Joan and Peter

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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
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JOAN AND PETER
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THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
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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_.
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