainwearing and
- stopped, and let go his hold with a shove. “Now go to your place,” he
- said. He was secretly grateful to Peter that he went. Peter had a way at
- times of looking a very small boy, and he did so now. He was tearful,
- red and amazingly dishevelled, but still not broken down to technical
- blubbing. His face was streaked with emotion; it was only too manifest
- that the routines of High Cross had reduced his private ablutions to a
- minimum. He glanced over his shoulder to see if he was still pursued. He
- could still sob, “My uncle.”
- But Mr. Mainwearing did not mean this to be the close of the encounter.
- He had thought out the problems of discipline according to his lights; a
- boy must give in. Peter had still to give in.
- “And now Stubland,” he proclaimed, “stay in after afternoon school, stay
- in all tomorrow, and write me out five hundred times, ’_I must not sulk.
- I must obey._’ Five hundred times, Sir.”
- Something muffled was audible from Peter, something suggestive of a
- refusal.
- “Bring them to me on Wednesday evening at latest. That will keep you
- busy—and no time to spare. You hear me, Sir? ’_I must not sulk_’ and ’_I
- must obey_.’ And if they are not ready, Sir, twelve strokes good and
- full. And every morning until they _are_ ready, twelve strokes. That’s
- how we do things here. No shirking. Play the fool with me and you pay
- for it—up to the hilt. This, at any rate, is a school, a school where
- discipline is respected, whatever queer Socialist Agapemone you may have
- frequented before. And now I’ve taken you in hand, young man, I mean to
- go through with you—if you have a hundred uncles Nobchick armed to the
- teeth. If you have a thousand uncles Nobchick, they won’t help you, if
- you air your stubborn temper at High Cross School....”
- Perhaps Peter would have written the lines, but young Newton, in the
- company of two friends, came up to him in the playground before dinner.
- “Going to write those lines, Simon Peter?” asked young Newton.
- What could a chap do but say, “No fear.”
- “You’ll write ’em all right,” said Newton, and turned scornfully. So
- Peter sat in the stuffy schoolroom during detention time, and drew
- pictures of soldiers and battles and adventures and mused and made his
- plans.
- He was going to run away. He was going to run right out of this
- disgusting place into the world. He would run away tomorrow after the
- midday meal. It would be the Wednesday half-holiday, and to go off then
- gave him his very best chance of a start; he might not be missed by any
- one in particular throughout the afternoon. The gap of time until
- tea-time seemed to him to be a limitless gap. “Abscond,” said Peter, a
- beautiful, newly-acquired word. Just exactly whither he wanted to go, he
- did not know. Vaguely he supposed he would have to go to his Limpsfield
- aunts, but what he wanted to think he was doing was running away to sea.
- He was going to run away to sea and meet Nobby very soon; he was going
- to run against Nobby by the happiest chance, Nobby alone, or perhaps
- even (this was still dreamier) Daddy and Mummy. Then they would go on
- explorations together, and he and Nobby would sleep side by side at camp
- fires amidst the howling of lions. Somewhere upon that expedition he
- would come upon Mainwearing and Probyn and Newton, captives perhaps in
- the hands of savages.
- What would he and Nobby and Mummy and Daddy and Bungo Peter and Joan do
- to such miscreants?...
- This kept Peter thinking a long time. Because it was beyond the limits
- of Peter’s generosity just now to spare Mr. Mainwearing. Probyn perhaps.
- Probyn, penitent to the pitch of tears, might be reduced to the status
- of a humble fag; even Newton might go on living in some very menial
- capacity—there could be a dog with the party of which Newton would
- always go in fear—but Mr. Mainwearing had exceeded the limits of
- mercy....
- A man like that was capable of any treason....
- Peter had it!—a beautiful scene. Mr. Mainwearing detected in a hideous
- conspiracy with a sinister Arab trader to murder the entire expedition,
- would be captured redhanded by Peter (armed with a revolver and a
- cutlass) and brought before Nobby and Bungo Peter. “The man must die,”
- Nobby would say. “And quickly,” Bungo Peter would echo, “seeing how
- perilous is our present situation.”
- Then Peter would step forward. Mr. Mainwearing in a state of abject
- terror would fling himself down before him, cling to his knees, pray for
- forgiveness, pray Peter to intercede.
- Yes. On the whole—yes. Peter would intercede.
- Peter began to see the scene as a very beautiful one indeed....
- But Nobby would be made of sterner stuff. “You are too noble, Peter. In
- such a country as this we cannot be cumbered with traitor carrion. We
- have killed the Arab. Is it just to spare this thousand times more
- perjured wretch, this blot upon the fair name of Englishman?
- Mainwearing, if such indeed be your true name, down on your knees and
- make your peace with God.”...
- At this moment the reverie was interrupted by Mr. Mainwearing in
- cricketing flannels traversing the schoolroom. He was going to have a
- whack before tea. He just stood at the wickets and made the bigger boys
- bowl to him.
- Little he knew!
- Peter affected to write industriously....
- § 14
- After the midday meal on Wednesday Peter loafed for a little time in the
- playground.
- “Coming to play cricket, Simon Peter?” said Probyn.
- “Got to stay in the schoolroom,” said Peter.
- “He’s going to write his five hundred lines,” said young Newton. “I said
- he would.”
- (Young Newton would know better later.)
- Peter went back unobtrusively to the schoolroom. In his desk were two
- slices of bread-and-butter secreted from the breakfast table and wrapped
- in clean pages from an exercise-book. These were his simple provisions.
- With these, a pencil, and a good serviceable catapult he proposed to set
- out into the wide, wide world. He had no money.
- He “scouted” Mr. Mainwearing into his study, marked that he shut the
- door, and heard him pull down the blind. The armchair creaked as the
- schoolmaster sat down for the afternoon’s repose. That would make a
- retreat from the front door of the school house possible. The back of
- the house meant a risk of being seen by the servants, the playground
- door or the cricket-field might attract the attention of some sneak. But
- from the front door to the road and the shelter of the playground wall
- was but ten seconds dash. Still Peter, from the moment he crept out of
- the main class-room into the passage to the moment when he was out of
- sight of the windows was as tightly strung as a fiddlestring. Never
- before in all his little life had he lived at such a pitch of nervous
- intensity. Once in the road he ran, and continued to run until he turned
- into the road to Clewer. Then he dropped into a good smart walk. The
- world was all before him.
- The world was a warm October afternoon and a straight road, poplars and
- red roofs ahead. Whither the road ran he had no idea, but in the back of
- his mind, obscured but by no means hidden by a cloud of dreams, was the
- necessity of getting to Ingle-Nook. After he had walked perhaps half a
- mile upon the road to Clewer it occurred to Peter that he would ask his
- way.
- The first person he asked was a nice little old lady with a kind face,
- and she did not know where the road went nor whence it came. “That way
- it goes to Pescod Street,” she said, “if you take the right turning, and
- that way it goes past the racecourse. But you have to turn off, you
- know. That’s Clewer Church.”
- No, she didn’t know which was the way to Limpsfield. Perhaps if Peter
- asked the postman _he’d_ know.
- No postman was visible....
- The next person Peter asked was as excessive as the old lady was
- deficient. He was a large, smiling, self-satisfied man, with a hearty
- laugh.
- “Where does the road go, my boy?” he repeated. “Why! it goes to
- Maidenhead and Cookham. Cookham! Have you heard the story? This is the
- way the man told the waiter to take the underdone potatoes. Because it’s
- the way to Cookham. See? Good, eh? But not so good as telling him to
- take peas _that_ was. Through Windsor, you know. Because it’s the way to
- Turnham Green. Ha, ha!
- “How far is Maidenhead? Oh! a tidy bit—a _tidy_ bit. Say four miles.
- _Put_ it at four miles.”
- When Peter asked for Limpsfield the large man at once jumped to the
- conclusion he meant Winchfield. “That’s a bit on your left,” he said,
- “just a bit on your left. How far? Oh! a tidy bit. Say five miles—five
- miles and a ’arf, say.”
- When he had gone on a little way the genial man shouted back to Peter:
- “Might be six miles, perhaps,” he said. “Not more.”
- Which was comforting news. So Peter went on his way with his back to
- Limpsfield—which was a good thirty miles and more away from him—and a
- pleasant illusion that Aunts Phyllis and Phœbe were quite conveniently
- just round the corner....
- About four o’clock he had discovered Maidenhead bridge, and thereafter
- the river held him to the end. He had never had a good look at a river
- before. It was a glowing October afternoon, and the river life was
- enjoying its Indian summer. High Cross School was an infinite distance
- away, and all its shadows were dismissed from his mind. Boats are
- wonderful things to a small boy who has lived among hills. He wandered
- slowly along the towing-path, and watched several boats and barges
- through the lock. In each boat he hoped to see Uncle Nobby. But it just
- happened that Uncle Nobby wasn’t there. Near the lock some people were
- feeding two swans. When they had gone through the lock Peter went close
- down to the swans. They came to him in a manner so friendly that he gave
- them the better part of his provisions. After that he watched the
- operations of a man repairing a Canadian canoe beside a boat-letting
- place. Then he became interested in the shoaling fish in the shallows.
- After that he walked for a time, on past some little islands. At last,
- as he was now a little foot-sore, he sat down on the bank in the lush
- grass above some clumps of sweet rush.
- He was just opposite the autumnal fires of the Cleveden woods, amidst
- which he could catch glimpses of Italian balustrading. The water was a
- dark mirror over which hung a bloom of mist. Now and then an infrequent
- boat would glide noiselessly or with a measured beat of rowlocks,
- through the brown water. Afar off was a swan....
- Presently he would go on to Ingle-Nook. But not just yet. When his feet
- and legs were a little rested he would go on. He would ask first for
- Limpsfield and then for Ingle-Nook. It would be three or four miles. He
- would get there in time for supper.
- He was struck by a thought that should have enlightened him. He wondered
- no one had ever brought him before from Ingle-Nook to this beautiful
- place. It was funny they did not know of it....
- Above that balustrading among the trees over there, must be a palace,
- and in that palace lived a beautiful princess who loved Peter....
- § 15
- It seemed at the first blush the most delightful accident in the world
- that the man with the ample face should ask Peter to mind his boat.
- He rowed up to the wooden steps close by where Peter was sitting. He
- seemed to argue a little with the lady who was steering and had to back
- away again, but at last he got the steps and shipped his oars and held
- on with a boat hook and got out. He helped the lady to land.
- “Here, Tommy!” he shouted, tying up the boat to the rail of the steps.
- “Just look after this boat a bit. We’re going to have some tea.”
- “We shall have to walk miles,” said the lady.
- “Damn!” said the man.
- Something seemed to tell Peter that the man was cross.
- Peter doubted whether he was properly Tommy. Then he saw that there was
- something attractive in looking after a boat.
- “Don’t let any one steal it,” said the man with the ample face, with an
- unreal geniality. “And I’ll give you a tanner.”
- Peter arose and came to the steps. The lady and the gentleman stood for
- a time on the top of the bank, disputing fiercely—she wanted to go one
- way and he another—and finally disappeared, still disputing, in the
- lady’s direction. Or rather, the lady made off in the direction of
- Cookham and the gentleman followed protesting. “Any way it’s miles,” she
- said....
- Slowly the afternoon quiet healed again. Peter was left in solitude with
- the boat, the silvery river, the overhanging woods, the distant swan.
- At first he just sat and looked at the boat.
- It had crimson cushions in it, and the lady had left a Japanese
- sunshade. The name of the boat was the _Princess May_. The lining wood
- of the boat was pale and the outer wood and the wood of the rowlocks
- darker with just one exquisite gold line. The oars were very wonderful,
- but the boat-hook with its paddle was much more wonderful. It would be
- lovely to touch that boat-hook. It was a thing you could paddle with or
- you could catch hold with the hook or poke with the spike.
- In a minute or so the call of the boat-hook had become irresistible, and
- Peter had got it out of the boat. He held it up like a spear, he waved
- it about. He poked the boat out with it and tried to paddle with it in
- the water between the boat and the bank, but the boat swung back too
- soon.
- Presently he got into the boat very carefully so as to paddle with the
- boat-hook in the water beyond the boat. In wielding the paddle he almost
- knocked off his hat, so he took it off and laid it in the bottom of the
- boat. Then he became deeply interested in his paddling.
- When he paddled in a certain way the whole boat, he found, began to
- swing out and round, and when he stopped paddling it went back against
- the bank. But it could not go completely round because of the tight way
- in which the ample-faced man had tied it to the rail of the steps. If
- the rope were tied quite at its end the boat could be paddled completely
- round. It would be beautiful to paddle it completely round with the
- waggling rudder up-stream instead of down.
- That thought did not lead to immediate action. But within two minutes
- Peter was untying the boat and retying it in accordance with his
- ambitions.
- In those days the Boy Scout movement was already in existence, but it
- had still to disseminate sound views about knot-tying among the rising
- generation. Peter’s knot was not so much a knot as a knot-like gesture.
- How bad it was he only discovered when he was back in the boat and had
- paddled it nearly half-way round. Then he saw that the end of the rope
- was slipping off the rail to which he had tied it as a weary snake might
- slink off into the grass. The stem of the boat was perhaps a yard from
- shore.
- Peter acted with promptitude. He dropped his paddle, ran to the bows,
- and jumped. Except for his left leg he landed safely. His left leg he
- recovered from the water. But there was no catching the rope. It trailed
- submerged after the boat, and the boat with an exasperating
- leisureliness, with a movement that was barely perceptible, widened its
- distance from the bank.
- For a time Peter’s mind wrestled with this problem. Should he try and
- find a stick that would reach the boat? Should he throw stones so as to
- bring it back in shore?
- Or perhaps if he told some one that the boat was adrift?
- He went up the steps to the towing-path. There was no one who looked at
- all helpful within sight. He watched the boat drift slowly for a time
- towards the middle of the stream. Then it seemed to be struck with an
- idea of going down to Maidenhead. He watched it recede and followed it
- slowly. When he saw some people afar off he tried to look as though he
- did not belong to the boat. He decided that presently somebody would
- appear rowing—whom he would ask to catch his boat for him. Then he would
- tow it back to its old position.
- Presently Peter came to the white gate of a bungalow and considered the
- advisability of telling a busy gardener who was mowing a lawn, about the
- boat. But it was difficult to frame a suitable form of address.
- Still further on a pleasant middle-aged woman who was trimming a privet
- hedge very carefully with garden shears, seemed a less terrible person
- to accost. Peter said to her modestly and self-forgetfully; “I _think_
- there’s a boat adrift down there.”
- The middle-aged woman peered through her spectacles.
- “Some one couldn’t have tied it up,” she said, and having looked at the
- boat with a quiet intelligence for some time she resumed her clipping.
- Her behaviour did much to dispel Peter’s idea of calling in adult help.
- When he looked again the boat had turned round. It had drifted out into
- the middle of the stream, and it seemed now to be travelling rather
- faster and to be rocking slightly. It was not going down towards the
- lock but away towards where a board said “Danger.” Danger. It was as if
- a cold hand was laid on Peter’s heart. He no longer wanted to find the
- man with the ample face and tell him that his boat was adrift. The sun
- had set, the light seemed to have gone out of things, and Peter had a
- feeling that it was long past tea-time. He wished now he had never seen
- the man with the ample face. Would he have to pay for the boat? Could he
- say he had never promised to mind it?
- But if that was so why had he got into the boat and played about with
- it?
- His left shoe and his left trouser-leg were very wet and getting cold.
- A great craving for tea and home comforts generally arose in Peter’s
- wayward mind. Home comforts and forgetfulness. It seemed to him high
- time that he asked some one the way to Limpsfield....
- § 16
- When Noakley and Probyn arrived at Maidenhead bridge in the late
- afternoon it seemed to them that they had done all that reasonable
- searchers could do, and that the best thing now was to take the train
- back to Windsor. They were tired and they felt futile. And then, when
- hope was exhausted, they struck the trail of Peter. The policeman at the
- foot of the bridge had actually noted him. “’Ovvered about the bridge
- for a bit,” said the policeman, “and then went along the towing path. A
- little grave chap in grey flannel. Funny thing, but I thought ’E might
- be a runaway.... Something about ’im....”
- So it was that Noakley and Probyn came upon the ample-faced man at the
- lock, in the full tide of his distress.
- He was vociferous to get across to the weir. “The boat ought to have
- come down long ago,” he was saying, “unless it’s caught up in something.
- If he was in the boat the kid’s drowned for certain....”
- Noakley had some difficulty in getting him to explain _what_ kid. It was
- difficult to secure the attention of the ample-faced man. In fact before
- this could be done he twice pushed back Noakley’s face with his hand as
- though it was some sort of inanimate obstacle.
- It was a great and tragic experience for Probyn. They both went across
- by the lock to the island behind the lead of the lockkeeper and the
- ample-faced man. They came out in sight of the weir; the river was still
- full from the late September rains and the weir was a frothing cascade,
- and at the crest of it they saw an upturned boat jammed by the current
- against the timbers. A Japanese umbrella circled open in a foamy eddy
- below, stick upward. The sun was down now; a chill was in the air; a
- sense of coming winter.
- And then close at hand, caught in some weedy willow stems that dipped in
- the rushing water Probyn discovered a little soddened straw hat, a
- little half-submerged hat, bobbing with the swift current, entangled in
- the willow stems.
- It was unmistakable. It bore the white and black ribbon of High Cross
- School.
- “Oh, my God!” cried Probyn at the sight of the hat, and burst into
- tears.
- “Poor _little_ Peter. I’d have done anything for him!”
- He sobbed, and as he sobbed he talked. He became so remorseful and so
- grossly sentimental that even Noakley was surprised....
- § 17
- When next morning Mr. Grimes learnt by a long and expensive telegram
- from Mr. Mainwearing, followed almost immediately by a long explanatory
- letter, that Peter had run away from school and had been drowned near
- Boulter’s Lock, he was overcome with terror. He had visions of Aunt
- Phœbe—_doubled_, for he imagined Aunt Phyllis to be just such another—as
- an avenger of blood. At the bare thought he became again a storm of
- vibrations. His clerks in the office outside could hear his nails
- running along his teeth all the morning, like the wind among the reeds.
- His imagination threw up wild and hasty schemes for a long holiday in
- some inaccessible place, in Norway or Switzerland, but the further he
- fled from civilization the more unbridled the vengeance, when it did
- overtake him, might be. Lady Charlotte was still in England. On the day
- appointed and for two days after, the Channel sea was reported stormy.
- All her plans were shattered and she had stayed on. She was still
- staying on. In a spasm of spite he telegraphed the dire news to her.
- Then he went down to Windsor, all a-quiver, to see that Mr. Mainwearing
- did not make a fool of himself, and to help him with the inquest on
- Peter as soon as the body was recovered.
- His telegram did have a very considerable effect upon Lady Charlotte,
- the more so as it arrived within an hour or so of a letter from Mrs.
- Pybus containing some very disconcerting news about Joan. At midday came
- Mr. Mainwearing’s story—pitched to a high note of Anglican piety. The
- body, he said, was still not found, “but we must hope for the best.”
- When Mr. Sycamore arrived at Chastlands in the afternoon he found Lady
- Charlotte immensely spread out in her drawing-room as an invalid, with
- Unwin on guard behind her. She lay, a large bundle of ribbon, lace, and
- distresses, upon a sofa; she had hoisted an enormous beribboned lace cap
- with black-and-gold bows. On a table close at hand were a scent-bottle,
- smelling-salts, camphor, menthol, and suchlike aids. There were also a
- few choice black grapes and a tonic. She meant to make a brave fight for
- it.
- Mr. Sycamore was not aware how very dead Peter was at Chastlands and
- Windsor, seeing that he was now also at The Ingle-Nook in a state of
- considerable vitality. It was some moments before he realized this
- localized demise. Indeed it was upon an entirely different aspect of
- this War of the Guardians that he was now visiting the enemy camp.
- At first there was a little difficulty made about admitting him. Cashel
- explained that Lady Charlotte was “much upset. Terribly upset.” Finally
- he found himself in her large presence.
- She gave him no time to speak.
- “I am ill, Mr. Sycamore. I am in a wretched state. Properly I should be
- in bed now. I have been unable to travel abroad to rest. I have been
- totally unable to attend to affairs. And now comes this last blow.
- Terrible! A judgment.”
- “I was not aware, Lady Charlotte, that you knew,” Mr. Sycamore began.
- “Of course I know. Telegrams, letters. No attempt to break it to me. The
- brutal truth. I cannot tell you how I deplore my supineness that has led
- to this catastrophe.”
- “Hardly supine,” Mr. Sycamore ventured.
- “Yes, supine. If I had taken up my responsibilities years ago—when these
- poor children were christened, none of this might have happened.
- Nothing.”
- Mr. Sycamore perceived that he was in the presence of something more
- than mere fuss about Peter’s running away. A wary gleam came into his
- spectacles.
- “Perhaps, Lady Charlotte, if I could see your telegram,” he said.
- “Give it him, Unwin,” she said.
- “Stole a boat—carried over a weir,” he read. “But this is terrible! I
- had no idea.”
- “Give him the letter. No—not that one. The other.”
- “Body not yet recovered,” he read, and commented with confidence, “It
- will turn up later, I feel sure. Of course, all this is—news to me;
- boat—weir—everything. Yes.”
- “And I was ill already!” said Lady Charlotte. “There is reason to
- suppose my heart is weak. I use myself too hard. I am too concerned
- about many things. I cannot live for myself alone. It is not my nature.
- The doctor had commanded a quiet month here before I even _thought_ of
- travel—literally _commanded_. And then comes this blow. The wretched
- child could not have chosen a worse time.”
- She gave a gesture of despair. She fell back upon her piled pillows with
- a gesture of furious exhaustion.
- “In the last twenty-four hours,” she said, “I have eaten one egg, Mr.
- Sycamore.... And some of that I left.”
- Mr. Sycamore’s note of sympathy was perhaps a little insincere. “Of
- course,” he said, “in taking the children away from their school—where
- they were at least safe and happy—you undertook a considerable
- responsibility.”
- Lady Charlotte took him up with emphasis. “I admit no
- responsibility—none whatever. Understand, Mr. Sycamore, once for all, I
- am not responsible for—whatever has happened to this wretched little
- boy. Sorry for him—yes, but I have nothing to regret. I took him away
- from—undesirable surroundings—and sent him to a school, by no means a
- cheap school, that was recommended very highly, very highly indeed, by
- Mr. Grimes. It was my plain duty to do as much. There my responsibility
- ends.”
- Mr. Sycamore had drifted quietly into a chair, and was sitting obliquely
- to her in an attitude more becoming a family doctor than a hostile
- lawyer. He regarded the cornice in the far corner of the room as she
- spoke, and replied without looking at her, softly and almost as if in
- soliloquy: “Legally—_no_.”
- “I am not responsible,” the lady repeated. “If any one is responsible,
- it is Mr. Grimes.”
- “I came to ask you to produce your two wards,” said Mr. Sycamore
- abruptly, “because Mr. Oswald Sydenham lands at Southampton tonight.”
- “He has always been coming.”
- “This time he has come.”
- “If he had come earlier all this would not have happened. Has he really
- come?”
- “He is here—in England, that is.”
- Lady Charlotte gasped and lay back. Unwin handed her the bottle of
- smelling-salts. “I have done nothing more than my duty,” she said.
- Mr. Sycamore became more gentle in his manner than ever. “As the person
- finally responsible—”
- “_No!_”
- “Haven’t you been just a little careless?”
- “Mr. Sycamore, it was this boy who was careless. I am sorry to say it
- now that he— I can only hope that at the last— But he was not a good
- boy. Anything but a good boy. He had been altogether demoralized by
- those mad, violent creatures. He ran away from this school, an excellent
- school, highly recommended. And you must remember, Mr. Sycamore, that I
- was paying for it. The abnormal position of the property, the way in
- which apparently all the income is to be paid over to these
- women—without consulting me. Well, I won’t complain of that now. I was
- prepared to pay. I paid. But the boy was already thoroughly corrupted.
- His character was undermined. He ran away. I wash my hands of the
- consequences.”
- Mr. Sycamore was on the point of saying something and thought better of
- it.
- “At any rate,” he said, “I have to ask you on behalf of Mr. Oswald
- Sydenham to produce the other child—the girl.”
- “She _can’t_ be produced,” said Lady Charlotte desperately.
- “That really _does_ make things serious.”
- “Oh, don’t misunderstand me! The child is in excellent hands—excellent
- hands. But there are—neighbours. She was told to keep indoors, carefully
- told. What must she do but rush out at the first chance! She had had
- fair warning that there were measles about, she had had measles
- explained to her carefully, yet she must needs go and make friends with
- a lot of dirty little wretches!”
- “And catch measles.”
- “Exactly.”
- “That’s why—?”
- “That’s why—”
- “There again, Lady Charlotte, and again with all due respect, haven’t
- you been just a little careless? At that nice, airy school in Surrey
- there was never any contagion—of any sort.”
- “There was no proper religious teaching.”
- “Was there any where you placed these children?”
- “I was led to believe—”
- She left it at that.
- Mr. Sycamore allowed himself to point the moral. “It is a very
- remarkable thing to me, Lady Charlotte, most remarkable, that Catholic
- people and Church of England people—you must forgive me for saying
- it—and religious bodies generally should be so very anxious and
- energetic to get control of the education of children and so
- careless—indeed they are dreadfully careless—of the tone, the
- wholesomeness and the quality of the education they supply. And of the
- homes they permit. It’s almost as if they cared more for getting the
- children branded than whether they lived or died.”
- “The school was an excellent school,” said Lady Charlotte; “an excellent
- school. Your remarks are cruel and painful.”
- Mr. Sycamore again restrained some retort. Then he said, “I think it
- would be well for Mr. Oswald Sydenham to have the address of the little
- girl.”
- Lady Charlotte considered. “There is nothing to conceal,” she said, and
- gave the address of Mrs. Pybus, “a most trustworthy woman.” Mr. Sycamore
- took it down very carefully in a little notebook that came out of his
- vest pocket. Then he seemed to consider whether he should become more
- offensive or not, and to decide upon the former alternative.
- “I suppose,” he said reflectively as he replaced the little book, “that
- the demand for religious observances and religious orthodoxy as a first
- condition in schools is productive of more hypocrisy and rottenness in
- education than any other single cause. It is a matter of common
- observation. A school is generally about as inefficient as its religious
- stripe is marked. I suppose it is because if you put the weight on one
- thing you cannot put it on another. Or perhaps it is because no test is
- so easy for a thoroughly mean and dishonest person to satisfy as a
- religious test. Schools which have no claims to any other merit can
- always pass themselves off as severely religious. Perhaps the truth is
- that all bad schools profess orthodoxy rather than that orthodoxy makes
- bad schools. Nowadays it is religion that is the last refuge of a
- scoundrel.”
- “If you have nothing further to say than this Secularist lecturing,”
- said Lady Charlotte with great dignity, “I should be obliged if you
- would find somewhere—some Hall of Science—... Considering what my
- feelings must be... Scarcely in the mood for—blasphemies.”
- “Lady Charlotte,” said Mr. Sycamore, betraying a note of indignation in
- his voice; “this school into which you flung your little ward was a very
- badly conducted school indeed.”
- “It was nothing of the sort,” said Lady Charlotte. “How dare you
- reproach me?”
- Mr. Sycamore went on as though she had not spoken. “There was a lot of
- bullying and nasty behaviour among the boys, and the masters inflicted
- punishments without rhyme or reason.”
- “How can you know anything of the sort?”
- “On the best authority—the boy’s.”
- “But how could he—”
- “He was thrashed absurdly and set an impossible task for not answering
- to a silly nickname. There was no one to whom he could complain. He ran
- away. He had an idea of reaching Limpsfield, but when he realized that
- night was coming on, being really a very sensible little boy, he
- selected a kindly-looking house, asked to see the lady of the house, and
- told her he had run away from home and wanted to go back. He gave his
- aunt’s address at The Ingle-Nook, and he was sent home in the morning.
- He arrived home this morning.”
- Lady Charlotte made a strange noise, but Mr. Sycamore hurried on. “How
- this delusion about a boat and a weir got into the story I don’t know.
- He says nothing about them. Indeed, he says very little about anything.
- He’s a reserved little boy. We have to get what we can out of him.”
- “You mean to say that the boy is still alive!” cried Lady Charlotte.
- “Happily!”
- “In face of these telegrams!”
- “I saw him not two hours ago.”
- “But how do you account for these telegrams and letters?”
- Mr. Sycamore positively tittered. “That’s for Mr. Grimes to explain.”
- “And he is alive—and unhurt?”
- “As fresh as paint; and quite happy.”
- “Then if ever a little boy deserved a whipping, a thoroughly good
- whipping,” cried Lady Charlotte, “it is Master Peter Stubland! Safe,
- indeed! It’s outrageous! After all I have gone through! Unwin!”
- Unwin handed the salts.
- Mr. Sycamore stood up. He still had the essence of his business to
- communicate, but there was something in the great lady’s blue eyes that
- made him want to stand up. And that little tussock of fair hair on her
- cheek—in some indescribable way it had become fierce.
- “To think,” said Lady Charlotte, “that I have been put to all this
- unutterable worry and distress—”
- She was at a loss for words. Mr. Sycamore appreciated the fact that if
- he had anything more to say to her he must communicate it before the
- storm burst. He stroked his chin thoughtfully, and began to deliver his
- message with just the faintest quality of hurry in his delivery.
- “The real business upon which I came to you today, Lady Charlotte, has
- really nothing to do with this—escapade at all. It is something else.
- Things have arisen that alter the outlook for those children very
- considerably. There is every reason to suppose that neither you nor the
- Misses Stubland are properly guardians of Joan and Peter at all. No. One
- moment more, Lady Charlotte; let me explain. Two young Germans, it would
- appear, witnessed the accident to the boat from the top of the Capri
- headland. They saw Mr. Stubland apparently wrestling with the boatman,
- then the boat overset and the two men never reappeared. They must have
- dragged each other down. The witnesses are quite certain about that. But
- Mrs. Stubland, poor young lady, could be seen swimming for quite a long
- time; she swam nearly half-way to land before she gave in, although the
- water was very choppy indeed. I made enquiries when I was in Naples this
- spring, and I do not think there would be much trouble in producing
- those witnesses still. They were part of the—what shall I call
- it?—social circle of that man Krupp, the gunmaker. He lived at Capri. If
- we accept this story, then, Lady Charlotte, Mrs. Stubland’s will holds
- good, and her husband’s does not, and Mr. Oswald Sydenham becomes the
- sole guardian of the children....”
- He paused. The lady’s square face slowly assumed an expression of
- dignified satisfaction.
- “So long as those poor children are rescued from those _women_,” said
- Lady Charlotte, “my task is done. I do not grudge any exertion, any
- sacrifice I have made, so long as that end is secured. I do not look for
- thanks. Much less repayment. Perhaps some day these children may come to
- understand—”
- Unwin made a sound like the responses in church.
- “I would go through it all again,” said Lady Charlotte—“willingly....
- Now that my nephew has returned I have no more anxiety.” She made an
- elegant early-Georgian movement with the smelling-salts. “I am
- completely justified. I have been slighted, tricked, threatened,
- insulted, made ill ... but I am justified.”
- She resorted again to the salts.
- CHAPTER THE NINTH
- OSWALD TAKES CONTROL
- § 1
- While Mr. Sycamore was regaling himself with the discomfiture of Lady
- Charlotte, Oswald Sydenham was already walking about the West End of
- London.
- He had come upon a fresh crisis in his life. He was doing his best to
- accept some thoroughly disagreeable limitations. His London specialist
- had but confirmed his own conviction. It was no longer possible for him
- to continue in Africa. He had reached the maximum of blackwater fever
- permitted to normal men. The next bout—if there was a next bout—would
- kill him. In addition to this very valid reason for a return, certain
- small fragments of that Egyptian shell long dormant in his arm had
- awakened to mischief, and had to be removed under the more favourable
- conditions to be found in England. He had come back therefore to a land
- where he had now no close friends and no special occupations, and once
- more he had to begin life afresh.
- He had returned with extreme reluctance. He could not see anything ahead
- of him in England that gripped his imagination at all. He was strongly
- tempted to have his arm patched up, and return to Africa for a last
- spell of work and a last conclusive dose of the fever germ. But in
- England he might be of use for a longer period, and a kind of godless
- conscience in him insisted that there must be no deliberate waste in his
- disposal of his life.
- For some time he had been distressed by the general ignorance in England
- of the realities of things African, and by the general coarsening and
- deterioration, as he held it to be, of the Imperial idea. There was much
- over here that needed looking into, he felt, and when it was looked into
- then the indications for further work might appear. Why not, so far as
- his powers permitted, do something in helping English people to realize
- all that Africa was and might be. That was work he might do, and live.
- In Africa there was little more for him to do but die.
- That was all very well in theory. It did not alter his persuasion that
- he was going to be intolerably lonely if he stayed on in England. Out
- there were the Chief Commissioner and Muir and half a dozen other people
- for whom he had developed a strong affection; he was used to his native
- servants and he liked them; he had his round of intensely interesting
- activities, he was accustomed to the life. Out there, too, there was
- sunshine. Such sunshine as the temperate zone can never reproduce. This
- English world was a grey, draughty, cloudy, lonely world, and one could
- not always be working. That sunshine alone meant a vast deprivation.
- This sort of work he thought of doing and which seemed the only thing
- now that he could possibly do, wasn’t, he reflected uncomfortably, by
- any means the work that he could do best. He knew he was bad-tempered.
- Ill-health intensified a natural irritability. He knew his brain was now
- a very uncertain instrument, sometimes quite good, sometimes a weary
- fount of half-formed ideas and indecisions. As an advocate of the right
- way in Africa, he would do some good no doubt; but he would certainly
- get into some tiresome squabbles, he would bark his knuckles and bruise
- his shins. Nevertheless—cheerless though the outlook was—it was, he
- felt, the work he ought to do.
- “Pump up enthusiasm,” said Oswald. “Begin again. What else _can_ I do?”
- But what he was pumping up that afternoon in London was really far more
- like anger. Rage and swearing were the natural secretions of Oswald’s
- mind at every season of perplexity; he became angry when other types
- would be despondent. Where melancholic men abandon effort, men of the
- choleric type take to kicking and smashing. Where the former contract,
- the latter beat about and spread themselves. Oswald, beneath his
- superficial resignation, was working up for a quarrel with something.
- His instinct was to convert the distress of his developing physical
- insufficiencies into hostility to some external antagonist.
- He knew of, and he was doing his best to control, this black urgency to
- violent thoughts and conclusions. He wanted to kick and he knew he must
- not yet waste energy in kicking. He was not justified in kicking. He
- must not allow his sense of personal grievance against fate to disturb
- his mind. He must behave with a studied calm and aloofness.
- “Damn!” said Oswald, no doubt by way of endorsing this decision.
- Pursuant to these virtuous resolutions this tall, lean, thwarted man,
- full of jealous solicitude for the empire he had helped enlarge, this
- disfigured man whose face was in two halves like those partially treated
- portraits one sees outside the shops of picture-cleaners, was engaged in
- comporting himself as much as possible like some pleasant, leisurely man
- of the world with no obligation or concern but to make himself
- comfortable and find amusement in things about him. He was doing his
- best to feel that there was no hurry about anything, and no reason
- whatever for getting into a state of mind. Just a calm quiet onlooker he
- had to be. He was, he told himself, taking a look round London as a
- preliminary to settling down there. Perhaps he was going to settle down
- in London. Or perhaps in the country somewhere. It did not matter
- which—whichever was the most pleasant. It was all very pleasant. Very
- pleasant indeed. A life now of wise lounging and judicious, temperate
- activities it had to be. He must not fuss.
- He had arrived in England the day before, but as yet, except for a brief
- note to Mr. Sycamore, he had notified no one of his return. He had put
- up at the Climax Club in Piccadilly, a proprietary club that was half
- hotel, where one could get a sitting-room as well as a bedroom; and
- after a visit to his doctor—a visit that confirmed all his worst
- apprehensions of the need of abandoning Africa for ever—he had spent the
- evening in the club trying to be calm over the newspapers and magazines.
- But when one is ill and tired as Oswald was, all that one reads in the
- newspapers and magazines is wrong and exasperating.
- It was 1903; the time when Mr. Joseph Chamberlain returned from South
- Africa to launch his Tariff Reform agitation—and Oswald was
- temperamentally a Free Trader. The whole press, daily, weekly, monthly,
- was full of the noises of the controversy. It impressed him as a
- controversy almost intolerably mean. His Imperialism was essentially a
- romantic and generous imagination, a dream of service, of himself,
- serving the Empire and of the Empire serving mankind. The tacit
- assumption underlying this most sordid of political campaigns that the
- Empire was really nothing of the kind, that it was an adventure of
- exploitation, a national enterprise in the higher piracy, borrowing a
- faded picturesqueness from the scoundrelism of the Elizabethan and
- Jacobean buccaneers, the men who started the British slave trade and the
- Ulster trouble and founded no Empire at all except the plantations of
- Virginia and Barbados, distressed and perplexed his mind almost
- unendurably. It was so maddeningly plausible. It was so manifestly the
- pathway of destruction.
- After throwing _The National Review_ into a distant armchair and then,
- when he met the startled eye of a fellow member, trying to look as
- though that was his usual way with a magazine, he sought distraction in
- Southey’s “Doctor,” which happened to be in the club library. After
- dinner he went out for a stroll in the West End, and visited the
- Alhambra. He found that more soothing than the papers. The old
- excitement of the human moth at the candles of vice he no longer felt.
- He wondered why these flitting allurements had ever stirred him. But he
- liked the stir and the lights and the pleasant inconsecutive imbecility
- of the entertainment.
- He slept fairly well. In the morning a clerk of Mr. Sycamore’s
- telephoned to say that that gentleman was out of town, he had been
- called down to see Lady Charlotte Sydenham, but that he would be back,
- and would probably try to “get” Oswald about eleven in the evening. He
- had something important to tell Oswald. The day began cloudy, and
- repented and became fine. By midday it was, for London, a golden day.
- Yet to Oswald it seemed but a weak solution of sunshine. If you stood
- bareheaded in such sunshine you would catch a chill. But he made the
- best of it. “October mild and boon,” he quoted. He assured himself that
- it would be entertaining to stroll about the West End and look at the
- shops and mark the changes in things. He breakfasted late at one of the
- windows overlooking the Green Park, visited the club barber, walked
- along to his tailor, bought three new hats and a stout gold-banded cane
- with an agate top in Bond Street, a pair of boots, gloves and other
- sundries. Then he went into his second club, the Plantain, in Pall Mall,
- to read the papers—until he discovered that he was beginning to worry
- about Tariff Reform again. He saw no one he knew, and lunched alone. In
- the afternoon he strolled out into London once more.
- He was, he found, no longer uncomfortable and self-conscious in the
- streets of London. His one-sided, blank-sided face did not make him
- self-conscious now as it used to do, he had reconciled himself to his
- disfigurement. If at first he had exaggerated its effect, he now
- inclined to forget it altogether. He wore hats nowadays with a good
- broad brim, and cocked them to overshadow the missing eye; his dark
- moustache had grown and was thick and symmetrical; he had acquired the
- habit of looking at himself in glasses so as to minimize his defaced
- half. It seemed to him a natural thing now that the casual passer-by
- should pull up for the fraction of a second at the sight of his tall
- figure, or look back at him as if to verify a first impression. Didn’t
- people do that to everybody?
- He went along Pall Mall, whose high gentility was still in those days
- untroubled by the Royal Automobile Club and scarcely ruffled by a
- discreet shop or so; he turned up through St. James’s Street to
- Piccadilly with a reminiscent glance by the way down Jermyn Street,
- where he had had his first experiences of restaurants and suchlike
- dissipations in his early midshipman days. How far away those follies
- seemed now! The shops of Bond Street drew him northward; the Doré
- Gallery of his childhood, he noted, was still going on; he prowled along
- Oxford Street as far as the Marble Arch—Gillows was still Gillows in
- those days, and Selfridge had yet to dawn on the London world—and beat
- back by way of Seymour Street to Regent Street. He nodded to Verrey’s,
- where long ago he had lunched in a short plaid frock and white socks
- under the auspices of his godmother, old Lady Percival Pelham. It was
- all very much as he had left it in ’97. That fever of rebuilding and
- rearrangement which was already wrecking the old Strand and sweeping
- away Booksellers’ Row and the Drury Lane slums and a score of ancient
- landmarks, had not yet reached the West End. There was the same
- abundance of smart hansom cabs crawling in the streets or neatly ranked
- on the stands; the same populous horse omnibuses, the same brightly
- dressed people, and, in Regent Street and Piccadilly, the same
- too-brightly-dressed women loiterers, only now most of them were visibly
- coarse and painted; there were the same mendicants and sandwich-men at
- the pavement edge. Perhaps there were more omnibuses crowding upon one
- another at Piccadilly and Oxford Circuses, and more people everywhere.
- Or perhaps that was only the effect of returning from a less crowded
- world.
- Now and then he saw automobiles, queer, clumsy carriages without horses
- they seemed to be, or else low, heavy-looking vehicles with a flavour of
- battleship about them. Several emitted bluish smoke and trailed an evil
- smell. In Regent Street outside Liberty’s art shop one of these
- mechanical novelties was in trouble. Everybody seemed pleased. The
- passing cabmen were openly derisive. Oswald joined the little group of
- people at the pavement edge who were watching the heated and bothered
- driver engaged in some obscure struggle beneath his car.
- An old gentleman in a white waistcoat stood beside Oswald, and presently
- turned to him.
- “Silly things,” he said. “Noisy, dangerous, _stinking_ things. They
- ought to be forbidden.”
- “Perhaps they will improve,” said Oswald.
- “How could _that_ thing improve?” asked the old gentleman. “Lotto dirty
- ironmongery.”
- He turned away with the air of a man for whom a question had been
- settled. Oswald followed him thoughtfully....
- He resumed his identifications. Piccadilly Circus! Here was the good old
- Café Monico; yonder the Criterion....
- But everything seemed smaller.
- That was the thing that struck him most forcibly; London revisited he
- discovered to be an intense _little_ place.
- It was extraordinary that this should be the head of the Empire. It
- seemed, when one came back to it, so entirely indifferent to the Empire,
- so entirely self-absorbed. When one was out beyond there, in Uganda,
- East Africa, Sudan, Egypt, in all those vast regions where the British
- were doing the best work they had ever done in pacification and
- civilization, one thought of London as if it were a great head that
- watched one from afar, that could hear a cry for help, that could send
- support. Yet here were these people in these narrow, brightly served
- streets, very busy about their own affairs, almost as busy and
- self-absorbed as the white-robed crowd in the big market-place in Mengo,
- and conspicuously, remarkably not thinking of Africa—or anything of the
- sort. He compared Bond Street and its crowded, inconvenient side-walks
- with one of the great garden vistas of the Uganda capital, much to the
- advantage of the latter. He descended by the Duke of York’s steps, past
- the old milk stall with its cow, into the Mall. Buckingham Palace, far
- away, was much less impressive than the fort at Kampala on its
- commanding hill; the vegetation of St. James’s Park and its iron fencing
- were a poor substitute for the rich-patterned reed palisades and the
- wealth of fronds that bordered the wide prospects of the Uganda capital.
- All English trees looked stunted to Oswald’s eyes.
- Towards the palace, tree-felling was in progress, the felling of trees
- that could never be replaced; and an ugly hoarding veiled the erection
- of King Edward’s pious memorial to Queen Victoria, the memorial which
- later her grandson, the Kaiser, was to unveil.
- He went on into Whitehall—there was no Admiralty Arch in those days, and
- one came out of the Mall by way of Spring Gardens round the corner of an
- obtrusive bank. Oswald paused for a minute to survey the squat buildings
- and high column of Trafalgar Square, pale amber in the October sunshine,
- and then strolled down towards Westminster. He became more and more
- consciously the loitering home-comer. He smiled at the mounted soldiers
- in their boxes outside the Horse Guards, paused at and approved of the
- architectural intentions of the new War Office, and nodded to his old
- friends, the Admiralty and the Colonial Office. Here they brewed the
- destinies of the Old World outside Europe and kept the Seven Seas. He
- played his part with increased self-approval. He made his way to
- Westminster Bridge and spent some time surveying the down river
- prospect. It was, after all, a little ditch of a river. St. Paul’s was
- fairly visible, and the red, rusty shed of Charing Cross station and its
- brutal iron bridge, fit monument of the clumsy looting by “private
- enterprise” that characterized the Victorian age, had never looked
- uglier.
- He crossed from one side of the bridge to the other, leant over the
- parapet and regarded the Houses of Parliament. The flag was flying, and
- a number of little groups of silk-hatted men and gaily dressed ladies
- were having tea on the terrace.
- “I wonder why we rule our Empire from a sham Gothic building,” thought
- Oswald. “If anything, it ought to be Roman....”
- He turned his attention to the traffic and the passers-by. “They don’t
- realize,” he said. “Suppose suddenly they were to have a mirage here of
- some of the lands and cities this old Parliament House controls?”
- A little stout man driving a pony-trap caught his attention. It was a
- smart new pony-trap, and there was a look of new clothes about its
- driver; he smoked a cigar that stuck upward from the corner of his
- mouth, and in his button-hole was a red chrysanthemum; his whole bearing
- suggested absolute contentment with himself and acquiescence in the
- universe; he handled his reins and drew his whip across the flanks of
- his shining cob as delicately as if he was fly-fishing. “What does he
- think he is up to?” asked Oswald. A thousand times he had seen that
- Sphinx of perfect self-contentment on passing negro faces.
- “The Empire doesn’t worry _him_,” said Oswald.
- § 2
- It was worrying Oswald a lot. Everything was worrying Oswald just then.
- It is a subtle question to answer of such cases whether the physical
- depression shapes the despondent thought, or whether the gnawing doubt
- prepares the nervous illness. His confidence in his work and the system
- to which he belonged had vanished by imperceptible degrees.
- For some years he had gone about his work with very few doubts. He had
- been too busy. But now ill-health had conspired with external
- circumstances to expose him to questionings about things he had never
- questioned before. They were very fundamental doubts. They cut at the
- roots of his life. He was beginning to doubt whether the Empire was
- indeed as good a thing and as great a thing as he had assumed it to
- be.... The Empire to which his life had been given.
- This did not make him any less an Imperialist than he had been, but it
- sharpened his imperialism with a sense of urgency that cut into his
- mind.
- Altogether Oswald had now given nearly eighteen years to East and
- Central Africa. His illness had called a halt in a very busy life. For
- two years and more after his last visit to England, he had been occupied
- chiefly in operations in and beyond the Lango country against Kabarega
- and the remnant of the rebel Sudanese. He had assisted in the
- rounding-up of King Mwanga, the rebel king of Uganda, and in setting up
- the child king and the regency that replaced him. At the end of 1899 his
- former chief, Sir Harry Johnston, had come up from British Central
- Africa as Special Commissioner to Uganda, and the work of land
- settlement, of provincial organization, of railways and postal
- development had gone on apace. Next year indeed war had come again, but
- it was the last war in this part of the world for some time. It was
- caused by the obstinate disposition of the Nandi people to steal the
- copper wire from the telegraph poles that had been set up in their
- country. Hitherto their chief use for copper wire had been to make
- bracelets and anklets for their married women. They were shocked by this
- endless stretching out of attenuated feminine adornment. They did their
- best to restore it to what they considered was its proper use. It was a
- homely misunderstanding rather than a war. Oswald had led that
- expedition to a successful explanation. Thereafter the leading fact in
- the history of Uganda until the sleeping sickness came had been the
- construction of the railway from the coast to Lake Victoria Nyanza.
- In Uganda as in Nyasaland Oswald Sydenham had found himself part of a
- rapid and busy process of tidying up the world. For some years it had
- carried him along and determined all his views.
- The tidying-up of Africa during the closing years of the nineteenth
- century was indeed one of the most rapid and effective tidyings up in
- history. In the late ’eighties the whole of Africa from the frontiers of
- lower Egypt down to Rhodesia had been a world of chaotic adventure and
- misery; a black world of insecure barbarism invaded by the rifle, and
- the Arab and European adventurers who brought it. There had been no such
- thing as a school from Nubia to Rhodesia, and everywhere there had been
- constant aimless bloodshed. Long ages of conflict, arbitrary cruelty and
- instinctive fierceness seemed to have reached a culmination of
- destructive disorder. The increasing light that fell on Africa did but
- illuminate a scene of collapse. The new forces that were coming into the
- country appeared at first as hopelessly blind and cruel as the old; the
- only difference was that they were better armed. The Arab was frankly a
- slaver, European enterprise was deeply interested in forced labour. The
- first-fruits of Christianity had been civil war, and one of Oswald’s
- earliest experiences of Uganda had been the attack of Mwanga and his
- Roman Catholic adherents upon the Anglicans in Mengo, who held out in
- Lugard’s little fort and ultimately established the soundness of the
- Elizabethan compromise by means of a Maxim gun. It was never a confident
- outlook for many years anywhere between the Zambesi and the Nile
- cataracts. Probably no honest man ever worked in west and central Africa
- between 1880 and 1900 who escaped altogether from phases of absolute
- despair; who did not face with a sinking heart, lust, hatred, cunning
- and treachery, black intolerance and ruthless aggression. And behind all
- the perversities of man worked the wickedness of tropical Nature,
- uncertain in her moods, frightful in her storms, fruitful of strange
- troubles through weed and parasite, insect and pestilence. Yet
- civilization had in the long run won an astonishing victory. In a score
- of years, so endless then, so brief in retrospect, roads that had been
- decaying tracks or non-existent were made safe and open everywhere, the
- railway and the post and telegraph came to stay, vast regions of Africa
- which since the beginning of things had known no rule but the whim and
- arbitrary power of transitory chiefs and kings, awoke to the conception
- of impartial law; war canoes vanished from the lakes and robber tribes
- learnt to tend their own cattle and cultivate their gardens. And now
- there were schools. There were hospitals. Perhaps a quarter of a million
- young people in Uganda alone could read and write; the percentage of
- literacy in Uganda was rapidly overtaking that in India and Russia.
- On the face of it this was enough to set one thinking of the whole world
- as if it were sweeping forward to universal civilization and happiness.
- For some years that had been Oswald’s habit of mind. It had been his
- sustaining faith. He had gone from task to task until this last attack
- of blackwater fever had arrested his activities. And then these doubts
- displayed themselves.
- From South Africa, that land of destiny for western civilization, had
- come the first germ of his doubting. Sir Harry Johnston, Oswald’s chief,
- a frank and bitter critic of the New Imperialism that had thrust up from
- the Cape to Nyasaland under the leadership of Cecil Rhodes, helped to
- shape and point his scepticism. The older tradition of the Empire was
- one of administration regardless of profit, Johnston declared; the new
- seemed inspired by conceptions of violent and hasty gain. The Rhodes
- example had set all Africa dancing to the tune of crude exploitation. It
- had fired the competitive greed of the King of the Belgians and
- unleashed blood and torture in the Congo Free State. The Congo State had
- begun as a noble experiment, a real attempt at international compromise;
- it had been given over to an unworthy trustee and wrecked hideously by
- his ruthless profit-hunting. All over the Empire, honest administrators
- and colonial politicians, friendly explorers and the missionaries of
- civilization, were becoming more and more acutely aware of a heavy
- acquisitive thrust behind the New Imperialism. Usually they felt it
- first in the treatment of the natives. The earlier ill-treatment of the
- native came from the local trader, the local planter, the white rough;
- now as that sort of thing was got in hand and men could begin to hope
- for a new and better order, came extensive schemes from Europe for the
- wholesale detachment of the native from his land, for the wholesale
- working and sweating of the native population....
- Had we defeated the little robbers only to clear the way for organized
- imperial robbery?
- Such things were already troubling Oswald’s mind before the shock of the
- South African war. But before the war they amounted to criticisms of
- this administration or that, they were still untouched by any doubts of
- the general Imperial purpose or of the Empire as a whole. The South
- African war laid bare an amazing and terrifying amount of national
- incompetence. The Empire was not only hustled into a war for which there
- was no occasion, but that war was planned with a lack of intelligent
- foresight and conducted with a lack of soundness that dismayed every
- thoughtful Englishman. After a monstrous wasteful struggle the national
- resources dragged it at last to a not very decisive victory. The
- outstanding fact became evident that the British army tradition was far
- gone in decay, that the army was feebly organized and equipped, and that
- a large proportion of its officers were under-educated men, narrow and
- conventional, inferior in imagination and initiative to the farmers,
- lawyers, cattle-drovers, and suchlike leaders against whom their wits
- were pitted. Behind the rejoicings that hailed the belated peace was a
- real and unprecedented national humiliation. For the first time the
- educated British were enquiring whether all was well with the national
- system if so small a conquest seemed so great a task. Upon minds thus
- sensitized came the realization of an ever more vigorous and ever more
- successful industrial and trade competition from Germany and the United
- States; Great Britain was losing her metallurgical ascendancy, dropping
- far behind in the chemical industries and no longer supreme upon the
- seas. For the first time a threat was apparent in the methods of
- Germany. Germany was launching liner after liner to challenge the
- British mercantile ascendancy, and she was increasing her navy with a
- passionate vigour. What did it mean? All over the world the British were
- discovering the German. And the German, it seemed, had got this New
- Imperialism that was in the British mind in a still harsher, still less
- scrupulous and still more vulgar form. “Wake up, England,” said the
- Prince of Wales returning from a visit to Canada, and Oswald heard the
- phrase reverberating in Uganda and talked about it and thought it over
- continually.
- (And Lord Rosebery spoke of “efficiency.”)
- But now when Oswald sought in the newspapers for signs of this waking up
- that he desired, he found instead this tremendous reiteration of the
- ideas of the New Imperialism, acquisitive, mercenary, and altogether
- selfish and national, which he already so profoundly disliked. The
- awakening he desired was an awakening of the spirit, an awakening to
- broader ideas and nobler conceptions of the nation’s rôle in the world’s
- affairs. He had hoped to find men talking of great schemes of national
- education, of new schools of ethnology, of tropical botany and oriental
- languages that would put the Imperial adventure on a broad basis of
- understanding and competent direction. Instead, he found England full of
- wild talk about “taxing the foreigner.” A hasty search for national
- profit he refused to recognize as an awakening. For him indeed it had
- far more of the quality of a nightmare.
- § 3
- It is remarkable how much our deeper convictions are at the mercy of
- physiological jolts.
- Before the renewed attacks of fever had lowered his vitality, Oswald had
- felt doubtful of this and that, but he had never doubted of the ultimate
- human triumph; he had never even doubted that the great Empire he served
- would survive, achieve its mission triumphantly, and incorporate itself
- in some way with a unified mankind. He himself might blunder or fail,
- there might be all sorts of set-backs, but in the end what he called
- Anglo-Saxonism would prevail, the tradition of justice and free speech
- would be justified by victory, and the darkest phase of the Martyrdom of
- Man end. But now the fever had so wrought on his nerves and tissues that
- he no longer enjoyed this ultimate confidence. He could think that
- anything might fail. He could even doubt the stability of the Victorian
- world.
- One night during this last illness that had brought him home he fell
- thinking of Zimbabwe and the lost cities of Africa, and then presently
- of the dead cities of Yucatan, and then of all the lost and vanished
- civilizations of the world, of the long succession of human failures to
- secure any abiding order and security. With this he mingled the
- suggestion of a recent anthropological essay he had read. Two races of
- men with big brains and subtle minds, the Neanderthal race and the
- Cro-Magnon race, it was argued very convincingly, had been entirely
- exterminated before the beginnings of our present humanity. Our own race
- too might fail and perish and pass away. In the night with a mounting
- temperature these were very grisly and horrible thoughts indeed. And
- when at last he passed from such weary and dismal speculations to sleep,
- there came a dream to crown and perpetuate his mood, a dream that was to
- return again and again.
- It was one of those dreams that will sometimes give a nightmare reality
- of form and shape to the merest implications of the waking life, one of
- those dreams that run before and anticipate and perhaps direct one’s
- daylight decisions. That black artist of delirium who throws his dark
- creations upon our quivering mental screens, had seized and utilized all
- Oswald’s germinating misgivings and added queer suggestions of his own.
- Through a thousand irrelevant and transitory horrors one persistent idea
- ran through Oswald’s distresses. It was the idea of a dark forest. And
- of an endless effort to escape from it. He was one of the captains of a
- vaguely conceived expedition that was lost in an interminable wilderness
- of shadows; sometimes it was an expedition of limitless millions, and
- the black trees and creepers about him went up as high as the sky, and
- sometimes he alone seemed to be the entire expedition, and the darkness
- rested on his eyes, and the thorns wounded him, and the great ropes of
- the creepers slashed his face. He was always struggling to get through
- this forest to some unknown hope, to some place where there was light,
- where there was air and freedom, where one could look with brotherly
- security upon the stars; and this forest which was Life, held him back;
- it held him with its darkness, it snared him with slime and marshy
- pitfalls, it entangled him amidst pools and channels of black and
- blood-red stinking water, it tripped him and bound him with its
- creepers; evil beasts snared his followers, great serpents put them to
- flight, inexplicable panics and madnesses threw the long straggling
- columns into internecine warfare, incredible imbecilities threatened the
- welfare of the entire expedition. He would find himself examining the
- loads of an endless string of porters, and this man had flung away bread
- and loaded his pack with poisonous fungi, and that one had replaced
- ammunition by rust and rubbish and filth. He would find himself in
- frantic remonstrance with porters who had flung aside their loads, who
- were sullenly preparing to desert; or again, the whole multitude would
- be stricken with some strange disease with the most foul and horrible
- symptoms, and refuse the doubtful medicines he tendered in his despair;
- or the ground would suddenly breed an innumerable multitude of white
- thin voracious leeches that turned red-black as they fed....
- Then far off through the straight bars of the tree stems a light shone,
- and a great hope sprang up in him. And then the light became red, a
- wavering red, a sudden hot breeze brought a sound of crackling wood and
- the soughing of falling trees, spires and flags and agonized phantoms of
- flame rushed up to the zenith; through the undergrowth a thousand black
- beasts stampeded, the air was thick with wild flights of moths and
- humming-birds, and he realized that the forest had caught fire....
- That forest fire was always a climax. With it came a burning sensation
- in loins and back. It made him shout and struggle and fight amidst the
- black fugitives and the black thickets. Until the twigs and leaves about
- him were bursting into flames like a Christmas tree that is being lit
- up. He would awaken in a sweating agony.
- Then presently he would be back again in the midst of that vague
- innumerable expedition in the steamy deep grey aisles of the forest,
- under the same gathering sense of urgent necessity, amidst the same
- inextricable thickening tangle of confusions and cross-purposes.
- In his waking moments Oswald, if he could, would have dismissed that
- dream altogether from his mind. He could argue that it was the creation
- of some purely pathological despondency, that it had no resemblance, no
- parallelism, no sort of relation to reality. Yet something of its dark
- hues was reflected in his waking thoughts. Sometimes this reflection was
- so faint as to be scarcely perceptible, but always it was there.
- § 4
- The Plantain, to which Oswald drifted back to dine, was a club gathered
- from the ends of the earth and very proud of the fact; it was made up of
- explorers, travellers, colonial officials, K.C.M.G.’s and C.M.G.’s. It
- was understood to be a great exchange of imperial ideas, and except for
- a group or so of members who lived in and about London, it had no
- conversation because, living for the most part at different ends of the
- earth, its members did not get to know each other very well.
- Occasionally there was sporting gossip. Shy, sunburnt men drifted in at
- intervals of three or four years, and dined and departed. Once a member
- with a sunstroke from India gave way to religious mania, and tried to
- preach theosophy from the great staircase to three lonely gentlemen who
- were reading the telegrams in the hall. He was removed with difficulty.
- The great red-papered, white-painted silences of the club are copiously
- adorned with rather old yellow maps of remote regions, and in the hall
- big terrestrial and celestial globes are available for any members who
- wish to refresh their minds upon the broad facts of our position in
- space. But the great glory of the club is its wealth of ethnological and
- sporting trophies. Scarcely is there a variety of spear, stabbing or
- disembowelling knife, blowing tube, bow, crossbow, or matchlock, that is
- not at the disposal of any member nimble enough to pluck it from the
- wall. In addition there is a vast collection of the heads of beasts;
- everywhere they project from walls and pillars; heads of bison, gazelles
- and wart-hogs cheer the souls of the members even in the humblest
- recesses. In the dining-room, above each table, a hippopotamus or a
- rhinoceros or a tiger or a lion glares out with glassy eyes upon the
- world, showing every item in its dentition. Below these monsters sits an
- occasional empire-builder, in the careful evening dress of the
- occasional visitant to civilization, seeming by contrast a very pallid,
- little, nicely behaved thing indeed.
- To the Plantain came Oswald, proposing to dine alone, and in this
- dining-room he discovered Slingsby Darton, the fiscal expert, a little
- Cockney with scarcely any nose at all, sitting with the utmost impudence
- under the largest moose. Oswald was so pleased to discover any one he
- knew that he only remembered that he detested Slingsby Darton as he
- prepared to sit down with him. There was nothing for it then but to make
- the best of him.
- Oswald chose his dinner and his wine with care. Red wines were forbidden
- him, but the wine waiter had good authority, authority from India and
- gastrically very sensitive, for the Moselle he recommended. And in
- answer to Slingsby Darton’s enquiries, Oswald spread out his theory that
- he was an amiable, pleased sort of person obliged to come home from
- Uganda, sorry to leave Uganda, but glad to be back in the dear old
- country and “at the centre of things,” and ready to take up anything——
- “Politics?” said Slingsby Darton. “We want a few voices that have got
- out of sight of the parish pump.”
- Politics—well, it might be. But it was a little hard to join on to
- things at first. “Fearful lot of squabbling—not very much doing. Not
- nearly as much as one had hoped.”
- That seemed a restrained, reasonable sort of thing to say. Nor was it
- extravagant to throw out, “I thought it was ’Wake up, England’; but she
- seems just to be talking in her sleep.”
- Out flares the New Imperialism at once in Oswald’s face. “But have you
- read Chamberlain’s great speeches?” Slingsby Darton protests.
- “I had those in mind,” said Oswald grimly.
- Both gentlemen were in the early phase of encounter. It was not yet time
- to join issue. Slingsby Darton heard, but made no retort. Oswald was
- free to develop his discontents.
- Nothing seemed to be getting done, he complained. The army had been
- proved inefficient, incapable even of a colonial war, but what were we
- doing?
- “Exactly,” said Slingsby Darton. “You dare not even whisper
- ’conscription.’”
- Oswald had not been thinking of that but of a technical reorganization,
- more science, more equipment. But all that he could see in the way of a
- change were “these beastly new caps.” (Those were the days of the hated
- ’Brodrick.’) Then economic reorganization hung fire. “Unemployed”
- processions grew bigger every winter. (“Tariff,” whispered Darton.
- “Intelligent organization,” said Oswald.) Then education——
- “Education,” said Oswald, “is at the heart of the whole business.”
- “I wouldn’t say _that_ altogether,” said Slingsby Darton.
- “At the heart of the whole business,” Oswald repeated as though Slingsby
- Darton had not spoken. “The people do not know. Our people do not
- understand.” The Boer war had shown how horribly backward our education
- was—our higher education, our scientific and technical education, the
- education of our officials and generals in particular. “We have an
- empire as big as the world and an imagination as small as a parish.” But
- it would be a troublesome job to change that. Much too troublesome.
- Oswald became bitter and accusatory. His living side sneered. It would
- bother a lot of Balfour’s friends quite uncomfortably. The dear old
- Church couldn’t keep its grip on an education of that sort, and of
- course the dear old Church must have its grip on education. So after a
- few large-minded flourishes, the politicians had swamped the whole
- question of educational reform in this row about church schools and the
- Passive Resistance movement, both sides only too glad to get away from
- reality. Oswald was as bitter against the Passive Resister as he was
- against the Church.
- “I don’t know whether I should give quite the primary place to
- education,” said Slingsby Darton, battling against this tirade. “I don’t
- know whether I should quite say that. Mr. Chamberlain——”
- The fat, as the vulgar say, was in the fire.
- October, 1903, was a feverish and impassioned time in English affairs.
- From Birmingham that month the storm had burst. With a great splash Mr.
- Joseph Chamberlain had flung the issue of Protection into the sea of
- political affairs; huge waves of disturbance were sweeping out to the
- uttermost boundaries of the empire. Instead of paying taxes we were to
- “tax the foreigner.” To that our fine imperial dream had come. Over
- dinner-tables, in trains and smoking-rooms, men were quarrelling with
- their oldest friends. To Oswald the conversion of Imperialism into a
- scheme for world exploitation in the interests of Birmingham seemed the
- most atrocious swamping of real issues by private interests that it was
- possible to conceive. The Sydenham strain was an uncommercial strain.
- Slingsby Darton was manifestly in the full swirl of the new movement,
- the man looked cunning and eager, he put his pert little face on one
- side and raised his voice to argue. A gathering quarrelsomeness took
- possession of Oswald. He began to speak very rapidly and pungently. He
- assumed an exasperating and unjustifiable detachment in order to quarrel
- better. He came into these things from the outside, he declared, quite
- unbiased, oh! quite unbiased. And this “nail-trust organizer’s campaign”
- shocked him—shocked him unspeakably. Here was England confessedly in a
- phase of inefficiency and deterioration, needing a careful all-round
- effort, in education, in business organization, in military preparation.
- And suddenly drowning everything else in his noise came “this demagogue
- ironmonger with his panacea!”
- Slingsby Darton was indignant. “My dear Sir! I cannot hear you speak of
- Mr. Chamberlain in such terms as that!”
- “But consider the situation,” said Oswald. “Consider the situation! When
- of all things we want steady and harmonious constructive work, comes all
- the uproar, all the cheap, mean thinking and dishonest spouting, the
- music-hall tricks and poster arguments, of a Campaign.”
- Slingsby Darton argued. “But, my dear Sir, it is a _constructive_
- campaign! It is based on urgent economic needs.”
- Oswald would have none of that. Tariff Reform was a quack remedy. “A
- Zollverein. Think of it! With an empire in great detached patches all
- over the world. Each patch with different characteristics and different
- needs. A child could see that a Zollverein is absurd. A child could see
- it. Yet to read the speeches of Chamberlain you’d think a tariff could
- work geographical miracles and turn the empire into a compact continent,
- locked fast against the foreigner. How can a scattered host become a
- band of robbers? The mere attempt takes us straight towards disaster.”
- “Straight away from it!” Slingsby Darton contradicted.
- Oswald went on regardlessly. “An empire—scattered like ours—run on
- selfish and exclusive lines _must_ bring us into conflict with every
- other people under the sun,” he asserted. “It must do. Apart from the
- utter and wanton unrighteousness, apart from the treason to humanity.
- Oh! I _hate_ this New Imperialism. I hate it and dread it. It spoils my
- sleep at nights. It worries me and worries me....”
- Slingsby Darton thought he would do better to worry about this free
- trade of ours which was bleeding us to death.
- “I do not speak as one ignorant of the empire,” said Oswald. “I have
- been watching it——”
- Slingsby Darton, disregarded, maintained that he, too, had been
- watching.
- But Oswald was now at the “I tell you, Sir,” stage.
- He declared that the New Imperialism came from Germany. It was invented
- by professors of Weltpolitik. Milner had grafted it upon us at Balliol.
- But German conditions were altogether different from ours, Germany was a
- geographical unity, all drawn together, unified by natural necessity,
- like a fist. Germany was indeed a fist—by geographical necessity. The
- British empire was like an open hand. Must be like an open hand. We were
- an open people—or we were nothing. We were a liberalizing power or we
- were the most pretentious sham in history. But we seemed to be
- forgetting that liberal idea for which we stood. We swaggered now like
- owners, forgetting that we were only trustees. Trustees for mankind. We
- were becoming a boastful and a sprawling people. The idea of grabbing
- half the world—and then shutting other peoples out with tariffs,
- was—Oswald was losing self-control—“a shoving tradesman’s dream.” And we
- were doing it—as one might expect “a trust-organizing nail-maker”—phrase
- rubbed in with needless emphasis—to do it. We were shoving about,
- treading on everybody’s toes—and failing to educate, failing to arm.
- Yes—shoving. It was a good word. He did not mind how many times he used
- it. “This dream of defying the world without an army, and dominating it
- without education!” The Germans were at least logical in their swagger.
- If they shoved about they also armed. And they educated. Anyhow they
- trained. But we trod on everybody’s toes and tried to keep friends all
- round....
- So Oswald—under the moose—while Slingsby Darton did what he could by
- stabbing an objection at him now and again. It became clearer and
- clearer to Slingsby Darton that the only possibility before him of
- holding his own, short of throwing knives and glasses at Oswald, was to
- capture the offensive.
- “You complain of a panacea,” he said, poking out two arresting fingers
- at Oswald. “That Tariff Reform is a panacea. But what of education? What
- of this education of yours? That also is a panacea.”
- And just then apt to his aid came Walsall and the Bishop of Pinner from
- their table under the big, black, clerical-looking hippopotamus. Walsall
- was a naturalist, and had met Oswald in the days of his biological
- enthusiasm; the Bishop of Pinner had formerly been the Bishop of
- Tanganyika and knew Oswald by repute. So they came over to greet him and
- were at once seized upon as auxiliaries by Slingsby Darton.
- “We’re getting heated over politics,” said Slingsby Darton, indicating
- that at least Oswald was.
- “Every one is getting heated over politics,” said the bishop. “It’s as
- bad as the Home Rule split.”
- “Sydenham’s panacea is to save the world by education. He won’t hear of
- economic organization.”
- The bishop opened eyes and mouth at Oswald until he looked like the full
- moon....
- On that assertion of Slingsby Darton’s they drifted past the paying-desk
- to the small smoking-room, and there they had a great dispute about
- education beneath a gallery audience, so to speak, composed of antelope,
- Barbary sheep, gnu, yaks, and a sea lion. Oswald had never realized
- before how passionately he believed in education. It was a revelation.
- He discovered himself. He wanted to tell these men they were uneducated.
- He did succeed in saying that Mr. Chamberlain was “essentially an
- uneducated man.”
- Walsall was a very trying opponent for a disputant of swift and
- passionate convictions. He had a judicial affectation, a Socratic pose.
- He was a grey, fluffy-headed man with large tortoiseshell spectacles and
- a general resemblance to a kind wise owl. He liked to waggle his head
- slowly from side to side and smile. He liked to begin sentences with
- “But have you thought——?” or “I think you have overlooked——” or “So far
- from believing that, I hold the exact converse.” He said these things in
- a very suave voice as though each remark was carefully dressed in oil
- before serving.
- He expressed grave doubts whether there was “any benefit in
- education—any benefit whatever.”
- But the argument that formed that evening’s entertainment for the sea
- lion and those assorted ruminating artiodactyls was too prolonged and
- heated and discursive to interest any but the most sedulous reader.
- Every possible sort of heresy about education seemed loose that night
- for the affliction of Oswald. Slingsby Darton said, “Make men prosperous
- and education will come of its own accord.” Walsall thought that the
- sort of people who benefited by education “would get on anyhow.” He
- thought knowledge was of value according to the difficulty one
- experienced in attaining it. (Could any sane man really believe that?)
- “I would persecute science,” said Walsall, “and then it would be taken
- care of by enthusiasts.”
- “But do you know,” said Oswald, with an immense quiet in his manner,
- “that there is a—a British Empire? An empire with rather urgent needs?”
- (Suppressed murmur from Slingsby Darton: “Then I don’t see what your
- position is at all!”)
- Walsall disputed these “needs.” Weren’t we all too much disposed to make
- the empire a thing of plan and will? An empire was a growth. It was like
- a man, it grew without taking thought. Presently it aged and decayed. We
- were not going to save the empire by taking thought.
- (Slingsby Darton, disregarded, now disagreeing with Walsall.)
- “Germany takes thought,” Oswald interjected.
- “To its own undoing, perhaps,” said Walsall....
- The bishop’s method of annoyance was even blander than Walsall’s, and
- more exasperating to the fevered victim. He talked of the evils of an
- “educated proletariat.” For a stable community only a certain proportion
- of educated people was advisable. You could upset the social balance by
- over-educating the masses. “We destroy good, honest, simple-souled
- workers in order to make discontented clerks.” Oswald spluttered, “You
- _must_ make a citizen in a modern population understand something of the
- State he belongs to!”
- “Better, Faith,” said the bishop. “Far better, Faith. Teach them a
- simple Catechism.”
- He had visited Russia. He had been to the coronation of the Tzar, a
- beautiful ceremony, only a little marred by a quite accidental massacre
- of some of the spectators. Those were the days before the Russo-Japanese
- war and the coming of the Duma. There was much to admire in Russia, the
- good bishop declared; much to learn. Russia was the land of Mary,
- great-souled and blessed; ours alas! was the land of bustling Martha.
- Nothing more enviable than the political solidarity of Russia—“after our
- warring voices.... Time after time I asked myself, ’Aren’t we Westerns
- on the wrong track? Here is something—Great. And growing greater.
- Something simple. Here is obedience and a sort of primitive contentment.
- Trust in the Little White Father, belief in God. Here Christianity
- _lives indeed_.’”
- About eleven o’clock Walsall was propounding a paradox. “All this talk
- of education,” he said, “reminds me of the man who tried to lift himself
- by his own ears. How, I ask myself, can a democracy such as ours take an
- intelligent interest in its destiny unless it is educated, and how can
- it educate itself unless it takes an intelligent interest in its
- destiny? How escape that dilemma?”
- “A community,” said Oswald, grappling with this after a moment, “a
- community isn’t one mind, it’s a number of minds, some more intelligent,
- some less. It’s a perpetual flow of new minds——”
- Then something gave way within him.
- “We sit here,” he said in a voice so full of fury that the mouth of the
- bishop fell open, “and while we talk this half-witted, half-clever
- _muck_ to excuse ourselves from getting the nation into order, the sands
- run out of the glass. The time draws near when the empire will be
- challenged——”
- He stood up abruptly.
- “Have you any idea,” he said, “what the empire might be? Have you
- thought of these hundreds of millions to whom we might give light—_had_
- we light? Are we to be a possessing and profit-hunting people because we
- have not the education to be a leaderly people? Are we to do no better
- than Rome and Carthage—and loot the provinces of the world? Loot or
- education, that is the choice of every imperial opportunity. All
- England, I find, is echoing with screams for loot. Have none of us
- vision? None?”
- The bishop shook his head sadly. The man, he thought, was raving.
- “What _is_ this vision of yours?” sneered Walsall. “Ten thousand
- professors?”
- “After all,” said Slingsby Darton with a weary insidiousness, “we do not
- differ about our fundamental idea. You must have funds. You must endow
- your schools. Without Tariff Reform to give you revenue——”
- But Oswald was not going to begin over again.
- “I ought to be in bed,” he said, looking at his watch. “My doctor sends
- me to bed at ten....”
- “My God!” he whispered as he put on his coat under the benevolent
- supervision of an exceptionally fine Indian buffalo.
- “What is to happen to the empire,” he cried, going out into the night
- and addressing himself to the moon, to the monument which commemorates
- the heroic incompetence of the Duke of York, and to an interested hansom
- cabby, “what is to happen to the empire—when these are its educated
- opinions?”
- § 5
- But it is high time that Joan and Peter came back into this narrative.
- For this is their story, it bears their names on its covers and on its
- back and on its title-page and at the head of each left-hand page. It
- has been necessary to show the state of mind, the mental condition, the
- outlook, of their sole guardian when their affairs came into his hands.
- This done they now return by telephone. Oswald had not been back in the
- comfortable sitting-room at the Climax Club for ten minutes before he
- was rung up by Mr. Sycamore and reminded of his duty to his young
- charges. A club page called Mr. Sydenham to the receiver in his bedroom.
- In those days the telephone was still far from perfection. It had not
- been in general use for a decade.... Mr. Sycamore was audible as a still
- small voice.
- “Mr. Sydenham? Sycamore speaking.”
- “No need to be,” said Oswald. “You haven’t been speaking to me.”
- “Who am I speaking to? I want Mr. Sydenham. Sycamore speaking.”
- “I’m Mr. Sydenham. Who are you? No need to be sick of your speaking so
- far as I’m concerned. I’ve only just been called to the telephone——”
- “Your solicitor, Sycamore. S.Y.C.A.M.O.R.E.”
- “Oh! Right O. How are you, Mr. Sycamore? I’m Sydenham. How are those
- children?”
- “Hope you’re well, Mr. Sydenham?”
- “Gaudy—in a way. How are you?”
- “I’ve been with Lady Charlotte today. I don’t know if you’ve heard
- anything of——”
- Whop! Whop. Bunnik. _Silence._
- After a little difficulty communication with Mr. Sycamore was partially
- restored. I say partially because his voice had now become very small
- and remote indeed. “I was saying, I don’t know if you understand
- anything of the present state of affairs.”
- “Nothing,” said Oswald. “Fire ahead.”
- “Can you hear me distinctly? I find you almost inaudible.”
- Remonstrances with the exchange led after a time to slightly improved
- communications.
- “You were saying something about a fire?” said Mr. Sycamore.
- “I said nothing about a fire. You were saying something about the
- children?”
- “Well, well. Things are in a very confused state, Mr. Sydenham. I hope
- you mean to take hold of their education. These children are not being
- educated, they are being fought over.”
- “Who’s thinking over them?”
- “No one. But the Misses Stubland and Lady Charlotte are fighting over
- them.... F.I.G.H.T.I.N.G. I want _you_ to think over them....
- You—yes.... Think, yes. Both clever children. Great waste if they are
- not properly educated.... Matters are really urgent. I have been with
- Lady Charlotte today. You know she kidnapped them?”
- “Kidnapped?”
- A bright girlish voice, an essentially happy voice, cut into the
- conversation at this point. “Three minutes _up_,” it said.
- Empire-building language fell from Oswald. In some obscure way this
- feminine intervention was swept aside, and talk was resumed with Mr.
- Sycamore.
- It continued to be a fragmentary talk, and for a time the burthen of
- some unknown lady complaining to an unknown friend about the behaviour
- of a third unknown named George, stated to lack “gumption,” interwove
- with the main theme. But Mr. Sycamore did succeed in conveying to Oswald
- a sense of urgency about the welfare of his two charges. Immediate
- attention was demanded. They were being neglected. The girl was ill. “I
- would like to talk it over with you as soon as possible,” said Mr.
- Sycamore.
- “Can you come and breakfast here at eight?” said the man from the
- tropics.
- “Half past nine,” said the Londoner, and the talk closed.
- The talk ended, but for a time the bell of Oswald’s telephone remained
- in an agitated state, giving little nervous rings at intervals. When he
- answered these the exchange said “Number please,” and when he said, “You
- rang _me_,” the exchange said, “Oh, no! we didn’t....”
- “An empire,” whispered Oswald, sitting on the edge of his bed, “which
- cannot even run a telephone service efficiently....”
- “Education....”
- He tried to recall his last speech at the club. Had he ranted? What had
- they thought of it? What precisely had he said? While they sat and
- talked _muck_—his memory was unpleasantly insistent upon that
- “_muck_”—the sands ran out of the hour-glass, a new generation grew up.
- Had he said that? That was the point of it all—about the new generation.
- A new generation was growing up and we were doing nothing to make it
- wiser, more efficient, to give it a broader outlook than the generation
- that had blundered into and blundered through the Boer war. Had he said
- that? That was what he ought to have said.
- § 6
- For a long time he sat on his bed, blank-minded and too tired to finish
- undressing. He got to bed at last. But not to sleep. He found that the
- talk in the club had disturbed his mind almost unendurably. It had
- pointed and endorsed everything that he had been trying not to think
- about the old country. Now, too weary and too excited to sleep, he
- turned over and over again, unprofitably and unprogressively, the
- tangled impressions of his return to England.
- How many millions of such hours of restless questioning must have been
- spent by wakeful Englishmen in the dozen years between the Boer war and
- the Great war; how many nocturnally scheming brains must have explored
- the complicated maze of national dangers, national ambitions, and
- national ineptitude! If “Wake up, England,” sowed no great harvest of
- change in the daylight, it did at any rate produce large phantom crops
- at night. He argued with Walsall over and over again, sometimes wide
- awake and close to the point, sometimes drowsily with the discussion
- becoming vague and strangely misshapen and incoherent. Was Walsall
- right? Was it impossible to change the nature and quality of a people?
- Must we English always be laggards in peace and blunderers in war? Were
- our achievements accidents, and our failures essential? Was slackness in
- our blood? Surely a great effort might accomplish much, a great effort
- to reorganize political life, to improve national education, to make the
- press a better instrument of public thought and criticism. To which
- Walsall answered again with, “How can a democratic community take an
- intelligent interest in its destinies unless it is educated, and how can
- it educate itself unless it takes an intelligent interest in its
- destinies?”
- Oswald groaned and turned over in bed.
- Thought passed by insensible degrees into dreaming and dreaming
- shallowed again to wakefulness. Always he seemed to be arguing with
- Walsall and the bishop for education and effort; nevertheless, now
- vaguely apprehended as an atmospheric background, now real and close,
- the black forest of his African nightmare was about him. Always he was
- struggling on and always he was hoping to see down some vista the warm
- gleam of daylight, the promise of the open. And Walsall, a vast forest
- owl with enormous spectacles, kept getting in the way, flapping hands
- that were really great wings at him and assuring him that there was no
- way out. None. “This forest is life. This forest will always be life.
- There is no other life. After all it isn’t such a very bad forest.”
- Other figures, too, came and went; a gigantic bishop sitting back in an
- easy chair blocked one hopeful vista, declaring that book-learning only
- made the lower classes discontented and mischievous, and then a stupidly
- contented fat man smoking a fat cigar drove in a gig athwart the line of
- march. He said nothing; he just drove his gig. Then somehow an
- automobile came in, a most hopeful means of escape, except that it had
- broken down; and Oswald was trying to repair it in spite of the jeering
- of an elderly gentleman in a white waistcoat. Suddenly the whole forest
- swarmed with children. There were countless children; there were just
- two children. Instead of a multitudinous expedition Oswald found himself
- alone in the black jungle with just two children, two white and stunted
- children who were dying for the air and light. No one had cared for
- them. One was ill, seriously ill. Unless the way out was found they
- could not live. They were Dolly’s children, his wards. But what was he
- to do for them?...
- Then far ahead he saw that light of the great conflagration, that light
- that promised to be daylight and became a fire....
- “Black coffee,” said Oswald during one of the wide-awake intervals.
- “Cigars. Talk. Over-excited.... I ought to be more careful.... I forget
- how flimsy I am still....
- “I must get my mind off these things. I’ll talk to old Sycamore tomorrow
- and see about this little master Peter Stubland and his foster-sister.
- I’ll go into the matter thoroughly. I haven’t thought of them before.
- “I wonder if the boy still takes after Dolly....
- “After all,” he said, rolling over, “it’s true. Education is the big
- neglected duty of the time. It’s fundamental. And what am I doing? It’s
- just England—England all over—to let that boy be dragged up. I ought to
- see about him—now. I’ll go down there....
- “I’ll go and stay with Aunt Charlotte for a day or so. I’ll send her a
- wire tomorrow.”
- § 7
- The quiet but observant life of old Cashel at Chastlands was greatly
- enlivened by the advent of Oswald.
- Signs of a grave and increasing agitation in the mind of Cashel’s
- mistress became evident immediately after the departure of Mr. Sycamore.
- Manifestly whatever that gentleman had said or done—old Cashel had been
- able to catch very little—had been of a highly stimulating nature. So
- soon as he was out of the house, Lady Charlotte abandoned her sofa and
- table, upsetting her tonic as she did so, and still wearing her
- dressing-gown and cap, proceeded to direct a hasty packing for Italy.
- Unwin became much agitated, and a housemaid being addressed as a
- “perfect fool” became a sniffing fount of tears. There was a running to
- and fro with trunks and tea-baskets, a ringing of bells, and minor
- orders were issued and countermanded; the carriage was summoned twice
- for an afternoon drive and twice dismissed. When at last the lace
- peignoir was changed for a more suitable costume in which to take tea,
- Lady Charlotte came so near to actual physical violence that Unwin
- abruptly abandoned her quest of a perfect pose for wig and cap, and her
- ladyship surprised and delighted Cashel with a blond curl cocked
- waggishly over one eye. She did not have tea until half-past five.
- She talked to herself with her hard blue eyes fixed on vacancy. “I will
- not stay here to be insulted,” she said.
- “Rampageous,” whispered Cashel on the landing. “Rumbustious. What’s it
- all about?”
- “Cashel!” she said sharply as he was taking away the tea-things.
- “M’lady.”
- “Telephone to Mr. Grimes and ask him to take tickets as usual for myself
- and Unwin to Pallanza—for tomorrow.”
- It was terrible but pleasing to have to tell her that Mr. Grimes would
- now certainly have gone home from his office.
- “See that it is done tomorrow. Tomorrow I must catch the eleven
- forty-seven for Charing Cross. I shall take lunch with me in the train.
- A wing of chicken. A drop of claret. Perhaps a sandwich. Gentleman’s
- Relish or shrimp paste. And a grape or so. A mere mouthful. I shall
- expect you to be in attendance to help with the luggage as far as
- Charing Cross....”
- So she was going after all.
- “Like a flight,” mused Cashel. “What’s after the Old Girl?”...
- He grasped the situation a little more firmly next day.
- The preparations for assembling Lady Charlotte in the hall before
- departure were well forward at eleven o’clock, although there was no
- need to start for the station until the half hour. A brief telegram from
- Oswald received about half-past ten had greatly stimulated these
- activities....
- Unwin, very white in the face—she always had a bilious headache when
- travelling was forward—and dressed in the peculiar speckled black dress
- and black hat that she considered most deterrent to foreign depravity,
- was already sitting stiffly in the hall with Lady Charlotte’s
- purple-coloured dressing-bag beside her, and Cashel having seen to the
- roll of rugs was now just glancing through the tea-basket to make sure
- that it was in order, when suddenly there was the flapping, rustling
- sound of a large woman in rapid movement upon the landing above, and
- Lady Charlotte appeared at the head of the stairs, all hatted, veiled
- and wrapped for travelling. Her face was bright white with excitement.
- “Unwin, I want you,” she cried. “Cashel, say I’m in bed. Say I’m ill and
- must not be disturbed. Say I’ve been taken ill.”
- She vanished with the agility of a girl of twenty—except that the
- landing was of a different opinion.
- The two servants heard her scuttle into her room and slam the door.
- There was a great moment of silence.
- “Oh, _Lor’_!” Unwin rose with the sigh of a martyr, and taking the
- dressing-bag with her—the fittings alone were worth forty pounds—and
- pressing her handkerchief to her aching brow, marched upstairs.
- Cashel, agape, was roused by the ringing of the front door bell. He
- opened to discover Mr. Oswald Sydenham with one arm in a sling and a rug
- upon the other.
- “Hullo, Cashel,” he said. “I suppose my room isn’t occupied? My telegram
- here? How’s Lady Charlotte?”
- “Very poorly, sir,” said Cashel. “She’s had to take in her bed, sir.”
- “Pity. Anything serious?”
- “A sudden attact, sir.”
- “H’m. Well, tell her I’m going to inflict myself upon her for a day or
- so. Just take my traps in and I’ll go on with this fly to Limpsfield.
- Say I’ll be back to dinner.”
- “Certainly, sir.”
- The old man bustled out to get in the valise and Gladstone bag that
- constituted Oswald’s luggage. When he came into the hall again he found
- the visitor scrutinizing the tea-basket and the roll of rugs with his
- one penetrating eye in a manner that made him dread a question. But
- Oswald never questioned servants; on this occasion only he winked at
- one.
- “Nothing wrong with the arm, sir?” asked old Cashel.
- “Nothing,” said Oswald, still looking markedly at the symptoms of
- imminent travel. “H’m.”
- He went out to the fly, stood ready to enter it, and then swivelled
- round very quickly and looked up at his aunt’s bedroom window in time to
- catch an instant impression of a large, anxious face regarding him.
- “Ah!” said Oswald, and returned smiling grimly into the hall.
- “Cashel,” he called.
- “Sir?”
- “Her ladyship is up. Tell her I have a few words to say to her before
- she goes.”
- “Beg pardon, sir——”
- “Look here, Cashel, you do what I tell you.”
- “I’ll tell Miss Unwin, sir.”
- He went upstairs, leaving Oswald still thinking over the rugs. Yes, she
- was _off!_ She had got everything; pointed Alpine sticks, tea-basket,
- travelling campstool. It must be Switzerland or Italy for the winter at
- least. A great yearning to see his aunt with his own eye came upon
- Oswald. He followed Cashel upstairs quietly but swiftly, and found him
- in a hasty whispered consultation with Unwin on the second landing. “Oh
- my ’ed’ll burst _bang_,” Unwin was saying.
- “’Er ladyship, sir,” she began at the sight of Oswald.
- “Ssh!” he said to her, and held her and Cashel silent with an uplifted
- forefinger while he listened to the sounds of a large powerful woman
- going to bed swiftly and violently in her clothes.
- “I must go in to her, sir,” said Unwin breaking the silence. “Poor dear!
- It’s a _very_ sudden attact.”
- The door opened and closed upon Unwin.
- “Lock the door on him, you—you _Idiot!_” they heard Lady Charlotte
- shout—too late.
- The hated and dreaded visage of Oswald appeared looking round the corner
- of the door into the great lady’s bedroom. Her hat had been flung aside,
- she was tying on an unconvincing night cap over her great blond
- travelling wig; her hastily assumed nightgown betrayed the agate brooch
- at her neck.
- “How dare you, sir!” she cried at the sight of him.
- “You’re not ill. You’re going to cut off to Italy this afternoon. What
- have you done to my Wards?”
- “A lady’s sick room! Sacred, Sir! Have you no sense of decency?”
- “Is it measles, Auntie?”
- “Go _away_!”
- “I daren’t. If I leave you alone in this country for a year or two
- you’re bound to get into trouble. What am I to _do_ with you?”
- “Unbecoming intrusion!”
- “You ought to be stopped by the Foreign Office. You’ll lead to a war
- with Italy.”
- “Go for a doctor, Cashel,” she cried aloud in her great voice. “Go for
- the doctor.”
- “M’lady,” very faintly from the landing.
- “And countermand the station cab, Cashel,” said Oswald.
- “If you do anything of the sort, Cashel!” she cried, and sitting up in
- bed clutched the sheets with such violence that a large spring-sided
- boot became visible at the foot of the bed. The great lady had gone to
- bed in her boots. Aunt and nephew both glared at this revelation in an
- astonished silence.
- “How _can_ you, Auntie,” said Oswald.
- “If I choose,” said Lady Charlotte. “If I choose——Oh! _Go away!_”
- “Back to dinner,” said Oswald sweetly, and withdrew.
- He was still pensive upon the landing when Unwin appeared to make sure
- that the station cab was not countermanded....
- Under the circumstances he was not surprised to find on his return from
- The Ingle-Nook that he was now the only occupant of Chastlands. Aunt
- Charlotte had fled, leaving behind a note that had evidently been
- written before his arrival.
- _My dear Nephew,—I am sorry that my arrangements for going abroad
- this winter, already made, prevent my welcoming you home for this
- uninvited and totally unexpected visit. I am sure Cashel and the
- other servants will take good care of you. You seem to know the way
- to their good graces. There are many things I should have liked to
- talk over with you if you had given me due and proper notice of your
- return as you ought to have done, instead of leaving it to a
- solicitor to break the glad tidings to me, followed by a sixpenny
- telegram. As it is, I shall just miss you. I have to go, and I
- cannot wait. All my arrangements are made. I suppose it is idle to
- expect civility from you ever or the slightest attention to the
- convenances. The Sydenhams have never shone in manners. Well, I hope
- you will take those two poor children quite out of the hands of
- those smoking, blaspheming, nightgown-wearing Limpsfield women. They
- are utterly unfit for such a responsibility. Utterly. I would not
- trust a pauper brat in their hands. The children require firm
- treatment, the girl especially, or they will be utterly spoilt. She
- is deceitful and dishonest, as one might expect; she gave Mrs. Pybus
- a very trying time indeed, catching measles deliberately and so
- converting the poor woman’s house into a regular hospital. I fear
- for her later. I have done my best for them both. No doubt you will
- find it all spun into a fine tale, but I trust your penetration to
- see through a tissue of lies, however plausible it may seem at the
- first blush. I am glad to think you are now to relieve me of a
- serious responsibility, though how a single man not related to her
- in the slightest degree can possibly bring up a young girl, even
- though illegitimate, without grave scandal, passes my poor
- comprehension. No doubt I am an old fashioned old fool nowadays!
- Thank God! I beg to be excused!_
- _Your affectionate Aunt_
- CHARLOTTE.
- Towards the end of this note her ladyship’s highly angular handwriting
- betrayed by an enhanced size and considerable irregularity, a deflection
- from her customary calm.
- § 8
- Oswald knocked for some time at the open green door of The Ingle-Nook
- before attracting any one’s attention. Then a small but apparently only
- servant appeared, a little round-faced creature who looked up hard into
- Oswald’s living eye—as though she didn’t quite like the other. She
- explained that “Miss Phyllis” was not at home, and that “Miss Phœbe
- mustn’t be disturved.” Miss Phœbe was working. Miss Phyllis had gone
- away with Mary——
- “Who’s Mary?” said Oswald.
- “Well, Sir, it’s Mary who always ’as been ’ere, Sir,”—to Windsor to be
- with Miss Joan. “And it’s orders no one’s allowed to upset Miss Phœbe
- when she’s writing. Not even Lady Charlotte Sydenham, Sir. I dursn’t
- give your name, Sir, even. I dursn’t.”
- “Except,” she added reverentially, “it’s Death or a Fire.”
- “You aren’t the Piano, per’aps?” she asked.
- Oswald had to confess he wasn’t.
- The little servant looked sorry for him.
- And that was in truth the inexorable law now of The Ingle-Nook. Aunt
- Phœbe was taking herself very seriously—as became a Thinker whose
- _Stitchwoman_ papers, deep, high, and occasionally broad in thought,
- were running into a sale of tens of thousands. So she sat hard and close
- at her writing-table from half-past nine to twelve every morning,
- secluded and defended from all the world, correcting, musing deeply
- over, and occasionally reading aloud the proofs of the third series of
- _Stitchwoman_ papers. (Old Groombridge, the occasional gardener, used to
- listen outside in awe and admiration. “My word, but she do give it ’em!”
- old Groombridge used to say.) Oswald perceived that there was nothing to
- do but wait. “I’ll wait,” he said, “downstairs.”
- “I suppose I ought to let you in,” said the little servant, evidently
- seeking advice.
- “Oh, decidedly,” said Oswald, and entered the room in which he had
- parted from Dolly six years ago.
- The door closed behind the little servant, and Oswald found himself in a
- house far more heavily charged with memories than he could have
- expected. The furniture had been but little altered; it was the morning
- time again, the shadow masses fell in the same places, it had just the
- same atmosphere of quiet expectation it had had on that memorable day
- before the door beyond had opened and Dolly had appeared, subdued and
- ashamed, to tell him of the act that severed them for ever. How living
- she seemed here by virtue of those inanimate things! Had that door
- opened now he would have expected to see her standing there again. And
- he was alive still, strong and active, altered just a little by a touch
- of fever and six short years of experience, but the same thing of
- impulse and desire and anger, and she had gone beyond time and space,
- beyond hunger or desire. He had walked between this window and this
- fireplace on these same bricks on which he was pacing now, spitting
- abuse at her, a man mad with shame and thwarted desire. Never had he
- forgiven her, or stayed his mind to think what life had been for her,
- until she was dead. That outbreak, with gesticulating hands and an
- angry, grimacing face, had been her last memory of him. What a broken
- image he had made of himself in her mind! And now he could never set
- things right with her, never tell her of his belated understanding and
- pity. “I was a weak thing, confused and torn between my motives. Why did
- you—you who were my lover—why did you not help me after I had stumbled?”
- So the still phantom in that room reproached him, a phantom of his own
- creation, for Dolly had never reproached him; to the end she had had no
- reproaches in her heart for any one but herself because of their
- disaster.
- “Hold tight to love, little people,” he whispered. “Hold tight to
- love.... But we don’t, we don’t....”
- Never before had Oswald so felt the tremendous pitifulness of life. He
- felt that if he stayed longer in this room he must cry out. He walked to
- the garden door and stood looking at the empty flagstone path between
- the dahlias and sunflowers.
- It was all as if he had but left it yesterday, except for the heartache
- that now mingled with the sunshine.
- “Pat—whack—pat—whack”; he scarcely heeded that rhythmic noise.
- Peter had gone out of his head altogether. He walked slowly along the
- pathway towards the little arbour that overhung the Weald. Then,
- turning, he discovered Peter with a bat in his hand, regarding him....
- Directly Oswald saw Peter he marvelled that he had not been eager to see
- him before. The boy was absurdly like Dolly; he had exactly the same
- smile; and directly he saw the gaunt figure of his one-eyed guardian he
- cried out, “It’s Nobby!” with a voice that might have been hers. There
- was a squeak of genuine delight in his voice. He wasn’t at all the
- sturdy little thing in a pinafore that Oswald remembered. He seemed
- indeed at the first glance just a thin, flat-chested little Dolly in
- grey flannel trousers.
- He had obviously been bored before this happy arrival of Oswald. He had
- been banging a rubber ball against the scullery with a cricket-bat and
- counting hits and misses. It is a poor entertainment. Oswald did not
- realize how green his memory had been kept by the Bungo-Peter saga, and
- Peter’s prompt recognition after six years flattered him.
- The two approached one another slowly, taking each other in.
- “You remember me?” said Oswald superfluously.
- “Don’t I just! You promised me a lion’s skin.”
- “So I did.”
- He could not bear to begin this new relationship as a defaulter. “It’s
- on its way to you,” he equivocated, making secret plans.
- Peter, tucking his bat under his arm and burying his hands in his
- trouser pockets, drew still nearer. At a distance of four feet or
- thereabouts he stopped short and Oswald stopped short. Peter regarded
- this still incredible home-comer with his head a little on one side.
- “It was you, used to tell me stories.”
- “You don’t remember my telling you stories?”
- “I do. About the Ba-ganda who live in U-ganda. Don’t you remember how
- you used to put out my Zulus and my elephants and lions on the floor and
- say it was Africa. You taught us roaring like lions—Joan and me. Don’t
- you remember?”
- Oswald remembered. He remembered himself on all fours with the children
- on the floor of the sunny playroom upstairs, and some one sometimes
- standing, sometimes sitting above the game, some one who listened as
- keenly as the children, some one at whom he talked about that world of
- lakes as large as seas, and of trackless, sunless forests and of
- park-like glades and wildernesses of flowers, and about strings of
- loaded porters and of encounters with marvelling people who had never
- before set eyes on a European....
- § 9
- The idea that the guardianship of Peter was just a little duty to be
- seen to, vanished at the sight of him in favour of the realization of a
- living relationship. There are moments when small boys of ten in perfect
- health and condition can look the smallest, flimsiest, and most pathetic
- of created things—and at the same time preternaturally valiant and
- intelligent. They take on a likeness to sacred flames that may at any
- moment flicker out. More particularly does this unconscious camouflage
- of delicacy occur in the presence of parents and guardians already in a
- state of self-reproach and emotional disorder. Mr. Grimes with an eye to
- growth had procured a grey flannel suit a little too large for Peter,
- but it never occurred to Oswald that the misfit could be due to anything
- but a swift and ominous shrinkage of the boy. He wanted to carry him off
- forthwith to beer and cream and sea-bathing.
- But these were feelings he knew he must not betray.
- “I must tell you some more stories,” he said. “I’ve come back to England
- to live.”
- “_Here?_”—brightly.
- “Well, near here. But I shall see a lot of you now, Peter.”
- “I’ll like that,” said Peter. “I’ve often thought of you....”
- A pause.
- “You broken your arm?” said Peter.
- “Not so bad as that. I’ve got to have some bits of shell taken out.”
- “That Egyptian shell? When you got the V.C.?”
- “I never told you of the Egyptian shell?” asked Oswald.
- “Mummy did. Once. Long ago.”
- Another pause.
- “This garden’s not so greatly altered, Peter,” said Oswald.
- “There’s a Friendship’s Garden up that end,” said Peter, indicating the
- end by a movement of his head. “But it isn’t much. Aunt Phœbe started it
- and forgot it. Every one who came was to plant something. And me and
- Joan have gardens, but they’ve got all weedy now.”
- “Let’s have a look at it all,” said Oswald, and guardian and ward
- strolled towards the steep.
- “The Dahlias are splendid this year,” Oswald remarked, “and these
- Japanese roses are covered with berries. Splendid, aren’t they? One can
- make a jelly of them. Quite a good jelly. And let me see, wasn’t there a
- little summerhouse at the end of this path where one looked over the
- Weald? Ah! here it is. Hardly changed at all.”
- He sat down. Here he had talked with Dolly and taken her hand....
- He bestirred himself to talk.
- “And exactly how old are you now, Peter?”
- “Ten years and two months,” said Peter.
- “We’ll have to find a school for you.”
- “Have you been in Africa since I saw you?” Peter asked, avoiding the
- topic.
- “Since you saw me going off,” said Oswald, and the man glanced at the
- boy and the boy glanced at the man, and each was wondering what the
- other remembered. “I’ve been in Uganda all the time. There’s been
- fighting and working. Some day you must go to Uganda and see all that
- has been done. We’ve made a good railway and good roads and telegraphs.
- We’ve put down robbers and cruelty.”
- “And shot a lot of lions?”
- “Plenty. The lions were pretty awful for a bit. About Nairobi and along
- the line.”
- “Shot ’em when they were coming at you?”
- “One was coming straight at me.”
- “That’s my skin,” said Peter.
- Oswald made no answer.
- “I’d like to go to Africa,” said Peter.
- “You shall.”
- He decided to begin at once upon his neglected task of making an
- Imperial citizen according to the ideas that prevailed before the advent
- of the New Imperialism. “That sort of thing,” he said, “is what we
- Englishmen are for, you know, Peter. What our sort of Englishman is for
- anyhow. We have to go about the world and make roads and keep the peace
- and see fair play. We’ve got to kill big beasts and climb hard
- mountains. That’s the job of the Englishman. He’s a sort of policeman. A
- sort of working guardian. Not a nosy slave-driver trying to get rich. He
- chases off slave-drivers. All the world’s his beat. India, Africa,
- China, and the East, all the seas of the world. This little fat green
- country, all trim and tidy and set with houses and gardens, isn’t much
- of a land for a man, you know—unless he’s an invalid. It’s a good land
- to grow up in and come back to die in. Or rest in. But in between, no!”
- “No,” said Peter.
- “No.”
- “But you haven’t come back to die, Uncle Nobby?”
- “No fear. But I’ve had to come back. I’m resting. This old arm, you
- know, and all that sort of thing. Just for a time.... And besides I want
- to see a lot of you.”
- “Yes.”
- “You have to grow up here and learn all you can, science and all sorts
- of things, so that you can be a useful man—wherever you have to go.”
- “Africa,” said Peter.
- “Africa, perhaps. And that’s why one has to go to school and college—and
- learn all about it.”
- “They haven’t taught me much about it yet,” said Peter.
- “Well, you haven’t been to much in the way of schools,” said Oswald.
- “Are there better schools?”
- “No end. We’re going to find one,” said Oswald.
- “I wish school was over,” said Peter.
- “Why? You’ve got no end to learn yet.”
- “I want to begin,” said Peter, looking out across the tumbled gentleness
- of the Weald.
- “Begin school?”
- “No, begin—Africa, India—doing things.”
- “School first,” said Oswald.
- “Are there schools where you learn about guns and animals and mountains
- and foreign people?” said Peter.
- “There must be,” said Oswald. “We’ll find something.”
- “Where you don’t do Latin and parsing and ’straction of the square
- root.”
- “Oh! those things have their place.”
- “Did you have to do them, Uncle Nobby?”
- “Rather.”
- “Were they useful to you?”
- “At times—in a way. Of course those things are good as training, you
- know—awfully good. Harden up the mental muscles, Peter.”
- Peter made no reply to that.
- Presently Peter said, “Shall I learn about machines?”
- “When you’ve done some mathematics, Peter.”
- “I’d like to fly,” said Peter.
- “That’s far away yet.”
- “There was a boy at that school, his father was an engineer; and he said
- that flying machines were coming quite soon.”
- This was beyond Oswald’s range.
- “The French have got a balloon that steers about,” he said. “That’s as
- near as we are likely to come to flying for a long time yet.”
- “This boy said that he meant a real flying machine, not a balloon. It
- was to be heavier than air. It would fly like a kite or a bird.”
- “I doubt if we’ll see that in my lifetime,” said Oswald; “or yours,”
- blind to the fate that had marked Peter for its own.
- “H’m,” said Peter, with a shadow falling upon one of his brightest
- dreams. (Nobby ought to know these things. His word ought surely to be
- final. Still, after all, this chap’s father was an engineer.) “I’d love
- to fly,” said Peter.
- § 10
- Something with the decorative effect of a broad processional banner in a
- very High Church indeed, appeared upon the flagstone path. It was Aunt
- Phœbe.
- She had come out into the garden half an hour before her usual time. But
- indeed from the moment when she had heard Oswald and Peter talking in
- the garden below she had been unable to write more. After some futile
- attempts to pick up the lost thread of her discourse, she had gone to
- her bedroom and revised her toilet, which was often careless in the
- morning, so as to be more expressive of her personality. She was wearing
- a long djibbah-like garment with a richly embroidered yoke, she had
- sandals over her brown stockings, and rather by way of symbol of
- authorship than for any immediate use she bore a big leather portfolio.
- There was moreover now a gold-mounted fountain pen amidst the other
- ingredients of the cheerful chatelaine that had once delighted Peter’s
- babyhood.
- She seemed a fuller, more confident person than Oswald remembered. She
- came eloquent with apologies. “I have to make an inexorable rule,” she
- said, “against disturbances. As if I were a man writer instead of a mere
- woman. Between nine and one I am a woman enclosed—cloistered—refused.
- Sacred hours of self-completeness. Unspeakably precious to me. Visitors
- are not even announced. It is a law—inflexible.”
- “We must all respect our work,” said Oswald.
- “It’s over now,” said Aunt Phœbe, smiling like the sun after clouds.
- “It’s over now for the day. I am just human—until tomorrow again.”
- “You are writing a book?” Oswald asked rather ineptly.
- “The Stitchwoman; Series Three. Much is expected; much must be given. I
- am the slave now of a Following.”
- Aunt Phœbe went to the wall and stood with her fine profile raised up
- over the view. She was a little breathless and twitching slightly, but
- very magnificent. Most of her hair was tidy. “Our old Weald, does it
- look the same?” she asked.
- “Quite the same,” said Oswald, standing up beside her.
- “But not to me,” she said. “Indeed not to me. To me every day it is
- different. Always wide, always wonderful, but different, always
- different. I know it so well.”
- Oswald felt she had worked a “catch” on him. He was faintly nettled.
- “Still,” he said, “fundamentally one must recognize that it’s the same
- Weald.”
- “I wonder,” said Aunt Phœbe suddenly, looking at him very intently, and
- then, as if she tasted the word, “Fundamentally?”
- “I don’t know,” she added.
- Oswald was too much annoyed to reply.
- “And what do you think of your new charge?” she asked. “I don’t know
- whether Peter quite understands that yet. The young squire goes to the
- men. He casts aside childish things, and rides out in his little
- Caparison to join the ranks. Do you know that, Peter? Mr. Sydenham is
- now your sole guardian.”
- Peter looked at Oswald and smiled shyly, and his cheeks flushed.
- “I think we shall get on together,” said Oswald.
- “Would that it ended there! You take the girl too?”
- “It is not my doing,” said Oswald.
- Aunt Phœbe addressed the Weald.
- “Poor Dolly! So it is that the mother soul cheats itself. Through the
- ages—always self-abnegation for the woman.” She turned to Oswald. “If
- she had had time to think I am certain she would not have excluded women
- from this trust. Certain. What have men to do with education? With the
- education of a woman more particularly. The Greater from the Less. But
- the thing is done. It has been a great experiment, a wonderful
- experiment; teaching, I learnt—but I doubt if you will understand that.”
- There was a slight pause. “What exactly was the nature of the
- experiment?” asked Oswald modestly.
- “Feminine influence. Dominant.”
- Oswald considered. “I don’t know if you include Lady Charlotte,” he
- threw out.
- “Oh!” said Aunt Phœbe.
- “But she has played her part, I gather.”
- “Feminine! No! She is completely a Man-made Woman. Quintessentially the
- Pampered Squaw. Holding her position by her former charms. A Sex
- Residuum. Relict. This last outrage. An incident—merely. Her course of
- action was dictated for her. A Man. A mere solicitor. One Grimes. The
- flimsiest creature! An aspen leaf—but Male. Male.”
- Stern thoughts kept Aunt Phœbe silent for a time. Then she remarked very
- quietly, “I shook him. I shook him _well_.”
- “I hope still to have the benefit of your advice,” said Oswald gravely.
- “Nay,” she said. But she was pleased. “A shy comment, perhaps. But the
- difference will be essential. Don’t expect me to guide you as you would
- wish to be guided. That phase is over between men and women. We hand the
- children over—since the law will have it so. Take them!”
- And then addressing the Weald, Aunt Phœbe, in vibrating accents, uttered
- a word that was to be the keynote of a decade of feminine activities.
- “The Vote,” said Aunt Phœbe, getting a wonderful emotional buzz into her
- voice. “The Vo-o-o-o-o-te.”
- § 11
- So it was that Oswald found himself fully invested with his
- responsibilities.
- There was a terrifying suggestion in Aunt Phœbe’s manner that he would
- presently have to clap Peter’s hat on, make up a small bundle of Peter’s
- possessions, and fare forth with him into the wide world, picking up the
- convalescent at Windsor on the way, but that was a misapprehension of
- Aunt Phœbe’s intentions. And, after all, it was Peter’s house and garden
- if it came to that. For a time at least things could go on as they were.
- But the task of direction was now fully his. Whether these two young
- people were properly educated or not, whether they too became slackers
- and inadequate or worthy citizens of this great empire, rested now
- entirely in his hands.
- “They must have the best,” he said....
- The best was not immediately apparent.
- From Chastlands and his two rooms at the Climax Club Oswald conducted
- his opening researches for the educational best, and whenever he was at
- Chastlands he came over nearly every day to The Ingle-Nook on his
- bicycle. It was a well-remembered road. Scarcely was there a turn in it
- that did not recall some thought of the former time when he had ridden
- over daily for a sight of Dolly; he would leave his bicycle in a clump
- of gorse by the high road that was surely an outgrown fragment of the
- old bush in which he had been wont to leave it six years before; he
- would walk down the same rusty path, and his heart would quicken as it
- used to quicken at the thought of seeing Dolly. But presently Peter
- began to oust Dolly from his thoughts. Sometimes Peter would be standing
- waiting for him by the high road. Sometimes Peter, mounted on a little
- outgrown bicycle, would meet him on the purple common half way.
- A man and a boy of ten are perhaps better company than a man and a boy
- of fifteen. There’s so much less egotism between them. At any rate Peter
- and Oswald talked of education and travel and politics and philosophy
- with unembarrassed freedom. Oswald, like most childless people, had had
- no suspicion of what the grey matter of a bright little boy’s brain can
- hold. He was amazed at Peter’s views and curiosities. It was Oswald’s
- instinct never to talk “down” to man, woman or child. He had never
- thought about it, but if you had questioned him he would have told you
- that that was the sort of thing one didn’t do. And this instinct gave
- him a wide range of available companionship. Peter had never conceived
- such good company as Oswald. You could listen to Oswald for hours. They
- discoursed upon every topic out of dreamland. And sometimes they came
- very close even to that dreamland where Bungo Peter adventured
- immortally. Oswald would feel a transfiguring presence, a touch of
- fantasy and half suspect their glorious companion.
- Much of their talk was a kind of story-telling.
- “How should we go to the Congo Forest?” Peter would ask. “Would one go
- by Nairobi?”
- “No, that’s the other way. We’d have to go——”
- And forthwith Nobby and Peter were getting their stuff together and
- counting how many porters they would need....
- “One day perhaps we’d come upon a place ’fested with crocodiles,” Peter
- would say.
- “We would. You would be pushing rather ahead of the party with your
- guns, looking for anything there might be—pushing through tall reeds far
- above your head,” Oswald would oblige.
- “You’d be with me,” insisted Peter....
- It was really story-telling....
- It was Peter’s habit in those days when he was alone to meditate on
- paper. He would cover sheet after sheet with rapidly drawn scenes of
- adventure. One day Oswald found himself figuring in one of these dream
- pictures. He and Peter were leading an army in battle. “Capture of Ten
- War Elephants” was the legend thereon. But he realized how clearly the
- small boy saw him. Nothing was spared of the darkened, browless side of
- his face with its asymmetrical glass eye, the figure of him was very
- long and lean and bent, with its arm still in its old sling; and it was
- drawn manifestly with the utmost confidence and admiration and love....
- Peter’s hostility to schools was removed very slowly. The lessons at
- High Cross had scarred him badly, and about Miss Mills clung
- associations of the utmost dreariness. Still it was Oswald’s instinct to
- consult the young man on his destiny.
- “There’s a lot you don’t know yet,” said Oswald.
- “Can’t I read it out of books?” asked Peter.
- “You can’t read everything out of books,” said Oswald. “There’s things
- you ought to see and handle. And things you can only learn by doing.”
- Oswald wanted Peter to plan his own school.
- Peter considered. “I’d like lessons about the insides of animals, and
- about the people in foreign countries—and how engines work—and all that
- sort of thing.”
- “Then we must find a school for you where they teach all that sort of
- thing,” said Oswald, as though it was merely a question of ordering
- goods from the Civil Service Stores....
- He had much to learn yet about education.
- § 12
- But Oswald was still only face to face with the half of his
- responsibility.
- One morning he found Peter at the schoolroom table very busy cutting big
- letters out of white paper. Beside him was a long strip of Turkey twill
- from the dressing-up box that The Ingle-Nook had plagiarized from the
- Sheldricks. “I’m getting ready for Joan,” said Peter. “I’m going to put
- ’Welcome’ on this for over the garden gate. And there’s to be a
- triumphal arch.”
- Hitherto Peter had scarcely betrayed any interest in Joan at all, now he
- seemed able to think of no one else, and Oswald found himself reduced
- abruptly from the position of centre of Peter’s universe to a mere
- helper in the decorations. But he was beginning to understand the small
- boy by this time, and he took the withdrawal of the limelight
- philosophically.
- When Aunt Phyllis and Joan arrived they found the flagged path from the
- “Welcome” gate festooned with chains of coloured paper (bought with
- Peter’s own pocket-money and made by him and Oswald, with some slight
- assistance and much moral support from Aunt Phœbe in the evening) to the
- door. The triumphal arch had been achieved rather in the Gothic style by
- putting the movable Badminton net posts into a sort of trousering of
- assorted oriental cloths from the dressing-up chest, and crossing two
- heads of giant Heracleum between them. Peter stood at the door in the
- white satin suit his innocent vanity loved—among other rôles it had
- served for Bassanio, Prince Hal, and Antony (over the body of
- Cæsar)—with a face of extraordinary solemnity. Behind him stood Uncle
- Nobby.
- Joan wasn’t quite the Joan that Peter expected. She was still wan from
- her illness and she had grown several inches. She was as tall as he. And
- she was white-faced, so that her hair seemed blacker than ever, and her
- eyes were big and lustrous. She came walking slowly down the path with
- her eyes wide open. There was a difference, he felt, in her movement as
- she came forward, though he could not have said what it was; there was
- more grace in Joan now and less vigour. But it was the same Joan’s voice
- that cried, “Oh, Petah! It’s lovely!” She stood before him for a moment
- and then threw her arms about him. She hugged him and kissed him, and
- Uncle Nobby knew that it was the smear of High Cross School that made
- him wriggle out of her embrace and not return her kisses.
- But immediately he took her by the hand.
- “It’s better in the playroom, Joan,” he said.
- “All right, Joan, go on with him,” said Oswald, and came forward to meet
- Aunt Phyllis. Aunt Phœbe was on the staircase a little aloof from these
- things, as became a woman of intellect, and behind Aunt Phyllis came
- Mary, and behind Mary came the Limpsfield cabman with Aunt Phyllis’s
- trunk upon his shoulder, and demolished the triumphal arch. But Peter
- did not learn of that disaster until later, and then he did not mind; it
- had served its purpose.
- The playroom (it was the old nursery rechristened) was indeed better. It
- was all glorious with paper chains of green and white festooned from
- corner to corner. On the floor to the right under the window was every
- toy soldier that Peter possessed drawn up in review array—a gorgeous new
- Scots Grey band in the front that Oswald had given him. But that was
- nothing. The big armchair had been drawn out into the middle of the
- room, and on it was _Peter’s own lion-skin_. And a piece of red
- stair-carpet had been put for Joan to go up to the throne upon. And
- beside the throne was a little table, and on the table was a tinsel robe
- from Clarkson’s and a wonderful gilt crown and a sceptre. Oswald had
- brought them along that morning.
- “The crown is for _you_, Joan!” said Peter. “The sceptre was bought for
- _you_.”
- Little white-faced Joan stood stockishly with the crown in one hand and
- the sceptre in the other. “Put the crown on, Joan,” said Peter. “It’s
- yours. It’s a rest’ration ceremony.”
- But she didn’t put it on.
- “It’s lovely—and it’s lovely,” whispered Joan in a sort of rapture, and
- stared about her incredulously with her big dark eyes. It was home
- again—_home_, and Mrs. Pybus had passed like an evil dream in the night.
- She had never really believed it possible before that Mrs. Pybus could
- pass away. Even while Aunt Phyllis and Mary had been nursing her, Mrs.
- Pybus had hovered in the background like something more enduring,
- waiting for them to pass away as inexplicably as they had come. Joan had
- heard the whining voice upon the stairs every day and always while she
- was ill, and once Mrs. Pybus had come and stood by her bedside and
- remarked like one who maintains an argument, “She’ll be ’appy enough
- ’ere when she’s better again.”
- _No more Mrs. Pybus!_ No more whining scoldings. No more unexpected
- slaps and having to go to bed supperless. No more measles and uneasy
- misery in a bed with grey sheets. No more dark dreadful sayings that
- lurked in the mind like jungle beasts. She was home, home with Peter,
- out of that darkness....
- And yet—outside was the darkness still....
- “Joan,” said Peter, trying to rouse her. “There’s a cake like a birthday
- for tea....”
- When Oswald came in she was still holding the gilt crown in her hand.
- She let Peter take it from her and put it on her head, still staring
- incredulously about her. She took the sceptre limply. Peter was almost
- gentle with this strange, staring Joan.
- § 13
- For some days Oswald regarded Joan as a grave and thoughtful child. She
- seemed to be what country people call “old-fashioned.” She might have
- been a changeling. He did not hear her laugh once. And she followed
- Peter about as if she was his shadow.
- Then one day as he cycled over from Chastlands he heard a strange tumult
- proceeding from a little field on Master’s farm, a marvellous mixture of
- familiar and unfamiliar sounds, an uproar, wonderful as though a
- tinker’s van had met a school treat and the twain had got drunk
- together. The source of this row was hidden from him by a little
- coppice, and he dismounted and went through the wood to investigate.
- Joan and Peter had discovered a disused cowshed with a sloping roof of
- corrugated iron, and they had also happened upon an abandoned kettle and
- two or three tin cans. They were now engaged in hurling these latter
- objects on to the resonant roof, down which they rolled thunderously
- only to be immediately returned. Joan was no longer a slip of pensive
- dignity, Peter was no longer a marvel of intellectual curiosities. They
- were both shrieking their maximum. Oswald had never before suspected
- Joan of an exceptionally full voice, nor Peter of so vast a wealth of
- gurgling laughter. “Keep the Pot-A-boilin’” yelled Joan. “Keep the
- Pot-A-boilin’.”
- “Hoo!” cried Peter. “Hoo! Go it, Joan. Wow!”
- And then, to crown the glory, _the kettle burst_. It came into two
- pieces. That was too perfect! The two children staggered back. Each
- seized a half of the kettle and kicked it deliberately. Then they rolled
- away and fell on their stomachs amidst the grass, kicking their legs in
- the air.
- But the spirit of rowdyism grows with what it feeds upon.
- “Oh, let’s do something _reely_ awful!” cried Joan. “Let’s do something
- _reely_ awful, Petah!”
- Peter’s legs became still and stiff with interrogation.
- “Oh, Petah!” said Joan. “If I could only smash a window. Frow a brick
- frough a real window, a Big Glass Window. Just one Glass Window.”
- “_Where’s_ a window?” said Peter, evidently in a highly receptive
- condition.
- From which pitch of depravity Oswald roused him by a prod in the
- back....
- § 14
- But after that Joan changed rapidly. Colour crept back into her skin,
- and a faintly rollicking quality into her bearing. She became shorter
- again and visibly sturdier, and her hair frizzed more and stuck out
- more. Her laugh and her comments upon the world became an increasingly
- frequent embroidery upon the quiet of The Ingle-Nook. She seemed to have
- a delusion that Peter was just within earshot, but only just.
- Oswald wondered how far her recent experiences had vanished from her
- mind. He thought they might have done so altogether until one day Joan
- took him into her confidence quite startlingly. He was smoking in the
- little arbour, and she came and stood beside him so noiselessly that he
- did not know she was there until she spoke. She was holding her hands
- behind her, and she was regarding the South Downs with a pensive frown.
- She was paying him the most beautiful compliment. She had come to
- consult him.
- “Mrs. Pybus said,” she remarked, “that every one who doesn’t believe
- there’s a God goes straight to Hell....
- “I don’t believe there’s a God,” said Joan, “and Peter _knows_ there
- isn’t.”
- For a moment Oswald was a little taken aback by this simple theology.
- Then he said, “D’you think Peter’s looked everywhere, Joan?”
- Then he saw the real point at issue. “One thing you may be sure about,
- Joan,” he said, “and that is that there isn’t a Hell. Which is rather a
- pity in its way, because it would be nice to think of this Mrs. Pybus of
- yours going there. But there’s no Hell at all. There’s nothing more
- dreadful than the dreadful things _in_ life. There’s no need to worry
- about Hell.”
- That he thought was fairly conclusive. But Joan remained pensive, with
- her eyes still on the distant hills. Then she asked one of those
- unanswerable children’s questions that are all implication, imputation,
- assumption, misunderstanding, and elision.
- “But if there isn’t a Hell,” said Joan, “what does God do?”
- § 15
- It was after Joan had drifted away again from these theological
- investigations that Oswald, after sitting some time in silence, said
- aloud and with intense conviction, “I love these children.”
- He was no longer a stranger in England; he had a living anchorage. He
- looked out over the autumnal glories of the Weald, dreaming intentions.
- These children must be educated. They must be educated splendidly.
- Oswald wanted to see Peter serving the empire. The boy would have
- pluck—he had already the loveliest brain—and a sense of fun. And Joan?
- Oswald was, perhaps, not quite so keen in those days upon educating
- Joan. That was to come later....
- After all, the empire, indeed the whole world of mankind, is made up of
- Joans and Peters. What the empire is, what mankind becomes, is nothing
- but the sum of what we have made of the Joans and Peters.
- CHAPTER THE TENTH
- A SEARCHING OF SCHOOLMASTERS
- § 1
- So it was that a systematic intention took hold of the lives of Joan and
- Peter. They had been snatched apart adventurously and disastrously out
- of the hands of an aimless and impulsive modernism and dragged off into
- dusty and decaying corners of the Anglican system. Now they were to be
- rescued by this Empire worshipper, this disfigured and suffering
- educational fanatic, and taught——?
- What was there in Oswald’s mind? His intentions were still sentimental
- and cloudy, but they were beginning to assume a firm and definite form.
- Just as the Uganda children were being made into civilized men and women
- according to the lights and means of the Protectorate government, so
- these two children had to be made fit rulers and servants of the
- greatest empire in the world. They had to know all that a ruling race
- should know, they had to think and act as befitted a leading people. All
- this seemed to him the simple and obvious necessity of the case. But he
- was a sick man, fatigued much more readily than most men, given to moods
- of bitter irritability; he had little knowledge of how he might set
- about this task, he did not know what help was available and what was
- impossible. He made enquiries and some were very absurd enquiries; he
- sought advice and talked to all sorts of people; and meanwhile Joan and
- Peter spent a very sunny and pleasant November running wild about
- Limpsfield—until one day Oswald noted as much and packed them off for
- the rest of the term to Miss Murgatroyd again. The School of St. George
- and the Venerable Bede was concentrating upon a Christmas production of
- _Alice in Wonderland_. There could not be very much bad teaching anyhow,
- and there would be plenty of fun.
- How is one to learn where one’s children may be educated?
- This story has its comic aspects: Oswald went first to the Education
- Department!
- He thought that if one had two rather clever and hopeful children upon
- whom one was prepared to lavish time and money, an Imperial Education
- Department would be able to tell an anxious guardian what schools
- existed for them and the respective claims and merits and
- inter-relationships of such schools. But he found that the government
- which published a six-inch map of the British Isles on which even the
- meanest outhouse is marked, had no information for the enquiring parent
- or guardian at all in this matter of schools. An educational map had
- still to become a part of the equipment of the civilized state. As it
- was inconceivable that party capital could be made out of the production
- of such a map, it was likely to remain a desideratum in Great Britain
- for many years to come.
- In an interview that remained dignified on one side at least until the
- last, Oswald was referred to the advertisement columns of _The Times_
- and the religious and educational papers, and to—“a class of educational
- _agents_,” said the official with extreme detachment. “Usually, of
- course, people _hear_ of schools.”
- So it was that England still referred back to the happy days of the
- eighteenth century when our world was small enough for everybody to know
- and trust and consult everybody, and tell in a safe and confidential
- manner everything that mattered.
- “Oh, my God!” groaned Oswald suddenly, giving way to his internal
- enemies. “My God! Here are two children, brilliant children—with plenty
- of money to be spent on them! Doesn’t the Empire care a twopenny damn
- what becomes of them?”
- “There is an Association of Private Schoolmasters, I believe,” said the
- official, staring at him; “but I don’t know if it’s any good.”
- § 2
- Joan was rehearsing a special dance in costume and Peter was
- word-perfect as the White Knight long before Oswald had found even a
- hopeful school for either of them. He clung for some time to the
- delusion that there must exist somewhere a school that would exactly
- meet Peter’s natural and reasonable demand for an establishment where
- one would learn about “guns and animals, mountains, machines and foreign
- people,” that would give lessons about “the insides of animals” and “how
- engines work” and “all that sort of thing.” The man wanted a school kept
- by Leonardo da Vinci. When he found a curriculum singularly bare of
- these vital matters, he began to ask questions.
- His questions presently developed into a very tiresome and trying
- Catechism for Schoolmasters. He did not allow for the fact that most
- private schoolmasters in England were rather overworked and rather
- under-exercised men with considerable financial worries. Indeed, he made
- allowances for no one. He wanted to get on with the education of Joan
- and Peter—and more particularly of Peter.
- His Catechism varied considerably in detail, but always it ran upon the
- lines of the following questions.
- “What sort of boy are you trying to make?”
- “How will he differ from an uneducated boy?”
- “I don’t mean in manners, I mean how will he differ in imagination?”
- “Yes—I said—imagination.”
- “Don’t you _know_ that education is building up an imagination? I
- thought everybody knew that.”
- “Then what _is_ education doing?”
- Here usually the Catechized would become troublesome and the Catechist
- short and rude. The Catechism would be not so much continued as resumed
- after incivilities and a silence.
- “What sort of curriculum is my ward to go through?”
- “Why is he to _do_ Latin?”
- “Why is he to _do_ Greek?”
- “Is he going to read or write or speak these languages?”
- “Then what is the strange and peculiar benefit of them?”
- “What will my ward know about Africa when you have done with him?”
- “What will he know about India? Are there any Indian boys here?”
- “What will he know about Garibaldi and Italy? About engineering? About
- Darwin?”
- “Will he be able to write good English?”
- “Do your boys do much German? Russian? Spanish or Hindustani?”
- “Will he know anything about the way the Royal Exchange affects the
- Empire? But why shouldn’t he understand the elementary facts of finance
- and currency? Why shouldn’t every citizen understand what a pound
- sterling really means? All our everyday life depends on that. What do
- you teach about Socialism? Nothing! Did you say Nothing? But he may be a
- member of Parliament some day. Anyhow he’ll be a voter.”
- “But if you can’t teach him everything why not leave out these damned
- classics of yours?”...
- The record of an irritable man seeking the impossible is not to be dwelt
- upon too closely. During his search for the boys’ school that has yet to
- exist, Oswald gave way to some unhappy impulses; he made himself
- distressing and exasperating to quite a number of people. From the first
- his attitude to scholastic agents was hostile and uncharitable. His
- appearance made them nervous and defensive from the outset, more
- particularly the fierce cocking of his hat and the red intensity of his
- eye. He came in like an accusation rather than an application.
- “And tell me, are these all the schools there are?” he would ask,
- sitting with various printed and copygraphed papers in his hand.
- “All we can recommend,” the genteel young man in charge would say.
- “All you are _paid_ to recommend?” Oswald would ask.
- “They are the best schools available,” the genteel young man would
- fence.
- “Bah!” Oswald would say.
- A bad opening....
- From the ruffled scholastic agents Oswald would go on in a mood that was
- bound to ruffle the hopeful school proprietor. Indeed some of these
- interviews became heated so soon and so extravagantly that there was a
- complete failure to state even the most elementary facts of the case.
- Lurid misunderstandings blazed. Uganda got perplexingly into the
- dispute. From one admirable establishment in Eastbourne Oswald retreated
- with its principal calling after him from his dignified portico, “I
- wouldn’t take the little nigger at any price.”
- When his doctor saw him after this last encounter he told him; “You are
- not getting on as well as you ought to do. You are running about too
- much. You ought to be resting completely.”
- So Oswald took a week’s rest from school visiting before he tried again.
- § 3
- If it had not been for the sense of Joan and Peter growing visibly day
- by day, Oswald might perhaps have displayed more of the patience of the
- explorer. But his was rather the urgency of a thirsty traveller who
- looks for water than the deliberation of a trigonometrical survey. In a
- little while he mastered the obvious fact that preparatory schools were
- conditioned by the schools for which they prepared. He found a school at
- Margate, White Court, which differed rather in quality, and particularly
- in the quality of its proprietor, than in the nature of its arrangements
- from the other schools he had been visiting, and to this he committed
- Peter. Assisted by Aunt Phyllis he found an education for Joan in
- Highmorton School, ten miles away; he settled himself in a furnished
- house at Margate to be near them both; and having thus gained a
- breathing time, he devoted himself to a completer study of the
- perplexing chaos of upper-class education in England. What was it “up
- to”? He had his own clear conviction of what it ought to be up to, but
- the more he saw of existing conditions, the more hopelessly it seemed to
- be up to either entirely different things or else, in a spirit of
- intellectual sabotage, up to nothing at all. From the preparatory
- schools he went on to the great public schools, and from the public
- schools he went to the universities. He brought to the quest all the
- unsympathetic detachment of an alien observer and all the angry passion
- of an anxious patriot. With some suggestions from Matthew Arnold.
- “Indolence.” “Insincerity.” These two words became more and more
- frequent in his thoughts as he went from one great institution to
- another. Occasionally the headmasters he talked to had more than a
- suspicion of his unspoken comments. “Their imaginations are dead within
- them,” said Oswald. “If only they could see the Empire! If only they
- could forget their little pride and dignity and affectations in the
- vision of mankind!”
- His impressions of headmasters were for the most part taken against a
- background of white-flannelled boys in playing-fields or grey-flannelled
- boys in walled court-yards. Eton gave him its river effects and a
- bright, unforgetable boatman in a coat of wonderful blue; Harrow
- displayed its view and insisted upon its hill. Physically he liked
- almost all the schools he saw, except Winchester, which he visited on a
- rainy day. Almost always there were fine architectural effects; now
- there was a nucleus of Gothic, now it was time-worn Tudor red brick, now
- well-proportioned grey Georgian. Most of these establishments had the
- dignity of age, but Caxton was wealthily new. Caxton was a nest of new
- buildings of honey-coloured stone; it was growing energetically but
- tidily; it waved its hand to a busy wilderness of rocks and plants and
- said, “our botanical garden,” to a piece of field and said “our museum
- group.” But it had science laboratories with big apparatus, and the
- machinery for a small engineering factory. Oswald with an experienced
- eye approved of its biological equipment. All these great schools were
- visibly full of life and activity. At times Oswald was so impressed by
- this life and activity that he felt ashamed of his enquiries; it seemed
- ungracious not to suppose that all was going well here, that almost any
- of these schools was good enough and that almost any casual or
- sentimental considerations, Sydenham family traditions or the like,
- should suffice to determine which was to have the moulding of Peter. But
- he had set his heart now on getting to the very essentials of this
- problem; he was resolved to be blinded by no fair appearances, and
- though these schools looked as firmly rooted and stoutly prosperous as
- British oaks and as naturally grown as they, though they had an air of
- discharging a function as necessary as the beating of a heart and as
- inevitably, he still kept his grip on the idea that they were artificial
- things of men’s contriving, and still pressed his questions: What are
- you trying to do? What are you doing? How are you doing it? How do you
- fit in to the imperial scheme of things?
- So challenged these various high and headmasters had most of them the
- air of men invited to talk of things that are easier to understand than
- to say. They were not at all pompous about their explanations; from
- first to last Oswald never discovered the pompous schoolmaster of legend
- and history; without exception they seemed anxious to get out of their
- gowns and pose as intelligent laymen; but they were not intelligent
- laymen, they did not explain, they did not explain, they waved hands and
- smiled. They “hoped” they were “turning out clean English gentlemen.”
- They didn’t train their men specially to any end at all. The aim was to
- develop a general intelligence, a general goodwill.
- “In relation to the empire and its destiny?” said Oswald.
- “I should hardly fix it so definitely as that,” said Overtone of
- Hillborough.
- “But don’t you set before these youngsters some general aim in life to
- which they are all to contribute?”
- “We rather leave the sort of contribution to them,” said Overtone.
- “But you must put something before them of where they are, where they
- are to come in, what they belong to?” said Oswald.
- “That lies in the world about them,” said Overtone. “King and country—we
- don’t need to preach such things.”
- “But what the King signifies—if he signifies anything at all—and the aim
- of the country,” urged Oswald. “And the Empire! The Empire—our reality.
- This greatness of ours beyond the seas.”
- “We don’t stress it,” said Overtone. “English boys are apt to be
- suspicious and ironical. Have you read that delightful account of the
- patriotic lecture in _Stalky and Co_? Oh, you _should_.”
- A common evasiveness characterized all these headmasters when Oswald
- demanded the particulars of Peter’s curriculum. He wanted to know just
- the subjects Peter would study and which were to be made the most
- important, and then when these questions were answered he would demand:
- “And why do you teach this? What is the particular benefit of that to
- the boy or the empire? How does this other fit into your scheme of a
- clear-minded man?” But it was difficult to get even the first questions
- answered plainly. From the very outset he found himself entangled in
- that longstanding controversy upon the educational value of Latin and
- Greek. His circumstances and his disposition alike disposed him to be
- sceptical of the value of these shibboleths of the British academic
- world. Their share in the time-table was enormous. Excellent gentlemen
- who failed to impress him as either strong-minded or exact, sought to
- convince him of the pricelessness of Latin in strengthening and
- disciplining the mind; Hinks of Carchester, the distinguished Greek
- scholar, slipped into his hand at parting a pamphlet asserting that only
- Greek studies would make a man write English beautifully and precisely.
- Unhappily for his argument Hinks had written his pamphlet neither
- beautifully nor precisely. Lippick, irregularly bald and with neglected
- teeth, a man needlessly unpleasing to the eye, descanted upon the Greek
- spirit, and its blend of wisdom and sensuous beauty. He quoted Euripides
- at Oswald and breathed an antique air in his face—although he knew that
- Oswald knew practically no Greek.
- “Well,” said Oswald, “but compare this,” and gave him back three good
- minutes of Swahili.
- “But what does it mean? It’s gibberish to me. A certain melody perhaps.”
- “In English,” Oswald grinned, “you would lose it all. It is a passage
- of—oh! quite fantastic beauty.”...
- No arguments, no apologetics, stayed the deepening of Oswald’s
- conviction that education in the public schools of Great Britain was not
- a forward-going process but a habit and tradition, that these classical
- schoolmasters were saying “nothing like the classics” in exactly the
- same spirit that the cobbler said “nothing like leather,” because it was
- the stuff they had in stock. These subjects were for the most part being
- slackly, tediously, and altogether badly taught to boys who found no
- element of interest in them, the boys were as a class acquiring a
- distaste and contempt for learning thus presented, and a subtle, wide
- demoralization ensued. They found a justification for cribs and every
- possible device for shirking work in the utter remoteness and
- uselessness of these main subjects; the extravagant interest they took
- in school games was very largely a direct consequence of their intense
- boredom in school hours.
- Such was the impression formed by Oswald. To his eyes these great
- schools, architecturally so fine, so happy in their out-of-door aspects,
- so pleasant socially, became more and more visibly whirlpools into which
- the living curiosity and happy energy of the nation’s youth were drawn
- and caught, and fatigued, thwarted, and wasted. They were beautiful
- shelters of intellectual laziness—from which Peter must if possible be
- saved.
- But how to save him? There was, Oswald discovered, no saving him
- completely. Oswald had a profound hostility to solitary education. He
- knew that except through accidental circumstances of the rarest sort, a
- private tutor must necessarily be a poor thing. A man who is cheap
- enough to devote all his time to the education of one boy can have very
- little that is worth imparting. And education is socialization.
- Education is the process of making the unsocial individual a citizen....
- Oswald’s decision upon Caxton in the end, was by no means a certificate
- of perfection for Caxton. But Caxton had a good if lopsided Modern Side,
- with big, businesslike chemical and physical laboratories, a quite
- honest and living-looking biological and geological museum, and a
- pleasant and active layman as headmaster. The mathematical teaching
- instead of being a drill in examination solutions was carried on in
- connexion with work in the physical and engineering laboratories. It was
- true that the “Modern Side” of Caxton taught no history of any sort,
- ignored logic and philosophy, and, in the severity of its modernity,
- excluded even that amount of Latin which is needed for a complete
- mastery of English; nevertheless it did manifestly interest its boys
- enough to put games into a secondary place. At Caxton one did not see
- boys playing games as old ladies in hydropaths play patience,
- desperately and excessively and with a forced enthusiasm, because they
- had nothing better to do. Even the Caxton school magazine did not give
- much more than two-thirds of its space to games. So to Caxton Peter
- went, when Mr. Mackinder of White Court had done his duty by him.
- § 4
- Mr. Henderson, the creator of Caxton, was of the large sized variety of
- schoolmaster, rather round-shouldered and with a slightly persecuted
- bearing towards parents; his mind seemed busy with many
- things—buildings, extensions, governors, chapels. Oswald walked with him
- through a field that was visibly becoming a botanical garden, towards
- the school playing-fields. Once the schoolmaster stopped, his mind
- distressed by a sudden intrusive doubt whether the exactly right place
- had been chosen for what he called a “biological pond.” He had to ask
- various questions of a gardener and give certain directions. But he was
- listening to Oswald, nevertheless.
- Oswald discoursed upon the training of what he called “the fortunate
- Elite.” “We can’t properly educate the whole of our community yet,
- perhaps,” he said, “but at least these expensive boys of ours ought to
- be given everything we can possibly give them. It’s to them and their
- class the Empire will look. Naturally. We ought to turn out boys who
- know where they are in the world, what the empire is and what it aims to
- do, who understand something of their responsibilities to Asia and
- Africa and have a philosophy of life and duty....”
- “More of that sort of thing is done,” said Mr. Henderson, “than
- outsiders suppose. Masters talk to boys. Lend them books.”
- “In an incidental sort of way,” said Oswald. “But three-quarters of the
- boys you miss.... Even here, it seems, you must still have your
- classical side. You must still keep on with Latin and Greek, with
- courses that will never reach through the dull grind to the stale old
- culture beyond. Why not drop all that? Why not be modern outright, and
- leave Eton and Harrow and Winchester and Westminster to go the old ways?
- Why not teach modern history and modern philosophy in plain English
- here? Why not question the world we see, instead of the world of those
- dead Levantines? Why not be a modern school altogether?”
- The headmaster seemed to consider that idea. But there were the gravest
- of practical objections.
- “We’d get no scholarships,” he considered. “Our boys would stop at a
- dead end. They’d get no appointments. They’d be dreadfully
- handicapped....
- “We’re not a complete system,” said Mr. Henderson. “No. We’re only part
- of a big circle. We’ve got to take what the parents send on to us and
- we’ve got to send them on to college or the professions or what not.
- It’s only part of a process here—only part of a process.”...
- Just as the ultimate excuse of the private schoolmasters had been that
- they could do no more than prepare along the lines dictated for them by
- the public school, so the public school waved Oswald on to the
- university. Thus he came presently with his questions to the university,
- to Oxford and Cambridge, for it was clear these set the pattern of all
- the rest in England. He came to Oxford and Cambridge as he came to the
- public schools, it must be remembered, with a fresh mind, for the navy
- had snatched him straight out of his preparatory school away from the
- ordinary routines of an English education at the tender age of thirteen.
- § 5
- Oswald’s investigation of Oxford and Cambridge began even before Peter
- had entered School House at Caxton. As early as the spring of 1906, the
- scarred face under the soft felt hat was to be seen projecting from one
- of those brown-coloured hansom cabs that used to ply in Cambridge. His
- bag was on the top and he was going to the University Arms to instal
- himself and have “a good look round the damned place.” At times there
- still hung about Oswald a faint flavour of the midshipman on leave in a
- foreign town.
- He spent three days watching undergraduates, he prowled about the
- streets, and with his face a little on one side, brought his red-brown
- eye to bear on the books in bookshop windows and the display of socks
- and ties and handkerchiefs in the outfitters. In those years the
- chromatic sock was just dawning upon the adolescent mind, it had still
- to achieve the iridescent glories of its crowning years. But Oswald
- found it symptomatic; _ex pede Herculem_. He was to be seen surveying
- the Backs, and standing about among the bookstalls in the Market Place.
- He paddled a Canadian canoe to Byron’s pool, and watched a cheerful
- group dispose of a huge tea in the garden of the inn close at hand. They
- seemed to joke for his benefit, neat rather than merry jesting. So that
- was Cambridge, was it? Then he went on by a tedious crosscountry journey
- to the slack horrors of one of the Oxford hotels, and made a similar
- preliminary survey of the land here that he proposed to prospect. There
- seemed to be more rubbish and more remainders in the Oxford second-hand
- bookshops and less comfort in the hotels; the place was more
- self-consciously picturesque, there was less of Diana and more of Venus
- about its beauty, a rather blowsy Gothic Venus with a bad tooth or so.
- So it impressed Oswald. The glamour of Oxford, sunrise upon Magdalen
- tower, Oriel, Pater, and so forth, were lost upon Oswald’s toughened
- mind; he had spent his susceptible adolescence on a battleship, and the
- sunblaze of Africa had given him a taste for colour like a taste for raw
- rye whiskey....
- He walked about the perfect garden of St. Giles’ College and beat at the
- head of Blepp, the senior tutor, whose acquaintance he had made in the
- Athenaeum, with his stock questions. The garden of St. Giles’ College is
- as delicate as fine linen in lavender; its turf is supposed to make
- American visitors regret the ancestral trip in the _Mayflower_ very
- bitterly; Blepp had fancied that in a way it answered Oswald. But Oswald
- turned his glass eye and his ugly side to the garden, it might just as
- well have not been there, and kept to his questioning; “What are we
- making of our boys here? What are they going to make of the Empire? What
- are you teaching them? What are you not teaching them? How are you
- working them? And why? Why? What’s the idea of it all? Suppose presently
- when this fine October in history ends, that the weather of the world
- breaks up; what will you have ready for the storm?”
- Blepp felt the ungraciousness of such behaviour acutely. It was like
- suddenly asking the host of some great beautiful dinner-party whether he
- earned his income honestly. Like shouting it up the table at him. But
- Oswald was almost as comfortable a guest for a don to entertain as a
- spur in one’s trouser pocket. Blepp did his best to temper the occasion
- by an elaborate sweet reasonableness.
- “Don’t you think there’s something in our atmosphere?” he began.
- “I don’t like your atmosphere. The Oxford shops seem grubby little
- shops. The streets are narrow and badly lit.”
- “I wasn’t thinking of the shops.”
- “It’s where the youngsters buy their stuff, their furniture, and as far
- as I can see, most of their ideas.”
- “You’ll be in sympathy with the American lady who complained the other
- day about our want of bathrooms,” Blepp sneered.
- “Well, _why not_?” said Oswald outrageously.
- Blepp shrugged his shoulders and looked for sympathy at the twisted
- brick chimneys of St. Giles’.
- Oswald became jerkily eloquent. “We’ve got an empire sprawling all over
- the world. We’re a people at grips with all mankind. And in a few years
- these few thousand men here and at Cambridge and a few thousand in the
- other universities, have practically to be the mind of the empire. Think
- of the problems that press upon us as an empire. All the nations sharpen
- themselves now like knives. Are we making the mentality to solve the
- Irish riddle here? Are we preparing any outlook for India here? What are
- you doing here to get ready for such tasks as these?”
- “How can I show you the realities that go on beneath the surface?” said
- Blepp. “You don’t see what is brewing today, the talk that goes on in
- the men’s rooms, the mutual polishing of minds. Look not at our formal
- life but our informal life. Consider one college, consider for example
- Balliol. Think of the Jowett influence, the Milner group—not blind to
- the empire there, were we? Even that fellow Belloc. A saucy rogue, but
- good rich stuff. All out of just one college. These are things one
- cannot put in a syllabus. These are things that defeat statistics.”
- “But that is no reason why you should put chaff and dry bones into the
- syllabus,” said Oswald....
- “This place,” said Oswald, and waved his arm at the great serenity of
- St. Giles’, “it has the air of a cathedral close. It might be a
- beautiful place of retirement for sad and weary old men. It seems a
- thousand miles from machinery, from great towns and the work of the
- world.”
- “Would you have us teach in a foundry?”
- “I’d have you teaching something about the storm that seems to me to be
- gathering in the world of labour. These youngsters here are going to be
- the statesmen, the writers and teachers, the lawyers, the high
- officials, the big employers, of tomorrow. But all that world of
- industry they have to control seems as far off here as if it were on
- another planet. You’re not talking about it, you’re not thinking about
- it. You’re teaching about the Gracchi and the Greek fig trade. You’re
- magnifying that pompous bore Cicero and minimizing—old Salisbury for
- example—who was a far more important figure in history—a greater man in
- a greater world.”
- “With all respect to his memory,” said Blepp, “but _good Lord_!”
- “Much greater. Your classics put out your perspective. Dozens of living
- statesmen are greater than Cicero. Of course our moderns are greater. If
- only because of the greatness of our horizons. Oxford and Cambridge
- ought to be the learning and thinking part of the whole empire, twin
- hemispheres in the imperial brain. But when I think of the size of the
- imperial body, its hundreds of nations, its thousands of cities, its
- tribes, its vast extension round and about the world, the immense
- problem of it, and then of the size and quality of _this_, I’m reminded
- of the Atlantosaurus. You’ve heard of the beast? Its brain was smaller
- than the ganglia of its rump. No doubt its brain thought itself quite up
- to its job. It wasn’t. Something ate up the Atlantosaurus. These two
- places, this place, ought to be big enough, and bigly conceived enough,
- to irradiate our whole world with ideas. All the empire. They ought to
- dominate the minds of hundreds of millions of men. And they dominate
- nothing. Leave India and Africa out of it. They do not even dominate
- England. Think only of your labour at home, of that huge blind Titan,
- whom you won’t understand, which doesn’t understand you——”
- “There again,” interrupted Blepp sharply, “you are simply ignorant of
- what is going on here. Because Oxford has a certain traditional beauty
- and a decent respect for the past, because it doesn’t pose and assert
- itself rawly, you are offended. You do not realize how active we can be,
- how up-to-date we are. It wouldn’t make us more modern in spirit if we
- lived in enamelled bathrooms and lectured in corrugated iron sheds. That
- isn’t modernity. That’s your mistake. In respect to this very question
- of labour, we _have_ got our labour contact. Have you never heard of
- Ruskin College? Founded here by an American of the most modern type, one
- Vrooman.” He repeated the name “Vrooman,” not as though he loved it but
- as though he thought it ought to appeal to Oswald. “I think he came from
- Chicago.” Surely a Teutonic name from Chicago was modern enough to
- satisfy any one! “It is a college of real working-men, of the Trade
- Union leader type, the actual horny-handed article, who come up here—I
- suppose because they don’t agree with your idea that we deal only in the
- swathings of mummies. They at any rate think that we have something to
- tell the modern world, something worth their learning. Perhaps they know
- their needs better than you do.”
- Oswald was momentarily abashed. He expressed a desire to visit this
- Ruskin College.
- Blepp explained he was not himself connected with the college. “Not
- quite my line,” said Blepp parenthetically; but he could arrange for a
- visit under proper guidance, and presently under the wing of a don of
- radical tendencies Oswald went.
- It seemed to him the most touching and illuminating thing in Oxford. It
- reminded him of _Jude the Obscure_.
- Ruskin College was sheltered over some stables in a back street, and
- it displayed a small group of oldish young men, for the most part
- with north-country accents, engaged in living under austere
- circumstances—they paid scarcely anything and did all the
- housework—and doing their best to get hold of the precious treasure
- of knowledge and understanding they were persuaded Oxford possessed.
- They had come up on their savings by virtue of extraordinary
- sacrifices. Graduation in any of the Oxford schools was manifestly
- impossible to them, if only on account of the Greek bar; the
- university had no use for these respectful pilgrims and no intention
- of encouraging more of them, and the “principal,” Mr. Dennis Hird,
- in the teeth of much opposition, was vamping a sort of course for
- them with the aid of a few liberal-minded junior dons who delivered
- a lecture when their proper engagements permitted. There was a vague
- suggestion of perplexity in the conversation of the two students
- with whom Oswald talked. This tepid drip of disconnected instruction
- wasn’t what they had expected, but then, what had they expected?
- Vrooman, the idealist who had set the thing going, had returned to
- America leaving much to be explained. Oswald dined with Blepp at St.
- Osyth’s that night, and spoke over the port in the common room of
- these working men who were “dunning Oxford for wisdom.”
- Jarlow, the wit of the college, who had been entertaining the company
- with the last half-dozen Spoonerisms he had invented, was at once
- reminded of a little poem he had made, and he recited it. It was
- supposed to be by one of these same Ruskin College men, and his artless
- rhyming of “Socrates” and “fates” and “sides” and “Euripides,” combined
- with a sort of modest pretentiousness of thought and intention, was very
- laughable indeed. Everybody laughed merrily except Oswald.
- “That’s quite one of your best, Jarlow,” said Blepp.
- But Oxford had been rubbing Oswald’s fur backwards that day. The common
- room became aware of him sitting up stiffly and regarding Jarlow with an
- evil expression.
- “Why the Devil,” said Oswald, addressing himself pointedly and
- querulously to Jarlow, “shouldn’t a working-man say ’So-_crates_?’ We
- all say ’Paris.’ These men do Oxford too much honour.”
- § 6
- Perhaps there was a sort of necessity in the educational stagnation of
- England during those crucial years before the Great War. All the
- influential and important people of the country were having a thoroughly
- good time, and if there was a growing quarrel between worker and
- employer no one saw any reason in that for sticking a goad into the
- teacher. The disposition of the mass of men is always on the side of
- custom against innovation. The clear-headed effort of yesterday tends
- always to become the unintelligent routine of tomorrow. So long as we
- get along we go along. In the less exacting days of good Queen Victoria
- the educational processes of Great Britain had served well enough; they
- still went on because the necessity for a more thorough, coherent, and
- lucid education had still to be made glaringly manifest. Few people
- understood the discontent of a Ray Lankester, the fretfulness of a
- Kipling. Foresight dies when the imagination slumbers. Only catastrophe
- can convince the mass of people of the possibility of catastrophe. The
- system had the inertia of a spinning top. The most thoroughly and
- completely mis-taught of one generation became the mis-teachers of the
- next. “Learn, obey, create nothing, initiate nothing, have no
- troublesome doubts,” ran the rules of scholarly discretion. “Prize-boy,
- scholar, fellow, don, pedagogue; prize-boy, scholar, fellow, don”—so
- spun the circle of the schools. Into that relentless circle the bright,
- curious little Peters, who wanted to know about the insides of animals
- and the way of machines and what was happening, were drawn; the little
- Joans, too, were being drawn. The best escaped complete deadening, they
- found a use for themselves, but life usually kept them too busy and used
- them too hard for them ever to return to teach in college or school of
- the realities they had experienced. And so as Joan and Peter grew up,
- Oswald became more and more tolerant of a certain rabble rout of inky
- outsiders who, without authority and dignity, were at least putting
- living ideas of social function and relationship in the way of
- adolescent inquiry.
- It became manifest to Oswald that the real work of higher education, the
- discussion of God, of the state and of sex, of all the great issues in
- life, while it was being elaborately evaded in the formal education of
- the country, was to a certain extent being done, thinly,
- unsatisfactorily, pervertedly even by the talk of boys and girls among
- themselves, by the casual suggestions of tutors, friends, and chance
- acquaintances, and more particularly by a number of irresponsible
- journalists and literary men. For example though the higher education of
- the country afforded no comprehensive view of social inter-relationship
- at all, the propaganda of the socialists did give a scheme—Oswald
- thought it was a mistaken and wrong-headed scheme—of economic
- interdependence. If the school showed nothing to their children of the
- Empire but a few tiresome maps, Kipling’s stories, for all his Jingo
- violence, did at least breathe something of its living spirit. As Joan
- and Peter grew up they ferreted out and brought to their guardian’s
- knowledge a school of irresponsible contemporary teachers, Shaw, Wells
- and the other Fabian Society pamphleteers, the Belloc-Chesterton group,
- Cunninghame Graham, Edward Carpenter, Orage of _The New Age_,
- Galsworthy, Cannan; the suffragettes, and the like. If the formal
- teachers lacked boldness these strange self-appointed instructors seemed
- to be nothing if not bold. _The Freewoman_, which died to rise again as
- _The New Freewoman_, existed it seemed chiefly to mention everything
- that a young lady should never dream of mentioning. Aunt Phœbe’s
- monthly, _Wayleaves_, in its green and purple cover, made a gallant
- effort to outdo that valiant weekly. Aunt Phœbe was a bright and
- irresponsible assistant in the education of Oswald’s wards. She sowed
- the house with strange books whenever she came to stay with them. Oswald
- found Joan reading Oscar Wilde when she was seventeen. He did not
- interrupt her reading, for he could not imagine how to set about the
- interruption. Later on he discovered a most extraordinary volume by
- Havelock Ellis lying in the library, an impossible volume. He read in it
- a little and then put it down. Afterwards he could not believe that book
- existed. He thought he must have dreamt about it, or dreamt the contents
- into it. It seemed incredible that Aunt Phœbe——!... He was never quite
- sure. When he went to look for it again it had vanished, and he did not
- like to ask for it.
- More and more did this outside supplement of education in England press
- upon Oswald’s reluctant attention. Most of these irregulars he disliked
- by nature and tradition. None of them had the dignity and restraint of
- the great Victorians, the Corinthian elegance of Ruskin, the Teutonic
- hammer-blows of Carlyle. Shaw he understood was a lean, red-haired
- Pantaloon, terribly garrulous and vain; Belloc and Chesterton thrust a
- shameless obesity upon the public attention; the social origins of most
- of the crew were appalling, Bennett was a solicitor’s clerk from the
- potteries, Wells a counter-jumper, Orage came from Leeds. Oswald had
- seen a picture of Wells by Max that confirmed his worst suspicions about
- these people; a heavy bang of hair assisted a cascade moustache to veil
- a pasty face that was broad rather than long and with a sly, conceited
- expression; the creature still wore a long and crumpled frock coat,
- acquired no doubt during his commercial phase, and rubbed together two
- large, clammy, white, misshapen hands. Except for Cunninghame Graham
- there was not a gentleman, as Oswald understood the word, among them
- all. But these writers got hold of the intelligent young because they
- did at least write freely where the university teacher feared to tread.
- They wrote, he thought, without any decent restraint. They seasoned even
- wholesome suggestions with a flavour of scandalous excitement. It
- remained an open question in his mind whether they did more good by
- making young people think or more harm by making them think wrong.
- Progressive dons he found maintained the former opinion. With that
- support Oswald was able to follow his natural disposition and leave the
- reading of his two wards unrestrained.
- And they read—and thought, to such purpose as will be presently told.
- § 7
- But here Justice demands an interlude.
- Before we go on to tell of how Joan and Peter grew up to adolescence in
- these schools that Oswald—assisted by Aunt Phyllis in the case of
- Joan—found for them, Mr. Mackinder must have his say, and make the
- Apology of the Schoolmaster. He made it to Oswald when first Oswald
- visited him and chose his school out of all the other preparatory
- schools, to be Peter’s. He appeared as a little brown man with a
- hedgehog’s nose and much of the hedgehog’s indignant note in his voice.
- He came, shy and hostile, into the drawing-room in which Oswald awaited
- him. It was, by the by, the most drawing-room-like drawing-room that
- Oswald had ever been in; it was as if some one had said to a furniture
- dealer, “People expect me to have a drawing-room. Please let me have
- exactly the sort of drawing-room that people expect.” It displayed a
- grand piano towards the French window, a large standard lamp with an
- enormous shade, a pale silk sofa, an Ottoman, a big fern in an ornate
- pot, and water-colours of Venetian lagoons. In the midst of it all stood
- Mr. Mackinder, in a highly contracted state, mutely radiating an
- interrogative “Well?”
- “I’m looking for a school for my nephew,” said Oswald.
- “You want him here?”
- “Well— Do you mind if first of all I see something of the school?”
- “We’re always open to investigation,” said Mr. Mackinder, bitterly.
- “I want to do the very best I can for this boy. I feel very strongly
- that it’s my duty to him and the country to turn him out—as well as a
- boy can be turned out.”
- Mr. Mackinder nodded his head and continued to listen.
- This was something new in private schoolmasters. For the most part they
- had opened themselves out to Oswald, like sunflowers, like the receptive
- throats of nestlings. They had embraced and silenced him by the wealth
- of their assurances.
- “I have two little wards,” he said. “A boy and a girl. I want to make
- all I can of them. They ought to belong to the Elite. The strength of a
- country—of an empire—depends ultimately almost entirely on its Elite.
- This empire isn’t overwhelmed with intelligence and most of the talk we
- hear about the tradition of statesmanship——”
- Mr. Mackinder made a short snorting noise through his nose that seemed
- to indicate his opinion of contemporary statesmanship.
- “You see I take this schooling business very solemnly. These upper-class
- schools, I say, these schools for the sons of prosperous people and
- scholarship winners, are really Elite-making machines. They really
- make—or fail to make—the Empire. That makes me go about asking
- schoolmasters a string of questions. Some of them don’t like my
- questions. Perhaps they are too elementary. I ask: what is this
- education of yours up to? What is the design of the whole? What is this
- preparation of yours for? This is called a Preparatory School. You lay
- the foundations. What is the design of the building for which these
- foundations are laid?”
- He paused, determined to make Mr. Mackinder say something before he
- discoursed further.
- “It isn’t so simple as that,” was wrung from Mr. Mackinder. “Suppose we
- just walk round the school. Suppose we just see the sort of place it is
- and what we are doing here. Then perhaps you’ll be able to see better
- what we contribute—in the way of making a citizen.”
- The inspection was an unusually satisfactory one. White Court was one of
- the few private schools Oswald had seen that had been built expressly
- for its purpose. Its class rooms were well lit and well arranged, its
- little science museum seemed good and well arranged and well provided
- with diagrams; its gymnasium was businesslike; its wall blackboards
- unusually abundant and generously used, and everything was tidy.
- Nevertheless the Catechism for Schoolmasters was not spared. “Now,” said
- Oswald, “now for the curriculum?”
- “We live in the same world with most other English schools,” Mr.
- Mackinder sulked. “This is a preparatory school.”
- “What are called English subjects?”
- “Yes.”
- “How do you teach geography?”
- “With books and maps.”
- Oswald spoke of lantern slides and museum visits. The cinema had yet to
- become an educational possibility.
- “I do what I can,” said Mr. Mackinder; “I’m not a millionaire.”
- “Do you _do_ classics?”
- “We do Latin. Clever boys do a little Greek. In preparation for the
- public schools.”
- “Grammar of course?...”
- “What else?...”
- “French, German, Latin, Greek, bits of mathematics, botany, geography,
- bits of history, book-keeping, music lessons, some water-colour
- painting; it’s very mixed,” said Oswald.
- “It’s miscellaneous.”
- Mr. Mackinder roused himself to a word of defence: “The boys don’t
- specialize.”
- “But this is a diet of scraps,” said Oswald, reviving one of the most
- controversial topics of the catechism. “Nothing can be done thoroughly.”
- “We are necessarily elementary.”
- “It’s rather like the White Knight in _Alice in Wonderland_ packing his
- luggage for nowhere.”
- “We have to teach what is required of us,” said Mr. Mackinder.
- “But what _is_ education up to?” asked Oswald.
- As Mr. Mackinder offered no answer to that riddle, Oswald went on. “What
- is Education in England up to, anyhow? In Uganda we knew what we were
- doing. There was an idea in it. The old native tradition was breaking
- up. We taught them to count and reckon English fashion, to read and
- write, we gave them books and the Christian elements, so that they could
- join on to our civilization and play a part in the great world that was
- breaking up their little world. We didn’t teach them anything that
- didn’t serve mind or soul or body. We saw the end of what we were doing.
- But half this school teaching of yours is like teaching in a dream. You
- don’t teach the boy what he wants to know and needs to know. You spend
- half his time on calculations he has no use for, mere formal
- calculations, and on this dead language stuff——! It’s like trying to
- graft mummy steak on living flesh. It’s like boiling fossils for soup.”
- Mr. Mackinder said nothing.
- “And damn it!” said Oswald petulantly; “your school is about as good a
- school as I’ve seen or am likely to see....
- “I had an idea,” he went on, “of just getting the very best out of those
- two youngsters—the boy especially—of making every hour of his school
- work a gift of so much power or skill or subtlety, of opening the world
- to him like a magic book.... The boy’s tugging at the magic covers....”
- He stopped short.
- “There are no such schools,” said Mr. Mackinder compactly. “This is as
- good a school as you will find.”
- And there he left the matter for the time. But in the evening he dined
- with Oswald at his hotel, and it may be that iced champagne had
- something to do with a certain relaxation from his afternoon restraint.
- Oswald had already arranged about Peter, but he wanted the little man to
- talk more. So he set him an example. He talked of his own life. He
- represented it as a life of disappointment and futility. “I envy you
- your life of steadfast usefulness.” He spoke of his truncated naval
- career and his disfigurement. Of the years of uncertainty that had
- followed. He talked of the ambitions and achievements of other men, of
- the large hopes and ambitions of youth.
- “I too,” said Mr. Mackinder, warming for a moment, and then left his
- sentence unfinished. Oswald continued to generalize....
- “All life, I suppose, is disappointment—is anyhow largely
- disappointment,” said Mr. Mackinder presently.
- “We get something done.”
- “Five per cent., ten per cent., of what we meant to do.”
- The schoolmaster reflected. Oswald refilled his glass for him.
- “To begin with I thought, none of these other fellows really know how to
- run a school. I will, I said, make a nest of Young Paragons. I will take
- a bunch of boys and get the best out of them, the best possible; watch
- them, study them, foster them, make a sort of boy so that the White
- Court brand shall be looked for and recognized....”
- He sipped his faintly seething wine and put down the glass.
- “Five per cent.,” he said; “ten per cent., perhaps.” He touched his lips
- with his dinner-napkin. “I have turned out some creditable boys.”
- “Did you make any experiments in the subjects you taught?”
- “At first. But one of the things we discover in life as we grow past the
- first flush of beginning, is just how severely we are conditioned. We
- are conditioned. We seem to be free. And we are in a net. You have
- criticized my curriculum today pretty severely, Mr. Sydenham. Much that
- you say is absolutely right. It is wasteful, discursive, ineffective.
- Yes.... But in my place I doubt if you could have made it much other
- than it is....
- “One or two things I do. Latin grammar here is taught on lines strictly
- parallel with the English and French and German—that is to say, we teach
- languages comparatively. It was troublesome to arrange, but it makes a
- difference mentally. And I take a class in Formal Logic; English
- teaching is imperfect, expression is slovenly, without that. The boys
- write English verse. The mathematical teaching too, is as modern as the
- examining boards will let it be. Small things, perhaps. But you do not
- know the obstacles.
- “Mr. Sydenham, your talk today has reminded me of all the magnificent
- things I set out to do at White Court, when I sank my capital in
- building White Court six and twenty years ago. When I found that I
- couldn’t control the choice of subjects, when I found that in that
- matter I was ruled by the sort of schools and colleges the boys had to
- go on to and by the preposterous examinations they would have to pass,
- then I told myself, ’at least I can cultivate their characters and
- develop something like a soul in them, instead of crushing out
- individuality and imagination as most schools do....’
- “Well, I think I have a house of clean-minded and cheerful and willing
- boys, and I think they all tell the truth....”
- “I don’t know what I’m to do with the religious teaching of these two
- youngsters of mine,” said Oswald abruptly. “Practically, they’re
- Godless.”
- Mr. Mackinder did not speak for a little while. Then he said, “It is
- almost unavoidable, under existing conditions, that the religious
- teaching in a school should be—formal and orthodox.
- “For my own part—I’m liberal,” said Mr. Mackinder, and added, “very
- liberal. Let me tell you, Mr. Sydenham, exactly how I see things.”
- He paused for a moment as if he collected his views.
- “If a little boy has grown up in a home, in the sort of home which one
- might describe as God-fearing, if he has not only heard of God but seen
- God as a living influence upon the people about him, then—then, I admit,
- you have something real. He will believe in God. He will know God.
- God—simply because of the faith about him—will be a knowable reality.
- God is a faith. In men. Such a boy’s world will fall into shape about
- the idea of God. He will take God as a matter of course. Such a boy can
- be religious from childhood—yes.... But there are very few such homes.”
- “Less, probably, than there used to be?”
- Mr. Mackinder disavowed an answer by a gesture of hands and shoulders.
- He went on, frowning slightly as he talked. He wanted to say exactly
- what he thought. “For all other boys, Mr. Sydenham, God, for all
- practical purposes, does not exist. Their worlds have been made without
- him; they do not think in terms of him; and if he is to come into their
- lives at all he must come in from the outside—a discovery, like a mighty
- rushing wind. By what is called Conversion. At adolescence. Until that
- happens you must build the soul on pride, on honour, on the decent
- instincts. It is all you have. And the less they hear about God the
- better. They will not understand. It will be a cant to them—a kind of
- indelicacy. The two greatest things in the world have been the most
- vulgarized. God and sex.... If I had my own way I would have no
- religious services for my boys at all.”
- “Instead of which?”
- Mr. Mackinder paused impressively before replying.
- “The local curate is preparing two of my elder boys for Confirmation at
- the present time.”
- He gazed gloomily at the tablecloth. “If one could do as one liked!” he
- said. “If only one could do as one liked!”
- But now Oswald was realizing for the first time the eternal tragedy of
- the teacher, that sower of unseen harvests, that reaper of thistles and
- the wind, that serf of custom, that subjugated rebel, that feeble,
- persistent antagonist of the triumphant things that rule him. And behind
- that immediate tragedy Oswald was now apprehending for the first time
- something more universally tragic, an incessantly recurring story of
- high hopes and a grey ending; the story of boys and girls, clean and
- sweet-minded, growing up into life, and of the victory of world inertia,
- of custom drift and the tarnishing years.
- Mr. Mackinder spoke of his own youth. Quite early in life had come
- physical humiliations, the realization that his slender and delicate
- physique debarred him from most active occupations, and his resolve to
- be of use in some field where his weak and undersized body would be at
- no great disadvantage. “I made up my mind that teaching should be my
- religion,” he said.
- He told of the difficulties he had encountered in his attempts to get
- any pedagogic science or training. “This is the most difficult
- profession in the world,” he said, “and the most important. Yet it is
- not studied; it has no established practice; it is not endowed.
- Buildings are endowed and institutions, but not teachers.” And in Great
- Britain, in the schools of the classes that will own and rule the
- country, ninety-nine per cent. of the work was done by unskilled
- workmen, by low-grade, genteel women and young men. In America the
- teachers were nearly all women. “How can we expect to raise a nation
- nearly as good as we might do under such a handicap?” He had read and
- learnt what he could about teaching; he had served for small salaries in
- schools that seemed living and efficient; finally he had built his own
- school with his own money. He had had the direst difficulties in getting
- a staff together. “What can one expect?” he said. “We pay them hardly
- better than shop assistants—less than bank clerks. You see the relative
- importance of things in the British mind.” What hope or pride was there
- to inspire an assistant schoolmaster to do good work?
- “I thought I could make a school different from all other schools, and I
- found I had to make a school like most other fairly good schools. I had
- to work for what the parents required of me, and the ideas of the
- parents had been shaped by their schools. I had never dreamt of the
- immensity of the resistance these would offer to constructive change. In
- this world there are incessant changes, but most of them are landslides
- or epidemics.... I tried to get away from stereotyping examinations. I
- couldn’t. I tried to get away from formal soul-destroying religion. I
- couldn’t. I tried to get a staff of real assistants. I couldn’t. I had
- to take what came. I had to be what was required of me....
- “One works against time always. Over against the Parents. It is not only
- the boys one must educate, but the parents—let alone one’s self. The
- parents demand impossible things. I have been asked for Greek and for
- book-keeping by double-entry by the same parent. I had—I had to leave
- the matter—as if I thought such things were possible. After all, the
- Parent is master. One can’t run a school without boys.”
- “You’d get _some_ boys,” said Oswald.
- “Not enough. I’m up against time. The school has to pay.”
- “Can’t you hold out for a time? Run the school on a handful of oatmeal?”
- “It’s running it on an overdraft I don’t fancy. You’re not a married
- man, Mr. Sydenham, with sons to consider.”
- “No,” said Oswald shortly. “But I have these wards. And, after all,
- there’s not only today but tomorrow. If the world is going wrong for
- want of education——. If you don’t give it your sons will suffer.”
- “Tomorrow, perhaps. But today comes first. I’m up against time. Oh, I’m
- up against time.”
- He sat with his hands held out supine on the table before him.
- “I started my school twenty-seven years ago next Hilary. And it seems
- like yesterday. When I started it I meant it to be something memorable
- in schools.... I jumped into it. I thought I should swim about.... It
- was like jumping into the rapids of Niagara. I was seized, I was rushed
- along.... Ai! Ai!...”
- “Time’s against us all,” said Oswald. “I suppose the next glacial age
- will overtake us long before we’re ready to fight out our destiny.”
- “If you want to feel the generations rushing to waste,” said Mr.
- Mackinder, “like rapids—like rapids—you must put your heart and life
- into a private school.”
- CHAPTER THE ELEVENTH
- ADOLESCENCE
- § 1
- “The generations rushing to waste like rapids—like rapids....”
- Ten years later Oswald found himself repeating the words of the little
- private schoolmaster.
- He was in the gravest perplexity. Joan was now nineteen and a half and
- Peter almost of age, and they had had a violent quarrel. They would not
- live in the same house together any longer, they declared. Peter had
- gone back overnight to Cambridge on his motor bicycle; Joan’s was out of
- order—an embittering addition to her distress—and she had cycled on her
- push bicycle over the hills that morning to Bishop’s Stortford to catch
- the Cambridge train. And Oswald was left to think over the situation and
- all that had led to it.
- He sat alone in the May sunshine in the little arbour that overlooked
- his rose garden at Pelham Ford, trying to grasp all that had happened to
- these stormy young people since he had so boldly taken the care of their
- lives into his hands. He found himself trying to retrace the phases of
- their upbringing, and his thoughts went wide and far over the problem of
- human training. Suddenly he had discovered his charges adult. Joan had
- stood before him, amazingly grown up—a woman, young, beautiful,
- indignant.
- Who could have foretold ten years ago that Joan would have been
- declaring with tears in her voice but much stiffness in her manner, that
- she had “stood enough” from Peter, and calling him “weak.”
- “He insults all my friends, Nobby,” she had said, “and as for his——.
- He’s like that puppy we had who dug up rotten bones we had never
- suspected, all over the garden.
- “Oh! _his women are horrible_!” Joan had cried....
- § 2
- Oswald’s choice of a permanent home at Pelham Ford had been largely
- determined by the educational requirements of Joan and Peter. While
- Peter had been at White Court and Joan at Highmorton School twelve miles
- away, Oswald had occupied a not very well furnished “furnished house” at
- Margate. When Peter, after an inquisition by Oswald into English Public
- Schools, had been awarded at last as a sort of prize, with reservations,
- to Caxton, Oswald—convinced now by his doctors and his own disagreeable
- experiences that he must live in England for the rest of his life if he
- was to hope for any comfort or activity—decided to set up a permanent
- home with a garden and buildings that would be helpful through days of
- dullness in some position reasonably accessible from London, Caxton and
- Margate, and later on from Cambridge, to which they were both
- predestined. After some search he found the house he needed in the
- pretty little valley of the Rash, that runs north-eastward from Ware.
- The Stubland aunts still remained as tenants of The Ingle-Nook, and made
- it a sort of alternative home for the youngsters.
- The country to the north and east of Ware is a country of miniature
- gorges with frequent water-splashes. The stream widens and crosses the
- road in a broad, pebbly shallow of ripples just at the end of Pelham
- Ford, there is a causeway with a white handrail for bicycles and foot
- passengers beside the ford, and beyond it is an inn and the post office
- and such thatched, whitewashed homes as constitute the village. Then
- beyond comes a row of big trees and the high red wall and iron gates of
- this house Oswald had taken. The church of Pelham Ford is a little
- humped, spireless building up the hill to the left. The stream brawls
- along for a time beside the road. Through the gates of the house one
- looks across a lawn barred by the shadows of big trees, at a blazing
- flower-garden that goes up a series of terraces to the little red tiled
- summerhouse that commands the view of the valley. The house is to the
- right and near the road, a square comfortable eighteenth-century
- red-brick house with ivy on its shadowed side and fig trees and rose
- trees towards the sun. It has a classical portico, and a grave but
- friendly expression.
- The Margate house had been a camp, but this was furnished with some
- deliberation. Oswald had left a miscellany of possessions behind him in
- Uganda which Muir had packed and sent on after him when it was settled
- that there could be no return to Africa. The hall befitted the home of a
- member of the Plantain Club; African spoils adorned it, three lions’
- heads, a white rhinoceros head, elephants’ feet, spears, gourds, tusks;
- in the midst a large table took the visitor’s hat and stick, and bore a
- large box for the post. Out of this hall opened a little close study
- Oswald rarely used except when Joan and Peter and their friends were at
- home and a passage led to a sunny, golden-brown library possessing three
- large southward windows on the garden, a room it had pleased him greatly
- to furnish, and in which he did most of his writing. It had a parquet
- floor and Oriental rugs like sunlit flower-beds. Across the hall,
- opposite the study, was a sort of sittingroom-livingroom which was given
- over to Joan and Peter. It had been called the Schoolroom in the days
- when their holiday visits had been mitigated by the presence of some
- temporary governess or tutor, and now that those disciplined days were
- over their two developing personalities still jostled in the one
- apartment. A large pleasant drawing-room and a dining-room completed the
- tale of rooms on the ground floor.
- In this room across the hall there was much that would have repaid
- research on the part of Oswald. The room was a joint room only when Joan
- and Peter were without guests in the house. Whenever there were guests,
- whether they were women or men, Joan turned out and the room became a
- refuge or rendezvous for Peter. It was therefore rather Peter’s than
- Joan’s. Here as in most things it was Peter’s habit to prevail over
- Joan. But she had her rights; she had had a voice in the room’s
- decoration, a share in its disorder. The upper bookshelves to the right
- of the fireplace were hers and the wall next to that. Against this stood
- her bureau, locked and secure, over and against Peter’s bureau. Oswald
- had given them these writing desks three Christmases ago. But the mess
- on the table under the window was Peter’s, and Peter had more than his
- fair share of the walls. The stuffed birds and animals and a row of
- sculls were the result of a “Mooseum” phase of Peter’s when he was
- fourteen. The water-colour pictures were Peter’s. The hearthrug was the
- lion-skin that Peter still believed had been brought for him from
- Nairobi by Oswald.
- Peter could caricature, and his best efforts were framed here; his style
- was a deliberate compliment to the incomparable Max. He had been very
- successful twice in bringing out the latent fierceness of Joan; one not
- ungraceful effort was called “The Scalp Dance,” the other, less pleasing
- to its subject, represented Joan in full face with her hands behind her
- back and her feet apart, “Telling the Whole Troof.” Joan, alas! had no
- corresponding skill for a retort, but she had framed an enlargement of a
- happy snap-shot of Peter on the garden wall. She had stood below and
- held her camera up so that Peter’s boots and legs were immense and his
- head dwindled to nothing in perspective. So seen, he became an
- embodiment of masculine brutality. The legend was, “The Camera can
- Detect what our Eyes Cannot.”
- One corner of this room was occupied by a pianola piano and a large
- untidy collection of classical music rolls; right and left of the
- fireplace the bookshelves bore an assortment of such literature as
- appealed in those days to animated youth, classics of every period from
- Plato to Shaw, and such moderns as Compton Mackenzie, Masefield, Gilbert
- Cannan and Ezra Pound. Back numbers of _The Freewoman_, _The New Age_,
- _The New Statesman_, and _The Poetry Review_ mingled on the lowest
- shelf. There was a neat row of philosophical textbooks in the Joan
- section; Joan for no particular reason was taking the moral science
- tripos; and a microscope stood on Peter’s table, for he was
- biological....
- § 3
- Oswald’s domestic arrangements had at first been a grave perplexity. In
- Uganda he had kept house very well with a Swahili over-man and a number
- of “boys”; in Margate this sort of service was difficult to obtain, and
- the holiday needs of the children seemed to demand a feminine influence
- of the governess-companion type, a “lady.” A succession of refined
- feminine personalities had intersected these years of Oswald’s life.
- They were all ladies by birth and profession, they all wore collars
- supported by whalebone about their necks, and they all developed and
- betrayed a tenderness for Oswald that led to a series of flights to the
- Climax Club and firm but generous dismissals. Oswald’s ideas of
- matrimony were crude and commonplace; he could imagine himself marrying
- no one but a buxom young woman of three-and-twenty, and he could not
- imagine any buxom young woman of three-and-twenty taking a healthy
- interest in a man over forty with only half a face and fits of fever and
- fretfulness. When these ladies one after another threw out their gentle
- intimations he had the ingratitude to ascribe their courage to a sense
- of his own depreciated matrimonial value. This caused just enough
- indignation to nerve him to the act of dismissal. But on each occasion
- he spent the best part of a morning and made serious inroads upon the
- club notepaper before the letter of dismissal was framed, and he always
- fell back upon the stock lie that he was going abroad to a Kur-Ort and
- was going to lock up the house. On each occasion the house was locked up
- for three or four weeks, and Oswald lived a nomadic existence until a
- fresh lady could be found. Finally God sent him Mrs. Moxton.
- She came in at Margate during an interregnum while Aunt Phyllis was in
- control. Aunt Phyllis after a reflective interview passed her on to
- Oswald. She was more like Britannia than one could have imagined
- possible; her face was perhaps a little longer and calmer and her pink
- chins rather more numerous.
- “I understand,” she said, seating herself against Oswald’s desk, “that
- you are in need of some one to take charge of your household.”
- “Did you—hear?” began Oswald.
- “It’s the talk of Margate,” she said calmly.
- “So I understand that you are prepared to be the lady——”
- “I am _not_ a lady,” said Mrs. Moxton with a faint asperity.
- “I beg your pardon,” said Oswald.
- “I am a housekeeper,” she said, as who should say: “at least give me
- credit for that.” “I have had experience with a single gentleman.”
- There seemed to be an idea in it.
- “I was housekeeper to the late Mr. Justice Benlees for some years, until
- he died, and then unhappily, being in receipt of a small pension from
- him, I took to keeping a boarding-house. Winnipeg House. On the Marine
- Parade. A most unpleasant and anxious experience.” Her note of
- indignation returned, and the clear pink of her complexion deepened by a
- shade. “A torrent of Common People.”
- “Exactly,” said Oswald. “I have seen them walking about the town.
- Beastly new yellow boots. And fast, squeaky little girls in those new
- floppy white hats. You think you could dispose of the boarding-house?”
- Mrs. Moxton compressed her chins slightly in assent.
- “It’s a saleable concern?”
- “There are those,” said Mrs. Moxton with a faint sense of the marvels of
- God’s universe in her voice, “who would be glad of it.”
- He rested his face on his hand and regarded her profile very earnestly
- with his one red-brown eye—from the beginning to the end of the
- interview Mrs. Moxton never once looked straight at him. He perceived
- that she was incapable of tenderness, dissimulation, or any personal
- relationship, a woman in profile, a woman with a pride in her work, a
- woman to be trusted.
- “You’ll _do_,” he said.
- “Of course, Sir, you will take up my references first. They are a
- little—old, but I think you will find them satisfactory.”
- “I have no doubts about your references, Mrs. Moxton, but they shall be
- taken up nevertheless, duly and in order.”
- “Thank you, Sir,” said Mrs. Moxton, giving him a three-quarter face, and
- almost looking at him in her pleasure.
- And thereafter Mrs. Moxton ruled the household of Oswald according to
- the laws and habits of the late Mr. Justice Benlees, who had evidently
- been a very wise, comfortable, and intelligent man. When she came on
- from the uncongenial furniture at Margate to the comfort and beauty of
- Pelham Ford she betrayed a certain approval by expanding an inch or so
- in every direction and letting out two new chins, but otherwise she made
- no remark. She radiated decorum and a faint smell of lavender. She had,
- it seemed, always possessed a black-watered-silk dress and a gold chain.
- Even Lady Charlotte approved of her.
- For some years Mrs. Moxton enabled Oswald to disregard the social
- difficulties that are supposed to surround feminine adolescence. Joan
- and Peter got along very well with Pelham Ford as their home, and no
- other feminine control except an occasional visit from the Stubland
- aunts. Then Aunt Charlotte became tiresome because Joan was growing up.
- “How can the gal grow up properly,” she asked, “even considering what
- she is, in a house in which there isn’t a lady at the head?”
- Oswald reflected upon the problem. He summoned Mrs. Moxton to his
- presence.
- “Mrs. Moxton,” he said, “when Miss Joan is here, I’ve been thinking,
- don’t you think she ought to be, so to speak, mistress of the place?”
- “I have been wondering when you would make the change, Mr. Sydenham,”
- said Mrs. Moxton. “I shall be very pleased to take my orders from Miss
- Joan.”
- And after that Mrs. Moxton used to come to Joan whenever Joan was at
- Pelham Ford, and tell her what orders she had to give for the day. And
- when Joan had visitors, Mrs. Moxton told Joan just exactly what
- arrangements Joan was to order Mrs. Moxton to make. In all things that
- mattered Mrs. Moxton ruled Joan with an obedience of iron. Her curtseys,
- slow, deliberate and firm, insisted that Joan was a lady—and had got to
- be one. She took to calling Joan “Ma’am.” Joan had to live up to it, and
- did. Visitors increased after the young people were at Cambridge. Junior
- dons from Newnham and Girton would come and chaperon their hostess, and
- Peter treated Oswald to a variety of samples of the younger male
- generation. Some of the samples Oswald liked more than others. And he
- concealed very carefully from Aunt Charlotte how mixed these young
- gatherings were, how light was the Cambridge standard of chaperonage,
- and how very junior were some of the junior dons from the women’s
- colleges.
- § 4
- When children are small we elders in charge are apt to suppose them
- altogether plastic. There are resistances, it is true, but these express
- themselves at first only in tantrums, in apparently quite meaningless
- outbreaks; we impose our phrases and values so completely, that such
- spasmodic opposition seems to signify nothing. We impose our names for
- things, our classifications with their thousand implications, our
- interpretations. The child is imitative and obedient by instinct, its
- personality for the most part latent, warily hidden. That is “hand,” we
- dictate, that is “hat,” that is “pussy cat,” that is “pretty, pretty,”
- that is “good,” that is “nasty,” that is “ugly—Ugh!” That again is
- “fearsome; run away!” There is no discussion. If we know our parental
- business we are able to establish all sorts of habits, readinesses,
- dispositions in these entirely plastic days. “Time for Peter to go to
- bed,” uttered with gusto, becomes the signal for an interesting ritual
- upon which he embarks with dignity. Until some idiot visitor remarks
- loudly, “Doesn’t he _hate_ going to bed? I always _hated_ going to bed.”
- Whereupon in that matter the seeds of reflection and dissent are sown in
- the little mind.
- And so with most other matters. For a few years of advantage the new
- mind is clay and we have it to ourselves, and then, still clay, it
- becomes perceptibly resistant, perceptibly disposed to recover some
- former shape we have given it or to take an outline of its own. It
- discovers we are not divine and that even Dadda cannot recall the
- sunset. It is not only that other minds are coming in to modify and
- contradict our decisions. We contradict ourselves and it notes the
- contradiction. And old Nature begins to take an increasing share in the
- accumulating personality. Apart from what we give and those others give,
- things bubble up inside it, desires, imaginations, creative dreams. By
- imperceptible degrees the growing mind slips away from us. A little
- while ago it seemed like some open vessel into which we could pour
- whatever we chose; now suddenly it is closed and locked, hiding a
- fermentation.
- Perhaps things have always been more or less so between elders and
- young, but in the old days of slower change what fathers and mothers had
- to tell the child, priest and master re-echoed, laws and institutions
- confirmed, the practice of every one, good or evil, endorsed in black or
- white. But from the break-up of the Catholic culture in England onward
- there has been an unceasing conflict between more and more divergent
- stories about life, and in the last half century that clash has
- enormously intensified. What began as a war of ideals became at last a
- chaos. Adolescence was once either an obedience or a rebellion; at the
- opening of the twentieth century it had become an interrogation and an
- experiment. One heard very much of the right of the parent to bring up
- children in his own religion, his own ideas, but no one ever bothered to
- explain how that right was to be preserved. In Ireland one found near
- Dublin educational establishments surrounded by ten-foot walls topped
- with broken glass, protecting a Catholic atmosphere for a few precious
- and privileged specimens of the Erse nation. Mr. James Joyce in his
- _Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man_, has bottled a specimen of that
- Catholic atmosphere for the astonishment of posterity. The rest of the
- youth of the changing world lay open to every wind of suggestion that
- blew. The parent or guardian found himself a mere competitor for the
- attention and convictions of his charges.
- § 5
- Through childhood and boyhood and girlhood, Peter’s sex and seniority
- alike had conspired to give him a leadership over Joan. His seemed the
- richer, livelier mind, he told most of the stories and initiated most of
- the games; Joan was the follower. That masculine ascendancy lasted until
- Peter was leaving Caxton; in spite of various emancipating forces at
- Highmorton. Then in less than a year Joan took possession of herself.
- Reserve is a necessary grace in all younger brothers and sisters. Peter
- spread his reveries as a peacock spreads its tail, but Joan kept her
- dreams discreetly private. All youth lives much in reverie; thereby the
- stronger minds anticipate and rehearse themselves for life in a thousand
- imaginations, the weaker ones escape from it. Against that early
- predominance of Peter, Joan maintained her self-respect by extensive
- secret supplements of the Bungo-Peter saga. For example she was
- Bungo-Peter’s “Dearest Belovèd.” Peter never suspected how Bungo-Peter
- and she cuddled up together at the camp fires and were very close and
- warm every night, until she went off to sleep....
- When she was about fourteen Joan’s imagination passed out of the phase
- of myth and saga into the world of romance. The real world drew closer
- to her. Bungo-Peter vanished; Nobby shrank down to a real Uncle Nobby.
- Her childish reveries had disregarded possibility; now the story had to
- be plausible; it had to join on to Highmorton and The Ingle-Nook and
- Pelham Ford; its heroine had to be conceivable as the real Joan. And
- with the coming of reality, came moods. There were times when she felt
- dull, and the world looked on her with a grey and stupid face, and other
- times to compensate her for these dull phases, seasons of unwonted
- exaltation. It was as if her being sometimes drew itself together in
- order presently to leap and extend itself.
- In these new phases of expansion she had the most perfect conviction
- that life, and particularly her life, was wonderful and beautiful and
- destined to be more and more so. She began to experience a strange, new
- happiness in mere existence, a happiness that came with an effect of
- revelation. It is hard to convey the peculiar delight that invaded her
- during these phases. It was almost as if the earth had just been created
- for her and given to her as a present. There were moments when the world
- was a crystal globe of loveliness about her, moments of ecstatic
- realization of a universal beauty. The slightest things would suffice to
- release this sunshine in her soul. She would discover the intensest
- delight in little, hitherto disregarded details, in the colour of a leaf
- held up to the light, or the rhythms of ripples on a pond or the touch
- of a bird’s feather. There were moments when she wanted to kiss the
- sunset, and times when she would clamber over the end wall of the garden
- at Pelham Ford in order to lie hidden and still, with every sense awake,
- in the big clump of bracken in the corner by the wood beyond. The smell
- of crushed bracken delighted her intensely. She wanted to be a nymph
- then and not a girl in clothes. And shining summer streams and lakes
- roused in her a passionate desire to swim, to abandon herself wholly to
- the comprehensive sweet silvery caress of the waters.
- In the days of the Saga story, the time of the story had always been
- Now—and Never; but in the drama of adolescence the time of all Joan’s
- reveries was Tomorrow; what she dreamt of now were things that were to
- be real experiences in quite a little time, when she had grown just a
- year or so older, when she was a little taller, when she had left
- school, when she was really as beautiful as she hoped to be.
- The world about her by example and precept, by plays and stories and
- poems and histories, was supplying her with a rich confusion of material
- for these anticipatory sketches. One main history emerged in her
- fifteenth year. It went on for many months. Joan of Arc was in the
- making of it, and Jane Shore, and Nell Gwyn. At first she was the Lady
- Joan, and then she became just Joan Stubland, but always she was the
- king’s mistress.
- From the very beginning Joan had found something splendid and attractive
- in the word “mistress.” It had come to her first in a history lesson,
- and then more brightly clad in a costume novel. But it was a very
- glorious and noble kind of mistress that Joan had in view. Her ideas of
- the authority and duties of a mistress were vague; but she knew that a
- mistress rules by beauty. That she ruled Joan never doubted—or why
- should she be called mistress? And she prevailed over queens, so French
- history had instructed her. She made war and peace. Joan of Arc was
- inextricably mixed in with the vision. She was a beautiful girl, and she
- told the king of France what to do. At need she led armies. What else
- but a mistress could you call her? “Mistress of France,” magnificent
- phrase! Of such ideas was Joan Stubland woven. The king perhaps would do
- injustice, or neglect a meritorious case. Then Joan Stubland would
- appear, watchful and dignified. “No,” she would say. “That must not be.
- I am the king’s mistress.”
- And she wore a kind of light armour. Without skirts. Never with skirts.
- Joan at fourteen already saw long skirts ahead of her, and hated them as
- a man might hate a swamp that he must presently cross knee-deep.
- Where the king went Joan went. But he was not the current king, nor his
- destined successor. She had studied these monarchs in the illustrated
- papers—and in the news. She did not think much of them. They stood down
- out of Joan’s dream in favour of a younger autocrat. After all, was
- there not also a young prince, her contemporary, who would some day be
- king? But in her imagination he was not like his published portraits;
- instead—and this is curious—he was rather like Peter. He was as much
- like Peter as any one. This was all of Peter that ever got into her
- reveries, for there was a curious bar in her mind to Peter being thought
- of either as her lover or as any one not her lover. Something obscure in
- her composition barred any such direct imaginations about Peter.
- So, contrawise to all established morality and to everything to which
- her properly constituted teachers were trying to shape her, a chance
- phrase in a history book filled the imagination of Joan with this dream
- of a different sort of woman’s life altogether. In which one went side
- by side with a man in a manly way, sharing his power, being dear and
- beautiful to him. Compared with such a lot who would be one of these
- wives? Who would stay at home and—as a consequence apparently of the
- religious ceremony of matrimony—have babies?
- The king’s mistress story was Joan’s dominant reverie, but it was not
- her only one. It was, so to speak, her serial; it was always “to be
- continued in our next.” But her busy mind, whenever her attention was
- not fully occupied, was continually spinning romance; beside the serial
- story there were endless incidental ones. Almost always they were love
- stories. They were violent and adventurous in substance, full of chases,
- fights, and confrontations, but Joan did not stint herself of kissing
- and embraces. There were times when she liked tremendously to think of
- herself kissing. Most little girls of thirteen or fourteen are thinking
- with the keenest interest and curiosity about this lover business and
- its mysteries, and Joan was no exception. She was deeply interested to
- find she was almost as old as Juliet. Inspired by Shakespeare, Joan
- thought quite a lot about balconies and ladders—and Romeo. Some of her
- school contemporaries jested about these things and were very arch and
- sly. But she was as shy of talking about love as she was prone to love
- reveries. She talked of flowers and poetry and music and scenery and
- beautiful things as though they were things in themselves, but in her
- heart she was convinced that all the loveliness that shone upon her in
- the world was only so much intimation of the coming loveliness of love.
- The outward and visible disposition of Highmorton School was all against
- the spirit of such dreams. The disposition of Highmorton was towards a
- scorn of males. What Joan knew surely to be lovely, Highmorton denounced
- as “soppy.” “Soppy” was a terrible word in boys’ schools and girls’
- schools alike, a flail for all romance. But in the girls’ schools it was
- used more particularly against tender thoughts of men. Highmorton taught
- the revolt of women from the love of men—in favour of the love of women.
- The school resounded always with the achievements of the one important
- sex, hitherto held back by man-made laws from demonstrating an all-round
- superiority. The staff at Highmorton had all a common hardness of
- demeanour; they were without exception suffragettes, and most of them
- militant suffragettes. They played hockey with great violence, and let
- the elder girls hear them say “damn!” The ones who had any beauty
- aspired to sub-virile effects; they impressed small adorers as if they
- were sexless angels. There was Miss Oriana Frobisher (science) with the
- glorious wave in her golden hair and the flash of lightning in her
- glasses. She had done great feats with love, it was said; she had
- refused a professor of botany and a fabulously rich widower, and the
- mathematical master was “gone” on her. There was Miss Kellaway, dark and
- pensive, known to her worshippers as “Queen of the Night,” fragile, and
- yet a swift and nimble forward. Aunt Phœbe also had become a leading
- militant, and Aunt Phyllis, who wavered on the verge of militancy,
- continued the Highmorton teaching in the holidays. “Absolute equality
- between the sexes,” was their demand; their moderate demand, seeing what
- men were. Joan would have been more than human not to take the colour of
- so universal a teaching. And yet in her reveries there was always one
- man exempt from that doom of general masculine inferiority. She had no
- use for a dream lover—unless he was dying of consumption or, Tristram
- fashion, of love-caused wounds—who could not out-run, out-fence,
- out-wrestle and out-think her, or for a situation of asserted equality
- which could not dissolve into caressing devotion.
- § 6
- And of these preoccupations with the empire and the duties and destinies
- of the empire and the collective affairs of mankind, which to Oswald
- were the very gist and purpose of education, Highmorton taught Joan
- practically nothing. Miss Jevons, the Head, would speak now and then of
- “loyalty to the crown” in a rather distant way—Miss Murgatroyd had been
- wont to do the same thing—and for the rest left politics alone. Except
- that there was one thing, one supreme thing, the Vote. When first little
- Joan heard of the Vote at Limpsfield she was inclined to think it was a
- flattened red round thing rather like the Venerable Bede at the top of
- the flagstaff. She learned little better at Highmorton. She gathered
- that women were going to “get the vote” and then they were to vote. They
- were going to vote somehow against the men and it would make the world
- better, but there was very little more to it than that. The ideas
- remained strictly personal, strictly dramatic. Wicked men like Mr.
- Asquith who opposed the vote were to be cast down; one of the dazzling
- Pankhurst family, or perhaps Miss Oriana Frobisher, was to take his
- place. Profound scepticisms about this vote—in her heart of hearts she
- called it the “old Vote,” were hidden by Joan from the general
- observation of the school. She had only the slightest attacks of that
- common schoolgirl affliction, schoolmistress love; she never idolized
- Miss Jevons or Miss Frobisher or Miss Kellaway. Their enthusiasm for the
- vote, therefore, prevented hers.
- Later on it was to be different. She was to find in the vote a symbol of
- personal freedom—and an excellent excuse for undergraduate misbehaviour.
- It is true Highmorton School presented a certain amount of history and
- geography to Joan’s mind, but in no way as a process in which she was
- concerned. She grew up to believe that in England we were out of
- history, out of geography, eternally blessed in a constitution that we
- could not better, under a crown which was henceforth for ever, so to
- speak, the centre of an everlasting social tea-party, and that party
- “politics” in Parliament and the great Vote struggle had taken the place
- of such real convulsions of human fortune as occurred in other countries
- and other times. Wars, famine, pestilence; the world had done with them.
- Nations, kings and people, politics, were for Joan throughout all her
- schooldays no more than scenery for her unending private personal
- romance.
- But because much has been told here of Joan’s reveries it is not to be
- imagined that she was addicted to brooding. It was only when her mind
- was unoccupied that the internal story-teller got to work. Usually Joan
- was pretty actively occupied. The Highmorton ideal of breezy activity
- took hold of her very early; one kept “on the Go.” In school she liked
- her work, even though her unworshipping disposition got her at times at
- loggerheads with her teachers; there was so much more in the lessons
- than there had been at Miss Murgatroyd’s. Out of school she became
- rather a disorderly influence. At first she missed Peter dreadfully.
- Then she began to imitate Peter for the benefit of one or two small
- associates with less initiative than her own. Then she became
- authentically Peter-like. She tried a mild saga of her own in those
- junior days, and taught her friends to act a part in it as Peter had
- taught her to be a companion of the great Bungo. She developed the same
- sort of disposition to go up ladders, climb over walls, try the fronts
- of cliffs, go through open doors and try closed ones, that used to make
- Peter such agreeable company. Once or twice she and a friend or so even
- got lost by the mistress in charge of a school walk, and came home by a
- different way through the outskirts of Broadstairs. But that led to an
- awe-inspiring “fuss.” Moreover, it took Joan some years to grasp the
- idea that the physical correction of one’s friends is not ladylike. When
- it came to other girls she perceived that Peter’s way with a girl was
- really a very good way—better than either hauteur or pinching. Holding
- down, for instance, or the wrist wrench.
- All the time that she was at Highmorton Joan found no friend as good as
- Peter. Tel Wymark, with the freckles, became important about Joan’s
- fifteenth birthday as a good giggling associate, a person to sit with in
- the back seats of lectures and debates and tickle to death with dry
- comments on the forward proceedings. To turn on Tel quietly and slowly
- and do a gargoyle face at her was usually enough to set her off—or even
- to pull a straight face and sit as if you were about to gargoyle. Tel’s
- own humour was by no means negligible, and she had a store of Limericks,
- the first Limericks Joan had encountered. Joan herself rarely giggled;
- on a few occasions she laughed loudly, but for most comic occasions her
- laughter was internal, and so this disintegration of Tel by merriment
- became a fascinating occupation. It was no doubt the contrast of her
- dark restraint that subjected her to the passionate affection of Adela
- Murchison.
- That affair began a year or so before the friendship with Tel. Adela was
- an abundant white-fleshed creature rather more than a year older than
- Joan. She came back from the Easter holidays, stage struck, with her
- head full of Rosalind. She had seen Miss Lillah McCarthy as Rosalind in
- _As You Like it_, and had fallen violently in love with her. She went
- over the play with Joan, and Joan was much fascinated by the Rosalind
- masquerade; in such guise Joan Stubland might well have met her king for
- the first time. Then Adela and Joan let their imaginations loose and
- played at Shakespearian love-making. They would get together upon walks
- and steal apart whenever an opportunity offered. Adela wanted to kiss a
- great deal, and once when she kissed Joan she whispered, “It’s not
- Rosalind I love, not Lillah or any one else; just Joan.” Joan kissed her
- in return. And then something twisted over in Joan’s mind that drove her
- to austerity; suddenly she would have no more of this kissing, she
- herself could not have explained why or wherefore. It was the queerest
- recoil. “We’re being too soppy,” she said to Adela, but that did not in
- the least express it. Adela became a protesting and urgent lover; she
- wrote Joan notes, she tried to make scenes, she demanded Was there any
- one else?
- “No,” said Joan. “But I don’t like all this rot.”
- “You did!” said Adela with ready tears shining in her pretty eyes.
- “And I don’t now,” said Joan....
- Joan herself was puzzled, but she had no material in her mind by which
- she could test and analyse this revulsion. She hid a dark secret from
- all the world, she hid it almost from herself, that once before, in the
- previous summer holidays, one afternoon while she was staying with her
- aunts at The Ingle-Nook, she had walked over by the Cuspard house on the
- way to Miss Murgatroyd’s. And she had met young Cuspard, grown tall and
- quaintly good-looking, in white flannels. They had stopped to talk and
- sat down on a tree together, and suddenly he had kissed her. “You’re
- lovely, Joan,” he said. It was an incredible thing to remember, it was a
- memory so astounding as to be obscure, but she knew as a fact that she
- had kissed him again and had liked this kissing, and then had had just
- this same feeling of terror, of enormity, as though something vast
- clutched at her. It was fantastically disagreeable, not like a real
- disagreeable thing, but like a dream disagreeable thing. She resolved
- that in fact it had not happened, she barred it back out of the current
- of her thoughts, and it shadowed her life for days.
- § 7
- The modern world tells the young a score of conflicting stories—more or
- less distinctly—about every essential thing. While men like Oswald dream
- of a culture telling the young plainly what they are supposed to be for,
- what this or that or the other is for, the current method of instruction
- about God and state and sex alike is a wrangle that never joins issue.
- For every youth and maiden who is not strictly secluded or very stupid,
- adolescence is a period of distressful perplexity, of hidden hypotheses,
- misunderstood hints, checked urgency, and wild stampedes of the
- imagination. Joan’s opening mind was like some ill-defended country
- across which armies marched. Came the School of St. George and the
- Venerable Bede, led by Miss Murgatroyd and applauded by Aunt Phœbe,
- baring its head and feet and knees, casting aside corsets, appealing to
- nature and simplicity, professing fearlessness, and telling the young a
- great deal less than it had the air of telling them. Came Highmorton, a
- bracing wind after that relaxing atmosphere.
- But Limpsfield had at least a certain honesty in its limited initiation;
- Highmorton was comparatively an imposture. With an effect of going right
- on beyond all established things to something finer and newer,
- Highmorton was really restoring prudery in a brutalized form. It is no
- more vigorous to ban a topic by calling it “soppy” and waving a muddy
- hockey-stick at it in a threatening manner, than it is to ban it by
- calling it “improper” and primly cutting it dead. There the topic
- remains.
- A third influence had made a contributory grab at Joan; Aunt Charlotte
- Sydenham’s raid on the children’s education was on behalf of all that
- was then most orthodox. Hers was indeed the essential English culture of
- the earlier Victorian age; a culture that so far as sex went was pure
- suppression—tempered by the broad hints and tittering chatter of
- servants and base people....
- Stuck away, shut in, in Joan’s memory, shut in and disregarded as bees
- will wax up and disregard the decaying body of some foul intruder, were
- certain passages with Mrs. Pybus. They carried an impression at once
- vague and enormous, of a fascinating unclean horror. They were
- inseparably mixed up with strange incredulous thoughts of hell that were
- implanted during the same period. Such scenery as they needed was
- supplied by the dusty, faded furnishings of the little house in Windsor,
- they had the same faintly disagreeable dusty smell of a home only
- cleansed by stray wipes with a duster and spiritless sweeping with
- tea-leaves.
- That period had been a dark patch upon the sunlit fabric of Joan’s life.
- Over it all brooded this Mrs. Pybus, frankly dirty while “doing” her
- house in the morning, then insincerely tidy in the afternoon. She talked
- continually to, at, and round about Joan. She was always talking. She
- was an untimely widow prone to brood upon the unpleasant but enormously
- importunate facts that married life had thrust upon her. She had an
- irresistible desire to communicate her experiences with an air of
- wisdom. She had a certain conceit of wisdom. She had no sense of the
- respect due to the ignorance of childhood. Like many women of her class
- and type she was too egotistical to allow for childhood.
- Never before had Joan heard of diseases. Now she heard of all the
- diseases of these two profoundly clinical families, the Pybuses and the
- Unwins. The Pybus family specialized in cancers, “chumors” and morbid
- growths generally; one, but he was rather remote and legendary, had had
- an “insec’ in ’is ’ed”; the distinction of the Unwins on the other hand
- was in difficult parturitions. All this stuff was poured out in a
- whining monologue in Joan’s presence as Mrs. Pybus busied herself in the
- slatternly details of her housework.
- “Two cases of cancer I’ve seen through from the very first pangs,” Mrs.
- Pybus would begin, and then piously, “God grant I never see a third.”
- “Whatever you do, Joan, one thing I say never do—good though Pybus was
- and kind. Never marry no one with internal cancer, ’owever ’ard you may
- be drove. Indigestion, rheumatism, even a wooden leg rather. Better a
- man that drinks. I say it and I know. It doesn’t make it any easier,
- Joan, to sit and see them suffer.
- “You’ve got your troubles yet to come, young lady. I don’t expec’ you
- understand ’arf what I’m telling you. But you will some day. I sometimes
- think if I ’adn’t been kep’ in ignorance things might have been better
- for me—all I bin called upon to go through.” That was the style of
- thing. It was like pouring drainage over a rosebud. First Joan listened
- with curiosity, then with horror. Then unavailingly, always overpowered
- by a grotesque fascination, she tried not to listen. Monstrous fragments
- got through to her cowering attention. Here were things for a little
- girl to carry off in her memory, material as she sickened for measles
- for the most terrifying and abominable of dreams.
- “There’s poor ladies that has to be reg’lar cut open....
- “I ’ad a dreadful time when I married Pybus. Often I said to ’im
- afterwards, you can’t complain of _me_, Pybus. The things one lives
- through!...
- “’Is sister’s ’usband didn’t ’ave no mercy on ’er....
- “Don’t you go outside this gate, Joan—ever. If one of these ’ere Tramps
- should get hold of you.... I’ve ’eard of a little girl....”
- If a congenial gossip should happen to drop in Joan would be told to sit
- by the window and look at the “nice picture book”—it was always that one
- old volume of _The Illustrated London News_—while a talk went on that
- insisted on being heard, now dropping to harsh whispers, now rising
- louder after the assurance of Mrs. Pybus:
- “Lord! _She_ won’t understand a word you’re saying.”
- If by chance Mrs. Pybus and her friend drifted for a time from personal
- or consanguineous experiences then they dealt with crimes. Difficulties
- in the disposal of the body fascinated these ladies even more than the
- pleasing details of the act. And they preferred murders of women by men.
- It seemed more natural to them....
- The world changed again. Through the tossing distress of the measles
- Aunt Phyllis reappeared, and then came a journey and The Ingle-Nook and
- dear Petah! and Nobby. She was back in a world where Mrs. Pybus could
- not exist, where the things of which Mrs. Pybus talked could not happen.
- Yet there was this in Joan’s mind, unformulated, there was a passionate
- stress against its formulation, that all the other things she thought
- about love and beauty were poetry and dreaming, but this alone of all
- the voices that had spoken over and about her, told of something real.
- In the unknown beyond to which one got if one pressed on, was something
- of that sort, something monstrous, painful and dingy....
- Reality!
- Wax it over, little dream bees; cover it up; don’t think of it! Back to
- reverie! Be a king’s mistress, clad in armour, who sometimes grants a
- kiss.
- § 8
- It was in the nature of Mrs. Pybus to misconceive things. She never
- grasped the true relationship of Joan and Peter; Mr. Grimes had indeed
- been deliberately vague upon that point in the interests of the Sydenham
- family, the use of the Stubland surname for Joan had helped him; and so
- there dropped into Joan’s ears a suggestion that was at the time merely
- perplexing but which became gradually an established fact in her mind.
- “Ow! don’t you know?” said Mrs. Pybus to her friend. “Ow, no! She’s——”
- (Her voice sank to a whisper.)
- For a time what they said was so confidential as to convey nothing to
- Joan but a sense of mystery. “Ow ’is mother ever stood ’er in the ’ouse
- passes my belief,” said Mrs. Pybus, coming up to the audible again.
- “Why! I’d ’ave _killed_ ’er. But ladies and gentlemen don’t seem to ’ave
- no natural affections—not wot I call affections. There she was brought
- into the ’ouse and treated just as if she was the little chap’s sister.”
- “She’d be——?” said the friend, trying to grasp it.
- “’Arf sister,” said Mrs. Pybus. “Of a sort. Neither ’ere nor there, so
- to speak. Not in the eyes of the law. And there they are—leastways they
- was until Lady Charlotte Sydenham interfered.”
- The friend nodded her head rapidly to indicate intelligent appreciation.
- “It isn’t like being _reely_ brother and sister,” said Mrs. Pybus,
- contemplating possibilities. “It’s neither one thing nor another. And
- all wrop up in mystery as you might say. Why, oo knows? They might go
- falling in love with each other.”
- “_’Orrible!_” said Mrs. Pybus’s friend.
- “It ’ad to be put a stop to,” said Mrs. Pybus.
- Confirmatory nodding, with a stern eye for the little figure that sat in
- a corner and pretended to be interested in the faded exploits of
- vanished royalties, recorded in that old volume of _The Illustrated
- London News_....
- That conversation sank down into the deeps of Joan’s memory and remained
- there, obscured but exercising a dim influence upon her relations with
- Peter. One phrase sent up a bubble every now and then into her conscious
- thoughts: “half-sister.” It was years after that she began to piece
- together the hidden riddle of her birth. Mummy and Daddy were away; that
- had served as well for her as for Peter far beyond the Limpsfield days.
- It isn’t until children are in their teens that these things interest
- them keenly. It wasn’t a thing to talk about, she knew, but it was a
- thing to puzzle over. Who was really her father? Who was her mother? If
- she was Peter’s half-sister, then either his father was not hers or his
- mother....
- When people are all manifestly in a plot to keep one in the dark one
- does not ask questions.
- § 9
- After the first violent rupture that Mr. Grimes had organized, Joan and
- Peter parted and met again in a series of separations and resumptions.
- They went off to totally dissimilar atmospheres, Joan to the bracing and
- roughening air of Highmorton and Peter first to the brightness of White
- Court and then to the vigorous work and play of Caxton; and each time
- they returned for the holidays to Margate or Limpsfield or Pelham Ford
- changed, novel, and yet profoundly familiar. Always at first when
- holidays brought them together again they were shy with each other and
- intensely egotistical, anxious to show off their new tricks and make the
- most of whatever small triumphs school life had given them. Then in a
- day or so they would be at their ease together like a joint that has
- been dislocated and has slipped into place again. Cambridge at last
- brought them nearer together, and ended this series of dislocations.
- After much grave weighing of the situation by Miss Fairchild, the
- principal of Newton Hall, Peter, when Joan came up, was given the status
- of a full brother.
- They grew irregularly, and that made some quaint variations of
- relationship. Peter, soon after he went to Caxton, fell to expanding
- enormously. He developed a chest, his limbs became great things. There
- was a summer bitten into Joan’s memory when he regarded her as nothing
- more than a “leetle teeny female tick,” and descanted on the minuteness
- of her soul and body. But he had lost some of his lightness, if none of
- his dexterity and balance, as a climber, and Joan got her consolations
- among the lighter branches of various trees they explored. Next
- Christmas Joan herself had done some serious growing, and the gap was
- not so wide. But it was only after her first term at Newnham that Joan
- passed from the subservience of a junior to the confidence of a senior.
- She did it at a bound. She met him one day in the narrow way between
- Sidney Street and Petty Cury. Her hair was up and her eyes were steady;
- most of her legs had vanished, and she had clothes like a real woman. We
- do not foregather even with foster brothers in the streets of Cambridge,
- but a passing hail is beyond the reach of discipline. “Hullo, Petah!”
- she said, “what a gawky great thing you’re getting!”
- Peter, a man in his second year, was so taken aback he had no adequate
- reply.
- “You’ve grown too,” he said, “if it comes to that”;—a flavourless reply.
- And there was admiration in his eyes.
- An encounter for subsequent regrets. He thought over it afterwards. The
- cheek of her! It made his blood boil.
- “So long, Petah,” said Joan, carrying it off to the end....
- They were sterner than brother and sister with each other. There was
- never going to be anything “soppy” between them. At fourteen, when Peter
- passed into the Red Indian phase of a boy’s development, when there can
- be no more “blubbing,” no more shirking, he carried Joan with him. She
- responded magnificently to the idea of pluck. Spartan ideals ruled them
- both. And a dark taciturnity. Joan would have died with shame if Peter
- had penetrated the secret romance of Joan Stubland, and the days of
- Peter’s sagas were over for ever. When Peter was fifteen he was consumed
- by a craving for a gun, and Oswald gave him one. “But kill,” said
- Oswald. “If you let anything get away wounded——”
- Peter took Joan out into the wood at the back. He missed a pigeon, and
- then he got one.
- “Pick it up, Joan,” he said, very calmly and grandly.
- Joan was white to the lips, but she picked up the bloodstained bird in
- silence. These things had to happen.
- Then out of a heap of leaves in front darted a rabbit. Lop, lop, lop,
- went its little white scut. _Bang!_ and over it rolled, but it wasn’t
- instantly killed. Horror came upon Joan. She was nearest; she ran to the
- wretched animal, which was lying on its side and kicking automatically,
- and stood over it. Its eyes were bright and wide with terror. “Oh, how
- am I to _kill_ it?” she cried, with agony in her voice; “what am I to
- do-o?” She wrung her hands. She felt she was going to pieces, giving
- herself away, failing utterly. Peter would despise her and jeer at her.
- But the poor little beast! The poor beast! There is a limit to pride.
- She caught it up. “Petah!” she cried quite pitifully, on the verge of a
- whimper.
- Peter had come up to her. He didn’t look contemptuous. He was
- white-lipped too. She had never seen him look scared before. He snatched
- the rabbit from her and killed it by one, two, three—she counted—quick
- blows—she didn’t see. But she had met his eyes, and they were as
- distressed as hers. Just for a moment.
- Then he was a fifth form boy again. He examined his victim with an
- affectation of calm. “Too far back,” he said. “Bad shot. Mustn’t do that
- again.”...
- The rabbit was quite still and limp now, dangling from Peter’s hand, its
- eye had glazed, blood dripped and clotted at its muzzle, but its
- rhythmic desperate kicking was still beating in Joan’s brain.
- Was this to go on? Could she go on?
- Peter’s gun and the pigeon were lying some yards away. He regarded them
- and then looked down at the rabbit he held.
- “Now I know I can shoot,” he said, and left the sentence unfinished.
- “Bring the pigeon, Joan,” he said, ending an indecision, and picked up
- his gun and led the way back towards the house....
- “We got a pigeon and a rabbit,” Joan babbled at tea to Oswald. “Next
- time, Petah’s going to let me have the gun.”
- Our tone was altogether sporting.
- But there was no next time. There were many unspoken things between Joan
- and Peter, and this was to be one of them. For all the rest of their
- lives neither Joan nor Peter went shooting again. Men Peter was destined
- to slay—but no more beasts. Necessity never compelled them, and it would
- have demanded an urgent necessity before they would have faced the risk
- of seeing another little furry creature twist and wriggle and of marking
- how a bright eye glazes over. But they were both very bitterly ashamed
- of this distressing weakness. They left further shooting for “tomorrow,”
- and it remained always tomorrow. They said nothing about their real
- feelings in the matter, and Peter cleaned and oiled his new gun very
- carefully and hung it up conspicuously over the mantelshelf of their
- common room, ready to be taken down at any time—when animals ceased to
- betray feeling.
- § 10
- Joan and Peter detested each other’s friends from the beginning. The
- quarrel that culminated in that amazing speech of Joan’s, had been
- smouldering between them for a good seven years. It went right back to
- the days when they were still boy and girl.
- To begin with, after their first separation they had had no particular
- friends; they had had acquaintances and habits of association, but the
- mind still lacks the continuity necessary for friendship and Euclid
- until the early teens. The first rift came with Adela Murchison. Joan
- brought her for the summer holidays when Peter had been just a year at
- Caxton.
- That was the first summer at Pelham Ford. Aunt Phyllis was with them,
- but Aunt Phœbe was in great labour with her first and only novel, a
- fantasia on the theme of feminine genius, “These are my Children, or
- Mary on the Cross.” (It was afterwards greatly censored. Boots, the
- druggist librarian, would have none of it.) She stayed alone, therefore,
- at The Ingle-Nook, writing, revising, despairing, tearing up and
- beginning again, reciting her more powerful passages to the scarlet but
- listening ears of Groombridge and the little maid, and going more and
- more unkempt, unhooked, and unbuttoned. Oswald, instead of resorting to
- the Climax Club as he was apt to do when Aunt Phœbe was imminent, abode
- happily in his new home.
- Adela was a month or so older than Peter and, what annoyed him to begin
- with, rather more fully grown. She was, as she only too manifestly
- perceived, a woman of the world in comparison with both of her hosts.
- She was still deeply in love with Joan, but by no means indifferent to
- this dark boy who looked at her with so much of Joan’s cool detachment.
- Joan’s romantic dreams were Joan’s inmost secret, Adela’s romantic
- intentions were an efflorescence. She was already hoisting the signals
- for masculine surrender. She never failed to have a blue ribbon astray
- somewhere to mark and help the blueness of her large blue eyes. She
- insisted upon the flaxen waves over her ears, and secretly assisted them
- to kink. She had a high colour. She had no rouge yet in her possession
- but there was rouge in her soul, and she would rub her cheeks with her
- hands before she came into a room. She discovered to Joan the incredible
- fact that Oswald was also a man.
- With her arm round Joan’s waist or over her shoulder she would look back
- at him across the lawn.
- “I say,” she said, “he’d be _frightfully_ good-looking—if it wasn’t for
- _that_.”
- And one day, “I wonder if Mr. Sydenham’s ever been in love.”
- She lay in wait for Oswald’s eye. She went after him to ask him
- unimportant things.
- Once or twice little things happened, the slightest things, but it might
- have seemed to Joan that Oswald was disposed to flirt with Adela. But
- that was surely impossible....
- The first effect of the young woman upon Peter was a considerable but
- indeterminate excitement. It was neither pleasurable nor unpleasurable,
- but it hung over the giddy verge of being unpleasant. It made him want
- to be very large, handsome and impressive. It also made him acutely
- ashamed of wanting to be very large, handsome and impressive. It turned
- him from a simple boy into a conflict of motives. He wanted to extort
- admiration from Adela. Also he wanted to despise her utterly. These
- impulses worked out to no coherent system of remarks and gestures, and
- he became awkward and tongue-tied.
- Adela wanted to be shown all over the house and garden. She put her arm
- about Joan in a manner Peter thought offensive. Then she threw back her
- hair at him over her shoulder and said, shooting a glance at him, “You
- come too.”
- Cheek!
- Still, she was a guest, and so a fellow had to follow with his hands in
- his pockets and watch his own private and particular Joan being ordered
- about and—what was somehow so much more exasperating—_pawed_ about.
- At what seemed to be the earliest opportunity Peter excused himself, and
- went off to the outhouse in which he had his tools and chemicals and
- things. He decided he would rig up everything ready to make Sulphuretted
- Hydrogen—although he knew quite well that this was neither a large,
- handsome, nor impressive thing to do. And then he would wait for them to
- come along, and set the odour going.
- But neither of the girls came near his Glory Hole, and he was not going
- to invite them. He just hovered there unvisited, waiting with his
- preparations and whistling soft melancholy tunes. Finally he made a lot
- of the gas, simply because he had got the stuff ready, and stank himself
- out of his Glory Hole into society again.
- At supper, which had become a sort of dinner that night, Adela insisted
- on talking like a rather languid, smart woman of the world to Nobby.
- Nobby took her quite seriously. It was perfectly sickening.
- “D’you hunt much?” said Adela.
- “Not in England,” said Nobby. “There’s too many hedges for me. I’ve a
- sailor’s seat.”
- “All my people hunt,” said Adela. “It’s rather a bore, don’t you think,
- Mr. Sydenham?”
- Talk like that!
- Two days passed, during which Peter was either being bored to death in
- the company of Adela and Joan or also bored to death keeping aloof from
- them. He cycled to Ware with them, and Adela’s cycle had a change speed
- arrangement with a high gear of eighty-five that made it difficult to
- keep ahead of her. Beast!
- And on the second evening she introduced a new card game, Demon
- Patience, a scrambling sort of game in which you piled on aces in the
- middle and cried “Stop!” as soon as your stack was out. It was one of
- those games, one of those inferior games, at which boys in their teens
- are not nearly as quick as girls, Peter discovered. But presently Joan
- began to pull ahead and beat Adela and Peter. The two girls began to
- play against each other as if his poor little spurts didn’t amount to
- anything. They certainly didn’t amount to very much.
- Adela began to play with a sprawling eagerness. Her colour deepened; her
- manners deteriorated. She was tormented between ambition and admiration.
- When Joan had run her out for the third time, she cried, “Oh, Joan, you
- Wonderful Darling!”
- And clutched and kissed her!...
- All the other things might have been bearable if it had not been for
- this perpetual confabulating with Joan, this going off to whisper with
- Joan, this putting of arms round Joan’s neck, this whispering that was
- almost kissing Joan’s ear. One couldn’t have a moment with Joan. One
- couldn’t use Joan for the slightest thing. It would have been better if
- one hadn’t had a Joan.
- On the mill-pond there was a boat that Joan and Peter were allowed to
- use. On the morning of the fifth day Joan found Peter hanging about in
- the hall.
- “Joan.”
- “Yes?”
- “Come and muck about in Baker’s boat.”
- “If Adela——”
- “Oh, _leave_ Adela! We don’t want her. She’d stash it all up.”
- “But she’s a visitor!”
- “Pretty rotten visitor! What did you bring her here for? She’s rotten.”
- “She’s not. She’s all right. You’re being horrid rude to her. Every
- chance you get. I like her.”
- “Silly tick, she is!”
- “She’s taller than you are, anyhow.”
- “Nyar Nyar Nyar Nyar,” said Peter in a singularly ineffective mockery of
- Adela’s manner. Adela appeared, descending the staircase. Peter turned
- away.
- “Peter wants to go in the boat on the mill-pond,” said Joan, as if with
- calculated wickedness.
- “Oh! I _love_ boats!” said Adela.
- “What was a chap to do but go?”
- But under a thin mask of playfulness Peter splashed them both a
- lot—especially Adela. And in the evening he refused to play at Demon
- Patience and went and sat by himself to draw. He tried various designs.
- He was rather good at drawing Mr. Henderson, and he did several studies
- of him. Then the girls, who found Demon Patience slow with only two
- players, came and sat beside him. He was inspired to begin an ugly
- caricature of Adela.
- He began at the eyes.
- Joan knew him better than Adela. She saw what was coming. Down came her
- little brown paw on the paper. “No, you don’t, Petah,” she said.
- Peter looked into her face, hot against his, and there was a red light
- in his eyes.
- “Leago, Joan,” he said.
- A struggle began in which Adela took no share.
- The Sydenham blood is hot blood, and though it doesn’t like hurting
- rabbits it can be pretty rough with its first cousins. But Joan was
- still gripping the crumpled half of the offending sheet when Aunt
- Phyllis, summoned by a scared Adela, came in. The two were on the
- hearthrug, panting, and Joan’s teeth were deep in Peter’s wrist; they
- parted and rose somewhat abashed. “My _dears_!” cried Aunt Phyllis.
- “We were playing,” said Joan, flushed and breathless, but honourably
- tearless.
- “Yes,” said Peter, holding his wrist tight. “We were playing.”
- “Romping,” said Aunt Phyllis. “Weren’t you a little rough? Adela, you
- know, isn’t used to your style....”
- After that, Peter shunned further social intercourse. He affected a
- great concentration upon experimental chemistry and photography, and
- bicycled in lonely pride to Waltham Cross, Baldock, and Dunmow. He gave
- himself up to the roads of Hertfordshire. When at last Adela departed it
- made no difference in his aloofness. Joan was henceforth as nothing to
- him; she was just a tick, a silly little female tick, an associate of
- things that went “Nyar Nyar Nyar.” He hated her. At least, he would have
- hated her if there was anything that a self-respecting Caxtonian could
- hate in a being so utterly contemptible. (Yet at the bottom of his heart
- he loved and respected her for biting his wrist so hard.)
- Deprived of Adela, Joan became very lonely and forlorn. After some days
- there were signs of relenting on the part of Peter, and then came his
- visitor, Wilmington, a boy who had gone with him from White Court to
- Caxton, and after that there was no need of Joan. With a grim resolution
- Peter shut Joan out from all their pursuits. She was annihilated.
- The boys did experimental chemistry together, made the most disgusting
- stinks, blew up a small earthwork by means of a mine, and stained their
- hands bright yellow; they had long bicycle rides together, they did
- “splorjums” in the wood, they “mucked about” with Baker’s boat. Joan by
- no effort could come into existence again. Once or twice as Peter was
- going off with Wilmington, Peter would glance back and feel a gleam of
- compunction at the little figure that watched him going. But she had her
- Adelas. She and Adela wrote letters to each other. She could go and
- write to her beastly Adela now....
- “Can’t Joan come?” said Wilmington.
- “She’s only a tick,” said Peter.
- “She’s not a bad sort of tick,” said Wilmington.
- (What business was it of his?)
- Joan fell back on Nobby, and went for walks with him in the afternoon.
- Then came a complication. Towards the end Wilmington got quite soppy on
- Joan. It showed.
- Aunt Phyllis suggested charades for the evening hour after dinner.
- Wilmington and Peter played against each other, and either of them took
- out any people he wanted to act with him. Aunt Phyllis was a grave and
- dignified actress and Nobby could do better than you might have
- expected. Peter did Salome. (Sal—owe—me; doing sal volatile for Sal.) He
- sat as Herod, crowned and scornful with the false black beard, and Joan
- danced and afterwards brought the football in on a plate. Aunt Phyllis
- did pseudo-oriental music. But when Wilmington saw Joan dance he knew
- what it was to be in love. He sat glowering passion. For a time he
- remained frozen rigid, and then broke into wild hand-clapping. His ears
- were bright red, and Aunt Phyllis looked at him curiously. It was with
- difficulty that his clouded mind could devise a charade that would give
- him a call upon Joan. But he thought at last of Milton. (Mill-tun.)
- “I want you,” he said.
- “Won’t Aunty do?”
- “No, _you_. It’s got to be a girl.”
- He held the door open for her, and stumbled going out of the room. He
- was more breathless and jerky than ever outside. Joan heard his
- exposition with an unfriendly expression.
- “And what am I to do then?” she asked....
- “And then?...”
- They did “Mill” and “Tun” pretty badly. Came Wilmington’s last precious
- moments with her. He broke off in his description of Milton blind and
- Joan as the amanuensis daughter. “Joan,” he whispered, going hoarse with
- emotion. “Joan, you’re lovely. I’d die for you.”
- A light of evil triumph came into Joan’s eyes.
- “Ugly thing!” said Joan, “what did you come here for? You’ve spoilt my
- holidays. Let _go_ of my hand!... Let’s go in and do our tableau.”
- And afterwards when Wilmington met Joan in the passage she treated him
- to a grimace that was only too manifestly intended to represent his own
- expression of melancholy but undying devotion. In the presence of others
- she was coolly polite to him.
- Peter read his friend like a book, but refrained from injurious comment,
- and Wilmington departed in a state of grave nervous disarray.
- A day passed. There was not much left now of the precious holidays. Came
- a glowing September morning.
- “Joe-un,” whooped Peter in the garden—in just the old note.
- “Pee-tah!” answered Joan, full-voiced as ever, distant but drawing
- nearer.
- “Come and muck about in Baker’s boat.”
- “Right-o, Petah!” said Joan, and approached with a slightly prancing
- gait.
- § 11
- Growing out of his Red Indian phase Peter moved up into the Lower Sixth
- and became a regular cynical man of the world with an air of knowing
- more than a thing or two. He was, in fact, learning a vast number of
- things that are outside the books; and rearranging many of his early
- shocks and impressions by the help of a confusing and increasing mixture
- of half-lights. The chaotic disrespect of the young went out of his
- manner in his allusion to school affairs, he no longer spoke of various
- masters as “Buzzy,” “Snooks,” and “the Croker,” and a curious
- respectability had invaded his demeanour. The Head had had him in to tea
- and tennis. The handle of the prefect’s birch was perhaps not more than
- a year now from his grip, if he bore himself gravely. He reproached Joan
- on various small occasions for “thundering bad form,” and when
- Wilmington came, a much more wary and better-looking Wilmington with his
- heart no longer on his sleeve, the conversation became, so to speak,
- political. They talked at the dinner-table of the behaviour of so-and-so
- and this-and-that at “High” and at “Bottoms” and on “the Corso”; they
- discussed various cases of “side” and “cheek,” and the permanent effect
- of these upon the standing and reputations of the youths concerned; they
- were earnest to search out and know utterly why Best did not get his
- colours and whether it was just to “super” old Rawdon. They discussed
- the question of superannuation with Oswald very gravely. “Don’t you
- think,” said Oswald, “if a school takes a boy on, it ought to see him
- through?”
- “But if he doesn’t work, sir?” said Wilmington.
- “A school oughtn’t to produce that lassitude,” said Oswald.
- “A chap ought to _use_ a school,” said Peter.
- That was a new point of view to Oswald and Joan.
- Afterwards came Troop, a larger boy than either Peter or Wilmington, a
- prefect, a youth almost incredibly manly in his manner, and joined on to
- these discussions. Said Oswald, “There ought not to be such a thing as
- superannuation. A man ought not to be let drift to the point of
- unteachable incapacity. And then thrown away. Some master ought to have
- shepherded him in for special treatment.”
- “They don’t look after us to that extent, sir,” said Troop.
- “Don’t they teach you? Or fail to teach you?”
- “It’s the school teaches us,” said Peter, as though it had just occurred
- to him.
- “Still, the masters are there,” said Oswald, smiling.
- “The masters are there,” Troop acquiesced. “But the life of the school
- is the tradition. And a big chap like Rawdon hanging about, too big to
- lick and too stupid for responsibility—— It breaks things up, sir.”
- Oswald was very much interested in this prefect’s view of the school
- life. Behind his blank mask he engendered questions; his one eye watched
- Troop and went from Troop to Peter. This manliness in the taught
- surprised him tremendously. Peter was acquiring it rapidly, but Troop
- seemed to embody it. Oswald himself had been a man early enough and had
- led a hard life of mutual criticism and exasperation with his fellows,
- but that had been in a working reality, the navy; this, he reflected,
- was a case of cocks crowing inside the egg. These boys were living in a
- premature autonomous state, an aristocratic republic with the Head as a
- sort of constitutional monarch. There was one questionable consequence
- at least. They were acquiring political habits before they had acquired
- wide horizons. Were the political habits of a school where all the boys
- were of one race and creed and class, suitable for the problems of a
- world’s affairs?
- Troop, under Oswald’s insidious leading, displayed his ideas modestly
- but frankly, and they were the ideas of a large child. Troop was a
- good-looking, thoroughly healthy youth, full of his grave
- responsibilities towards the school and inclined to claim a liberal
- attitude. He was very great upon his duty to “make the fellows live
- decently and behave decently.” He was lured into a story of how one
- youth with a tendency to long hair had been partly won and partly driven
- to a more seemly coiffure; how he had dealt with a games shirker, and
- how a fellow had been detected lending socialist pamphlets—“not to his
- friends, sir, I shouldn’t mind that so much, but pushing them upon any
- one”—and restrained. “Seditious sort of stuff, sir, I believe. No, I did
- not _read_ it, sir.” Troop was for cold baths under all circumstances,
- for no smoking under sixteen and five foot six, and for a simple and
- unquestioning loyalty to any one who came along and professed to be in
- authority over him. When he mentioned the king his voice dropped
- worshipfully. Upon the just use of the birch Troop was conscientiously
- prolix. There were prefects, he said, who “savaged” the fellows. Others
- swished without judgment. Troop put conscience into each whack.
- Troop’s liberalism interested Oswald more than anything else about
- him. He was proud to profess himself no mere traditionalist; he wanted
- Caxton to “broaden down from precedent to precedent.” Indeed he had
- ambitions to be remembered as a reformer. He hoped, he said, to leave
- the school “better than he found it”—the modern note surely. His idea
- of a great and memorable improvement was to let the Upper Fifth
- fellows into the Corso after morning service on Sunday. He did not
- think it would make them impertinent; rather it would increase their
- self-respect. He was also inclined to a reorganization of the
- afternoon fagging “to stop so much bawling down the corridor.” There
- ought to be a bell—an electric bell—in each prefect’s study. No doubt
- that was a bit revolutionary—Troop almost smirked. “It’s all very well
- for schools like Eton or Winchester to stick to the old customs, sir,
- but we are supposed to be an Up-to-Date school. Don’t you think, sir?”
- The egg was everything to this young cockerel; the world outside was
- naught. Oswald led him on from one solemn puerility to another, and as
- the big boy talked in his stout man-of-the-world voice, the red eye
- roved from him to Peter and from Peter back to Troop. Until presently
- it realized that Peter was watching it as narrowly. “What does Peter
- really think of this stuff?” thought Oswald. “What does Nobby really
- think of this stuff?” queried Peter.
- “I suppose, some day, you’ll leave Caxton,” said Oswald.
- “I shall be very sorry to, sir,” said Troop sincerely.
- “Have you thought at all——”
- “Not yet, sir. At least——”
- “Troop’s people,” Peter intervened, “are Army people.”
- “I see,” said Oswald.
- Joan listened enviously to all this prefectorial conversation. At
- Highmorton that sort of bossing and influencing was done by the junior
- staff....
- Oswald did his best to lure Troop from his administrative preoccupations
- into general topics. But apparently some one whom Troop respected had
- warned him against general topics. Oswald lugged and pushed the talk
- towards religion, Aunt Phyllis helping, but they came up against a stone
- wall. “My people are Church of England,” said Troop, intimating thereby
- that his opinions were banked with the proper authorities. It was not
- for him to state them. And in regard to politics, “All my people are
- Conservative.” One evening Oswald showed him a portfolio of drawings
- from various Indian temples, and suggested something of the complex
- symbolism of the figures. Troop thought it was “rather unhealthy.”
- But—turning from these monstrosities—he had hopes for India. “My cousin
- tells me, sir, that cricket and polo are spreading very rapidly there.”
- “Polo,” said Oswald, “is an Indian game. They have played it for
- centuries. It came from Persia originally.” But Troop was unable to
- imagine Indians riding horses; he had the common British delusion that
- the horse and the ship were both invented in our islands and that all
- foreign peoples are necessarily amateurs at such things. “I thought they
- rode elephants,” said Troop with quiet conviction....
- Troop was not only a great experience for Oswald, he also exercised the
- always active mind of Joan very considerably.
- Peter, it seemed, hadn’t even mentioned her beforehand.
- “Hullo!” said Troop at the sight of her. “Got a sister?”
- “Foster-sister,” said Peter, minimizing the thing. “Joan, this is
- Troop.”
- Joan regarded him critically. “Can he play D.P.?”
- “Not one of my games,” said Troop, who was chary of all games not
- usually played.
- “It’s a game like Snap,” said Peter with an air of casual contempt, and
- earned a bright scowl.
- For a day or so Troop and Joan kept aloof, watching one another. Then
- she caught him out rather neatly twice at single wicket cricket; he had
- a weakness for giving catches to point and she had observed it.
- “Caught!” he cried approvingly. Also she snicked and slipped and at last
- slogged boldly at his patronizing under-arm bowling. “Here’s a Twister,”
- he said, like an uncle speaking to a child.
- Joan smacked it into the cedar. “_Twister!_” quoth Joan, running.
- After that he took formal notice of her, betraying a disposition to
- address her as “Kid.” (Ralph Connor was at that time adding his quota to
- the great British tradition. It is true he wrote in American about
- cowboys—but a refined cowboy was the fullest realization of an English
- gentleman’s pre-war ideals—and Ralph Connor’s cowboys are essentially
- refined. Thence came the “Kid,” anyhow.) But Joan took umbrage at the
- “Kid.” And she disliked Troop’s manner and influence with Peter. And the
- way Peter stood it. She did not understand what a very, very great being
- a prefect is in an English public school, she did not know of Troop’s
- superbness at rugger, it seemed to her that it was bad manners to behave
- as though a visit to Pelham Ford were an act of princely condescension.
- She was even disposed to diagnose Troop’s largeness, very unjustly, as
- fat. So she pulled up Troop venomously with “My name’s not Kit, it’s
- Joan. J.O.A.N.”
- “Sorry!” said Troop. And being of that insensitive class whose passions
- are only to be roused by a smacking, he began to take still more notice
- of her. She was, he perceived, a lively Kid. He felt a strong desire to
- reprove and influence her. He had no suspicion that what he really
- wanted to do was to interest Joan in himself.
- Joan’s tennis was incurably tricky. Troop’s idea of tennis was to play
- very hard and very swiftly close over the net, but without cunning.
- Peter and Wilmington followed his lead. But Joan forced victory upon an
- unwilling partner by doing unexpected things.
- Troop declared he did not mind being defeated, but that he was shocked
- by the spirit of Joan’s play. It wasn’t “sporting.”
- “Those short returns aren’t done, Kid,” he said.
- “I do them,” said Joan. “Ancient.”
- Peter and Wilmington were visibly shocked, but Troop showed no
- resentment at the gross familiarity.
- “But if every one did them!” he reasoned.
- “I could take them,” said Joan. “Any one could take them who knew how.”
- The dispute seemed likely to die down into unverifiable assertions.
- “Peter can take them,” said Joan. “He drops them back. But he isn’t
- doing it today.”
- Peter reflected. Troop would never understand, but there was something
- reasonable in Joan’s line. “I’ll see to Joan,” he said abruptly, and
- came towards the middle of the net.
- The game continued on unorthodox but brilliant lines. “I don’t call this
- tennis,” said Troop.
- “If you served to her left,” said Peter.
- “But she’s a girl!” protested Troop. “_Serve!_”
- He made the concessions that are proper to a lady, and Joan scored the
- point after a brief rally with Peter. “Game,” said Joan.
- Troop declared he did not care to play again. It would put him off
- tennis. “Take me as a partner,” said Joan. “No—I don’t think so,
- thanks,” said Troop coldly.
- Every one became thoughtful and drifted towards the net. Oswald
- approached from the pergola, considering the problem.
- “I’ve been thinking about that sort of thing for years,” he remarked,
- strolling towards them.
- “Well, sir, aren’t you with me?” asked Troop.
- “No. I’m for Joan—and Peter.”
- “But that sort of trick play——”
- “No. The way to play a game is to get all over the game and to be equal
- to anything in it. If there is a stroke or anything that spoils the game
- it ought to be barred by the rules. Apart from that, a game ought to be
- worked out to its last possibility. Things oughtn’t to be barred in the
- interests of a few conventional swipes. This cutting down of a game to
- just a few types of stroke——”
- Peter looked apprehensive.
- “It’s laziness,” said Oswald.
- Troop was too puzzled to be offended. “But you have to work tremendously
- hard, sir, at the proper game.”
- “Not mentally,” said Oswald. “There’s too much good form in all our
- games. It’s just a way of cutting down a game to a formality.”
- “But, for instance, sir, would you bowl grounders at cricket?”
- “If I thought the batsman had been too lazy to learn what to do with
- them. Why not?”
- “If you look at it like _that_, sir!” said Troop and had no more to say.
- But he went away marvelling. Oswald was a V.C. Yet he looked at games
- like—like an American, he played to win; it was enough to perplex any
- one....
- “Must confess I don’t see it,” said Troop when Oswald had gone....
- When at last Troop and Wilmington departed Oswald went with them to the
- station—the luggage was sent on in the cart—and walked back over the
- ploughed ridge and up the lane with Peter. For a time they kept silence,
- but Troop was in both their minds.
- “He’s a good sort,” said Peter.
- “Admirable—in some ways.”
- “I thought,” said Peter, “you didn’t like him. You kept on pulling his
- leg.”
- So Peter had seen.
- “Well, he doesn’t exercise his brain very much,” said Oswald.
- “Stops short at his neck,” said Peter. “Exercise, I mean.”
- “You and Troop are singularly unlike each other,” said Oswald.
- “Oh, that’s exactly it. I can’t make out why I like him. If nothing else
- attracted me, that would.”
- “Does he know why he likes you?”
- “Hasn’t the ghost of an idea. It worries him at times. Makes him want to
- try and get all over me.”
- “Does he—at all?”
- “Lots,” said Peter. “I fag at the blessed Cadet Corps simply because I
- like him. At rugger he’s rather a god, you know. And he’s a clean chap.”
- “He’s clean.”
- “Oh, he’s clean. It’s catching,” said Peter, and seemed to reflect. “And
- in a sort of way lately old Troop’s taken to swatting. It’s pathetic.”
- Then with a shade of anxiety, “I don’t think for a moment he twigged you
- were pulling his leg.”
- Oswald came to the thing that was really troubling him. “Allowing for
- his class,” said Oswald, “that young man is growing up to an outlook
- upon the world about as broad and high as the outlook of a bricklayer’s
- labourer.”
- Peter reflected impartially, and Oswald noted incidentally what a good
- profile the boy was developing.
- “A Clean, Serious bricklayer’s labourer,” said Peter, weighing his
- adjectives carefully.
- “But he may go into Parliament, or have to handle a big business,” said
- Oswald.
- “Army for Troop,” said Peter, “via a university commission.”
- “Even armies have to be handled intelligently nowadays,” said Oswald.
- “He’ll go into the cavalry,” said Peter, making one of those tremendous
- jumps in thought that were characteristic of himself and Joan.
- § 12
- A day or so after Troop’s departure Peter waylaid Oswald in the garden.
- Peter, now that Troop had gone, was amusing himself with dissection
- again—an interest that Troop had disposed of as a “bit morbid.” Oswald
- thought the work Peter did neat and good; he had to brush up his own
- rather faded memories of Huxley’s laboratory in order to keep pace with
- the boy.
- “I wish you’d come to the Glory Hole and look at an old rat I dissected
- yesterday. I want to get its solar plexus and I’m not sure about it.
- I’ve been using acetic acid to bring out the nerves, but there’s such a
- lot of white stuff about....”
- The dissection was a good piece of work, the stomach cleaned out and the
- viscera neatly displayed. Very much in evidence were eight small embryo
- rats which the specimen under examination, had not science overtaken
- her, would presently have added to the rat population of the world.
- “The old girl’s been going it,” said Peter in a casual tone, and turned
- these things over with the handle of his scalpel. “Now is all _this_
- stuff solar plexus, Nobby?”...
- The next morning Oswald stopped short in the middle of his shaving,
- which in his case involved the most tortuous deflections and grimacings.
- “It’s all right with the boy,” he said to himself.
- “I _think_ it’s all right.
- “No nonsense about it anyhow.
- “But what a tortuous, untraceable business the coming of knowledge is!
- Curiosity. A fad for dissecting. An instinct for cleanliness. Pride. A
- bigger boy like Troop.... Suppose Troop had been a different sort of
- boy?...
- “But then I suppose Peter and he wouldn’t have hit it off together.”
- Oswald scraped, and presently his mind tried over a phrase.
- “Inherent powers of selection,” said Oswald. “Inherent.... I suppose I
- picked my way through a pretty queer lot of stuff....”
- He stood wiping his safety-razor blade.
- “There was more mystery in my time and more emotion. This is better....
- “Facts are clean,” said Oswald, uttering the essential faith with which
- science has faced vice and priestcraft, magic and muddle and fear and
- mystery, the whole world over.
- “Facts are clean.”
- § 13
- Joan followed a year after Peter to Cambridge. She entered at Newton
- Hall. Both Oswald and Aunt Phyllis preferred Newnham to Girton because
- of the greater freedom of the former college. They agreed that, as
- Oswald put it, if women were to be let out of purdah they might as well
- be let right out.
- Coming from Highmorton to Newnham was like emerging from some narrow,
- draughty passage in which one marches muddily with a whispering,
- giggling hockey team all very much of a sort, into a busy and confused
- market-place, a rather squabbling and very exciting market-place, in
- which there is the greatest variety of sorts. And Joan’s mind, too, was
- opening out in an even greater measure. A year or so ago she was a
- spirited, intelligent animal, a being of dreams and unaccountable
- impulses; in a year or so’s time she was to become a shaped and ordered
- mind, making plans, controlling every urgency, holding herself in
- relation to a definite conception of herself and the world. We have
- still to gauge the almost immeasurable receptivity of those three or
- four crucial years. We have still to grasp what the due use of those
- years may mean for mankind.
- Oswald had been at great pains to find out what was the best education
- the Empire provided for these two wards of his. But his researches had
- brought him to realize chiefly how poor and spiritless a thing was the
- very best formal education that the Empire could offer. It seemed to
- him, in the bitter urgency of his imperial passion, perhaps even poorer
- than it was. There was a smattering of Latin, a thinner smattering of
- Greek, a little patch of Mediterranean history and literature detached
- from past and future—all university history seemed to Oswald to be in
- disconnected fragments—but then he would have considered any history
- fragmentary that did not begin with the geological record and end with a
- clear tracing of every traceable consequence of the “period” in current
- affairs; there were mathematical specializations that did not so much
- broaden the mind as take it into a gully, modern and mediaeval language
- specializations, philosophical studies that were really not
- philosophical studies at all but partial examinations of remote and
- irrelevant systems, the study of a scrap of Plato or Aristotle here, or
- an excursion (by means of translations) into the Hegelian phraseology
- there. This sort of thing given out to a few thousand young men, for the
- most part greatly preoccupied with games, and to a few hundred young
- women, was all that Oswald could discover by way of mental binding for
- the entire empire. It seemed to him like innervating a body as big as
- the world with a brain as big as a pin’s head. As Joan and Peter grew
- out of school and went up to Cambridge they became more and more aware
- of a note of lamentation and woe in the voice of their guardian. He
- talked at them, over their heads at lunch and dinner, to this or that
- visitor. He also talked to them. But he had a great dread of
- preachments. They were aware of his general discontent with the
- education he was giving them, but as yet they had no standards by which
- to judge his charges. Over their heads his voice argued that the
- universities would give them no access worth considering to the thoughts
- and facts of India, Russia, or China, that they were ignoring something
- stupendous called America, that their political and economic science
- still neglected the fact that every problem in politics, every problem
- in the organization of production and social co-operation is a
- psychological problem; and that all these interests were supremely
- urgent interests, and how the devil was one going to get these things
- in? But one thing Joan and Peter did grasp from these spluttering
- dissertations that flew round and about them. They had to find out all
- the most important things in life for themselves.
- Perhaps the problem of making the teacher of youth an inspiring figure
- is an insoluble one. At any rate, there was no great stir evoked in Joan
- and Peter by the personalities of any of their university tutors,
- lecturers, and professors. These seemed to be for the most part
- little-spirited, gossiping men. They had also an effect of being
- underpaid; they had been caught early by the machinery of prize and
- scholarship, bred, “in the menagerie”; they were men who knew nothing of
- the world outside, nothing of effort and adventure, nothing of sin and
- repentance. Not that there were not whispers and scandals about, but
- such sins as the dons knew of were rather in the nature of dirty
- affectations, got out of Petronius and Suetonius and practised with a
- tremendous sense of devilment behind locked doors, than those graver and
- larger sins that really distress and mar mankind. As Joan and Peter
- encountered these master minds, they appeared as gowned and capped
- individuals, hurrying to lecture-rooms, delivering lectures that were
- often hasty and indistinct, making obscure but caustic allusions to
- rival teachers, parrying the troublesome inquiring student with an
- accustomed and often quite pretty wit. With a lesser subtlety and a
- greater earnestness the women dons had fallen in with this tradition.
- There were occasional shy personal contacts. But at his tea or breakfast
- the don was usually too anxious to impress Peter with the idea that he
- himself was really only a sort of overgrown undergraduate, to produce
- any other effect at all.
- Into the Cambridge lecture rooms and laboratories went Joan and Peter,
- notebook in hand, and back to digestion in their studies, and presently
- they went into examination rooms where they vindicated their claim to
- have attended to textbook and lecture. In addition Peter did some
- remarkably good sketches of tutors and professors and fellow students.
- This was their “grind,” Joan and Peter considered, a drill they had to
- go through; it became them to pass these tests creditably—if only to
- play the game towards old Nobby. Only with Peter’s specialization in
- biology did he begin to find any actuality in these processes. He found
- a charm in phylogenetic speculations; and above the narrow cañons of
- formal “research” there were fascinating uplands of wisdom. Upon those
- uplands there lay a light in which even political and moral riddles took
- on a less insoluble aspect. But going out upon those uplands was
- straying from the proper work.... Joan got even less from her moral
- philosophy. Her principal teacher was a man shaped like a bubble, whose
- life and thought was all the blowing of a bubble. He claimed to have
- _proved_ human immortality. It was, he said, a very long and severe
- logical process. About desire, about art, about social association,
- about love, about God—for he knew also that there was no God—it mattered
- not what deep question assailed him, this gifted being would dip into
- his Hegelian suds and blow without apparent effort, and there you
- were—as wise as when you started! And off the good man would float,
- infinitely self-satisfied and manifestly absurd.
- But even Peter’s biology was only incidentally helpful in answering the
- fierce questions that life was now thrusting upon him and Joan. Nor had
- this education linked them up to any great human solidarity. It was like
- being guided into a forest—and lost there—by queer, absent-minded men.
- They had no sense of others being there too, upon a common adventure....
- “And it is all that I can get for them!” said Oswald. “Bad as it is, it
- is the best thing there is.”
- He tried to find comfort in comparisons.
- “Has any country in the world got anything much better?”
- § 14
- One day Oswald found himself outside Cambridge on the Huntingdon road.
- It was when he had settled that Peter was to enter Trinity, and while he
- was hesitating between Newnham and Girton as Joan’s destiny. There was a
- little difficulty in discovering Girton. Unlike Newnham, which sits down
- brazenly in Cambridge, Girton is but half-heartedly at Cambridge, coyly
- a good mile from the fountains of knowledge, hiding its blushes between
- tall trees. He was reminded absurdly of a shy, nice girl sitting afar
- off until father should come out of the public-house....
- He fell thinking about the education of women in Great Britain.
- At first he had been disposed to think chiefly of Peter’s education and
- to treat Joan’s as a secondary matter; but little by little, as he
- watched British affairs close at hand, he had come to measure the
- mischief feminine illiteracy can do in the world. In no country do the
- lunch and dinner-party, the country house and personal acquaintance,
- play so large a part in politics as they do in Great Britain. And the
- atmosphere of all that inner world of influence is a womanmade
- atmosphere, and an atmosphere made by women who are for the most part
- untrained and unread. Here at Girton and Newnham, and at Oxford at
- Somerville, he perceived there could not be room for a tithe of the
- girls of the influential and governing classes. Where were the rest?
- English womanhood was as yet only nibbling at university life. Where
- were the girls of the peerage, the county-family girls and the like?
- Their brothers came up, but they stayed at home and were still educated
- scarcely better than his Aunt Charlotte had been educated forty years
- ago—by a genteel person, by a sort of mental maid who did their minds as
- their maids did their hair for the dinner-table.
- “No wonder,” he said, “they poison politics and turn it all into
- personal intrigues. No wonder they want religion to be just a business
- of personal consolations. No wonder every sort of charlatan and spook
- dealer, fortune-teller and magic healer flourishes in London. Well, Joan
- anyhow shall have whatever they can give her here....
- “It’s better than nothing. And she’ll talk and read....”
- § 15
- But school and university are only the formal part of education. The
- larger part of the education of every human being is and always has been
- and must be provided by the Thing that Is. Every adult transaction has
- as its most important and usually most neglected aspect its effect upon
- the minds of the young. Behind school and university the Empire itself
- was undesignedly addressing Joan and Peter. It was, so to speak,
- gesticulating at them over their teachers’ heads and under their
- teachers’ arms. It was performing ceremonies and exhibiting spectacles
- of a highly suggestive nature.
- In a large and imposing form certain ideas were steadfastly thrust at
- Joan and Peter. More particularly was the idolization of the monarchy
- thrust upon them. In terms of zeal and reverence the press, the pulpit,
- and the world at large directed the innocent minds of Joan and Peter to
- the monarch as if that individual were the Reason, the Highest Good and
- Crown of the collective life. Nothing else in the world of Joan and
- Peter got anything like the same tremendous show. Their early years were
- coloured by the reflected glories of the Diamond Jubilee; followed the
- funeral pomps of Queen Victoria, with much mobbing of negligent or
- impecunious people not in black by the loyal London crowd; then came the
- postponed and then the actual coronation of King Edward, public prayings
- for his health, his stupendous funeral glories; succeeded by the
- coronation of King George, and finally, about the time that Joan
- followed Peter up to Cambridge, the Coronation Durbar. The multitude
- which could not go to India went at least to the Scala cinema, and saw
- the adoration in all its natural colours. Reverent crowds choked that
- narrow bystreet. Across all the life and activities of England, across
- all her intellectual and moral effort, holding up legislation,
- interfering with industry, stopping the traffic, masking every reality
- of the collective life, these vast formalities trailed with a
- magnificent priority. Nothing was respected as they were respected!
- Sober statesmen were seen invested in strange garments that no sensible
- person would surely wear except for the gravest reasons; the archbishops
- and bishops were discovered bent with reverence, invoking the name of
- God freely, blessing the Crown with the utmost gravity, investing the
- Sovereign with Robe and Orb, Ring and Sceptre, anointing him with the
- Golden Coronation Spoon. Either the Crown was itself a matter of
- altogether supreme importance to the land or else it was the most
- stupendous foolery that ever mocked and confused the grave realities of
- a great people’s affairs.
- The effect of it upon the minds of our two young people
- was—complicating. How complicating it is few people realize who have not
- closely studied the educational process of the British mind as a whole.
- Then it becomes manifest that the monarch, the state church, and the
- system of titles and social precedence centering upon the throne,
- constitute a system of mental entanglements against which British
- education struggles at an enormous disadvantage. The monarchy in Great
- Britain is a compromise that was accepted by a generation regardless of
- education and devoid of any sense of the future. It is now a mask upon
- the British face; it is a gaudy and antiquated and embarrassing wrapping
- about the energies of the nation. Because of it Britain speaks to her
- youth, as to the world, with two voices. She speaks as a democratic
- republic, just ever so little crowned, and also she speaks as a
- succulently loyal Teutonic monarchy. Either she is an adolescent
- democracy whose voice is breaking or an old monarchy at the squeaking
- stage. Now her voice is the full strong voice of a great people, now it
- pipes ridiculously. She perplexes the world and stultifies herself.
- That was why her education led up to no such magnificent exposition and
- consolidation of purpose as Oswald dreamt of for his wards. Instead, the
- track presently lost itself in a maze of prevarications and evasions.
- The country was double-minded, double-mindedness had become its habit,
- and it had lost the power of decision. Every effort to broaden and
- modernize university education in Britain encountered insurmountable
- difficulties because of this fundamental dispersal of aim. The court got
- in the way, the country clergy got in the way, the ruling-class families
- got in the way. It is impossible to turn a wandering, chance-made track
- into a good road until you know where it is to go. And that question of
- destination was one that no Englishman before the war could be induced
- to put into plain language. Doublemindedness had become his second
- nature. From the very outset it had taken possession of him. When a
- young American goes to his teacher to ask why he should serve his state,
- he is shown a flag of thirteen stripes and eight and forty stars and
- told a very plain and inspiring history. His relations to his country
- are thenceforward as simple and unquestionable as a child’s to its
- mother. He may be patriotic or unpatriotic as a son may be dutiful or
- undutiful, but he will not be muddle-headed. But when Joan and Peter
- first began to realize that they belonged to the British Empire they
- were shown a little old German woman and told that reverence for her
- linked us in a common abjection with the millions of India. They were
- told also that really this little old lady did nothing of the slightest
- importance and that the country was the freest democracy on earth, ruled
- by its elected representatives. And each of these preposterously
- contradictory stories pursued them in an endless series of variations up
- to adolescence....
- To two naturally clear-headed young people it became presently as
- palpably absurd to have a great union of civilized states thus
- impersonated as it is to have Wall impersonated by Snout the Tinker in
- _A Midsummer Night’s Dream_. They were already jeering at royalty and
- the church with Aunt Phyllis long before they went up to Cambridge.
- There they found plenty of associates to jeer with them. And there too
- they found a quite congenial parallel stream of jeering against
- Parliament, which pretended to represent the national mind and quality,
- but which was elected by a method that manifestly gave no chance to any
- candidate who was not nominated by a party organization. In times of
- long established peace, when the tradition of generations has
- established the illusion of the profoundest human security, men’s minds
- are not greatly distressed by grotesqueness and absurdity in their
- political forms. It is all part of the humour and the good-humour of
- life. When one believes that all the tigers in the jungle are dead, it
- is quite amusing to walk along the jungle paths in a dressing-gown with
- a fan instead of a gun. Joan and Peter grew up to the persuasion that
- the crown above them was rather a good joke, and that Parliament and its
- jobs and party flummery were also a joke, and that the large, deep
- rottenness in this British world about them was perhaps in the nature of
- things and anyhow beyond their altering. They too were becoming
- double-minded according to the tradition of the land.
- Yet beneath this acquiescence in the deep-rooted political paradox of
- Britain they were capable of the keenest interest in a number of
- questions that they really believed were alive. It became manifest to
- them that this great golden preposterous world was marred by certain
- injustices and unkindnesses. Something called Labour they heard was
- unhappy and complained of unfair treatment, certain grumblings came from
- India and Ireland, and there was a curiously exciting subject which
- demanded investigation and reforming activities called the sex question.
- And generally there seemed to be, for no particular reason, a lot of
- restrictions upon people’s conduct.
- In addition Peter had acquired from Oswald, rather by way of example
- than precept, a very definite persuasion, and Joan had acquired a
- persuasion that was perhaps not quite so clearly and deeply cut, that to
- make it respectable there ought to be something in one’s life in the
- nature of special work. In Oswald’s case it was his African interest.
- Peter thought that his own work might perhaps be biological. But that
- one’s work ought to join on to the work of the people or that all the
- good work in the world should make one whole was a notion that had not
- apparently entered Peter’s mind. Oswald with his dread of preachments
- was doubtful about any deliberate dissertations in the matter. He got
- Peter to begin the _Martyrdom of Man_, which had so profoundly affected
- his own life, but Peter expressed doubts about the correctness of
- Reade’s Egyptian history, and put the book aside and did not go on
- reading it.
- At times Oswald tried to say something to Joan and Peter of his
- conception of the Empire as a great human enterprise, playing a
- dominating part in the establishment of a world peace and a world
- civilization, and giving a form and direction and pride to every life
- within it. But these perpetual noises of royalty in its vulgarest, most
- personal form, the loyalist chatter of illiterate women and the clamour
- of the New Imperialism to “tax the foreigner” and exploit the empire for
- gain, drowned his intention while it was still unspoken in his mind.
- There were moments when he could already ask himself whether this empire
- he had shaped his life to serve, this knightly empire of his,
- enlightened, righteous, and predominant, was anything better than a
- dream—or a lie.
- § 16
- When Joan left Highmorton she came into the market-place of ideas. She
- began to read the newspaper. She ceased to be a leggy person with a
- skirt like a kilt and a dark shock of hair not under proper control;
- instead, she became visibly a young lady, albeit a very young young
- lady, and suddenly all adult conversation was open to her.
- Under the brotherly auspices of Peter she joined the Cambridge
- University Fabian Society. Peter belonged to it, but he explained that
- he didn’t approve of it. He was in it for its own good. She also took a
- place in two suffrage organizations, and subscribed to three suffrage
- papers. Tel Wymark, who was also in Newton Hall, introduced her to the
- Club of Strange Faiths, devoted to “the impartial examination of all
- religious systems.” And she went under proper escort to the First
- Wednesday in Every Month Teas in Bunny Cuspard’s rooms. Bunny was an
- ex-collegiate student, he had big, comfortable rooms in Siddermorton
- Street, and these gatherings of his were designed to be discussions,
- very memorable discussions of the most advanced type, about this and
- that. As a matter of fact they consisted in about equal proportions of
- awkward silences, scornful treatment of current reputations, and Bunny,
- in a loose, inaccurate way, spilling your tea or handing you edibles.
- Bunny’s cakes and sandwiches were wonderful; in that respect he was a
- born hostess. Junior dons and chance visitors to Cambridge would
- sometimes drift in to Bunny’s intellectual feasts, and here it was that
- Joan met young Winterbaum again.
- Young Winterbaum was rather a surprise. He had got his features together
- astonishingly since the days of Miss Murgatroyd’s school; he had grown a
- moustache, much more of a moustache than Peter was to have for years
- yet, and was altogether remarkably grown up and a man of the world.
- “Funny lot,” he remarked to Joan when he had sat down beside her. “Why
- do _you_ come to Cambridge?”
- “My people make me come up here,” he explained; “family considerations,
- duty to the old country, loyalty to the old college, and all that. But
- I’d rather be painting. It’s the only live thing just now. You up to
- anything?”
- “Ears and eyes and mouth wide open,” said Joan.
- “This show isn’t worth it. Do you ever drift towards Chelsea?”
- Joan said she went to Hampstead now and then; she stayed sometimes with
- the Sheldricks, who were in a congested house on Downshire Hill now, and
- sometimes with Miss Jepson. Henceforth, now that she was no longer under
- the Highmorton yoke, she hoped to be in London oftener.
- “Did you see the Picasso show?” asked Winterbaum.
- She had not.
- “You missed something,” said young Winterbaum, just like old times.
- “Picasso, Mancini; these are the gods of my idolatry....”
- Bunny Cuspard interrupted clumsily with some specially iced cakes. Joan,
- accepting a cake, discovered Wilmington talking absent-mindedly to her
- chaperon and looking Pogroms at Winterbaum. So Joan, pleased rather than
- excited by this chance evidence of a continuing interest, lifted up a
- face of bright recognition and smiled and nodded to Wilmington....
- § 17
- It was the ambition of Mrs. Sheldrick and her remaining daughters—some
- of them had married—to make their home on Downshire Hill “a little bit
- of the London _Quartier Latin_.”
- Mr. Sheldrick had worn out the large, loose, tweed suit that had held
- him together for so long, he had gone to pieces altogether and was dead
- and buried, and the Sheldricks were keeping a home together by the
- practice of decorative arts and promiscuous hospitalities. Mrs.
- Sheldrick was writing a little in the papers of the weaker among the
- various editors who lived within her social range; little vague reviews
- and poems she wrote, with a quiet smile, that were not so much allusive
- as with an air of having recently had a flying visit from an allusion
- that was unable to stay. Sydney Sheldrick was practising sculpture, and
- Babs was attending the London School of Dramatic Art, to which Adela
- Murchison had also found her way. Antonia, the eldest, was in business,
- making djibbah-like robes.
- There was downstairs and the passage and staircase and upstairs, a
- sitting-room in front, and a sort of oriental lounge (that later in the
- evening became the bedroom of Antonia and Babs) behind. It had all been
- decorated in the most modern style by Antonia in a very blue blue that
- seemed a little threadbare in places and very large, suggestive shapes
- of orange, with a sort of fringe of black and white chequers and a green
- ceiling with harsh pink stars. And the chairs, except for the various
- ottomans and cosy corners which were in faded blue canvas, had been
- painted bright pink or grey.
- Into this house they gathered, after nine and more particularly on
- Saturdays, all sorts of people who chanced to be connected by birth,
- marriage, misfortune, or proclivity with journalism or the arts. Hither
- came Aunt Phœbe Stubland, and read a paper called insistently:
- _Watchman, What of the Night? What of it?_ and quite up to its title;
- and hither too came Aunt Phyllis Stubland, quietly observant. But quite
- a lot of writers came. And in addition there were endless conspirators.
- There was Mrs. O’Grady, the beautiful Irish patriot, who was always
- dressed like a procession of Hibernians in New York, and there was
- Patrick Lynch, a long, lax black object, ending below in large dull
- boots, and above in a sad white face under wiry black hair, grieving for
- ever that grief for Ireland—_Cathleen ni Houlihan_ and all the rest of
- it—that only these long, black, pale Irishmen can understand. And there
- was Eric Schmidt, who was rare among Irish patriots because of his
- genuine knowledge of Erse. All these were great conspirators. Then there
- was Mrs. Punk, who had hunger-struck three times, and Miss
- Corcoran-Deeping the incendiary. And American socialists. And young
- Indians. And one saw the venerable figure of Mr. Woodjer, very old now
- and white and deaf and nervous and indistinct, who had advocated in
- several beautiful and poetical little volumes a new morality that would
- have put the wind up of the Cities of the Plain. And Winterbaum drifted
- in, but cautiously, as doubting whether it wasn’t just “a bit too
- marginal,” to bring away his two frizzy-haired sisters, very bright-eyed
- and eager, rapid-speaking and _au fait_, and wonderfully bejewelled for
- creatures so young. They were going in for dancing; they did Spanish
- dances, stupendously clicking down their red heels with absolute
- precision together; they took the Sheldricks on the way to the Contangos
- or the Mondaines or the Levisons, or even to the Hoggenheimers; they
- glittered at Downshire Hill like birds of Paradise, and had the
- loveliest necks and shoulders and arms. Outside waited young
- Winterbaum’s coupé—a very smart little affair in black and cream, with
- an electric starter wonderfully fitted.
- Here too came young Huntley, who had written three novels before he was
- twenty-two, and who was now thirty and quite well known, not only as a
- novelist of reputation, but as a critic eminently unpopular with actor
- managers; a blond young man with a strong profile, a hungry, scornful
- expression and a greedy, large blue eye that wandered about the crush as
- if it sought something, until it came to rest upon Joan. Thereafter Mr.
- Huntley’s other movements and conversation were controlled by a
- resolution to edge towards and overshadow and dominate Joan with the
- profile as much as possible.
- Joan, by various delicacies of perception, was quite aware of these
- approaches without seeming at any time to regard Huntley directly; and
- by a subtlety quite imperceptible to him she drifted away from each
- advance. She did not know who he was, and though the profile interested
- her, his steadfast advance towards her seemed to be premature. Until
- suddenly an apparently quite irrelevant incident spun her mind round to
- the idea of encouraging him.
- The incident was the arrival of Peter.
- Early in the afternoon he had vanished from Mrs. Jepson’s, where he and
- Joan were staying; he had not come in to dinner, and now suddenly he
- appeared conspicuously in this gathering of the Sheldricks’,
- conspicuously in the company of Hetty Reinhart, who was to Joan, for
- quite occult reasons, the most detestable of all his large circle of
- detestable friends. That alone was enough to tax the self-restraint of
- an exceedingly hot-tempered foster sister. (So this was what Peter had
- been doing with his time! This had been his reason for neglecting his
- own household! At the _Petit Riche_, or some such place—with _her_! A
- girl with a cockney accent! A girl who would stroke your arm as soon as
- speak to you!...) But though the larger things in life strain us, it is
- the smaller things that break us. What finally turned Joan over was a
- glance, a second’s encounter with Peter’s eye. Hetty had sailed forward
- with that extraordinary effect of hers of being a grown-up, experienced
- woman, to greet Mrs. Sheldrick, and Peter stood behind, disregarded.
- (His expression of tranquil self-satisfaction was maddening.) His eye
- went round the room looking, Joan knew, for two people. It rested on
- Joan.
- The question that Peter was asking Joan mutely across the room was in
- effect this: “Are you behaving yourself, Joan?”
- Then, not quite reassured by an uncontrollable scowl, Peter looked away
- to see if some one else was present. Some one else apparently wasn’t
- present, and Joan was unfeignedly sorry.
- He was looking for Mir Jelalludin, the interesting young Indian with the
- beautifully modelled face, whom Joan had met and talked to at the Club
- of Strange Faiths. At the Club of Strange Faiths one day she had been
- suddenly moved to make a short speech about the Buddhist idea of
- Nirvana, which one of the speakers had described as extinction. Making a
- speech to a little meeting was not a very difficult thing for Joan; she
- had learnt how little terrible a thing is to do in the Highmorton
- debating society, where she had been sustained by a grim determination
- to score off Miss Frobisher. She said that she thought the real
- intention was not extinction at all, but the escape of the individual
- consciousness after its living pilgrimage from one incarnate self to
- another into the universal consciousness. That was the very antithesis
- of extinction; one lost oneself indeed, but one lost oneself not in
- darkness and non-existence, but in light and the fullness of existence.
- There was all the difference between a fainting fit and ecstasy between
- these two conceptions. And it was true of experience that one was least
- oneself, least self-conscious and egotistical at one’s time of greatest
- excitement.
- Mir Jelalludin received these remarks with earnest applause. He made as
- if to speak after her, rose in his place, and then hastily sat down.
- Afterwards he came and spoke to her, quite modestly and simply, without
- the least impertinence.
- He explained, with a pleasant staccato accent and little slips in his
- pronunciation that suggested restricted English conversation and much
- reading of books, how greatly he had been wanting to say just what she
- had said, “so bew-ti-fully,” but he had been restrained by “impafction
- of the pronunsation. So deefi’clt, you know.” One heard English people
- so often not doing justice to Indian ideas so that it was very pleasant
- to hear them being quite sympathetically put.
- There was something very pleasing in the real intellectual excitement
- that had made him speak to her, and there was something very pleasing to
- the eye in the neat precision with which his brown features were
- chiselled and the decisive accuracy of every single hair on his brow. He
- was, he explained, a Moslem, but he was interested in every school of
- Indian thought. He was afraid he was not very orthodox, and he showed a
- smile of the most perfect teeth. There had always been a tendency to
- universalism in Indian thought, that affected even the Moslem. Did she
- know anything of the Brahmo Somaj? Had she read any novel of
- Chatterji’s? There was at least one great novel of his the English ought
- to read, the _Ananda Math_. No one could understand Indian thought
- properly who had not read it. He had a translation of it into
- English—which he would lend her.
- Would she be interested to read it?
- Might he send it to her?
- Joan’s chaperon was a third year girl who put no bar upon these
- amenities. Joan accepted the book and threw out casually that she
- sometimes went to Bunny Cuspard’s teas. If Mr. Jelalludin sent her
- Chatterji’s book she could return it to Bunny Cuspard’s rooms.
- It was in Bunny Cuspard’s room that Peter had first become aware of this
- exotic friendship. He discovered his Joan snugly in a corner listening
- to an explanation of the attitude of Islam towards women. It had been
- enormously misrepresented in Christendom. Mr. Jelalludin was very
- earnest in his exposition, and Joan listened with a pleasant smile and
- regarded him pleasantly and wished that she could run her fingers just
- once along his eyebrow without having her motives misunderstood.
- But at the sight of his Joan engaged in this confabulation Peter
- suddenly discovered all the fiercest traits of race pride. He fretted
- about the room and was rude to other people and watched a book change
- hands, and waited scarcely twenty seconds after the end of Joan’s
- conversation before he came up to her.
- “I say, Joan,” he said, “you can’t go chumming with Indians anyhow.”
- “Peter,” she said, “we’ve chummed with India.”
- “Oh, nonsense! Not socially. Their standards are different.”
- “I hope they are,” said Joan. “The way you make these Indian boys here
- feel like outcasts is disgraceful.”
- “They’re different. The men aren’t uncivil to them. But it isn’t for
- you——”
- “It’s for all English people to treat them well. He’s a charming young
- man.”
- “It isn’t _done_, Joan.”
- “It’s going to be, Petah.”
- “You’re meeting him again?”
- “If I think proper.”
- “Oh!” said Peter, baffled for the time. “All _right_, Joan.”
- A fierce exchange of notes followed. “Don’t you understand the fellow’s
- a polygamist?” Peter wrote. “He keeps his women in purdah. No decent
- woman could be talked to in India as he talked to you. Not even an
- introduction. Personally, I’ve no objection to any friends you make
- provided they are decent friends....”
- “He isn’t a polygamist,” Joan replied. “I’ve asked him. And every one
- says he’s a first-rate cricketer. As for decent friends, Peter——”
- The issue had been still undecided when they came down for the Christmas
- vacation.
- So far Joan had maintained her positions without passion. But now
- suddenly her indignation at Peter’s interference flared to heaven. That
- he should come here, hot from Soho, to tyrannize over _her_! Indians
- indeed! As if Hetty Reinhart wasn’t worse than a Gold Coast nigger!...
- The only outward manifestation of this wild storm of resentment had been
- her one instant’s scowl at Peter. Thereafter Joan became again the
- quiet, intelligently watchful young woman she had been all that evening.
- But now she turned herself through an angle of about thirty degrees
- towards Huntley, who was talking to old Mrs. Jex, the wonder of
- Hampstead, who used to know George Eliot and Huxley, the while he was
- regarding Joan with sidelong covetousness. Joan lifted her eyes towards
- him with an expression of innocent interest. The slightly projecting
- blue eyes seemed to leap in response.
- Mrs. Jex was always rather inattentive to her listener when she was
- reciting her reminiscences, and Huntley was able to turn away from her
- quietly without interrupting the flow.
- The Sheldrick circle scorned the formalities of introductions. “Are you
- from the Slade school?” said Huntley.
- “Cambridge,” said Joan.
- “My name’s Gavan Huntley.”
- But this was going to be more amusing than Joan had expected. This was a
- real live novelist—Joan’s first. Not a fortnight ago she had read _The
- Pernambuco Bunshop_, and thought it rather clever and silly.
- “Not _the_ Gavan Huntley?” she said.
- His face became faintly luminous with satisfaction. “Just Gavan
- Huntley,” he said with a large smile.
- “The Pernambuco Bunshop?” she said.
- “Guilty,” he pleaded, smiling still more naïvely.
- One had expected something much less natural in a novelist.
- “I _loved_ it,” said Joan, and Huntley was hers to do what she liked
- with. Joon’s idea of a proper conversation required it to be in a
- corner. “Do Sheldricks never sit down?” she asked. “I’ve been standing
- all the evening.”
- “They can’t,” he said confidentially. “They’re the other sort of Dutch
- doll, the cheap sort, that hasn’t got joints at the knees.”
- “Antonia sometimes leans against the wall.”
- “Her utmost. The next thing would be to sit on the floor with her legs
- straight out. I’ve seen her do that. But there is a sort of bench on the
- staircase landing.”
- Thither they made their way, and there presently Peter found them.
- He found them because he was making for that very corner in the company
- of Sydney Sheldrick. “Hullo!” said Sydney. “That you, Joan?”
- “We’ve taken this corner for the evening,” said Huntley, laying a
- controlling hand on Joan’s pretty wrist.
- Joan and Peter regarded each other darkly.
- “There ought to be more seats about somewhere,” said Sydney. “Come up to
- the divan, old Peter....”
- Of course Peter must object to Huntley. They were scarcely out of the
- Sheldricks’ house when he began. “That man Huntley’s a bad egg, Joan.
- Everybody knows it.”
- For a time they disputed about Huntley.
- “Peter,” said Joan, with affected calm, “is there any man, do you think,
- to whom so—so untrustworthy a girl as I am might safely talk?”
- Peter seemed to consider. “There’s chaps like Troop,” he said.
- “Troop!” said Joan, relying on her intonation.
- “It isn’t that you’re untrustworthy,” said Peter.
- “Fragile?”
- “It’s the look and tone of things.”
- “I wonder how you get these ideas.”
- “What ideas?”
- “Of how I behave in a corner with Jelalludin or Gavan Huntley.”
- “I haven’t suggested anything.”
- “You’ve suggested everything. Do you think I collect stray kisses like
- Sydney Sheldrick? Do you think I’m a dirty little—little—cocotte like
- Hetty Reinhart?”
- “_Joan!_”
- “_Well_,” said Joan savagely, and said no more.
- Peter came to the defence of Hetty belatedly. “How can you say such
- things of Hetty?” he asked. “What can you know about her?”
- “Pah! I can smell what she is across a room. Do you think I’m an
- absolute young fool, Peter?”
- “You’ve got no right, Joan——”
- “Why argue, Peter, why argue? When things are plain. Can’t you go your
- own way, Peter”—Joan was annoyed to find suddenly that she was weeping.
- Tears were running down her face. But the road was dark, and perhaps if
- she gave no sign Peter would not see. “You go your own way, Peter, go
- your own way, and let me go mine.”
- Peter was silent for a little while. Then compunction betrayed itself in
- his voice.
- “It’s you I’m thinking of, Joan. I can’t bear to see you make yourself
- cheap.”
- “Cheap! And _you_?”
- “I’m different. I’m altogether different. A man is.”
- Silence for a time. Joan seemed to push back her hair, and so smeared
- the tears from her face.
- “We interfere with each other,” she said at last. “We interfere with
- each other. What is the good of it? You’ve got to go your way and I’ve
- got to go mine. We used to have fun—lots of fun. _Now_....”
- She couldn’t say any more for a while.
- “I’m going my own way, Peter. It’s a different way——Leave me alone. Keep
- off!”
- They said no more. When they got in they found Miss Jepson sitting by
- the fire, and she had got them some cocoa and biscuits. The headache
- that had kept her from the Sheldrick festival had lifted, and Joan
- plunged at once into a gay account of the various people she had seen
- that evening—saving and excepting Gavan Huntley. But Peter stood by the
- fireplace, silent, looking down into the fire, sulking or grieving. All
- the while that Joan rattled on to Miss Jepson she was watching him with
- almost imperceptible glances and wondering whether he sulked or grieved.
- Did he feel as she felt? If he sulked—well, confound him! But what if
- this perplexing dissension hurt him as much as it was hurting her!
- § 18
- Joan had long since lost that happiness, that perfect assurance, that
- intense appreciation of the beauty in things which had come to her with
- early adolescence. She was troubled and perplexed in all her ways. She
- was full now of stormy, indistinct desires and fears, and a gnawing,
- indefinite impatience. No religion had convinced her of a purpose in her
- life, neither Highmorton nor Cambridge had suggested any mundane
- devotion to her, nor pointed her ambitions to a career. The only career
- these feminine schools and colleges recognized was a career of academic
- successes and High School teaching, intercalated with hunger strikes for
- the Vote, and Joan had early decided she would rather die than teach in
- a High School. Nor had she the quiet assurance her own beauty would have
- given her in an earlier generation of a discreet choice of lovers and
- marriage and living “happily ever afterwards.” She had a horror of
- marriage lurking in her composition; Mrs. Pybus and Highmorton had each
- contributed to that; every one around her spoke of it as an entire
- abandonment of freedom. Moreover there was this queerness about her
- birth—she was beginning to understand better now in what that queerness
- consisted—that seemed to put her outside the customary ceremonies of
- veil and orange blossoms. Why did they not tell her all about it—what
- her mother was and where her mother was? It must be a pretty awful
- business, if neither Aunt Phyllis nor Aunt Phœbe would ever allude to
- it. It would have to come out—perhaps some monstrous story—before she
- could marry. And who could one marry? She could not conceive herself
- marrying any of these boys she met, living somewhere cooped up in a
- little house with solemn old Troop, or under the pursuing eyes, the
- convulsive worship, of Wilmington. She had no object in life, no star by
- which to steer, and she was full of the fever of life. She was getting
- awfully old. She was eighteen. She was nineteen. Soon she would be
- twenty.
- All her being, in her destitution of any other aim that had the
- slightest hold upon her imagination, was crying out for a lover.
- It was a lover she wanted, not a husband; her mind made the clearest
- distinction between the two. He would come and unrest would cease,
- confusion would cease and beauty would return. Her lover haunted all her
- life, an invisible yet almost present person. She could not imagine his
- face nor his form, he was the blankest of beings, and yet she was so
- sure she knew him that if she were to see him away down a street or
- across a crowded room, instantly, she believed, she would recognize him.
- And until he came life was a torment of suspense. Life was all wrong and
- discordant, so wrong and discordant that at times she could have hated
- her lover for keeping her waiting so wretchedly.
- And she had to go on as though this suspense was nothing. She had to
- disregard this vast impatience of her being. And the best way to do
- that, it seemed to her, was to hurry from one employment to another,
- never to be alone, never without some occupation, some excitement. Her
- break with Peter had an extraordinary effect of release in her mind.
- Hitherto, whatever her resentment had been she had admitted in practice
- his claim to exact a certain discretion from her; his opinion had been,
- in spite of her resentment, a standard for her. Now she had no standard
- at all—unless it was a rebellious purpose to spite him. On Joan’s
- personal conduct the thought of Oswald, oddly enough, had scarcely any
- influence at all. She adored him as one might a political or historical
- hero; she wanted to stand well in his sight, but the idea of him did not
- pursue her into the details of her behaviour at all. He seemed
- preoccupied with ideas and unobservant. She had never had any struggle
- with him; he had never made her do anything. And as for Aunts Phyllis
- and Phœbe—while the latter seemed to make vague gestures towards quite
- unutterable liberties, the former maintained an attitude of nervous
- disavowal. She was a woman far too uncertain-minded for plain speaking.
- She was a dear. Clearly she hated cruelty and baseness; except in regard
- to such things she set no bounds.
- Hitherto Joan had had a very few flirtations; the extremest thing upon
- her conscience was Bunny Cuspard’s kiss. She had the natural
- shilly-shally of a girl; she was strongly moved to all sorts of
- flirtings and experimentings with love, and very adventurous and curious
- in these matters; and also she had a system of inhibitions, pride,
- hesitation, fastidiousness, and something beyond these things, a sense
- of some ultimate value that might easily be lost, that held her back.
- Rebelling against Peter had somehow also set her rebelling against these
- restraints. Why shouldn’t she know this and that? Why shouldn’t she try
- this and that? Why, for instance, was she always “shutting up” Adela
- whenever she began to discourse in her peculiar way upon the great
- theme? Just a timid prude she had been, but now——.
- And all this about undesirable people and unseemly places, all this
- picking and choosing as though the world was mud; what nonsense it was!
- She could take care of herself surely!
- She began deliberately to feel her way through all her friendships to
- see whether this thing, passion, lurked in any of them. It was an
- interesting exercise of her wits to try over a youth like old Troop, for
- example; to lure him on by a touch of flattery, a betrayal of warmth in
- her interest, to reciprocal advances. At first Troop wasn’t in the least
- in love with her, but she succeeded in suggesting to him that he was.
- But the passion in him released an unsuspected fund of egotistical
- discourse; he developed a disposition to explain himself and his mental
- operations in a large, flattering way both by word of mouth and by
- letter. Even when he was roused to a sense of her as lovable, he did not
- become really interested in her but only in his love for her. He arrived
- at one stride at the same unanalytical acceptance of her as of his God
- and the Church and the King and his parents and all the rest of the
- Anglican system of things. She was his girl—“the kid.” He really wasn’t
- interested in those other things any more than he was in her; once he
- had given her her rôle in relation to him his attention returned to
- himself. The honour, integrity, and perfection of Troop were the
- consuming occupations of his mind. This was an edifying thing to
- discover, but not an entertaining thing to pursue; and after a time Joan
- set herself to avoid, miss, and escape from Troop on every possible
- occasion. But Troop prided himself upon his persistence. He took to
- writing her immense, ill-spelt, manly letters, with sentences beginning:
- “You understand me very little if——.” It was clear he was hers only
- until some simpler, purer, more receptive and acquisitive girl swam into
- his ken.
- Wilmington, on the other hand, was a silent covetous lover. Joan could
- make him go white, but she could not make him talk. She was a little
- afraid of him and quite sure of him. But he was not the sort of young
- man one can play with, and she marvelled greatly that any one could
- desire her so much and amuse her so little. Bunny Cuspard was a more
- animated subject for experiment, and you could play with him a lot. He
- danced impudently. He could pat Joan’s shoulder, press her hand, slip
- his arm round her waist and bring his warm face almost to a kissing
- contact as though it was all nothing. Did these approaches warm her
- blood? Did she warm his? Anyhow it didn’t matter, and it wasn’t
- anything.
- Then there was Graham Prothero, a very good-looking friend of Peter’s,
- whom she had met while skating. He had a lively eye, and jumped after a
- meeting or so straight into Joan’s dreams, where he was still more
- lively and good-looking. She wished she knew more certainly whether she
- had got into his dreams.
- Meanwhile Joan’s curiosity had not spared Jelalludin. She had had him
- discoursing on the beauties of Indian love, and spinning for her
- imagination a warm moonlight vision of still temples reflected in water
- tanks, of silvery water shining between great lily leaves, of music like
- the throbbing of a nerve, of brown bodies garlanded with flowers. There
- had been a loan of Rabindranath Tagore’s love poems. And once he had
- sent her some flowers.
- Any of these youths she could make her definite lover she knew, by an
- act of self-adaptation and just a little reciprocal giving. Only she had
- no will to do that. She felt she must not will anything of the sort. The
- thing must come to her; it must take possession of her. Sometimes,
- indeed, she had the oddest fancy that perhaps suddenly one of these
- young men would become transfigured; would cease to be his clumsy,
- ineffective self, and change right into that wonderful, that compelling
- being who was to set all things right. There were moments when it seemed
- about to happen. And then the illusion passed, and she saw clearly that
- it was just old Bunny or just staccato Mir Jelalludin.
- In Huntley, Joan found something more intriguing than this pursuit of
- the easy and the innocent. Huntley talked with a skilful impudence that
- made a bold choice of topics seem the most natural in the world. He
- presented himself as a leader in a great emancipation of women. They
- were to be freed from “the bondage of sex.” The phrase awakened a warm
- response in Joan, who was finding sex a yoke about her imagination. Sex,
- Huntley declared, should be as incidental in a woman’s life as it was in
- a man’s. But before that could happen the world must free its mind from
- the “superstition of chastity,” from the idea that by one single step a
- woman passed from the recognizable into an impossible category. We made
- no such distinction in the case of men; an artist or a business man was
- not suddenly thrust out of the social system by a sexual incident. A
- woman was either Mrs. or Miss; a gross publication of elemental facts
- that were surely her private affair. No one asked whether a man had
- found his lover. Why should one proclaim it in the case of a woman by a
- conspicuous change of her name? Here, and not in any matter of votes or
- economics was the real feminine grievance. His indignation was
- contagious. It marched with all Joan’s accumulated prejudice against
- marriage, and all her growing resentment at the way in which emotional
- unrest was distracting and perplexing her will and spoiling her work at
- Cambridge. But when Huntley went on to suggest that the path to freedom
- lay in the heroic abandonment of the “fetish of chastity,” Joan was
- sensible of a certain lagging of spirit. A complex of instincts that
- conspired to adumbrate that unseen, unknown, and yet tyrannous lover,
- who would not leave her in peace and yet would not reveal himself, stood
- between her and the extremities of Huntley’s logic.
- There were moments when he seemed to be pretending to fill that
- oppressive void; moments when he seemed only to be hinting at himself as
- a possible instrument of freedom. Joan listened to him gravely enough so
- long as he theorized; when he came to personal things she treated him
- with the same experimental and indecisive encouragement that she dealt
- out to her undergraduate friends. Huntley’s earlier pose of an
- intellectual friend was attractive and flattering; then he began to
- betray passion, as it were, unwittingly. At a fancy dress dance at
- Chelsea—and he danced almost as well as Joan—he became moody. He was
- handsome that night in black velvet and silver that betrayed much
- natural grace; Joan was a nondescript in black and red, with short
- skirts and red beads about her pretty neck. “Joan,” he said suddenly,
- “you’re getting hold of me. You’re disturbing me.” He seemed to
- soliloquize. “I’ve not felt like this before.” Then very flatteringly
- and reproachfully, “You’re so damned intelligent, Joan. And you dance—as
- though God made you to make me happy.” He got her out into an open
- passage that led from the big studio in which they had been dancing, to
- a yard dimly lit by Chinese lanterns, and at the dark turn of the
- passage kissed her more suddenly and violently than she had ever been
- kissed before. He kissed her lips and held her until she struggled out
- of his arms. Up to that moment Joan had been playing with him, half
- attracted and half shamming; then once more came the black panic that
- had seized her with Bunny and Adela.
- She did not know whether she liked him now or hated him. She felt
- strange and excited. She made him go back with her into the studio.
- “I’ve got to dance with Ralph Winterbaum,” she said.
- “Say you’re not offended,” he pleaded.
- She gave him no answer. She did not know the answer. She wanted to get
- away and think. He perceived her confused excitement and did not want to
- give her time to think. She found Winterbaum and danced with him, and
- all the time, with her nerves on fire, she was watching Huntley, and he
- was watching her. Then she became aware of Peter regarding her coldly,
- over the plump shoulder of a fashion-plate artist. She went to him as
- soon as the dance was over.
- “Peter,” she said, “I want to go home.”
- He surveyed her. She was flushed and ruffled, and his eyes and mouth
- hardened.
- “It’s early.”
- “I want to go home.”
- “Right. You’re a bit of a responsibility, Joan.”
- “Don’t, then,” she said shortly, and turned round to greet Huntley as
- though nothing had happened between them.
- But she kept in the light and the crowd, and there was a constraint
- between them. “I want to talk to you more,” he said, “and when we can
- talk without some one standing on one’s toes all the time and listening
- hard. I wish you’d come to my flat and have tea with me one day. It’s
- still and cosy, and I could tell you all sorts of things—things I can’t
- tell you here.”
- Joan’s dread of any appearance of timid virtue was overwhelming. And she
- was now blind with rage at Peter—why, she would have been at a loss to
- say. She wanted to behave outrageously with Huntley. But in Peter’s
- sight. This struck her as an altogether too extensive invitation.
- “I’ve never noticed much restraint in your conversation,” she said.
- “It’s the interruptions I don’t like,” he said.
- “You get me no ice, you get me no lemonade,” she complained abruptly.
- “That’s what my dear Aunt Adelaide used to call changing the subject.”
- “It’s the cry of outraged nature.”
- “But I saw you having an ice—not half an hour ago.”
- “Not the ice I wanted,” said Joan.
- “Distracting Joan! I suppose I must get you that ice. But about the
- tea?”
- “I _hate_ tea,” said Joan, with a force of decision that for a time
- disposed of his project.
- Just for a moment he hovered with his eye on her, weighing just what
- that decision amounted to, and in that moment she decided that he wasn’t
- handsome, that there was something _unsound_ about his profile, that he
- was pressing her foolishly. And anyhow, none of it really mattered. He
- was nothing really. She had been a fool to go into that dark passage,
- she ought to have known her man better; Huntley had been amusing
- hitherto and now the thing had got into a new phase that wouldn’t, she
- felt, be amusing at all; after this he would pester. She hated being
- kissed. And Peter was a beast. Peter was a hateful beast....
- Joan and Peter went home in the same taxi—in a grim silence. Yet neither
- of them could have told what it was that kept them hostile and silent.
- § 19
- But Joan and Peter were not always grimly silent with one another. The
- black and inexplicable moods came and passed again. Between these
- perplexing mute conflicts of will, they were still good friends. When
- they were alone together they were always disposed to be good friends;
- it was the presence and excitement and competition of others that
- disturbed their relationship; it was when the species invaded their
- individualities and threatened their association with its occult and
- passionate demands. They would motor-cycle together through the lanes
- and roads of Hertfordshire, lunch cheerfully at wayside inns, brotherly
- and sisterly, relapse again into mere boy and girl playfellows, race and
- climb trees, or, like fellow-students, share their common room amicably,
- dispute over a multitude of questions, and talk to Oswald. They both had
- a fair share of scholarly ambition and read pretty hard. They had both
- now reached the newspaper-reading stage. Peter was beginning to take an
- interest in politics, he wanted to discuss socialism and economic
- organization thoroughly; biological work alone among all scientific
- studies carries a philosophy of its own that illuminates these
- questions, and Oswald was happy to try over his current interests in the
- light of these fresh, keen young minds. Peter was a discriminating
- advocate of the ideas of Guild socialism; Oswald was still a cautious
- individualist drifting towards Fabianism. The great labour troubles that
- had followed the Coronation of King George had been necessary to
- convince him that all was not well with the economic organization of the
- empire. Hitherto he had taken economic organization for granted; it
- wasn’t a matter for Sydenhams.
- Pelham Ford at such times became a backwater from the main current of
- human affairs, the current that was now growing steadily more rapid and
- troubled. Thinking could go on at Pelham Ford. There were still forces
- in that old-world valley to resist the infection of intense impatience
- that was spreading throughout the world. The old red house behind its
- wall and iron gates seemed as stable as the little hills about it; the
- road and the row of great trees between the stream and the road, the
- high pathway and the ford and the village promised visibly to endure for
- a thousand years. It was when Aunt Phyllis or Aunt Phœbe descended upon
- the place to make a party, “get a lot of young people down and brighten
- things up,” or when the two youngsters went to London together into the
- Sheldrick translation of the _Quartier Latin_, or when they met in
- Cambridge in some crowded chattering room that imagination grew
- feverish, fierce jealousies awoke, temperaments jarred, and the urge of
- adolescence had them in its clutch again.
- It was during one of these parties at Pelham Ford that Joan was to
- happen upon two great realizations, realizations of so profound an
- effect that they may serve to mark the end for her of this great process
- of emotional upheaval and discovery that is called adolescence. They
- left her shaped. They came to her in no dramatic circumstances, they
- were mere conversational incidents, but their effect was profound and
- conclusive.
- In the New Year of 1914 Oswald was to take Peter to Russia for three
- weeks. Before his departure, Aunt Phœbe had insisted that there should
- be a Christmas gathering of the young at Pelham Ford. They would skate
- or walk or toboggan or play hockey by day, and dress up and dance or
- improvise charades and burlesques in the evening. One or two Sheldricks
- would come, Peter and Joan could bring down any stray friends who had no
- home Christmas to call them, and Aunts Phyllis and Phœbe would collect a
- few young people in London.
- The gathering was from the first miscellaneous. Christmas is a homing
- time for the undergraduates of both sexes, such modern spirits as the
- home failed to attract used to go in those days in great droves to the
- Swiss winter sports, and Joan found nobody but an ambitious Scotch girl
- whom she knew but slightly and Miss Scroby the historian, who was rather
- a friend for Aunt Phyllis than herself. Peter discovered that Wilmington
- intensely preferred Pelham Ford to his parental roof, and brought also
- two other stray men, orphans. This selection was supplemented by Aunt
- Phœbe, who had latterly made Hetty Reinhart her especial protégée. She
- descanted upon the obvious beauty of Hetty and upon the courage that had
- induced Hetty to leave her home in Preston and manage for herself in a
- great lonely studio upon Haverstock Hill. “The bachelor woman,” said
- Aunt Phœbe; “armed with a latchkey and her purity. A vote shall follow.
- Hetty is not one of the devoted yet. But I have my hopes. We need our
- Beauty Chorus. Hetty shall be our Helen, and Holloway our Troy.”
- So with Peter’s approval Hetty was added to the list before Joan could
- express an opinion, and appeared with a moderate sized valise that
- contained some extremely exiguous evening costumes, and a steadfast eye
- that rested most frequently on Peter. In addition Aunt Phœbe brought two
- Irish sisters, one frivolous, the other just recuperating from the
- hunger-strike that had ended her imprisonment for window-breaking in
- pursuit of the Vote, and a very shy youth of seventeen, Pryce, the
- caddie-poet. Huntley was to constitute a sort of outside element in the
- party, sharing apartments with young Sopwith Greene the musician, in the
- village about half a mile away. These two men were to work and keep away
- when they chose, and come in for meals and sports as they thought fit.
- At the eleventh hour had come a pathetic and irresistible telegram from
- Adela Murchison:
- Alone Xmas may I come wire if inconvenient.
- and she, too, was comprehended.
- The vicarage girls were available for games and meals except on Sunday
- and Christmas Day; there was a friendly family of five sons and two
- daughters at Braughing, a challenging hockey club at Bishop’s Stortford,
- and a scratch collection at Newport available by motor-car for a pick-up
- match if the weather proved, as it did prove, too open for skating.
- Oswald commonly stood these Aunt parties for a day or so and then
- retreated to the Climax Club. Always beforehand he promised himself
- great interest and pleasure in the company of a number of exceptionally
- bright and representative youths and maidens of the modern school, but
- always the actual gathering fatigued him and distressed him. The youths
- and maidens wouldn’t be representative, they talked too loud, too fast
- and too inconsecutively for him, their wit was too rapid and hard—and
- they were all over the house. It was hard to get mental contacts with
- them. They paired off when there were no games afoot, and if ever talk
- at table ceased to be fragmentary Aunt Phœbe took control of it. In a
- day or so he would begin to feel at Pelham Ford like a cat during a
- removal; driven out of his dear library, which was the only available
- room for dancing, he would try to work in his unaccustomed study, with
- vivid, interesting young figures passing his window in groups of two or
- three, or only too audibly discussing the world, each other, and their
- general arrangements, in the hall.
- His home would have felt altogether chaotic to him but for the presence,
- the unswerving, if usually invisible, presence of Mrs. Moxton, observing
- times and seasons, providing copious suitable meals, dominating by means
- of the gong, replacing furniture at every opportunity, referring with a
- calm dignity to Joan as the hostess for all the rules and sanctions she
- deemed advisable. From unseen points of view one felt her eye. One’s
- consolation for the tumult lay in one’s confidence in this discretion
- that lay behind it. Even Aunt Phœbe’s way of speaking of “our good
- Moxton” did not mask the facts of the case. Pelham Ford was ruled. At
- Pelham Ford even Aunt Phœbe came down to meals in time. At Pelham Ford
- no fire, once lit, ever went out before it was right for it to do so.
- You might in pursuit of facetious ends choose to put your pyjamas
- outside your other clothes, wrap your window curtains about you, sport
- and dance, and finally, drawn off to some other end, abandon these
- wrappings in the dining-room or on the settee on the landing. When you
- went to bed your curtains hung primly before your window again, and your
- pyjamas lay folded and reproved upon your bed.
- The disposition of the new generation to change its clothes, adopt
- fantastic clothes, and at any reasonable excuse get right out of its
- clothes altogether, greatly impressed Oswald. Hetty in particular
- betrayed a delight in the beauties of her own body with a freedom that
- in Oswald’s youth was permitted only to sculpture. But Adela made no
- secrets of her plump shoulders and arms, and Joan struck him as
- insensitive. Skimpiness was the fashion in dress at that time. No doubt
- it was all for the best, like the frankness of Spartan maidens. And
- another thing that brought a flavour of harsh modernity into the house
- was the perpetual music and dancing that raged about it. There was a
- pianola in the common room of Joan and Peter, but when they were alone
- at home it served only for an occasional outbreak of Bach, or Beethoven,
- or Chopin. Now it was in a state of almost continuous eruption. Aunt
- Phyllis had ordered a number of rolls of dance music from the
- Orchestrelle library, and in addition she had brought down a gramophone.
- Never before had music been so easy in the world as it was in those
- days. In Oswald’s youth music, good music, was the rare privilege of a
- gifted few, one heard it rarely and listened with reverence. Nowadays
- Joan could run through a big fragment of the Ninth Symphony, giving a
- rendering far better than any but a highly skilled pianist could play,
- while she was waiting for Peter to come to breakfast. And this Christmas
- party was pervaded with One Steps and Two Steps, pianola called to
- gramophone and gramophone to pianola, and tripping feet somewhere never
- failed to respond. Most of these young people danced with the wildest
- informality. But Hetty and the youngest Irish girl were serious
- propagandists of certain strange American dances, the Bunny Hug, and the
- Fox Trot; Sopwith Greene and Adela tangoed and were getting quite good
- at it, and Huntley wanted to teach Joan an Apache dance. Joan danced by
- rule and pattern or by the light of nature as occasion required.
- The Christmas dinner was at one o’clock, a large disorderly festival.
- Gavan Huntley and Sopwith Greene came in for it. Oswald carved a turkey,
- Aunt Phyllis dispensed beef; the room was darkened and the pudding was
- brought in flaming blue and distributed in flickering flames.
- Mince-pies, almonds and raisins, Brazil nuts, oranges, tangerines,
- Carlsbad plums, crystallized fruits and candied peel; nothing was
- missing from the customary feast. Then came a mighty banging of
- crackers, pre-war crackers, containing elaborate paper costumes and
- preposterous gifts. Wilmington ate little and Huntley a great deal, and
- whenever Joan glanced at them they seemed to be looking at her. Hetty,
- flushed and excited, became really pretty in a paper cap of liberty, she
- waved a small tricolour flag and knelt up in her chair to pull crackers
- across the table; Peter won a paper cockscomb and was moved to come and
- group himself under her arm and crow as “Vive la France!” The two Irish
- girls started an abusive but genial argument with Sopwith Greene upon
- the Irish question. Aunt Phœbe sat near Aunt Phyllis and discoursed on
- whether she ought to go to prison for the Vote. “I try to assault
- policemen,” she said. “But they elude me.” One of Peter’s Cambridge
- friends, it came to light, had been present at a great scene in which
- Aunt Phœbe had figured. He emerged from his social obscurity and
- described the affair rather amusingly.
- It had been at an Anti-Suffrage meeting in West Kensington, and Aunt
- Phœbe had obtained access to the back row of the platform by some
- specious device. Among the notabilities in front Lady Charlotte Sydenham
- and her solicitor had figured. Lady Charlotte had entered upon that last
- great phase in a woman’s life, that phase known to the vulgar observer
- as “old lady’s second wind.” It is a phase often of great Go and
- determination, a joy to the irreverent young and a marvel and terror to
- the middle-aged. She had taken to politics, plunged into public
- speaking, faced audiences. It was the Insurance Act of 1912 that had
- first moved her to such publicity. Stung by the outrageous possibility
- of independent-spirited servants she had given up her usual trip to
- Italy in the winter and stayed to combat Lloyd George. From mere
- subscriptions and drawing-room conversations and committees to
- drawing-room meetings and at last to public meetings had been an easy
- series of steps for her. At first a mere bridling indignation on the
- platform, she presently spoke. As a speaker she combined reminiscences
- of Queen Elizabeth at Tilbury and Marie Antoinette on the scaffold with
- vast hiatuses peculiar to herself. “My good people,” she would say,
- disregarding the more conventional methods of opening, “have we
- neglected our servants or have we not? Is any shop Gal or factory Gal
- half so well off as a servant in a good house? Is she? I ask. The food
- alone! The morals! And now we are to be taxed and made to lick stamps
- like a lot of galley-slaves to please a bumptious little Welsh
- solicitor! For my part I shall discontinue all my charitable
- subscriptions until this abominable Act is struck off the Statute Book.
- Every one. And as for buying these Preposterous stamps—— Rather than
- lick a stamp I will eat skilly in prison. Stamps indeed. I’d as soon
- lick the man’s boots. That’s all I have to say, Mr. Chairman (or ’My
- Lord,’ or ’Mrs. Chairman,’ as the case might be). I hope it will be
- enough. Thank you.” And she would sit down breathing heavily and looking
- for eyes to meet.
- For the great agitation against the Insurance Act that sort of thing
- sufficed, but when it came to testifying against an unwomanly clamour
- for votes, the argument became more complicated and interruptions
- difficult to handle, and after an unpleasant experience when she was
- only able to repeat in steadily rising tones, “I am not one of the
- Shrieking Sisterhood” ten times over to a derisive roomful, she decided
- to adopt the more feminine expedient of a spokesman. She had fallen back
- upon Mr. Grimes, who like all solicitors had his parliamentary
- ambitions, and she took him about with her in the comfortable brown car
- that had long since replaced the white horse, and sat beside him while
- he spoke and approved of him with both hands. Mr. Grimes had been
- addressing the meeting when Aunt Phœbe made her interruption. He had
- been arguing that the unfitness of women for military service debarred
- them from the Vote. “Let us face the facts,” he said, drawing the air in
- between his teeth. “Ultimately—ultimately all social organization rests
- upon Force.”
- It was just at this moment that cries of “Order, Order,” made him aware
- of a feminine figure close beside him. He turned to meet the heaving
- wrath of Aunt Phœbe’s face. There was just an instant’s scrutiny. Then
- he remembered, he remembered everything, and with a wild shriek leapt
- clean off the platform upon the toes of the front row of the audience.
- “If you _touch_ me!” he screamed....
- The young man told the incident briefly and brightly.
- “Thereby hangs a tale,” said Aunt Phœbe darkly, and became an allusive
- Sphinx for the rest of the dinner.
- “I shook that man,” she said at last to Pryce.
- “What—_him_?” said Pryce, staring round-eyed at the young man from
- Cambridge.
- “No, the man at the meeting.”
- “What—afterwards?” said Pryce, lost and baffled.
- “No,” said Aunt Phœbe; “_before_.”
- Pryce tried to look intelligent, and nodded his head very fast to
- conceal the fear and confusion in his mind.
- Amidst all these voices and festivities sat Oswald, with a vast paper
- cap shaped rather like the dome of a Russian church cocked over his
- blind side, listening distractedly, noting this and that, saying little,
- thinking many things.
- The banquet ended at last, and every one drifted to the library.
- Affairs hovered vaguely for a time. Peter handed cigarettes about. Some
- one started the gramophone with a Two Step that set every one tripping.
- Hetty with a flush on her cheek and a light in her eyes was keeping near
- Peter; she seized upon him now for a dance that was also an embrace.
- Peter laughed, nothing loath. “Oh! but this is glorious!” panted Hetty.
- “Come and dance, too, Joan,” said Wilmington.
- “It’s stuffy!” said Joan.
- Oswald, contemplating a retreat to his study armchair, found her
- presently in the hall dressed to go out with Huntley.
- “We’re going over the hill to see the sunset,” Joan explained. “It’s too
- stuffy in there.”
- Oswald met Huntley’s large grey eye for a moment. He had an instinctive
- distrust of Huntley. But on the other hand, surely Joan had brains
- enough and fastidiousness enough not to lose her head with this—this
- phosphorescent fish of a novelist.
- “Right-o,” said Oswald, and hovered doubtfully.
- Aunt Phœbe appeared on the landing above carrying off a rather reluctant
- Miss Scroby to her room for a real good talk; a crash and an
- unmistakable giggle proclaimed a minor rag in progress in the common
- room across the hall in which Sydney Sheldrick was busy. The study door
- closed on Oswald....
- Joan and Huntley passed by outside his window. He sat down in front of
- his fire, poked it into a magnificent blaze, lit a cigar and sat
- thinking. The beat of dancing, the melody of the gramophone and a
- multitude of less distinct sounds soaked in through the door to him.
- He was, he reflected, rather like a strange animal among all this youth.
- They treated him as something remotely old; he was one-and-fifty, and
- yet this gregarious stir and excitement that brightened their eyes and
- quickened their blood stirred him too. He couldn’t help a feeling of
- envy; he had missed so much in his life. And in his younger days the
- pace had been slower. These young people were actually noisier, they
- were more reckless, they did more and went further than his generation
- had gone. In his time, with his sort of people, there had been the
- virtuous life which was, one had to admit it, slow, and the fast life
- which was noisily, criminally, consciously and vulgarly vicious. This
- generation didn’t seem to be vicious, and was anything but slow. How far
- did they go? He had been noting little things between Peter and this
- Reinhart girl. What were they up to between them? He didn’t understand.
- Was she manœuvring to marry the boy? She must be well on the way to
- thirty, twenty-six or twenty-seven perhaps, she hadn’t a young girl’s
- look in her eyes. Was she just amusing herself by angling for calf-love?
- Was she making a fool of Peter? Their code of manners was so easy; she
- would touch his hands, and once Peter had stroked her bare forearm as it
- lay upon the table. She had looked up and smiled. Leaving her arm on the
- table. One could not conceive of Dolly permitting such things. Was this
- an age of daring innocence, or what was coming to the young people?
- Joan seemed more dignified than the others, but she, too, had her
- quality of prematurity. At her age Dolly had dressed in white with a
- pink sash. At least, Dolly must have been _about_ Joan’s age when first
- he had seen her. Eighteen—seventeen? Of course a year or so makes no end
- of difference just at this age....
- From such meditations Oswald was roused by the tumult of a car outside.
- He took a wary glimpse from his window at this conveyance, and
- discovered that it was coloured an unusual bright chocolate colour, and
- had its chauffeur—a depressed-looking individual—in a livery to match.
- He went out into the hall to discover the large presence, the square
- face, the “whisker,” and the china-blue eyes of Lady Charlotte Sydenham.
- He knew she was in England, but he had had no idea she was near enough
- to descend upon them. She stood in the doorway surveying the Christmas
- disorder of the hall. Some one had adorned Oswald’s stuffed heads with
- paper caps, the white rhinoceros was particularly motherly with pink
- bonnet-strings under its throat, a box of cigarettes had been upset on
- the table amidst various hats, and half its contents were on the floor,
- which was also littered with scraps of torn paper from the crackers;
- from the open door of the library came the raucous orchestration of the
- gramophone, and the patter and swish of dancers.
- “I thought you’d be away,” said Aunt Charlotte, a little checked by the
- sight of Oswald. “I’m staying at Minchings on my way to sit on the
- platform at Cambridge. We’re raising money to get those brave Ulstermen
- guns. Something has to be done if these Liberals are not to do as they
- like with us. They and their friends the priests. But I _knew_ there’d
- be a party here. And those aunts. So I came.... Who are all these young
- people you have about?”
- “Miscellaneous friends,” said Oswald.
- “You’ve got a touch of grey in your hair,” she noted.
- “I must get a big blond wig,” he said.
- “You might do worse.”
- “You’re looking as fresh as paint,” he remarked, scrutinizing her
- steadfastly bright complexion. “Is that the faithful Unwin sitting and
- sniffing in the car? It’s a rennet face.”
- “She can sit,” said Lady Charlotte. “I shan’t stay ten minutes, and
- she’s got a hot-water bottle and three rugs. But being so near I had to
- come and see what was being done with those wards of mine.”
- “Former wards,” Oswald interjected.
- “The Gal I passed. Where is Master Stubland? I’ll just look at him. Is
- he one of these people making a noise in here?”
- She went to the door of the library and surveyed the scene with an
- aggressive lorgnette. The furniture had been thrust aside with haste and
- indignity, the rugs rolled up from the parquet floor, and Babs Sheldrick
- was presiding over the gramophone and helping and interrupting Sydney in
- the instruction of Wilmington, of Peter and Hetty and of Adela and
- Sopwith Greene in some special development of the tango. All the young
- people still wore their paper caps and were heated and dishevelled. In
- the window-seat the convalescent suffragette was showing wrist tricks to
- one of the young men from Cambridge. “Party!” said Lady Charlotte.
- “Higgledy-piggledy I call it. Which is Peter?”
- Peter was indicated.
- “Well, he’s grown! Who’s that fast-looking girl he’s hugging?”
- Peter detached himself from Hetty and came forward.
- His ancient terror of the whisker-woman still hung about him, but he
- made a brave show of courage. “Glad you’ve not forgotten us, Lady
- Charlotte,” he said.
- “Not much Stubland about _him_,” she remarked to Oswald. “There’s a
- photograph of you before you blew your face off—”
- “It’s his mother he’s like,” said Oswald, laying a hand on Peter’s
- shoulder.
- “I never saw a family harp on themselves more than the Sydenhams,” the
- lady declared. “It’s like the Habsburg chin.... This one of the new
- improper dances, Peter?”
- “_Honi soit_,” said Peter.
- “People have been whipped at the cart’s tail for less. In my mother’s
- time no decent woman waltzed. Even—in crinolines. Now a waltz isn’t
- close enough for them.”
- The gramophone came to an end and choked. “Thank goodness!” said Lady
- Charlotte.
- “Won’t you dance yourself, Lady Charlotte?” said Peter, standing up to
- her politely.
- The hard blue eye regarded him with a slightly impaired disfavour, but
- the old lady made no reply.
- They heard the startled voice of the youth from Cambridge. “It’s
- _her_!”...
- But the sting of the call was at its end.
- “So that’s Peter,” said Lady Charlotte, as the chauffeur and Oswald
- assisted her back into her liver-coloured car. “I told you I saw the
- Gal?”
- “Joan?”
- “I passed her on the road half a mile from here. Came upon her and her
- ’gentleman friend’—I suppose she’d call him—as we turned a corner. A
- snap-shot so to speak. It’s the walking-out instinct. Blood will tell. I
- saw her, but she didn’t see me. Lost, she was, to things mundane. But it
- was plain enough how things were. A tiff. Some lovers’ quarrel. Wake
- _up_, Unwin.”
- “What do you mean?”
- “What I say,” said Lady Charlotte.
- “That fellow Huntley!”
- “_Ha!_ So now you’ll lock the stable door! What else was to be
- expected?”
- “But this is nonsense!”
- “I may be mistaken. I hope I am mistaken. I just give you my impression.
- I’m not a fool, Oswald, though it’s always been your pleasure to treat
- me as one. Time shows.”
- There was a pause while rugs with loud monograms were adjusted about
- her.
- “Well, I’m glad I came over. I wanted to see the Great Experiment. I
- said at the time it can’t end well. Bad in the beginnings. No woman to
- help him—except for those two Weird Sisters. No religion. You see? The
- boy’s a young Impudence. The girl’s in some mess already. What did I
- tell you?”
- Oswald was late with his recovery.
- “Look here, auntie! you keep your libellous mind off my wards.”
- “Home, Parbury!” said Lady Charlotte to the chocolate-uniformed
- chauffeur.
- She fired a parting shot.
- “I warned you long ago, you’d get the Gal into a thoroughly false
- position....”
- She was getting away after her raid with complete impunity. Never before
- had she scored like this. Was Oswald growing old? She made her farewell
- of him with a stately gesture of head and hand. She departed
- disconcertingly serene. A flood of belated repartee rushed into Oswald’s
- mind. But except for a violent smell of petrol and a cloud of smoke and
- a kind of big scar of chocolate on the retina nothing remained now of
- Lady Charlotte.
- In the hall he paused before a mirror and examined that touch of grey.
- § 20
- But it had not been a lovers’ quarrel that had blinded Joan to the
- passing automobile. It had been the astounding discovery of her real
- relationship to Peter. So astounding had that been that at the moment
- she was not only regardless of the passing traffic but oblivious of
- Huntley and every other circumstance of her world.
- Huntley was not one of those people who love; he was a pursuing egotist
- with an unwarrantable scorn for the intelligence of his
- fellow-creatures. He liked to argue and show people that they were wrong
- in a calm, scornful manner; _The Pernambuco Bunshop_ was a very
- sarcastic work. He was violently attracted by the feminine of all ages;
- it fixed his attention with the vast possibilities of admiration and
- triumph it offered him. And he had greedy desires. Joan attracted him at
- first because she was admired. He saw how Wilmington coveted her. She
- had a prestige in her circle. She had, too, a magnetism of her own.
- Before he realized the slope down which he slid, he wanted her so badly
- that he thought he was passionately in love. It kept him awake of
- nights, and distracted him from his work. He did not want to marry her.
- That was against his principles. That was the despicable way of ordinary
- human beings. He lived on a higher plane. But he wanted her as a monkey
- wants a gold watch—he wanted this new, fresh, lovely and beautiful thing
- just to handle and feel as his own.
- There was little charm about Huntley and less companionship. He was too
- arrogant for companionship. But he abounded in ideas, he knew much, and
- so he interested her. He talked. He pursued her with the steadfast
- scrutiny of his large grey eyes—and with arguments. He tried to argue
- and manœuvre Joan into a passionate love for him.
- Well, Joan had a broad brow; she thought things over; she was amenable
- to ideas.
- He harped on “freedom.” He carried freedom far beyond the tempered
- liberties of ordinary human association. Any ordinary belief was by his
- standards a limitation of freedom. There was a story that he had once
- been caught burgling a house in St. John’s Wood and had been let off by
- the magistrate only because the crime seemed absolutely motiveless. No
- doubt he had been trying to convince himself of his freedom from
- prejudice about the rights of property. He had an obscure idea that he
- could induce Joan to plunge into wild depravities merely to prove
- himself free from her own decent instincts. But he was ceasing to care
- for his argument if only he could induce her.
- There was a moment when he said, “Joan, you are the one woman”—he always
- called her a woman—“who could make me marry her.”
- “I’ll spare you,” said Joan succinctly.
- “Promise me that.”
- “Promise.”
- “Anyhow.”
- “Anyhow.”
- On this Christmas afternoon he discoursed again upon freedom. “You,
- Joan, might be the freest of the free, if only you chose. You are
- absolutely your own mistress. Absolutely.”
- “I have a guardian,” she said.
- “You’re of age.”
- “No; I’m nineteen.”
- “You—it happens, were of age at eighteen, Joan.” He watched her face. He
- had been burning to get to this point for weeks. “Even about your birth
- there was freedom.”
- “So _you_ know that.”
- “Icy voice! To me it seems the grandest thing. When I reflect that I,
- alas! was born in loveless holy wedlock I grit my teeth.”
- “Oh! I don’t care. But how do you know?”
- “It’s fairly well known, Joan. It’s no very elaborate secret. I’ve got a
- little volume of your father’s poetry.”
- She hesitated. “I didn’t know my father wrote poetry,” she said.
- “It was all Will Sydenham ever did that was worth doing—except launch
- you into the world. He was a dramatic critic and something of a
- journalist, I believe. Stoner of the _Post_ knew him quite well. But all
- this is ancient history to you.”
- “It isn’t. Nobody has told me.... I didn’t know.”
- “But what did you think?”
- “Never mind what I thought. Every one doesn’t talk with your freedom.
- I’ve never been told. Who was my mother?”
- “Stoner says she died in hospital. Soon after you were born. He never
- knew her name.”
- “Wasn’t it Stubland?”
- “Lord, No! Why should it be?”
- “But then——”
- “That’s one of the things that makes you so splendidly new, Joan. You
- start clean in the world—like a new Eve. Without even an Adam to your
- name. Fatherless, motherless, sisterless, brotherless. You fall into the
- world like a meteor!”
- She stood astonished at the way in which she had blundered. Brotherless!
- If Huntley had not drawn her back by the arm Lady Charlotte’s car would
- have touched her....
- § 21
- That night some one tapped at the bedroom door of Aunt Phyllis. “Come
- in,” she cried, slipping into her dressing-gown, and Joan entered. She
- was still wearing the dress of spangled black in which she had danced
- with Huntley and Wilmington and Peter. She went to her aunt’s fire in
- silence and stood over it, thinking.
- “You’re having a merry Christmas, little Joan?” said Aunt Phyllis,
- coming and standing beside her.
- “Ever so merry, Auntie. We go it—don’t we?”
- Aunt Phyllis looked quickly at the flushed young face beside her, opened
- her mouth to speak and said nothing. There was a silence, it seemed a
- long silence, between them. Then Joan asked in a voice that she tried to
- make offhand, “Auntie. Who was my father?”
- Aunt Phyllis was deliberately matter-of-fact. “He was the brother of
- Dolly—Peter’s mother.”
- “Where is he?”
- “He was killed by an omnibus near the Elephant and Castle when you were
- two years old.”
- “And my mother?”
- “Died three weeks after you were born.”
- Joan was wise in sociological literature. “The usual fever, I suppose,”
- she said.
- “Yes,” said Aunt Phyllis.
- “Do you know much about her?”
- “Very little. Her name was Debenham. Fanny Debenham.”
- “Was she pretty?”
- “I never saw her. It was Dolly—Peter’s mother—who went to her....”
- “So that’s what I am,” said Joan, after a long pause.
- “Only we love you. What does it matter? Dear Joan of my heart,” and Aunt
- Phyllis slipped her arm about the girl’s shoulder.
- But Joan stood stiff and intent, not answering her caress.
- “I knew—in a way,” she said.
- The thought that consumed her insisted upon utterance. “So I’m not
- Peter’s half-sister,” she said.
- “But have you thought——?”
- Joan remained purely intellectual. “I’ve thought dozens of things. And I
- thought at last it was that.... Why was I called Stubland? I’m not a
- Stubland.”
- “It was more convenient. It grew up.”
- “It put me out. It has sent me astray....”
- She remained for a time taking in this new aspect of things so intently
- as to be regardless of the watcher beside her. Then she roused herself
- to mask her extravagant preoccupation. “You’re no relation then of
- mine?” she said.
- “No.”
- “You’ve been so kind to me. A mother....”
- Aunt Phyllis was weeping facile tears. “Have I been kind, dear? Have I
- seemed kind? I’ve always wanted to be kind. And I’ve loved you, Joan, my
- dear. And love you.”
- “And Nobby?”
- “Nobby too.”
- “You’ve been bricks to me, both of you. No end. Aunt Phœbe too. And
- Peter——? Does Peter know? Does he know what I am?”
- “I don’t know. I don’t know what he knows, Joan.”
- “If it hadn’t been for the same surname. Joan Debenham.... I’ve had
- fancies. I’ve thought Nobby, perhaps, was my father.... Queer!... Why
- did you people bother yourselves about me?”
- “My dear, it was the most natural thing in the world.”
- “I suppose it was—for you. You’ve been so decent——”
- “Every woman wants a daughter,” said Aunt Phyllis in a whisper, and then
- almost inaudibly; “you are mine.”
- “And the tempers I’ve shown. The trouble I’ve been. All these years. I
- wonder what Peter knows? He must suspect. He must have ideas.... Joan
- Debenham—from outside.”
- She stood quite still with the red firelight leaping up to light her
- face, and caressing the graceful lines of her slender form. She stood
- for a time as still as stone. Had she, after all, a stony heart? Aunt
- Phyllis stood watching her with a pale, tear-wet, apprehensive face.
- Then abruptly the girl turned and held out her arms.
- “Can I ever thank you?” she cried, with eyes that now glittered with big
- tears....
- Presently Aunt Phyllis was sitting in her chair stroking Joan’s dark
- hair, and Joan was kneeling, staring intently at some strange vision in
- the fire. “Do you mind my staying for a time?” she asked. “I want to get
- used to it. It’s just as though there wasn’t anything—but just here.
- I’ve lost my aunt—and found a mother.”
- “My Joan,” whispered Aunt Phyllis. “My own dear Joan.”
- “Always I have thought Peter was my brother—always. My half brother.
- Until today.”
- § 22
- It was Adela who inflicted Joan’s second shock upon her, and drove away
- the last swirling whispers of adolescent imaginations and moon mist from
- the hard forms of reality. This visit she had seemed greatly improved to
- Joan; she was graver. Visibly she thought, and no longer was her rolling
- eye an invitation to masculine enterprise. She came to Joan’s room on
- Boxing Day morning to make up dresses with her for the night’s dance,
- and she let her mind run as she stitched. Every one was to come in fancy
- dress; the vicarage girls would come and the Braughing people. Every one
- was to represent a political idea. Adela was going to be Tariff Reform.
- All her clothes were to be tattered and unfinished, she said, even her
- shoes were to have holes. She would wear a broken earring in one ear. “I
- don’t quite see your point,” said Joan.
- “Tariff Reform means work for all, dear,” Adela explained gently.
- Days before Joan had planned to represent Indian Nationalism. It was a
- subject much in dispute between her and Peter, whose attitude to India
- and Indians seemed to her unreasonably reactionary—in view of all his
- other opinions. She could never let her controversies with Peter rest;
- the costume had been aimed at him. She was going to make up her
- complexion with a little brown, wear a sari, sandals on bare feet, and a
- band of tinsel across her forehead. She had found some red Indian
- curtain stuff that seemed to be adaptable for the sari. She worked now
- in a preoccupied manner, with her mind full of strange thoughts.
- Sometimes she listened to what Adela was saying, and sometimes she was
- altogether within herself. But every now and then Adela would pull her
- back to attention by a question.
- “Don’t you think so, Joan?”
- “Think what?” asked Joan.
- “Love’s much more _our_ business than it is theirs.”
- That struck Joan. “Is it?” she asked. She had thought the shares in the
- business were equal and opposite.
- “All this waiting for a man to discover himself in love with you; it’s
- rot. You may wait till Doomsday.”
- “Still, they do seem to fall in love.”
- “With any one. A man’s in love with women in general, but women fall in
- love with men in particular. We’re the choosers. Naturally. We want a
- man, that man and no other, and all our own. They don’t feel like that.
- And we have to hang about pretending they choose and trying to make them
- choose without seeming to try to make them. Well, we’re altering all
- that. When I want a man——”
- Adela’s pause suggested a particular reference.
- “I’ll get him somehow,” she said intently.
- “If you mean to get him—if you don’t mind much the little things that
- happen meanwhile—you’ll get him,” said Adela, as though she repeated a
- creed. “But, of course, you can’t make terms. When a man knows that a
- woman is his, when he’s sure of it—absolutely, then she’s got him for
- good. Sooner or later he must come to her. I haven’t had my eyes open
- just for show, Joan, this last year or so.”
- “Good luck, Adela,” said Joan.
- Adela attempted no pretences. “It stands to reason if you love a man——”
- Her eyes filled with tears. “Love his very self. You can make him happy
- and safe. Be his line of least resistance. But the meanwhile is hard——”
- Adela stitched furiously.
- “That’s why you came down here?” Joan asked.
- “You haven’t seen?” Adela’s preoccupation with Sopwith Greene had been
- the most conspicuous fact in the party. “Once or twice a gleam,” said
- Joan.
- “Ask him to play tonight, dear,” said Adela. “Some of his own things.”
- But now the last checks upon Adela’s talk were removed. She wanted to
- talk endlessly and unrestrainedly about love. She wanted to hear herself
- saying all the generosities and devotions she contemplated. “There’s no
- bargain in love,” said Adela. “You just watch and give.” Running through
- all her talk was a thread of speculation; she was obsessed by the idea
- of the relative blindness and casualness of love in men. “We used to
- dream of lovers who just concentrated upon us,” she said. “But there’s
- something nimmy-pimmy in a man concentrating on a woman. He ought to
- have a Job, something Big, his Art, his Aim—Something. One wouldn’t
- really respect a man who didn’t do something Big. Love’s a nuisance to a
- real man, a disturbance, until some woman takes care of him.”
- “Couldn’t two people—take care of each other?” asked Joan.
- “Oh, that’s Ideal, Joan,” said Adela as one who puts a notion aside. “A
- man takes his love where he finds it. On his way to other things. The
- easier it is to get the better he likes it. That’s why, so often, they
- take up with any—sort of creature. And why one needn’t be so
- tremendously jealous....”
- Adela reflected. “_I_ don’t care a bit about him and Hetty.”
- “Hetty Reinhart?”
- “Everybody talked about them. Didn’t you hear? But of course you were
- still at school. Of course there’s that studio of hers. You know about
- her? Yes. She has a studio. Most convenient. She does as she pleases. It
- amused him, I suppose. Men don’t care as we do. They’re just amused. Men
- can fall in love for an afternoon—and out of it again. He makes love to
- her and he’s not even jealous of her. Not a bit. He doesn’t seem to mind
- a rap about Peter.”
- She babbled on, but Joan’s mind stopped short.
- “Adela,” she said, “what is this about Hetty and Peter?”
- “The usual thing, I suppose, dear. You don’t seem to hear of _anything_
- at Cambridge.”
- “But you don’t mean——?”
- “Well, I know _something_ of Hetty. And I’ve got eyes.”
- “You mean to say she’s—she’s _got_ Peter?”
- “It shows plainly enough.”
- “_My_ Peter!” cried Joan sharply.
- “You’re not an Egyptian princess,” said Adela.
- “You mean—he’s gone—Peter’s gone—to her studio? That—things like that
- have happened?”
- Adela stared at her friend. “These things _have_ to happen, Joan.”
- “But he’s only a boy yet.”
- “She doesn’t think he’s a boy. Why! he’s almost of age! Lot of boy about
- Peter!”
- “But do you mean——?”
- “I don’t mean anything, Joan, if you’re going to look like that. You’ve
- got no right to interfere in Peter’s love affairs. Why should you? Don’t
- we all live for experience?”
- “But,” said Joan, “Peter is different.”
- “No. No one is different,” said Adela.
- “But I tell you he’s _my_ Peter.”
- “He’s your brother, of course.”
- “_No!_”
- “Your half brother then. Everybody knows that, Joan—thanks to the
- Sheldricks. A sister can’t always keep her brothers away from other
- girls.”
- Joan was on the verge of telling Adela that she was not even Peter’s
- half sister, but she restrained herself. She stuck to the thing that
- most concerned her now.
- “It’s spoiling him,” she said. “It will make a mess of him. Why! he may
- think that is love, that!—slinking off to a studio. The nastiness! And
- she’s had a dozen lovers. She’s a common thing. She just strips herself
- here and shows her arms and shoulders because she’s—just that.”
- “She’s really in love with him anyhow,” said Adela. “She’s gone on him.
- It’s amusing.”
- “Love! _That_—love! It makes me sick to think of it,” said Joan.
- “A man isn’t made like that,” said Adela. “Peter has to go his own way.”
- “Peter,” said Joan, “who used to be the cleanest thing alive.”
- “Good sisters always feel like that,” said Adela. “I know how shocked I
- was when first I heard of Teddy.... It isn’t the same thing to men,
- Joan. It isn’t indeed....”
- “_Dirty_ Peter,” said Joan with intense conviction. “Of course I’ve
- known. Of course I’ve known. Any one could see. Only I wouldn’t know.”
- She thrust the striped red stuff for her Indian dress from her.
- “I shan’t be Indian Nationalism, Adela, after all. Somehow I don’t care
- to be. Why should I cover myself up in this way?”
- “You’d look jolly.”
- “No. I want something with black in it. And red. And my arms and
- shoulders showing. Why shouldn’t we all dress down to Hetty? She has the
- approval of the authorities. Aunt Phœbe applauds every stitch she takes
- off. Freedom—with a cap of Liberty.”
- “Hetty said something about being Freedom,” hesitated Adela.
- “Then I shall come as Anarchy,” said Joan, staring at the red stuff upon
- the table before her.
- Came a pause.
- “I don’t see why Peter should have all the fun in life,” said Joan.
- § 23
- Joan as Anarchy made a success that evening at Pelham Ford. In the
- private plans of Hetty Reinhart that success had not been meant for
- Joan. Hetty as Freedom gave the party her lithe arms, her slender neck,
- and so much of her back that the two vicarage girls, who had come very
- correctly in powder and patches as Whig and Tory, were sure that it was
- partly accidental. On Hetty’s dark hair perched a Phrygian cap, and she
- had a tricolour skirt beneath a white bodice that was chiefly
- decolletage and lace. About her neck was a little band of black which
- had nothing to do with Freedom; it was there for the sake of her slender
- neck. She was much more like _La Vie Parisienne_. She was already
- dancing with Peter when Joan, who had delayed coming down until the
- music began, appeared in the doorway. Nobby, wrapped in a long toga-like
- garment of sun-gold and black that he alleged qualified him to represent
- Darkest Africa, was standing by the door, and saw the effect of Joan
- upon one of the Braughing boys before he discovered her beside him.
- Her profile was the profile of a savage. She lifted her clear-cut chin
- as young savage women do, and her steady eyes regarded Hetty and Peter.
- Her black hair was quite unbound and thrown back from her quiet face,
- and there was no necklace, no bracelet, not a scrap of adornment nor
- enhancement upon her arms or throat. It had not hitherto occurred to
- Oswald that his ward had the most beautiful neck and shoulders in the
- world, or that Joan was as like what Dolly once had been as a wild beast
- is like a cherished tame one. But he did presently find these strange
- ideas in his mind.
- Her dress was an exiguous scheme of slashes and tatters in black and
- bright red. She was bare ankled—these modern young people thought
- nothing of that—but she had white dancing shoes upon her feet.
- “Joan!” said Huntley, advancing with an air of proprietorship.
- “No,” said Joan with a gesture of rejection. “I don’t want to dance with
- any one in particular. I’m going to dance alone.”
- “Well—dance!” said Huntley with a large courtly movement of a white
- velvet cloak all powdered with gold crosses and fleur-de-lys, that he
- pretended was a symbol of Reaction.
- “When I choose,” said Joan. “And as I choose.”
- Across the room Peter was staring at her, and she was looking at Peter.
- He tripped against Hetty, and for a little interval the couple was out
- of step. “Come on, Peter,” said Hetty, rallying him.
- Joan appeared to forget Peter and every one.
- There was dancing in her blood, and this evening she meant to dance. Her
- body felt wonderfully light and as supple as a whip under her meagre
- costume. There was something to be said for this semi-nudity after all.
- The others were dancing a two-step with such variations as they thought
- fit, and there was no objection whatever at Pelham Ford to solo
- enterprises. Joan could invent dances. She sailed out into the room to
- dance as she pleased.
- Oswald watched her nimble steps and the whirling rhythms of her slender
- body. She made all the others seem overdressed and clumsy and heavy. Her
- face had a grave preoccupied expression.
- Huntley stood for a moment or so beside Oswald, and then stepped out
- after her to convert her dance into a duet. He too was a skilful and
- inventive dancer, and the two coquetted for a time amidst the other
- couples.
- Then Joan discovered Wilmington watching her and Huntley from the window
- bay. She danced evasively through Huntley’s circling entanglements, and
- seized Wilmington’s hand and drew him into the room.
- “I can’t dance, Joan,” he said, obeying her. “You _know_ I can’t dance.”
- “You have to dance,” she said, aglow and breathing swiftly. “Trust me.”
- She took and left his hands and took them again and turned him about so
- skilfully that a wonderful illusion was produced in Wilmington’s mind
- and in those about him that indeed he could dance. Huntley made a
- crouching figure of jealousy about them; he spread himself and his cloak
- into fantastic rhombs—and then the music ceased....
- “The Argentine Tango!” cried Huntley. “Joan, you _must_ tango.”
- “Never.”
- “Dance Columbine to my Harlequin then.”
- “And stand on your knee? I should break it.”
- “Try me,” said Huntley.
- “Kneel,” said Joan. “Now take my hands. Prepare for the shock.” And she
- leapt lightly to his knee and posed for a second, poised with one toe on
- Huntley’s thigh, and was down again.
- “Do it again, Joan,” he cried with enthusiasm. “Do it again.”
- “Let us invent dances,” cried Aunt Phyllis. “Let us invent dances.
- Couldn’t we dance charades?”
- “Let them dance as nature meant them to,” said Aunt Phœbe’s deepest
- tones. “_Madly!_”
- “Shall we try that Tango we did the other night?” said Hetty, coming
- behind Peter.
- Peter had come forward to the group in the centre of the room. Old
- habits were strong in him, and he had a vague feeling that this was one
- of the occasions when Joan ought to be suppressed. “We’re getting
- chaotic,” he said.
- “You see, Peter, I’m Anarchy,” said Joan.
- “An ordered Freedom is the best,” said Peter without reflecting on his
- words.
- “Nobby, I want to dance with you,” said Joan.
- “I’ve never danced anything but a Country Dance—you know the sort of
- thing in which people stand in rows—in my life,” said Oswald.
- “A country dance,” cried Joan. “Sir Roger de Coverley.”
- “We want to try a fox-trot we know,” complained one of the Braughing
- guests.
- Two parties became more and more distinctly evident in the party. There
- was a party which centred around Hetty and the Sheldrick girls, which
- was all for the rather elaborately planned freak dances they had more or
- less learnt in London, the Bunny-Hugs, the Fox-Trot, and various
- Tangoes. Most of the Londoners were of this opinion, Sopwith Greene
- trailed Adela with him, and Huntley was full of a passionate desire to
- guide Joan’s feet along the Tango path. But Joan’s mind by a kind of
- necessity moved contrariwise to Hetty’s. Either, she argued, they must
- dance in the old staid ways—Oswald and the Vicarage girls applauding—or
- dance as the spirit moved them.
- “Oh, dance your old Fox-Trots,” she cried, with a gesture that seemed to
- motion Huntley and Hetty together. “Have your music all rattle and
- rag-time like sick people groaning in trains. That’s neither here nor
- there. I want to dance to better stuff than that. Come along, Willy.”
- She seized on Wilmington’s arm.
- “But where are you going?” cried Huntley.
- “I’m going to dance Chopin in the hall—to the pianola.”
- “You’re going to play,” she told Wilmington.
- “But you can’t,” said Peter.
- Joan disappeared with her slave. A light seemed to go out from the big
- library as she went. “Now we can get on,” said Hetty, laying hands on
- her Peter.
- For a time the Fox-Trot ruled. The Vicarage girls didn’t do these
- things, and drifted after Joan. So did Oswald. Towards the end the
- dancers had a sense of a cross-current of sound in the air, of some
- adverse influence thrown across their gymnastics. When their own music
- stopped, they became aware of that crying voice above the thunder, the
- Revolutionary Etude.
- There was a brief listening pause. “Now, how the deuce,” said Huntley,
- “can she be dancing _that_?”
- He led the way to the hall....
- “I’m tired of dancing,” whispered Hetty. “Stay back. They’re all going.
- I want you to kiss the little corner of my mouf.”
- Peter looked round quickly, and seized his privilege with unseemly
- haste. “Let’s see how Joan is dancing that old row,” he said....
- Animation, boldness, and strict relegation of costume to its function of
- ornament had hitherto made Hetty the high light of this little
- gathering. She was now to realize how insecure is this feminine
- predominance in the face of fresher youth and greater boldness. And Joan
- was full of a pretty girl’s discovery that she may do all that she dares
- to do. For a time—and until it is time to pay.
- Life had intoxicated Joan that night. A derision of seemliness possessed
- her. She was full of impulse and power. She felt able to dominate every
- one. At one time or other she swept nearly every man there except Oswald
- and Peter and Pryce into her dancing. Two of the Braughing youths fell
- visibly in love with her, and Huntley lost his head, badgered her too
- much to dance, and then was offended and sulked in a manner manifest to
- the meanest capacity. And she kissed Wilmington.
- That was her wildest impulse. She came into the study where he was
- playing the pianola for her dancing. She wanted him to change the roll
- for the first part of the Kreutzer Sonata, and found herself alone with
- him. She loved him because he was so completely and modestly hers. She
- bent over him to take off the roll from the instrument, and found her
- face near his forehead. “Dear old Willy,” she whispered, and put her
- hand on his shoulder and brushed his eyebrows with her lips.
- Then she was remorseful.
- “It doesn’t mean anything, Willy,” she said.
- “I know it doesn’t,” he said in a voice of the deepest melancholy.
- “Only you are a dear all the same,” she said. “You are clean. You’re
- _right_.”
- “If it wasn’t for my damned Virtues——” said Wilmington. “But anyhow.
- Thank you, Joan—very much. Shall I play you this right through?”
- “A little slowly,” she said. “It’s marked too fast,” and went towards
- the open door.
- Then she flitted back to him.... Her intent face came close to his. “I
- don’t love any one, Willy,” she said. “I’m not the sort. I just dance.”
- They looked at each other.
- “I love _you_,” said Wilmington, and watched her go.
- But she had made him ridiculously happy....
- She danced through the whole Kreutzer Sonata. The Kreutzer Sonata has
- always been a little dirty since Tolstoy touched it. Tolstoy pronounced
- it erotic. There are men who can find a lascivious import in a
- Corinthian capital. The Kreutzer Sonata therefore had a strong appeal to
- Huntley’s mind. These associations made it seem to him different from
- other music, just as calling this or that substance a “drug” always
- dignified it in his eyes with the rich suggestions of vice. He read
- strange significances into Joan’s choice of that little music as he
- watched her over the heads of the Braughing girls. But Joan just danced.
- At supper she found herself drifting to a seat near Peter. She left him
- to his Hetty, and went up the table to a place under Oswald’s black
- wing. The supper at Pelham Ford was none of your stand-up affairs. Mrs.
- Moxton’s ideas of a dance supper were worthy of Britannia. Oswald carved
- a big turkey and Peter had cold game pie, and Aunt Phyllis showed a
- delicate generosity with a sharp carver and a big ham. There were hot
- potatoes and various salads, and jugs of lemonade and claret cup for
- every one, and whisky for the mature. Joan became a sober enquirer about
- African dancing.
- “It’s the West Coast that dances,” said Oswald. “There’s richer music on
- the West Coast than all round the Mediterranean.”
- “All this American music comes from the negro,” he declared. “There’s
- hardly a bit of American music that hasn’t colour in its blood.”
- After supper Joan was the queen of the party. Adela was in love with her
- again, as slavish as in their schooldays, and the Sheldricks and the
- Braughing boys and girls did her bidding. “Let’s do something
- processional,” said Joan. “Let us dress up and do the Funeral March of a
- Marionette.”
- Hetty didn’t catch on to that idea, and Peter was somehow overlooked.
- Most of the others scampered off to get something black and cast aside
- anything too coloured. Aunt Phyllis knew of some black gauze and
- produced it. There were black curtains in the common room, and these
- were seized upon by Huntley and Wilmington. They made a coffin of the
- big black lacquered post-box in the hall, and a bier of four alpenstocks
- and a drying-board from the scullery.
- Joan was chief mourner, and after the Funeral March was over danced the
- sorrows of life before the bier to the first part of the Fifth Symphony.
- Hetty and Peter sat close together and yet unusually apart upon the
- broad window-seat. Hetty looked tired and Peter seemed inattentive.
- Perhaps they had a little overdone each other’s charm that Christmas.
- And only once more that evening did it happen that Peter and Joan met
- face to face. Nearly everybody poured out into the garden to see the
- guests go off. The Braughing people crowded hilariously into a car; the
- others walked. The weather had suddenly hardened, a clear dry cold made
- the paths and road very like metal, and not the littlest star was
- missing from the quivering assembly in the sky.
- “We’ll have skating yet,” cried the Braughing party.
- Adela and Joan and Wilmington and Pryce came with Huntley and Greene and
- the vicarage girls along the road and over the ice-bound water-splash as
- far as the vicarage gate. “Too cooold to say good-bye,” cried Joan. “Oh,
- my _poor_ bare legs!” and led a race back.
- Adela was left far behind, but neither Wilmington nor Pryce would let
- Joan win without a struggle. The three shot in through the wide front
- door almost abreast, and Joan ran straight at Peter and stopped short
- within two feet of him.
- “I’ve won!” said Joan.
- Just for an instant the two looked at one another, and it seemed to Joan
- afterwards that she had seen something then in Peter’s eyes, something
- involuntary that she had caught just once before in them—when she had
- come upon him by chance in Petty Cury when first she had gone up to
- Cambridge.
- A silly thing to think about! What did it matter? What did anything
- matter? Life was a dance, and Joan, thank heaven! could dance. Peter was
- just nothing at all. Nothing at all. Nothing at all.
- “I wonder, Joan, how many miles you have pranced tonight!” said Aunt
- Phyllis, kissing her good night.
- “Joan,” said Adela, “you _are_ The Loveliest.”...
- For a minute or so Joan stood in front of her looking-glass, studying a
- flushed, candle-lit figure....
- “Pah!” she said at last. “_Hetty!_” and flung her scanty clothes aside.
- She caught the reflection of herself in the mirror again. She spread out
- her hands in a gesture to the pretty shape she saw there, and stood.
- “What’s the Good of it?” she said at last.
- As soon as Joan’s head touched the pillow that night she fell asleep,
- and she slept as soundly as a child that had been thoroughly naughty and
- all at sixes and sevens, and that has been well slapped and had a good
- cry to wind up with, and put to bed. In all the world there is no
- sounder sleep than that.
- CHAPTER THE TWELFTH
- THE WORLD ON THE EVE OF WAR
- § 1
- Oswald sat in the March sunshine that filled and warmed his little
- summerhouse, and thought about Joan and Peter....
- His sudden realization of Joan’s mental maturity, the clear warning it
- brought to him that the task and opportunity of education was passing
- out of his hands, that already the reckoning of consequences was
- beginning for both his wards, set his mind searching up and down amidst
- the memories of his effort, to find where he could have slipped, where
- blundered and failed. He perceived now how vague had been the gesture
- with which he had started, when he proclaimed his intention to give them
- “the best education in the world.”
- The best education in the world is still to seek, and while he had been
- getting such scraps of second best for them as he could, the world
- itself, nature, tradition, custom, suggestion, example and accident, had
- moulded them and made them. When he measured what had been done upon
- these youngsters by these outward things and compared it with their
- deliberate education, the schoolmaster seemed to him to be still no more
- than a half-hearted dwarf who would snare the white horses of a cataract
- with a noose of packthread.
- “The generations running to waste—like rapids.”
- But there are stronger harnessings than packthreads, and there are
- already engineers in the world who, by taking thought and patient work,
- can tame the maddest torrent that ever overawed the mind of man. In the
- end perhaps all torrents will be tamed, and knowledge and purpose put an
- end to aimless adventure. The schoolmaster will not always be a
- dwarf....
- As our children grow beyond our control we begin to learn something of
- the reality of education. The world had Joan and Peter now; at the most
- Oswald could run and shout advice from the bank as they went down the
- rush. But he knew that he could have done more for them, and that with a
- different world he could have done infinitely more for them in their
- receptive years. They were the children of an age; their restless fever
- of impulse was but their individual share in a great fever. The whole
- world now was restless, out of touch with any standards, and manifestly
- drifting towards great changes.
- Neither Joan nor Peter seemed to have any definite purpose in life.
- Their impulses were not focused. They were drawn hither and thither.
- That was the essential failure of their adolescence. Their education had
- done many good things for them, but it had left their wills as
- spontaneous, indefinite and unsocial as the will of a criminal.
- Physically Oswald and the world had done well by them; they were
- clean-blooded, well grown, well exercised animals; they belonged to a
- generation of youth measurably taller, finer, and more beautiful than
- any generation before them. They were swift-footed and nimble. Mentally,
- too, they were swift and clear. It was not that their ideas were
- confused but their wills. Each of them could speak and read and write
- three languages quite well, they could draw well and Peter could draw
- brilliantly, they were alive to art and music, they read widely, they
- had the dispassionate, wide, scientific vision of the world. But being
- so fine and clean it was all the more distressing to realize that these
- two young people now faced the world with no clear will in them about it
- or themselves, that Joan seemed consumed with discontents and this dark
- personal quarrel with Peter, and that Peter could be caught and held by
- a mere sensual adventure. Hetty Reinhart kept him busy with notes and
- situations; having created a necessity she went on to create a jealous
- rivalry. He would be sometimes excited and elated, sometimes manifestly
- angry and sulky; and his work at Cambridge, which for two years had been
- conspicuously brilliant, was falling away.
- Until Joan’s angry outspokenness had forced these facts upon his
- attention, Oswald had shirked their realization. He had seen with his
- one watchful eye, but he had not willed to see. A score of facts had
- lain, like disagreeable letters that one hesitates to answer,
- uncorrelated in his mind. The disorders of the Christmas party had
- indeed left him profoundly uneasy. With the new year he went with Peter
- on a trip to Russia. He wanted the youngster to develop a vision of the
- European problem, for Peter seemed blind to the importance of
- international things. They had crossed to Flushing, travelled straight
- through to Berlin, gone about Berlin for a few days, run on to St.
- Petersburg—it was not yet Petrograd—visited a friendly house near the
- Valdai Hills, spent a busy week in and about Moscow, and returned by way
- of Warsaw. They saw Germany already trained like an athlete for the
- adventure of the coming war, and Russia great and disorderly, destined
- to be taken unawares. Then they returned to England to look again at
- their own country with eyes refreshed by these contrasts. And all the
- time Oswald watched Peter and speculated about the thoughts and ideas
- hidden in Peter’s head.
- § 2
- This Russian trip had been precipitated by a sudden opportunity.
- Originally Oswald had planned a Russian tour for his wards on a more
- considerable scale. Among the unsolved difficulties of this scheme had
- been his ignorance of Russian. He had thought of employing a courier—but
- a courier can be a tiresome encumbrance. His friend Bailey, who was an
- enthusiast for Russia and spoke Russian remarkably well for an
- Englishman, wrote from Petrograd offering to guide Oswald and Peter
- about that city, suggesting a visit to a cousin who had married a
- Russian landowner in Novgorod, and a week or so in Moscow, where some
- friends of Bailey’s would keep a helpful eye on the travellers. It was
- too good a chance to lose. There was some hasty buying of fur-lined
- gloves, insertion of wadding under the fur of Oswald’s fur coat, and the
- purchase of a suitable outfit for Peter.
- Bailey had his misogynic side, Oswald knew; he thought women troublesome
- millinery to handle; and he did not include Joan in the invitation. On
- the whole Oswald did not regret that omission, because it gave him so
- excellent a chance of being alone with Peter for long spells, and
- getting near his private thoughts.
- It was an expedition that left a multitude of vivid impressions upon the
- young man’s memory; the still, cold, starry night of the departure from
- Harwich, the lit decks, the black waters, the foaming wake caught by the
- ship’s lights, the neat Dutch landscape with its black and white cows
- growing visible as day broke, shivering workers under a chill, red-nosed
- dawn pouring down by a path near the railway into the factories of some
- industrial town; the long flat journey across Germany; the Sieges-Allée
- and the war trophies and public buildings of Berlin; the Sunday morning
- crowd upon Unter den Linden; the large prosperity of the new suburbs of
- Berlin; north Germany under an iron frost, a crowd of children sliding
- and skating near Königsberg; the dingier, vaster effects of Russia,
- streets in Petrograd with the shops all black and gold and painted with
- shining pictures of the goods on sale to a population of illiterates,
- the night crowd in the People’s Palace; a sledge drive of ten miles
- along the ice of a frozen river, a wooden country house behind a great
- stone portico, and a merry house party that went scampering out after
- supper to lie on the crisp snow and see the stars between the tree
- boughs; the chanting service in a little green-cupolaed church and a
- pretty village schoolmistress in peasant costume; the great red walls of
- the Kremlin rising above the Moskva and the first glimpse of that
- barbaric caricature, the cathedral of St. Basil; the painted
- magnificence of the Troitzkaya monastery; a dirty, evil-smelling little
- tramp with his bundle and kettle, worshipping unabashed in the Uspenski
- cathedral; endless bearded priests, Tartar waiters with purple sashes, a
- whole population in furs and so looking absurdly wealthy to an English
- eye; a thousand such pictures, keen, bright and vivid against a
- background of white snow....
- The romanticism of the late Victorians still prevailed in Oswald’s mind.
- The picturesqueness of Russia had a great effect upon him. From the
- passport office at Wirballen with its imposing green-uniformed guards
- and elaborate ceremonies onward into Moscow, he marked the contrast with
- the trim modernity of Germany. The wild wintry landscape of the land
- with its swamps and unkempt thickets of silver birch, the crouching
- timber villages with their cupolaed churches, the unmade roads, the
- unfamiliar lettering of the stations, contributed to his impression of
- barbaric greatness. After the plainly ugly, middle-class cathedral of
- Berlin he rejoiced at the dark splendours, the green serpentine and
- incense, of St. Isaac’s; he compared the frozen Neva to a greater Thames
- and stood upon the Troitzki Bridge rejoicing over the masses of the
- fortress of St. Peter and St. Paul. In Petrograd he said, “away from
- here to the North Pole is Russia and the Outside, the famine-stricken
- north, the frozen fen and wilderness, the limits of mankind.” Moscow
- made him talk of the mingling of east and west, western and eastern
- costumes jostled in the streets. He was surprised at the frequency of
- Chinamen. “Away from here to Vladivostok,” he said, “is Russia and all
- Asia. North, west, east and south there is limitless land. We are an
- island people. But here one feels the land masses of the earth.”
- Peter was preoccupied with a gallant attempt to master colloquial
- Russian in a fortnight by means of a _Russian Self-Taught_ he had bought
- in London; he did not thrust his conversation between Bailey and Oswald,
- but sometimes when he was alone with his guardian and the mood took him
- he would talk freely and rather well. He had been reading abundantly and
- variously; it was evident that at Cambridge he belonged to a talking
- set. If he had no directive form in his mind he had at any rate
- something like a systematic philosophy.
- It was a profoundly sceptical philosophy. There were moments when Oswald
- was reminded of Beresford’s “Hampdenshire Wonder,” who read through all
- human learning and literature before the age of five, and turned upon
- its instructor with “Is this _all_?” Peter looked at the world into
- which he had come, at the Kings and Kaisers demanding devotion to “our
- person,” at the gentlemen waving flags and talking of patriotism and
- service to empires and races and “nationality,” at the churches and
- priests pursuing their “policies,” and in effect he turned to Oswald
- with the same question. In the background of his imagination it was only
- too manifest that the nymphs—with a general family resemblance to Hetty
- Reinhart—danced, and he heard that music of the senses which the
- decadent young men of the _fin de siècle_ period were wont to refer to
- as “the pipes of Pan.”
- He and Oswald looked together at Moscow in the warm light of sunset.
- They were in the veranda of a hillside restaurant which commanded the
- huge bend of the river between the Borodinski and the Kruimski bridges.
- The city lay, wide and massive, along the line of the sky, with little
- fields and a small church or so in the foreground. The six glittering
- domes of the great Church of the Redeemer rose in the centre against the
- high red wall and the clustering palaces and church cupolas of the
- Kremlin. Left and right of the Kremlin the city spread, a purple sea of
- houses and walls, flecked with snowy spaces and gemmed with red
- reflecting windows, through which the river twisted like a silver eel.
- Moscow is a city of crosses, every church has its bulbous painted cupola
- and some have five or six, and every cupola carries its brightly gilded
- two-armed cross. The rays of the setting sun was now turning all these
- crosses to pale fire.
- Oswald, in spite of his own sceptical opinions, was a little under the
- spell of the “Holy Russia” legend. He stood with his foot on a chair and
- rested his jaw on his hand, with the living side of his face turned as
- usual towards his ward, and tried to express the confused ideas that
- were stirring in his mind. “This isn’t a city like the cities of western
- Europe, Peter,” he said. “This is something different. Those western
- cities, they grow out of the soil on which they stand; they are there
- for ever like the woods and hills; there is no other place for London or
- Rouen or Rome except just where it stands; but this, Peter, is a Tartar
- camp, frozen. It might have been at Nijni-Novgorod or Yaroslav or Kazan.
- It might be anywhere upon the Russia plain; only it happens to be here.
- It’s a camp changed to wood and brick and plaster. That’s the
- headquarters camp there, the Tsar’s pavilions. And all these crosses
- everywhere are like the standards outside the tents of the captains.”
- “And where is it going?” said Peter, looking at Moscow over his fur
- collar, with his hands deep in his overcoat pockets.
- “Asia advancing on Europe—with a new idea.... One understands Dostoevsky
- better when one sees this. One begins to realize this Holy Russia, as a
- sort of epileptic genius among nations—like his Idiot, insisting on
- moral truth, holding up the cross to mankind.”
- “_What_ truth?” asked Peter.
- “They seem to have the Christian idea. In a way we Westerns don’t.
- Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and their endless schools of dissent have a
- character in common. Christianity to a Russian means Brotherhood.”
- “If it means anything,” said Peter.
- The youngster reflected.
- “I wonder, is there really this Russian idea? I don’t believe very much
- in these national ideas.”
- “Say national character then. This city with its endless crosses is so
- in harmony with Russian music, Russian art, Russian literature.”
- “Any city that had to be built here would have to look more or less like
- this,” said Peter.
- “If it were built by Americans?”
- “If they’d lived here always,” said Peter. “But we’re arguing in a
- circle. If they’d lived here always the things that have made the
- Russians Russians, would have made them Russians. I’ve gone too far. Of
- course there is a Russian character. They’re wanderers, body and brain.
- Men of an endless land. But——”
- “Well?”
- “Not much of a Russian idea to it.... I don’t believe a bit in all these
- crosses.”
- “You mean as symbols of an idea?”
- “Yes. Of course the cross has meant _something_ to people. It must have
- meant tremendous things to some people. But men imitate. One sticks up a
- cross because it means all sorts of deep things to him. Then the man
- down the road thinks he will have a cross too. And the man up the road
- doesn’t quite see what it’s all about but doesn’t like to be out of it.
- So they go on, until sticking up crosses becomes a habit. It becomes a
- necessity. They’d be shocked to see a new church without four or five
- crosses on it. They organize a business in golden crosses. Everybody
- says, ’You _must_ have a cross.’ Long ago every one has forgotten that
- deep meaning....”
- “H’m,” said Oswald, “you think that?”
- “It’s just a crowd,” said Peter, thinking aloud. “Underneath the crosses
- it’s just a swarming and breeding of men.... Like any other men.”
- “But don’t you think that all that million odd down there is held
- together by a distinctive idea? Don’t you feel sometimes the Russian
- idea about you—like the smell of burnt wood on the breeze?”
- “Well, call it a breeze,” said Peter. “It’s like a breeze blowing over
- mud. It blows now and then. It’s forgotten before it is past. What does
- it signify?”
- He was thinking as he talked. Oswald did not want to interrupt him, and
- just smiled slightly and looked at Peter for more.
- “I don’t think there’s any great essential differences between cities,”
- said Peter. “It’s easy to exaggerate that. Mostly the differences are
- differences of scenery. Beneath the differences it’s the same story
- everywhere; men shoving about and eating and squabbling and multiplying.
- We might just as well be looking at London from Hampstead bridge so far
- as the human facts go. Here things are done in red and black and gold
- against a background of white snow; there they are done in drab and grey
- and green. This is a land of dull tragedy instead of dull comedy, gold
- crosses on green onions instead of church spires, extremes instead of
- means, but it’s all the same old human thing. Even the King and Tsar
- look alike, there’s a state church here, dissenters, landowners....”
- “I suppose there is a sort of parallelism,” Oswald conceded....
- “We’re not big enough yet for big ideas, the Russian idea, or the
- Christian idea or any such idea,” said Peter. “Why pretend we have
- them?”
- “Now that’s just it,” said Oswald, coming round upon him with an
- extended finger. “Because we want them so badly.”
- “Does every one?”
- “Yes. Consciously or not. That’s where you and I are at issue, Peter.”
- “Oh, I don’t _see_ the ideas at work!” cried Peter. “Except as a sort of
- flourish of the mind. But look at the everyday life. Wherever we have
- been—in London, Paris, Italy, Berlin, here, we see every man who can
- afford it making for the restaurants and going where there are women to
- be got. Hunger, indulgence, and sex, sex, sex, sex.” His voice was
- suddenly bitter. He turned his face to Oswald for a moment. “We’re too
- little. These blind impulses——I suppose there’s a sort of impulse to
- Beauty in it. Some day perhaps these forces will do something—drive man
- up the scale of being. But as far as _we’ve_ got——!”
- He stared at Moscow again.
- He seemed to have done.
- “You think we’re oversexed?” said Oswald after a pause.
- The youngster glanced at his guardian.
- “I’m not blind,” he fenced.
- Then he laughed with a refreshing cheerfulness. “It’s youthful
- pessimism, Nobby. My mind runs like this because it’s the fashion. We
- get so dosed with Schopenhauer and Nietzsche—usually at second hand. We
- all _try_ to talk like this. Don’t mind me.”
- Oswald smiled back.
- “Peter, you drive my spirit back to the Victorians,” he said. “I want to
- begin quoting Longfellow to you. ’Life is real, life is earnest——’”
- “No!” Peter countered. “But it ought to be.”
- “Well, it becomes so. We have Science, and out of Science comes a light.
- We shall see the Will plainer and plainer.”
- “The Will?” said Peter, turning it over in his mind.
- “Our own will then,” said Oswald. “Yours, mine, and every right sort of
- man’s.”
- Peter seemed to consider it.
- “It won’t be a national will, anyhow,” he said, coming back to Moscow.
- “It won’t be one of these national ideas. No Holy Russia—or Old England
- for the matter of that. They’re just—human accumulations. No. I don’t
- know of this Will at all—_any_ will, Nobby. I can’t see or feel this
- Will. I wish I could....”
- He had said his say. Oswald turned again to the great spectacle of the
- city. Did all those heavenward crosses now sinking into the dusk amount
- to no more than a glittering emanation out of the fen of life, an
- unmeaning _ignis fatuus_, born of a morass of festering desires that had
- already forgotten it? Or were these crosses indeed an appeal and a
- promise? Out of these millions of men would Man at last arise?...
- Slowly, smoothly, unfalteringly, the brush of the twilight had been
- sweeping its neutral tint across the spectacle, painting out the
- glittering symbols one by one. A chill from outer space fell down
- through the thin Russian air, a dark transparent curtain. Oswald
- shivered in his wadded coat. Abruptly down below, hard by a ghostly
- white church, one lamp and then another pricked the deepening blue. A
- little dark tram-car that crept towards them out of the city ways to
- fetch them back into the city, suddenly became a glow-worm....
- § 3
- Twenty years before Oswald would not have talked in this fashion of the
- Will. Twenty years before, the social and political order of the world
- had seemed so stable to an English mind that the thought of a sustaining
- will was superfluous. Queen Victoria and the whole system had an air of
- immortal inertia. The scientific and economic teachings under which
- Oswald’s ideas had been shaped recognized no need for wilfully
- co-ordinated efforts. The end of education, they indicated, was the
- Diffusion of Knowledge. Victorian thought in England took good motives
- for granted, seemed indeed disposed to regard almost any motive as
- equally good for the common weal. Herbert Spencer, that philosopher who
- could not read Kant, most typical of all English intelligences in those
- days, taught that if only there were no regulation, no common direction,
- if every one were to pursue his own individual ends unrestrained, then
- by a sort of magic, chaos, freed from the interference of any collective
- direction, would produce order. His supreme gift to a generation of
- hasty profiteers was the discovery that the blind scuffle of fate could
- be called “Evolution,” and so given an air of intention altogether
- superior to our poor struggles to make a decent order out of a greedy
- scramble. For some decades, whatever sections of British life had ceased
- to leave things to Providence and not bother—not bother—were leaving
- them to Evolution—and still not bothering....
- It was because of Oswald’s discovery of the confused and distressed
- motives of Joan and Peter and under the suggestions of the more kinetic
- German philosophy that was slowly percolating into English thought, that
- his ideas were now changing their direction. Formerly he had thought of
- nations and empires as if they were things in themselves, loose shapes
- which had little or nothing to do with the individual lives they
- contained; now he began to think that all human organizations, large and
- small alike, exist for an end; they are will forms; they present a
- purpose that claims the subordination of individual aims. He began to
- see states and nations as things of education, beings in the minds of
- men.
- The parallelism of Russia and Britain which Peter had made, struck
- Oswald as singularly acute. They had a closer parallelism with each
- other than with France or Italy or the United States or Germany or any
- of the great political systems of the world. Russia was Britain on land.
- Britain was Russia in an island and upon all the seas of the globe. One
- had the dreamy lassitude of an endless land horizon, the other the
- hardbitten practicality of the salt seas. One was deep-feeling, gross,
- and massively illiterate, the other was pervaded by a cockney
- brightness. But each was trying to express and hold on to some general
- purpose by means of forms and symbols that were daily becoming more
- conspicuously inadequate. And each appeared to be moving inevitably
- towards failure and confusion.
- One afternoon during their stay in Petrograd, Bailey took Oswald and
- Peter to see a session of the Duma. They drove in a sledge down the
- Nevski Prospekt and by streets of ploughed-up and tumbled snow, through
- which struggled an interminable multitude of sledges bringing firewood
- into the city, to the old palace of the favourite Potemkin, into which
- the Duma had in those days been thrust. The Duma was sitting in a big
- adapted conservatory, and the three visitors watched the proceedings
- from a little low gallery wherein the speakers were almost inaudible.
- Bailey pointed out the large proportion of priests in the centre and
- explained the various party groups; he himself was very sympathetic with
- the Cadets. They were Anglo-maniac; they idealized the British
- constitution and thought of a limited monarchy—in the land of
- extremes....
- Oswald listened to Bailey’s exposition, but the thing that most gripped
- his attention was the huge portrait of the Tsar that hung over the
- gathering. He could not keep his eyes off it. There the figure of the
- autocrat stood, with its sidelong, unintelligent visage, four times as
- large as life, dressed up in military guise and with its big cavalry
- boots right over the head of the president of the Duma. That portrait
- was as obvious an insult, as outrageous a challenge to the self-respect
- of Russian men, as a gross noise or a foul gesture would have been.
- “You and all the empire exist for _ME_,” said that foolish-faced
- portrait, with its busby a little on one side and its weak hand on its
- sword hilt....
- It was to that figure they asked young Russia to be loyal.
- That dull-faced Tsar and the golden crosses of Moscow presented
- themselves as Russia to the young. A heavy-handed and very corrupt
- system of repression sustained their absurd pretensions. They had no
- sanction at all but that they existed—through the acquiescences of less
- intelligent generations. The aged, the prosperous, the indolent, the
- dishonest, the mean and the dull supported them in a vast tacit
- conspiracy. Beneath such symbols could a land under the sting of modern
- suggestions ever be anything but a will welter, a confusion of
- sentiments and instincts and wilfulness? Was it so wonderful that the
- world was given the stories of Artzibachev as pictures of the will forms
- of the Russian young?
- § 4
- Through all that journey Oswald was constantly comparing Peter with the
- young people he saw. On two occasions he and Peter went to the Moscow
- Art Theatre. Once they saw _Hamlet_ in Russian, and once Tchekhov’s
- _Three Sisters_; and each was produced with a completeness of ensemble,
- an excellence of mechanism and a dramatic vigour far beyond the range of
- any London theatre. Here in untidy, sprawling, slushy Moscow shone this
- diamond of co-operative effort and efficient organization. It set Oswald
- revising certain hasty generalizations about the Russian character....
- But far more interesting than the play to him was the audience. They
- were mostly young people, and some of them were very young people;
- students in uniform, bright-faced girls, clerks, young officers and
- soldiers, a sprinkling of intelligent-looking older people of the
- commercial and professional classes; each evening showed a similar
- gathering, a very full house, intensely critical and appreciative. It
- was rather like the sort of gathering one might see in the London Fabian
- Society, but there were scarcely any earnest spinsters and many more
- young men. The Art Theatre, like a magnet, had drawn its own together
- out of the vast barbaric medley of western and Asiatic, of peasant,
- merchant, priest, official and professional, that thronged the Moscow
- streets. And they seemed very delightful young people.
- His one eye wandered from the brightly-lit stage to the rows and rows of
- faces in the great dim auditorium about him, rested on Peter, and then
- went back to those others. This, then, must be a sample of the
- Intelligentzia. These were the youth who figured in so large a
- proportion of recent Russian literature. How many bright keen faces were
- there! What lay before them?...
- A dark premonition crept into his mind of the tragedy of all this eager
- life, growing up in the clutch of a gigantic political system that now
- staggered to its end....
- This youth he saw here was wonderfully like the new generation that was
- now dancing its way into his house at Pelham Ford....
- It was curious to note how much more this big dim houseful of young
- Muscovites was like a British or an American audience than it was to a
- German gathering. Perhaps there were rather more dark types, perhaps
- more high cheekbones; it was hard to say....
- But all the other north temperate races, it seemed to Oswald, as
- distinguished from the Germans, had the same suggestion about them of
- unco-ordinated initiatives. Their minds moved freely in a great old
- system that had lost its hold upon them. But the German youths were
- co-ordinated. They were tremendously co-ordinated. Two Sundays ago he
- and Peter had been watching the Sunday morning parade along Unter den
- Linden. They had gone to see the white-trousered guards kicking their
- legs out ridiculously in the goose step outside the Guard House that
- stands opposite the Kaiser’s Palace, they had walked along Unter den
- Linden to the Brandenburger Tor, and then, after inspecting that
- vainglorious trophy of piled cannon outside the Reichstag, turned down
- the Sieges Allée, and so came back to the Adlon by way of the Leipziger
- Platz. Peter had been alive to many things, but Oswald’s attention had
- been concentrated almost exclusively on the youngsters they were
- passing, for the most part plump, pink-faced students in corps caps,
- very erect in their bearing and very tight in their clothes. They were
- an absolutely distinct variety of the young human male. A puerile
- militarism possessed them all. They exchanged salutations with the
- utmost punctilio. While England had been taking her children from the
- hands of God, and not so much making them as letting them develop into
- notes of interrogation, Germany without halt or hesitation had moulded
- her gift of youth into stiff, obedient, fresh soldiers.
- There had been a moment like a thunderclap while Oswald and Peter had
- been near the Brandenburger Tor. A swift wave of expectation had swept
- through the crowd; there had been a galloping of mounted policemen, a
- hustling of traffic to the side of the road, a hasty lining up of
- spectators. Then with melodious tootlings and amidst guttural plaudits,
- a big white automobile carrying a glitter of uniforms had gone by,
- driven at a headlong pace. “_Der Kaiser!_” Just for a moment the
- magnificence hung in the eye—and passed.
- What had they seen? Cloaks, helmets, hard visages, one distinctive
- pallid face; something melodramatic, something eager and in a great
- hurry, something that went by like the sound of a trumpet, a figure of
- vast enterprise in shining armour, with mailed fist. This was the symbol
- upon which these young Germans were being concentrated. This was the
- ideal that had gripped them. Something very modern and yet romantic,
- something stupendously resolute. Going whither? At any rate, going
- magnificently somewhere. That was the power of it. It _was_ going
- somewhere. For good or bad it was an infinitely more attractive lead
- than the cowardly and oppressive Tsardom that was failing to hold the
- refractory minds of these young Russians, or the current edition of the
- British imperial ideal, twangling its idiotic banjo and exhorting Peter
- and his generation to “tax the foreigner” as a worthy end and aim in
- life.
- Oswald, with his eye on the dim, preoccupied audience about him,
- recalled a talk that he and Peter had had with a young fellow-traveller
- in the train between Hanover and Berlin. It had been a very typical
- young German, glasses and all; and his clothes looked twice as hard as
- Peter’s, and he sat up stiffly while Peter slouched on the seat. He
- evidently wanted to air his English, while Peter had not the remotest
- desire to air his German, and only betrayed a knowledge of German when
- it was necessary to explain some English phrase the German didn’t quite
- grasp. The German wanted to know whether Oswald and Peter had been in
- Germany before, where they were going, what they thought of it, what
- they were going to think of Berlin.
- Responding to counter questions he said he had been twice to England. He
- thought England was a great country. “Yes—but not systematic. No!”
- “You mean undisciplined?”
- Yes, it was perhaps undisciplined he meant.
- Oswald said that as a foreigner he was most struck by the tremendous air
- of order in north Germany. The Germans were orderly by nature. The
- admission proved an attractive gambit.
- The young German questioned Oswald’s view that the Germans were
- naturally orderly. Hard necessity had made them so. They had had to
- discipline themselves, they had been obliged to develop a
- Kultur—encircled by enemies. Now their Kultur was becoming a second
- nature. Every nation, he supposed, brought its present to mankind.
- Germany’s was Order, System, the lesson of Obedience that would
- constantly make her more powerful. The Germans were perforce a thorough
- people. Thorough in all they did. Although they had come late into
- modern industrialism they had already developed social and economic
- organization far beyond that of any other people. Nicht wahr? Their work
- was becoming necessary to the rest of mankind. In Russia, for example,
- in Turkey, in Italy, in South America, it was more and more the German
- who organized, developed, led. “Though we are fenced round,” he said,
- “still—we break out.”
- There was something familiar and yet novel in all this to Oswald. It was
- like his first sensation upon reading Shakespeare in German. It was
- something very familiar—in an unfamiliar idiom. Then he recognized it.
- This was exactly his own Imperialism—Teutonized. The same assertion of
- an educational mission....
- “Everywhere we go,” said the young German, “our superior science, our
- higher education, our better method prevails. Even in your India——”
- He smiled and left that sentence unfinished.
- “But your militarism, your sabre rule here at home; this Zabern
- business; isn’t that a little incompatible with this idea of Germany as
- a great civilizing influence permeating the world?”
- “Not at all,” said the young German, with the readiness of a
- word-perfect actor. “Behind our missionaries of order we must have ready
- the good German sword.”
- “But isn’t the argument of force apt to be a little—decivilizing?”
- The young German did not think so. “When I was in England I said, there
- are three things that these English do not properly understand to use,
- they are the map or index, the school, and—the sword. Those three things
- are the triangle of German life....”
- That hung most in Oswald’s mind. He had gone on talking to the young
- German for a long time about the differences of the British and the
- German way. He had made Peter and the youngster compare their school and
- college work, and what was far more striking, the difference in pressure
- between the two systems. “You press too hard,” he said. “In Alsace you
- have pressed too hard—in Posen.”
- “Perhaps we sometimes press—I do not know,” said the young German. “It
- is the strength of our determination. We are impatient. We are a young
- people.” For a time Oswald had talked of the methods of Germany in the
- Cameroons and of Britain on the Gold Coast, where the German had been
- growing cacao by the plantation system, turning the natives into slaves,
- while the British, with an older experience and a longer view, had left
- the land in native hands and built up a happy and loyal free cultivation
- ten times as productive mile for mile as the German. It seemed to him to
- be one good instance of his general conception of Germany as the land of
- undue urgency. “Your Wissmann in East Africa was a great man—but
- everywhere else you drive too violently. You antagonize.” North Germany
- everywhere, he said, had the same effect upon him of a country, “going
- hard.”
- “Germany may be in too much of a hurry,” he repeated.
- “We came into world-politics late,” said the young German, endorsing
- Oswald’s idea from his own point of view. “We have much to overtake
- yet.”...
- The Germans had come into world-politics late. That was very true. They
- were naïve yet. They could still feed their natural egotism on the story
- of a world mission. The same enthusiasms that had taken Russia to the
- Pacific—and to Grand Ducal land speculation in Manchuria—and the English
- to the coolie slavery of the Rand, was taking these Germans now—whither?
- Oswald did not ask what route to disillusionment Germany might choose.
- But he believed that she would come to disillusionment. She was only a
- little later in phase than her neighbours; that was all. In the end they
- would see that that white-cloaked heroic figure in the automobile led
- them to futility as surely as the skulking Tsar. Not that way must the
- nations go....
- Oswald saw no premonition of a world catastrophe in this German
- youngster’s devotion to an ideal of militant aggression, nor in the
- whole broad spectacle of straining preparation across which he and Peter
- travelled that winter from Aix to Wirballen. He was as it were magically
- blind. He could stand on the Hanover platform and mark the largeness of
- the station, the broad spreading tracks, the endless sidings, the
- tremendous transport preparations, that could have no significance in
- the world but military intention, and still have no more to say than,
- “These Germans give themselves elbow-room on their railways, Peter. I
- suppose land is cheaper.” He could see nothing of the finger of fate
- pointing straight out of all this large tidy preparedness at Peter and
- their fellow-passengers and all the youth of the world. He thought
- imperialistic monarchy was an old dead thing in Russia and in Britain
- and in Germany alike.
- In Berlin indeed in every photographer’s was the touched-up visage of
- the Kaiser, looking heroic, and endless postcards of him and of his sons
- and of the Kaiserin and little imperial grandchildren and the like; they
- were as dull and dreary-looking as any royalties can be, and it was
- inconceivable to Oswald that such figures could really rule the
- imagination of a great people. He did not realize that all the tragedy
- in the world might lie behind the words of that young German, “we came
- into world-politics late,” behind the fact that the German imperialist
- system was just a little less decayed, a little less humorous, a little
- less indolent and disillusioned than either of its great parallels to
- the east and west. He did not reflect that no system is harmless until
- its hands are taken off the levers of power. He could still believe that
- he lived in an immensely stable world, and that these vast forms of
- kingdom and empire, with their sham reverences and unmeaning ceremonies
- and obligations, their flags and militancy and their imaginative
- senility, threatened nothing beyond the negative evil of uninspired
- lives running to individual waste. That was the thing that concerned
- him. He saw no collective fate hanging over all these intent young faces
- in the Moscow Art Theatre, as over the strutting innocents of patriotic
- Berlin; he had as yet no intimation of the gigantic disaster that was
- now so close at hand, that was to torment and shatter the whole youth of
- the world, that was to harvest the hope and energy of these bright
- swathes of life....
- He glanced at Peter, intent upon the stage.
- Peter lay open to every impulse. That was Oswald’s supreme grievance
- then against Tsars, Kings, and Churches. They had not been good enough
- for Peter. That seemed grievance enough.
- He did not imagine yet that they could murder the likes of Peter by the
- hundred thousand, without a tremor.
- He loved the fine lines of the boy’s profile, he marked his delicate
- healthy complexion. Peter was like some wonderful new instrument in
- perfect condition. And all these other youngsters, too, had something of
- the same clean fire in them....
- Was it all to be spent upon love-making and pleasure-seeking and play?
- Was this exquisite hope and desire presently to be thrown aside, rusted
- by base uses, corroded by self-indulgence, bent or broken? “The
- generations running to waste—like rapids....”
- He still thought in that phrase. The Niagara of Death so near to them
- all now to which these rapids were heading, he still did not hear, did
- not suspect its nearness....
- And Joan——. From Peter his thoughts drifted to Joan. Joan apparently
- could find nothing better to do in life than dance....
- Suddenly Peter took a deep breath, sat back, and began to clap. The
- whole house broke out into a pelting storm of approval.
- “Ripping!” said Peter. “Oh! ripping.”
- He turned his bright face to Oswald. “They do it so well,” he said,
- smiling. “I had forgotten it was in Russian. I seemed to understand
- every word.”
- Oswald turned his eye again to _Hamlet_ in Gordon Craig’s fantastic
- setting—which Moscow in her artistic profusion could produce when London
- was too poor to do so.
- § 5
- Very similar were the thoughts in Oswald’s mind three months later,
- three months nearer the world catastrophe, as he sat in his summerhouse
- after Joan had told him of her quarrel with Peter.
- Her denunciation of Peter had had the curious effect upon him of making
- him very anxious about her. So far as Peter went, what she had told him
- had but confirmed and made definite what he had known by instinct since
- the Christmas party. His mind was used now to the idea of Peter being
- vicious. But he was very much shocked indeed at the discovery that Joan
- was aware of Peter’s vices. That was a new jolt to his mind. In many
- things Joan and Peter had changed his ideas enormously, but so far he
- had retained not only his wardroom standards with regard to the morals
- of a youth, but also his romantic ideals of feminine purity with regard
- to a girl. He still thought of his own womenkind as of something
- innocent, immaculate and untouchable, beings in a different world from
- the girls who “didn’t mind a bit of fun” and the women one made love to
- boldly.
- But now he had to face the fact—Joan had forced it upon him—this new
- feminine generation wasn’t divided in that obvious way. The clean had
- knowledge, the bold were not outcast and apart. The new world of women
- was as mixed as the world of men. He sat in his summerhouse thinking of
- his Joan’s flushed face, her indignant eyes, her outspoken words.
- “It was a _woman’s_ face,” he whispered....
- And he was realizing too how much more urgent the ending of adolescence
- was becoming with a girl than it could ever be with a boy. Peter might
- tumble into a scrape or so and scramble out again, not very much the
- worse for it, as he himself had done. But Joan, with all the temerity of
- a youth, might be making experiments that were fatal. He had not been
- watching her as he had watched Peter. Suddenly he woke up to this
- realization of some decisive issue at hand. Why was she so whitely angry
- with Peter? Why did she complain of having to “stand too much” from
- Peter? Her abuse of his friends had the effect of a counter attack. Was
- there some mischief afoot from which Peter restrained her? What men were
- there about in Joan’s world?
- There was something slimy and watchful about this fellow Huntley. Could
- there be more in that affair than one liked to think?... Or was there
- some one unknown in London or in Cambridge?
- She and Peter were quarrelling about the Easter party. It would
- apparently be impossible to have any Easter party this year, since both
- wanted to bar out the other one’s friends. And anyhow there mustn’t be
- any more of this Hetty Reinhart business at Pelham Ford. That must stop.
- It ought never to have happened.... He would take Peter over to Dublin.
- They could accept an invitation he had had from Graham Powys out beyond
- Foxrock, and they could motor into Dublin and about the country, and
- perhaps the Irish situation might touch the boy’s imagination....
- Joan could go to her aunts at The Ingle-Nook....
- Should he have a talk to Aunt Phyllis about the girl?
- It was a pity that Aunt Phyllis always lost her breath and was shaken
- like an aspen leaf with fine feeling whenever one came to any serious
- discussion with her. If it wasn’t for that confounded shimmer in her
- nerves and feelings, she would be a very wise and helpful woman....
- § 6
- Oswald’s thoughts ranged far and wide that morning.
- Now he would be thinking in the most general terms of life as he
- conceived it, now he would be thinking with vivid intensity about some
- word or phrase or gesture of Joan and Peter.
- He was blind still to the thing that was now so close to all his world;
- nevertheless a vague uneasiness about the trend of events was creeping
- into his mind and mixing with his personal solicitudes. Many men felt
- that same uneasiness in those feverish days—as if Death cast his shadow
- upon them before he came visibly into their lives.
- Oswald belonged to that minority of Englishmen who think systematically,
- whose ideas join on. Most Englishmen, even those who belong to what we
- call the educated classes, still do not think systematically at all; you
- cannot understand England until you master that fact; their ideas are in
- slovenly detached little heaps, they think in ready-made phrases, they
- are honestly capable therefore of the most grotesque inconsistencies.
- But Oswald had built up a sort of philosophy for himself, by which he
- did try his problems and with which he fitted in such new ideas as came
- to him. It was a very distinctive view of life he had; a number of
- influences that are quite outside the general knowledge of English
- people had been very powerful in shaping it. Biological science, for
- example, played a quite disproportionate part in it. Like the countrymen
- of Metchnikoff, most of the countrymen of Darwin and Huxley believe
- firmly that biological science was invented by the devil and the Germans
- to undermine the Established Church. But Oswald had been exceptional in
- the chances that had turned his attention to these studies. And a writer
- whose suggestions had played a large part in shaping his ideas about
- education and social and political matters was J. J. Atkinson. He
- thought Atkinson the most neglected of all those fine-minded Englishmen
- England ignores. He thought Lang and Atkinson’s _Social Origins_ one of
- the most illuminating books he had ever read since Winwood Reade’s
- _Martyrdom of Man_. No doubt it will be amusing to many English readers
- that Oswald should have mixed up theories of the origins and destinies
- of mankind with his political views and his anxieties about Joan’s
- behaviour and Peter’s dissipations but he did. It was the way of his
- mind. He perceived a connexion between these things.
- The view he had developed of human nature and human conditions was
- saturated with the idea of the ancestral ape. In his instincts, he
- thought, man was still largely the creature of the early Stone Age,
- when, following Atkinson, he supposed that the human herd, sex linked,
- squatted close under the dominion of its Old Man, and hated every
- stranger. He did not at all accept the Aristotelian maxim that man is “a
- political animal.” He was much more inclined to Schopenhauer’s
- comparison of human society to a collection of hedgehogs driven together
- for the sake of warmth. He thought of man as a being compelled by
- circumstances of his own inadvertent creation to be a political animal
- in spite of the intense passions and egotisms of his nature. Man he
- judged to be a reluctant political animal. Man’s prehensile hand has
- given him great possibilities of experiment, he is a restless and
- curious being, knowledge increases in him and brings power with it. So
- he jostles against his fellows. He becomes too powerful for his
- instincts. The killing of man becomes constantly more easy for man. The
- species must needs therefore become political and religious, tempering
- its intense lusts and greeds and hostilities, if it is to save itself
- from self-destruction. The individual man resists the process by force
- and subterfuge and passivity at every step. Nevertheless necessity still
- finds something in the nature of this fiercest of its creatures to work
- upon. In the face of adult resistance necessity harks back to plastic
- immaturity. Against the narrow and intense desires of the adult man,
- against the secretive cunning and dispersiveness of our ape heredity,
- struggle the youthful instincts of association. Individualism is after
- all a by-path in the history of life. Every mammal begins by being
- dependent and social; even the tiger comes out of a litter. The litter
- is brotherhood. Every mother is a collectivist for her brood. A herd, a
- tribe, a nation, is only a family that has delayed dispersal, stage by
- stage, in the face of dangers. All our education is a prolongation and
- elaboration of family association, forced upon us by the continually
- growing danger of the continually growing destructiveness of our kind.
- And necessity has laid hold of every device and formula that will impose
- self-restraint and devotion upon the lonely savagery of man, that will
- help man to escape race-suicide. In spite of ever more deadly and
- far-reaching weapons, man still escapes destruction by man. Religion,
- loyalty, patriotism, those strange and wonderfully interwoven nets of
- superstition, fear, flattery, high reason and love, have subjugated this
- struggling egotistical ape into larger and larger masses of
- co-operation, achieved enormous temporary securities. But the ape is
- still there, struggling subtly. Deep in every human individual is a
- fierce scepticism of and resentment against the laws that bind him, and
- the weaker newer instincts that would make him the servant of his fellow
- man.
- Such was Oswald’s conception of humanity. It marched with all his
- experiences of Africa, where he had struggled to weave the net of law
- and teaching against warrior, slave-trader, disease and greed. It
- marched now with all the appearances of the time. So it was he saw men.
- It seemed to him that the world that lay behind the mask of his soft,
- sweet Hertfordshire valley, this modern world into which Joan and Peter
- had just rushed off so passionately, was a world in which the old nets
- of rule and convention which had maintained a sufficiency of peace and
- order in Europe for many generations of civilization, were giving way
- under the heavy stresses of a new time. Peoples were being brought too
- closely together, too great a volume of suggestions poured into their
- minds, criticism was vivid and destructive; the forms and rules that had
- sufficed in a less crowded time were now insufficient to hold
- imaginations and shape lives. Oswald could see no hope as yet of a new
- net that would sweep together all that was bursting out of the old. His
- own generation of the ’eighties and ’nineties, under a far less feverish
- urgency, had made its attempt to patch new and more satisfactory network
- into the rotting reticulum, but for the most part their patches had done
- no more than afford a leverage for tearing. He had built his cosmogony
- upon Darwin and Winwood Reade, his religion upon Cotter Morrison’s
- _Service of Man_; he had interwoven with that a conception of the Empire
- as a great civilizing service. That much had served him through the
- trying years at the end of adolescence, had in spite of strong coarse
- passions made his life on the whole a useful life. King, church, and all
- the forms of the old order he had been willing to accept as a
- picturesque and harmless paraphernalia upon these structural ideas to
- which he clung. He had been quite uncritical of the schoolmaster. Now
- with these studies of education that Joan and Peter had forced upon him,
- he was beginning to realize how encumbering and obstructive the old
- paraphernalia could be, how it let in indolence, stupidity, dishonesty,
- and treachery to the making of any modern system. A world whose schools
- are unreformed is an unreformed world. Only in the last year or so had
- he begun to accept the fact that for some reason these dominant ideas of
- his, this humanitarian religion which had served his purpose and held
- his life and the lives of a generation of liberal-minded Englishmen
- together, had no gripping power upon his wards. This failure perplexed
- him profoundly. Had his Victorian teachers woven prematurely, or had
- they used too much of the old material? Had they rather too manifestly
- tried to make the best of two worlds—leaving the schools alone? Must
- this breaking down of strands that was everywhere apparent, go still
- further? And if so, how far would the breaking down have to go before
- fresh nets could be woven?
- If Oswald in his summerhouse in the spring of 1914 could see no
- immediate catastrophe ahead, he could at least see that a vast
- disintegrative process had begun in the body of European civilization.
- This disintegration, he told himself, was a thing to go on by stages, to
- be replaced by stages; it would give place to a new order, a better
- order, “some-day”; everything just and good was going to happen
- some-day, the liberation of India, the contentment of Ireland, economic
- justice, political and military efficiency. It was all coming—always
- coming and never arriving, that new and better state of affairs. What
- did go on meanwhile was disintegration. The British mind hates crisis;
- it abhors the word “Now.” It believes that you can cool water for ever
- and that it will never freeze, that you can saw at a tree for ever and
- that it will never fall, that there is always some sand left above in
- the hour-glass. When the English Belshazzar sees the writing on the
- wall, he welcomes the appearance of a new if rather sensational form of
- publication, and he sits back to enjoy it at his leisure....
- The nets were breaking, but they would never snap. That in effect was
- Oswald’s idea in 1913. The bother, from his point of view, was that they
- had let out Joan and Peter to futility.
- There is a risk that the catastrophic events of 1914 may blind the
- historian to the significance of the spinning straws of 1913. But
- throughout Europe the sands were trickling before the avalanche fell.
- The arson of the suffragettes, the bellicose antics of the Unionist
- leaders in Ulster, General Gough’s Curragh mutiny, were all parts of the
- same relaxation of bonds that launched the grey-clad hosts of Germany
- into Belgium. Only the habits of an immense security could have blinded
- Oswald to the scale and imminence of the disaster. The world had
- outgrown its ideas and its will.
- Already people are beginning to forget the queer fevers that ran through
- the British community in 1913. For example there was the violent unrest
- of the women. That may exercise the historian in the future profoundly.
- Probably he will question the facts. Right up to the very outbreak of
- the war there was not a week passed without some new ridiculous outrage
- on the part of the militant suffragettes. Now it was a fine old church
- would be burnt, now a well-known country house; now the mania would take
- the form of destroying the letters in pillar-boxes, now the attack was
- upon the greens of the golf links. Public meetings ceased to be public
- meetings because of the endless interruptions by shrill voices crying
- “Votes for women!” One great triumph of the insurgents was a raid with
- little hammers upon the west-end shop-windows. They burnt the tea
- pavilion in Kew Gardens, set fire to unoccupied new buildings,
- inaugurated a campaign of picture-slashing at the public exhibitions.
- For a time they did much mischief to the cushions and fittings of
- railway carriages. Churches had to be locked up and museums closed on
- account of them. Poor little Pelham Ford church had had to buy a new
- lock against the dangers of some wandering feminist. And so on and so
- on. But this revolt of the women was more than a political revolt. That
- concentration upon the Vote was the concentration of a vast confused
- insurgence of energy that could as yet find no other acceptable means of
- expression. New conditions had robbed whole strata of women of any
- economic importance, new knowledge had enormously diminished the need
- for their domestic services, the birth-rate had fallen, the marriage age
- had risen, but the heedless world had made no provision for the vitality
- thus let loose. The old ideals of a womanly life showed absurd in the
- light of the new conditions. Why be pretty and submissive when nobody
- wants you? Why be faithful with no one to be faithful to? Why be devoted
- in a world which has neither enough babies nor lovers nor even its old
- proportion of helpless invalids to go round? Why, indeed, to come to the
- very heart of the old ideal, keep chaste when there is no one to keep
- chaste for? Half the intelligent women in that world had stood as Joan
- had done, facing their own life and beauty and asking desperately “What
- is the Good of it?”
- But while the old nets rotted visibly, there were no new nets being
- woven. There was everywhere the vague expectation of new nets, of a new
- comprehensiveness, a new way of life, but there was no broad movement
- towards any new way of life. Everywhere the old traditions and standards
- and institutions remained, discredited indeed and scoffed at, but in
- possession of life. Energetic women were reaching out in a mood of the
- wildest experiment towards they knew not what. It was a time of chaotic
- trials. The disposition of the first generation of released women had
- been towards an austere sexlessness, a denial of every feminine
- weakness, mental and physical, and so by way of Highmorton and hockey to
- a spinsterish, bitter competition with men. A few still bolder spirits,
- and Aunt Phœbe Stubland was among these pioneers, carried the
- destructive “Why not?” still further. Grant Allen’s _Woman Who Did_ and
- Arthur’s infidelities were but early aspects of a wide wave of
- philoprogenitive and eugenic sentimentality. The new generation carried
- “why not?” into the sphere of conduct with amazing effect.
- Women are the custodians of manners, and mothers and hostesses who did
- not dream of the parallelism of their impulse with militancy, were
- releasing the young to an unheard-of extravagance of dress and festival.
- Joan could wear clothes at a Chelsea dance that would have shocked a
- chorus girl half a century before; she went about London in the small
- hours with any casual male acquaintance; so far as appearances went she
- might have been the most disreputable of women. She yielded presently to
- Huntley’s persistence and began dancing the tango with him. It was the
- thing to slip away from a dance in slippers and a wrap, and spend an
- hour or so careering about London in a taxi or wandering on Hampstead
- Heath. Joan’s escapades fretted the sleeping tramps upon the Thames
- Embankment. London, which had hitherto dispersed its gatherings about
- eleven and got to bed as a rule by midnight, was aspiring in those days
- to become nocturnal. The restaurants were obliged to shut early, but a
- club was beyond such regulations. Necessity created the night club,
- which awoke about eleven and closed again after a yawning breakfast of
- devilled bones.
- A number of night clubs were coming into existence, to the particular
- delight of young Winterbaum. His boyish ambition for Joan was returning.
- He had seen her dance and heard her dancing praised. Vulgar people made
- wild vulgar guesses in his hearing at what lay behind her grave and
- sometimes sombre prettiness. He pretended to be very discreet about
- that. It became the pride of his life to appear at some crowded night
- club in possession of Joan; he did not know what people thought of her
- or of him but he hoped for the worst. He wore the most beautiful buttons
- on his white waistcoat and the most delicate gold chain you can imagine.
- In the cloakroom he left a wonderful overcoat and a wonderful cane.
- Sometimes he encouraged the ringlets in his hair and felt like Disraeli,
- and sometimes he restrained them and felt like a cold, cynical
- Englishman of the darker sort. He would sit swelling with pride beside
- Joan, and nod to painted women and heavy men; he knew no end of people.
- He did not care what sort of people they were so long as he knew them.
- It was always his ambition to be seen drinking champagne with Joan. Joan
- had no objection in the world, but she could not bring herself to
- swallow a drink that tasted, she thought, like weak vinegar mixed with a
- packet of pins and that went up your nose and made your brain swing
- slowly to and fro on its axis for the rest of the evening. So she just
- drank nothing at all.
- She would sit at her table with her pretty bare arms folded under her
- like the paws of a little cat, with her face, that still had the
- delicacy and freshness of a child’s, as intent as any intelligent
- child’s can be on the jumble of people before her, and her sombre eyes,
- calm and beautiful, looking at smart London trying at last to take its
- pleasures gaily. Perhaps some fortunate middle-aged gentleman of
- Winterbaum’s circle would be attempting to charm her by brilliant
- conversation, as, for instance Sir Joseph Lystrom, with a full-mouthed
- German flavour in his voice, in this style: “Pretty cheap here this
- evening somehow, eh? _What?_” Somewhere in the back of Sir Joseph’s mind
- was the illusion that by barking in this way and standing treat
- profusely, lay the road to a girl’s young love. Somewhen perhaps—who
- knows?—he may have found justification for that belief. Joan had long
- since learnt how to turn a profile to these formal attentions, and
- appear to be interested without hearing or answering a word.
- Or sometimes it would be Huntley. Huntley had lately taken to dodging
- among the night clubs to which he had access, when Joan was in London.
- Usually such nights ended in futility, but occasionally he was lucky and
- found Joan. Then he would come and talk and suggest ideas to her. He
- still remained the most interesting personality in her circle. She
- pretended to Winterbaum and herself to be bored by his pursuit, but
- indeed she looked for it. Except for Winterbaum and Huntley and
- Winterbaum’s transitory introductions, she remained a detached figure in
- these places. Sometimes quite good-looking strangers sat a little way
- off and sought to convey to her by suitable facial expression the growth
- of a passionate interest in her. She conveyed to them in return that
- they were totally invisible to her, resisting at times a macabre
- disposition to take sights at them suddenly and amazingly or put out her
- tongue. Sometimes women of the great Winterbaum circle would make a fuss
- of her. They called her a “dear child.” They would have been amazed at
- the complete theoretical knowledge a dear child of unrestricted reading
- could possess of them and their little ways.
- “So this is the life of pleasure,” thought the dear child. “_Well!_”
- And then that same question that Peter seemed always to be asking of
- Oswald: “Is this _all_?”
- When she danced in these places she danced with a sort of contempt. And
- the sage, experienced men who looked at her so knowingly never realized
- how much they imagined about her and how little they knew.
- She would sit and think how indecent it was to be at the same time old
- and dissipated. Some of these women here, she perceived, were older than
- her aunts Phœbe and Phyllis, years older. Their faces were painted and
- done most amazingly—Joan knew all about facial massage and the rest of
- it—and still they were old faces. But their poor bodies were not nearly
- so old as their faces, that was the tragedy of them. Joan regarded the
- tremendous V decolletage of a lively grandmother before her, and the
- skin of the back shone as young as her own. The good lady was slapping
- the young gentleman next to her with a quite smooth and shapely arm.
- Joan speculated whether the old fashion of the masked ball and the
- Venetian custom of masks which she had been reading about that day in
- Voltaire’s _Princesse de Babylone_, might not have something to do with
- that. But—she reverted—only young people ought to make love at all. Her
- aunts didn’t; Oswald didn’t. And Oswald was years younger than some of
- the men here, and in Joan’s eyes at least far more presentable. He had a
- scarred face indeed but a clean skin; some of the old men here had skins
- one would shiver to touch, and the expressions of evil gargoyles. She
- let her thoughts dwell—not for the first time—on Oswald and a queer
- charm he had for her. Never in all her life had she known him do or say
- a mean, dishonest, unjust, or unkind thing. In some ways he was oddly
- like Peter, but wise and gentle—and not exasperating....
- But all this playing with love in London was detestable, all of it. This
- was really a shameful place. It was shameful to be here. Love—mixed up
- with evening dress and costly clothes and jewellery and nasty laughter
- and cigars, strong cigars and drink that slopped about. It was
- disgusting. These people made love after their luncheons and dinners and
- suppers. Pigs! They were all pigs. They looked like pigs. If ever she
- made love it should be in the open air, in some lovely place with blue
- mountains in the distance, where there were endless wild flowers, where
- one could swim. No man she had ever talked with of love had really
- understood anything of the beauty of love and the cleanness of
- love—except Mir Jelaluddin. And he had a high-pitched voice and a
- staccato accent—and somehow.... One ought not to be prejudiced against a
- dark race, but somehow it was unthinkable....
- Joan sat in the night club dreaming of a lover, and the men about her
- glanced furtively at her face, asking themselves, “Can it be I?” men
- with red ears, men with greasy hair, men with unpleasing necks and
- clumsy gestures; bald men, fat men, watery-eyed men, cheats, profiteers,
- usurers, snobs, toadies, successful old men of every sort and young men
- who had done nothing and for the most part never would. “Can it be I?”
- they surmised dimly, seeing her pensive eyes. And she was dreaming of a
- lithe, white, slender figure, strong and clean. He would hunt among the
- mountains, he would swim swift rivers; he would never drink strong drink
- nor reek of smoke....
- At this moment young Winterbaum became urgent with his beautiful gold
- cigarette case. Joan took a cigarette and lighted it, and sat smoking
- with her elbows side by side on the table.
- “You’re not bored?” said young Winterbaum.
- “Oh, no. I’m watching people. I don’t want to talk.”
- “Oh! not at all?” said young Winterbaum.
- “So long as one has to talk,” he said after reflection and with an air
- of cleverness, “one isn’t really friends.”
- “Exactly,” said Joan, and blew smoke through her nose.
- What was it she had been thinking about? She could not remember, the
- thread was broken. She was sorry. She had a vague memory of something
- pleasant.... She fell into a fresh meditation upon Jews. All Jews, she
- thought, ought to grow beards. At least after they were thirty. They are
- too dark to shave, and besides there is a sort of indignity about their
- beaked shaven faces. A bearded old Jew can look noble, a moustached old
- Jew always looked like an imitation of a Norman gentleman done in
- cheaper material. But that of course was exactly what he was....
- Why did men of forty or fifty always want to dance with and make love to
- flappers? Some of these girls here must be two or three years younger
- than herself. What was the interest? They couldn’t talk; they weren’t
- beautiful; one could see they weren’t beautiful. And they laughed, good
- God! how they laughed! Girls ought to be taught to laugh, or at any rate
- taught not to laugh offensively. Laughter ought to be a joyful,
- contagious thing, jolly and kind, but these shrieks! How few of these
- people looked capable of real laughter! They just made this loud
- chittering sound. Only human beings laugh....
- In this manner the mind of Joan was running on the evening when she saw
- Peter and Hetty come into the club which tried to live up to the name of
- “The Nest of the Burning Phœnix.” Some tango experts had just
- relinquished the floor and there was a space amidst the throng when
- Hetty made her entry. Hetty had made a great effort, she was in full
- London plumage, and her effect was tremendous.
- About her little bold face was a radiant scheme of peacock’s feathers,
- her slender neck carried a disc a yard and a quarter wide; her slender,
- tall body was sheathed in black and peacock satin; she wore enormous
- earrings and a great barbaric chain. Her arms were bare except for a
- score of bangles, and she had bare sandalled feet. She carried her arrow
- point of a chin triumphantly. Peter was not her only attendant. There
- was also another man in her train whom every one seemed to recognize, a
- big, square-faced, handsome man of thirty-five or so who made Peter look
- very young and flimsy. “She’s got Fred Beevor!” said Winterbaum with
- respect, and dropped the word “Million.” Peter’s expression was stony,
- but Joan judged he was not enjoying himself.
- There were very few unoccupied chairs and tables, but opposite Joan were
- two gilt seats and another disengaged at a table near at hand. Hetty was
- too busy with her triumph to note Joan until Beevor had already chosen
- this place. With a slight awkwardness the two parties mingled. Young
- Winterbaum at least was elated. Beevor after a few civilities to Joan
- let it appear that Hetty preoccupied him. Peter was evidently not
- enjoying himself at all. Joan found him seated beside her and silent.
- Joan knew that it is the feminine rôle to lead conversation, but it
- seemed to her rather fun to have to encourage a tongue-tied Peter. A
- malicious idea came into her head.
- “Well, Petah,” she said; “why don’t you say I oughtn’t to be here?”
- Peter regarded her ambiguously. He had an impulse.
- “No decent people ought to be here,” he said quietly. “Let’s go home,
- Joan.”
- Her heart jumped at the suggestion. All her being said yes. And then she
- remembered that she had as much right to have a good time as Peter. If
- she went back with him it would be like giving in to him; it would be
- like admitting his right to order her about. And besides there was
- Hetty. He wasn’t really disgusted. All he wanted to do really was to
- show off because he was jealous of Hetty. He didn’t want to go home with
- Joan. She wasn’t going to be a foil for Hetty anyhow. And finally, once
- somewhere he had refused her almost exactly the same request. She
- checked herself and considered gravely. A little touch of spite crept
- into her expression.
- “No,” she said slowly. “No.... I’ve only just come, Petah.”
- “Very well,” said Peter. “_I_ don’t mind. If you like this sort of
- thing——”
- He said no more, sulking visibly.
- Joan resolved to dance at the first opportunity, and to dance in a bold
- and reckless way—so as thoroughly to exasperate Peter. She looked about
- the room through the smoke-laden atmosphere in the hope of seeing
- Huntley....
- She and Peter sat side by side, feeling very old and experienced and
- worldly and up-to-date. But indeed they were still only two children who
- ought to have been packed off to bed hours before.
- § 7
- The disorder in the world of women, the dissolution of manners and
- restraints, was but the more intimate aspect of a universal drift
- towards lawlessness. The world of labour was seething also with the same
- spirit of almost aimless insurrection. In a world of quickened
- apprehensions and increasing stimulus women were losing faith in the
- rules of conduct that had sufficed in a less exacting age. Far
- profounder and more dangerous to the established order were the
- scepticisms of the workers. The pretensions of the old social system
- that trade unionism had scarcely challenged were now being subjected
- throughout all western Europe to a pitiless scrutiny by a new and more
- educated type of employé.
- The old British trade unionism had never sought much more than increased
- wages and a slightly higher standard of life; its acceptance of
- established institutions had been artlessly complete; it had never
- challenged the authority nor the profits of the proprietor. It had never
- proposed more than a more reasonable treaty with the masters, a fairer
- sharing of the good gifts of industry. But infatuated by the evil
- teachings of an extreme individualism, a system of thought which was
- indeed never more than a system of base excuses dressed up as a
- philosophy, the directing and possessing classes had failed altogether
- to agree with their possible labour adversary quickly while they were
- yet in the way with him. They had lacked the intelligence to create a
- sympathetic industrial mentality, and the conscience to establish a
- standard of justice. They left things alone until the grit of a formless
- discontent had got into every cog of the industrial machinery. Too late,
- the employers were now conceding the modest demands that labour had made
- in the ’eighties and ’nineties, they were trying to accept the offers of
- dead men; they found themselves face to face with an entirely less
- accommodating generation. This new labour movement was talking no longer
- of shorter hours and higher pay but of the social revolution. It did not
- demand better treatment from the capitalist; it called him a profiteer
- and asked him to vanish from the body politic. It organized strikes now
- not to alter the details of its working conditions as its predecessor
- had done, but in order to end the system by making it impossible. In
- Great Britain as on the Continent, the younger generation of labour was
- no longer asking to have the harness that bound it to the old order made
- easier and lighter; it was asking for a new world.
- The new movement seemed to men of Oswald’s generation to come as
- thunderstorms will sometimes come, as the militant suffragette had
- seemed to come, suddenly out of a clear sky. But it was far more ominous
- than the suffragette movement, for while that made one simple explicit
- demand, this demanded nothing short of a new economic order. It asked
- for everything and would be content with nothing. It was demanding from
- an old habitual system the supreme feat of reconstruction. Short of that
- vague general reconstruction it promised no peace. Higher wages would
- not pacify it; shorter hours would not pacify it. It threatened sabotage
- of every sort, and a steady, incessant broadening antagonism of master
- and man. Peter, half sympathetic and half critical, talked about it to
- Oswald one day.
- “They all say, ’I’m a Rebel!’” said Peter. “’Rebel’ is their cant word.”
- “Yes, but rebel against what?”
- “Oh! the whole system.”
- “They have votes.”
- “They get humbugged, they say. They do, you know. The party system is a
- swindle, and everybody understands that. Why don’t we clean it up?
- P.R.’s the only honest method. They don’t understand how it is rigged,
- but they know it is rigged. When you talk about Parliament they laugh.”
- “But they have their Unions.”
- “They don’t trust their leaders. They say they are got at. They say they
- are old-fashioned and bluffed by the politicians.... They are....”
- “Then what do they want?”
- “Just to be out of all this. They are bored to tears by their work, by
- the world they have to live in, by the pinched mean lives they have to
- lead—in the midst of plenty and luxury—bored by the everlasting dulness
- and humbug of it all.”
- “But how are they going to alter it?”
- “That’s all vague. Altogether vague. Cole and Mellor and those Cambridge
- chaps preach Guild Socialism to them, but I don’t know how far they take
- it in—except that they agree that profit is unnecessary. But the
- fundamental fact is just blind boredom and the desire to smash up
- things. Just on the off chance of their coming better. The employer has
- been free to make the world for them, and this is the world he has made.
- Damn him! That’s how they look at it. They are bored by his face, bored
- by his automobile, bored by his knighthood, bored by his country house
- and his snob of a wife——”
- “But what can they do?”
- “Make things impossible.”
- “They can’t run things themselves.”
- “They aren’t convinced of that. Anyhow if they smash up things the
- employer goes first, and he’s the chap they seem to be principally
- after——”
- Peter reflected. Then he gave a modern young Englishman’s view of the
- labour conflict. “The employers have been pretty tidy asses not to see
- that their workpeople get a better, more amusing life than they do. It
- was their business and their interest to do so. It could have been
- managed easily. But they’re so beastly disloyal. And so mean. They not
- only sweat labour themselves but they won’t stir a finger to save it
- from jerry-built housing, bad provisioning, tally-men, general ugliness,
- bad investments, rotten insurance companies—every kind of rotten old
- thing. Any one may help kill _their_ sheep. They’ve got no gratitude to
- their workers. They won’t even amuse them. Why couldn’t they set up
- decent theatres for them, and things like that? It’s so stupid of them.
- These employers are the most dangerous class in the community. There’s
- enough for every one nowadays and over. It’s the first business of
- employers to see workpeople get their whack. What good are they if they
- don’t do that? But they never have. Labour is convinced now that they
- never will. They run about pretending to be landed gentry. They’ve got
- their people angry and bitter now, they’ve destroyed public confidence
- in their ways, and it serves them jolly well right if the workmen make
- things impossible for them. I think they will. I hope they will.”
- “But this means breaking up the national industries,” said Oswald.
- “Where is this sort of thing going to end?”
- “Oh! things want shaking up,” said Peter.
- “Perhaps,” he added, “one _must_ break up old things before one can hope
- for new. I suppose the masters won’t let go while they think there’s a
- chance of holding on....”
- He had not a trace left of the Victorian delusion that this might after
- all be the best of all possible worlds. He thought that our politicians
- and our captains of industry were very poor muddlers indeed. They
- drifted. Each one sat in his own works, he said, and ran them for profit
- without caring a rap whither the whole system was going. Compared with
- Labour even their poverty of general ideas was amazing. Peter, warming
- with his subject, walked to and fro across the Pelham Ford lawn beside
- Oswald, proposing to rearrange industrialism as one might propose to
- reshuffle a pack of cards.
- “But suppose things smash up,” said Oswald.
- “Smash up,” did not seem to alarm Peter.
- “Nowadays,” said Peter, “so many people read and write, so much has been
- thought out, there is so big a literature of ideas in existence, that I
- think we could recover from a very considerable amount of smashing. I’m
- pro-smash. We have to smash. What holds us back are fixed ideas. Take
- Profit. We’re used to Profit. Most business is done for profit still.
- But why should the world tolerate profit at all? It doesn’t stimulate
- enterprise; it only stimulates knavery. And Capital, Financial Capital
- is just blackmail by gold—gold rent. We think the state itself even
- can’t start a business going or employ people without first borrowing
- money. Why should it borrow money? Why not, for state purposes, create
- it? Yes. No money would be any good if it hadn’t the state guarantee.
- Gold standard, fixed money fund, legitimate profits and so on; that’s
- the sort of fixed idea that gets in the way nowadays. It won’t get out
- of the way just for reason’s sake. The employers keep on with these old
- fixed ideas, naturally, because so it is they have been made, but the
- workpeople believe in them less and less. There must be a smash of some
- sort—just to shake ideas loose....”
- Oswald surveyed his ward. So this was the young man’s theory. Not a bad
- theory. Fixed Ideas!
- “There’s something to be said for this notion of Fixed Ideas,” he said.
- “Yes. But isn’t this ’I’m a Rebel’ business, isn’t that itself a Fixed
- Idea?”
- “Oh certainly!” said Peter cheerfully. “We poor human beings are always
- letting our ideas coagulate. That’s where the whole business seems to me
- so hopeless....”
- § 8
- In the ’eighties and ’nineties every question had been positive and
- objective. “People,” you said, “think so and so. _Is it right?_” That
- seemed to cover the grounds for discussion in those days. One believed
- in a superior universal reason to which all decisions must ultimately
- bow. The new generation was beginning where its predecessors left off,
- with what had been open questions decided and carried beyond discussion.
- It was at home now on what had once been battlefields of opinion. The
- new generation was reading William James and Bergson and Freud and
- becoming more and more psychological. “People,” it said, “think so and
- so. Why do they do so?”
- So when at last Oswald carried off Peter to Dublin—which he did not do
- at Easter as he had planned but at Whitsuntide for a mere long
- week-end—to see at close hand this perplexing Irish Question that seemed
- drifting steadily and uncontrollably towards bloodshed, he found that
- while he was asking “who is in the right and who is in the wrong here?
- Who is most to blame and who should have the upper hand?” Peter was
- asking with a terrible impartiality, “Why are _all_ these people talking
- nonsense?” and “Why have they got their minds and affairs into this
- dangerous mess?” Sir Horace Plunkett, Peter had a certain toleration
- for; but it was evident he suspected A.E. Peter did not talk very much,
- but he listened with a bright scepticism to brilliant displays of good
- talk—he had never heard such good anecdotal talk before—and betrayed
- rather than expressed his conviction that Nationalism, Larkinism, Sinn
- Feinism, Ulsterism and Unionism were all insults to the human
- intelligence, material for the alienist rather than serious
- propositions.
- It wasn’t that he felt himself to be in possession of any conclusive
- solution, or that he obtruded his disbelief with any sense of
- superiority. In spite of his extreme youth he did not for a moment
- assume the attitude of a superior person. Life was evidently troubling
- him profoundly, and he was realizing that there was no apparent answer
- to many of his perplexities. But he was at least trying hard to get an
- answer. What shocked him in the world of Dublin was its manifest
- disinclination to get any answer to anything. They jeered at people who
- sought solutions. They liked the fun of disorder; it gave more scope for
- their irrepressible passion for character study. He began to recognize
- one particular phrase as the keynote of Dublin’s animation: “Hev ye
- hurrd the letest?”
- On the Sunday afternoon of their stay in Dublin, Powys motored them
- through the city by way of Donnybrook and so on round the bay to Howth
- to see the view from Howth Head. Powys drove with a stray guest beside
- him. Behind, Peter imparted impressions to Oswald.
- “I don’t like these high walls,” he said. “I’ve never seen such a lot of
- high walls.... It’s just as if they all shut themselves in from one
- another.”
- “Fixed Ideas, Peter?”
- “They _are_ rather like Fixed Ideas. I suppose high walls are fun to
- climb over and throw things over. But—it’s uncivilized.”
- “Everybody,” grumbled Peter, “is given to fixed ideas, but the Irish
- have ’em for choice. All this rot about Ireland a Nation and about the
- Harp, which isn’t properly their symbol, and the dear old Green Flag
- which isn’t properly their colour!... They can’t believe in that stuff
- nowadays.... But _can_ they? In our big world? And about being a Black
- Protestant and pretending Catholics are poison, or the other way round.
- What are Protestants and Catholics now?... Old dead squabbles.... Dead
- as Druids.... Keeping up all that bickering stuff, when a child of eight
- ought to know nowadays that the Christian God started out to be a
- universal, charitable God.... If Christ came to Dublin the Catholics and
- Protestants would have a free fight to settle which was to crucify
- Him....”
- “It’s the way with them,” said Oswald. “We’ve got to respect Irish
- opinion.”
- “It doesn’t respect itself. Everywhere else in the world, wherever we
- have been, there’s been at least something like the germ of an idea of a
- new life. But here! When you get over here you realize for the first
- time that England is after all a living country trying to get on to
- something—compared with this merry-go-round.... It’s exactly like a
- merry-go-round churning away. It’s the atmosphere of a country fair. An
- Irishman hasn’t any idea of a future at all, so far as I can see—except
- that perhaps his grandchildren will tell stories of what a fine fellow
- he was....”
- The automobile halted for a moment at cross roads, and the finger-post
- was in Erse characters.
- “Look at _that!_” said Peter with genuine exasperation. “And hardly a
- Dubliner knows fifty words of the language! It’s foolery. If we were
- Irish I suppose we should smother London with black-letter. We should go
- on pretending that we, too, were still Catholics and Protestants. The
- pseudo-Protestants would hang Smithfield with black on account of the
- martyrs, and the pseudo-Catholics would come and throw the meat about on
- Fridays. Chesterton and Belloc would love it anyhow.”...
- Oswald was not sure of the extent of Peter’s audience. “The
- susceptibilities of a proud people, Peter,” he whispered, with his eye
- on the back of their host.
- “Bother their susceptibilities. Much they care for _our_
- susceptibilities. The worst insult you can offer a grown-up man is to
- humour him,” said Peter. “What’s the good of pretending to be
- sympathetic with all this Wearing of the Green. It’s like our White Rose
- League. Let ’em do it by all means if they want to, but don’t let’s
- pretend we think it romantic and beautiful and all the rest of it. It’s
- just posing and dressing up, and it’s a nuisance, Nobby. All Dublin is
- posing and dressing up and playing at rebellion, and so is all Ulster.
- The Volunteers of the eighteenth century all over again. It’s like
- historical charades. And they’ve pointed loaded guns at each other. Only
- idiots point loaded guns. Why can’t we English get out of it all, and
- leave them to pose and dress up and then tell anecdotes and anecdotes
- and anecdotes about it until they are sick of it? If ever they are sick
- of it. Let them have their Civil War if they want it; let them keep on
- with Civil Wars for ever; what has it got to do with us?”
- “You’re a Home Ruler then,” said Oswald.
- “I don’t see that we English do any good here at all. What are we here
- for anyhow? The Castle’s just another Fixed Idea, something we haven’t
- the mental vigour to clear away. Nobody does any good here. We’re not
- giving them new ideas, we’re not unifying them, we’re not letting
- Ireland out into the world—which is what she wants—we’re not doing
- anything but just holding on.”
- “What’s that?” said Powys suddenly over his shoulder.
- “Peter’s declaring for Home Rule,” said Oswald.
- “After his glimpse of the slums of Dublin?”
- “It’s out of malice. He wants to leave Irishmen to Irishmen.”
- “Ulster says _No_!” said Powys. “Tell him to talk to Ulster,” and
- resumed a conversation he had interrupted with the man beside him.
- At the corner where Nassau Street runs into Grafton Street they were
- held up for some lengthy minutes by a long procession that was trailing
- past Trinity College and down Grafton Street. It had several bands, and
- in the forefront of it went National Volunteers in green uniforms,
- obviously for the most part old soldiers; they were followed by men with
- green badges, and then a straggle of Larkinites and various Friendly
- Societies with their bands and banners, and then by a long dribble of
- children and then some workgirls, and then a miscellany of people who
- had apparently fallen in as the procession passed because they had
- nothing else to do. As a procession it was tedious rather than
- impressive. The warm afternoon—it was the last day in May—had taken the
- good feeling out of the walkers. Few talked, still fewer smiled. The
- common expression was a long-visaged discontent, a gloomy hostile stare
- at the cars and police cordon, an aimless disagreeableness. They were
- all being very stern and resolute about they did not quite know what.
- They meant to show that Dublin could be as stern and resolute as
- Belfast. Between the parts of the procession were lengthy gaps. It was a
- sunshiny, dusty afternoon, and the legs of the processionists were dusty
- to the knees, their brows moist, and their lips dry. There was an
- unhurried air about them of going nowhere in particular. It was evident
- that many of their banners were heavy. “What’s it all about?” asked
- Oswald.
- “Lord knows,” said Powys impatiently. “It’s just a demonstration.”
- “Is that all? Why don’t we cut across now and get on?”
- “There’s more coming. Don’t you hear another band?”
- “But the police could hold it up for a minute and let all these tramcars
- and automobiles across.”
- “There’d be a fight,” said Powys. “They daren’t.”...
- “And I suppose this sort of thing is going on in the north too?” asked
- Oswald after a pause.
- “Oh! everywhere,” said Powys. “Orange or Green. But they’ve got more
- guns up north.”
- “These people don’t really want Ireland a Nation and all the rest of
- it,” said Peter.
- “_Oh?_” said Powys, staring at him.
- “Well, look at them,” said Peter. “You can see by their faces. They’re
- just bored to death. I suppose most people _are_ bored to death in
- Ireland. There’s nothing doing. England just holds them up, I suppose.
- And it’s an island—rather off the main line. There’s nothing to get
- people’s minds off these endless, dreary old quarrels. It’s all they
- have. But they’re bored by it....”
- “And that’s why we talk nothing but anecdotes, Peter, eh?” Powys
- grinned.
- “Well, you _do_ talk a lot of anecdote,” said Peter, who hadn’t realized
- the sharpness of his host’s hearing.
- “Oh! we do. I don’t complain of your seeing it. It isn’t your discovery.
- Have you read or heard the truest words that were ever said of
- Ireland—by that man Shaw? In _John Bull’s Other Island_.... That
- laughing scene about the pig. ’Nowhere else could such a scene cause a
- burst of happiness among the people.’ That’s the very guts of things
- here; eh?”
- “It’s his best play,” said Oswald, avoiding too complete an assent.
- “It gets there,” Powys admitted, “anyhow. The way all them fools come
- into the shanty and snigger.”...
- The last dregs of the procession passed reluctantly out of the way. It
- faded down Grafton Street into a dust cloud and a confusion of band
- noises. The policemen prepared to release the congested traffic. Peter
- leaned out to count the number of trams and automobiles that had been
- held up. He was still counting when the automobile turned the corner.
- They shook Dublin off and spun cheerfully through the sunshine along the
- coast road to Howth. It was a sparkling bright afternoon, and the road
- was cheerful with the prim happiness of many couples of Irish lovers.
- But that afternoon peace was the mask worn by one particular day. If the
- near future could have cast a phantom they would have seen along this
- road a few weeks ahead of them the gun-runners of Howth marching to the
- first foolish bloodshed in Dublin streets....
- They saw Howth Castle, made up now by Lutyens to look as it ought to
- have looked and never had looked in the past. The friend Powys had
- brought wanted to talk to some of the castle people, and while these two
- stayed behind Oswald and Peter went on, between high hedges of clipped
- beech and up a steep, winding path amidst great bushes of rhododendron
- in full flower to the grey rock and heather of the crest. They stood in
- the midst of one of the most beautiful views in the world. Northward
- they looked over Ireland’s Eye at Lambay and the blue Mourne mountains
- far away; eastward was the lush green of Meath, southward was the long
- beach of the bay sweeping round by Dublin to Dalkey, backed by more blue
- mountains that ran out eastward to the Sugar Loaf. Below their feet the
- pale castle clustered amidst its rich greenery, and to the east, the
- level blue sea sustained one single sunlit sail. It was rare that the
- sense of beauty flooded Peter, as so often it flooded Joan, but this
- time he was transported.
- “But this is altogether beautiful,” he said, like one who is taken by
- surprise.
- And then as if to himself: “How beautiful life might be! How splendid
- life might be!”
- Oswald was standing on a ledge below Peter, and with his back to him. He
- waited through a little interval to see if Peter would say any more.
- Then he pricked him with “only it isn’t.”
- “No,” said Peter, with the sunlight gone out of his voice. “It isn’t.”
- He went on talking after a moment’s reflection.
- “It’s as if we were hypnotized and couldn’t get away from mean things,
- beastly suspicions, and stale quarrels. I suppose we are still half
- apes. I suppose our brains set too easily and rapidly. I suppose it’s
- easy to quarrel yet and still hard to understand. We take to jealousy
- and bitterness as ducklings take to water. Think of that stale, dusty
- procession away there!”
- Oswald’s old dream vision of the dark forest came back to his mind. “Is
- there no way out, Peter?” he said.
- “If some great idea would take hold of the world!” said Peter....
- “There have been some great ideas,” said Oswald....
- “If it would take hold of one’s life,” Peter finished his thought....
- “There has been Christianity,” said Oswald.
- “Christianity!” Peter pointed at the distant mist that was Dublin. “Sour
- Protestants,” he said, “and dirty priests setting simple people by the
- ears.”
- “But that isn’t true Christianity.”
- “There isn’t true Christianity,” said Peter compactly....
- “Well, there’s love of country then,” said Oswald.
- “That Dublin corporation is the most patriotic and nationalist in the
- world. Fierce about it. And it’s got complete control there. It’s green
- in grain. No English need apply.... From the point of view of
- administration that town is a muck heap—for patriotic crowings. Look at
- their dirty, ill-paved streets. Look at their filthy slums! See how they
- let their blessed nation’s children fester and die!”
- “There are bigger ideas than patriotism. There are ideas of empire, the
- Pax Britannica.”
- “Carson smuggling guns.”
- “Well, is there nothing? Do _you_ know of nothing?”
- Oswald turned on his ward for the reply.
- “There’s a sort of idea, I suppose.”
- “But what idea?”
- “There’s an idea in our minds.”
- “But what is it, Peter?”
- “Call it Civilization,” Peter tried.
- “I believe,” he went on, weighing his words carefully, “as you believe
- really, in the Republic of Mankind, in universal work for a common
- end—for freedom, welfare, and beauty. Haven’t you taught me that?”
- “_Have_ I taught you that?”
- “It seems to me to be the commonsense aim for all humanity. You’re awake
- to it. You’ve awakened me to it and I believe in it. But most of this
- world is still deep in its old Fixed Ideas, walking in its sleep. And it
- won’t wake up. It won’t wake up.... What can we _do_? We’ve got to a
- sort of idea, it’s true. But here are these Irish, for example,
- naturally wittier and quicker than you or I, hypnotized by Orange and
- Green, by Protestant and Catholic, by all these stale things—drifting
- towards murder. It’s murder is coming here. You can smell the bloodshed
- coming on the air—and we can’t do a thing to prevent it. Not a thing.
- The silliest bloodshed it will be. The silliest bloodshed the world has
- ever seen. We can’t do a thing to wake them up....
- “We’re _in_ it,” said Peter in conclusion. “We can’t even save
- ourselves.”
- “I’ve been wanting to get at your political ideas for a long time,” said
- Oswald. “You really think, Peter, there might be a big world
- civilization, a world republic, did you call it?—without a single slum
- hidden in it anywhere, with the whole of mankind busy and happy, the
- races living in peace, each according to its aptitudes, a world going
- on—going on steady and swift to still better things.”
- “How can one believe anything else? Don’t you?”
- “But how do we get there, Peter?”
- “Oh, how do we get there?” echoed Peter. “How do we get there?”
- He danced a couple of steps with vexation.
- “I don’t _know_, Nobby,” he cried. “I don’t know. I can’t find the way.
- I’m making a mess of my life. I’m not getting on with my work. You
- _know_ I’m not.... Either we’re mad or this world is. Here’s all these
- people in Ireland letting a solemn humbug of a second-rate lawyer with a
- heavy chin and a lumpish mind muddle them into a civil war—and _that’s_
- reality! That’s life! The solemn League and Covenant—copied out of old
- history books! That’s being serious! And over there in England, across
- the sea, muddle and muck and nonsense indescribable. Oh! and we’re _in_
- it!”
- “But aren’t there big movements afoot, Peter, social reform, the labour
- movement, the emancipation of women, big changes like that?”
- “Only big discontents.”
- “But doesn’t discontent make the change?”
- “It’s just boredom that’s got them. It isn’t any disposition to _make_.
- Labour is bored, women are bored, all Ireland is bored. I suppose Russia
- is bored and Germany is getting bored. She is boring all the world with
- her soldiering. How bored they must be in India too—by us! The day bores
- its way round the earth now—like a mole. Out of sight of the stars. But
- boring people doesn’t mean making a new world. It just means boring on
- to decay. It just means one sort of foolish old fixed idea rubbing and
- sawing against another, until something breaks down.... Oh! I want to
- get out of all this. I don’t _like_ this world of ours. I want to get
- into a world awake. I’m young and I’m greedy. I’ve only got one life to
- live, Nobby.... I want to spend it where something is being made. Made
- for good and all. Where clever men can do something more than sit
- overlong at meals and tell spiteful funny stories. Where there’s
- something better to do than play about with one’s brain and viscera!...”
- § 9
- In the days when Peter was born the Anglican system held the Empire with
- apparently invincible feelings of security and self-approval; it
- possessed the land, the church, the army, the foreign office, the court.
- Such people as Arthur and Dolly were of no more account than a stray
- foreign gipsy by the wayside. When Peter came of age the Anglican system
- still held on to army, foreign office, court, land, and church, but now
- it was haunted by a sense of an impalpable yet gigantic antagonism that
- might at any time materialize against it. It had an instinctive
- perception of the near possibility of a new world in which its base
- prides could have no adequate satisfaction, in which its authority would
- be flouted, its poor learning despised, and its precedents disregarded.
- The curious student of the history of England in the decade before the
- Great War will find the clue to what must otherwise seem a hopeless
- tangle in the steady, disingenuous, mischievous antagonism of the old
- Anglican system to every kind of change that might bring nearer the
- dreaded processes of modernization. Education, and particularly
- university, reform was blocked, the most necessary social legislation
- fought against with incoherent passion, the lightest, most reasonable
- taxation of land or inheritance resisted.
- Wherever the old system could find allies it snatched at them and sought
- to incorporate them with itself. It had long since taken over the New
- Imperialism with its tariff schemes and its spirit of financial
- adventure. It had sneered aloof when the new democracy of the elementary
- schools sought to read and think; it had let any casual adventurer to
- supply that reading; but now the creator of _Answers_ and _Comic Cuts_
- ruled the _Times_ and sat in the House of Lords. It was a little
- doubtful still whether he was of the new order or the old, whether he
- was not himself an instalment of revolution, whether the Tories had
- bought him or whether he had bought them, but at any rate he did for a
- time seem to be serving the ends of reaction.
- To two sources of strength the Anglicans clung with desperate
- resolution, India and Ulster. From India the mass of English people were
- shut and barred off as completely as any foreigners could have been.
- India was the preserve of the “ruling class.” To India the good
- Anglican, smitten by doubts, chilled by some disrespectful comment or
- distressed by some item of progress achieved, could turn, leaving all
- thoughts of new and unpleasant things behind him; there in what he loved
- to believe was the “unchanging East” he could recover that sense of
- walking freely and authoritatively upon an abundance of inferior people
- which was so necessary to his nature, and which was being so seriously
- impaired at home. The institution of caste realized his secret ideals.
- From India he and his womankind could return refreshed, to the struggle
- with Liberalism and all the powers of democratic irreverence in England.
- And Ulster was a still more precious stronghold for this narrow culture.
- From the fastness of Ulster they could provoke the restless temperament
- of the Irish to a thousand petty exasperations of the English, and for
- Ulster, “loyal Ulster,” they could appeal to the generous partisanship
- of the English against their native liberalism. More and more did it
- become evident that Ulster was the keystone of the whole Anglican
- ascendancy; to that they owed their grip upon British politics, upon
- army, navy, and education; they traded—nay! they existed—upon the open
- Irish sore. With Ireland healed and contented England would be lost to
- them. England would democratize, would Americanize. The Anglicans would
- vanish out of British life as completely as the kindred Tories vanished
- out of America at the close of the eighteenth century. And when at last,
- after years of confused bickering, a Home Rule Bill became law, and
- peace between the two nations in Ireland seemed possible, the Anglicans
- stepped at once from legal obstruction to open treason and revolt. The
- arming of Ulster to resist the decision of Parliament was incited from
- Great Britain, it was supported enthusiastically by the whole of the
- Unionist party in Great Britain, its headquarters were in the west end
- of London, and the refusal of General Gough to carry out the
- precautionary occupation of Ulster was hailed with wild joy in every
- Tory home. It was not a genuine popular movement, it was an artificial
- movement for which the landowning church people of Ireland and England
- were chiefly responsible. It was assisted by tremendous exertions on the
- part of the London yellow press. When Sir Edward Carson went about
- Ulster in that warm June of 1914, reviewing armed men, promising “more
- Mausers,” and pouring out inflammatory speeches, he was manifestly
- preparing bloodshed. The old Tory system had reached a point where it
- had to kill men or go.
- And it did not mean to go; it meant to kill. It meant to murder men.
- If youth and the new ideas were to go on with the world, the price was
- blood.
- Ulster was a little country; altogether the dispute did not affect many
- thousands of men, but except for the difference in scale there was
- indeed hardly any difference at all between this scramble towards civil
- conflict in Ireland and the rush, swift and noiseless, that was now
- carrying central Europe towards immeasurable bloodshed. To kill and
- mutilate and waste five human beings in a petty riot is in its essence
- no less vile a crime than to kill and mutilate and waste twenty
- millions. While the British Tories counted their thousands, the Kaiser
- and his general staff reckoned in millions; while the British
- “loyalists” were smuggling a few disused machine-guns from Germany,
- Krupp’s factories were turning out great guns by the hundred. But the
- evil thing was the same evil thing; a system narrow and outworn, full of
- a vague fear of human reason and the common sense of mankind, full of
- pride and greed and the insolent desire to trample upon men, a great
- system of false assumptions and fixed ideas, oppressed by a thirsty
- necessity for reassurance, was seeking the refreshment of loud
- self-assertion and preparing to drink blood. The militarist system that
- centred upon Potsdam had clambered to a point where it had to kill men
- or go. The Balkans were the Ulster of Europe. If once this Balkan
- trouble settled down, an age of peace might dawn for Europe, and how
- would Junkerdom fare then, and where would Frau Bertha sell her goods?
- How would the War Lord justify his glories to the social democrat?...
- But Oswald, like most Englishmen, was not attending very closely to
- affairs upon the Continent. He was preoccupied with the unreason of
- Ulster.
- Recently he had had a curious interview with Lady Charlotte Sydenham,
- and her white excited face and blazing blue eyes insisted now upon
- playing the part of mask to the Ulster spirit in his thoughts. She had
- had to call him in because she had run short of ready money through
- over-subscription to various schemes for arming the northern patriots.
- She had sat at her writing-desk with her cap a little over one eye, as
- though it was a military cap, and the tuft of reddish hair upon her
- cheek more like bristles than ever, and he had walked about the room
- contriving disagreeable things to say to her after his wont. He was
- disinclined to let her have more money, he confessed; she ought to have
- had more sense, he said, than to write off big cheques, cheques beyond
- her means, in support of this seditious mischief. If she asked these
- people who had taken her money, probably they would let her have some
- back to go on with.
- This enraged her nicely, as he had meant it to do. She scolded at him. A
- nice Sydenham he was, to see his King insulted and his country torn
- apart. He who had once worn the Queen’s uniform. Thank God! she herself
- was a Parminter and belonged to a sounder strain!
- “It’s you who are insulting the King,” Oswald interpolated, “trying to
- defy his Acts in Parliament.”
- “_Oh!_” cried Lady Charlotte, banging the desk with her freckled fist.
- “Oh! Parliament! I’d shoot ’em down! First that vile Budget, then the
- attack on the Lords.”
- “They passed the Parliament Act,” said Oswald.
- “To save themselves from being swamped in a horde of working-men
- peers—sitting there in their caps with their dirty boots on the
- cushions. Lord Keir Hardie! You’ll want Lord Chimneysweep and Viscount
- Cats-meatman next.... Then came that abominable Insurance Act—one thing
- worse than another! Setting class against class and giving them ideas!
- Then we gave up South Africa to the Boers again! What did we fight for?
- Didn’t we buy the country with our blood? Why, my poor cousin Rupert
- Parminter was a prisoner in Pretoria for a whole year—thirteen weary
- months! For nothing! And now Ireland is to be handed over to priests and
- rebels. To _Irishmen_! And I—I am not to lift a finger, not a finger, to
- save my King and my Country and my God—when they are all going straight
- to the Devil!”
- “H’m,” said Oswald, rustling the counterfoils in his hand. “But you
- _have_ been lifting your finger, you know!”
- “If I could give more——”
- “You _have_ given more.”
- “I’d give it.”
- “Won’t Grimes make a friendly advance? But I suppose you’re up to the
- neck with Grimes.... I wonder what interest that little swindler charges
- you.”
- The old lady could not meet the mild scrutiny of his eye. “You come here
- and grin and mock while your country is being handed over to a gang of
- God-knows-whos!” she said, staring at her inkpot.
- “To whom probably it belongs as much as it does to me,” said Oswald.
- “Thank God the army is sound,” said Aunt Charlotte. “Thank God this
- doesn’t end with your Parliaments! Mark my words, Oswald! On the day
- they raise their Home Rule flag in Ireland there will be men shot
- down—men shot down. A grim lesson.”
- “Some perhaps killed by your own particular cheques,” said Oswald. “Who
- knows?”
- “I hope so,” said Lady Charlotte, with a quiver of deep passion in her
- voice. “I hope so sincerely. If I could think I had caused the death of
- one of those traitors.... If it could be Lloyd George!”...
- But that was too much apparently even for Lady Charlotte to hope for.
- Oswald, when he had come to her, had fully intended to let her have
- money to go on with, but now he was changing his mind. He had thought of
- her hitherto just as a grotesque figure in his life, part of the joke of
- existence, but now with this worry of the Irish business in his mind he
- found himself regarding her as something more than an individual. She
- seemed now to be the accentuated voice of a whole class, the embodiment
- of a class tradition. He strolled back from the window and stood with
- his hands deep in his trouser pockets—which always annoyed her—and his
- head on one side, focusing the lady.
- “My dear Aunt,” he said, “what right have you to any voice in politics
- at all? You know, you’re pretty—ungracious. The world lets you have this
- money—and you spend it in organizing murder.”
- “_The world lets me have this money!_” cried Lady Charlotte, amazed and
- indignant. “Why!” she roared, “it’s MY money!”
- In that instant the tenets of socialism, after a siege lasting a quarter
- of a century, took complete possession of Oswald’s mind. In that same
- instant she perceived it. “Any one can see you’re a Liberal and a
- Socialist yourself,” she cried. “You’d shake hands with Lloyd George
- tomorrow. Yes, you would. Why poor foolish Vincent made _you_ trustee——!
- He might have known! _You_ a sailor! A faddy invalid! Mad on blacks. I
- suppose you’d give your precious Baganda Home Rule next! And him always
- so sound on the treatment of the natives! Why! he kicked a real judge—a
- native judge—Inner Temple and all the rest of it—out of his railway
- compartment. Kicked him. Bustled him out neck and crop. Awayed with him!
- Oh, if he could see you now! Insulting me! Standing up for all these
- people, blacks, Irishmen, strikers, anything. Sneering at the dear old
- Union Jack they want to tear to pieces.”
- “Well,” said Oswald as she paused to take breath. “You’ve got yourself
- into this mess and you must get along now till next quarter day as well
- as you can. I can’t help you and you don’t deserve to be helped.”
- “You’ll not let me spend my own money?”
- “You’ve fired off all the money you’re entitled to. You’ll probably kill
- a constable—or some decent little soldier boy from Devon or Kent....
- Good God! Have you _no_ imagination?...”
- It was the most rankling encounter he had ever had with her. Either he
- was losing tolerance for her or she was indeed becoming more noisy and
- ferocious. She haunted his thoughts for a long time, and his thoughts of
- her, so intricate is our human composition, were all mixed up with
- sympathy and remorse for the petty cash troubles in which he had left
- her....
- But what a pampered, evil soul she had always been! Never in all her
- life had she made or grown or got one single good thing for mankind. She
- had lived in great expensive houses, used up the labour of innumerable
- people, bullied servants, insulted poor people, made mischief. She was
- like some gross pet idol that mankind out of whim kept for the sake of
- its sheer useless ugliness. He found himself estimating the weight of
- food and the tanks of drink she must have consumed, the carcases of oxen
- and sheep, the cartloads of potatoes, the pyramids of wine bottles and
- stout bottles she had emptied. And she had no inkling of gratitude to
- the careless acquiescent fellow-creatures who had suffered her so long
- and so abundantly. At the merest breath upon her clumsy intolerable
- dignity she clamoured for violence and cruelty and killing, and would
- not be appeased. An old idol! And she was only one of a whole class of
- truculent, illiterate harridans who were stirring up bad blood in half
- the great houses of London, and hurrying Britain on to an Irish civil
- war. No! She wasn’t as funny as she seemed. Not nearly so funny. She was
- too like too many people for that. Too like most people?
- Did that go too far?
- After all there was a will for good in men; even this weary Irish
- business had not been merely a conflict of fixed ideas, there had been,
- too, real efforts on the part of countless people to get the tangle
- straightened out. There were creative forces at work in men—even in
- Ireland. And also there was youth.
- His thoughts came back to the figure of Peter, standing on the head of
- Howth and calling for a new world.
- “I’ll pit my Peter,” he said, “against all the Aunt Charlottes in
- creation.... In the long run, that is.”
- He was blind—was not all Europe blind?—to the vast disaster that hung
- over him and his and the whole world, to the accumulated instability of
- the outworn social and political façade that now tottered to a crash.
- Massacre, famine, social confusion, world-wide destruction, long years
- of death and torment were close at hand; the thinnest curtain of time, a
- mere month of blue days now, hung between him and the thunderous
- overture of the world disaster.
- “I pit my Peter,” he repeated, “against all the Aunt Charlottes in
- creation.”
- § 10
- All novels that run through the years of the great war must needs be
- political novels and fragments of history. In August, 1914, that
- detachment of human lives from history, that pretty picaresque disorder
- of experiences, that existence like a fair with ten thousand different
- booths, which had gone on for thousands of years, came to an end. We
- were all brought into a common drama. Something had happened so loud and
- insistent that all lives were focused upon it; it became a leading
- factor in every life, the plot of every story, the form of all our
- thoughts. It so thrust itself upon mankind that the very children in the
- schools about the world asked “why has this thing happened?” and could
- not live on without some answer. The Great War summoned all human beings
- to become political animals, time would brook no further evasion.
- August, 1914, was the end of adventure and mental fragmentation for the
- species; it was the polarization of mankind.
- Other books have told, innumerable books that have yet to come will
- tell, of the rushing together of events that culminated in the breach of
- the Belgian frontier by the German hosts. Our story has to tell only of
- how that crisis took to itself and finished and crowned the education of
- these three people with whom we are concerned. Of the three, Oswald and
- Joan spent nearly the whole of July at Pelham Ford. Peter came down from
- Cambridge for a day or so and then, after two or three days in London
- for which he did not clearly account, he went off to the Bernese
- Oberland to climb with a party of three other Trinity men. There was a
- vague but attractive project at the back of his mind, which he did not
- confide to Oswald or Joan, of going on afterwards into north Italy to a
- little party of four or five choice spirits which Hetty was to organize.
- They could meet on the other side of the Simplon. Perhaps they would
- push on into Venezia. They would go for long tramps amidst sweet
- chestnut trees and ripening grapes, they would stay in the vast, roomy,
- forgotten inns of sleepy towns whose very stables are triumphs of
- architecture, they would bathe amidst the sunlit rocks of quiet lakes.
- Wherever they went in that land the snow and blue of the distant Alps
- would sustain the sweet landscape as music sustains a song.
- Hetty had made it all fantastically desirable. She had invented it and
- woven details about it one afternoon in her studio. She knew north Italy
- very well; it was not the first amusing journey in that soft, delicious
- land that she had contrived. Peter was tremendously excited to think of
- the bright possibilities of such an adventure, and yet withal there was
- a queer countervailing feeling gnawing amidst his lusty anticipations.
- Great fun it would be, tremendous fun, with a little spice of sin in it,
- and why not? Only somehow he had a queer unreasonable feeling that Joan
- ought to share his holidays. Old Joan who looked at him with eyes that
- held a shadow of sorrow; who made him feel that she knew more than she
- could possibly know. He wished Joan, too, had some spree in
- contemplation—not of course quite the same sort of spree. A decent
- girl’s sort of spree. Just the tramp part. He wished he could tell Joan
- of what was in hand, that there wasn’t this queer embarrassment between
- them. Joan had her car of course....
- Oswald had recently bought Joan a pretty little ten-horsepower Singer
- car, a two-seater, in which she was to run about the country at her own
- free will. It was one of several attempts he had recently made to
- brighten life for Joan. He was beginning to watch her very closely; he
- did not clearly understand the thoughts and imaginations that made her
- so grave and feverish at times, but he knew that she was troubled. The
- girl’s family resemblance to his Dolly had caught his mind. He thought
- she was more like Dolly than she was because her image constantly before
- him was steadily replacing Dolly’s in his mind. And he liked very much
- to sit beside her and watch her drive. At five-and-forty miles an hour
- her serene profile was divine. She had a good mechanical intelligence
- and her nerve was perfect; the little car lived in her hands and had the
- precision of movement of an animal.
- They ran across country to Warwick and Stratford-on-Avon, and slept the
- night in Warwick; they went to Newmarket and round to Chelmsford and
- Dovercourt, which was also an overnight excursion. These were their
- longer expeditions. They made afternoon runs to St. Albans, Hitchin,
- Baldock, Bedford, Stevenage and Royston. Almost every fine day they made
- some trip. While she drove or while they walked about some unfamiliar
- town the cloud seemed to lift from Joan’s mind, she became as fresh and
- bright as a child. And she talked more and more freely to Oswald. She
- talked more abundantly than Peter and much less about ideas. She talked
- rather of scenery and customs and atmospheres. She seemed to have a far
- more concrete imagination than Peter, to accept the thing that was with
- none of his reluctance. She would get books about Spain, about the South
- Sea Islands, about China, big books of travel and description, from the
- London Library, and so assimilate them that she seemed to be living
- imaginatively for days together in these alien atmospheres. She wanted
- to know about Uganda. She was curious about the native King. There were
- times when Oswald was reminded of some hungry and impatient guest in a
- restaurant reading over an over-crowded and perplexing menu.
- She did not read many plays or novels nor any poetry. She mentioned
- casually one day to Oswald that such reading either bored her or
- disturbed her. She read a certain amount of philosophy, but manifestly
- now as a task. And she was incessantly restless. She had no mother nor
- sisters, no feminine social world about her; she suffered from a
- complete lack of all those distracting and pacifying routines and all
- those restraints of habit and association that control the lives of more
- normally placed girls. Her thoughts, stimulated by her uncontrolled
- reading, ran wild. One morning she was up an hour before dawn, and let
- herself out of the house and walked over the hills nearly to Newport
- before breakfast, coming back with skirts and shoes wet with dew and
- speckled with grass seeds and little burrs. She spent that afternoon
- asleep in the hammock. And she would play fitfully at the piano or the
- pianola after dinner and then wander out, a restless white sprite, into
- the garden. One night early in the month she persuaded Oswald to go for
- a long moonlight walk with her along the road to Ware.
- There was a touch of dream quality in that walk for both of them. They
- had never been together in moonlight before. She ceased to be Joan and
- became at once something very strange and wonderful and very intimate, a
- magic phantom of womanhood, a creature no longer of flesh and blood but
- of pallor and shadow, whose hair was part of the universal dusk and her
- eyes two stars. And he, too, walking along and sometimes talking as if
- he talked to the lonely sky, and sometimes looking down out of the
- dimness closely at her, he had lost his age and his scars and become the
- utmost dignity of a man. They walked sometimes on a road of misty
- brightness and sometimes through deep pools of shadow and sometimes
- amidst the black bars and lace cast by tree stems and tree branches, and
- she made him talk of the vast spaces of Africa and the long trails
- through reed and forest, and of great animals standing still and
- invisible close at hand, hidden by the trickery of their colourings, and
- how he had gone all alone into the villages of savage people who had
- never before set eyes on a European. And she talked with a whisper and
- sigh in her voice of how she, too, would like to go into wild and remote
- lands—“if I could go off with a man like you.” And it seemed to him for
- a time that this sweet voice beside him was not truly Joan’s but
- another’s, and that he walked once more with the dearest wish he had
- ever wished in his life.
- He talked to her of moonlight and starlight in the tropics, of a
- wonderful pale incandescence that shines out above the grave of the
- sunset when the day has gone, of fireflies and of phosphorescent seas,
- and of the distant sounds of drumming and chanting and the remote blaze
- of native bonfires seen through black tree stems in the night. He
- talked, too, of the howling of beasts at night, and of the sudden
- roaring of lions, and at that she drew closer to him.
- When at last it was time for her to turn she did not want to turn. “I
- have been happy,” she said. “I have been happy. Let us go on. Why should
- we go back?”
- As if she was not always happy. She pulled at his arm like a child....
- And as they came home she came close to him, and for long spaces they
- said not a word to one another.
- But at the water splash in the village she had a queer impulse. The
- water splash appeared ahead of them, an incessant tumult of silver in
- which were set jewels of utter blackness and shining diamonds. She
- looked and tugged him by the arm.
- “Let us walk through the water, dear Nobby!” she said. “I want to feel
- it about my feet. Do! Do! Do! It will hardly cover our shoes....”
- A queer impulse that was of hers but, what was queerer, it found the
- completest response in him. “All right,” he said, as though this was the
- most commonplace suggestion possible; and very gravely, and as if it was
- some sort of rite, he let her lead him through the water. They were
- indeed both very grave....
- They walked up to the house in silence....
- “Good night, Nobby dear,” said Joan, leaning suddenly over by the newel
- of the stairs, and kissed him, as the moonlight kisses, a kiss as soft
- and cool as ever awakened Endymion....
- Life was at high tide in Joan that July, and everything in her was
- straining at its anchors. All her being was flooded with the emotional
- intimations that she was a woman, that she had to be beautiful and
- hasten to meet exquisite and profoundly significant experiences; none of
- her instincts told her that the affairs of the world drew to an issue
- that would maim and kill half the youths she knew and torment and alter
- her own and every life about her. She was haunted and distressed day and
- night—for the trouble got into her dreams—by Peter’s evident love-making
- with Hetty and Huntley’s watchful eyes, and she saw nothing of the red
- eyes of war and the blood-lust that craved for all her generation. Peter
- was making love—making love to Hetty. Peter was making love to Hetty.
- And Joan was left at home in a fever of desertion. Her brotherhood with
- Peter which had been perhaps the greatest fact of her girlhood was
- breaking down under the exasperation of their separation and her
- jealousy, and Huntley was steadily and persistently invading her
- imagination....
- Women and men alike are love-hungry creatures; women even more so than
- men. It is not beauty nor strength nor goodness that hearts go to so
- much as attention. To know that another human being thinks of us,
- esteems us above all our secret estimates, has a steadfast and consuming
- need of us, is the supreme reassurance of life. And when women’s hearts
- are distressed by vague passions and a friendless insecurity they will
- go out very readily even to a cripple who watches and waits.
- Huntley was one of those men for whom women are the sole interest in
- life. If he had been obliged to master a mathematical problem he would
- have thought he struggled with a Muse and so achieved it. He watched
- them and waylaid them for small and great occasions. He understood
- completely these states of wild impatience that possess the feminine
- mind. He had no brotherliness nor fatherliness in his composition: his
- sole conception of this trouble of the unmated was of an opportunity for
- himself. A little patience, a little thought—and it was very delightful
- thought, a little pleasant skill, and all this vague urgency would
- become a gift for him.
- But never before had Huntley met any one so fresh and youthfully
- beautiful as Joan. There were times when he could doubt whether he was
- the magnetizer or the magnetized. He had kissed her but he was not sure
- that she had kissed him. Some day she should kiss him of her own free
- will. He thought now almost continuously of Joan. The only work he could
- get on with was a novel into which he put things he had imagined about
- Joan. He wrote her long letters and planned for days to get an hour’s
- conversation with her. And he would go for long walks and spend all the
- time composing letters or scheming dramatic conversations that never
- would happen in reality because Joan missed all her cues.
- It was rather by instinct than by any set scheme that he did his utmost
- to convert her vague unrest into a discontent with all her
- circumstances, to shape her thoughts to the idea that her present life
- was a prison-house of which he held the key of escape. He suggested in a
- score of different ways to her mind that outside her present prison was
- a wonderland of beauty and excitement. He was clever enough to catch
- from her talk her love of the open, of fresh air and sunlight. He had
- more than a suspicion of Hetty Reinhart’s plans; he conveyed them by
- shadowy hints. Why should not Joan too defy convention? She could tell
- Oswald a story of a projected walk with some other girl at Cambridge,
- and slip away to Huntley. They had always been the best of companions.
- Why shouldn’t they take a holiday together?
- And why not?
- What was there to fear? Couldn’t she trust Huntley? Couldn’t she trust
- herself?
- To which something deep in Joan’s composition replied that this was but
- playing with passion and romance, and she wanted passion and romance.
- She wanted a reality—unendurably. And it was clear as day to her that
- she did not want passion and romance with Huntley. He was a strange
- being to her really, not differing as man does from woman but as dog
- does from cat; hidden deep down perhaps was some mysterious difference
- of race; he could amuse her and interest her because he was queer and
- unexpected, but he was not of her kind. Like to like was the way of the
- Sydenham blood. He offered and pointed to all that seemed to her
- necessary to make life right and to end this aching suspense—except that
- he was a stranger....
- The long sunny days of June dragged by. Suppose after all she were to
- slip away to Huntley. It would be a spree, it would be an excitement.
- Did he matter so much after all?...
- Peter sent a postcard and said he thought he would go on “with some
- people into Italy.”
- She had known—all along—that that was coming.
- She went out the night after that postcard came into the garden alone.
- It was a still and sultry evening, and she stifled even in the open air.
- She wanted to go up into the arbour and to sit there and think. She
- could not understand the quiver of anger that ran through her being like
- the shiver of the current on the surface of a stream. All the trees and
- bushes about her were dark and shapeless lumps of blackness and as she
- went up the path she trod on two snails.
- “Damn them!” she said at the second scrunch. “Phew! What a night. Full
- of things that crawl about in the darkness. Full of _beastly_
- things....”
- A little owl mewed and mocked wickedly among the trees.
- There was no view out of the black arbour, only the sense of a darkened
- world. A thin ineffectual moon crescent was sinking westward, and here
- and there were spiritless stars. A strange, huge shape of clouds, a
- hooded figure of the profoundest blue, brooded in a sky of luminous pale
- yellow over the land to the south and east, and along the under fringe
- of its skirts ever and again there ran a flicker of summer lightning.
- “And I am to live here! I am to live here while life runs by me,” she
- said.
- She would go to Huntley. No brother and sister business though! She
- would go to Huntley and end all this torment.
- But she couldn’t!...
- “Why have I no will?” she cried harshly.
- She did not love Huntley. That did not matter. She would _make_ herself
- love Huntley....
- She went out upon the terrace and stood very still, looking down upon
- the house and thinking hard.
- Could she love no one? If so, then it might as well be Huntley she went
- to as any one? All these boys, Troop, Winterbaum, Wilmington—they were
- nothing to her. But she wanted to live. Was it perhaps that she did love
- some one—who stood, invisible and unregarded, possessing her heart?
- Her mind halted on that for a time and then seemed to force itself along
- a certain line that lay before it. Did she love Oswald? She did. More
- than any of them—far more. The other night most certainly she had been
- in love with him. When he walked through the water with her—absurdly
- grave——! She could have flung her arms about him then. She could have
- clung to him and kissed him. Of course she must be in love with him....
- But he was not in love with her!... And yet that moonlit evening it
- seemed——?
- Suppose it were Oswald and not Huntley who beckoned.
- Love for Huntley—love him where you would—though you loved him in the
- most beautiful scenery in the world—would still be something vulgar,
- still be this dirty love of the studios, still a trite disobedience, a
- stolen satisfaction, after the fashion of the Reinhart affair. But
- Oswald was a great man, a kind and noble giant, who told no lies, who
- played no tricks....
- If he were to love one——!...
- She stood upon the terrace looking down upon the lit house, trembling
- with this thought that she loved Oswald and holding fast to it—for fear
- of another thought that she dared not think, that lay dark and waiting
- outside her consciousness, a poor exile thought, utterly forbidden.
- § 11
- Joan stood in the darkness on the turf outside Oswald’s open window, and
- watched him.
- He was so deep in thought that he had not noted the soft sounds of her
- approach. The only light in the room was his study lamp, and his face
- was in shadow while his hands rested on the open Atlas in front of him
- and were brightly lit. They were rather sturdy white hands with broad
- thumbs, exactly like Peter’s. Presently he stirred and pulled the Atlas
- towards him, and turned the page over to another map. The fingers of his
- left hand drummed on the desk.
- He looked up abruptly, and she came to the window and leant forward into
- the room, with her arms folded on the sill.
- “You’re as still as the night, Joan,” he said.
- “There’s thunder brewing.”
- “There’s war brewing, Joan.”
- “Why do you sit poring over that map?”
- “Because there are various people called Croats and Slovenes and Serbs
- and they are beginning to think they are one people and ought to behave
- as one people, and some of them are independent and some are under the
- Austrians and some are under the Italians.”
- “What has that got to do with us?” said Joan.
- She followed her question up with another. “Is it a fresh Balkan war?”
- “Something bigger than that,” said Oswald. “Something very much
- bigger—unless we are careful.”
- His tone was so grave that Joan caught something of his gravity. She
- stepped in through the window. “Where are all these people?” she said.
- She thought it was characteristic of him to trouble about these distant
- races and their entanglements. But she wished he could have a keener
- sense of the perplexities that came nearer him. She came and leant over
- him while he explained the political riddle of Austria and Eastern
- Europe to her....
- “We are too busy with the Irish trouble,” he said. “I am afraid of
- Germany. If that fool Carson and these Pankhurst people had been paid to
- distract our minds from what is happening, they could not do the work
- better. Big things are happening—oh! big things.”
- She tried to feel their bigness. But to her all such political talk was
- still as unreal as things one reads about in histories, something to do
- with maps and dates, something you can “get up” and pass examinations
- in, but nothing that touches the warm realities of personal life and
- beauty. Yet it pleased her to think that this Oswald she loved could
- reach up to these things, so that he partook of the nature of the great
- beings who cared for them like Gladstone or Lincoln, and was not simply
- a limited real person like Troop or Wilmington or Peter. (He was really
- like a great Peter, like what Peter ought to be.) He seemed preoccupied
- as if he did not feel how close she was about him, how close her beauty
- came to him. She sat now on the arm of his chair behind him, with her
- face over his shoulder. Her body touched his shoulders, by imperceptible
- degrees she brought her cheek against his crisp hair, where it pressed
- no heavier than a shadow.
- She had no suspicion how vividly he was aware of her nearness.
- As he discoursed to her upon the text of the maps before them, a deep
- undercurrent of memories and feelings of quite a different quality ran
- contrariwise through his mind. “We are getting nearer than we have ever
- been to a big European war, a big break-up! People do not understand, do
- not begin to dream of the smash-up that that would be. There is scarcely
- a country that may not be drawn in.”
- So he spoke. And below that level of thought he was irritated to feel
- that such thought could not wholly possess him. Far more real to him
- were the vague suggestions of love and the summer night and the dusky
- nearness of this Joan, this phantom of Dolly, for more and more were
- Joan and Dolly blending together in his emotional life, this dearness
- and sweetness that defied all reasoning and explanation. And cutting
- across both these streams of thought and feeling came a third stream of
- thought. Joan’s intonations in every word she spoke betrayed her
- indifference to the great net of political forces in which the world
- struggled. She was no more deeply interested than if he had been
- discussing some problem at chess or some mathematical point. She was not
- deeply interested and he was not completely interested, and yet this
- question that was slipping its hold on their attention might involve the
- lives and welfare of millions....
- He struggled with his conception of a world being hauled to its
- destruction in a net of vaguely apprehended ideas, of ordinary life
- being shattered not by the strength but by the unattractive feebleness
- of its political imaginings. “People do not understand,” he repeated,
- trying to make this thing real to himself. “All Europe is in danger.”
- He turned upon her with a betrayal of irritation in his voice. “You
- think all this matters nothing to us,” he said. “But it does. If Austria
- makes war in Serbia, Russia will come in. If Russia comes in, France
- comes in. That brings in Germany. We can’t see France beaten again. We
- can’t have that.”
- But Joan had still the child’s belief that somewhere, somehow, behind
- all the ostensible things of the world, wise adults in its interests
- have the affairs of mankind under control. “They won’t let things go as
- far as that,” she said.
- Oswald reflected upon that. How sure this creature was of her world!
- “Until Death and Judgment come, Joan,” he said, “there is neither Death
- nor Judgment.”
- That saying and his manner of saying it struck hard on her mind. Before
- she went to sleep that night she found herself trying to imagine what
- war was really like....
- And next day she was thinking of war. Would Peter perhaps have to be a
- soldier if there was a real great war? Would all her young men go
- soldiering? Would Oswald go? And what was there for a girl to do in
- war-time? She hated the idea of nursing, but she supposed she would have
- to nurse. Far rather would she go under fire and rescue wounded men. Had
- modern war no use for a Joan of Arc?... She sank to puerile visions of a
- girl in a sort of Vivandière uniform upholding a tattered flag under a
- heavy fire.... It couldn’t last very long.... It would be exciting....
- But all this was nonsense; there would be no war. There would be a
- conference or an arbitration or something dull of that sort, and all
- this stir and unrest would subside and leave things again—as they had
- been....
- Swiftly and steadfastly now the world was setting itself to tear up all
- the scenery of Joan’s world and to smash and burn its every property. If
- it had not been for the suggestion of Oswald’s deepening preoccupation
- one may doubt whether Joan would have heeded the huge rush of events in
- Europe until the moment of the crash. But because of him she was drawn
- into the excitement. From the twenty-fifth of July, which was the day
- when the news of the Austrian ultimatum to Serbia appeared in the
- English newspapers, through the swift rush of events that followed, the
- failure of the Irish Conference at Buckingham Palace to arrive at any
- settlement upon the Irish question, the attempts of Sir Edward Grey to
- arrest the march of events in Eastern Europe, the unchallenged march of
- five thousand men with machine-guns through Belfast, the shooting upon
- the crowd in Dublin after the Howth gun-running, the consequent
- encouragement of Germany and Austria to persist in a stiff course with
- Russia because of the apparent inevitability of civil war in Ireland,
- right up to the march of the Germans into Luxembourg on the first of
- August, Joan followed with an interest that had presently swamped her
- egotistical eroticism altogether.
- The second of August was a Sunday and brought no papers to Pelham Ford,
- but Joan motored to Bishop’s Stortford to get an _Observer_. Monday was
- Bank Holiday; the belated morning paper brought the news of the massacre
- of Belgian peasants by the Germans at Visé. The Germans were pouring
- into Belgium, an incredible host of splendidly armed men. Tuesday was an
- immense suspense for Oswald and Joan. They were full of an
- uncontrollable indignation against Germany. They thought the assault on
- Belgium the most evil thing that had ever happened in history. But it
- seemed as though the Government and the country hesitated. _The Daily
- News_ came to hand with a whole page advertisement in great letters
- exhorting England not to go to war for Belgium.
- “But this is Shame!” cried Oswald. “If once the Germans get Paris——! It
- is Shame and Disaster!”
- The postman was a reservist and had been called up. All over the country
- the posts were much disorganized. It was past eleven on the sunniest of
- Wednesdays when Joan, standing restless at the gates, called to Oswald,
- who was fretfully pacing the lawn, that the papers were coming. She ran
- down the road to intercept the postman, and came back with a handful of
- letters and parcels. Newspapers were far more important than any
- personal letters that morning. She gave Oswald the newspaper package to
- tear open, and snatched up _The Daily News_ as it fell out of the
- enveloping _Times_.
- There was a crisp rustling of the two papers.
- Oswald’s fear of his country’s mental apathy, muddle-headedness, levity,
- and absolute incapacity to grasp any great situation at all, had become
- monstrous under the stresses of these anxious days. Up to the end he
- feared some politicians’ procrastination, some idiot dishonesty and
- betrayal, weak palterings with a challenge as high as heaven, with
- dangers as plain as daylight....
- “Thank God!” he cried. “It is War!”
- CHAPTER THE THIRTEENTH
- JOAN AND PETER GRADUATE
- § 1
- So it was, with a shock like the shock of an unsuspected big gun fired
- suddenly within a hundred yards of her, that the education of Joan and
- her generation turned about and entered upon a new and tragic phase.
- Necessity had grown impatient with the inertia of the Universities and
- the evasions of politicians. Mankind must learn the duties of human
- brotherhood and respect for the human adventure, or waste and perish; so
- our stern teacher has decreed. If in peace time we cannot learn and
- choose between those alternatives, then through war we must. And if we
- will in no manner learn our lesson, then——. The rocks are rich with the
- traces of ineffective creatures that the Great Experimenter has tried
- and thrown aside....
- All these young people who had grown up without any clear aims or any
- definite sense of obligations, found themselves confronted, without
- notice, without any preparation, by a world crisis that was also a
- crisis of life or death, of honour or dishonour for each one of them.
- They had most of them acquired the habit of regarding the teachers and
- statesmen and authorities set up over their lives as people rather on
- the dull side of things, as people addicted to muddling and
- disingenuousness in matters of detail; but they had never yet suspected
- the terrific insecurity of the whole system—until this first thunderous
- crash of the downfall. Even then they did not fully realize themselves
- as a generation betrayed to violence and struggle and death. All human
- beings, all young things, are born with a conviction that all is right
- with the world. There is mother to go to and father to go to, and behind
- them the Law; for most of the generation that came before Joan and Peter
- the delusion of a great safety lasted on far into adult life; only
- slowly, with maturity, came the knowledge of the flimsiness of all these
- protections and the essential dangerousness of the world. But for this
- particular generation the disillusionment came like an unexpected blow
- in the face. They were preparing themselves in a leisurely and critical
- fashion for the large, loose prospect of unlimited life, and then
- abruptly the world dropped its mask. That pampered and undisciplined
- generation was abruptly challenged to be heroic beyond all the
- precedents of mankind. Their safety, their freedom ended, their leisure
- ended. The first few days of August, 1914, in Europe, was a spectacle of
- old men planning and evading, lying and cheating, most of them so scared
- by what they were doing as completely to have lost their heads, and of
- youth and young men everywhere being swept from a million various
- employments, from a million divergent interests and purposes, which they
- had been led to suppose were the proper interests and purposes of life,
- towards the great military machines that were destined to convert,
- swiftly and ruthlessly, all their fresh young life into rags and blood
- and rotting flesh....
- But at first the young had no clear sense of the witless futility of the
- machine that was to crush their lives. They did not understand that
- there was as yet no conception of a world order anywhere in the world.
- They had taken it for granted that there was an informal, tacitly
- understood world order, at which these Germans—confound them!—had
- suddenly struck.
- Peter and his friends were so accustomed to jeer at the dignitaries of
- church and state and at kings and politicians that they could not
- realize that such dwarfish and comic characters could launch disaster
- upon a whole world. They sat about a little table in a twilit arbour on
- the way down from Bel-Alp—Peter was to leave the climbers and join the
- Italian party at Brigue—and devoured omelette and veal and drank Yvorne,
- and mocked over the Swiss newspapers.
- “Another ultimatum!” said one cheerful youth. “Holland will get it
- next.”
- “He’s squirting ultimatums. Like a hedgehog throwing quills.”
- “I saw him in Berlin,” said Peter. “He rushed by in an automobile. He
- isn’t a human being. He’s more like Mr. Toad in _The Wind in the
- Willows_....”
- “All the French have gone home; all the Germans,” said Troop. “I suppose
- we ought to go.”
- “I’ve promised to go to Italy,” said Peter.
- “War is war,” said Troop, and stiffened Peter’s resolution.
- “I’m not going to have my holidays upset by a theatrical ass in a gilt
- helmet,” said Peter.
- He got down to Brigue next day, and the little town was bright with
- uniforms, for the Swiss were mobilizing. He saw off his mountaineering
- friends in the evening train for Paris. “You’d better come,” said Troop
- gravely, hanging out of the train.
- Peter shook his head. His was none of your conscript nations. No....
- He dined alone; Hetty and her two friends were coming up from Lausanne
- next day. In the reading-room he found the _Times_ with the first news
- of the invasion of Belgium. Several of the villagers of Visé had turned
- out with shot guns, and the Germans had performed an exemplary massacre
- for the discouragement of franc-tireurs. Indignation had been gathering
- in Peter during the day. He swore aloud and flung down the paper. “Is
- there no one sane enough to assassinate a scoundrel who sets things
- loose like this?” he said. He prowled about the little old town in the
- moonlight, full of black rage against the Kaiser. He felt he must go
- back. But it seemed to him a terrible indignity that he should have to
- interrupt his holiday because of the ambition of a monarch. “Why the
- devil can’t the Germans keep him on his chain?” he said, and then,
- “Shooting the poor devils—like rabbits!”
- Hetty and her friends arrived in the early train next morning, all agog
- about the war. They thought it a tremendous lark. They were not to get
- out at Brigue, it was arranged; Peter was to be on the platform with his
- rucksack and join them. He kept the appointment, but he was a very
- scowling Peter in spite of the fact that Hetty was gentle and tremulous
- at the sight of him in her best style. “This train is an hour late,”
- said Peter, sitting down beside her. “That accursed fool at Potsdam is
- putting all our Europe out of gear.”...
- For three days he was dark, preoccupied company. “Somebody ought to
- assassinate him,” he said, harping on that idea. “Have men no
- self-respect at all?”
- He felt he ought to go back to England, and the feeling produced a bleak
- clearness in his mind. It was soft sunshine on the lake of Orta, but
- east wind in Peter’s soul. He disliked Hetty’s friends extremely; he had
- never met them before; they were a vulgar brace of sinners he thought,
- and they reflected their quality upon her. The war they considered was
- no concern of theirs; they had studio minds. The man was some sort of
- painter, middle-aged, contemptuous, and with far too much hair. He ought
- to have been past this sort of spree. The girl was a model and had never
- been in Italy before. She kept saying, “O, the _sky_!” until it jarred
- intolerably. The days are notoriously longer on the lake of Orta than
- anywhere else in the world; from ten o’clock in the morning to lunch
- time is about as long as a week’s imprisonment; from two to five is
- twice that length; from five onward the course of time at Orta is more
- normal. Hetty was Hetty, in the tradition of Cleopatra, but could
- Cleopatra hold a young man whose mind was possessed by one unquenchable
- thought that he had been grossly insulted and deranged by an
- exasperating potentate at Potsdam who was making hay of his entire
- world, and that he had to go at once and set things right, and that it
- was disgraceful not to go?
- He broached these ideas to Hetty about eleven o’clock on their first
- morning upon the lake. They were adrift in a big tilted boat in the
- midst of a still, glassy symmetry of mountain-backed scenery and
- mountain-backed reflections, and the other couple was far away, a little
- white dot at the head of a V of wake, rowing ambitiously to the end of
- the lake.
- “You can’t go,” said Hetty promptly....
- “But I have come all the way to Italy for you!” cried Hetty....
- This was a perplexing problem for the honour of a young man of
- one-and-twenty. He argued the case—weakly. He had an audience of one, a
- very compelling one. He decided to remain. In the night he woke up and
- thought of Troop. Old Troop must be in England by now. Perhaps he had
- already enlisted. Ever since their school days he and Troop had had a
- standing dispute upon questions of morals and duty. There was something
- dull and stiff about old Troop that drove a bright antagonist to laxity,
- but after all——? Troop had cut off clean and straight to his duty....
- Because Troop wasn’t entangled. He had kept clear of all this
- love-making business.... There was something to be said for Troop’s
- point of view after all....
- The second day Peter reopened the question of going as they sat on a
- stone seat under the big, dark trees on the Sacro Monte, and looked out
- under the drooping boughs upon the lake, and Hetty had far more trouble
- with him. He decided he could not leave her. But he spent the hours
- between tea and dinner in reading all the war news he could
- find—translating the Italian with the aid of a small conversation
- dictionary. Something had happened in the North Sea, he could not make
- out exactly what it was, but the Germans had lost a ship called the
- _Königin Luise_, and the British a battleship—was it a battleship?—the
- _Amphion_. Beastly serious that!—a battleship. There was something
- vague, too, about a fleet encounter, but no particulars. It was a bore
- getting no particulars. Here close at hand in the Mediterranean there
- had been, it was said, a naval battle in the Straits of Messina also;
- the _Panther_ was sunk; and the Germans had had a great defeat at Liége.
- The British army was already landing in France....
- Upon his second decision to remain Peter reflected profoundly that
- night.
- The standing dispute between him and Troop upon the lightness or
- seriousness of things sexual returned to his mind. Troop, Peter held,
- regarded all these things with a portentous solemnity, a monstrous
- sentimentality. Peter, Troop maintained, regarded them with a dangerous
- levity. Troop declared that love, “true love,” was, next to “honour,”
- the most tremendous thing in life; he was emphatic upon “purity.” Peter
- held that love was as light and pleasant and incidental a thing as
- sunshine. You said, “Here’s a jolly person!” just as you said, “Here’s a
- pretty flower!” There had been, he argued, a lot of barbaric “Taboos” in
- these matters, but the new age was dropping all that. He called Troop’s
- idea of purity “ceremonial obsession.” Both talked very freely of
- “cleanness” and meant very different things: Troop chiefly abstinence
- and Peter baths. Peter had had the courage of his opinions; but once or
- twice he had doubted secretly whether, after all, there weren’t
- defilements beyond the reach of mere physical cleansing. One dismissed
- that sort of thing as “reaction.” All these disputes were revived now in
- his memory in the light of this one plain, disconcerting fact: Troop had
- gone straight home to enlist and he himself was still in Italy.
- Weakening of moral fibre? Loss of moral fibre?
- The next day, in the boat, Peter reopened the question of his departure.
- “You see, Hetty,” he said, “if there was conscription in England—I
- shouldn’t feel so bound to go.”
- “But then you would be bound to go.”
- “Well, then I could be a decent deserter—for love’s sake. But when your
- country leaves it to you to come back or not as you think fit—then, you
- know, you’re bound—in honour.”
- Hetty dabbled her hand over the side of the boat. “Oh—_go_!” she said.
- “Yes,” said Peter over the oars, and as if ashamed, “I must go—I must.
- There is a train this afternoon which catches the express at Domo
- d’Ossola.”
- He rowed for a while. Presently he stole a glance at Hetty. She was
- lying quite still on her cushion under the tilt, staring at the distant
- mountains, with tears running down her set face. They were real tears.
- “Three days,” she said choking, and at that rolled over to weep noisily
- upon her arms.
- Peter sat over his oars and stared helplessly at her emotion.
- A familiar couplet came into his head, and remained unspoken because of
- its striking inappropriateness:
- “I could not love thee, dear, so much,
- Loved I not honour more.”
- Presently Hetty lay still. Then she sat up and wiped at a tear-stained
- face.
- “If you must go,” said Hetty, “you must go. But why you didn’t go from
- Brigue——!”
- That problem was to exercise Peter’s mind considerably in the extensive
- reflections of the next few days and nights.
- “And I have to stick in Italy with those two Bores!”...
- But the easy flexibility of Hetty’s temperament was a large part of her
- charm.
- “I suppose you ought to go, Peter,” she said, “really. I had no business
- to try and keep you. But I’ve had so little of you. And I love you.”
- She melted. Peter melted in sympathy. But he was much relieved....
- She slipped into his bedroom to help him pack his rucksack, and she went
- with him to the station. “I wish I was a man, too,” she said. “Then I
- would come with you. But wars don’t last for ever, Peter. We’ll come
- back here.”
- She watched the train disappear along the curve above the station with
- something like a sense of desolation. Then being a really very
- stout-hearted young woman, she turned about and went down to the
- telegraph office to see what could be done to salvage her rent and
- shattered holiday.
- And Peter, because of these things, and because of certain delays at
- Paris and Havre, for the train and Channel services were getting badly
- disorganized, got to England six whole days later than Troop.
- § 2
- This passion of indignation against Germany in which Peter enlisted was
- the prevailing mood of England during the opening months of the war. The
- popular mind had seized upon the idea that Europe had been at peace and
- might have remained at peace indefinitely if it had not been for the
- high-handed behaviour, first of Austria with Serbia, and then of Germany
- with Russia. The belief that on the whole Germany had prepared for and
- sought this war was no doubt correct, and the spirit of the whole nation
- rose high and fine to the challenge. But that did not so completely
- exhaust the moral factors in the case as most English people, including
- Peter, supposed at that time.
- Neither Peter nor Joan, although they were members of the best educated
- class in the community and had been given the best education available
- for that class, had any but the vaguest knowledge of what was going on
- in the political world. They knew practically nothing of what a modern
- imperial system consisted, had but the vaguest ideas of the rôle of
- Foreign Office, Press and Parliament in international affairs, were
- absolutely ignorant of the direction of the army and navy, knew nothing
- of the history of Germany or Russia during the previous half-century, or
- the United States since the Declaration of Independence, had no inklings
- of the elements of European ethnology, and had scarcely ever heard such
- words, for example, as Slovene, or Slovak, or Ukrainian. The items of
- foreign intelligence in the newspapers joined on to no living historical
- conceptions in their minds. Between the latest history they had read and
- the things that happened about them and in which they were now
- helplessly involved, was a gap of a hundred years or more; the profound
- changes in human life and political conditions brought about during that
- hundred years by railways, telegraphs, steam shipping, steel castings
- and the like, were all beyond the scope of their ideas. For Joan history
- meant stories about Joan of Arc, Jane Shore, the wives of Henry the
- Eighth, James I. and his Steenie, Charles the Second, and suchlike
- people, winding up with the memoirs of Madame d’Arblay; Peter had ended
- his historical studies when he went on to the modern side at Caxton—it
- would have made little difference so far as modern affairs were
- concerned if he had taken a degree in history—and was chiefly conversant
- with such things as the pedigree of the Electress Sophia of Hanover, the
- Constitutions of Clarendon, the statute of Mortmain, and the claims of
- Edward the Third and Henry the Fifth to the crown of France. Neither of
- them knew anything at all of India except by way of Kipling’s stories
- and the Coronation Durbar pictures. If the two of them had rather
- clearer ideas than most of their associates about the recent opening up
- and partition of Africa it was because Oswald had talked about those
- things. But the jostling for empire that had been going on for the past
- fifty years all over the world, and the succession of Imperialist
- theories from Disraeli to Joseph Chamberlain and from Bismarck to
- Treitschke, had no place in their thoughts. The _entente cordiale_ was a
- phrase of no particular significance to them. The State in which they
- lived had never explained to them in any way its relations to them nor
- its fears and aims in regard to the world about it. It is doubtful,
- indeed, if the State in which they lived possessed the mentality to
- explain as much even to itself.
- How far the best education in America or Germany or any other country
- was better, it is not for us to discuss here, nor how much better
- education might be. This is the story of the minds of Joan and Peter and
- of how that vast system of things hidden, things unanalysed and things
- misrepresented and obscured, the political system of the European
- “empires” burst out into war about them. The sprawling, clumsy, heedless
- British State, which had troubled so little about taking Peter into its
- confidence, displayed now no hesitation whatever in beckoning him home
- to come and learn as speedily as possible how to die for it.
- The tragedy of youth in the great war was a universal tragedy, and if
- the German youths who were now, less freely and more systematically,
- beating Peter by weeks and months in a universal race into uniform, were
- more instructed than he, they were also far more thoroughly misinformed.
- If Peter took hold of the war by the one elemental fact that Belgium had
- been invaded most abominably and peaceful villagers murdered in their
- own fields, the young Germans on the other hand had been trained to a
- whole system of false interpretations. They were assured that they
- fought to break up a ring of threatening enemies. And that the whole
- thing was going to be the most magnificent adventure in history. Their
- minds had been prepared elaborately and persistently for this heroic
- struggle—in which they were to win easily. They had been made to believe
- themselves a race of blond aristocrats above all the rest of mankind,
- entitled by their moral and mental worth to world dominion. They
- believed that now they did but come to their own. They had been taught
- all these things from childhood; how could they help but believe them?
- Peter arrived, tired and dirty, at Pelham Ford in the early afternoon.
- Oswald and Joan were out, but he bathed and changed while Mrs. Moxton
- got him a belated lunch. As he finished this Joan came into the
- dining-room from a walk.
- “Hullo, Petah,” she said, with no display of affection.
- “Hullo, Joan.”
- “We thought you were never coming.”
- “I was in Italy,” said Peter.
- “H’m,” said Joan, and seemed to reckon in her mind.
- “Nobby is in London,” she said. “He thinks he might help about East
- Africa. It’s his country practically.... Are you going to enlist?”
- “What else?” said Peter, tapping a cigarette on the table. “It’s a
- beastly bore.”
- “Bunny’s gone,” said Joan. “And Wilmington.”
- “They’ve written?”
- “Willy came to see me.”
- “Heard from any of the others?”
- “Oh!... Troop.”
- “Enlisted?”
- “Cadet.”
- “Any one else?”
- “No,” said Joan, and hovered whistling faintly for a moment and then
- walked out of the room....
- She had been counting the hours for four days, perplexed by his delay;
- his coming had seemed the greatest event in the world, for she had never
- doubted he would come back to serve, and now that he had come she met
- him like this!
- § 3
- They dressed for dinner that night because Oswald came back tired and
- vexed from London and wanted a bath before dining. “They seemed to be
- sending everybody to East Africa on the principle that any one who’s
- been there before ought not to go again,” he grumbled. “I can’t see any
- other principle in it.” He talked at first of the coming East African
- campaign because he hesitated to ask Peter what he intended to do. Then
- he went on to the war news. The Germans had got Liége. That was certain
- now. They had smashed the forts to pieces with enormous cannon. There
- had been a massacre of civilians at Dinant. Joan did not talk very much,
- but sat and watched Peter closely with an air of complete indifference.
- There was a change in him, and she could not say exactly what this
- change was. The sunshine and snow glare and wind of the high mountains
- had tanned his face to a hard bronze and he was perceptibly leaner; that
- made him look older perhaps; but the difference was more than that. She
- knew her Peter so well that she could divine a new thought in him.
- “And what are you going to do, Peter?” said Oswald, coming to it
- abruptly.
- “I’m going to enlist.”
- “In the ranks, you mean?” Oswald had expected that.
- “Yes.”
- “You ought not to do that.”
- “Why not?”
- “You have your cadet corps work behind you. You ought to take a
- commission. We shan’t have too many officers.”
- Peter considered that.
- “I want to begin in the ranks.... I want discipline.”
- (Had some moral miracle happened to Peter? This was quite a new note
- from our supercilious foster brother.)
- “You’ll get discipline enough in the cadet corps.”
- “I want to begin right down at the bottom of the ladder.”
- “Well, if you get a rotten drill sergeant, I’m told, it’s disagreeable.”
- “All the better.”
- “They’ll find you out and push you into a commission,” said Oswald. “If
- not, it’s sheer waste.”
- “Well, I want to feel what discipline is like—before I give orders,”
- said Peter. “I want to be told to do things and asked why the devil I
- haven’t done ’em smartly. I’ve been going too easy. The ranks will brace
- me up.”
- (Yes, this was a new note. Had that delay of four or five days anything
- to do with this?... Joan, with a start, discovered that she was holding
- up the dinner, and touched the electric bell at her side for the course
- to be changed.)
- “I suppose we shall all have to brace up,” said Oswald. “It still seems
- a little unreal. The French have lost Mulhausen again, they say, but
- they are going strong for Metz. There’s not a word about our army. It’s
- just crossed over and vanished....”
- (Queer to sit here, dining in the soft candlelight, and to think of the
- crowded roads and deploying troops, the thudding guns and bursting
- shells away there behind that veil of secrecy—millions of men in France
- and Belgium fighting for the world. And Peter would go off tomorrow.
- Presently he would be in uniform; presently he would be part of a
- marching column. He would go over—into the turmoil. Beyond that her
- imagination would not pass.)
- “I wish I could enlist,” said Joan.
- “They’re getting thousands of men more than they can handle as it is,”
- said Oswald. “They don’t want you.”
- “You’d have thought they’d have had things planned and ready for this,”
- said Peter.
- “Nothing is ready,” said Oswald. “Nothing is planned. This war has
- caught our war office fast asleep. It isn’t half awake even now.”
- “There ought to be something for women to do,” said Joan.
- “There ought to be something for every one to do,” said Oswald bitterly,
- “but there isn’t. This country isn’t a State; it’s a crowd adrift. Did
- you notice, Peter, as you came through London, the endless multitudes of
- people just standing about? I’ve never seen London like that before.
- People not walking about their business, but just standing.”...
- Peter told of things he had seen on his way home. “The French are in a
- scowling state. All France scowls at you, and Havre is packed with
- bargains in touring cars—just left about—by rich people coming home....”
- So the talk drifted. And all the time Joan watched Peter as acutely and
- as unsuspectedly as a mother might watch a grown-up son. Tomorrow
- morning he would go off and join up. But it wasn’t that which made him
- grave. New experiences always elated Peter. And he wouldn’t be afraid;
- not he.... She had been let into the views of three other young men who
- had gone to war already; Troop had written, correctly and consciously
- heroic, “_Some of the chaps seem to be getting a lot of emotion into
- it_,” said Troop. “_It’s nothing out of the way that I can see. One just
- falls into the line of one’s uncles and cousins._”
- Wilmington had said: “I just wanted to see you, Joan. I’m told I’ll be
- most useful as a gunner because of my mathematics. When it comes to
- going over, you won’t forget to think of me, Joan?”
- Joan answered truthfully. “I’ll think of you a lot, Billy.”
- “There’s nothing in life like you, Joan,” said Wilmington in his white
- expressionless way. “Well, I suppose I’d better be going.”
- But Bunny had discoursed upon fear. “_I’ve enlisted_,” he wrote,
- “_chiefly because I’m afraid of going Pacifist right out—out of funk.
- But it’s hell, Joan. I’m afraid in my bones. I hate bangs, and they say
- the row of modern artillery is terrific. I’ve never seen a dead body, a
- human dead body, I mean, ever. Have you? I would go round a quarter of a
- mile out of my way any time to dodge a butcher’s shop. I was sick when I
- found Peter dissecting a rabbit. You know, sick, à la Manche. No
- metaphors. I shall run away, I know I shall run away. But we’ve got to
- stop these beastly Germans anyhow. It isn’t killing the Germans I shall
- mind—I’m fierce on Germans, Joan; but seeing the chaps on stretchers or
- lying about with all sorts of horrible injuries._”
- Sheets of that sort of thing, written in an unusually bad
- handwriting—apparently rather to comfort himself than to sustain Joan.
- Well, it wasn’t Peter’s way to think beforehand of being “on stretchers
- or lying about,” but Bunny’s scribblings had got the stretchers into
- Joan’s thoughts. And it made her wish somehow that Peter, instead of
- being unusually grave and choosing to be a ranker, was taking this job
- with his usual easy confidence and going straight and gaily for a
- commission.
- After dinner they all sat out in garden chairs, outside the library
- window, and had their coffee and smoked. Joan got her chair and drew it
- close to Peter’s. Two hundred miles away and less was battle and
- slaughter, perhaps creeping nearer to them, the roaring of great guns,
- the rattle of rifle fire, the hoarse shouts of men attacking, and a
- gathering harvest of limp figures “on stretchers and lying about”; but
- that evening at Pelham Ford was a globe of golden serenity. Not a leaf
- stirred, and only the little squeaks and rustlings of small creatures
- that ran and flitted in the dusk ruffled the quiet air.
- Oswald made Peter talk of his climbing. “My only mountain is
- Kilimanjaro,” he said. “No great thing so far as actual climbing goes.”
- Peter had begun with the Dolomites, had gone over to Adelboden, and then
- worked round by the Concordia Hut to Bel Alp. “Was it very beautiful?”
- asked Joan softly under his elbow.
- “You could have done it all. I wish you had come,” said Peter.
- There was a pause.
- “And Italy?” said Joan, still more softly.
- “Where did you go in Italy, Peter?” said Oswald, picking up her
- question.
- Peter gave a travel-book description of Orta and the Isle of San Giulio.
- Joan sat as still and watchful as a little cat watching for a mouse.
- (Something had put Peter out in Italy.)
- “It’s off the main line,” said Peter. “The London and Paris papers don’t
- arrive, and one has to fall back on the _Corriere della Sera_.”
- “Very good paper too,” said Oswald.
- “News doesn’t seem so real in a language you don’t understand.”
- He was excusing himself. So he was ashamed to that extent. That was what
- was bothering him. One might have known he wouldn’t care for—those other
- things....
- Late that night Joan sat in her room thinking. Presently she unlocked
- her writing-desk and took out and re-read a letter. It was from Huntley
- in Cornwall, and it was very tender and passionate. “_The world has gone
- mad, dearest_,” it ran; “_but we need not go mad. The full moon is
- slipping by. I lay out on the sands last night praying for you to come,
- trying to will you to come. Oh—when are you coming?_”...
- And much more to the same effect....
- Joan’s face hardened. “Po’try,” she said. She took a sharpened pencil
- from the glass tray upon her writing-table and regarded it. The pencil
- was finely pointed—too finely pointed. She broke off the top with the
- utmost care and tested the blunt point on her blotting-paper to see if
- it was broad enough for her purpose. Then she scrawled her reply across
- his letter—in five words: “_You ought to enlist. Joan_,” and addressed
- an envelope obliquely in the same uncivil script.
- After which she selected sundry other letters and a snap-shot giving a
- not unfavourable view of Huntley from her desk, and having scrutinized
- the latter for an interval, tore them all carefully into little bits and
- dropped them into her wastepaper basket. She stood regarding these
- fragments for some time. “I might have gone to him,” she whispered at
- last, and turned away.
- She blew out her candle, hesitated by her bedside, and walked to the
- open window to watch the moon rise.
- She sat upon her window-sill like a Joan of marble for a long time. Then
- she produced one of those dark sayings with which she was wont to wrap
- rather than express her profounder thoughts.
- “Queer how suddenly one discovers at last what one has known all
- along.... Queer....
- “Well, I know anyhow.”...
- She stood up at last and yawned. “But I don’t like war,” said Joan.
- “Stretchers! Or lying about! Groaning. In the darkness. Boys one has
- danced with. Oh! beastly. _Beastly!_”
- She forgot her intention of undressing, put her foot on the sill, and
- rested chin on fist and elbow on knee, scowling out at the garden as
- though she saw things that she did not like there.
- § 4
- So it was that Joan saw the beginning of the great winnowing of mankind,
- and Peter came home in search of his duty.
- Within the first month of the war nearly every one of the men in Joan’s
- world had been spun into the vortex; hers was so largely a world of
- young or unattached people, with no deep roots in business or employment
- to hold them back. Even Oswald at last, in spite of many rebuffs, found
- a use for himself in connection with a corps of African labourers behind
- the front, and contrived after a steady pressure of many months towards
- the danger zone, to get himself wounded while he was talking to some of
- his dear Masai at an ammunition dump. A Hun raider dropped a bomb, and
- some flying splinters of wood cut him deeply and extensively. The
- splinters were vicious splinters; there were complications; and he found
- himself back at Pelham Ford before the end of 1916, aged by ten years.
- The Woman’s Legion captured Joan from the date of its formation, and
- presently had her driving a car for the new Ministry of Munitions, which
- came into existence in the middle of 1915.
- Her career as a chauffeuse was a brilliant one. She lived, after the
- free manner of the Legion, with Miss Jepson at Hampstead; she went down
- every morning to her work, she drove her best and her best continually
- improved, so that she became distinguished among her fellows. The
- Ministry grew aware of her and proud of her. A time arrived when
- important officials quarrelled to secure her for their journeys. Eminent
- foreign visitors invariably found themselves behind her.
- “But she drives like a man,” they would say, a little breathlessly,
- after some marvellously skidded corner.
- “All our girls drive like this,” the Ministry of Munitions would remark,
- carelessly, loyally, but untruthfully.
- Joan’s habitual wear became khaki; she had puttees and stout boots and
- little brass letterings upon her shoulders and sleeves, and the only
- distinctive touches she permitted herself were the fur of her overcoat
- collar and a certain foppery about her gauntlets....
- Extraordinary and profound changes of mood and relationship occurred in
- the British mind during those first two years of the war, and reflected
- themselves upon the minds of Joan and Peter. To begin with, and for
- nearly a year, there was a quality of spectacularity about the war for
- the British. They felt it to be an immense process and a vitally
- significant process; they read, they talked, they thought of little
- else; but it was not yet felt to be an intimate process. The habit of
- detachment was too deeply ingrained. Great Britain was an island of
- onlookers. To begin with the war seemed like something tremendous and
- arresting going on in an arena. “Business as usual,” said the business
- man, putting up the price of anything the country seemed to need. There
- was a profound conviction that British life and the British community
- were eternal things; they might play a part—a considerable part—in these
- foreign affairs; they might even have to struggle, but it was
- inconceivable that they should change or end. September and October in
- 1914 saw an immense wave of volunteer enthusiasm—enthusiasm for the most
- part thwarted and wasted by the unpreparedness of the authorities for
- anything of the sort, but it was the enthusiasm of an audience eager to
- go on the stage; it was not the enthusiasm of performers in the arena
- and unable to quit the arena, fighting for life or death. To secure any
- sort of official work was to step out of the undistinguished throng. In
- uniform one felt dressed up and part of the pageant. Young soldiers were
- self-conscious in those early days, and inclined to pose at the ordinary
- citizen. The ordinary citizen wanted to pat young soldiers on the back
- and stand them drinks out of his free largesse. They were “in it,” he
- felt, and he at most was a patron of the affair.
- That spectacularity gave way to a sense of necessary participation only
- very slowly indeed. The change began as the fresh, bright confidence
- that the Battle of the Marne had begotten gave place to a deepening
- realization of the difficulties on the road to any effective victory.
- The persuasion spread from mind to mind that if Great Britain was to
- fight this war as she had lived through sixty years of peace, the
- gentleman amateur among the nations, she would lose this war. The change
- of spirit that produced its first marked result in the creation of the
- Ministry of Munitions with a new note of quite unofficial hustle, and
- led on through a series of inevitable steps to the adoption of
- conscription, marks a real turning about of the British mind, the close
- of a period of chaotic freedom almost unprecedented in the history of
- communities. It was the rediscovery of the State as the necessary form
- into which the individual life must fit.
- To the philosophical historian of the future the efforts of governing
- and leading people in Great Britain to get wills together, to explain
- necessities, to supplement the frightful gaps in the education of every
- class by hastily improvised organizations, by speeches, press-campaigns,
- posters, circulars, cinema shows, parades and proclamations; hasty,
- fitful, ill-conducted and sometimes dishonestly conducted appeals though
- they were, will be far more interesting than any story of battles and
- campaigns. They remind one of a hand scrambling in the dark for
- something long neglected and now found to be vitally important; they are
- like voices calling in a dark confusion. They were England seeking to
- comprehend herself and her situation after the slumber of two centuries.
- But to people like Joan and Peter, who were not philosophical
- historians, the process went on, not as a process, but as an apparently
- quite disconnected succession of events. Imperceptibly their thoughts
- changed and were socialized. Joan herself had no suspicion of the
- difference in orientation between the Joan who stood at her bedroom
- window in August, 1914, the most perfect spectator of life, staring out
- at the darkness of the garden, dumbly resenting the call that England
- was making upon the free lives of all her friends, and the Joan of 1917,
- in khaki and a fur-collared coat, who slung a great car with a swift,
- unerring confidence through the London traffic and out to Woolwich or
- Hendon or Waltham or Aldershot or Chelmsford or what not, keen and
- observant of the work her passengers discussed, a conscious part now of
- a great and growing understanding and criticism and will, of a
- rediscovered unity, which was England—awakening.
- Youth grew wise very fast in those tremendous years. From the simple and
- spectacular acceptance of every obvious appearance, the younger minds
- passed very rapidly to a critical and intricate examination. In the
- first blaze of indignation against Germany, in the first enthusiasm,
- there was a disposition to trust and confide in every one in a position
- of authority and responsibility. The War Office was supposed—against
- every possibility—to be planning wisely and acting rapidly; the wisdom
- of the Admiralty was taken for granted, the politicians now could have
- no end in view but victory. It was assumed that Sir Edward Carson could
- become patriotic, Lord Curzon self-forgetful, Mr. Asquith energetic, and
- Mr. Lloyd George straightforward. It was indeed a phase of extravagant
- idealism. Throughout the opening weeks of the war there was an
- appearance, there was more than an appearance, of a common purpose and a
- mutual confidence. The swift response of the Irish to the call of the
- time, the generous loyalty of India, were like intimations of a new age.
- The whole Empire was uplifted; a flush of unwonted splendour suffused
- British affairs.
- Then the light faded again. There was no depth of understanding to
- sustain it; habit is in the long run a more powerful thing than even the
- supremest need. In a little time all the inglorious characteristics of
- Britain at peace, the double-mindedness, the slackness, were reappearing
- through the glow of warlike emotion. Fifty years of undereducation are
- not to be atoned for in a week of crisis. The men in power were just the
- same men. The inefficient were still inefficient; the individualists
- still self-seeking. The party politicians forgot their good resolutions,
- and reverted to their familiar intrigues and manœuvres. Redmond and
- Ireland learnt a bitter lesson of the value of generosity in the face of
- such ignorant and implacable antagonists as the Carsonites. Britain, it
- became manifest, had neither the greatness of education nor yet the
- simplicity of will to make war brilliantly or to sustain herself
- splendidly. At every point devoted and able people found themselves
- baffled by the dull inertias of the old system. And the clear flame of
- enthusiasm that blazed out from the youth of the country at the first
- call of the war was coloured more and more by disillusionment as that
- general bickering which was British public life revived again, and a
- gathering tale of waste, failure, and needless suffering mocked the
- reasonable expectation of a swift and glorious victory.
- The change in the thought and attitude of the youth of Britain is to be
- found expressed very vividly in the war poetry of the successive years.
- Such glowing young heroes as Julian Grenfell and Rupert Brooke shine
- with a faith undimmed; they fight consciously, confident of the nearness
- of victory; they sing and die in what they believe to be a splendid
- cause and for a splendid end. An early death in the great war was not an
- unmitigated misfortune. Three years later the young soldier’s mind found
- a voice in such poetry as that of young Siegfried Sassoon, who came home
- from the war with medals and honours only to denounce the war in verse
- of the extremest bitterness. His song is no longer of picturesque
- nobilities and death in a glorious cause; it is a cry of anger at the
- old men who have led the world to destruction; of anger against the
- dull, ignorant men who can neither make war nor end war; the men who
- have lost the freshness and simplicity but none of the greed and egotism
- of youth. Germany is no longer the villain of the piece. Youth turns
- upon age, upon laws and institutions, upon the whole elaborate
- rottenness of the European system, saying: “_What is this to which you
- have brought us? What have you done with our lives?_”
- No story of these years can ever be true that does not pass under a
- shadow. Of the little group of youths and men who have figured in this
- story thus far, there was scarcely one who was not either killed
- outright or crippled or in some way injured in the Great War—excepting
- only Huntley. Huntley developed a deepening conscience against warfare
- as the war went on, and suffered nothing worse than some unpleasant
- half-hours with Tribunals and the fatigues of agricultural labour.
- Death, which had first come to Joan as a tragic end to certain
- “kittays,” was now the familiar associate of her every friend. Her
- confidence in the safety of the world, in the wisdom of human laws and
- institutions, in the worth and dignity of empires and monarchs, and the
- collective sanity of mankind was withdrawn as a veil is withdrawn, from
- the harsh realities of life.
- Wilmington, with his humourless intensity, was one of the first to bring
- home to her this disillusionment and tragedy of the youth of the world.
- He liked pure mathematics; it was a subject in which he felt
- comfortable. He had worked well in the first part of the mathematical
- tripos, and he was working hard in the second part when the war broke
- out. He fluctuated for some days between an utter repudiation of all war
- and an immediate enlistment, and it was probably the light and colour of
- Joan in his mind that made Wilmington a warrior. War was a business of
- killing, he decided, and what he had to do was to apply himself and his
- mathematics to gunnery as efficiently as possible, learning as rapidly
- as might be all that was useful about shells, guns and explosives, and
- so get to the killing of Germans thoroughly, expeditiously, and
- abundantly. He was a particularly joyless young officer, white-faced and
- intent, with an appearance of scorn that presently developed from
- appearance into reality, for most of his colleagues. He was working as
- hard and as well as he could. At first with incredulity and then with
- disgust he realized that the ordinary British officer was not doing so.
- They sang songs, they ragged, they left things to chance, they thought
- blunders funny, they condoned silliness and injustice in the powers
- above. He would not sing nor rag nor drink. He worked to the verge of
- exhaustion. But this exemplary conduct, oddly enough, did not make him
- unpopular either with the junior officers or with his seniors. The
- former tolerated him and rather admired him; the latter put work upon
- him and sought to promote him.
- In quite a little while as it seemed—for in those days, while each day
- seemed long and laborious and heavy, yet the weeks and months passed
- swiftly—he was a captain in France, and before the end of 1915 he wrote
- to say that his major had left him practically in command of his battery
- for three weeks. He had been twice slightly wounded by that time, but he
- got little leisure because he was willing and indispensable.
- He wrote to Joan very regularly. He was a motherless youth, and Joan was
- not only his great passion but his friend and confidante. His interest
- in his work overflowed into his letters; they were more and more about
- gunnery and the art of war, which became at last, it would seem, a
- serious rival to Joan in his affections. He described ill, but he would
- send her reasoned statements of unanswerable views. He could not
- understand why considerations that were so plain as to be almost
- obvious, were being universally disregarded by the Heads and the War
- Office. He appealed to Joan to read what he had to say, and tell him
- whether he or the world was mad. When he came back on leave in the
- spring of 1916, she was astonished to find that he was still visibly as
- deeply in love with her as ever. The fact of it was he had words for his
- gunnery and military science, but he had no words, and that was the
- essence of his misfortune, for his love for Joan.
- But the burthen of his story was bitter disillusionment at the levity
- with which his country could carry on a war that must needs determine
- the whole future of mankind. He would write out propositions of this
- sort: “It is manifest that success in warfare depends upon certain
- primary factors, of which generalship is one. No country resolute to win
- a war will spare any effort to find the _best men_, and make them its
- generals and leaders irrespective of every other consideration. No
- honourable patriots will permit generals to be appointed by any means
- except the _best selective methods_, and no one who cares for his
- country will obstruct (1) the _promotion_, (2) _trying over_, and (3)
- _prompt removal_, if they fail to satisfy the most exacting tests, of
- all possible men. And next consider what sort of men will be the best
- commanders. They must be _fresh-minded young men_. All the great
- generals of the world, the supreme cases, the Alexanders, Napoleons, and
- so on, have shown their quality before thirty even in the days when
- strategy and tactics did not change very greatly from year to year, and
- now when the material and expedients of war make warfare practically a
- _new thing_ every few years, the need for fresh young commanders is far
- more urgent than ever it has been. But the British army is at present
- commanded by oldish men who are manifestly of not more than mediocre
- intelligence, and who have no knowledge of this new sort of war that has
- arisen. It is a war of guns and infantry—with aeroplanes coming in more
- and more—and most of the higher positions are held by cavalry officers;
- the artillery is invariably commanded by men unused to the handling of
- such heavy guns as we are using, who stick far behind our forward
- positions and decline any practical experience of our difficulties. They
- put us in the wrong positions, they move us about absurdly; young
- officers have had to work out most of the problems of gun-pits and so
- forth for themselves—against resistance and mere stupid interference
- from above. The Heads have no idea of the kind of work we do or of the
- kind of work we could do. They are worse than amateurs; they are
- unteachable fossils. But why is this so? If the country is serious about
- the war, why does it permit it? If the Government is serious about the
- war, why does it permit it? If the War Office is serious about the war,
- why does it permit it? If G.H.Q. is serious about the war, why does it
- permit it? What is wrong? There is a hitch here I don’t understand. Am I
- over-serious, and is all this war really some sort of gross, grim joke,
- Joan? Do I take life too seriously?
- “Joan, in this last push this battery did its little job _right_; we cut
- all the wire opposite us and blew out every blessed stake. We made a
- nice tidy clean up. It was quite easy to do, given hard work. If I
- hadn’t done it I ought either to have been shot for neglect or dismissed
- for incapacity. But on our left it wasn’t done. Well, there were at
- least a hundred poor devils of our infantrymen on that wire, a hundred
- mothers’ sons, hanging like rags on it or crumpled up below. I saw them.
- It made me sick. And I saw the chap who was chiefly responsible for
- that, Major Clutterwell, a little bit screwed, being the life and soul
- of a little party in Hazebrouck three days after! He ought to have been
- the life and soul of a hari kari party, but either he is too big a cad
- or too big a fool—or both. The way they shy away our infantrymen over
- here is damnable. They are the finest men in the world, I’m convinced;
- they will go at anything, and the red tabs send them into impossible
- jobs, fail to back them up—always they fail to back them up; they
- neglect them, Joan; they neglect them even when they are fighting and
- dying! There are men here, colonels, staff officers, I would like to
- beat about the head with an iron bar....”
- This was an unusually eloquent passage. Frequently his letters were
- mainly diagram to show for example how we crowded batteries to brass
- away at right angles to the trenches when we ought to enfilade them, or
- some such point. Sometimes he was trying to establish profound truths
- about the proper functions of field guns and howitzers. For a time he
- was gnawing a bitter grievance. “I was told to shell a line I couldn’t
- reach. The contours wouldn’t allow of it. You can do a lot with a shell,
- but you cannot make it hop slightly and go round a corner. There is a
- definite limit to the height to which a gun will lob a shell. I tried to
- explain these elementary limitations of gunfire through the telephone,
- and I was told I should be put under arrest if I did not obey orders. I
- wasn’t up against a commander, I wasn’t up against an intelligence; I
- was up against a silly old man in a temper. So I put over a barrage
- about fifty yards beyond the path—the nearest possible. Every one was
- perfectly satisfied—the Boche included. Thus it is that the young
- officer is subdued to the medium he works in.”
- At times Wilmington would embark on a series of propositions to
- demonstrate with mathematical certitude that if the men and material
- wasted at Loos had been used in the Dardanelles, the war would have been
- decided by the end of 1915. But the topic to which his mind recurred
- time after time was the topic of efficient leadership. “Modern war
- demands continuity of idea, continuity of will, and continuous
- progressive adaptation of means and methods,” he wrote—in two separate
- letters. In the second of these he had got on to a fresh notion.
- “Education in England is a loafer education; it does not point to an
- end; it does not drive through; it does not produce _minds that can hold
- out_ through a long effort. The young officers come out here with the
- best intentions in the world, but one’s everyday life is shaped not by
- our intentions but our habits. Their habits of mind are loafing habits.
- They learnt to loaf at school. Caxton, I am now convinced, is one of the
- best schools in England; but even at Caxton we did not fully acquire the
- _habit of steadfast haste_ which modern life demands. Everything that
- gets done out here is done by a spurt. With the idea behind it of
- presently doing nothing. The ordinary state of everybody above the
- non-commissioned ranks is loafing. At the present moment my major is
- shooting pheasants; the batteries to the left of us are cursing because
- they have to shift—it holds up their scheme for a hunt. Just as though
- artillery work wasn’t the most intense sport in the world—especially now
- that we are going to have kite balloons and do really scientific
- observing. Even the conscientious men of the Kitchener-Byng school don’t
- really seem to me to _get on_; they work like Trojans at established and
- routine stuff but they don’t keep up inquiry. They are human, all too
- human. Man is a sedentary animal, and the schoolmaster exists to prevent
- his sitting down comfortably.” This from Wilmington without a suspicion
- of jesting. “This human weakness for just living can only be corrected
- in schools. The more I scheme about increasing efficiency out here, the
- more I realize that it can’t be done here, that one has to go right back
- to the schools and begin with _a more continuous urge_. When this war is
- over I shall try to be a schoolmaster. I shall hate it most of the time,
- but then I hate most things....”
- But Wilmington never became a schoolmaster. He got a battery of six-inch
- guns just before the Somme push in 1916, and he went forward with them
- into positions he chose and built up very carefully, only to be shifted
- against his wishes almost at once to a new and, he believed, an
- altogether inferior position. He was blown to nothingness by a German
- shell while he was constructing a gun pit.
- § 6
- Wilmington was not the first of Joan’s little company to be killed. Joan
- had the gift of friendship. She was rare among girls in that respect.
- She was less of an artist in egotism than most of her contemporaries;
- there were even times when she could be self-forgetful to the pitch of
- untidiness. Two other among that handful of young soldiers who were
- killed outright and who had been her friends, wrote to her with some
- regularity right up to the times of their deaths, and found a comfort in
- doing so. They wrote to her at first upon neat notepaper adorned with
- regimental crests, but their later letters as they worked their slow
- passages towards the place of death were pencilled on thin paper. She
- kept them all. She felt she could have been a good sister to many
- brothers.
- One of these two who died early was Winterbaum. She did not hear from
- this young man of the world for some weeks after the declaration of war.
- Then came a large photograph of himself in cavalry uniform, and a manly,
- worldly letter strongly reminiscent of Kipling and anticipatory of
- Gilbert Frankau. “There is something splendid about this life after
- all,” he wrote. “It’s good to be without one’s little luxuries for a
- space, democratically undistinguished among one’s fellows. It’s good to
- harden up until nothing seems able to bruise one any more. I bathed
- yesterday, without water, Joan—just a dry towel, and that not over
- clean—was all that was available. After this is all over I shall have
- such an appetite for luxury—I shall be fierce, Joan.”
- Those early days were still days of unrestricted plenty, and the
- disposition of the British world was to pet and indulge everything in
- khaki. Young Winterbaum wore his spurs and the most beautiful
- riding-breeches to night clubs and great feasts in the more
- distinguished restaurants. He took his car about with him, his neat
- little black-and-white car, fitted with ivory fopperies. He tried hard
- to take it with him to France. From France his scribbled letters became
- more and more heroic in tone. “Poor David has been done in,” he said. “I
- am now only three from the Contango peerage. Heaven send I get no
- nearer! No Feudal dignities for me. I would give three gilded chambers
- at any time for one reasonably large and well-lit studio. And—I have a
- kind of affection for my cousins.”
- His prayer was answered. He got no nearer to the Contango peerage. The
- powers above him decided that a little place called Loos was of such
- strategic value to the British army as to be worth the lives of a great
- number of young men, and paid in our generous British fashion even more
- than the estimate. Winterbaum was part of the price. No particulars of
- his death ever came to Joan and Peter. The attack began brightly, and
- then died away. There was a failure to bring up reserves and grasp
- opportunity. Winterbaum vanished out of life in the muddle—one of
- thousands. He was the first of the little company of Joan’s friends to
- be killed.
- Bunny Cuspard spread a less self-conscious, more western, and altogether
- more complicated psychology before Joan’s eyes. Like Wilmington he had
- faltered at the outset of the war between enlistment and extreme
- pacifism, but unlike Wilmington he had never reconciled himself to his
- decision. Bunny was out of sympathy with the fierceness of mankind; he
- wanted a kindly, prosperous, rather funny world where there is nothing
- more cruel than gossip; that was the world he was fitted for. He
- repeated in his own person and quality the tragedy of Anatole France. He
- wanted to assure the world and himself that at heart everything was
- quite right and magnificent fun, to laugh gaily at everything, seeing
- through its bristling hostilities into the depth of genial absurdity
- beneath.
- And so often he could find no genial absurdity.
- He had always pretended that discovering novel sorts of cakes for his
- teas or new steps for dances was the really serious business of life.
- One of his holiday amusements had been “Little Wars,” which he played
- with toy soldiers and little model houses and miniature woods of twigs
- and hills of boarding in a big room at his Limpsfield home. He would
- have vacation parties for days to carry out these wars, and he and his
- guests conducted them with a tremendous seriousness. He had elaborated
- his miniature battle scenery more and more, making graveyards, churches,
- inns, walls, fences—even sticking absurd notices and advertisements upon
- the walls, and writing epitaphs upon his friends in the graveyard. He
- had loved the burlesque of it. He had felt that it brought history into
- a proper proportion to humour. But one of the drawbacks had always been
- that as the players lay upon the floor to move their soldiers and guns
- about they crushed down his dear little toy houses and woods....
- His mind still fought desperately to see the war as a miniature.
- He got to a laugh ever and again by a great effort, but some of the
- things that haunted his imagination would not under any circumstances
- dissolve in laughter. Things that other people seemed to hear only to
- dismiss remained to suppurate in his mind. One or two of the things that
- were most oppressive to him he never told Joan. But she had a glimpse
- now and then of what was there, through the cracks in his laughter.
- He had heard a man telling a horrible story of the opening bombardment
- of Ypres by the Germans. The core of the story was a bricked tunnel near
- the old fortifications of the town, whither a crowd of refugees had fled
- from the bombardment, and into which a number of injured people had been
- carried. A shell exploded near the exit and imprisoned all those people
- in a half-light without any provisions or help. There was not even
- drinking-water for the wounded. A ruptured drain poured a foul trickle
- across the slimy floor on which the wounded and exhausted lay. Now quite
- near and now at a distance the shells were still bursting, and through
- that thudding and uproar, above all the crouching and murmuring
- distresses of that pit of misery sounded the low, clear, querulous voice
- of a little girl who was talking as she died, talking endlessly of how
- she suffered, of how her sister could not come to help her, of her
- desire to be taken away; a little, scolding, indignant spirit she was,
- with a very clear explicit sense of the vast impropriety of everything
- about her.
- “Why does not some one come?”
- “Be tranquil,” an old woman’s voice remonstrated time after time. “Help
- will come.”
- But for most of the people in the tunnel help never came. Through a
- slow, unhurrying night of indescribable pain and discomfort, in hunger,
- darkness, and an evil stench, their lives ebbed away one by one....
- That dark, dreadful, stinking place, quivering to the incessant thunder
- of guns, sinking through twilight into night, lit by flashes and distant
- flames, and passing through an eternity of misery to a cold, starving
- dawn, threaded by the child’s shrill voice, took a pitiless grip upon
- Bunny’s imagination. He could neither mitigate it nor forget it.
- How could one laugh at the Kaiser with this rankling in his mind? He
- could not fit it into any merry scheme of things, and he could not bear
- any scheme that was not merry; and not to be able to fit dreadful things
- into a scheme that does at last prevail over them was, for such a mind
- as Bunny’s, to begin to drift from sanity.
- The second story that mutely reinforced the shrill indictment of that
- little Belgian girl was a description he had heard of some poor devil
- being shot for cowardice at dawn. A perplexed, stupid youth of two- or
- three-and-twenty, with little golden hairs that gleamed on a pallid
- cheek, was led out to a heap of empty ammunition boxes in a desolate and
- mutilated landscape of mud and splintered trees under a leaden sky, and
- set down on a box to die. It was as if Bunny had seen that living body
- with his own eyes, the body that jumped presently to the impact of the
- bullets and lurched forward, and how the officer in command—who had been
- himself but a little child in a garden a dozen years or more ago—came up
- to the pitiful prostrate form and put his revolver to the head behind
- the ear that would never hear again and behind the eye that stared and
- glazed, and pulled the trigger “to make sure.”
- Bunny could feel that revolver behind his own ear. It felt as a dental
- instrument feels in the mouth.
- “Oh, my God!” cried Bunny; “oh, my God!” starting up from his sack of
- straw on the floor in his billet in the middle of the night.
- “Oh! _shut_ it!” said the man who was trying to sleep beside him.
- “Sorry!” said Bunny.
- “You keep it for the Germans, mate.”
- “Oh! Oh! If I could kill this damned Kaiser with ten thousand torments!”
- whispered Bunny, quieting down....
- These were not the only stories that tormented Bunny’s mind, but they
- were the chief ones. Others came in and went again—stories of the
- sufferings of wounded men, of almost incredible brutalities done to
- women and children and helpless people, and of a hundred chance
- reasonless horrors; they came in with an effect of support and
- confirmation to these two principal figures—the shrill little girl
- making her bitter complaint against God and the world which had promised
- to take care of her, and had scared her horribly and torn her limbs and
- thrust her, thirsty and agonized, into a stinking drain to die; and the
- poor puzzled lout, caught and condemned, who had to die so dingily and
- submissively because his heart had failed him. Against the grim
- instances of their sombre and squalid fates the soul of Bunny battled
- whenever, by night or day, thought overtook him in his essential and
- characteristic resolve to see life as “fun”—as “great fun.”
- These two fellow-sufferers in life took possession of his imagination
- because of their intense kindred with himself. So far as he got his
- riddle clear it was something after this fashion: “Why, if the world is
- like this, why are we in it? What am I doing in this nightmare? Why are
- there little girls and simple louts—and me?”
- The days drew near when he would have to go to the front. He wrote
- shamelessly to Joan of his dread of that experience.
- “_It’s the mud and dirtiness and ugliness_,” he said. “_I am a domestic
- cat, Joan—an indoor cat...._
- “_I’ve got a Pacifist temperament...._
- “_All the same, Joan, the Germans started this war. If we don’t beat
- them, they will start others. They are intolerable brutes—the Junkers,
- anyhow. Until we get them down they will go on kicking mankind in the
- stomach. It is their idea of dignified behaviour. But we are casting our
- youth before swine.... Why aren’t there more assassins in the world? Why
- can’t we kill them by machinery—painlessly and cleanly? We ought to be
- cleverer than they are._”
- There was extraordinarily little personal fear in Bunny. He was not
- nearly so afraid of the things that would happen to him as of the things
- that would happen about him. He hated the smashing even of inanimate
- things; a broken-down chair or a roofless shed was painful to him.
- Whenever he thought of the trenches he thought of treading and slipping
- in the dark on a torn and still living body....
- He stuck stoutly to his reasoning that England had to fight and that he
- had to fight; but hidden from Joan, hidden from every living soul, he
- kept a secret resolve. It was, he knew, an entirely illogical and
- treasonable resolve, and yet he found it profoundly comforting. He would
- never fire his rifle so that it would hurt any one even by chance, and
- he would never use his bayonet. He would go over the top with the best
- of them, and carry his weapons and shout.
- If it came to close fighting he would go for a man with his hands and
- try to disarm him.
- But this resolve was never put to the test. The Easter newspapers of
- 1916 arrived with flaming headlines about an insurrection in Dublin and
- the seizure of the Post Office by the rebels. Oddly enough, this did not
- shock Bunny at all. It produced none of the effect of horror and
- brutality that the German invasion of Belgium had made upon his mind. It
- impressed him as a “rag”; as the sort of rag that they got up to at
- Cambridge during seasons of excitement. He was delighted by the seizure
- of the Post Office, by the appearance of a revolutionary flag and the
- issue of Republican stamps. It was as good as “Little Wars”; it was
- “Little Revolutions.” He didn’t like the way they had shot a policeman
- outside Trinity College, but perhaps that report wasn’t true. The whole
- affair had restored that flavour of adventure and burlesque that he had
- so sadly missed from the world since the war began.
- He had always idealized the Irish character as the pleasantest
- combination of facetiousness and generosity. When he found himself part
- of a draft crossing to Dublin with his back to the grim war front, his
- spirits rose. He could forget that nightmare for a time. He was going to
- a land of wit and laughter which had rebelled for a lark. He felt sure
- that the joke would end happily and that he would be shaking hands with
- congenial spirits still wearing Sinn Fein badges before a fortnight was
- out. Perhaps he would come upon Mrs. O’Grady or Patrick Lynch, whom he
- had been accustomed to meet at the Sheldricks’. He had heard they were
- in it. And when the whole business had ended brightly and cheerfully
- then all those clever and witty people would grow grave and helpful, and
- come back with him to join in that temporarily neglected task of
- fighting on the western front against an iron brutality that threatened
- to overwhelm the world.
- He was still in this cheerful vein two days later as he was crossing St.
- Stephen’s Green. His quaint, amiable face was smiling pleasantly and he
- was marching with a native ungainliness that no drill-sergeant could
- ever overcome, when something hit him very hard in the middle of the
- body.
- He knew immediately that he had been shot.
- He was not dismayed or shocked by this, but tremendously interested.
- All other feelings were swamped in his surprise at a curious
- contradiction. He had felt hit behind, he was convinced he had been hit
- behind, but what was queer about it was that he was spinning round as
- though he had been hit in front. It gave him a preposterous drunken
- feeling. His head was quite clear, but he was altogether incapable of
- controlling these spinning legs of his, which were going round backward.
- His facile sense of humour was aroused. It was really quite funny to be
- spinning backwards in this way. It was like a new step in dancing. His
- hilarity increased. It was like the maddest dancing they had ever had at
- Hampstead or Chelsea. The “backwards step.” He laughed. He had to laugh;
- something was tickling his ribs and throat. His whole being laughed. He
- laughed a laugh that became a rush of hot blood from his mouth....
- The soul of Bunny, for all I know, laughs for ever among the stars; but
- it was a dead young man who finished those fantastic gyrations.
- He paused and swayed and dropped like an empty sack, and lay still in
- St. Stephen’s Green, the modest contribution of one happy Sinn Fein
- sniper to the Peace of Mankind.
- Perhaps Bunny was well out of a life where there can be little room for
- Bunnyism for many years to come, and lucky to leave it laughing. And as
- an offset to his loss we have to count the pleasant excitement of
- Ireland in getting well back into the limelight of the world’s affairs,
- and the bright and glowing gathering of the armed young heroes who got
- away, recounting their deeds to one another simultaneously in some
- secure place, with all the rich, tumultuous volubility of the Keltic
- habit.
- “Did ye see that red-haired fella I got in the square, boys?... Ah, ye
- should have seen that fella I got in the square.”
- § 7
- But not all the world of Joan was at war. The Sheldrick circle, for
- example, after some wide fluctuations during which Sydney almost became
- a nurse and Babs nearly enlisted into the Women’s Legion, took a marked
- list under the influence of one of the sons-in-law towards pacifism.
- Antonia, who had taken two German prizes at school, was speedily
- provoked by the general denunciation of “Kultur” into a distinctly
- pro-German attitude. The Sheldrick circle settled down on the whole as a
- pro-German circle, with a poor opinion of President Wilson, a marked
- hostility to Belgians, and a disposition to think the hardships of
- drowning by U-boats much exaggerated.
- The Sheldricks were like seedlings that begin flourishing and then damp
- off. From amusing schoolfellows they had changed into irritating and
- disappointing friends. Energy leaked out of them at adolescence. They
- seemed to possess the vitality for positive convictions no longer, they
- displayed an instinctive hostility to any wave of popular feeling that
- threatened to swamp their weak but still obstinate individualities.
- Their general attitude towards life was one of protesting
- refractoriness. Whatever it was that people believed or did, you were
- given to understand by undertones and abstinences that the Sheldricks
- knew better, and for the most exquisite reasons didn’t. All their
- friends were protesters and rebels and seceders, or incomprehensible
- poets, or inexplicable artists. And from the first the war was
- altogether too big and strong for them. Confronted by such questions as
- whether fifty years of belligerent preparation, culminating in the most
- cruel and wanton invasion of a peaceful country it is possible to
- imagine, was to be resisted by mankind or condoned, the Sheldricks fell
- back upon the counter statement that Sir Edward Grey, being a landowner,
- was necessarily just as bad as a German Junker, or that the Government
- of Russia was an unsatisfactory one.
- In a few months it was perfectly clear to the Sheldricks that they would
- have nothing to do with the war at all. They were going to ignore it.
- Sydney just went on quietly doing her little statuettes that nobody
- would buy, little portrait busts of her sisters and suchlike things; now
- and then her mother contrived to get her a commission. Babs kept on
- trying to get a part in somebody’s play; Antonia continued to produce
- djibbahs in chocolate and grocer’s blue and similar tints. One saw the
- sisters drifting about London in costumes still trailingly
- Pre-Raphaelite when all the rest of womankind was cutting its skirts
- shorter and shorter, their faces rather pained in expression and
- deliberately serene, ignoring the hopes and fears about them, the stir,
- the huge effort, the universal participation. It was not their affair,
- thank you. They were not going to wade through this horrid war; they
- were going round.
- Every time Joan went to see them, either they had become more
- phantomlike and incredible, or she had become coarser and more real.
- Would they ever get round? she asked herself; and what would they be
- like when at last they attempted, if ever they attempted, to rejoin the
- main stream of human interests again?
- They kept up their Saturday evenings, but their gatherings became
- thinner and less and less credible as the war went on. The first wave of
- military excitement carried off most of the sightly young men, and
- presently the more capable and enterprising of the women vanished one
- after another to nurse, to join the Women’s Legion, to become substitute
- clerks and release men to volunteer, to work in canteens and so forth.
- There was, however, a certain coming and going of ambiguous adventurers,
- who in those early days went almost unchallenged between London and
- Belgium on ambulance work, on mysterious missions and with no missions
- at all. Belgian refugees drifted in and, when they found a lack of
- sympathy for their simple thirst for the destruction of Germans under
- all possible circumstances, out again. Then Ireland called her own, and
- Patrick Lynch went off to die a martyr’s death with arms in his hands
- after three days of the most exhilarating mixed shooting in the streets
- of Dublin. Antonia discovered passionate memories as soon as he was
- dead, and nobody was allowed to mention the name of Bunny in the
- Sheldrick circle for fear of spoiling the emotional atmosphere. Hetty
- Reinhart, after some fluctuations, went khaki, flitted from one ministry
- to another in various sorts of clerical capacities, took such
- opportunities as offered of entertaining young officers lonely in our
- great capital, and was no more seen in Hampstead. What was left of this
- little group in the Hampstead _Quartier Latin_ drew together into a band
- of resistance to the creeping approach of compulsory service.
- Huntley’s lofty scorn of the war had intensified steadily; the harsh
- disappointment of Joan’s patriotism had stung him to great efforts of
- self-justification, and he became one of the most strenuous writers in
- the extreme Pacifist press. Not an act or effort of the Allies, he
- insisted, that was not utterly vile in purpose and doomed to accelerate
- our defeat. Not an act of the enemy’s that was not completely thought
- out, wisely calculated, and planned to give the world peace and freedom
- on the most reasonable terms. He was particularly active in preparing
- handbills and pamphlets of instruction for lifelong Conscientious
- Objectors to war service who had not hitherto thought about the subject.
- Community of view brought him very close in feeling to both Babs and
- Sydney Sheldrick. There was much talk of a play he was to write which
- was to demonstrate the absurdity of Englishmen fighting Germans just
- because Germans insisted upon fighting Englishmen, and which was also to
- bring out the peculiarly charming Babsiness of Babs. He studied her
- thoroughly and psychologically and physiologically and intensively and
- extensively.
- By a great effort of self-control he abstained from sending his writings
- to Joan. Once however they were near meeting. On one of Joan’s rare
- calls Babs told her that he was coming to discuss the question whether
- he should go to prison and hunger-strike, or consent to take up work of
- national importance. Babs was very full of the case for each
- alternative. She was doubtful which course involved the greatest moral
- courage. Moral courage, it was evident, was being carried to giddy
- heights by Huntley. It would be pure hypocrisy, he felt, to ignore the
- vital value of his writings, and while he could go on with these quite
- comfortably while working as a farm hand, with a little judicious
- payment to the farmer, their production would become impossible in
- prison. He must crucify himself upon the cross of harsh judgments, he
- felt, and take the former course. He wanted to make his views exactly
- clear to every one to avoid misunderstanding.
- Joan hesitated whether she should stay and insult him or go, and chose
- the seemlier course.
- § 8
- Joan was already driving a car for the Ministry of Munitions before
- Peter got himself transferred from the ranks of the infantry to the
- Royal Flying Corps. Peter’s career as an infantryman never took him
- nearer to the western front than Liss Forest. Then he perceived the
- error of his ways and decided to get a commission in the Royal Flying
- Corps. In those days the Flying Corps was still a limited and
- inaccessible force with a huge waiting list, and it needed a
- considerable exertion of influence to secure a footing in that select
- band.... But at last a day came when Peter, rather self-conscious in his
- new leather coat and cap, walked out from the mess past a group of
- chatting young pilots towards the aeroplane in which he was to have his
- first experience of flight.
- He had a sense of being scrutinized, but indeed hardly any one upon the
- aerodrome noted him. This sense of an audience made him deliberately
- casual in his bearing. He saluted his pilot in a manner decidedly
- offhand. He clambered up through struts and wire to the front seat as if
- he was a clerk ascending the morning omnibus, and strapped himself in as
- if it hardly mattered whether he was strapped in or not.
- “Contact, sir,” said the mechanic. “Contact,” came the pilot’s voice
- from behind. The engine roared, a gale swept backwards, and Peter
- vibrated like an aspen leaf.
- The wheels were cleared, the mechanics jumped aside, and Peter was
- careering across the grass in a series of light leaps, and then his
- progress became smoother. He did not perceive at first the reason for
- this sudden steadying of the machine. He found himself tilting upward.
- He was off the ground. He had been off the ground for some seconds. He
- looked over the side and saw the grass fifty feet below, and the black
- shadow of the aeroplane, as if it fled before them, rushing at a hedge,
- doubling up at the hedge, and starting again in the next field. And up
- he went.
- Peter stared at fields, hedges, trees, sheds and roadways growing small
- below him. He noted cows in plan and an automobile in plan, in a lane,
- going it seemed very slowly indeed. It was a stagnant world below in
- comparison with his own forward sweep. His initial nervousness and
- self-consciousness had passed away. He was enormously interested and
- delighted. He was trying to remember when it was that Nobby had said: “I
- doubt if we’ll see that in my lifetime—or yours.” It was somewhen long
- ago at Limpsfield. Quite early....
- And then abruptly Peter was clutching the side with his thick-gloved
- hand; the aeroplane was coming round in a close curve and banking
- steeply, very steeply. For a moment it seemed as though there was
- nothing at all between him and England below. If he fell out——!
- He looked over his shoulder and met the hard regard of a pair of
- steel-blue eyes.
- He remembered that after all he was under observation. This was no mere
- civilian’s joy ride. He affected a concentration upon the scenery. The
- aeroplane swung slowly back again to the level, and his hand left the
- side....
- They were going up very rapidly now. The world seemed to be rolling in
- at the edges of a great circle that grew constantly larger. Away to the
- left were broad spaces of brown sand, and grey rippled and smooth
- shining water channels, and beyond, the sapphire sea; beneath and to the
- right were fields, houses, villages, woods, and a distant range of hills
- that seemed to be coming nearer. The scale was changing and everything
- was becoming maplike. Cows were little dots now and men scarcely
- visible.... And then suddenly all the scenery seemed to be rushing
- upward before Peter’s eyes and he had a feeling like the feeling one has
- in a lift when it starts—a down-borne feeling. He affected indifference,
- and gave the pilot his whistling profile. Down they swept, faster than a
- luge on the swiftest ice run, until one could see the ditches in the
- shadows beneath the hedges and cows were plainly cows again, and then
- once more they were heeling over and curving round. But Peter had been
- ready for that this time; he had been telling himself over and over
- again that he was strapped in. He betrayed no surprise. He was getting
- more and more exhilarated.
- And then they were climbing again and soaring straight out towards the
- sea. Up went this roaring dragonfly in which Peter was sitting, at a
- hundred and twenty miles or so per hour, leaving the dwindling land
- behind.
- Up they went and up, until the world seemed nearly all sea and the coast
- was far away; they mounted at last above a little white cloud puff and
- then above a haze of clouds, and when Peter looked down he saw at a vast
- distance below, through a clear gap in that filmy cloud fabric, three
- ships smaller than any toys. Of the men he could distinguish nothing.
- How sweet the cold clear air had become!
- And high above the world, in the lonely sky above the cloud fleece, the
- pilot saw fit to spring a surprise upon Peter.
- He was not of the genial and considerate order of teachers; he believed
- in weeding out duds as swiftly as possible. He had an open mind as to
- whether this rather over-intelligent-looking beginner might not, under
- certain circumstances, squeal. So he just tried him and, without a note
- of preparation, looped the loop with him.
- The propeller that span before the eyes of Peter dipped. Peter bowed in
- accord with it. It dipped more and more steeply, until the machine was
- almost nose down, until Peter was looking at the sea and the land as one
- sits and looks at a wall. He was tilted down and down until he was face
- downward. And then as abruptly he was tilted up; it was like being in a
- swing; the note of the engine altered as if a hand swept up a scale of
- notes; the sea and the land seemed to fall away below him as though he
- left them for ever, and the blue sky swept down across his field of
- vision like a curtain: he was, so to speak, on his back now with his
- legs in the air, looking straight at the sky, at nothing but sky, and
- expecting to recover. For a vast second he waited for the swing to end.
- This was surely the end of the swing....
- Only—most amazingly—he didn’t recover! He wanted to say, “Ouch!” He was
- immensely surprised—too surprised to be frightened. He went over
- backwards—in an instant—and the sea and the land reappeared above the
- sky and also came down like curtains, too, and then behold! the
- aeroplane was driving down and the world was in its place again far
- below.
- “The Loop!” whispered Peter, a little dazed, and glanced back at his
- pilot and smiled. This was no perambulator excursion. “The Loop—first
- trip!”
- The blue eyes seemed a little less hard, the weather-red face was
- smiling faintly.
- Then gripped by an irresistible power, Peter found himself going down,
- down, down almost vertically. The pilot had apparently stopped the
- engine....
- Peter watched the majestic expansion of the landscape as they fell. They
- had come back over the land. Far away he could see the aerodrome like a
- scattered collection of little toy huts, and growing bigger and bigger
- every instant. He sat quite still, for it was all right—it must be all
- right. But now they were getting very near the ground, and it was still
- rushing up to meet them, and pouring outwardly as it rose. A cat now
- would be visible....
- It _was_ all right. The engine picked up with a roar like a score of
- lions, and the pilot levelled out a hundred feet above the trees....
- Then presently they were dropping to the aerodrome again; down until the
- hedges were plain and the grazing cattle close and distinct; and then,
- with a sense of infinite regret, Peter perceived that they were back on
- the turf again and that the flight was over. They danced lightly over
- the turf. Their rush slowed down. They taxied gently up to the hangar
- and the engine shuddered and, with a pathetic drop to silence,
- stopped....
- A little stiffly, Peter unbuckled himself and stretched and set himself
- to clamber to the ground.
- His weather-bitten senior nodded to him and smiled faintly....
- Peter walked towards the mess. It was wonderful—and intensely
- disappointing in that it was so soon over. There were still great pieces
- of the afternoon left....
- § 9
- The aerodrome was short of machines and instructors, and he had to wait
- a couple of weeks before he could get into the air a second time.
- He worked sedulously to gather knowledge during that waiting interval,
- and his first real lesson found him a very alert and ready pupil. This
- time the dual control was at his disposal, and for a straight or so the
- pilot left things to him altogether. Came half a dozen other lessons,
- and then Peter found himself sitting alone in a machine outside the
- great sheds, watched closely by a knot of friendly rivals, and, for the
- first time on his own account, conducting that duologue he had heard now
- so often on other lips. “Switch off.”... “Suck in.” “Contact!”
- He started across the ground. His first sensations bordered on panic.
- Hitherto the machines he had flown in had been just machines; now this
- one, this one was an animal; it started out across the aerodrome like a
- demented ostrich, swerving wildly and trying to turn round. Always
- before this, the other man had done the taxi business on the ground. It
- had never occurred to Peter that it involved any difficulty. Peter’s
- heart nearly failed him in that opening twenty seconds; he was convinced
- he was going to be killed; and then he determined to get up at any cost.
- At any rate he wouldn’t smash on the ground. He let out the accelerator,
- touched his controls, and behold he was up—he was up! Instantly the
- machine ceased to resemble a floundering ostrich, and became a steady
- and dignified carinate, swaying only slightly from wing to wing. Up he
- went over the hedges, over the trees, beyond, above the familiar field
- of cows. The moment of panic passed, and Peter was himself again.
- He had got right outside the aerodrome and he had to bank and bring her
- round. Already he had done that successfully a number of times with an
- instructor to take care of him. He did it successfully now. His
- confidence grew. Back he buzzed and droned, a hundred feet over the
- aerodrome. He made three complete circuits, rose outside the aerodrome
- and came down, making a good landing. He was instantly smitten with the
- intensest regret that he had not made eight or nine circuits. It was a
- mere hop. Any man of spirit would have gone on. There were four hours of
- daylight yet. He might have gone up; he might have tried a spiral....
- _Damn!_
- But the blue eyes of the master approved him.
- “Couldn’t have made a better landing, Stubland,” said the master. “Try
- again tomorrow. Follow it up close. Short and frequent doses. That’s the
- way.”
- Peter had made another stage on his way to France.
- Came other solo flights, and flights on different types of machines, and
- then a day of glory and disobedience when, three thousand feet above the
- chimneys of a decent farmhouse, Peter looped the loop twice. He had
- learnt by that time what it was to side-slip, and what air pockets can
- do to the unwary. He had learnt the bitter consequences of coming down
- with the engine going strong. He had had a smash through that all too
- common mistake, but not a bad smash; a few struts and wires of the left
- wing were all that had gone. A hedge and a willow tree had stopped him.
- He had had a forced landing in a field of cabbages through engine
- stoppage, and half an hour in a snowstorm when he had had doubts in an
- upward eddy whether he might not be flying upside down. That had been a
- nasty experience—his worst. He had several times taken his hands off the
- controls and let the old bus look after herself, so badly were the
- snowflakes spinning about in his mind. He dreamt a lot about flying, and
- few of his dreams were pleasant dreams. And then this fantastic old
- world of ours, which had so suddenly diverted his education to these
- things, and taught him to fly with a haste and intensity it had never
- put into any teaching before, decided that he was ripe for the air war,
- and packed him off to France....
- § 10
- Now, seeing that Joan had at last discovered that she was in love with
- Peter, it would be pleasantly symmetrical to record that Peter had also
- discovered by this time that he was in love with Joan.
- But as a matter of fact he had discovered nothing of the sort. He had
- been amazed and humiliated by his three days of hesitation and
- procrastination at Orta; the delay was altogether out of keeping with
- his private picture of himself; and he discovered that he was not in
- love with any one and that he did not intend again to be lured into any
- dangerous pretence that he was. He had done with Hetty, he was
- convinced; he did not mean to see her any more, and he led a life of
- exasperated Puritanism for some months, refusing to answer the
- occasionally very skilful and perplexing letters, with amusing and
- provocative illustrations, that she wrote him.
- The idea of “relaxing moral fibre” obsessed him, and our genial Peter
- for a time abandoned both smoking and alcohol, and was only deterred
- from further abstinences by their impracticability. The ordinary
- infantry mess, for example, caters ill and resentfully for
- vegetarians.... Peter’s days in the ranks were days of strained
- austerity. He was a terribly efficient recruit, a fierce soldier, a
- wonderful influence on slackers, stripes gravitated towards him, and a
- prophetic corporal saw sergeant-major written on his forehead.
- Occasionally, when his imagination got loose or after a letter from
- Hetty, he would indulge privately in fits of violent rage, finding great
- relief in the smashing of light objects and foul and outrageous
- language. He found what he considered a convenient privacy for this
- idiosyncrasy in a disused cowshed near the camp, and only realized that
- he had an audience when a fellow recruit asked anxiously, “And how’s
- Miss Blurry ’Etty?” Whereupon Peter discovered a better outlet for
- pentup nervous energy in a square fight.
- Joan saw hardly anything of him during those early and brutal days, but
- she thought about him mightily. She shared Oswald’s opinion that he
- wasn’t in his right place, and she wrote to him frequently. He answered
- perhaps half her letters. His answers struck her as being rather posed.
- The strain showed through them. Peter was trying very hard not to be
- Peter. “I’m getting down to elementals,” was one of his experiments in
- the statement of his moral struggle.
- Then quite abruptly came his decision to get into the Royal Flying
- Corps.
- Neither Oswald nor Joan ventured any comment on this, because both of
- them had a feeling that Peter had, in a sense, climbed down by this
- decision to go up....
- In the Royal Flying Corps Peter’s rather hastily conceived theories of
- moral fibre came into an uncongenial atmosphere. The Royal Flying Corps
- was amazingly young, swift, and confident, and “moral fibre” based on
- abstinence and cold self-control was not at all what it was after. The
- Royal Flying Corps was much more inclined to scrap with soda-water
- syphons and rag to the tunes of a gramophone. It was a body that had had
- to improvise a tradition of conduct in three or four swift years, and
- its tradition was still unstable. Mainly it was the tradition of the
- games and sports side of a public school, roughly adapted to the new
- needs of the service; it was an essentially boyish tradition, even men
- old enough to have gone through the universities were in a minority in
- it, and Peter at one-and-twenty was one of the more elderly class of
- recruits. And necessarily the tradition of the corps still varied widely
- with the dominant personalities and favourite heroes of each aerodrome
- and mess and squadron. It was a crowd of plastic boys, left amazingly to
- chance leads. Their seniors had no light for them, and they picked up
- such hints as they could from Kipling and the music-halls, from
- overheard conversations, and one another.
- Is it not an incredible world in which old men make wars and untutored
- young men have to find out how to fight them; in which tradition and the
- past are mere entanglements about the feet of the young? The flying
- services took the very flower of the youth of the belligerent nations;
- they took the young men who were most manifestly fitted to be
- politicians, statesmen, leaders of men, masters in industry, and makers
- of the new age; the boys of nerve, pluck, imagination, invention, and
- decision. And there is not a sign of any realization on the part of any
- one of the belligerent states of the fact that a large proportion of
- this most select and valuable mass of youth was destined to go on living
- after the war and was going to matter tremendously and be the backbone
- of the race after the war. They let all these boys specialize as jockeys
- specialize. The old men and rulers wanted these youngsters to fight and
- die for them; that any future lay beyond the war was too much for these
- scared and unteachable ancients to apprehend. The short way to immediate
- efficiency was to back the tradition of recklessness and gallantry, and
- so the short way was taken; if the brave lads were kept bold and
- reckless by women, wine and song, then by all means, said their elders,
- let them have these helps. “A short life and a merry one,” said the
- British Empire to these lads of eighteen and nineteen encouragingly. “A
- short life and a merry one,” said the Empire to its future.
- If the story of the air forces is a glorious and not a shameful thing it
- is because of the enduring hope of the world—the incessant gallantry of
- youth. These boys took up their great and cardinal task with the
- unquenchable hopefulness of boyhood and with the impudence and humour of
- their race. They brought in the irreverence and the Spartanism of their
- years. They made a language for themselves, an atrocious slang of
- facetious misnomers; everything one did was a “stunt”; everything one
- used was a “gadget”; the machines were “’buses” and “camels” and “pups”;
- the older men were perpetually pleading in vain for more dignity in the
- official reports. And these youngsters worked out their moral problems
- according to their own generous and yet puerile ideas. They argued the
- question of drink. Could a man fly better or worse if he was “squiffy”?
- Does funk come to the thoughtful? And was ever a man gallant without
- gallantries? After the death of Lord Kitchener there survived no man in
- Britain of the quality to speak plainly and authoritatively and honestly
- about chastity and drink to the young soldier. The State had no mind in
- these matters. In most matters indeed the State had no mind; it was a
- little old silly State. And the light side of the feminine temperament
- flamed up into shameless acquiescences in the heroic presence of the
- flying man. Youth instinctively sets towards romantic adventures, and
- the scales of chance for a considerable number of the flying men swung
- between mésalliance and Messalina.
- The code and the atmosphere varied from mess to mess and from squadron
- to squadron; young men are by nature and necessity hero-worshippers and
- imitative. Peter’s lines fell among pleasant men of the “irresponsible”
- school. The two best flyers he knew, including him of the hard blue eyes
- who had first instructed him, were men of a physique that defied drink
- and dissipation. Vigours could smoke, drink, and dance in London, catch
- the last train back with three seconds to spare, and be flying with an
- unshaken nerve by half-past six in the morning; Vincent would only
- perform stunts when he was “tight,” and then he seemed capable of taking
- any risk with impunity. He could be funny with an aeroplane then a
- thousand feet up in the air. He could make it behave as though it was
- drunk, as though it was artful; he could make it mope or wag its tail.
- Men went out to watch him. The mess was decorated with pictures from _La
- Vie Parisienne_, and the art and literature of the group was Revue. Now
- seeing that Peter’s sole reason for his puritanism was the preservation
- of efficiency, this combination of a fast life and a fine record in the
- air was very disconcerting to him.
- If he had been naturally and easily a first-class flying man he might
- have stuck to his line of high austerity, but he was not. He flew well,
- but he had to fly with care; like many other airmen, he always felt a
- shadow of funk before going up, on two or three bad mornings it was on
- his conscience that he had delayed for ten minutes or so, and he was
- more and more inclined to think that he would fly better if he flew with
- a less acute sense of possibilities. It was the start and the uneventful
- flying that irked him most; hitherto every crisis had found him cool and
- able. But the slap-dash style, combined with the exquisite accuracy of
- these rakes, Vigours and Vincent, filled him with envious admiration.
- In the mess Peter met chiefly youths of his own age or a year or so
- younger; he soon became a master of slang; his style of wit won its way
- among them. He ceased to write of “getting down to elementals” to Joan,
- and he ceased to think of all other girls and women as inventions of the
- devil. Only they must be kept in their places. As Vigours and Vincent
- kept them. Just as one kept drink in its place. One must not, for
- example, lose trains on account of them....
- Through these months Joan maintained a strained watch upon the
- development and fluctuations of Peter. He wrote—variously; sometimes
- offhand duty notes and sometimes long and brotherly letters—incurably
- brotherly. Every now and then she had glimpses of him when he came to
- London on leave. Manifestly he liked her company and trusted her—as
- though she was a man. It was exasperating. She dressed for Peter as she
- had never dressed for any one, and he would take her out to dine at the
- _Rendezvous_ or the _Petit Riche_ and sit beside her and glance at
- common scraps of feminine humanity, at dirty little ogling bare-throated
- girls in patched-up raiment and with harsh and screaming voices, as
- though they were the most delicious of forbidden fruits. And he seemed
- to dislike being alone with her. If she dropped her hand to touch his on
- the table, he would draw his away.
- Was the invisible barrier between them invincible?
- For a time during his infantry phase he had shown a warm affection. In
- his early days in the flying corps it seemed that he drew still closer
- to her. Then her quick, close watch upon him detected a difference. Joan
- was getting to be a very shrewd observer nowadays, and she felt a subtle
- change that suddenly made him a little shame-faced in her presence.
- There had been some sort of spree in London with two or three other wild
- spirits, and there had been “girls” in the party. Such girls! He never
- told her this, but something told her. I am inclined to think it was her
- acute sense of smell detected a flavour of face powder or cheap scent
- about Peter when he came along one day, half an hour late, to take her
- to the Ambassadors. She was bad company that night for him.
- For a time Joan was bad company for any one.
- She was worse when she realized that Hetty was somehow reinstated in
- Peter’s world. That, too, she knew by an almost incredible flash of
- intuition. Miss Jepson was talking one evening to Peter, and Peter
- suddenly displayed a knowledge of the work of the London Group that
- savoured of studio. This was the first art criticism he had talked since
- the war began. It was clear he had been to a couple of shows. Not with
- Joan. Not alone. As he spoke, he glanced at Joan and met her eye.
- It was astonishing that Miss Jepson never heard the loud shout of
- “Hetty” that seemed to fill the room.
- It was just after this realization that an elderly but still gallant
- colonel, going on an expedition for the War Office with various other
- technical authorities to suppress some disturbing invention that the
- Ministry of Munitions was pressing in a troublesome manner, decided to
- come back from Longmore to London on the front seat beside Joan. His
- conversational intentions were honourable and agreeable, but he shared a
- common error that a girl who wears khaki and drives a car demands less
- respect from old gentlemen and is altogether more playful than the
- Victorian good woman. Possibly he was lured on to his own destruction.
- When he descended at the Ministry, he looked pinched and aged. He was
- shaken to the pitch of confidences. “My word,” he whispered. “That girl
- drives like the devil. But she’s a vixen ... snaps your head off....
- Don’t know whether this sort of thing is good for women in the long run.
- “Robs ’em of Charm,” he said.
- § 11
- It was just in this phase of wrath and darkness that Wilmington came
- over to London for his last leave before he was killed, and begged Joan
- for all the hours she had to spare. She was quite willing to treat him
- generously. They dined together and went to various theatres and
- music-halls and had a walk over Hampstead Heath on Sunday. He was a
- silent, persistent companion for most of the time. He bored her, and the
- more he bored her the greater her compunction and the more she hid it
- from him. But Wilmington, if he had a slow tongue, had a penetrating
- eye.
- The last evening they had together was at the Criterion. They dined in
- the grill room, a dinner that was interspersed with brooding silences.
- And then Wilmington decided to make himself interesting at any cost upon
- this last occasion.
- “Joan,” he said, knocking out a half-consumed cigarette upon the edge of
- his plate.
- “Billy?” said Joan, waking up.
- “Queer, Joan, that you don’t love me when I love you so much.”
- “I’d trust you to the end of the earth, Billy.”
- “I know. But you don’t love me.”
- “I think of you as much as I do of any one.”
- “No. Except—_one_.”
- “Billy,” said Joan weakly, “you’re the straightest man on earth.”
- Wilmington’s tongue ran along his white lips. He spoke with an effort.
- “You’ve loved Peter since you were six years old. It isn’t as
- though—you’d treated me badly. I can’t grumble that you’ve had no room
- for me. He’s always been there.”
- Joan, after an interval, decided to be frank.
- “It’s not much good, Billy, is it, if I do?”
- Wilmington said nothing for quite a long time. He sat thinking hard.
- “It’s not much good pretending I don’t hate Peter. I do. If I could kill
- him—and in your memory too.... He bars you from me. He makes you
- unhappy....”
- His face was a white misery. Joan glanced round at the tables about her,
- but no one seemed to be watching them. She looked at him again. Pity, so
- great that it came near to love, wrung her....
- “Joan,” he said at last.
- “Yes?”
- “It’s queer.... I feel mean.... As though it wasn’t right.... But look
- here, Joan.” He tapped her arm. “Something—something that I suppose I
- may as well point out to you. Because in certain matters—in certain
- matters you are being a fool. It’s astonishing—— But absolutely—a fool.”
- Joan perceived he had something very important to say. She sat watching
- him, as with immense deliberation he got out another cigarette and lit
- it.
- “You don’t understand this Peter business, Joan. I—I do. Mostly when I’m
- not actually planning out or carrying out the destruction of Germans, I
- think of you—and Peter. And all the rest of it. I’ve got nothing else
- much to think about. And I think I see things you don’t see. I know I
- do.... Oh damn it! Go to hell!”
- This last was to the waiter, who was making the customary warning about
- liqueurs on the stroke of half-past nine.
- “Sorry,” said Wilmington to Joan, and leant forward over his folded arms
- and collected his thoughts with his eyes on the flowers before them.
- “It’s like this, Joan. Peter isn’t where we are. I—I’m very definite and
- clear about my love-making. I fell in love with you, and I’ve never met
- any other woman I’d give three minutes of my life to. You’ve just got
- me. As if I were the palm of your hand. I wish I were. And—oh! what’s
- the good of shutting my eyes?—Peter has you. You’ve been thinking of
- Peter half the time we’ve been together. It’s true, Joan. You’ve grown
- up in love. Buh! But Peter, you’ve got to understand, isn’t in love. He
- doesn’t know what love means. Perhaps he never will. Love with you and
- me is a thing of flesh and bone. He takes it like some skin disease.
- He’s been spoilt. He’s so damned easy and good-looking. He was got hold
- of. I——”
- Wilmington flushed for a moment. “I’m a chaste man, Joan. It’s a rare
- thing. Among our sort. But Peter—— Loving a woman body and soul means
- nothing to him. He thinks love-making is a kind of amusement—— Casual
- amusement. Any woman who isn’t repulsive. You know, Joan, that’s not the
- natural way. The natural way is love of soul and body. He’s been
- perverted. But in this crowded world—like a monkey’s cage ...
- artificially heated ... the young men get made miscellaneous.... Lots of
- the girls even are miscellaneous....”
- He considered the word. “Miscellaneous? Promiscuous, I mean.... It
- hasn’t happened to us. To you and me, I mean. I’m unattractive somehow.
- You’re fastidious. He’s neither. He takes the thing that offers. To
- grave people sex is a sacrament, something—so solemn and beautiful——”
- The tears stood in his eyes. “If I go on,” he said.... “I can’t go
- on....”
- For a time he said no more, and pulled his unconsumed cigarette to
- pieces over the ash-tray with trembling fingers. “That’s all,” he said
- at last.
- “All this is—rather true,” said Joan. “But——!”
- “What does it lead up to?”
- “Yes.”
- “It means Peter’s the ordinary male animal. Under modern conditions.
- Lazy. Affectionate and all that, but not a scrap of emotion or love—yet
- anyhow. Not what you and I know as love. You may dress it up as you
- like, but the fact is that the woman has to make love to him. That’s
- all. Hetty has made love to him. He has never made love to
- anybody—except as a sort of cheerful way of talking, and perhaps he
- never, never will.... He respects you too much to make love to you....
- But he’d hate the idea of any one else—making love to you.... It’s an
- idea—— It’s outside of his conception of you.... He’ll never think of it
- for himself.”
- Joan sat quite still. After what seemed a long silence she looked up at
- him.
- Wilmington was watching her face. He saw she understood his drift.
- “You could cut her out like _that_,” said Wilmington, with a gesture
- that gained an accidental emphasis by knocking his glass off the table
- and smashing it.
- The broken glass supplied an incident, a distraction, with the waiters,
- to relieve the tension of the situation.
- “That’s all I had to say,” said Wilmington when that was all settled.
- “There’s no earthly reason why two of us should be unhappy.”
- “Billy,” she said, after a long pause, “if I could only love _you_——”
- The face of gratitude that looked at him faded to a mask.
- “You’re thinking of Peter already,” said Wilmington, watching her face.
- It was true. She started, detected.
- He speculated cheerlessly.
- “You’ll marry me some day perhaps. When Peter’s thrown you over.... It’s
- men of my sort who get things like that....”
- He stood up and reached for her cloak. She, too, stood up.
- Then, as if to reassure her, he said: “I shall get killed, Joan. So we
- needn’t worry about that. I shall get killed. I know it. And Peter will
- live.... I always have taken everything too seriously. Always.... I
- shall kill a lot of Germans yet, but one day they will get me. And Peter
- will be up there in the air, like a cheerful midge—with all the Archies
- missing him....”
- § 12
- This conversation was a cardinal event in Joan’s life. Wilmington’s
- suggestions raised out of the grave of forgetfulness and incorporated
- with themselves a conversation she had had long ago with Adela—one
- Christmas at Pelham Ford when Adela had been in love with Sopwith
- Greene. Adela too had maintained that it was the business of a woman to
- choose her man and not wait to be chosen, and that it was the woman who
- had to make love. “A man’s in love with women in general,” had been
- Adela’s idea, “but women fall in love with men in particular.” Adela had
- used a queer phrase, “It’s for a woman to find her own man and keep him
- and take care of him.” Men had to do their own work; they couldn’t think
- about love as women were obliged by nature to think about love. “Love’s
- just a trouble to a real man, like a mosquito singing in his ear, until
- some woman takes care of him.”
- All those ideas came back now to Joan’s mind, and she did her best to
- consider them and judge them as generalizations. But indeed she judged
- with a packed court, and all her being clamoured warmly for her to “get”
- Peter, to “take care”—most admirable phrase—of Peter. Her decision was
- made, and still she argued with herself. Was it beneath her dignity to
- set out and capture her Peter?—he was her Peter. Only he didn’t know it.
- She tried to generalize. Had it ever been dignified for a woman to wait
- until a man discovered her possible love? Was that at best anything more
- than the dignity of the mannequin?
- Three-quarters at least of the art and literature of the world is
- concerned with the relations of the sexes, and yet here was Joan, after
- thirty centuries or so of human art and literature, still debating the
- elementary facts of her being. There is so much excitement in our art
- and literature and so little light. The world has still to discover the
- scope and vastness of its educational responsibilities. Most of its
- teaching in these matters hitherto has been less in the nature of
- enlightenment than strategic concealment; we have given the young
- neither knowledge nor training, we have restrained and baffled them and
- told them lies. And then we have inflamed them. We have abused their
- instinctive trust when they were children with stories of old Bogey
- designed to save us the bother that unrestrained youthful enterprise
- might cause, and with humorous mockery of their natural curiosity.
- Jocularities about storks and gooseberry bushes, sham indignations at
- any plainness of speech, fierce punishments of imperfectly realized
- offences, this against a background of giggles, knowing innuendo, and
- careless, exciting glimpses of the mystery, have constituted the
- ordinary initiation of the youth of the world. Right up to full age, we
- still fail to provide the clear elemental facts. Our young men do not
- know for certain whether continence is healthy or unhealthy, possible or
- impossible; the sex is still assured with all our power of assurance,
- that the only pure and proper life for it is a sexless one. Until at
- last the brightest of the young have been obliged to get down to the
- bare facts in themselves and begin again at the beginning....
- So Joan, co-Heiress of the Ages with Peter, found that because of her
- defaulting trustees, because we teachers, divines, writers and the like
- have shirked what was disagreeable and difficult and unpopular, she
- inherited nothing but debts and dangers. She had not even that touching
- faith in Nature which sustained the generation of Jean Jacques Rousseau.
- She had to set about her problem with Peter as though he and she were
- Eve and Adam in a garden overrun with weeds and thorns into which God
- had never come.
- Joan was too young yet to have developed the compensating egotism of
- thwarted femininity. She saw Peter without delusions. He was a bigger
- and cleverer creature than herself; he compelled her respect. He had
- more strength, more invention, more initiative, and a relatively
- tremendous power of decision. And at the same time he was weak and blind
- and stupid. His flickering, unstable sensuousness, his light
- adventurousness and a certain dishonesty about women, filled her with a
- comprehensive pity and contempt. There was a real difference not merely
- in scale but in nature between them. It was clear to her now that the
- passionate and essential realities of a woman’s life are only incidental
- to a man. But on the other hand there were passionate and essential
- realities for Peter that made her own seem narrow and self-centred. She
- knew far more of his mental life than Oswald did. She knew that he had
- an intense passion for clear statement, he held to scientific and
- political judgments with a power altogether deeper and greater than she
- did; he cared for them and criticized them and polished them, like
- weapons that had been entrusted to him. Beneath his debonair mask he was
- growing into a strong and purposeful social and mental personality. She
- perceived that he was only in the beginning of his growth—if he came on
- no misadventure, if he did not waste himself. And she did not believe
- that she herself had any great power of further growth except through
- him. But linked to him she could keep pace with him. She could capture
- his senses, keep his conscience, uphold him....
- She had convinced herself now that that was her chief business in life.
- Her mind was remarkably free from doubts about the future if once she
- could get at her Peter. Mountains and forests of use and wont separated
- them, she knew. Peter had acquired a habit of not making love to her and
- of separating her from the thought of love. But if ever Peter came over
- these mountains, if ever he came through the forest to her—— In the
- heart of the forest, she would keep him. She wasn’t afraid that Peter
- would leave her again. Wilmington had been wrong there. That he had
- suggested in the bitterness of his heart. Men like Huntley and
- Winterbaum were always astray, but Peter was not “looking for women.” He
- was just a lost man, distracted by desire, desire that was strong
- because he was energetic, desire that was mischievous and unmeaning
- because he had lost his way in these things.
- “I don’t care so very much how long it takes, Peter; I don’t care what
- it costs me,” said Joan, getting her rôle clear at last. “I don’t even
- care—not vitally anyhow—how you wander by the way. No. Because you’re my
- man, Peter, and I am your woman. Because so it was written in the
- beginning. But you are coming over those mountains, my Peter, though
- they go up to the sky; you are coming through the forests though I have
- to make a path for you. You are coming to my arms, Peter ... coming to
- me....”
- So Joan framed her schemes, regardless of the swift approach of the day
- of battle for Peter. She was resolved to lose nothing by neglect or
- delay, but also she meant to do nothing precipitate. To begin with she
- braced herself to the disagreeable task of really thinking—instead of
- just feeling—about Hetty. She compared herself deliberately point by
- point with Hetty. Long ago at Pelham Ford she had challenged Hetty—and
- Peter had come out of the old library in spite of Hetty to watch her
- dancing. She was younger, she was fresher and cleaner, she was a ray of
- sunlight to Hetty’s flames. Hetty was good company—perhaps. But Peter
- and Joan had always been good company for each other, interested in a
- score of common subjects, able to play the same games and run abreast.
- But Hetty was “easy.” There was her strength. Between her and Peter
- there were no barriers, and between Joan and Peter was a blank wall, a
- stern taboo upon the primary among youthful interests, a long habit of
- aloofness, dating from the days when “soppy” was the ultimate word in
- the gamut of human scorn.
- “It’s just like that,” said Joan.
- Those barriers had to be broken down, without a shock. And before that
- problem Joan maintained a frowning, unsuccessful siege. She couldn’t
- begin to flirt with Peter. She couldn’t make eyes at him. Such things
- would be intolerable. She couldn’t devise any sort of signal. And so how
- the devil was this business ever to begin? And while she wrestled vainly
- with this perplexity she remained more boyish, more good-fellow and
- companion with Peter than ever....
- And while she was still meditating quite fruitlessly on this riddle of
- changing her relationship to Peter, he was snatched away from her to
- France.
- The thing happened quite unexpectedly. He came up to see her at
- Hampstead late in the afternoon—it was by a mere chance she was back
- early. He was full of pride at being chosen to go so soon. He seemed
- brightly excited at going, keen for the great adventure, the most
- lovable and animated of Peters—and he might be going to his death. But
- it was the convention of the time never to think of death, and anyhow
- never to speak of it. Some engagement held him for the evening, some
- final farewell spree; she did not ask too particularly what that was.
- She could guess only too well. Altogether they were about
- five-and-twenty minutes together, with Miss Jepson always in the room
- with them; for the most part they talked air shop; and then he prepared
- to leave with all her scheming still at loose ends in the air. “Well,”
- he said, “good-bye, old Joan,” and held out his hand.
- “No,” said Joan, with a sudden resolution in her eyes. “This time we
- kiss, Peter.”
- “Well,” said Peter, astonished.
- She had surprised him. He stared at her for an instant with a
- half-framed question in his eyes. And then they kissed very gravely and
- carefully. But she kissed him on the mouth.
- For some seconds solemnity hung about them. Then Peter turned upon Miss
- Jepson. “Do _you_ want a kiss?” said Peter....
- Miss Jepson was all for kissing, and then with a laugh and an effect of
- escape Peter had gone ... into the outer world ... into the outer
- air....
- § 13
- He flew to France the next day, above the grey and shining stretches of
- water and two little anxious ships, and he sent Joan a cheerful message
- on a picture-postcard of a shell-smashed church to tell of his safe
- arrival.
- Joan was dismayed. In war time we must not brood on death, one does not
- think of death if one can help it; it is the chance that wrecks all
- calculations; but the fear of death had fallen suddenly upon all her
- plans. And what was there left now of all her plans? She might write him
- letters.
- Death is more terrible to a girl in love than to any other living thing.
- “If he dies,” said Joan, “I am killed. I shall be worse than a widow—an
- Indian girl widow. Suttee; what will be left of me but ashes?... Some
- poor dregs of Joan carrying on a bankrupt life.... No me....”
- There was nothing for it but to write him letters. And Joan found those
- letters incredibly difficult to write. All lightness had gone from her
- touch. After long and tiring days with her car she sat writing and
- tearing up and beginning again. It was so difficult now to write to him,
- to be easy in manner and yet insidious. She wanted still to seem his old
- companion, and yet to hint subtly at the new state of things. “There’s a
- dull feeling now you’ve gone out of England, Peter,” she wrote. “I’ve
- never had company I cared for in all the world as I care for yours.”
- And, “I shall count the days to your leave, Peter, as soon as I know how
- many to count. I didn’t guess before that you were a sort of necessity
- to me.” Over such sentences, sentences that must have an edge and yet
- not be too bold, sentences full of tenderness and above all suspicion of
- “soppiness,” Joan pondered like a poet writing a sonnet....
- But letters went slowly, and life and death hustled along together very
- swiftly in the days of the great war....
- § 14
- Joan’s mind was full of love and life and the fear of losing them, but
- Peter was thinking but little of love and life; he was secretly
- preoccupied with the thought, the forbidden thought, of death, and with
- the strangeness of war and of this earth seen from an aeroplane ten
- thousand feet or so above the old battlefields of mankind. He was seeing
- the world in plan, and realizing what a flat and shallow thing it was.
- On clear days the circuit of the world he saw had a circumference of
- hundreds of miles, night flying was a journey amidst the stars with the
- little black planet far away; there was no former achievement of the
- race that did not seem to him now like a miniature toy set out upon the
- floor of an untidy nursery. He had beaten up towards the very limits of
- life and air, to the clear thin air of twenty-two or twenty-three
- thousand feet; he had been in the blinding sunlight when everything
- below was still asleep in the blue of dawn.
- And the world of history and romance, the world in which he and all his
- ancestors had believed, a world seen in elevation, of towering
- frontages, high portals, inaccessible dignities, giddy pinnacles and
- frowning reputations, had now fallen as flat, it seemed, as the façade
- of the Cloth Hall at Ypres. (He had seen that one day from above, spread
- out upon the ground.) He was convinced that high above the things of the
- past he droned his liquid way towards a new sort of life altogether,
- towards a greater civilization, a world-wide life for men with no
- boundaries in it at all except the emptiness of outer space, a life of
- freedom and exaltation and tremendous achievement. But meanwhile the old
- things of the world were trying most desperately to kill him. Every day
- the enemy’s anti-aircraft guns seemed to grow more accurate; and high
- above the little fleecy clouds lurked the braggart Markheimer and the
- gallant von Papen and suchlike German champions, with their decoys
- below, ready to swoop and strike. Never before had the world promised
- Peter so tremendous a spectacle as it seemed to promise now, and never
- before had his hope of living to see it been so insecure.
- When he had enlisted, and even after he had been transferred to the
- Flying Corps, Peter had thought very little of death. The thought of
- death only became prevalent in English minds towards the second year of
- the war. It is a hateful and unnatural thought in youth, easily
- dismissed altogether unless circumstances press it incessantly upon the
- attention. But even before Peter went to France two of his set had been
- killed under his eyes in a collision as they came down into the
- aerodrome, and a third he had seen two miles away get into a spiral nose
- dive, struggle out of it again, and then go down to be utterly smashed
- to pieces. In one day on Salisbury Plain he had seen three accidents,
- and two, he knew, had been fatal and one had left a legless thing to
- crawl through life. The messes in France seemed populous with young
- ghosts; reminiscences of sprees, talk of flying adventures were laced
- with, “dear old boy! he went west last May.” “Went west” was the common
- phrase. They never said “killed.” They hated the very name of death.
- They did their best, these dear gallant boys, to make the end seem an
- easy and familiar part of life, of life with which they were so joyously
- in love. They all knew that the dice was loaded against them, and that
- as the war went on the chances against them grew. The first day Peter
- was out in France he saw a man hit and brought down by a German Archie.
- Two days after, he found himself the centre of a sudden constellation of
- whoofing shells that left inky cloudbursts over him and under him and
- round about him; he saw the fabric of his wing jump and quiver, and
- dropped six hundred feet or so to shake the gunner off. But _whuff_ ...
- _whuff_ ... _whuff_, like the bark of a monstrous dog ... the beast was
- on him again within a minute, and Peter did two or three loops and came
- about and got away with almost indecent haste. He was trembling; he
- hated it. And he hated to tremble.
- In the mess that evening the talk ran on the “Pigeon shooter.” It seemed
- that there was this one German gunner far quicker and more deadly than
- any of his fellows. He had a knack of divining what an airman was going
- to do. Peter admitted his near escape and sought counsel.
- Peter’s colleagues watched him narrowly and unostentatiously when they
- advised him. Their faces were masks and his face was a mask, and they
- were keen for the faintest intonation of what was behind it. They all
- hated death, they all tried not to think of death; they all believed
- that there were Paladins, other fellows, who never thought of death at
- all. When the tension got too great they ragged; they smashed great
- quantities of furniture and made incredible volumes of noise. Twice
- Peter got away from the aerodrome to let things rip in Amiens. But such
- outbreaks were usually followed by a deep depression of spirit. In the
- night Peter would wake up and find the thought of death sitting by his
- bedside.
- So far Peter had never had a fight. He had gone over the enemy lines
- five times, he had bombed a troop train in a station and a regiment
- resting in a village, he believed he had killed a score or more of
- Germans on each occasion and he felt not the slightest compunction, but
- he had not yet come across a fighting Hun plane. He had very grave
- doubts about the issue of such a fight, a fight that was bound to come
- sooner or later. He knew he was not such a quick pilot as he would like
- to be. He thought quickly, but he thought rather too much for rapid,
- steady decisions. He had the balancing, scientific mind. He knew that
- none of his flights were perfect. Always there was a conflict of
- intention at some point, a hesitation. He believed he might last for
- weeks or months, but he knew that somewhen he would be found
- wanting—just for a second perhaps, just in the turn of the fight. Then
- he would be killed. He hid quite successfully from all his companions,
- and particularly from his squadron commander, this conviction, just as
- he had previously hidden the vague funk that had invariably invaded his
- being whenever he walked across the grounds towards the machine during
- his days of instruction, but at the back of his mind the thought that
- his time was limited was always present. He believed that he had to die;
- it might be tomorrow or next week or next month, but somewhen within the
- year.
- When these convictions became uppermost in Peter’s mind a black
- discontent possessed him. There are no such bitter critics of life as
- the young; theirs is a magnificent greed for the splendour of life. They
- have no patience with delays; their blunders and failures are
- intolerable. Peter reviewed his two-and-twenty years—it was now nearly
- three-and-twenty—with an intense dissatisfaction. He had wasted his
- time, and now he had got into a narrow way that led down and down
- pitilessly to where there would be no more time to waste. He had been
- aimless and the world had been aimless, and then it had suddenly turned
- upon him and caught him in this lobster-trap. He had wasted all his
- chances of great experience. He had never loved a woman or had been well
- loved because he had frittered away that possibility in a hateful sex
- excitement with Hetty—who did not even pretend to be faithful to him.
- And now things had got into this spin to death. It was exactly like a
- spin—like a spinning nose dive—the whole affair, his life, this war....
- He would lie and fret in his bed, and fret all the more because he knew
- his wakefulness wasted the precious nervous vigour that might save his
- life next day.
- After a black draught of such thoughts Peter would become excessively
- noisy and facetious in the mess tent. He was recognized and applauded as
- a wit and as a devil. He was really very good at Limericks, delicately
- indelicate, upon the names of his fellow officers and of the villages
- along the front—that was no doubt heredity, the gift of his Aunt
- Phyllis—and his caricatures adorned the mess. It was also understood
- that he was a rake....
- Peter’s evil anticipations were only too well justified. He was put down
- in his very first fight, which happened over Dompierre. He had bad luck;
- he was struck by von Papen, one of the crack German fliers on that part
- of the front. He was up at ten thousand feet or so, more or less
- covering a low-flying photographer, when he saw a German machine coming
- over half a mile perhaps or more away as though it was looking for
- trouble. Peter knew he might funk a fight, and to escape that moral
- disaster, headed straight down for the German, who dropped and made off
- southward. Peter rejoicing at this flight, pursued, his eyes upon the
- quarry. Then from out of the sun came von Papen, swiftly and
- unsuspected, upon Peter’s tail, and announced his presence by a whiff of
- bullets. Peter glanced over his shoulder to discover that he was caught.
- “Oh damn!” cried Peter, and ducked his head, and felt himself stung at
- the shoulder and wrist. Splinters were flying about him.
- He tried a side-slip, and as he did so he had an instant’s vision of yet
- another machine, a Frenchman this time, falling like a bolt out of the
- blue upon his assailant. The biter was bit.
- Peter tried to come round and help, but he turned right over sideways
- and dropped, and suddenly found himself with the second Hun plane coming
- up right ahead of him. Peter blazed away, but God! how his wrist hurt
- him! He cursed life and death. He blazed away with his machine going
- over more and more, and the landscape rushing up over his head and then
- getting in front of him and circling round. For some seconds he did not
- know what was up and what was down. He continued to fire, firing
- earthward for a long second or so after his second enemy had disappeared
- from his vision.
- The world was spinning round faster and faster, and everything was
- moving away outward, faster and faster, as if it was all hastening to
- get out of his way....
- This surely was a spinning nose dive, the spinning nose dive—from
- within. Round and round. Confusing and giddy! Just as he had seen poor
- old Gordon go down.... But one didn’t feel at all—as Peter had supposed
- one must feel—like an egg in an egg-whisk!...
- Down spun the aeroplane, as a maple fruit in autumn spins to the ground.
- Then this still living thing that had been Peter, all bloody and broken,
- made a last supreme effort. And his luck seconded his effort. The spin
- grew slower and flatter. Control of this lurching, eddying aeroplane
- seemed to come back, escaped again, mocked him. The ground was very
- near. _Now!_ The sky swung up over the whirling propeller again and
- stayed above it, and again the machine obeyed a reasonable soul.
- He was out of it! Out of a nose dive! Yes. Steady! It is so easy when
- one’s head is whirling to get back into a spin again. Steady!...
- He talked to himself. “Oh! good Peter! _Good_ Peter! _Clever_ Peter.
- Wonderful Mr. Toad! Stick it! Stick it!” But what a queer right hand it
- was! It was covered with blood. And it crumpled up in the middle when he
- clenched it! Never mind!
- He was in the lowest storey of the air. The Hun and the Frenchman up
- there were in another world.
- Down below, quite close—not five hundred feet now—were field-greys
- running and shooting at him. They were counting their chicken before he
- was hatched—no, smashed.... He wasn’t done yet! Not by any manner of
- means! A wave of great cheerfulness and confidence buoyed up Peter. He
- felt equal to any enterprise. Should he drop and let the bawling Boche
- have a round or so?
- And there was a Hun machine smashed upside down on the ground. Was that
- the second fellow?
- Flick! a bullet!
- Wiser counsels came to Peter. This was no place for a sick and giddy man
- with a smashed and bleeding wrist. He must get away.
- Up! Which way was west? West? The sun rises in the east and sets in the
- west. But where had the sun got to? It was hidden by his wing. Shadows!
- The shadows would be pointing north-east, that was the tip.... Up! There
- were the Boche trenches. No, Boche reserve trenches.... Going west,
- going west.... Rip! Snap! Bullet through the wing, and a wire flickering
- about. He ducked his head.... He put the machine up steeply to perhaps a
- thousand feet....
- He had an extraordinary feeling that he and the machine were growing and
- swelling, that they were getting bigger and bigger, and the sky and the
- world and everything else smaller. At last he was a monstrous man in a
- vast aeroplane in the tiniest of universes. He was as great as God.
- That wrist! And this blood! Blood! And great, glowing spots of blood
- that made one’s sight indistinct....
- He coughed, and felt his mouth full of blood, and spat it out and
- retched....
- Then in an instant he was a little thing again, and the sky and the
- world were immense. He had a lucid interval.
- One ought to go up and help that Frenchman. Where were they fighting?...
- _Up_, anyhow!
- This must be No Man’s Land. That crumpled little thing was a dead body
- surely. Barbed wire. More barbed wire.
- The engine was missing. Ugh! _That fairly put the lid on!_
- Peter was already asleep and dreaming. The great blood spots had
- returned and increased, but now they were getting black, they were
- black, huge black blotches; they blotted out the world!
- Peter, Peter as we have known him, discontinued existence....
- It was an automaton, aided by good luck, that dropped his machine half a
- mile behind the French trenches....
- § 15
- Peter had no memory of coming to again from his faint. For a long time
- he must have continued to be purely automatic. His flaming wrist was the
- centre of his being. Then for a time consciousness resumed, as abruptly
- as the thread of a story one finds upon the torn page of a novel.
- He found himself in the midst of a friendly group of pale blue uniforms;
- he was standing up and being very lively in spite of the strong taste of
- blood in his mouth and a feeling that his wrist was burning as a match
- burns, and that the left upper half of his body had been changed into a
- lump of raw and bleeding meat. He was talking a sort of French. “_C’est
- sacré bon stuff, cet eau-de-vie Française_,” he was saying gaily and
- rather loudly.
- “Haf some more,” said a friendly voice.
- “Not half, old chap,” said Peter, and felt at the time that this was not
- really good French.
- He tried to slap the man on the shoulder, but he couldn’t.
- “_Bon!_” he said, “as we say in England,” and felt that that remark also
- failed.
- Some one protested softly against his being given more brandy....
- Then this clear fragment ended again. There was a kind of dream of
- rather rough but efficient surgery upon a shoulder and arm that was
- quite probably his own, and some genially amiable conversation. There
- was a very nice Frenchman with a black beard and soft eyes, who wore a
- long white overall, and seemed to be looking after him as tenderly as a
- woman could do.
- But with these things mingled the matter of delirium. At one time the
- Kaiser prevailed in Peter’s mind, a large, foolish, pompous person with
- waxed moustaches and distraught eyes, who crawled up to Peter over
- immense piles of white and grey and green rotting corpses, and began
- gnawing at his shoulder almost absent-mindedly. Peter struggled and
- protested. What business had this beastly German to come interfering
- with Peter’s life? He started a vast argument about that, in which all
- sorts of people, including the nice-looking Frenchman in the white
- overall, took part.
- Peter was now making a formal complaint about the conduct of the
- universe. “No,” he insisted time after time, “I will not deal with
- subordinates. I insist on seeing the Head,” and so at last he found
- himself in the presence of the Lord God....
- But Peter’s vision of the Lord God was the most delirious thing of all.
- He imagined him in an office, a little office in a vast building, and so
- out of the way that people had to ask each other which was the passage
- and which the staircase. Old men stood and argued at corners with
- Peter’s girl-guide whether it was this way or that. People were being
- shown over the building by girl-guides; it was very like the London War
- Office, only more so; there were great numbers of visitors, and they all
- seemed to be in considerable hurry and distress, and most of them were
- looking for the Lord God to lodge a complaint and demand an explanation,
- just as Peter was. For a time all the visitors became wounded men, and
- nurses mixed up with the girl-guides, and Peter was being carried
- through fresh air to an ambulance train. His shoulder and wrist were
- very painful and singing, as it were, a throbbing duet together.
- For a time Peter did seem to see the Lord God; he was in his office, a
- little brown, rather tired-looking man in a kepi, and Peter was on a
- stretcher, and the Lord God or some one near him was saying: “_Quel
- numéro_?” But that passed away, and Peter was again conducting his
- exploration of the corridors with a girl-guide who was sometimes like
- Joan and sometimes like Hetty—and then there was a queer disposition to
- loiter in the passages.... For a time he sat in dishabille while Hetty
- tried to explain God.... Dreams cross the scent of dreams.
- Then it seemed to Peter’s fevered brain that he was sitting, and had
- been sitting for a long time, in the little office of the Lord God of
- Heaven and Earth. And the Lord God had the likeness of a lean, tired,
- intelligent-looking oldish man, with an air of futile friendliness
- masking a fundamental indifference.
- “My dear sir,” the Lord God was saying, “do please put that cushion
- behind your poor shoulder. I can’t bear to see you so uncomfortable. And
- tell me everything. Everything....”
- The office was the dingiest and untidiest little office it was possible
- to imagine. The desk at which God sat was in a terrible litter. On a
- side table were some grubby test tubes and bottles at which the Lord God
- had apparently been trying over a new element. The windows had not been
- cleaned for ages, they were dark with spiders’ webs, they crawled with a
- buzzing nightmare of horrible and unmeaning life. It was a most
- unbusinesslike office. There were no proper files, no card indexes;
- bundles of dusty papers were thrust into open fixtures, papers littered
- the floors, and there were brass-handled drawers—. Peter looked again,
- and blood was oozing from these drawers and little cries came out of
- them. He glanced quickly at God, and God was looking at him. “But did
- you really make this world?” he asked.
- “I _thought_ I did,” said God.
- “But why did you do it? _Why?_”
- “Ah, _there_ you have me!” said the Lord God with bonhomie.
- “But why don’t you exert yourself?” said Peter, hammering at the desk
- with his sound hand. “Why don’t you exert yourself?”
- Could delirium have ever invented a more monstrous conception than this
- of Peter hammering on an untidy desk amidst old pen nibs, bits of
- sealing-wax, half-sheets of notepaper, returns of nature’s waste, sample
- bones of projected animals, mineral samples, dirty little test tubes,
- and the like, and lecturing the Almighty upon the dreadful confusion
- into which the world had fallen? “Here was I, sir, and millions like me,
- with a clear promise of life and freedom! And what are we now? Bruises,
- red bones, dead bodies! This German Kaiser fellow—an ass, sir, a perfect
- ass, gnawing a great hole in my shoulder! He and his son, stuffing
- themselves with a Blut-Wurst made out of all our lives and happiness!
- What does it mean, sir? Has it gone entirely out of your control? And it
- isn’t as if the whole thing was ridiculous, sir. It isn’t. In some ways
- it’s an extraordinarily fine world—one has to admit that. That is why it
- is all so distressing, so unendurably distressing. I don’t in the least
- want to leave it.”
- “You admit that it’s fine—in places,” said the Lord God, as if he valued
- the admission.
- “But the management, sir! the management! Yours—ultimately. Don’t you
- realize, sir——? I had the greatest trouble in finding you. Half the
- messengers don’t know where this den of yours is. It’s _forgotten_.
- Practically forgotten. The Head Office! And now I’m here I can tell you
- everything is going to rack and ruin, driving straight to an absolute
- and final smash and break-up.”
- “As bad as that?” said the Lord God.
- “It’s the appalling waste,” Peter continued. “The waste of material, the
- waste of us, the waste of everything. A sort of splendour in it, there
- is; touches of real genius about it, that I would be the last to deny;
- but that only increases the bitterness of the disorder. It’s a good
- enough world to lament. It’s a good enough life to resent having to lose
- it. There’s some lovely things in it, sir; courage, endurance, and oh!
- many beautiful things. But when one gets here, when one begins to ask
- for you and hunt about for you, and finds this, this muddle, sir, then
- one begins to understand. _Look_ at this room, consider it—as a general
- manager’s room. No decency. No order. Everywhere the dust of ages, muck
- indescribable, bacteria! And that!”
- That was a cobweb across the grimy window pane, in which a freshly
- entangled bluebottle fly was buzzing fussily. “That ought not to be here
- at all,” said Peter. “It really ought not to exist at all. Why does it?
- Look at that beastly spider in the corner! Why do you suffer all these
- cruel and unclean things?”
- “You don’t like it?” said the Lord God, without any sign either of
- apology or explanation.
- “No,” said Peter.
- “Then _change_ it,” said the Lord God, nodding his head as who should
- say “got you there.”
- “But how are we to change it?”
- “If you have no will to change it, you have no right to criticize it,”
- said the Lord God, leaning back with the weariness of one who has had to
- argue with each generation from Job onward, precisely the same
- objections and precisely the same arguments.
- “After all,” said the Lord God, giving Peter no time to speak further;
- “after all, you are three-and-twenty, Mr. Peter Stubland, and you’ve
- been pretty busy complaining of me and everything between me and you,
- your masters, pastors, teachers, and so forth, for the last half-dozen
- years. Meanwhile, is your own record good? Positive achievements,
- forgive me, are still to seek. You’ve been nearly drunk several times,
- you’ve soiled yourself with a lot of very cheap and greedy love-making—I
- gave you something beautiful there anyhow, and you knew that while you
- spoilt it—you’ve been a vigorous member of the consuming class, and
- really, you’ve got nothing clear and planned, nothing at all. You
- complain of my lack of order; where’s the order in your own mind? If I
- was the hot-tempered old autocrat some of you people pretend I am, I
- should have been tickling you up with a thunderbolt long ago. But I
- happen to have this democratic fad as badly as any one—Free Will is what
- they used to call it—and so I leave you to work out your own salvation.
- And if I leave you alone then I have to leave that other—that other Mr.
- Toad at Potsdam alone. He tries me, I admit, almost to the miracle pitch
- at times with the tone of his everlasting prepaid telegrams—but one has
- to be fair. What is sauce for the goose is sauce for the Kaiser. I’ve
- got to leave you all alone if I leave one alone. Don’t you see that? In
- spite of the mess you are in. So don’t blame me. Don’t blame me. There
- isn’t a thing in the whole of this concern of mine that Man can’t
- control if only he chooses to control it. It’s arranged like that.
- There’s a lot more system here than you suspect, only it’s too ingenious
- for you to see. It’s yours to command. If you want a card index for the
- world—well, get a card index. I won’t prevent you. If you don’t like my
- spiders, kill my spiders. I’m not conceited about them. If you don’t
- like the Kaiser, hang him, assassinate him. Why don’t you abolish Kings?
- You could. But it was your sort, with your cheap and quick efficiency
- schemes, who set up Saul—in spite of my protests—ages ago.... Humanity
- either makes or breeds or tolerates all its own afflictions, great and
- small. Not my doing. Take Kings and Courts. Take dungheaps and flies.
- It’s astonishing you people haven’t killed off all the flies in the
- world long ago. They do no end of mischief, and it would be perfectly
- easy to do. They’re purely educational. Purely. Even as you lie in
- hospital, there they are buzzing within an inch of your nose and landing
- on your poor forehead to remind you of what a properly organized
- humanity could do for its own comfort. But there’s men in this world who
- want me to act as a fly-paper, simply because they are too lazy to get
- one for themselves. My dear Mr. Peter! if people haven’t taught you
- properly, teach yourself. If they don’t know enough, find out. It’s all
- here. All here.” He made a comprehensive gesture. “I’m not mocking you.”
- “You’re not mocking me?” said Peter keenly....
- “It depends upon you,” said the Lord God with an enigmatic smile. “You
- asked me why I didn’t exert myself. Well—why don’t _you_ exert yourself?
- “Why don’t _you_ exert yourself?” the Lord God repeated almost rudely,
- driving it home.
- “That pillow under your shoulder still isn’t comfortable,” said the Lord
- God, breaking off....
- The buzzing of the entangled fly changed to the drone of a passing
- aeroplane, and the dingy office expanded into a hospital ward. Some one
- was adjusting Peter’s pillows....
- § 16
- If his shoulder-blade was to mend, Peter could not be moved; and for a
- time he remained in the French hospital in a long, airy room that was
- full mostly with flying men like himself. At first he could not talk
- very much, but later he made some friends. He was himself very immobile,
- but other men came and sat by him to talk.
- He talked chiefly to two Americans, who were serving at that time in the
- French flying corps. He found it much easier to talk English than French
- in his exhausted state, for though both he and Joan spoke French far
- above the average public school level, he found that now it came with an
- effort. It was as if his mind had for a time been pared down to its
- essentials.
- These Americans amused and interested him tremendously. He had met
- hardly any Americans before so as to talk to them at all intimately, but
- they suffered from an inhibition of French perhaps more permanent than
- his own, and so the three were thrown into an unlimited intimacy of
- conversation. At first he found these Americans rather fatiguing, and
- then he found them very refreshing because of their explicitness of
- mind. Except when they broke into frothy rapids of slang they were never
- allusive; in serious talk they said everything. They laid a firm
- foundation for all their assertions. That is the last thing an
- Englishman does. They talked of the war and of the prospect of America
- coming into the war, and of England and America and again of the war,
- and of the French and of the French and Americans and of the war, and of
- Taft’s League to Enforce Peace and the true character of Wilson and
- Teddy and of the war, and of Sam Hughes and Hughes the Australian, and
- whether every country has the Hughes it deserves and of the war, and of
- going to England after the war, and of Stratford-on-Avon and Chester and
- Windsor, and of the peculiarities of English people. Their ideas of
- England Peter discovered were strange and picturesque. They believed all
- Englishmen lived in a glow of personal loyalty to the Monarch, and were
- amazed to learn that Peter’s sentiments were republican; and they
- thought that every Englishman dearly loved a lord. “We think that of
- Americans,” said Peter. “That’s our politeness,” said they in a chorus,
- and started a train of profound discoveries in international
- relationships in Peter’s mind.
- “The ideas of every country about every country are necessarily a little
- stale. What England is, what England thinks, and what England is
- becoming, isn’t on record. What is on record is the England of the
- ’eighties and ’nineties.”
- “Now, that’s very true,” said the nearer American. “And you can apply it
- right away, with a hundred per cent. or so added, to all your ideas of
- America.”
- As a consequence both sides in this leisurely discussion found how
- widely they had been out in their ideas about each other. Peter
- discovered America as not nearly so commercial and individualistic as he
- had supposed; he had been altogether ignorant of the increasing part the
- universities were playing in her affairs; the Americans were equally
- edified to find that the rampant imperialism of Cecil Rhodes and his
- group no longer ruled the British imagination. “If things are so,” said
- the diplomatist in the nearer bed, “then I seem to see a lot more coming
- together between us than I’ve ever been disposed to think possible
- before. If you British aren’t so keen over this king business——”
- “_Keen!_” said Peter.
- “If you don’t hold you are IT and unapproachable—in the way of Empires.”
- “The Empire is yours for the asking,” said Peter.
- “Then all there is between us is the Atlantic—and that grows narrower
- every year. We’re the same people.”
- “So long as we have the same languages and literature,” said Peter....
- From these talks onward Peter may be regarded as having a Foreign Policy
- of his own.
- § 17
- And it was in this hospital that Peter first clearly decided to become
- personally responsible for the reconstruction of the British Empire.
- This decision was precipitated by the sudden reappearance in his world
- of Mir Jelalludin, the Indian whom he had once thought unsuitable
- company for Joan.
- Peter had been dozing when Jelalludin appeared. He found him sitting
- beside the bed, and stared at the neat and smiling brown face, unable to
- place him, and still less able to account for the uniform he was
- wearing. For Jelalludin was wearing the uniform of the French aviator,
- and across his breast he wore four palms.
- “I had the pleasure of knowing you at Cambridge,” said Mir Jelalludin in
- his Indian staccato. “Cha’med I was of use to you.”
- An explanatory Frenchman standing beside the Indian dabbed his finger on
- the last of Jelalludin’s decorations. “He killed von Papen after your
- crash,” said the Frenchman.
- “You were that Frenchman——?” said Peter.
- “In your fight,” said Mir Jelalludin.
- “He’d have finished me,” said Peter.
- “I finished _him_,” said the Indian, laughing with sheer happiness, and
- showing his beautiful teeth.
- Peter contemplated the situation. He made a movement and was reminded of
- his bandages.
- “I wish I could shake hands,” he said.
- The Indian smiled with a phantom malice in his smile.
- Peter went bluntly to a question that had arisen in his mind. “Why
- aren’t you in khaki?” he asked.
- “The Brish’ Gu’ment objects to Indian flyers,” said Mir Jelalludin. “I
- tried. But Brish’ Gu’ment thinks flying beyond us. And bad for Prestige.
- Prestige very important thing to Brish’ Gu’ment. So I came to France.”
- Peter continued to digest the situation.
- “Of course,” said Jelalludin, “no commissions given in regular army to
- Indians. Brish’ soldiers not allowed to s’lute Indian officers. Not part
- of the Great White Race. Otherwise hundreds of flyers could come from
- India, hundreds and hundreds. We play cricket—good horsemen. Many Indian
- gentlemen must be first-rate flying stuff. But Gu’ment says ’No.’”
- He continued to smile more cheerfully than ever.
- “Hundreds of juvenile Indians ready and willing to be killed for your
- Empire”—he rubbed it in—“but—No, Thank You. Indo-European people we are,
- Aryans, more consanguineous than Jews or Japanese. Ready to take our
- places beside you.... Well, anyhow, I rejoice to see that you are
- recovering to entire satisfaction. It was only when I descended after
- the fight that I perceived that it was you, and it seemed to me then
- that you were very seriously injured. I was anxious. And mem’ries of
- otha days. I felt I must see you.”
- Peter and the young Indian looked at one another.
- “Look here, Jelalludin,” he said, “I must apologize.”
- “But why?”
- “As part of the British Empire. No! don’t interrupt. I do. But, I say,
- do they—do we really bar you—absolutely?”
- “Absolutely. Not only from the air force, but from any commission at
- all. The lowest little bazaar clerk from Clapham, who has got a
- commission, is over our Indian officers—over our princes. It is an
- everlasting humiliation. Necessary for Prestige.”
- “The French have more sense, anyhow.”
- “They take us on our merits.
- “If I _had_ a British commission,” said Jelalludin, “I should be made
- very uncomfortable. It is the way with British officers and gentlemen.
- The French are not so—particular.”
- “At present,” said Peter, “I can’t be moved.”
- “You improve.”
- “But when I get up this is one of the things I have to see to. You see,
- Jelalludin, this Empire of ours—yours and mine—has got into the hands of
- a gang of gory Old Fools. Partly my negligence—as God said.”
- “God?” said Jelalludin.
- “Oh, nothing! I mean we young men haven’t been given a proper grasp of
- the Indian situation. Or any situation. No. This business of the
- commissions——! after all that you fellows have done here in France! It’s
- disgraceful. You see, we don’t see or learn anything about India. Even
- at Cambridge——”
- “You didn’t see much of us there,” smiled the Indian.
- “I’m sorry,” said Peter.
- “I didn’t come to talk about this,” said Jelalludin, “it came out.”
- “I’m glad it came out,” said Peter.
- A pause.
- “I mustn’t tire you,” said Mir Jelalludin, and rose to go.
- Peter thanked him for coming.
- “And your cha’ming sister?” asked the Indian, as if by an afterthought.
- “Foster sister. She drives a big car about London,” said Peter....
- Peter meditated profoundly upon that interview for some days.
- Then he tried over the opinions of the Americans about India. But
- Americans are of little help to the British about India. Their simple
- uncriticized colour prejudice covers all “Asiatics” except the
- inhabitants of Siberia. They had a more than English ignorance of
- ethnology, and Oswald had at least imparted some fragments of that
- important science to his ward. Their working classification of mankind
- was into Anglo-Saxons, Frenchmen, Sheenies, Irishmen, Dutchmen, Dagoes,
- Chinks, Coloured People, and black Niggers. They esteemed Mir Jelalludin
- a Coloured Person. Peter had to fall back upon himself again.
- § 18
- It contributed to the thoroughness of Peter’s thinking that it was some
- time before he could be put into a position to read comfortably. And it
- has to be recorded in the teeth of the dictates of sentiments and the
- most sacred traditions of romance that the rôle played by both Joan and
- Hetty in these meditations was secondary and incidental. It was an
- attenuated and abstract Peter who lay in the French hospital, his chief
- link of sense with life was a growing hunger; he thought very much about
- fate, pain, the nature of things, and God, and very little about persons
- and personal incidents—and so strong an effect had his dream that God
- remained fixed steadfastly in his mind as that same intellectual
- non-interventionist whom he had visited in the fly-blown office. But
- about God’s rankling repartee, “Why don’t _you_ exert yourself?” there
- was accumulating a new conception, the conception of Man taking hold of
- the world, unassisted by God but with the acquiescence of God, and in
- fulfilment of some remote, incomprehensible planning on the part of God.
- Probably Peter in thinking this was following one of the most ancient
- and well-beaten of speculative paths, but it seemed to him that it was a
- new way of thinking. And he was Man. It was he who had to establish
- justice in the earth, achieve unity, and rule first the world and then
- the stars.
- He lay staring at the ceiling, and quite happy now that healing and
- habituation had freed him from positive pain, thinking out how he was to
- release and co-operate with his India, which had invariably the face of
- Mir Jelalludin, how he was to reunite himself with his brothers in
- America, and how the walls and divisions of mankind, which look so high
- and invincible upon the ground and so trivial from twelve thousand feet
- above, were to be subdued to such greater ends.
- It was only as the blood corpuscles multiplied inside him that Peter
- ceased to be constantly Man contemplating his Destiny and Races and
- Empires, and for more and more hours in the day shrank to the dimensions
- and natural warmth of Mr. Peter Stubland contemplating convalescence in
- Blighty. He became eager first for the dear old indulgent and welcoming
- house at Pelham Ford, and then for prowls and walks and gossip with Joan
- and Oswald, and then, then for London and a little “fun.” Life was
- ebbing back into what is understood to be the lower nature, and was
- certainly the most intimate and distinctive substance of Mr. Peter
- Stubland. His correspondence became of very great interest to him.
- Certain letters from Joan, faint but pursuing, had reached him, those
- letters over which Joan had sat like a sonneteer. He read them and
- warmed to them. He thought what luck it was that he had a Joan to be the
- best of sisters to him, to be even more than a sister. She was the best
- friend he had, and it was jolly to read so plainly that he was her best
- friend. He would like to do work with Joan better than with any man he
- knew. Driving a car wasn’t half good enough for her. Some day he’d be
- able to show her how to fly, and he would. It would be great fun going
- up with Joan on a double control and letting her take over. There must
- be girls in the world who would fly as well as any man, or better.
- He scribbled these ideas in his first letter to Joan, and they pleased
- her mightily. To fly with Peter would be surely to fly straight into
- heaven.
- And mixed up with Joan’s letters were others that he presently sorted
- out from hers and put apart, as though even letters might hold
- inconvenient communion. For the most part they came from Hetty Reinhart,
- and displayed the emotions of a consciously delicious female enamoured
- and enslaved by one of the heroes of the air. She had dreamt of him
- coming in through the skylight of her studio, Lord Cupid visiting his
- poor little Psyche—“but it was only the moonlight,” and she thought of
- him now always with great overshadowing wings. Sometimes they were great
- white wings that beat above her, and sometimes they were thrillingly
- soft and exquisite wings, like the wings of the people in _Peter
- Wilkins_. She sent him a copy of _Peter Wilkins_, book beloved by Poe
- and all readers of the fantastic. Then came the news of his smash. She
- had been clever enough to link it with the death of von Papen, the Hun
- Matador. “Was that your fight, dear Peterkins? Did you _begin_ on
- Goliath?” As the cordials of recovery raced through Peter’s veins there
- were phases when the thought of visiting the yielding fair, Jovelike and
- triumphant in winged glory, became not simply attractive but insistent.
- But he wrote to Hetty modestly, “They’ve clipped one wing for ever.”
- And so in a quite artless and inevitable way Peter found his first
- leave, when the British hospital had done with him, mortgaged up to hilt
- almost equally to dear friend Joan and to Cleopatra Hetty.
- The young man only realized the duplicity of his nature and the
- complications of his position as the hospital boat beat its homeward way
- across the Channel. The night was smooth and fine, with a high full moon
- which somehow suggested Hetty, and with a cloud scheme of great beauty
- and distinction that had about it a flavour of Joan. And as he meditated
- upon these complications that had been happening in his more personal
- life while his attention had been still largely occupied with divinity
- and politics, he was hailed by an unfamiliar voice and addressed as
- “Simon Peter.” “Excuse me,” said the stout young officer tucked up
- warmly upon the next deck chair between a pair of crutches, “but aren’t
- you Simon Peter?”
- Peter had heard that name somewhere before. “My name’s Stubland,” he
- said.
- “Ah! Stubland! I forgot your surname. Of High Cross School?”
- Peter peered and saw a round fair face that slowly recalled memories.
- “Wait a moment!” said Peter.... “_Ames!_”
- “Guessed it in one. Probyn and I were chums.”
- “What have you got?” said Peter.
- “Leg below the knee off, damn it!” said Ames. “One month at the front.
- Not much of a career. But they say they do you a leg now better than
- reality. But I’d have liked to have batted the pants of the unspeakable
- Hun a bit more before I retired. What have you got?”
- “Wrist chiefly and shoulder-blade. Air fight. After six weeks.”
- “Does you out?”
- “For flying, I’m afraid. But there’s lots of ground jobs. And
- anyhow—home’s pleasant.”
- “Yes,” said Ames. “Home’s pleasant. But I’d like to have got a scalp of
- some sort. Doubt if I killed a single Hun. D’you remember Probyn at
- school?—a dark chap.”
- Peter found he still hated Probyn. “I remember him,” he said.
- “He’s killed. He got the M.M. and the V.C. He wouldn’t take a
- commission. He was sergeant-major in my battalion. I just saw him, but
- I’ve heard about him since. His men worshipped him. Queer how men come
- out in a new light in this war.”
- “How was he killed?” asked Peter.
- “In a raid. He was with a bombing party, and three men straggled up a
- sap and got cornered. He’d taken two machine-guns and they’d used most
- of the bombs, and his officer was knocked out, so he sent the rest of
- his party back with the stuff and went to fetch his other men. One had
- been hit and the other two were thinking of surrendering when he came
- back to them. He stood right up on the parados, they say, and slung
- bombs at the Germans, a whole crowd of them, until they went back. His
- two chaps got the wounded man out and carried him back, and left him
- still slinging bombs. He’d do that. He’d stand right up and bung bombs
- at them until they seemed to lose their heads. Then he seems to have
- spotted that this particular bunch of Germans had gone back into a sort
- of blind alley. He was very quick at spotting a situation, and he
- followed them up, and the sheer blank recklessness of it seems to have
- put their wind up absolutely. They’d got bombs and there was an officer
- with them. But they held up their hands—nine of them. Panic. He got them
- right across to our trenches before the searchlights found him, and the
- Germans got him and two of their own chaps with a machine-gun. That was
- just the last thing he did. He’d been going about for months doing
- stunts like that—sort of charmed life business. The way he slung bombs,
- they say, amounted to genius.
- “They say he’d let his hair grow long—perfect golliwog. When I saw him
- it certainly _was_ long, but he’d got it plastered down. And there’s a
- story that he used to put white on his face like a clown with a great
- red mouth reaching from ear to ear—— Yes, painted on. It’s put the Huns’
- wind up something frightful. Coming suddenly on a chap like that in the
- glare of a searchlight or a flare.”
- “Queer end,” said Peter.
- “Queer chap altogether,” said Ames....
- He thought for a time, and then went on to philosophize about Probyn.
- “Clever chap he was,” said Ames, “but an absolute failure. Of course old
- High Cross wasn’t anything very much in the way of a school, but
- whatever there was to be learnt there he learnt. He was the only one of
- us who ever got hold of speaking French. I heard him over there—regular
- fluent. And he’d got a memory like an encyclopædia. I always said he’d
- do wonders....”
- Ames paused. “Sex was his downfall,” said Ames.
- “I saw a lot of him altogether, off and on, right up to the time of the
- war,” said Ames. “My people are furniture people, you know, in Tottenham
- Court Road, and his were in the public-house fitting line—in Highbury.
- We went about together. I saw him make three or four good starts, but
- there was always some trouble. I suppose most of us were a bit—well,
- _keen_ on sex; most of us young men. But he was ravenous. Even at
- school. Always on it. Always thinking about it. I could tell you stories
- of him.... Rum place that old school was, come to think of it. They left
- us about too much. I don’t know how far you——.... Of course you were
- about the most innocent thing that ever came to High Cross School,” said
- Ames.
- “Yes,” said Peter. “I suppose I was.”
- “Curious how it gnaws at you once it’s set going,” said Ames....
- Peter made a noise that might have been assent.
- Ames remained thinking for a time, watching the swish and surge of the
- black Channel waters. Peter pursued their common topic in silence.
- “What’s the sense of it?” said Ames, plunging towards philosophy.
- “It’s the system on which life goes—on this planet,” Peter contributed,
- but Ames had not had a biological training, and was unprepared to take
- that up.
- “Too much of it,” said Ames.
- “Over-sexed,” said Peter.
- “Whether one ought to hold oneself in or let oneself go,” said Ames.
- “But perhaps these things don’t bother you?”
- Peter wasn’t disposed towards confidences with Ames. “I’m moderate in
- all things,” he said.
- “Lucky chap! I’ve worried about this business no end. One doesn’t want
- to use up all one’s life like a blessed monkey. There’s other things in
- life—if only this everlasting want-a-girl want-a-woman would let one get
- at them.”
- His voice at Peter’s shoulder ceased for a while, and then resumed.
- “It’s the best chaps, seems to me, who get it worst. Chaps with
- imaginations, I mean, men of vitality. Take old Probyn. He could have
- done anything—anything. And he was eaten up. Like a fever....”
- Ames went down into a black silence for a couple of minutes or more, and
- came up again with an astonishing resolution. “I shall marry,” he said.
- “Got the lady?” asked Peter.
- “Near enough,” said Ames darkly.
- “St. Paul’s method,” said Peter.
- “I was talking to a fellow the other day,” said Ames. “He’d got a
- curious idea. Something in it perhaps. He said that every one was
- clean-minded and romantic, that’s how he put it, about sixteen or
- seventeen. Even if you’ve been a bit dirty as a schoolboy you sort of
- clean up then. Adolescence, in fact. And he said you ought to fall in
- love and pair off then. Kind of Romeo and Juliet business. First love
- and all that.”
- “Juliet wasn’t exactly Romeo’s first love,” said Peter.
- “Young beggar!” said Ames. “But, anyhow, that was only by way of
- illustration. His idea was that we’d sort of put off marriage and all
- that sort of thing later and later. Twenty-eight. Thirty. Thirty-five
- even. And that put us wrong. We kind of curdled and fermented. Spoilt
- with keeping. Larked about with girls we didn’t care for. Demi-vierge
- stunts and all that. Got promiscuous. Let anything do. His idea was
- you’d got to pair off with a girl and look after her, and she look after
- you. And keep faith. And stop all stray mucking about. ’Settle down to a
- healthy sexual peace,’ he said.”
- Ames paused. “Something in it?”
- “Ever read the Life of Lord Herbert of Cherbury?” asked Peter.
- “Never.”
- “He worked out that theory quite successfully. Married before he went up
- to Oxford. There’s a lot in it. Sex. Delayed. Fretting. Overflowing.
- Getting experimental and nasty.... But that doesn’t exhaust the
- question. The Old Experimenter sits there——”
- “_What_ experimenter?”
- “The chap who started it all. There’s no way yet of fitting it up
- perfectly. We’ve got to make it fit.”
- Peter was so interested that he forgot his aversion from confiding in
- Ames. The subject carried him on.
- “Any healthy young man,” Peter generalized, “could be happy and
- contented with any pretty girl, so far as love-making goes. It doesn’t
- strike you—as a particularly recondite art, eh? But you’ve got to be in
- love with each other generally. That’s more difficult. You’ve got to
- talk together and go about together. In a complicated artificial world.
- The sort of woman it’s easy and pleasant to make love to, may not be the
- sort of woman you really think splendid. It’s easier to make love to a
- woman you don’t particularly respect, who’s good fun, and all that.
- Which is just the reason why you wouldn’t be tied up with her for ever.
- No.”
- “So we worship the angels and marry the flappers,” said Ames.... “I
- shan’t do that, anyhow. The fact is, one needs a kind of motherliness in
- a woman.”
- “By making love too serious, we’ve made it not serious enough,” said
- Peter with oracular profundity, and then in reaction, “Oh! _I_ don’t
- know.”
- “_I_ don’t know,” said Ames.
- “Which doesn’t in the least absolve us from the necessity of going on
- living right away.”
- “I shall marry,” said Ames, in a tone of unalterable resolve.
- They lapsed into self-centred meditations....
- “Why! there’s the coast,” said Ames suddenly. “Quite close, too. _Dark._
- Do you remember, before the war, how the lights of Folkestone used to
- run along the top there like a necklace of fire?”
- § 19
- The powers that were set over Peter’s life played fast and loose with
- him in the matter of leave. They treated him at first as though he was a
- rare and precious hero—who had to be saved from his friends. They put
- him to mend at Broadstairs, and while he was at Broadstairs he had three
- visits from Hetty, whose days were free, and only one hasty Sunday
- glimpse of Joan, who was much in demand at the Ministry of Munitions.
- And Oswald could not come to see him because Oswald himself was a
- casualty mending slowly at Pelham Ford. Hetty and Joan and returning
- health fired the mind of Peter with great expectations of the leave that
- was to come. These expectations were, so to speak, painted in panels.
- Forgetful of the plain fact that a Joan who was not available at
- Broadstairs would also not be available at Pelham Ford, the panels
- devoted to the latter place invariably included Joan as a principal
- figure, they represented leave as a glorious escape from war to the
- space, the sunshine, the endlessness of such a summer vacation as only
- schoolboys know. He would be climbing trees with Joan, “mucking about”
- in the boats with Joan, lying on the lawn just on the edge of the
- cedar’s shadow with Joan, nibbling stems of grass. The London scenes
- were narrower and more intense. He wanted the glitter and fun of
- lunching in the Carlton grill-room or dining at the Criterion, in the
- company of a tremendous hat and transparent lace, and there were scenes
- in Hetty’s studio, quite a lot of fantastic and elemental scenes in
- Hetty’s studio.
- But the Germans have wiped those days of limitless leisure out of the
- life of mankind. Even our schoolboys stay up in their holidays now to
- make munitions. Peter had scarcely clambered past the approval of a
- medical board before active service snatched him again. He was wanted
- urgently. Peter was no good as a pilot any more, it was true; his right
- wrist was doomed to be stiff and weak henceforth, and there were queer
- little limitations upon the swing of his arm, but the powers had
- suddenly discovered other uses for him. There was more of Peter still
- left than they had assumed at first. For one particular job, indeed, he
- was just the man they needed. They docked him a wing—it seemed in
- mockery of the state of his arm—and replaced the two wings that had
- adorned him by one attached to the letter O, and they marked him down to
- join “balloons” at the earliest possible moment, for just then they were
- developing kite balloons very fast for artillery observation, and were
- eager for any available men. Peter was slung out into freedom for
- one-and-twenty days, and then told to report himself for special
- instruction in the new work at Richmond Park.
- One-and-twenty days! He had never been so inordinately greedy for life,
- free to live and go as you please, in all his days before. Something
- must happen, he was resolved, something bright and intense, on every one
- of those days. He snatched at both sides of life. He went down to Pelham
- Ford, but he had a little list of engagements in town in his pocket.
- Joan was not down there, and never before had he realized how
- tremendously absent Joan could be. And then at the week-end she couldn’t
- come. There were French and British G.H.Q. bigwigs to take down to some
- experiments in Sussex, but she couldn’t even explain that, she had to
- send a telegram at the eleventh hour: “_Week-end impossible._” To Peter
- that seemed the most brutally offhand evasion in the world. Peter was
- disappointed in Pelham Ford. It was altogether different from those
- hospital dreams; even the weather, to begin with, was chilly and
- unsettled. Oswald had had a set-back with his knee, and had to keep his
- leg up on a deck chair; he could only limp about on crutches. He seemed
- older and more distant from Peter than he had ever been before; Peter
- was obsessed by the idea that he ought to be treated with solicitude,
- and a further gap was opened between them by Peter’s subaltern habit of
- saying “Sir” instead of the old familiar “Nobby.” Peter sat beside the
- deck chair through long and friendly, but very impatient hours; and he
- talked all the flying shop he could, and Oswald talked of his Africans,
- and they went over the war and newspapers again and again, and they
- reverted to Africa and flying shop, and presently they sat through
- several silences, and at the end of one of them Oswald inquired: “Have
- you ever played chess, Peter—or piquet?”
- Now chess and piquet are very good pastimes in their way, but not good
- enough for the precious afternoons of a very animated and greedy young
- man keenly aware that they are probably his last holiday afternoons on
- earth.
- Sentiment requires that Peter should have gone to London and devoted
- himself to adorning the marginal freedom of Joan’s days. He did do this
- once. He took her out to dinner to Jules’, in Jermyn Street; he did her
- well there; but she was a very tired Joan that day; she had driven a
- good hundred and fifty miles, and, truth to tell, in those days Peter
- did not like Joan and she did not like herself in London, and more
- especially in smart London restaurants. They sat a little aloof from one
- another, and about them all the young couples warmed to another and
- smiled. She jarred with this atmosphere of meretricious ease and
- indulgence. She had had no time to get back to Hampstead and change; she
- was at a disadvantage in her uniform. It became a hair shirt, a Nessus
- shirt as the evening proceeded. It emphasized the barrier of seriousness
- between them cruelly. She was a policeman, a prig, the harshest thing in
- life; all those pretty little cocottes and flirts, with their little
- soft brightnesses and adornments, must be glancing at her coarse,
- unrevealing garments and noting her for the fool she was. She felt ugly
- and ungainly; she was far too much tormented by love to handle herself
- well. She could get no swing and forgetfulness into the talk. And about
- Peter, too, was a reproach for her. He talked of work and the war—as if
- in irony. And his eyes wandered. Naturally, his eyes wandered.
- “Good-night, old Peter,” she said when they parted.
- She lay awake for two hours, exasperated, miserable beyond tears,
- because she had not said: “Good night, old Peter _dear_.” She had
- intended to say it. It was one of her prepared effects. But she was a
- weary and a frozen young woman. Duty had robbed her of the energy for
- love. Why had she let things come to this pass? Peter was her business,
- and Peter alone. She damned the Woman’s Legion, Woman’s Part in the War,
- and all the rest of it, with fluency and sincerity.
- And while Joan wasted the hours of sleep in this fashion Peter was also
- awake thinking over certain schemes he had discussed with Hetty that
- afternoon. They involved some careful and deliberate lying. The idea was
- that for the purposes of Pelham Ford he should terminate his leave on
- the fourteenth instead of the twenty-first, and so get a clear week
- free—for life in the vein of Hetty.
- He lay fretting, and the hot greed of youth persuaded him, and the clean
- honour of youth reproached him. And though he knew the way the decision
- would go, he tossed about and damned as heartily as Joan.
- He could not remember if at Pelham Ford he had set a positive date to
- his leave, but, anyhow, it would not be difficult to make out that there
- had been some sort of urgent call.... It could be done.... The
- alternative was Piquet.
- Peter returned to Pelham Ford and put his little fabric of lies upon
- Oswald without much difficulty. Then at the week-end came Joan,
- rejoicing. She came into the house tumultuously; she had caught a train
- earlier than the one they had expected her to come by. “I’ve got all
- next week. Seven days, Petah! Never mind how, but I’ve got it. I’ve got
- it!”
- There was a suggestion as of some desperate battle away there in London
- from which Joan had snatched these fruits of victory. She was so
- radiantly glad to have them that Peter recoiled from an immediate reply.
- “I didn’t seem to see you in London somehow,” said Joan. “I don’t think
- you were really there. Let’s have a look at you, old Petah. Tenshun!...
- Lift the arm.... Rotate the arm.... It isn’t so bad, Petah, after all.
- Is tennis possible?”
- “I’d like to try.”
- “Boats certainly. No reason why we shouldn’t have two or three long
- walks. A week’s a long time nowadays.”
- “But I have to go back on Monday,” said Peter.
- Joan stood stock still.
- “Pity, isn’t it?” said Peter weakly.
- “But why?” she asked at last in a little flat voice.
- “I have to go back.”
- “But your leave——?”
- “Ends on Monday,” lied Peter.
- For some moments it looked as though Joan meant to make that last
- week-end a black one. “That doesn’t give us much time together,” said
- Joan, and her voice which had soared now crawled the earth.... “I’m
- sorry.”
- Just for a moment she hung, a dark and wounded Joan, downcast and
- thoughtful; and then turned and put her arms akimbo, and looked at him
- and smiled awry. “Well, old Peter, then we’ve got to make the best use
- of our time. It’s your Birf Day, sort of; it’s your Bank Holiday, dear;
- it’s every blessed thing for you—such time as we have together. Before
- they take you off again. I think they’re greedy, but it can’t be helped.
- Can it, Peter?”
- “It can’t be helped,” said Peter. “No.”
- They paused.
- “What shall we do?” said Joan. “The program’s got to be cut down. Shall
- we still try tennis?”
- “I want to. I don’t see why this wrist——” He held it out and rotated it.
- “Good old arm!” said Joan, and ran a hand along it.
- “I’ll go and change these breeches and things,” said Joan. “And get
- myself female. Gods, Peter! the craving to get into clothes that are
- really flexible and translucent!”
- She went to the staircase and then turned on Peter.
- “Peter,” she said.
- “Yes.”
- “Go out and stand on the lawn and tighten up the net. Now.”
- “Why?”
- “Then I can see you from my window while I’m changing. I don’t want to
- waste a bit of you.”
- She went up four steps and stopped and looked at him over her shoulder.
- “I want as much as I can get of you, Petah,” she said.
- “I wish I’d known about that week,” said Peter stupidly.
- “_Exactly!_” said Joan to herself, and flitted up the staircase.
- § 20
- Joan, Mrs. Moxton perceived that afternoon, had a swift and angry fight
- with her summer wardrobe. Both the pink gingham and the white drill had
- been tried on and flung aside, and she had decided at last upon a rather
- jolly warm blue figured voile with a belt of cherry-coloured ribbon that
- suited her brown skin and black hair better than those weaker supports.
- She had evidently opened every drawer in her room in a hasty search for
- white silk stockings.
- When she came out into the sunshine of the garden Peter’s eyes told her
- she had guessed the right costume.
- Oswald was standing up on his crutches and smiling, and Peter was
- throwing up a racquet and catching it again with one hand.
- “Thank God for a left-handed childhood!” said Peter. “I’m going to smash
- you, Joan.”
- “I forgot about that,” said Joan. “But you aren’t going to smash me, old
- Petah.”
- When tea-time came they were still fighting the seventh vantage game,
- and Joan was up.
- They came and sat at the tea-table, and Joan as she poured the tea
- reflected that a young man in white flannels, flushed and a little out
- of breath, with his white silk shirt wide open at the neck, was a more
- beautiful thing than the most beautiful woman alive. And her dark eyes
- looked at the careless and exhausted Peter, that urgent and insoluble
- problem, while she counted, “Twenty-four, thirty-six, forty-one—about
- forty-one hours. How the devil shall I do it?”
- It wasn’t to be done at tennis anyhow, and she lost the next three games
- running without apparent effort, and took Peter by the arm and walked
- him about the garden, discoursing on flying. “I must teach you to fly,”
- said Peter. “Often when I’ve been up alone I’ve thought, ’Some day I’ll
- teach old Joan.’”
- “That’s a promise, Petah.”
- “Sure,” said Peter, who had not suffered next to two Americans for
- nothing.
- “I’ve got it in writing,” said Joan.
- “I’d rather learn from you than any one,” said she.
- Peter discoursed of stunts....
- They spent a long golden time revisiting odd corners in which they had
- played together. They went down the village and up to the church and
- round the edge of the wood, and there they came upon and devoured a lot
- of blackberries, and then they went down to the mill pond and sat for a
- time in Baker’s boat. Then they got at cross purposes about dressing for
- dinner. Joan wanted to dress very much. She wanted to remind Peter that
- there were prettier arms in the world than Hetty Reinhart’s, and a
- better modelled neck and shoulders. She had a new dress of ivory silk
- with a broad belt of velvet that echoed the bright softness of her eyes
- and hair. But Peter would not let her dress. He did not want to dress
- himself. “And you couldn’t look prettier, Joan, than you do in that blue
- thing. It’s so _like_ you.”
- And as Joan couldn’t explain that the frock kept her a jolly girl he
- knew while the dress would have shown him the beautiful woman he had to
- discover, she lost that point in the game. And tomorrow was Sunday, when
- Pelham Ford after the good custom of England never dressed for dinner.
- Afterwards she thought how easily she might have overruled him.
- Joan’s plans for the evening were dashed by this costume failure. She
- had relied altogether on the change of personality into something rich
- and strange, that the ivory dress was to have wrought. She could do
- nothing to develop the situation. Everything seemed to be helping to
- intensify her sisterliness. Oswald was rather seedy, and the three of
- them played Auction Bridge with a dummy. She had meant to sit up with
- Peter, but it didn’t work out like that.
- “Good night, Petah dear,” she said outside her bedroom door with the
- candlelight shining red between the fingers of her hand.
- “Good night, old Joan,” he said from his door-mat, with an infinite
- friendliness in his voice.
- You cannot kiss a man good night suddenly when he is fifteen yards
- away....
- She closed the door behind her softly, put down her candle, and began to
- walk about her room and swear in an entirely unladylike fashion. Then
- she went over to the open window, wringing her hands. “How am I to _do_
- it?” she said. “How am I to _do_ it? The situation’s preposterous. He’s
- mine. And I might be his sister!”
- “Shall I make a declaration?”
- “I suppose Hetty did.”
- But all the cunning of Joan was unavailing against the invisible
- barriers to passion between herself and Peter. They spent a long Sunday
- of comradeship, and courage and opportunity alike failed. The dawn on
- Monday morning found a white and haggard Joan pacing her floor, half
- minded to attempt a desperate explanation forthwith in Peter’s bedroom
- with a suddenly awakened Peter. Only her fear of shocking him and
- failing restrained her. She raved. She indulged in absurd soliloquies
- and still absurder prayers. “Oh, God, give me my Peter,” she prayed.
- “__Give me my Peter!__”
- § 21
- Monday broke clear and fine, with a September freshness in the sunshine.
- Breakfast was an awkward meal; Peter was constrained, Oswald was worried
- by a sense of advice and counsels not given; Joan felt the situation
- slipping from her helpless grasp. It was with a sense of relief that at
- last she put on her khaki overcoat to drive Peter to the station. “This
- is the end,” sang in Joan’s mind. “This is the end.” She glanced at the
- mirror in the hall and saw that the fur collar was not unfriendly to her
- white neck and throat. She was in despair, but she did not mean to let
- it become an unbecoming despair—at least until Peter had departed. The
- end was still incomplete. She had something stern and unpleasant to say
- to Peter before they parted, but she did not mean to look stern or
- unpleasant while she said it. Peter, she noted with a gleam of
- satisfaction, was in low spirits. He was sorry to go. He was ashamed of
- himself, but also he was sorry. That was something, at any rate, to have
- achieved. But he was going—nevertheless.
- She brought round the little Singer to the door. She started the engine
- with a competent swing and got in. The maids came with Peter’s
- portmanteau and belongings. “This is the end,” said Joan to herself,
- touching her accelerator and with her hand ready to release the brake.
- “All aboard?” said Joan aloud.
- Peter shook hands with Oswald over the side of the car, and glanced from
- him to the house and back at him. “I wish I could stay longer, sir,”
- said Peter.
- “There’s many days to come yet,” said Oswald. For we never mention death
- before death in war time; we never let ourselves think of it before it
- comes or after it has come.
- “So long, Nobby!”
- “Good luck, Peter!”
- Joan put the car into gear, and steered out into the road.
- “The water-splash is lower than ever I’ve seen it,” said Peter.
- They ran down the road to the station almost in silence. “These poplars
- have got a touch of autumn in them already,” said Peter.
- “It’s an early year,” said Joan.
- “The end, the end!” sang the song in Joan’s brain. “But I’ll tell him
- all the same.”...
- But she did not tell him until they could hear the sound of the
- approaching train that was to cut the thread of everything for Joan.
- They walked together up the little platform to the end.
- “I’m sorry you’re going,” said Joan.
- “I’m infernally sorry. If I’d known you’d get this week——”
- “Would that have altered it?” she said sharply.
- “No. I suppose it wouldn’t,” he fenced, just in time to save himself.
- The rattle of the approaching train grew suddenly loud. It was round the
- bend.
- Joan spoke in a perfectly even voice. “I know you have been lying,
- Peter. I have known it all this week-end. I know your leave lasts until
- the twenty-first.”
- He stared at her in astonishment.
- “There was a time.... It’s to think of all this dirt upon you that hurts
- most. The lies, the dodges, the shuffling meanness of it. From _you_....
- Whom _I love_.”
- A gap of silence came. To the old porter twelve yards off they seemed
- entirely well-behaved and well-disciplined young people, saying nothing
- in particular. The train came in with a sort of wink under the bridge,
- and the engine and foremost carriages ran past them up the platform.
- “I wish I could explain. I didn’t know—— The fact is I got entangled in
- a sort of promise....”
- “_Hetty!_” Joan jerked out, and “There’s an empty first for you.”
- The train stopped.
- Peter put his hand on the handle of the carriage door.
- “You go to London—like a puppy that rolls in dirt. You go to beastliness
- and vulgarity.... You’d better get in, Peter.”
- “But look here, Joan!”
- “_Get_ in!” she scolded to his hesitation, and stamped her foot.
- He got in mechanically, and she closed the door on him and turned the
- handle and stood holding it.
- Then still speaking evenly and quietly, she said: “You’re a blind fool,
- Peter. What sort of love can that—that—that miscellany give you, that I
- couldn’t give? Have I no life? Have I no beauty? Are you afraid of me?
- Don’t you see—don’t you _see?_ You go off to _that!_ You trail yourself
- in the dirt and you trail my love in the dirt. Before a female hack!...
- “_Look_ at me!” she cried, holding her hands apart. “Think of me
- tonight.... _Yours!_ Yours for the taking!”
- The train was moving.
- She walked along the platform to keep pace with him, and her eyes held
- his. “Peter,” she said; and then with amazing quiet intensity: “You
- _damned_ fool!”
- She hesitated on the verge of saying something more. She came towards
- the carriage. It wasn’t anything pleasant that she had in mind, to judge
- by her expression.
- “Stand away please, miss!” said the old porter, hurrying up to
- intervene. She abandoned that last remark with an impatient gesture.
- Peter sat still. The end of the station ran by like a scene in a
- panorama. Her Medusa face had slid away to the edge of the picture that
- the window framed, and vanished.
- For some seconds he was too amazed to move.
- Then he got up heavily and stuck his head out of the window to stare at
- Joan.
- Joan was standing quite still with her hands in the side pockets of her
- khaki overcoat; she was standing straight as a rod, with her heels
- together, looking at the receding train. She never moved....
- Neither of these two young people made a sign to each other, which was
- the first odd thing the old porter noted about them. They just stared.
- By all the rules they should have waved handkerchiefs. The next odd
- thing was that Joan stared at the bend for half a minute perhaps after
- the train had altogether gone, and then tried to walk out to her car by
- the little white gate at the end of the platform which had been disused
- and nailed up for three years....
- § 22
- After Oswald had seen the car whisk through the gates into the road, and
- after he had rested on his crutches staring at the gates for a time, he
- had hobbled back to his study. He wanted to work, but he found it
- difficult to fix his attention. He was thinking of Joan and Peter, and
- for the first time in his life he was wondering why they had never
- fallen in love with each other. They seemed such good company for each
- other....
- He was still engaged upon these speculations half an hour or so later,
- when he heard the car return and presently saw Joan go past his window.
- She was flushed, and she was staring in front of her at nothing in
- particular. He had never seen Joan looking so unhappy. In fact, so
- strong was his impression that she was unhappy that he doubted it, and
- he went to the window and craned out after her.
- She was going straight up towards the arbour. With a slight hurry in her
- steps. She had her fur collar half turned up on one side, her hands were
- deep in her pockets, and something about her dogged walk reminded him of
- some long-forgotten moment, years ago it must have been, when Joan, in
- hot water for some small offence, had been sent indoors at The
- Ingle-Nook.
- He limped back to his chair and sat thinking her over.
- “I wonder,” he said at last, and turned to his work again....
- There was no getting on with it. Half an hour later he accepted defeat.
- “Peter has knocked us all crooked,” he said. “There’s no work for
- today.”
- He would go out and prowl round the place and look at the roses. Perhaps
- Joan would come and talk. But at the gates he was amazed to encounter
- Peter.
- It was Peter, hot and dusty from a walk of three miles, and carrying his
- valise with an aching left arm. There was a look of defiance in the eyes
- that stared fiercely out from under the perspiration-matted hair upon
- his forehead. He seemed to find Oswald’s appearance the complete
- confirmation of the most disagreeable anticipations. Thoughts of panic
- and desertion flashed upon Oswald’s mind.
- “Good God, Peter!” he cried. “What brings you back?”
- “I’ve come back for another week,” said Peter.
- “But your leave’s up!”
- “I told a lie, sir. I’ve got another week.”
- Oswald stared at his ward.
- “I’m sorry, sir,” said Peter. “I’ve been making a fool of myself. I
- thought better of it. I got out of the train at Standon and walked back
- here.”
- “What does it mean, Peter?” said Oswald.
- Peter’s eyes were the most distressed eyes he had ever seen. “If you’d
- just not ask, sir, now——”
- It is a good thing to deal with one’s own blood in a crisis. Oswald,
- resting thoughtfully on his crutches, leapt to a kind of understanding.
- “I’m going to hop down towards the village, Peter,” said Oswald,
- becoming casual in his manner. “I want some exercise.... If you’ll tell
- every one you’re back.”
- He indicated the house behind him by a movement of his head.
- Peter was badly blown with haste and emotion. “Thank you, sir,” he said
- shortly.
- Oswald stepped past him and stared down the road.
- “Mrs. Moxton’s in the house,” he said without looking at Peter again.
- “Joan’s up the garden. See you when I get back, Peter.... Glad you’ve
- got another week, anyhow.... So long....”
- He left Peter standing in the gateway.
- Fear came upon Peter. He stood quite still for some moments, looking at
- the house and the cedars. He dropped his valise at the front door and
- mopped his face. Then he walked slowly across the lawn towards the
- terraces. He wanted to shout, and found himself hoarse. Then on the
- first terrace he got out: “Jo-un!” in a flat croak. He had to cry again:
- “Jo-un!” before it sounded at all like the old style.
- Joan became visible. She had come out of the arbour at the top of the
- garden, and she was standing motionless, regarding him down the vista of
- the central path. She was white and rather dishevelled, and she stood
- quite still.
- Peter walked up the steps towards her.
- “I’ve come back, Joan,” he said, as he drew near. “I want to talk to
- you.... Come into the arbour.”
- He took her arm clumsily and led her back into the arbour out of sight
- of the house. Then he dropped her arm.
- “Joan,” he said, “I’ve been the damndest of fools ... as you said.... I
- don’t know why.”...
- He stood before her awkwardly. He was trembling violently. He thought he
- was going to weep.
- He could not touch her again. He did not dare to touch her.
- Then Joan spread out her arms straight and stood like a crucifix. Her
- face, which had been a dark stare, softened swiftly, became radiant,
- dissolved into a dusky glow of tears and triumph. “Oh! Petah my
- _darling_,” she sobbed, and seized him and kissed him with tear-salt
- lips and hugged him to herself.
- The magic barrier was smashed at last. Peter held her close to him and
- kissed her....
- It was the second time they had kissed since those black days at High
- Cross school....
- § 23
- Those were years of swift marryings, and Peter was a young married man
- when presently he was added to the number of that select company
- attached to sausage-shaped observation balloons who were sent up in the
- mornings and pulled down at nights along the British front. He had had
- only momentary snatches of matrimony before the front had called him
- back to its own destructive interests, but his experiences had banished
- any lingering vestiges of his theory that there is one sort of woman you
- respect and another sort you make love to. There was only one sort of
- woman to love or respect, and that was Joan. He was altogether in love
- with Joan, he was sure he had never been in love before, and he was now
- also extravagantly in love with life. He wanted to go on with it, with a
- passionate intensity. It seemed to him that it was not only beginning
- for him, but for every one. Hitherto Man had been living _down there_,
- down on those flats—for all the world is flat from the air. Now, at
- last, men were beginning to feel how they might soar over all ancient
- limitations.
- Occasionally he thought of such things up in his basket, sitting like a
- spectator in a box at a theatre, with the slow vast drama of the western
- front spread out like a map beneath his eyes, with half Belgium and a
- great circle of France in sight, the brown, ruined country on either
- side of No Man’s Land, apparently lifeless, with its insane tangle of
- trenches and communicating ways below, with the crumbling heaps of
- ruined towns and villages scattered among canals and lakes of flood
- water, and passing insensibly into a green and normal-looking landscape
- to the west and east, where churches still had towers and houses roofs,
- and woods were lumps and blocks of dark green, fields manifestly
- cultivated patches, and roads white ribbons barred by the purple poplar
- shadows. But these spectacular and speculative phases were rare. They
- came only when a thin veil of haze made the whole spacious prospect
- faint, so that beyond his more immediate circle Peter could see only the
- broad outlines of the land. Given worse conditions of the weather and he
- would be too uncomfortable for philosophy; given better and he would be
- too busy.
- He sat on a canvas seat inside the square basket with his instruments
- about him, or leant over the side scrutinizing the details of the
- eastward landscape. Upon his head, over his ears, he wore a telephone
- receiver, and about his body was a rope harness that linked him by a
- rope to the silk parachute that was packed neatly in a little swinging
- bucket over the side of his basket. Under his hand was his map board,
- repeating the shapes of wood and water and road below. The telephone
- wire that ran down his mooring rope abolished any effect of isolation;
- it linked him directly to his winch on a lorry below, to a number of
- battery commanders, to an ascending series of headquarters; he could
- always start a conversation if he had anything practical to say. He was,
- in fact, an eye at the end of a tentacle thread, by means of which the
- British army watched its enemies. Sometimes he had an illusion that he
- was also a kind of brain. When distant visibility was good he would find
- himself hovering over the war as a player hangs over a chessboard,
- directing fire upon road movements or train movements, suspecting and
- watching for undisclosed enemy batteries, or directing counter-battery
- fire. Above him, green and voluminous, hung the great translucent lobes
- of his gas bag, and the loose ropes by which it was towed and held upon
- the ground swayed and trailed about his basket.
- It was on one of his more slack afternoons that Peter fell thinking of
- how acutely he now desired to live. The wide world was full of sunshine,
- but a ground haze made even the country immediately below him
- indistinct. The enemy gunners were inactive, there came no elfin voices
- through the telephone, only far away to the south guns butted and
- shivered the tranquil air. There was a faint drift in the air rather
- than a breeze, and the gas bag had fallen into a long, lazy rhythmic
- movement, so that sometimes he faced due south and sometimes south by
- east and so back. A great patch of flooded country to the north-east, a
- bright mirror with a kind of bloom upon it, seemed trying with an
- aimless persistency to work its way towards the centre of his field of
- vision and never succeeding.
- For a time Peter had been preoccupied with a distant ridge far away to
- the east, from which a long-range gun had recently taken to shelling the
- kite balloons towards evening as they became clear against the bright
- western sky. Four times lately this new gun had got on to him, and this
- clear and tranquil afternoon promised just the luminous and tranquil
- sunset that favoured these unpleasant activities. It was five hours to
- sunset yet, but Peter could not keep his mind off that gun. It was a big
- gun; perhaps a 42 centimetre; it was beyond any counter-battery
- possibility, and it had got a new kind of shell that the Germans seemed
- to have invented for the particular discomfort of Peter and his kind. It
- had a distinctive report, a loud _crack_, and then the “_whuff_” of high
- explosive, and at every explosion it got nearer and nearer to its
- target, with a quite uncanny certainty. It seemed to learn more than any
- gun should learn from each shot. It was this steadfast approach to a hit
- that Peter disliked. That and the long pause after the shell had
- started. Far away he would see the flash of the gun amidst the ridges in
- the darkling east. Then would come a long, blank pause of expectation.
- For all he could tell this might get him. Then the whine of the shell
- would become audible, growing louder and louder and lower and lower in
- note; Phee-whoo! _Crack!_ _WHOOF!_ Then Peter would get quite voluble to
- the men at the winch below. He could let himself up, or go down a few
- hundred feet, or they could shift his lorry along the road. Until it was
- dark he could not come down, for a kite balloon is a terribly visible
- and helpless thing on the ground until it has been very carefully put to
- bed. To come down in the daylight meant too good a chance for the nearer
- German guns. So Peter, by instructing his winch to lower him or let him
- up or shift, had to dodge about in a most undignified way, up and down
- and backwards and sideways, while the big gun marked him and guessed at
- his next position. Flash! “Oh, damn!” said Peter. “Another already!”
- Silence. Anticipations. Then: Phee—eee—eee—_whoo_. _Crack!_ _WHOOF!_ A
- rush of air would set the gas bag swinging. That was a near one!
- “Where _am_ I?” said Peter.
- But that wasn’t going to happen for hours yet. Why meet trouble half
- way? Why be tormented by this feeling of apprehension and danger in the
- still air? Why trouble because the world was quiet and seemed to be
- waiting? Why not think of something else? Banish this war from the
- mind.... Was he more afraid nowadays than he used to be? Peter was
- inclined to think that now he was more _systematically_ afraid. Formerly
- he had funked in streaks and patches, but now he had a steady,
- continuous dislike to all these risks and dangers. He was getting more
- and more clearly an idea of the sort of life he wanted to lead and of
- the things he wanted to do. He was ceasing to think of existence as a
- rather aimless series of adventures, and coming to regard it as one
- large consecutive undertaking on the part of himself and Joan. This
- being hung up in the sky for Germans to shoot at seemed to him to be a
- very tiresome irrelevance indeed. He and Joan and everybody with
- brains—including the misguided people who had made and were now firing
- this big gun at him—ought to be setting to work to get this preposterous
- muddle of a world in order. “This sort of thing,” said Peter, addressing
- the western front, his gas bag, and so much of the sky as it permitted
- him to see, and the universe generally, “is ridiculous. There is no
- sense in it at all. None whatever.”
- His dream of God, as a detached and aloof personage, had taken a very
- strong hold upon his imagination. Or, perhaps, it would be truer to say
- that his fevered mind in the hospital had given a caricature personality
- to ideas that had grown up in his mind as a natural consequence of his
- training. He had gone on with that argument; he went on with it now,
- with a feeling that really he was just as much sitting and talking in
- that queer, untidy, out-of-the-way office as swaying in a kite balloon,
- six thousand feet above Flanders, waiting to be shot at.
- “It is all very well to say ’exert yourself,’” said Peter. “But there is
- that chap over there exerting himself. And what he is doing with all his
- brains is just trying to wipe my brains out of existence. Just that. He
- hasn’t an idea else of what he is doing. He has no notion of what he is
- up to or what I am up to. And he hasn’t the sense or ability to come
- over here and talk about it to me. He’s there—at that—and he can’t help
- himself. And I’m here—and I can’t help myself. But if I could only catch
- him within counter battery range——!
- “There’s no sense in it at all,” summarized Peter, after some moments of
- grim reflection. “Sense hasn’t got into it.”
- “Is sense ever going to get into it?
- “The curious thing about you,” said Peter, addressing himself quite
- directly to his Deity at the desk, “is that somehow, without ever
- positively promising it or saying anything plain and definite about it,
- you yet manage to convey in an almost irresistible manner, that there is
- going to be sense in it. You seem to suggest that my poor brain up here
- and the brains of those chaps over there, are, in spite of all
- appearance to the contrary, up to something jointly that is going to
- come together and make good some day. You hint it. And yet I don’t get a
- scrap of sound, trustworthy reasoning to help me to accept that; not a
- scrap. Why should it be so? I ask, and you just keep on not saying
- anything. I suppose it’s a necessary thing, biologically, that one
- should have a kind of optimism to keep one alive, so I’m not even
- justified in my half conviction that I’m not being absolutely fooled by
- life....
- “I admit that taking for example Joan, there is something about Joan
- that almost persuades me there must be something absolutely _right_
- about things—for Joan to happen at all. Yet isn’t that again just
- another biologically necessary delusion?... There you sit silent. You
- seem to say nothing, and yet you soak me with a kind of answer, a sort
- of shapeless courage....”
- Peter’s mind rested on that for a time, and then began again at another
- point.
- “I wonder,” said Peter, “if that chap gets me tonight, what I shall
- think—in the moment—after he has got me....”
- § 24
- But the German gunner never got Peter, because something else got him
- first.
- He thought he saw a Hun aeroplane coming over very high indeed to the
- south of him, fifteen thousand feet up or more, a mere speck in the blue
- blaze, and then the gas bag hid it and he dismissed it from his mind. He
- was thinking that the air was growing clearer, and that if this went on
- guns would wake up presently and little voices begin to talk to him,
- when he became aware of the presence and vibration of an aeroplane quite
- close to him. He pulled off his telephone receivers and heard the roar
- of an engine close at hand. It was overhead, and the gas bag still hid
- it. At the same moment the British anti-aircraft gunners began a belated
- fire. “Damn!” said Peter in a brisk perspiration, and hastened to make
- sure that his parachute rope was clear.
- “Perhaps he’s British,” said Peter, with no real hope.
- “_Pap, pap, pap!_” very loud overhead.
- The gas bag swayed and billowed, and a wing with a black cross swept
- across the sky. “_Pap, pap, pap._”
- The gas bag wrinkled and crumpled more and more, and a little streak of
- smoke appeared beyond its edge. The German aeroplane was now visible, a
- hundred yards away, and banking to come round. He had fired the balloon
- with tracer bullets.
- The thing that Peter had to do and what he did was this. He had to step
- up on to a little wood step inside his basket. Then he had to put first
- one foot and then the other on to another little step outside his
- basket. This little step was about four inches wide by nine long. Below
- it was six thousand feet of emptiness, above the little trees and houses
- below. As he swayed on the step Peter had to make sure that the rope
- attached to his body was clear of all entanglements. Then he had to step
- off that little shelf, which was now swinging and slanting with the
- lurching basket to which it was attached, into the void, six thousand
- feet above the earth.
- He had not to throw himself or dive headlong, because that might lead to
- entanglement with the rope. He had just to step off into pellucid
- nothingness, holding his rope clear of himself with one hand. This rope
- looped back to the little swinging bucket in which his fine silk
- parachute was closely packed. He had seen it packed a week ago, and he
- wished now, as he stood on his step holding to his basket with one hand,
- that he had watched the process more meticulously. He became aware that
- the Hun, having disposed of the balloon, was now shooting at him. He did
- not so much step off the little shelf as slip off as it heeled over with
- the swing of the basket. The first instants of a leap or fall make no
- impression on the mind. For some seconds he was falling swiftly, feet
- foremost, through the air. He scarcely noted the faint snatch when the
- twine, which held his parachute in its basket, broke. Then his
- consciousness began to register again. He kept his feet tightly pressed
- together. The air whistled by him, but he thought that dreams and talk
- had much exaggerated the sensations of falling. He was too high as yet
- to feel the rush of the ground towards him.
- He seemed to fall for an interminable time before anything more
- happened. He was assailed by doubts—whether the twine that kept the
- parachute in its bucket would break, whether it would open. His rope
- trailed out above him.
- Still falling. Why didn’t the parachute open? In another ten seconds it
- would be too late.
- The parachute was not opening. It was certainly not opening. Wrong
- packing? He tugged and jerked his rope, and tried to shake and swing the
- long silken folds that were following his fall. Why? Why the devil——?
- The rope seemed to tighten abruptly. The harness tightened upon his
- body. Peter gasped, sprawled and had the sensation of being hauled up
- back again into the sky....
- It was all right, so far. He was now swaying down earthward with a
- diminishing velocity beneath an open parachute. He was floating over the
- landscape instead of falling straight into it.
- But the German had not done with Peter yet. He became visible beneath
- the edge of Peter’s parachute, circling downward regardless of
- anti-aircraft and machine-guns. “_Pap, pap, pap, pap._” The bullets
- burst and banged about Peter.
- Something kicked Peter’s knee; something hit his neck; something rapped
- the knuckles of his wounded hand; the parachute winced and went
- sideways, slashed and pierced. Peter drifted down faster, helpless, his
- angry eyes upon his assailant, who vanished again, going out of sight as
- he rose up above the edge of the parachute.
- A storm of pain and rage broke from Peter.
- “Done in!” shouted Peter. “Oh! my leg! my leg!
- “I’m shot to bits. I’m shot to bloody bits!”
- The tree tops were near at hand. The parachute had acquired a rhythmic
- swing and was falling more rapidly.
- “And I’ve still got to land,” wailed Peter, beginning to cry like a
- child.
- He wanted to stop just a moment, just for one _little_ moment, before
- the ground rushed up to meet him. He wanted time to think. He didn’t
- know what to do with this dangling leg. It became a monstrous, painful
- obstacle to landing. How was he to get a spring? He was bleeding. He was
- dying. It was cruel. Cruel.
- Came the crash. Hot irons, it seemed, assailed his leg and his shoulder
- and neck. He crumpled up on the ground in an agony, and the parachute,
- with slow and elegant gestures, folded down on the top of his
- floundering figure....
- The gunners who ran to help him found him, enveloped in silk, bawling
- and weeping like a child of four in a passion of rage and fear, and
- trying repeatedly to stand up upon a blood-streaked leg that gave way as
- repeatedly. “Damn!” cursed Peter in a stifled voice, plunging about like
- a kitten in a sack. “Damn you all! I tell you I _will_ use my leg. I
- _will_ have my leg. If I bleed to death. Oh! Oh!... You fool—you lying
- old _humbug_! You!”
- And then he gave a leap upward and forward, and fainted and fell, and
- lay still, with his head and body muffled in the silk folds of his
- parachute.
- CHAPTER THE FOURTEENTH
- OSWALD’S VALEDICTION
- § 1
- It was the third of April in 1918, the Wednesday after Easter, and the
- war had now lasted three years and eight months. It had become the
- aching habit of the whole world. Throughout the winter it had been for
- the most part a great and terrible boredom, but now a phase of acute
- anxiety was beginning. The “Kaiser’s Battle” was raging in France; news
- came through sparingly; but it was known that General Gough had lost
- tens of thousands of prisoners, hundreds of guns, and vast stores of
- ammunition and railway material. It was rumoured that he had committed
- suicide. But the standards of Tory England differ from those of Japan.
- Through ten sanguinary days, in a vaster Inkerman, the common men of
- Britain, reinforced by the French, had fought and died to restore the
- imperilled line. It was by no means certain yet that they had succeeded.
- It seemed possible that the French and British armies would be broken
- apart, and Amiens and Paris lost. Oswald’s mind was still dark with
- apprehension.
- The particular anxieties of this crisis accentuated the general worry
- and inconveniences of the time, and deepened Oswald’s conviction of an
- incredible incompetence in both the political and military leadership of
- his country. In spite of every reason he had to the contrary, he had
- continued hitherto to hope for some bright dramatic change in the course
- of events; he had experienced a continually recurring disappointment
- with each morning’s paper. His intelligence told him that all the
- inefficiency, the confusion, the cheap and bad government by press and
- intrigue, were the necessary and inevitable consequences of a neglect of
- higher education for the past fifty years; these defects were now in the
- nature of things, almost as much as the bleakness of an English February
- or the fogs of a London November, but his English temperament had
- refused hitherto to accept the decision of his intelligence. Now for the
- first time he could see the possibility of an ultimate failure in the
- war. To this low level of achievement, he perceived, a steadfast
- contempt for thought and science and organization had brought Britain;
- at this low level Britain had now to struggle through the war,
- blundering, talking, and thinking confusedly, suffering
- enormously—albeit so sound at heart. It was a humiliating realization.
- At any rate she could still hope to struggle through; the hard-won
- elementary education of the common people, the stout heart and sense of
- the common people, saved her gentlefolk from the fate of their brother
- inefficients in Russia. But every day he fretted afresh at the costly
- and toilsome continuance of an effort that a little more courage and
- wisdom in high places on the allied side, a little more knowledge and
- clear thinking, might have brought to an entirely satisfactory close in
- 1917.
- For a man of his age, wounded, disappointed, and a chronic invalid,
- there was considerable affliction in the steadily increasing hardships
- of the Fourth Year. A number of petty deprivations at which a healthy
- man might have scoffed, intensified his physical discomfort. There had
- been a complete restriction of his supply of petrol, the automobile now
- hung in its shed with its tyres removed, and the railway service to
- London had been greatly reduced. He could not get up to London now to
- consult books or vary his moods without a slow and crowded and fatiguing
- journey; he was more and more confined to Pelham Ford. He had been used
- to read and work late into the night, but now his home was darkened in
- the evening and very cheerless; there was no carbide for the acetylene
- installation, and a need for economy in paraffin. For a time he had been
- out of coal, and unable to get much wood because of local difficulties
- about cartage, and for some weeks he had had to sit in his overcoat and
- read and write by candlelight. Now, however, that distress had been
- relieved by the belated delivery of a truckload of coal. And another
- matter that may seem trivial in history, was by no means trivial in
- relation to his moods. In the spring of 1918 the food supply of Great
- Britain was at its lowest point. Lord Rhondda was saving the situation
- at the eleventh hour. The rationing of meat had affected Oswald’s health
- disagreeably. He had long ago acquired the habit of living upon chops
- and cutlets and suchlike concentrated nourishment, and he found it
- difficult to adapt himself now to the bulky insipidity of a diet that
- was, for a time, almost entirely vegetarian. For even fish travels by
- long routes to Hertfordshire villages. The frequent air raids of that
- winter were also an added nervous irritation. In the preceding years of
- the war there had been occasional Zeppelin raids, the Zeppelins had been
- audible at Pelham Ford on several occasions and once Hertford had
- suffered from their bombs; but those expeditions had ended at last in a
- series of disasters to the invaders, and they had never involved the
- uproar and tension of the Gotha raids that began in the latter half of
- 1917. These latter raids had to be met by an immense barrage of
- anti-aircraft guns round London, a barrage which rattled every window at
- Pelham Ford, lit the sky with star shells, and continued intermittently
- sometimes for four or five hours. Oswald would lie awake throughout that
- thudding conflict, watching the distant star shells and searchlights
- through the black tree boughs outside his open window, and meditating
- drearily upon the manifest insanity of mankind....
- He was now walking up and down his lawn, waiting until it should be time
- to start for the station with Joan to meet Peter.
- For Peter, convalescent again and no longer fit for any form of active
- service—he was lamed now as well as winged—was to take up a minor
- administrative post next week at Adastral House, and he was coming down
- for a few days at Pelham Ford before carrying his wife off for good to a
- little service flat they had found in an adapted house in the Avenue
- Road. They had decided not to live at The Ingle-Nook, although Arthur
- had built it to become Peter’s home, but to continue the tenancy of
- Aunts Phyllis and Phœbe. They did not want to disturb those two ladies,
- whose nervous systems, by no means stable at the best of times, were now
- in a very shaken condition. Aunt Phyllis was kept busy restraining Aunt
- Phœbe from inflicting lengthy but obscure prophetic messages upon most
- of the prominent people of the time. To these daily activities Aunt
- Phœbe added an increasing habit of sleep-walking that broke the nightly
- peace of Aunt Phyllis. She would wander through the moonlit living rooms
- gesticulating strangely, and uttering such phrases as “Blood! Blood!
- Seas of blood! The multitudinous seas incarnadine”; or “Murder most
- foul!”
- She had a fixed idea that it was her business to seek out the Kaiser and
- either scold him or kill him—or perhaps do both. She held that it was
- the duty of women to assassinate. Men might fight battles, it was their
- stupid way; but surely women were capable of directer things. If some
- woman were to kill any man who declared war directly he declared war,
- there would be a speedy end to war. She could not, she said, understand
- the inactivity of German wives and mothers. She would spend hours over
- her old school German grammar, with a view to writing an “Open Letter to
- German Womankind.” But her naturally rich and very allusive prose was
- ill adapted to that sort of translation.
- Many over-sensitive people were suffering more or less as Aunt Phœbe was
- suffering—from a sense of cruelty, wickedness, and disaster that
- staggered their minds. They had lived securely in a secure world; they
- could not readjust. Even for so sane a mind as Oswald’s, hampered as it
- was by the new poison his recent wound had brought into his blood,
- readjustment was difficult. He suffered greatly from insomnia, and from
- a haunting apprehension of misfortunes. His damaged knee would give him
- bouts of acute distress. Sometimes it would seem to be well and he would
- forget it. Then it would become painfully lame by day and a neuralgic
- pain at night. His moods seemed always exaggerated now; either he was
- too angry or too sorrowful or too hopeful. Sometimes he experienced
- phases of blank stupidity, when his mind became unaccountably sluggish
- and clumsy....
- Joan was indoors now packing up a boxful of books that were to go with
- her to the new home.
- He was feeling acutely—more acutely than he wanted to feel—that his
- guardianship was at an end. Joan, who had been the mistress of his
- house, and the voice that sang in it, the pretty plant that grew in it,
- was going now—to return, perhaps, sometimes as a visitor—but never more
- to be a part of it; never more to be its habitual presence. Peter, too,
- was severing the rope, a long rope it had seemed at times during the
- last three years, that had tethered him to Pelham Ford....
- Oswald did not want to think now of his coming loneliness. What he
- wanted to think about was the necessity of rounding off their
- relationship properly, of ending his educational task with some sort of
- account rendered. He felt he owed it to these young people and to
- himself to tell them of his aims and of what he considered the whole of
- this business of education amounted to. He had to explain what had
- helped and what had prevented him. “A Valediction,” he said. “A
- Valediction.” But he could not plan out what he had to say that morning.
- He could not arrange his heads, and all the while that he tried to fix
- his thoughts upon these topics, he was filled with uncontrollable
- self-pity for the solitude ahead of him.
- He was ashamed at these personal distresses that he could not control.
- He disliked himself for their quality. He did not like to think he was
- thinking the thoughts in his mind. He walked up and down the lawn for a
- time like a man who is being pestered by uncongenial solicitations.
- In spite of his intense affection for both of them, he was feeling a
- real jealousy of the happiness of these two young lovers. He hated the
- thought of losing Joan much more than he hated the loss of Peter. Once
- upon a time he had loved Peter far more than Joan, but by imperceptible
- degrees his affection had turned over to her. In these war years he and
- she had been very much together. For a time he had been—it was
- grotesque, but true—actually in love with her. He had let himself
- dream—. It was preposterous to think of it. A moonlight night had made
- his brain swim.... At any rate, thank Heaven! she had never had a
- suspicion....
- She’d come now as a visitor—perhaps quite often. He wasn’t going to lose
- his Joan altogether. But each time she would come changed, rather less
- his Joan and rather more a new Joan—Peter’s Joan....
- Some day they’d have children, these two. Joan would sit over her child
- and smile down at it. He knew exactly how she would smile. And at the
- thought of that smile Joan gave place to Dolly. Out of the past there
- jumped upon him the memory of Peter bubbling in a cradle on the sunny
- verandah of The Ingle-Nook, and how he had remarked that the very
- sunshine seemed made for this fortunate young man.
- “It _was_ made for him,” Dolly had said, with that faintly mischievous
- smile of hers.
- How far off that seemed now, and how vivid still! He could remember
- Dolly’s shadow on the rough-cast wall, and the very things he had said
- in reply. He had talked like a fool about the wonderful future of
- Peter—and of the world. How long was that ago? Five-and-twenty years?
- (Yes, Peter would be five-and-twenty in June.) How safe and secure the
- European world had seemed then! It seemed to be loitering, lazily and
- basely indeed, but certainly, towards a sort of materialist’s
- millennium. And what a vast sham its security had been! He had called
- Peter the “Heir of the Ages.” And the Heritage of the Ages had been
- preparing even then to take Peter away from the work he had chosen and
- from all the sunshine and leisure of his life and to splinter his
- shoulder-blade, smash his wrist, snap his leg-bones with machine-gun
- bullets, and fling him aside, a hobbling, stiff, broken young man to
- limp through the rest of life....
- § 2
- That was what his mind had to lay hold of, that was what he had to talk
- about, this process that had held out such fair hopes for Peter and had
- in the end crippled him and come near to killing him and wasting him
- altogether. He had to talk of that, of an enormous collapse and breach
- of faith with the young. The world which had seemed to be the glowing
- promise of an unprecedented education and upbringing for Peter and his
- generation, the world that had been, so to speak, joint guardian with
- himself, had defaulted. This war was an outrage by the senior things in
- the world upon all the hope of the future; it was the parent sending his
- sons through the fires to Moloch, it was the guardian gone mad, it was
- the lapse of all educational responsibility.
- He had to keep his grasp upon that idea. By holding to that he could get
- away from his morbidly intense wish to be personal and intimate with
- these two. He loved them and they loved him, but what he wanted to say
- was something quite beyond that.
- What he had to talk about was Education, and Education alone. He had to
- point out to them that their own education had been truncated, was rough
- ended and partial. He had to explain why that was so. And he had to show
- that all this vast disaster to the world was no more and no less than an
- educational failure. The churches and teachers and political forms had
- been insufficient and wrong; they had failed to establish ideas strong
- and complete enough and right enough to hold the wills of men.
- Necessarily he had to make a dissertation upon the war. To talk of life
- now was to talk of the war. The war now was human life. It had eaten up
- all free and independent living.
- The war was an educational breakdown, that was his point; and in
- education lay whatever hope there was for mankind. He had to say that to
- them, and he had to point out how that idea must determine the form of
- their lives. He had to show the political and social and moral
- conclusions involved in it. And he had to say what he wanted to say in a
- large manner. _He had to keep his temper while he said it._
- Oswald, limping slowly up and down his lawn in the April sunshine, with
- a gnawing pain at his knee, had to underline, as it were, that last
- proviso in his thoughts. That was the extreme difficulty of these urgent
- and tragic times. The world was in a phase of intense, but swift,
- tumultuous, and distracting tragedy. The millions were not suffering and
- dying in stateliness and splendour but in a vast uproar, amidst mud,
- confusion, bickering, and incoherence indescribable. While it was
- manifest that only great thinking, only very clear and deliberate
- thinking, could give even the forms of action that would arrest the
- conflagration, it was nevertheless almost impossible for any one
- anywhere to think clearly and deliberately, so universal and various
- were the compulsions, confusions, and distresses of the time. And even
- the effect to see and state the issue largely, fevered Oswald’s brain.
- He grew angry with the multitudinous things that robbed him of his
- serenity.
- “Education,” he said, as if he called for help; “education.”
- And then, collapsing into wrath: “A land of uneducated blockheads!”
- No! It was not one of his good mornings. In a little while his steps had
- quickened and his face had flushed. His hands clenched in his pockets.
- “A universal dulness of mind,” he whispered. “Obstinacy....
- Inadaptability.... Unintelligent opposition.”
- Broad generalizations slipped out of his mind. He began to turn over one
- disastrous instance after another of the shortness of mental range, the
- unimaginative stupidity, the baseness and tortuousness of method, the
- dull suspicions, class jealousies, and foolish conceits that had
- crippled Britain through three and a half bitter years. With a vast
- fleet, with enormous armies, with limitless wealth, with the loyal
- enthusiasm behind them of a united people and with great allies, British
- admirals and generals had never once achieved any great or brilliant
- success, British statesmen had never once grasped and held the
- fluctuating situation. One huge disappointment had followed another; now
- at Gallipoli, now at Kut, now in the air and now beneath the seas, the
- British had seen their strength ill applied and their fair hopes of
- victory waste away. No Nelson had arisen to save the country, no
- Wellington; no Nelson nor Wellington could have arisen; the country had
- not even found an alternative to Mr. Lloyd George. In military and naval
- as in social and political affairs the Anglican ideal had been—to
- blockade. On sea and land, as in Ireland, as in India, Anglicanism was
- not leading but obstruction. Throughout 1917 the Allied armies upon the
- Western front had predominated over the German as greatly as the British
- fleet had predominated at sea, and the result on either element had been
- stagnation. The cavalry coterie who ruled upon land had demonstrated
- triumphantly their incapacity to seize even so great an opportunity as
- the surprise of the tanks afforded them; the Admiralty had left the
- Baltic to the Germans until, after the loss of Riga, poor Kerensky’s
- staggering government had collapsed. British diplomacy had completed
- what British naval quiescence began; in Russia as in Greece it had
- existed only to blunder; never had a just cause been so mishandled; and
- before the end of 1917 the Russian debacle had been achieved and the
- German armies, reinforced by the troops the Russian failure had
- released, began to concentrate for this last great effort that was now
- in progress in the west. Like many another anxious and distressed
- Englishman during those darker days of the German spring offensive in
- 1918, Oswald went about clinging to one comfort: “Our men are tough
- stuff. Our men at any rate will stick it.”
- In Oswald’s mind there rankled a number of special cases which he called
- his “sores.” To think of them made him angry and desperate, and yet he
- could scarcely ever think of education without reviving the irritation
- of these particular instances. They were his foreground; they blocked
- his vistas, and got between him and the general prospect of the world.
- For instance, there had been a failure to supply mosquito curtains in
- the East African hospitals, and a number of slightly wounded men had
- contracted fever and died. This fact had linked on to the rejection of
- the services he had offered at the outset of the war, and became a
- festering centre in his memory. Those mosquito curtains blew into every
- discussion. Moreover there had been, he believed, much delay and
- inefficiency in the use of African native labour in France, and a lack
- of proper organization for the special needs of the sick and injured
- among these tropic-bred men. And a shipload had been sunk in a collision
- off the Isle of Wight. He had got an irrational persuasion into his head
- that this collision could have been prevented. After his wound had
- driven him back to Pelham Ford he would limp about the garden thinking
- of his “boys” shivering in the wet of a French winter and dying on straw
- in cold cattle trucks, or struggling and drowning in the grey channel
- water, and he would fret and swear. “Hugger mugger,” he would say,
- “hugger mugger! No care. No foresight. No proper grasp of the problem.
- And so death and torment for the men.”
- While still so painful and feverish he had developed a new distress for
- himself by taking up the advocacy of certain novelties and devices that
- he became more and more convinced were of vital importance upon the
- Western front. He entangled himself in correspondence, interviews,
- committees, and complicated quarrels in connection with these ideas....
- He would prowl about his garden, a baffled man, trying to invent some
- way of breaking through the system of entanglements that held back
- British inventiveness from the service of Great Britain. More and more
- clearly did his reason assure him that no sudden blow can set aside the
- deep-rooted traditions, the careless, aimless education of a negligent
- century, but none the less he raged at individuals, at ministries, at
- coteries and classes.
- His peculiar objection to the heads of the regular army, for example,
- was unjust, for much the same unimaginative resistance was evident in
- every branch of the public activities of Great Britain. Already in 1915
- the very halfpenny journalists were pointing out the necessity of a
- great air offensive for the allies, were showing that in the matter of
- the possible supply of good air fighters the Germans were altogether
- inferior to their antagonists and that consequently they would be more
- and more at a disadvantage in the air as the air warfare was pressed.
- But the British mind was trained, so far that is as one can speak of it
- as being trained at all, to dread “over-pressure.” The western allies
- having won a certain ascendancy in the air in 1916 became so
- self-satisfied that the Germans, in spite of their disadvantages, were
- able to recover a kind of equality in 1917, and in the spring of 1918
- the British, with their leeway recovered, were going easily in matters
- aerial, and the opinion that a great air offensive might yet end the war
- was regarded as the sign of a froward and revolutionary spirit.
- The sea war had a parallel history. Long before 1914 Dr. Conan Doyle had
- written a story to illustrate the dangers of an unrestricted submarine
- attack, but no precaution whatever against such a possibility seemed to
- have been undertaken by the British Admiralty before the war at all;
- Great Britain was practically destitute of sea mines in the October of
- 1914, and even in the spring of 1918, after more than a year and a half
- of hostile submarine activity, after the British had lost millions of
- tons of shipping, after the people were on short commons and becoming
- very anxious about rations, the really very narrow channel of the North
- Sea—rarely is it more than three hundred miles wide—which was the only
- way out the Germans possessed, was still unfenced against the coming and
- going of these most vulnerable pests.
- It is hard not to blame individual men and groups when the affairs of a
- nation go badly. It is so much easier to change men than systems. The
- former satisfies every instinct in the fierce, suspicious hearts of men,
- the latter demands the bleakest of intellectual efforts. The former
- justifies the healthy, wholesome relief of rioting; the latter
- necessitates self-control. The country was at sixes and sevens because
- its education by school and college, by book and speech and newspaper,
- was confused and superficial and incomplete, and its education was
- confused and superficial and incomplete because its institutions were a
- patched-up system of traditions, compromises, and interests, devoid of
- any clear and single guiding idea of a national purpose. The only wrongs
- that really matter to mankind are the undramatic general wrongs; but the
- only wrongs that appeal to the uneducated imagination are individual
- wrongs. It is so much more congenial to the ape in us to say that if Mr.
- Asquith hadn’t been lazy or Mr. Lloyd George disingenuous——! Then out
- with the halter—and don’t bother about yourself. As though the worst of
- individuals can be anything more than the indicating pustule of a
- systemic malaise. For his own part Oswald was always reviling
- schoolmasters, as though they, alone among men, had the power to rise
- triumphant over all their circumstances—and wouldn’t. He had long since
- forgotten Mr. Mackinder’s apology.
- He limped and fretted to and fro across the lawn in his struggle to get
- out of his jungle of wrathful thoughts, about drowned negroes and
- rejected inventions, and about the Baltic failure and about Gough of the
- Curragh and St. Quentin, to general and permanent things.
- “Education,” he said aloud, struggling against his obsessions.
- “Education! I have to tell them what it ought to be, how it is more or
- less the task of every man, how it can unify the world, how it can save
- mankind....”
- And then after a little pause, with an apparent complete irrelevance,
- “_Damn_ Aunt Charlotte!”
- § 4
- Nowadays quite little things would suddenly assume a tremendous and
- devastating importance to Oswald. In his pocket, not folded but crumpled
- up, was an insulting letter from Lady Charlotte Sydenham, and the
- thought of it was rankling bitterly in his mind.
- The days were long past when he could think of the old lady as of
- something antediluvian in quality, a queer ungainly megatherium
- floundering about in a new age from which her kind would presently
- vanish altogether. He was beginning to doubt more and more about her
- imminent disappearance. She had greater powers of survival than he had
- supposed; he was beginning to think that she might outlive him; there
- was much more of her in England than he had ever suspected. All through
- the war she, or a voice indistinguishable from hers, had bawled
- unchastened in the _Morning Post_; on many occasions he had seemed to
- see her hard blue eye and bristling whisker glaring at him through a
- kind of translucency in the sheets of _The Times_; once or twice in
- France he had recognized her, or something very like her, in red tabs
- and gilt lace, at G.H.Q. These were sick fancies no doubt; mere
- fantastic intimations of the stout resistances the Anglican culture
- could still offer before it loosened its cramping grip upon the future
- of England and the world, evidence rather of his own hypersensitized
- condition than of any perennial quality in her.
- The old lady had played a valiant part in the early stages of the war.
- She had interested herself in the persecution of all Germans not related
- to royalty, who chanced to be in the country; and had even employed
- private detectives in one or two cases that had come under her notice.
- She had been forced most unjustly to defend a libel case brought by a
- butcher named Sterne, whom she had denounced as of German origin and a
- probable poisoner of the community, in the very laudable belief that his
- name was spelt Stern. She felt that his indubitable British ancestry and
- honesty only enhanced the deception and made the whole thing more
- alarming, but the jury, being no doubt tainted with pacifism, thought,
- or pretended to think, otherwise. She had had a reconciliation with her
- old antagonists the Pankhurst section of the suffragettes, and she had
- paid twenty annual subscriptions to their loyal and outspoken
- publication _Britannia_, directing twelve copies to be sent to suitable
- recipients—Oswald was one of the favoured ones—and herself receiving and
- blue-pencilling the remaining eight before despatching them to such
- public characters as she believed would be most beneficially cowed or
- instructed by the articles she had marked. She also subscribed liberally
- to the British Empire Union, an organization so patriotic that it
- extended its hostility to Russians, Americans, Irishmen, neutrals,
- President Wilson, the League of Nations, and similar infringements of
- the importance and dignity of Lady Charlotte and her kind. She remained
- at Chastlands, where she had laid in an ample store of provisions quite
- early in the war—two sacks of mouldy flour and a side of bacon in an
- advanced state of decomposition had been buried at night by Cashel—all
- through the Zeppelin raids; and she played a prominent rather than a
- pacifying part in the Red Cross politics of that part of Surrey. She
- induced several rich Jewesses of Swiss, Dutch, German or Austrian origin
- to relieve the movement of their names and, what was still better, of
- the frequently quite offensively large subscriptions with which they
- overshadowed those who had the right to lead in such matters. She
- lectured also in the National Economy campaign on several occasions—for
- like most thoughtful women of her class and type, she was deeply shocked
- by the stories she had heard of extravagance among our over-paid
- munition workers. After a time the extraordinary meanness of the
- authorities in restricting her petrol obliged her in self-respect to
- throw up this branch of her public work. She was in London during one of
- the early Gotha raids, but she conceived such a disgust at the cowardice
- of the lower classes on this occasion that she left town the next day
- and would not return thither.
- The increasing scarcity of petrol and the onset of food rationing, which
- threatened to spread all over England, drove her to Ulster—in spite of
- the submarine danger that might have deterred a less stout-hearted
- woman. She took a small furnished house in a congenial district, and
- found herself one of a little circle of ultra-patriotic refugees, driven
- like herself from England by un-English restrictions upon the
- nourishment of the upper classes and the spread of the pacifist
- tendencies of Lord Lansdowne. “If the cowards must make peace,” said
- Lady Charlotte, “at least give _me_ leave to be out of it.”
- Considering everything, Ulster was at that time as comfortably and
- honourably out of the war as any part of the world, and all that seemed
- needed to keep it safely out to the end was a little tactful firmness in
- the Dublin Convention. There was plenty of everything in the loyal
- province at that time—men, meat, butter, Dublin stout, and
- self-righteousness; and Lady Charlotte expanded again like a flower in
- the sun. She reverted to driving in a carriage; it was nice to sit once
- more behind a stout able-bodied coachman with a cockade, with a perfect
- excuse for neutrality, and she still did her best for old England from
- eleven to one and often from five to six by writing letters and dabbling
- in organization. Oswald she kept in mind continually. Almost daily he
- would get newspaper cuttings from her detailing Sinn Fein outrages, or
- blue-marked leading articles agitating for a larger share of the
- munition industries for Belfast, or good hot stuff, deeply underlined,
- from the speeches of Sir Edward Carson. One dastardly Sinn Feiner,
- Oswald learnt, had even starved himself to death in gaol, a most
- unnatural offence to Lady Charlotte. She warmed up tremendously over the
- insidious attempts of the Prime Minister and a section of the press to
- get all the armies in France and Italy under one supreme generalissimo
- and end the dislocated muddling that had so long prolonged the war. It
- was a change that might have involved the replacement of regular
- generals by competent ones, and it imperilled everything that was most
- dear to the old lady’s heart. It was “_an insult to the King’s
- uniform_,” she wrote. “_A revolution. I knew that this sort of thing
- would begin if we let those Americans come in. We ought not to have let
- them come in. What good are they to us? What can they know of war? A
- crowd of ignorant republican renegades! British generals to be
- criticized and their prospects injured by French Roman Catholics and
- Atheists and chewing, expectorating Yankees and every sort of low
- foreigner. What is the world coming to? Sir Douglas Haig has been
- exactly where he is for two years. Surely he knows the ground better
- than any one else can possibly do._”
- Once the theme of Lady Charlotte got loose in Oswald’s poor old brain,
- it began a special worry of its own. He found his mind struggling with
- assertions and arguments. As this involved trying to remember exactly
- what she had said in this letter of hers, and as it was in his pocket,
- he presently chose the lesser of two evils and took it out to read
- over:—
- “_I suppose you have read in the papers what is happening in Clare. The
- people are ploughing up grass-land. It is as bad as that man Prothero.
- They raid gentlemen’s houses to seize arms; they resist the police. That
- man Devil-era—so I must call him—speaks openly of a republic. Devil-era
- and Devil-in; is it a coincidence merely? All this comes of our
- ill-timed leniency after the Dublin rebellion. When will England learn
- the lesson Cromwell taught her? He was a wicked man, he made one great
- mistake for which he is no doubt answering to his Maker throughout all
- eternity, but he certainly did know how to manage these Irish. If he
- could come back now he would be on our side. He would have had his
- lesson. Your Bolshevik friends go on murdering and cutting throats, I
- see, like true Republicans. Happily the White Guards seem getting the
- upper hand in Finland. In the end I suppose we shall be driven to a
- peace with the Huns as the worst of two evils. If we do, it will only be
- your Bolsheviks and pacifists and strikers and Bolos who will be to
- blame._
- “_The whining and cowardice of the East Enders disgusts me more and
- more. You read, I suppose, the account of the disgraceful panic during
- the air raid the other day in the East End, due entirely to foreigners
- of military age, mostly, no doubt, your Russian Bolsheviks. I am well
- away from such a rabble. I suffer from rheumatism here. I know it is
- rheumatism; what you say about gout is nonsense. In spite of its loyalty
- Ulster is damp. I pine more and more for the sun and warmth of Italy.
- Unwin must needs make herself very tiresome and peevish nowadays. These
- are not cheerful times for me. But one must do one’s bit for one’s
- country, I suppose, unworthy though it be._
- “_So Mr. Peter is back in England again wounded after his flying about
- in the air. I suppose he is tasting the delights of matrimony, such as
- they are! What an affair! Something told me long ago that it would
- happen. I tried to separate them. My instincts warned me, and my
- instincts were right. Breed is breed, and the servant strain came out in
- her. You can’t say I didn’t warn you. Why you let them marry I cannot
- imagine!!! I am sure the young lady could have dispensed with that
- ceremony!!!! I still think at times of that queer scene I passed on the
- road when I came to Pelham Ford that Christmas. A second string,—no
- doubt of it. But Peter was her great chance, of course, thanks to your
- folly. Well, let us hope that in the modern way they won’t have any
- children, for nothing is more certain than that these inter-breeding
- marriages are most harmful, and whether we like it or not you have to
- remember they are first cousins, if not in the sight of the law at any
- rate in the sight of God, which is what matters in this respect. Mr.
- Grimes, who has studied these things in his leisure time, tells me that
- there is a very great probability indeed that any child will be blind or
- malformed or consumptive, let us hope the latter, if not actually
- still-born, which, of course, would be the best thing that could
- possibly happen...._”
- § 5
- At this point Oswald became aware of Joan coming out of the house
- towards him.
- He looked at his watch. “Much too early yet, Joan,” he said.
- “Yes, but I want to be meeting him,” said Mrs. Joan....
- So they walked down to the station and waited for a long time on the
- platform. And Joan said very little to Oswald because she was musing
- pleasantly.
- When the train came in neither Joan nor Peter took much notice of Oswald
- after the first greeting. I do not see what else he could have expected;
- they were deeply in love and they had been apart for a couple of weeks,
- they were excited by each other and engrossed in each other. Oswald
- walked beside them up the road—apart. “I’ve got some work,” he said
- abruptly in the hall. “See you at lunch,” and went into his study and
- shut the door upon them, absurdly disappointed.
- § 6
- Peter came on Wednesday. It was not until Friday that Oswald found an
- opportunity to deliver his valediction. But he had rehearsed it, or
- rather he had been rehearsing experimental fragments of it for most of
- the night before. On Thursday night the cloudy malaise of his mind broke
- and cleared. Things fell into their proper places in his thoughts, and
- he could feel that his ideas were no longer distorted and confused. The
- valediction appeared, an ordered discourse. If only he could hold out
- through a long talk he felt he would be able to make himself plain to
- them....
- He lay in the darkness putting together phrase after phrase, sentence
- after sentence, developing a long and elaborate argument, dipping down
- into parentheses, throwing off footnotes, resuming his text. For the
- most part Joan and Peter remained silent hearers of this discourse; now
- his ratiocination glowed so brightly that they were almost forgotten,
- now they came into the discussion, they assisted, they said helpful and
- understanding things, they raised simple and obvious objections that
- were beautifully overcome.
- “What is education up to?” he would begin. “What is education?”
- Then came a sentence that he repeated in the stillness of his mind quite
- a number of times. “Consider this beast we are, this thing man!” He did
- not reckon with Peter’s tendency to prompt replies.
- He would begin in the broadest, most elementary way. “Consider this
- beast we are, this thing man!” so he framed his opening: “a creature
- restlessly experimental, mischievous and destructive, as sexual as a
- monkey, and with no really strong social instincts, no such tolerance of
- his fellows as a deer has, no such instinctive self-devotion as you find
- in a bee or an ant. A solitary animal, a selfish animal. And yet this
- creature has now made for itself such conditions that it _must_ be
- social. Must be. Or destroy itself. Continually it invents fresh means
- by which man may get at man to injure him or help him. That is one view
- of the creature, Peter, from your biological end.” Here Peter was to
- nod, and remain attentively awaiting the next development. “And at the
- same time, there grows upon us all a sense of a common being and a
- common interest. Biologically separate, we unify spiritually. More and
- more do men feel, ’I am not for myself! There is something in me—that
- belongs to a greater being than myself—of which I am a part.’... I won’t
- philosophize. I won’t say which may be in the nature of cause and which
- of effect here. You can put what I have said in a dozen different ways.
- We may say, ’The individual must live in the species and find his
- happiness there’—that is—Biologese. _Our_ language, Peter. Or we can
- quote, ’I am the True Vine and ye are the Branches.’” Oswald’s mind
- rested on that for a time. “That is not _our_ language, Peter, but it is
- the same idea. Essentially it is the same idea. Or we can talk of the
- ’One and the Many.’ We can say we all live in the mercy of Allah, or if
- you are a liberal Jew that we are all a part of Israel. It seems to me
- that all these formulæ are so much spluttering and variation over one
- idea. Doesn’t it to you? Men can quarrel mortally even upon the question
- of how they shall say ’Brotherhood.’...” Here for a time Oswald’s mind
- paused.
- He embarked upon a great and wonderful parenthesis upon religious
- intolerance in which at last he lost himself completely.
- “I don’t see that men need fall out about religion,” was his main
- proposition.
- “There was a time when I was against all religions. I denounced
- priestcraft and superstition and so on.... That is past. That is past. I
- want peace in the world.... Men’s minds differ more about _initial_
- things than they do about _final_ things. Some men think in images,
- others in words and abstract ideas—but yet the two sorts can think out
- the same practical conclusions. A lot of these chapels and churches only
- mean a difference in language.... Difference in dialect.... Often they
- don’t mean the same things, those religious people, by the same words,
- but often contrariwise they mean the same things by quite different
- words. The deaf man says the dawn is bright and red, and the blind man
- says it is a sound of birds. It is the same dawn. The same dawn.... One
- man says ’God’ and thinks of a person who is as much of a person as Joan
- is, and another says ’God’ and thinks of an idea more abstract than the
- square root of minus one. That’s a tangle in the primaries of thought
- and not a difference in practical intention. One can argue about such
- things for ever.... One can make a puzzle with a bit of wire that will
- bother and exasperate people for hours. Is it any wonder, then, if
- stating what is at the root of life bothers and exasperates people?...
- “Personally, I should say now that all religions are right, and none of
- them very happy in the words and symbols they choose. And none of them
- are calm enough—not calm enough. Not peaceful enough. They are all
- floundering about with symbols and metaphors, and it is a pity they will
- not admit it.... Why will people never admit their intellectual
- limitations in these matters?... All the great religions have this in
- common, this idea in common; they profess to teach the universal
- brotherhood of man and the universal reign of justice. Why argue about
- phrases? Why not put it in this fashion?”...
- For a long time Oswald argued about phrases before he could get back to
- the main thread of his argument....
- “Men have to be unified. They are driven to seek Unity. And they are
- still with the individualized instincts of a savage.... See then what
- education always has to be! The process of taking this imperfectly
- social, jealous, deeply savage creature and socializing him. The
- development of education and the development of human societies are one
- and the same thing. Education makes the social man. So far as schooling
- goes, it is quite plainly that. You teach your solitary beast to read
- and write, you teach him to express himself by drawing, you teach him
- other languages perhaps, and something of history and the distribution
- of mankind. What is it all but making this creature who would naturally
- possess only the fierce, narrow sociability of a savage family in a
- cave, into a citizen in a greater community? That is how I see it. That
- primarily is what has been done to you. An uneducated man is a man who
- can talk to a few score familiar people with a few hundred words. You
- two can talk to a quarter of mankind. With the help of a little
- translation you can get to understandings with most of mankind.... As a
- child learns the accepted language and the accepted writing and the laws
- and rules of life it learns the community. Watching the education of you
- two has made me believe more and more in the idea that, over and above
- the enlargement of expression and understanding, education is the state
- explaining itself to and incorporating the will of the individual....
- “Yes—but what state? What state? Now we come to it....”
- Oswald began to sketch out a universal history. There is no limit to
- these intellectual enterprises of the small hours.
- “All history is the record of an effort in man to form communities, an
- effort against resistance—against instinctive resistance. There seems no
- natural and proper limit to a human community. (That’s my great point,
- that. That is what I have to tell them.) That is the final teaching of
- History, Joan and Peter; the very quintessence of History; that
- limitlessness of the community. As soon as men get a community of any
- size organized, it begins forthwith to develop roads, wheels, writing,
- ship-building, and all manner of things which presently set a fresh
- growth growing again. Let that, too, go on. Presently comes steam,
- mechanical traction, telegraphy, the telephone, wireless, aeroplanes;
- and each means an extension of range, and each therefore demands a
- larger community.... There seems no limit to the growth of states. I
- remember, Peter, a talk we had; we agreed that this hackneyed analogy
- people draw between the life and death of animals and the life and death
- of states was bad and silly. It isn’t the same thing, Joan, at all. An
- animal, you see, has a limit of size; it develops no new organs for
- further growth when it has reached that limit, it breeds its successors,
- it ages naturally; when it dies, it dies for good and all and is cleared
- away. Exactly the reverse is true of a human community. Exactly? Yes,
- exactly. If it can develop its educational system steadily—note that—if
- it can keep up communications, a State can go on indefinitely,
- conquering, ousting, assimilating. Even an amoeba breaks up after
- growth, but a human community need not do so. And so far from breeding
- successors it kills them if it can—like Frazer’s priest—where was
- it?—Aricia? The priest of Diana. The priest of The _Golden Bough_....”
- Oswald picked up his thread again after a long, half dreaming excursion
- in Frazer-land.
- “It is just this limitlessness, this potential immortality of States
- that makes all the confusion and bloodshed of history. What is happening
- in the world today? What is the essence of it all? The communities of
- today are developing _range_, faster than ever they did: aeroplanes,
- guns, swifter ships, everywhere an increasing range of action. That is
- the most important fact to grasp about the modern world. It is the key
- fact in politics. From the first dawn of the human story you see man in
- a kind of a puzzled way—how shall I put it?—_pursuing the boundary of
- his possible community_. Which always recedes. Which recedes now faster
- than ever. Until it brings him to a fatal war and disaster. Over and
- over again it is the same story. If you had a coloured historical atlas
- of the world, the maps would be just a series of great dabs of empire,
- spreading, spreading—coming against resistances—collapsing. Each dab
- tries to devour the world and fails. There is no natural limit to a
- human community, no limit in time or space—except one.
- “Genus _Homo_, species _Sapiens_, Mankind, that is the only limit.”
- (Peter, perhaps, might be led up to saying that.)...
- “What has the history of education always been? A series of little
- teaching chaps trying to follow up and _fix_ the fluctuating boundaries
- of communities”—an image came into Oswald’s head that pleased him and
- led him on—“like an insufficient supply of upholsterers trying to
- overtake and tack down a carpet that was blowing away in front of a
- gale. An insufficient supply of upholsterers.... And the carpet always
- growing as it blows. That’s good.... They were trying to fix something
- they hadn’t clearly defined. And you have a lot of them still hammering
- away at their tacks when the edge of the carpet has gone on far
- ahead.... That was really the state of education in England when I took
- you two young people in hand; the carpet was in the air and most of the
- schoolmasters, schoolmistresses, writers, teachers, journalists, and all
- who build up and confirm ideas were hammering in tacks where the carpet
- had been resting the day before yesterday.... But a lot were not even
- hammering. No. They just went easy. Yes, that is what I mean when I say
- that education was altogether at loose ends.... But Germany was
- different; Germany was teaching and teaching in schools, colleges,
- press, everywhere, this new Imperialism of hers, a sort of patriotic
- melodrama, with Britain as Carthage and Berlin instead of Rome. They
- pointed the whole population to that end. They _taught_ this war. All
- over the world a thousand other educational systems pointed in a
- thousand directions....
- “So Germany set fire to the Phœnix....
- “Only one other great country had any sort of state education.
- Real state education that is. The United States was also
- teaching citizenship, on a broader if shallower basis; a wider
- citizenship—goodwill to all mankind. Shallower. Shallower certainly. But
- it was there. A republican culture. Candour ... generosity.... The world
- has still to realize its debt to the common schools of America....
- “This League of Free Nations, of which all men are dreaming and talking,
- this World Republic, is the rediscovered outline, the proper teaching of
- all real education, the necessary outline now of human life.... There is
- nothing else to do, nothing else that people of our sort can do at all,
- nothing but baseness, grossness, vileness, and slavery unless we live
- now as a part of that process of a world peace. Our lives have got to be
- political lives. All lives have to be made political lives. We can’t run
- about _loose_ any more. This idea of a world-wide commonwealth, this
- ideal of an everlasting world-peace in which we are to live and move and
- have our being, has to be built up in every school, in every mind, in
- every lesson. ‘You belong. You belong. And the world belongs to
- you.’...”
- What ought one to teach when one teaches geography, for instance, but
- the common estate of mankind? Here, the teacher should say, are
- mountains and beautiful cities you may live to see. Here are plains
- where we might grow half the food of mankind! Here are the highways of
- our common life, and here are pleasant bye-ways where you may go! All
- this is your inheritance. Your estate. To rejoice in—and serve. But is
- that how geography is taught?...
- “We used to learn lists of the British possessions, with their total
- exports and imports in money. I remember it as if it were yesterday....
- Old Smugs—a hot New Imperialist—new then....
- “Then what is history but a long struggle of men to find peace and
- safety, and how they have been prevented by baseness and greed and
- folly? Is that right? No, folly and baseness—and hate.... Hate
- certainly.... All history is one dramatic story, of man blundering his
- way from the lonely ape to the world commonwealth. All history is each
- man’s adventure. But what teacher makes history much more than a
- dwarfish twaddle about boundaries and kings and wars? Dwarfish twaddle.
- History! It went nowhere. It did nothing. Was there ever anything more
- like a crowd of people getting into an omnibus without wheels than the
- History Schools at Oxford? Or your History Tripos?”... Oswald repeated
- his image and saw that it was good....
- “What is the teaching of a language again but teaching the knowledge of
- another people—an exposition of the soul of another people—a work of
- union?... But you see what I mean by all this; this idea of a great
- world of co-operating peoples; it is not just a diplomatic scheme, not
- something far off that Foreign Offices are doing; it is an idea that
- must revolutionize the lessons of a child in the nursery and alter the
- maps upon every schoolroom wall. And frame our lives altogether. Or be
- nothing. The World Peace. To that we all belong. I have a fancy— As
- though this idea had been hovering over the world, unsubstantial, unable
- to exist—until all this blood-letting, this torment and disaster gave it
- a body....
- “What I am saying to you the University ought to have said to you.
- “Instead of Universities”—he sought for a phrase and produced one that
- against the nocturnal dark seemed brilliant and luminous. “Instead of
- the University _passant regardant_, we want the University militant. We
- want Universities all round and about the world, associated, working to
- a common end, drawing together all the best minds and the finest wills,
- a myriad of multi-coloured threads, into one common web of a world
- civilization.”
- § 7
- Also that night Oswald made a discourse upon the English.
- “Yours is a great inheritance, Joan and Peter,” he said to the darkness.
- “You are young; that is a great thing in itself. The world cries out now
- for the young to enter into possession. And also—do you ever think of
- it?—you are English, Joan and Peter....
- “Let me say something to you before we have done, something out of my
- heart. Have I ever canted patriotism to you? No! Am I an aggressive
- Imperialist? Am I not a Home Ruler? For Ireland. For India. The best
- years of my life have been spent in saving black men from white—and
- mostly those white men were of our persuasion, men of the buccaneer
- strain, on the loot. But now that we three are here together with no one
- else to hear us, I will confess. I tell you there is no race and no
- tradition in the whole world that I would change for my English race and
- tradition. I do not mean the brief tradition of this little Buckingham
- Palace and Westminster system here that began yesterday and will end
- tomorrow, I mean the great tradition of the English that is spread all
- over the earth, the tradition of Shakespeare and Milton, of Newton and
- Bacon, of Runnymede and Agincourt, the tradition of the men who speak
- fairly and act fairly, without harshness and without fear, who face
- whatever odds there are against them and take no account of Kings. It is
- in Washington and New York and Christchurch and Sydney, just as much as
- it is in Pelham Ford.... Well, upon us more than upon any other single
- people rests now for a time the burthen of human destiny. Upon us and
- France. France is the spear head but we are the shaft. If we fail,
- mankind may fail. We English have made the greatest empire that the
- world has ever seen; across the Atlantic we have also made the greatest
- republic. And these are but phases in our task. The better part of our
- work still lies before us. The weight is on us now. It was Milton who
- wrote long ago that when God wanted some task of peculiar difficulty to
- be done he turned to his Englishmen. And he turns to us today. Old
- Milton saw English shine clear and great for a time and then pass into
- the darkness.... He didn’t lose his faith.... Church and crown are no
- part of the real England which we inherit....
- “We have no reason to be ashamed of our race and country, Joan and
- Peter, for all the confusion and blundering of these last years. Our
- generals and politicians have missed opportunity after opportunity. I
- cannot talk yet of such things.... The blunderings.... The slackness....
- Hanoverian England with its indolence, its dulness, its economic
- uncleanness, its canting individualism, its contempt for science and
- system, has been an England darkened, an England astray——. Young England
- has had to pay at last for all those wasted years—and has paid.... My
- God! the men we have expended already in fighting these Germans, the
- brave, beautiful men, the jesting common men, the fresh boys, so
- cheerful and kind and gallant!... And the happiness that has died! And
- the shame of following after clumsy, mean leadership in the sight of all
- the world!... But there rests no stain on our blood. For our people here
- and for the Americans this has been a war of honour. We did not come
- into this war for sordid or narrow ends. Our politicians when they made
- base treaties had to hide them from our people.... Even in the face of
- the vilest outrages, even now the English keep a balanced justice and
- will not hate the German common men for things they have been forced to
- do. Yesterday I saw the German prisoners who work at Stanton getting
- into the train and joking with their guard. They looked well fed and
- healthy and uncowed. One carried a bunch of primroses. No one has an ill
- word for these men on all the countryside.... Does any other people in
- the world treat prisoners as we treat them?...
- “Well, the time has come for our people now to go on from Empire and
- from Monroe doctrine, great as these ideas have been, to something still
- greater; the time has come for us to hold out our hands to every man in
- the world who is ready for a disciplined freedom. The German has dreamt
- of setting up a Cæsar over the whole world. Against that we now set up a
- disciplined world freedom. For ourselves and all mankind....
- “Joan and Peter, that is what I have been coming to in all this
- wandering discourse. Yours is a great inheritance. You and your
- generation have to renew and justify England in a new world. You have to
- link us again in a common purpose with our kind everywhere. You have to
- rescue our destinies, the destinies of the world, from these stale
- quarrels; you have to take the world out of the hands of these weary and
- worn men, these old and oldish men, these men who can learn no more. You
- have to reach back and touch the England of Shakespeare, Milton,
- Raleigh, and Blake—and that means you have to go forward. You have to
- take up the English tradition as it was before church and court and a
- base imperialism perverted it. You have to become political. Now. You
- have to become responsible. Now. You have to create. Now. You, with your
- fresh vision, with the lessons you have learnt still burning bright in
- your minds, you have to remake the world. Listen when the old men tell
- you facts, for very often they know. Listen when they reason, they will
- teach you many twists and turns. But when they dogmatize, when they
- still want to rule unquestioned, and, above all, when they say
- ’_impossible_,’ even when they say ’_wait—be dilatory and discreet_,’
- push them aside. Their minds squat crippled beside dead traditions....
- That England of the Victorian old men, and its empire and its honours
- and its court and precedences, it is all a dead body now, it has died as
- the war has gone on, and it has to be buried out of our way lest it
- corrupt you and all the world again....”
- § 8
- We underrate the disposition of youth to think for itself.
- Oswald set himself to deliver this Valediction of his after dinner on
- Friday evening....
- Joan was hesitating between a game of Demon Patience with Peter—in which
- she always played thirteen to his eleven and usually won in spite of the
- handicap—and an inclination for Bach’s _Passacaglia_ upon the pianola in
- the study. Peter expressed himself ready for whatever she chose; he
- would play D.P. or read _Moll Flanders_—he had just discovered the
- delight of that greatest of all eighteenth century novels. He was
- sitting on the couch in the library and Joan was standing upon the
- hearthrug, regarding him thoughtfully, when Oswald came in. He stopped
- to hear what Peter was saying, with his one eye intent on Joan’s pretty
- gravity.
- “No,” he interrupted. “This is my evening.
- “You see,” he said, coming up to the fire; “I want to talk to you young
- people. I want to know some things—— I want to know what you make of
- life.... I want ... an exchange of views.”
- He stood with his back to the fire and smiled at Joan’s grave face close
- to his own. “I’ve got to talk to you,” he said, “very seriously. It’s
- necessary.”
- Having paralysed them by this preface he sat down in his deep armchair,
- pulled it an inch or so towards the fire, and leaning forward, with his
- eye on the spitting coals, began.
- “I wish I could talk better, Joan and Peter.... I know I’ve never been a
- good talker—it’s been rather a loss between us all. And now
- particularly.... I want to talk.... You must let me get it out in my own
- way....
- “You see,” he went on after a moment or so to rally his forces, “I’ve
- been your guardian, I’ve had your education and your affairs in my
- hands, for fifteen years. So far as the affairs go, Sycamore, you know——
- We won’t go into that. That’s all plain sailing. But it’s the education
- I want to talk about—and your future. You are now both of age. Well
- past. You’re on the verge of twenty-five, Peter—in a month or so. You’re
- both off now—housekeeping. You’re dropping the pilot. It’s high time, I
- suppose....”
- Joan glanced at Peter, and then sank noiselessly into a crouching
- attitude close to Oswald’s knee. He paused to stroke her hair.
- “I’ve been trying to get you all that I could get you.... Education....
- I’ve had to blunder and experiment. I ought to tell you what I’ve aimed
- at and what I’ve done, take stock with you of the world I’ve educated
- you for and the part you’re going to play in it. Take stock.... It’s
- been a badly planned undertaking, I know. But then it’s such a
- surprising and unexpected world. All the time I’ve been learning, and
- most things I’ve learnt more or less too late to use the knowledge
- properly....”
- He paused.
- Peter looked at his guardian and said nothing. Oswald patted the head at
- his knee in return for a caress. It was an evasive, even apologetic pat,
- for he did not want to be distracted by affection just then.
- “This war has altered the whole world,” he went on. “Life has become
- stark and intense, and when I took this on—when I took up the task of
- educating you—our world here seemed the most wrapped up and comfortable
- and secure world you can possibly imagine. Comfortable to the pitch of
- stuffiness. Most English people didn’t trouble a bit about the shape of
- human life; they thought it was—well, rather like a heap of down
- cushions. For them it was. For most of Europe and America.... They
- thought it was all right and perfectly safe—if only you didn’t bother.
- And education had lost its way. Yes. That puts the case. _Education had
- lost its way._”
- Oswald paused again. He fixed his one eye firmly on a glowing cavity in
- the fire, as though that contained the very gist of his thoughts.
- “What is education up to?” he asked. “What is education?”...
- Thereupon of course he ought to have gone on to the passage beginning,
- “Consider this beast we are, this thing man!” as he had already
- rehearsed it overnight. But Peter had not learnt his part properly.
- “I suppose it’s fitting the square natural man into the round hole of
- civilized life,” Peter threw out.
- This reply greatly disconcerted Oswald. “Exactly,” he said, and was for
- some moments at a loss.
- “Yes,” he said, rallying. “But what is civilized life?”
- “Oh!... Creative activities in an atmosphere of helpful goodwill,” Peter
- tried in the brief pause that followed.
- Oswald had a disagreeable feeling that he was getting to the end of his
- discourse before he delivered its beginning. “Yes,” he said again. “Yes.
- But for that you must have a political form.”
- “The World State,” said Peter.
- “The League of Free Nations,” said Oswald, “to enforce Peace throughout
- the earth.”
- The next remark that came from Peter was still more unexpected and
- embarrassing.
- “Peace is nothing,” said Peter.
- Oswald turned his red eye upon his ward, in profound amazement.
- Did they differ fundamentally in their idea of the human future?
- “Peace, my dear Peter, is everything,” he protested.
- “But, sir, it’s nothing more than the absence of war. It’s a negative.
- In itself it’s—vacuum. You can’t live in a vacuum.”
- “But I mean an active peace.”
- “That would be something more than peace. War is an activity. Peace is
- not. If you take war out of the world, you must have some other
- activity.”
- “But doesn’t the organization of the World Peace in itself constitute an
- activity?”
- “That would be a diminishing activity, sir. Like a man getting himself
- morphia and taking it and going to sleep. A World Peace would release
- energy, and as the energy was released, if the end were merely peace,
- there would be less need for it. Until things exploded.”
- Great portions of Oswald’s Valediction broke away and vanished for ever
- into the limbo of unspoken discourses.
- “But would you have war go on, Peter?”
- “Not in its present form. But struggle and unification, which is the end
- sought in all struggles, must go on in some form, sir,” said Peter,
- “while life goes on. We have to get the World State and put an end to
- war. I agree. But the real question is what are you going to do with our
- Peace? What struggle is to take the place of war? What is mankind going
- to _do_? Most wars have come about hitherto because somebody was bored.
- Do you remember how bored we all were in 1914? And the rotten way we
- were all going on then? A World State or a League of Nations with
- nothing to do but to keep the peace will bore men intolerably.... That’s
- what I like about the Germans.”
- “What you _like_ about the Germans!” Oswald cried in horror.
- “They _did_ get a move on, sir,” said Peter.
- “We don’t want a preventive League of Nations,” Peter expanded. “It’s
- got to be creative or nothing. Or else we shall be in a sort of
- perpetual Coronation year—with nothing doing on account of the
- processions. Horrible!”
- For a little while Oswald made no reply. He could not recall a single
- sentence of the lost Valediction that was at all appropriate here, and
- he was put out and distressed beyond measure that Peter could find
- anything to “like” about the Germans.
- “A World Peace for its own sake is impossible,” Peter went on. “The Old
- Experimenter would certainly put a spoke into that wheel.”
- “Who is the Old Experimenter?” asked Oswald.
- “He’s a sort of God I have,” said Peter. “Something between theology and
- a fairy tale. I dreamt about him. When I was delirious. He doesn’t rule
- the world or anything of that sort, because he doesn’t want to, but he
- keeps on dropping new things into it. To see what happens. Like a man
- setting himself problems to work out in his head. He lives in a little
- out-of-the-way office. That’s the idea.”
- “You haven’t told me about him,” said Joan.
- “I shall some day,” said Peter. “When I feel so disposed....”
- “This is very disconcerting,” said Oswald, much perplexed. He scowled at
- the fire before him. “But you do realize the need there is for some form
- of world state and some ending of war? Unless mankind is to destroy
- itself altogether.”
- “Certainly, sir,” said Peter. “But we aren’t going to do that on a peace
- proposition simply. It’s got to be a positive proposal. You know, sir——”
- “I wish you’d call me Nobby,” said Oswald.
- “It’s a vice contracted in the army, this Sir-ing,” said Peter. “It’s
- Nobby in my mind, anyhow. But you see, I’ve got a kind of habit, at
- night and odd times, of thinking over my little misadventure with that
- balloon and my scrap with von Papen. They are my stock dreams, with
- extra details worked in, nasty details some of them ... and then I wake
- up and think about them. I think over the parachute affair more than the
- fight, because it lasted longer and I wasn’t so active. I felt it more.
- Especially being shot in the legs.... That sort of dream when you float
- helpless.... But the thing that impresses me most in reflecting on those
- little experiences is the limitless amount of intelligence that expended
- itself on such jobs as breaking my wrist, splintering my shoulder-blade
- and smashing up my leg. The amount of ingenuity and good workmanship in
- my instruments and the fittings of my basket, for example, was
- extraordinary, having regard to the fact that it was just one small item
- in an artillery system for blowing Germans to red rags. And the stuff
- and intelligence they were putting up against me, that too was
- wonderful; the way the whole problem had been thought out, the special
- clock fuse and so on. Well, my point is that the chap who made that
- equipment wasn’t particularly interested in killing me, and that the
- chaps who made my outfit weren’t particularly keen on the slaughter of
- Germans. But they had nothing else to do. They were brought up in a
- pointless world. They were caught by a vulgar quarrel. What did they
- care for the Kaiser? Old ass! What they were interested in was making
- the things....”
- Peter became very earnest in his manner. “No peace, as we have known
- peace hitherto, offers such opportunities for good inventive work as war
- does. That’s my point, Nobby. There’s no comparison between the
- excitement and the endless problems of making a real, live, efficient
- submarine, for example, that has to meet and escape the intensest risks,
- and the occupation of designing a great, big, safe, upholstered liner in
- which fat swindlers can cross the Atlantic without being seasick. War
- tempts imaginative, restless people, and a stagnant peace bores them.
- And you’ve got to reckon with intelligence and imagination in this
- world, Nobby, more than anything. They aren’t strong enough to control
- perhaps, but they will certainly upset. Inventive, restless men are the
- particular instruments of my Old Experimenter. He prefers them now to
- plague, pestilence, famine, flood and earthquake. They are more delicate
- instruments. And more efficient. And they won’t _stand_ a passive peace.
- Under no circumstances can you hope to induce the chap who contrived the
- clock fuse and the chap who worked out my gas bag or the chap with a new
- aeroplane gadget, and me—me, too—to stop cerebrating and making our
- damndest just in order to sit about safely in meadows joining up daisy
- chains—like a beastly lot of figures by Walter Crane. The Old
- Experimenter finds some mischief still for idle brains to do. He insists
- on it. That’s fundamental to the scheme of things.”
- “But that’s no reason,” interrupted Oswald, “why you and the inventors
- who were behind you, and the Germans who made and loaded and fired that
- shell, shouldn’t all get together to do something that will grow and
- endure. Instead of killing one another.”
- “Ah, that’s it!” said Peter. “But the word for that isn’t Peace.”
- “Then what is the word for it?”
- “I don’t know,” said Peter. “The Great Game, perhaps.”
- “And where does it take you?”
- Peter threw out his hands. “It’s an exploration,” he said. “It will take
- man to the centre of the earth; it will take him to the ends of space,
- between the atoms and among the stars. How can we tell beforehand? You
- must have faith. But of one thing I am sure, that man cannot stagnate.
- It is forbidden. It is the uttermost sin. Why, the Old Man will come out
- of his office himself to prevent it! This war and all the blood and loss
- of it is because the new things are entangled among old and dead things,
- worn-out and silly things, and we’ve not had the vigour to get them
- free. Old idiot nationality, national conceit—expanding to imperialism,
- nationality in a state of megalomania, has been allowed to get hold of
- the knife that was meant for a sane generation to carve out a new world
- with. Heaven send he cuts his own throat this time! Or else there may be
- a next time.... I’m all for the one world state, and the end of flags
- and kings and custom houses. But I have my doubts of all this talk of
- making the world safe—safe for democracy. I want the world made one for
- the adventure of mankind, which is quite another story. I have been in
- the world now, Nobby, for five-and-twenty years, and I am only beginning
- to suspect the wonder and beauty of the things we men might know and do.
- If only we could get our eyes and hands free of the old inheritance.
- What has mankind done yet to boast about? I despise human
- history—because I believe in God. Not the God you don’t approve of,
- Nobby, but in my Old Experimenter, whom I confess I don’t begin to
- understand, and in the far-off, eternal scheme he hides from us and
- which he means us to develop age by age. Oh! I don’t understand him, I
- don’t begin to explain him; he’s just a figure for what I feel is the
- reality. But he is right, he is wonderful. And instead of just muddling
- about over the surface of his universe, we have to get into the
- understanding of it to the very limits of our ability, to live our
- utmost and do the intensest best we can.”
- “Yes,” said Oswald; “yes.” This was after his own heart, and yet it did
- not run along the lines of the Valedictory that had flowered with such
- Corinthian richness overnight. He had been thinking then of world peace;
- what Peter was driving at now was a world purpose; but weren’t the two
- after all the same thing? He sat with his one eye reflecting the red
- light of the fire, and the phrases that had come in such generous
- abundance overnight now refused to come at all.
- Peter, on the couch, continued to think aloud.
- “Making the world safe for democracy,” said Peter. “That isn’t quite it.
- If democracy means that any man may help who can, that school and
- university will give every man and woman the fairest chance, the most
- generous inducement to help, to do the thing he can best do under the
- best conditions, then, _Yes_; but if democracy means getting up a riot
- and boycott among the stupid and lazy and illiterate whenever anything
- is doing, then I say _No_! Every human being has got to work, has got to
- take part. If our laws and organization don’t insist upon that, the Old
- Experimenter will. So long as the world is ruled by stale ideas and lazy
- ideas, he is determined that it shall flounder from war to war. Now what
- does this democracy mean? Does it mean a crowd of primitive brutes
- howling down progress and organization? because if it does, I want to be
- in the machine-gun section. When you talk of education, Nobby, you think
- of highly educated people, of a nation instructed through and through.
- But what of democracy in Russia, where you have a naturally clever
- people in a state of peasant ignorance—who can’t even read? Until the
- schoolmaster has talked to every one for ten or twelve years, can you
- have what President Wilson thinks of as democracy at all?”
- “Now there you meet me,” said Oswald. “That is the idea I have been
- trying to get at with you.” And for some minutes the palatial dimensions
- of the lost Valedictory loomed out. Where he had said “peace” overnight,
- however, he now said progress.
- But the young man on the couch was much too keenly interested to make a
- good audience. When presently Oswald propounded his theory that all the
- great world religions were on the side of this World Republic that he
- and Peter desired, Peter demurred.
- “But is that true of Catholicism for instance?” said Peter.
- Oswald quoted, “I am the Vine and ye are the Branches.”
- “Yes,” said Peter. “But look at the Church itself. Don’t look at the
- formula but at the practice and the daily teaching. Is it truly a
- growing Vine?” The reality of Catholicism, Peter argued, was a
- traditional, sacramental religion, a narrow fetish religion with a
- specialized priest, it was concerned primarily with another world, it
- set its face against any conception of a scheme of progress in this
- world apart from its legend of the sacrifice of the Mass.
- “All good Catholics sneer at progress,” said Peter. “Take Belloc and
- Chesterton, for example; they _hate_ the idea of men working steadily
- for any great scheme of effort here. They hold by stagnant standards,
- planted deep in the rich mud of life. What’s the Catholic conception of
- human life?—guzzle, booze, call the passion of the sexes unclean and
- behave accordingly, confess, get absolution, and at it again. Is there
- any recognition in Catholicism of the duty of keeping your body fit or
- your brain active? They’re worse than the man who buried his talent in a
- clean napkin; they bury it in wheezy fat. It’s a sloven’s life. What
- have we in common with that? Always they are harking back to the
- thirteenth century, to the peasant life amidst dung and chickens. It’s a
- different species of mind from ours, with the head and feet turned
- backward. What is the good of expecting the Pope, for instance, and his
- Church to help us in creating a League of Nations? His aim would be a
- world agreement to stop progress, and we want to release it. He wants
- peace in order to achieve nothing, and we want peace in order to do
- everything. What is the good of pretending that it is the same peace? A
- Catholic League of Nations would be a conspiracy of stagnation, another
- Holy Alliance. What real world unity can come through them? Every step
- on the way to the world state and the real unification of men will be
- fought by the stagnant men and the priests. Why blind ourselves to that?
- Progress is a religion in itself. Work and learning are our creed. We
- cannot make terms with any other creed. The priest has got his God and
- we seek our God for ever. The priest is finished and completed and
- self-satisfied, and we—we are beginning....”
- § 9
- There were two days yet before Peter went back to his work in London.
- Saturday dawned blue and fine, and Joan and he determined to spend it in
- a long tramp over the Hertfordshire hills and fields. He meant to stand
- no nonsense from his foot. “If I can’t walk four miles an hour then I
- must do two,” he said. “And if the pace is too slow for you, Joan, you
- must run round and round me and bark.” They took a long route by field
- and lane through Albury and Furneaux Pelham to the little inn at
- Stocking Pelham, where they got some hard biscuits and cheese and
- shandygaff, and came home by way of Patmore Heath, and the golden oaks
- and the rivulet. And as they went Peter talked of Oswald.
- “Naturally he wants to know what we are going to do,” said Peter, and
- then, rather inconsequently, “He’s ill.
- “This war is like a wasting fever in the blood and in the mind,” said
- Peter. “All Europe is ill. But with him it mixes with the old fever.
- That splinter at Fricourt was no joke for him. He oughtn’t to have gone
- out. He’s getting horribly lean, and his eye is like a garnet.”
- “I love him,” said Joan.
- But she did not want to discuss Oswald just then.
- “About this new theology of yours, Peter,” she said....
- “Well?” said Peter.
- “What do you mean by this Old Experimenter of yours? Is he—_God_?”
- “I don’t know. I thought he was. He’s—— He’s a Symbol. He’s just a
- Caricature I make to express how all _this_”—Peter swept his arm across
- the sunlit world—“seems to stand to me. If one can’t draw the thing any
- better, one has to make a caricature.”
- Joan considered that gravely.
- “I thought of him first in my dream as the God of the Universe,” Peter
- explained.
- “You couldn’t love a God like that,” Joan remarked.
- “Heavens, _no_! He’s too vast, too incomprehensible. I love you—and
- Oswald—and the R.F.C., Joan, and biology. But he’s above and beyond that
- sort of thing.”
- “Could you pray to him?” asked Joan.
- “Not to _him_,” said Peter.
- “I pray,” said Joan. “Don’t you?”
- “And swear,” said Peter.
- “One prays to something—it isn’t oneself.”
- “The fashion nowadays is to speak of the God in the Heart and the God in
- the Universe.”
- “Is it the same God?”
- “Leave it at that,” said Peter. “We don’t know. All the waste and muddle
- in religion is due to people arguing and asserting that they are the
- same, that they are different but related, or that they are different
- but opposed. And so on and so on. How can we know? What need is there to
- know? In view of the little jobs we are doing. Let us leave it at that.”
- Joan was silent for a while. “I suppose we must,” she said.
- “And what are we going to do with ourselves,” asked Joan, “when the war
- is over?”
- “They can’t keep us in khaki for ever,” Peter considered. “There’s a
- Ministry of Reconstruction foozling away in London, but it’s never said
- a word to me of the some-day that is coming. I suppose it hasn’t learnt
- to talk yet.”
- “What do you think of doing?” asked Joan.
- “Well, first—a good medical degree. Then I can doctor if I have to. But,
- if I’m good enough, I shall do research. I’ve a sort of feeling that
- along the border line of biology and chemistry I might do something
- useful. I’ve some ideas.... I suppose I shall go back to Cambridge for a
- bit. We neither of us need earn money at once. It will be queer—after
- being a grown-up married man—to go back to proctors and bulldogs. What
- are _you_ going to do, Joan, when you get out of uniform?”
- “Look after you first, Petah. Oh! it’s worth doing. And it won’t take me
- all my time. And then I’ve got my own ideas....”
- “Out with ’em, Joan.”
- “Well——”
- “Well?”
- “Petah, I shall learn plumbing.”
- “Jobbing?”
- “No. And bricklaying and carpentry. All I can. And then I am going to
- start building houses.”
- “Architect?”
- “As little as possible,” said Joan. “No. No beastly Architecture for
- Art’s sake for me! Do you remember how people used to knock their heads
- about at The Ingle-Nook? I’ve got some money. Why shouldn’t I be able to
- build houses as well as the fat builder-men with big, flat thumbs who
- used to build houses before the war?”
- “Jerry-building?”
- “High-class jerry-building, if you like. Cottages with sensible insides,
- real insides, and not so much waste space and scamping to make up for
- it. They’re half a million houses short in this country already. There’s
- something in building appeals to my sort of imagination. And I’m going
- to make money, Petah.”
- “I love the way you carry your tail,” said Peter. “Always.”
- “Well, doing running repairs hardens a woman’s soul.”
- “You’ll make more money than I shall, perhaps. But now I begin to
- understand all these extraordinary books you’ve been studying.... I
- might have guessed.... Why not?”
- He limped along, considering it. “Why shouldn’t you?” he said. “A
- service flat will leave your hands free.... I’ve always wondered
- secretly why women didn’t plunge into that sort of business more.”
- “It’s been just diffidence,” said Joan.
- “_Click!_” said Peter. “That’s gone, anyhow. If a lot of women do as you
- do and become productive for good, this old muddle of a country will sit
- up in no time. It doubles the output.... I wonder if the men will like
- working under you?”
- “There’ll be a boss in the background,” said Joan. “Mr. John Debenham.
- Who’ll never turn up. Being, in fact, no more than camouflage for Joan
- of that ilk. I shall be just my own messenger and agent.
- “One thing I know,” said Joan, “and that is, that I will make a cottage
- or a flat that won’t turn a young woman into an old one in ten years’
- time. Living in that Jepson flat without a servant has brightened me up
- in a lot of ways.... And a child will grow up in my cottages without
- being crippled in its mind by awkwardness and ugliness.... This sort of
- thing always has been woman’s work really. Only we’ve been so busy
- chittering and powdering our silly noses—and laying snares for our
- Peters. Who didn’t know what was good for them.”
- Peter laughed and was amused. He felt a pleasant assurance that Joan
- really was going to build houses.
- “Joan,” he said, “it’s a bleak world before us—and I hate to think of
- Nobby. He’s so _ill_. But the work—the good hard work—there’s times when
- I rather like to think of that.... They were beastly years just before
- the war.”
- “I hated them,” said Joan.
- “But what a lot of stuff there was about!” said Peter. “The petrol!
- Given away, practically, along the roadside everywhere. And the joints
- of meat. Do you remember the big hams we used to have on the sideboard?
- For breakfast. A lot of sausages going sizzle! Eggs galore! Bacon!
- Haddock. Perhaps cutlets. And the way one could run off abroad!”
- “To Italy,” said Joan dangerously.
- “God knows when those times will come back again! Not for years. Not for
- our lifetimes.”
- “If they came back all at once we’d have indigestion,” said Joan.
- “Orgy,” said Peter. “But they won’t.”...
- Presently their note became graver.
- “We’ve got to live like fanatics. If a lot of us don’t live like
- fanatics, this staggering old world of ours won’t recover. It will
- stagger and then go flop. And a race of Bolshevik peasants will breed
- pigs among the ruins. We owe it to ourselves, we owe it to the world to
- prevent that.”
- “And we owe it to the ones who have died,” said Joan.
- She hesitated, and then she began to tell him something of the part
- Wilmington had played in their lives.
- They went through field after field, through gates and over stiles and
- by a coppice spangled with primroses, while she told him of the part
- that Wilmington had played in bringing them together; Wilmington who was
- now no more than grey soil where the battle still raged in France. Many
- were the young people who talked so of dead friends in those days. Their
- voices became grave and faintly deferential, as though they had invoked
- a third presence to mingle with their duologue. They were very careful
- to say nothing and to think as little as possible that might hurt
- Wilmington’s self-love.
- Presently they found themselves speculating again about the kind of
- world that lay ahead of them—whether it would be a wholly poor world or
- a poverty-struck world infested and devastated by a few hundred
- millionaires and their followings. Poor we were certain to be. We should
- either be sternly poor or meanly poor. But Peter was disposed to doubt
- whether the war millionaires would “get away with the swag.”
- “There’s too much thinking and reading nowadays for that,” said Peter.
- “They won’t get away with it. This is a new age, Joan. If they try that
- game they won’t have five years’ run.”
- No, it would be a world generally poor, a tired but chastened world
- getting itself into order again.... Would there be much music in the
- years ahead? Much writing or art? Would there be a new theatre and the
- excitement of first nights again? Should we presently travel by
- aeroplane, and find all the world within a few days’ journey? They were
- both prepared to resign themselves to ten years’ of work and scarcity,
- but they both clung to the hope of returning prosperity and freedom
- after that.
- “Well, well, Joan,” said Peter, “these times teach us to love. I’m
- crippled. We’ve got to work hard. But I’m not unhappy. I’m happier than
- I was when I had no idea of what I wanted in life, when I lusted for
- everything and was content with nothing, in the days before the war. I’m
- a wise old man now with my stiff wrist and my game leg. You change
- everything, Joan. You make everything worth while.”
- “I’d like to think it was me,” said Joan idiomatically.
- “It’s you....
- “After all there must be some snatches of holiday. I shall walk with you
- through beautiful days—as we are doing today—days that would only be
- like empty silk purses if it wasn’t that they held you in them. Scenery
- and flowers and sunshine mean nothing to me—until you come in. I’m blind
- until you give me eyes. Joan, do you know how beautiful you are? When
- you smile? When you stop to think? Frowning a little. When you look—yes,
- just like that.”
- “_No!_” said Joan, but very cheerfully.
- “But you are—you are endlessly beautiful. Endlessly. Making love to
- Joan—it’s the intensest of joys. Every time—— As if one had just
- discovered her.”
- “There’s a certain wild charm about Petah,” Joan admitted, “for a coarse
- taste.”
- “After all, whether it’s set in poverty or plenty,” said Peter; “whether
- it’s rational or irrational, making love is still at the heart of us
- humans.”...
- For a time they exulted shamelessly in themselves. They talked of the
- good times they had had together in the past. They revived memories of
- Bungo Peter and the Sagas that had slumbered in silence since the first
- dawn of adolescence. She recalled a score of wonderful stories and
- adventures that he had altogether forgotten. She had a far clearer and
- better memory for such things than he. “D’you remember lightning slick,
- Petah? And how the days went faster? D’you remember how he put lightning
- slick on his bicycle?”...
- But Peter had forgotten that.
- “And when we fought for that picshua you made of Adela,” Joan said.
- “When I bit you.... It was my first taste of you, Petah. You tasted
- dusty....”
- “I suppose we’ve always had a blind love for each other,” said Peter,
- “always.”
- “I hated you to care for any one but myself,” said Joan, “since ever I
- can remember. I hated even Billy.”
- “It’s well we found out in time,” said Peter.
- “_I_ found out,” said Joan.
- “Ever since we stopped being boy and girl together,” said Peter, “I’ve
- never been at peace in my nerves and temper till now.... Now I feel as
- though I swung free in life, safe, sure, content.”
- “_Content_,” weighed Joan suspiciously. “But you’re still in love with
- me, Petah?”
- “Not particularly _in_ love,” said Peter. “No. But I’m loving you—as the
- June sun loves an open meadow, shining all over it. I shall always love
- you, Joan, because there is no one like you in all the world. No one at
- all. Making love happens, but love endures. How can there be
- companionship and equality except between the like?—who can keep step,
- who can climb together, joke broad and shameless, and never struggle for
- the upper hand? And where in all the world shall I find that, Joan, but
- in you? Listen to wisdom, Joan! There are two sorts of love between men
- and women, and only two—love like the love of big carnivores who know
- their mates and stick to them, or love like some man who follows a woman
- home because he’s never seen anything like her before. I’ve done with
- that sort of love for ever. There’s men who like to exaggerate every
- difference in women. They pretend women are mysterious and dangerous and
- wonderful. They like sex served up with lies and lingerie.... Where’s
- the love in that? Give me my old brown Joan.”
- “Not so beastly brown,” said Joan.
- “Joan _nature_.”
- “Tut, tut!” said Joan.
- “There’s people who scent themselves to make love,” said Peter.
- “Experienced Petah,” said Joan.
- “I’ve read of it,” said Peter, and a little pause fell between them....
- “Every one ought to be like us,” said Joan sagely, with the spring
- sunshine on her dear face.
- “It takes all sorts to make a world,” said Peter.
- “Everybody ought to have a lover,” said Joan. “Everybody. There’s no
- clean life without it.”...
- “We’ve been through some beastly times, Joan. We’ve run some beastly
- risks.... We’ve just scrambled through, Joan, to love—as I scrambled
- through to life. After being put down and shot at.”...
- Presently Joan suspected a drag in Peter’s paces and decided at the
- sight of a fallen tree in a little grass lane to profess fatigue. They
- sat down upon the scaly trunk, just opposite to where a gate pierced a
- budding hedge and gave a view of a long, curved ridge of sunlit blue,
- shooting corn with red budding and green-powdered trees beyond, and far
- away a woldy upland rising out of an intervening hidden valley. And
- Peter admitted that he, too, felt a little tired. But each was making a
- pretence for the sake of the other.
- “We’ve rediscovered a lot of the old things, Joan,” said Peter. “The war
- has knocked sense into us. There wasn’t anything to work for, there
- wasn’t much to be loyal to in the days of the Marconi scandals and the
- Coronation Durbar. Slack times, more despair in them by far than in
- these red days. Rotten, aimless times.... Oh! the world’s not done
- for....
- “I don’t grudge my wrist or my leg,” said Peter. “I can hop. I’ve still
- got five and forty years, fifty years, perhaps, to spend. In this new
- world.”...
- He said no more for a time. There were schemes in his head, so immature
- as yet that he could not even sketch them out to her.
- He sat with his eyes dreaming, and Joan watched him. There was much of
- the noble beast in this Peter of hers. In the end now, she was
- convinced, he was going to be an altogether noble beast. Through her. He
- was hers to cherish, to help, to see grow.... He was her chosen man....
- Depths that were only beginning to awaken in Joan were stirred. She
- would sustain Peter, and also presently she would renew Peter. A time
- would come when this dear spirit would be born again within her being,
- when the blood in her arteries and all the grace of her body would be
- given to a new life—to new lives, that would be beautiful variations of
- this dearest tune in the music of the world.... They would have courage;
- they would have minds like bright, sharp swords. They would lift their
- chins as Peter did.... It became inconceivable to Joan that women could
- give their bodies to bear the children of unloved men. “_Dear_ Petah,”
- her lips said silently. Her heart swelled; her hands tightened. She
- wanted to kiss him....
- Then in a whim of reaction she was moved to mockery.
- “Do you feel so _very_ stern and strong, dear Petah?” she whispered
- close to his shoulder.
- He started, surprised, stared at her for a moment, and smiled into her
- eyes.
- “Old Joan,” he said and kissed her....
- § 10
- When he returned to the house on Monday morning after he had seen the
- two young people off, a burthen of desolation came upon Oswald.
- It was a loneliness as acute as a physical pain. It was misery. If they
- had been dead, he could not have been more unhappy. The work that had
- been the warm and living substance of fifteen years was now finished and
- done. The nest was empty. The road and the stream, the gates and the
- garden, the house and the hall, seemed to ache with emptiness and
- desertion. He went into their old study, from which they had already
- taken a number of their most intimate treasures, and which was now as
- disordered as a room after a sale. Most of their remaining personal
- possessions were stacked ready for removal; discarded magazines and
- books and torn paper made an untidy heap beside the fireplace. “I could
- not feel a greater pain if I had lost a son,” he thought, staring at
- these untidy vestiges.
- He went to his own study and sat down at his desk, though he knew there
- was no power of attention in him sufficient to begin work.
- Mrs. Moxton, for reasons best known to herself, was interested in his
- movements that morning. She saw him presently wander into the garden and
- then return to the hall. He took his cap and stick and touched the bell.
- “I’ll not be back to lunch, Mrs. Moxton,” he called.
- “Very well, sir,” said Mrs. Moxton, unseen upon the landing above,
- nodding her head approvingly.
- At first the world outside was as lonely as his study.
- He went up the valley along the high road for half a mile, and then took
- a winding lane under almost overhanging boughs—the hawthorn leaves now
- were nearly out and the elder quite—up over the hill and thence across
- fields and through a wood until he came to where the steep lane runs
- down to Braughing. And by that time, although the spring-time world was
- still immensely lonely and comfortless, he no longer felt that
- despairful sense of fresh and irremediable loss with which he started.
- He was beginning to realize now that he had always been a solitary
- being; that all men, even in crowds, carry a certain solitude with them;
- and loneliness thus lifted to the level of a sustained and general
- experience ceased to feel like a dagger turning in his heart.
- Down the middle of Braughing village, among spaces of grass, runs the
- little Quin, now a race of crystalline water over pebbly shallows and
- now a brown purposefulness flecked with foam, in which reeds bend and
- recover as if they kept their footing by perpetual feats of dexterity.
- There are two fords, and midway between them a little bridge with a
- handrail on which Oswald stayed for a time, watching the lives and
- adventures of an endless stream of bubbles that were begotten thirty
- feet away where the eddy from the depths beneath a willow root dashed
- against a bough that bobbed and dipped in the water. He found a great
- distraction and relief in following their adventures. On they came,
- large and small, in strings, in spinning groups, busy bubbles, quiet
- bubbles, dignified solitary bubbles, and passed a dangerous headland of
- watercress and ran the gauntlet between two big stones and then, if they
- survived, came with a hopeful rush for the shadow under the bridge and
- vanished utterly....
- For all the rest of the day those streaming bubbles glittered and raced
- and jostled before Oswald’s eyes, and made a veil across his personal
- desolation. His mind swung like a pendulum between two ideas; those
- bubbles were like human life; they were not like human life....
- Philosophy is the greatest of anodynes.
- “Why is a man’s life different from a bubble? Like a bubble he is born
- of the swirl of matter, like a bubble he reflects the universe, he is
- driven and whirled about by forces he does not comprehend, he shines
- here and is darkened there and is elated or depressed he knows not why,
- and at last passes suddenly out into the darkness....”
- In the evening Oswald sat musing by his study fire, his lamp unlit. He
- sat in an attitude that had long become habitual to him, with the
- scarred side of his face resting upon and hidden by his hand. His walk
- had wearied him, but not unpleasantly, his knee was surprisingly free
- from pain, and he was no longer acutely unhappy. The idea, a very
- engaging idea, had come into his head that it was not really the
- education of Joan and Peter that had come to an end, but his own. They
- were still learners—how much they had still to learn! At Peter’s age he
- had not yet gone to Africa. They had finished with school and college
- perhaps, but they were but beginning in the university of life. Neither
- of them had yet experienced a great disillusionment, neither of them had
- been shamed or bitterly disappointed; they had each other. They had seen
- the great war indeed, and Peter knew now what wounds and death were
- like—but he himself had been through that at one-and-twenty. Neither had
- had any such dark tragedy as, for example, if one of them had been
- killed, or if one of them had betrayed and injured the other. Perhaps
- they would always have fortunate lives.
- But he himself had had to learn the lesson to the end. His life had been
- a darkened one. He had loved intensely and lost. He had had to abandon
- his chosen life work when it was barely half done. He had a present
- sense of the great needs of the world, and he was bodily weak and
- mentally uncertain. He would spend days now of fretting futility, unable
- to achieve anything. He loved these dear youngsters, but the young
- cannot give love to the old because they do not yet understand. He was
- alone. And yet, it was strange, he kept on. With such strength as he had
- he pursued his ends. Those two would go on, full of hope, helping one
- another, thinking together, succeeding. The lesson he had learnt was
- that without much love, without much vitality, with little hope of
- seeing a single end achieved for which he worked, he could still go on.
- He drifted through his memories, seeking for the motives that had driven
- him on from experience to experience. But while he could remember the
- experiences it was very hard now to recover any inkling of his motives.
- He remembered himself at school as a violent egotist, working hard,
- openly and fairly, for his ascendancy in the school games, working hard
- secretly for his school position. It seemed now as though all that time
- he had been no more than a greed and a vanity.... Was that fair to
- himself? Or had he forgotten the redeeming dreams of youth?...
- The scene shifted to the wardroom of his first battleship, and then to
- his first battle. He saw again the long low line of the Egyptian coast,
- and the batteries of Alexandria and Ramleh spitting fire and the
- _Condor_ standing in. He recalled the tense excitement of that morning,
- the boats rowing to land, but strangely enough the incident that had won
- him the Victoria Cross had been blotted completely from his mind by his
- injury. He could not recover even the facts, much less the feel of that
- act.... Why had he done what he had done? Did he himself really do
- it?... Then very vividly came the memory of his first sight of his
- smashed, disfigured face. That had been horrible at the time—in a way it
- was horrible still—but after that it seemed as though for the first time
- he had ceased then to be an egotism, a vanity. After that the memories
- of impersonal interests began. He thought of his attendance at Huxley’s
- lectures at South Kensington and the wonder of making his first
- dissections. About that time he met Dolly, but here again was a queer
- gap; he could not remember anything very distinctly about his early
- meetings with Dolly except that she wore white and that they happened in
- a garden.
- Yet, in a little while, all his being had been hungry for Dolly!
- With his first journey into Africa all his memories became brighter and
- clearer and as if a hotter sun shone upon them. Everything before that
- time was part of the story of a young man long vanished from the world,
- young Oswald, a personality at least as remote as Peter—very like Peter.
- But with the change of scene to Africa Oswald became himself. The man in
- the story was the man who sat musing in the study chair, moved by the
- same motives and altogether understandable. Already in Nyasaland he was
- working consciously for “civilization” even as he worked today.
- Everything in that period lived still, with all its accompanying
- feelings alive. He fought again in his first fight in Nyasaland, and
- recalled with complete vividness how he had loaded and fired and
- reloaded and fired time after time at the rushes of the Yao spearmen; he
- had fought leaning against the stockade because he was too weary to
- stand upright, and with his head and every limb aching. One man he had
- hit had wriggled for a long time in the grass, and that memory still
- distressed him. It trailed another memory of horror with it. In his
- campaign about Lake Kioga, years later, in a fight amidst some ant hills
- he had come upon a wounded Sudanese being eaten alive by swarms of ants.
- The poor devil had died with the ants still upon him.... Oswald could
- still recall the sick anguish with which he had tried in vain to save or
- relieve this man.
- The affair was in the exact quality of his present feelings; the picture
- was painted from the same palette. He remembered that then, as now, he
- felt the same helpless perplexity at apparently needless and
- unprofitable human agony. And then, as now, he had not despaired. He had
- been able to see no reason in this suffering and no excuse for it; he
- could see none now, and yet he did not despair. Why did not that and a
- hundred other horrors overwhelm him with despair? Why had he been able
- to go on with life after that? And after another exquisite humiliation
- and disappointment? He had loved Dolly intensely, and here again came a
- third but less absolutely obliterated gap in his recollections. For
- years he had been resolutely keeping his mind off the sufferings of that
- time, and now they were indistinct. His memory was particularly blank
- now about Arthur; he was registered merely as a blonde sort of ass with
- a tenor voice who punched copper. That faint hostile caricature was all
- his mind had tolerated. But still sharp and clear, as though it had been
- photographed but yesterday upon his memory, was the afternoon when he
- had realized that Dolly was dead. That scene was life-size and intense;
- how in a shady place under great trees, he had leant forwards upon his
- little folding table and wept aloud.
- What had carried him through all those things? Why had he desired so
- intensely? Why had he worked so industriously? Why did he possess this
- passion for order that had inspired his administrative work? Why had he
- given his best years to Uganda? Why had he been so concerned for the
- welfare and wisdom of Joan and Peter? Why did he work now to the very
- breaking-point, until sleeplessness and fever forced him to rest, for
- this dream of a great federation in the world—a world state he would
- certainly never live to see established? If he was indeed only a bubble,
- then surely he was the most obstinately opinionated of bubbles. But he
- was not merely a bubble. The essential self of him was not this thing
- that spun about in life, that felt and reflected the world, that missed
- so acutely the two dear other bubbles that had circled about him so long
- and that had now left him to eddy in his backwater while they hurried
- off into the midstream of life. His essential self, the self that mused
- now, that had struggled up through the egotisms of youth to this present
- predominance, was something deeper and tougher and more real than
- desire, than excitement, than pleasure or pain. That was the lesson he
- had been learning. There was something deeper in him to which he had
- been getting down more and more as life had gone on, something to which
- all the stuff of experience was incidental, something in which there was
- endless fortitude and an undying resolution to do. There was something
- in him profounder than the stream of accidents....
- He sat now with his distresses allayed, his mind playing with fancies
- and metaphors and analogies. Was this profounder contentment beneath his
- pains and discontents the consciousness of the bubble giving way to the
- underlying consciousness of the stream? That was ingenious, but it was
- not true. Men are not bubbles carried blindly on a stream; they are
- rather like bubbles, but that is all. They are wills and parts of a will
- that is neither the slave of the stream of matter nor a thing
- indifferent to it, that is paradoxically free and bound. They are parts
- of a will, but what this great will was that had him in its grasp, that
- compelled him to work, that saved him from drowning in his individual
- sorrows and cares, he could not say. It was easy to draw the analogy
- that a man is an atom in the life of the species as a cell is an atom in
- the life of a man. But this again was not the complete truth. Where was
- this alleged will of the species? If there was indeed such a will in the
- species, why was there this war? And yet, whatever it might be,
- assuredly there was _something_ greater than himself sustaining his
- life.... To him it felt like a universal thing, but was it indeed a
- universal thing? It was strangely bound up with preferences. Why did he
- love and choose certain things passionately? Why was he indifferent to
- others? Why were Dolly and Joan more beautiful to him than any other
- women; why did he so love the sound of their voices, their movements,
- and the subtle lines of their faces; why did he love Peter, standing
- upright and when enthusiasm lit him; and why did he love the lights on
- polished steel and the darknesses of deep waters, the movements of
- flames, and of supple, feline animals, so intensely? Why did he love
- these things more than the sheen on painted wood, or the graces of
- blonde women, or the movements of horses? And why did he love justice
- and the revelation of scientific laws, and the setting right of
- disordered things? Why did this idea of a League of Nations come to him
- with the effect of a personal and preferential call? All these lights
- and matters and aspects and personal traits were somehow connected in
- his mind, and had a compelling power over him. They could make him
- forget his safety or comfort or happiness. They had something in common
- among themselves, he felt, and he could not tell what it was they had in
- common. But whatever it was, it was the intimation of the power that
- sustained him. It was as if they were all reflections or resemblances of
- some overruling spirit, some Genius, some great ruler of the values that
- stood over his existence and his world. Yet that again was but a fancy—a
- plagiarism from Socrates....
- There was a light upon his life, and the truth was that he could not
- discover the source of the light nor define its nature; there was a
- presence in the world about him that made all life worth while, and yet
- it was Nameless and Incomprehensible. It was the Essence beyond Reality;
- it was the Heart of All Things.... Metaphors! Words! Perhaps some men
- have meant this when they talked of Love, but he himself had loved
- because of this, and so he held it must be something greater than Love.
- Perhaps some men have intended it in their use of the word Beauty, but
- it seemed to him that rather it made and determined Beauty for him. And
- others again have known it as the living presence of God, but the name
- of God was to Oswald a name battered out of all value and meaning. And
- yet it was by this, by this Nameless, this Incomprehensible, that he
- lived and was upheld. It did so uphold him that he could go on, he knew,
- though happiness were denied him; though defeat and death stared him in
- the face....
- § 11
- At last he sighed and rose. He lit his reading lamp by means of a
- newspaper rolled up into one long spill—for there was a famine in
- matches just then—and sat down to the work on his desk.
- THE END
- Printed in the United States of America.
- ------------------------------------------------------------------------
- TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES
- 1. Silently corrected typographical errors and variations in spelling.
- 2. Anachronistic, non-standard, and uncertain spellings retained as
- printed.
- 3. Enclosed italics font in _underscores_.
- End of Project Gutenberg's Joan and Peter, by H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
- *** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK JOAN AND PETER ***
- ***** This file should be named 61426-0.txt or 61426-0.zip *****
- This and all associated files of various formats will be found in:
- http://www.gutenberg.org/6/1/4/2/61426/
- Produced by Richard Tonsing and the Online Distributed
- Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was
- produced from images generously made available by The
- Internet Archive)
- Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions will
- be renamed.
- Creating the works from print editions not protected by U.S. copyright
- law means that no one owns a United States copyright in these works,
- so the Foundation (and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United
- States without permission and without paying copyright
- royalties. Special rules, set forth in the General Terms of Use part
- of this license, apply to copying and distributing Project
- Gutenberg-tm electronic works to protect the PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm
- concept and trademark. Project Gutenberg is a registered trademark,
- and may not be used if you charge for the eBooks, unless you receive
- specific permission. If you do not charge anything for copies of this
- eBook, complying with the rules is very easy. You may use this eBook
- for nearly any purpose such as creation of derivative works, reports,
- performances and research. They may be modified and printed and given
- away--you may do practically ANYTHING in the United States with eBooks
- not protected by U.S. copyright law. Redistribution is subject to the
- trademark license, especially commercial redistribution.
- START: FULL LICENSE
- THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE
- PLEASE READ THIS BEFORE YOU DISTRIBUTE OR USE THIS WORK
- To protect the Project Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting the free
- distribution of electronic works, by using or distributing this work
- (or any other work associated in any way with the phrase "Project
- Gutenberg"), you agree to comply with all the terms of the Full
- Project Gutenberg-tm License available with this file or online at
- www.gutenberg.org/license.
- Section 1. General Terms of Use and Redistributing Project
- Gutenberg-tm electronic works
- 1.A. By reading or using any part of this Project Gutenberg-tm
- electronic work, you indicate that you have read, understand, agree to
- and accept all the terms of this license and intellectual property
- (trademark/copyright) agreement. If you do not agree to abide by all
- the terms of this agreement, you must cease using and return or
- destroy all copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in your
- possession. If you paid a fee for obtaining a copy of or access to a
- Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work and you do not agree to be bound
- by the terms of this agreement, you may obtain a refund from the
- person or entity to whom you paid the fee as set forth in paragraph
- 1.E.8.
- 1.B. "Project Gutenberg" is a registered trademark. It may only be
- used on or associated in any way with an electronic work by people who
- agree to be bound by the terms of this agreement. There are a few
- things that you can do with most Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works
- even without complying with the full terms of this agreement. See
- paragraph 1.C below. There are a lot of things you can do with Project
- Gutenberg-tm electronic works if you follow the terms of this
- agreement and help preserve free future access to Project Gutenberg-tm
- electronic works. See paragraph 1.E below.
- 1.C. The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation ("the
- Foundation" or PGLAF), owns a compilation copyright in the collection
- of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works. Nearly all the individual
- works in the collection are in the public domain in the United
- States. If an individual work is unprotected by copyright law in the
- United States and you are located in the United States, we do not
- claim a right to prevent you from copying, distributing, performing,
- displaying or creating derivative works based on the work as long as
- all references to Project Gutenberg are removed. Of course, we hope
- that you will support the Project Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting
- free access to electronic works by freely sharing Project Gutenberg-tm
- works in compliance with the terms of this agreement for keeping the
- Project Gutenberg-tm name associated with the work. You can easily
- comply with the terms of this agreement by keeping this work in the
- same format with its attached full Project Gutenberg-tm License when
- you share it without charge with others.
- 1.D. The copyright laws of the place where you are located also govern
- what you can do with this work. Copyright laws in most countries are
- in a constant state of change. If you are outside the United States,
- check the laws of your country in addition to the terms of this
- agreement before downloading, copying, displaying, performing,
- distributing or creating derivative works based on this work or any
- other Project Gutenberg-tm work. The Foundation makes no
- representations concerning the copyright status of any work in any
- country outside the United States.
- 1.E. Unless you have removed all references to Project Gutenberg:
- 1.E.1. The following sentence, with active links to, or other
- immediate access to, the full Project Gutenberg-tm License must appear
- prominently whenever any copy of a Project Gutenberg-tm work (any work
- on which the phrase "Project Gutenberg" appears, or with which the
- phrase "Project Gutenberg" is associated) is accessed, displayed,
- performed, viewed, copied or distributed:
- This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
- most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no
- restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it
- under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this
- eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the
- United States, you'll have to check the laws of the country where you
- are located before using this ebook.
- 1.E.2. If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is
- derived from texts not protected by U.S. copyright law (does not
- contain a notice indicating that it is posted with permission of the
- copyright holder), the work can be copied and distributed to anyone in
- the United States without paying any fees or charges. If you are
- redistributing or providing access to a work with the phrase "Project
- Gutenberg" associated with or appearing on the work, you must comply
- either with the requirements of paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 or
- obtain permission for the use of the work and the Project Gutenberg-tm
- trademark as set forth in paragraphs 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.
- 1.E.3. If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is posted
- with the permission of the copyright holder, your use and distribution
- must comply with both paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 and any
- additional terms imposed by the copyright holder. Additional terms
- will be linked to the Project Gutenberg-tm License for all works
- posted with the permission of the copyright holder found at the
- beginning of this work.
- 1.E.4. Do not unlink or detach or remove the full Project Gutenberg-tm
- License terms from this work, or any files containing a part of this
- work or any other work associated with Project Gutenberg-tm.
- 1.E.5. Do not copy, display, perform, distribute or redistribute this
- electronic work, or any part of this electronic work, without
- prominently displaying the sentence set forth in paragraph 1.E.1 with
- active links or immediate access to the full terms of the Project
- Gutenberg-tm License.
- 1.E.6. You may convert to and distribute this work in any binary,
- compressed, marked up, nonproprietary or proprietary form, including
- any word processing or hypertext form. However, if you provide access
- to or distribute copies of a Project Gutenberg-tm work in a format
- other than "Plain Vanilla ASCII" or other format used in the official
- version posted on the official Project Gutenberg-tm web site
- (www.gutenberg.org), you must, at no additional cost, fee or expense
- to the user, provide a copy, a means of exporting a copy, or a means
- of obtaining a copy upon request, of the work in its original "Plain
- Vanilla ASCII" or other form. Any alternate format must include the
- full Project Gutenberg-tm License as specified in paragraph 1.E.1.
- 1.E.7. Do not charge a fee for access to, viewing, displaying,
- performing, copying or distributing any Project Gutenberg-tm works
- unless you comply with paragraph 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.
- 1.E.8. You may charge a reasonable fee for copies of or providing
- access to or distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works
- provided that
- * You pay a royalty fee of 20% of the gross profits you derive from
- the use of Project Gutenberg-tm works calculated using the method
- you already use to calculate your applicable taxes. The fee is owed
- to the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark, but he has
- agreed to donate royalties under this paragraph to the Project
- Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation. Royalty payments must be paid
- within 60 days following each date on which you prepare (or are
- legally required to prepare) your periodic tax returns. Royalty
- payments should be clearly marked as such and sent to the Project
- Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation at the address specified in
- Section 4, "Information about donations to the Project Gutenberg
- Literary Archive Foundation."
- * You provide a full refund of any money paid by a user who notifies
- you in writing (or by e-mail) within 30 days of receipt that s/he
- does not agree to the terms of the full Project Gutenberg-tm
- License. You must require such a user to return or destroy all
- copies of the works possessed in a physical medium and discontinue
- all use of and all access to other copies of Project Gutenberg-tm
- works.
- * You provide, in accordance with paragraph 1.F.3, a full refund of
- any money paid for a work or a replacement copy, if a defect in the
- electronic work is discovered and reported to you within 90 days of
- receipt of the work.
- * You comply with all other terms of this agreement for free
- distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm works.
- 1.E.9. If you wish to charge a fee or distribute a Project
- Gutenberg-tm electronic work or group of works on different terms than
- are set forth in this agreement, you must obtain permission in writing
- from both the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation and The
- Project Gutenberg Trademark LLC, the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm
- trademark. Contact the Foundation as set forth in Section 3 below.
- 1.F.
- 1.F.1. Project Gutenberg volunteers and employees expend considerable
- effort to identify, do copyright research on, transcribe and proofread
- works not protected by U.S. copyright law in creating the Project
- Gutenberg-tm collection. Despite these efforts, Project Gutenberg-tm
- electronic works, and the medium on which they may be stored, may
- contain "Defects," such as, but not limited to, incomplete, inaccurate
- or corrupt data, transcription errors, a copyright or other
- intellectual property infringement, a defective or damaged disk or
- other medium, a computer virus, or computer codes that damage or
- cannot be read by your equipment.
- 1.F.2. LIMITED WARRANTY, DISCLAIMER OF DAMAGES - Except for the "Right
- of Replacement or Refund" described in paragraph 1.F.3, the Project
- Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, the owner of the Project
- Gutenberg-tm trademark, and any other party distributing a Project
- Gutenberg-tm electronic work under this agreement, disclaim all
- liability to you for damages, costs and expenses, including legal
- fees. YOU AGREE THAT YOU HAVE NO REMEDIES FOR NEGLIGENCE, STRICT
- LIABILITY, BREACH OF WARRANTY OR BREACH OF CONTRACT EXCEPT THOSE
- PROVIDED IN PARAGRAPH 1.F.3. YOU AGREE THAT THE FOUNDATION, THE
- TRADEMARK OWNER, AND ANY DISTRIBUTOR UNDER THIS AGREEMENT WILL NOT BE
- LIABLE TO YOU FOR ACTUAL, DIRECT, INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL, PUNITIVE OR
- INCIDENTAL DAMAGES EVEN IF YOU GIVE NOTICE OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH
- DAMAGE.
- 1.F.3. LIMITED RIGHT OF REPLACEMENT OR REFUND - If you discover a
- defect in this electronic work within 90 days of receiving it, you can
- receive a refund of the money (if any) you paid for it by sending a
- written explanation to the person you received the work from. If you
- received the work on a physical medium, you must return the medium
- with your written explanation. The person or entity that provided you
- with the defective work may elect to provide a replacement copy in
- lieu of a refund. If you received the work electronically, the person
- or entity providing it to you may choose to give you a second
- opportunity to receive the work electronically in lieu of a refund. If
- the second copy is also defective, you may demand a refund in writing
- without further opportunities to fix the problem.
- 1.F.4. Except for the limited right of replacement or refund set forth
- in paragraph 1.F.3, this work is provided to you 'AS-IS', WITH NO
- OTHER WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT
- LIMITED TO WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR ANY PURPOSE.
- 1.F.5. Some states do not allow disclaimers of certain implied
- warranties or the exclusion or limitation of certain types of
- damages. If any disclaimer or limitation set forth in this agreement
- violates the law of the state applicable to this agreement, the
- agreement shall be interpreted to make the maximum disclaimer or
- limitation permitted by the applicable state law. The invalidity or
- unenforceability of any provision of this agreement shall not void the
- remaining provisions.
- 1.F.6. INDEMNITY - You agree to indemnify and hold the Foundation, the
- trademark owner, any agent or employee of the Foundation, anyone
- providing copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in
- accordance with this agreement, and any volunteers associated with the
- production, promotion and distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm
- electronic works, harmless from all liability, costs and expenses,
- including legal fees, that arise directly or indirectly from any of
- the following which you do or cause to occur: (a) distribution of this
- or any Project Gutenberg-tm work, (b) alteration, modification, or
- additions or deletions to any Project Gutenberg-tm work, and (c) any
- Defect you cause.
- Section 2. Information about the Mission of Project Gutenberg-tm
- Project Gutenberg-tm is synonymous with the free distribution of
- electronic works in formats readable by the widest variety of
- computers including obsolete, old, middle-aged and new computers. It
- exists because of the efforts of hundreds of volunteers and donations
- from people in all walks of life.
- Volunteers and financial support to provide volunteers with the
- assistance they need are critical to reaching Project Gutenberg-tm's
- goals and ensuring that the Project Gutenberg-tm collection will
- remain freely available for generations to come. In 2001, the Project
- Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation was created to provide a secure
- and permanent future for Project Gutenberg-tm and future
- generations. To learn more about the Project Gutenberg Literary
- Archive Foundation and how your efforts and donations can help, see
- Sections 3 and 4 and the Foundation information page at
- www.gutenberg.org
- Section 3. Information about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation
- The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation is a non profit
- 501(c)(3) educational corporation organized under the laws of the
- state of Mississippi and granted tax exempt status by the Internal
- Revenue Service. The Foundation's EIN or federal tax identification
- number is 64-6221541. Contributions to the Project Gutenberg Literary
- Archive Foundation are tax deductible to the full extent permitted by
- U.S. federal laws and your state's laws.
- The Foundation's principal office is in Fairbanks, Alaska, with the
- mailing address: PO Box 750175, Fairbanks, AK 99775, but its
- volunteers and employees are scattered throughout numerous
- locations. Its business office is located at 809 North 1500 West, Salt
- Lake City, UT 84116, (801) 596-1887. Email contact links and up to
- date contact information can be found at the Foundation's web site and
- official page at www.gutenberg.org/contact
- For additional contact information:
- Dr. Gregory B. Newby
- Chief Executive and Director
- gbnewby@pglaf.org
- Section 4. Information about Donations to the Project Gutenberg
- Literary Archive Foundation
- Project Gutenberg-tm depends upon and cannot survive without wide
- spread public support and donations to carry out its mission of
- increasing the number of public domain and licensed works that can be
- freely distributed in machine readable form accessible by the widest
- array of equipment including outdated equipment. Many small donations
- ($1 to $5,000) are particularly important to maintaining tax exempt
- status with the IRS.
- The Foundation is committed to complying with the laws regulating
- charities and charitable donations in all 50 states of the United
- States. Compliance requirements are not uniform and it takes a
- considerable effort, much paperwork and many fees to meet and keep up
- with these requirements. We do not solicit donations in locations
- where we have not received written confirmation of compliance. To SEND
- DONATIONS or determine the status of compliance for any particular
- state visit www.gutenberg.org/donate
- While we cannot and do not solicit contributions from states where we
- have not met the solicitation requirements, we know of no prohibition
- against accepting unsolicited donations from donors in such states who
- approach us with offers to donate.
- International donations are gratefully accepted, but we cannot make
- any statements concerning tax treatment of donations received from
- outside the United States. U.S. laws alone swamp our small staff.
- Please check the Project Gutenberg Web pages for current donation
- methods and addresses. Donations are accepted in a number of other
- ways including checks, online payments and credit card donations. To
- donate, please visit: www.gutenberg.org/donate
- Section 5. General Information About Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works.
- Professor Michael S. Hart was the originator of the Project
- Gutenberg-tm concept of a library of electronic works that could be
- freely shared with anyone. For forty years, he produced and
- distributed Project Gutenberg-tm eBooks with only a loose network of
- volunteer support.
- Project Gutenberg-tm eBooks are often created from several printed
- editions, all of which are confirmed as not protected by copyright in
- the U.S. unless a copyright notice is included. Thus, we do not
- necessarily keep eBooks in compliance with any particular paper
- edition.
- Most people start at our Web site which has the main PG search
- facility: www.gutenberg.org
- This Web site includes information about Project Gutenberg-tm,
- including how to make donations to the Project Gutenberg Literary
- Archive Foundation, how to help produce our new eBooks, and how to
- subscribe to our email newsletter to hear about new eBooks.