The Passionate Friends

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Title: The Passionate Friends
Author: Herbert George Wells
Release Date: October 26, 2009 [EBook #30340]
Language: English
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The Passionate Friends
By H. G. WELLS
Author of "Marriage."
[Illustration]
WITH FRONTISPIECE
A. L. BURT COMPANY, PUBLISHERS
114-120 East Twenty-third Street - - New York
PUBLISHED BY ARRANGEMENT WITH HARPER & BROTHERS
COPYRIGHT, 1913, BY HARPER & BROTHERS
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
PUBLISHED OCTOBER, 1913
TO
L. E. N. S.
[Illustration: "OUR KISSES WERE KISSES OF MOONLIGHT" See p. 85]
CONTENTS
CHAP. PAGE
I. MR. STRATTON TO HIS SON 1
II. BOYHOOD 14
III. INTENTIONS AND THE LADY MARY CHRISTIAN 40
IV. THE MARRIAGE OF THE LADY MARY CHRISTIAN 73
V. THE WAR IN SOUTH AFRICA 102
VI. LADY MARY JUSTIN 132
VII. BEGINNING AGAIN 197
VIII. THIS SWARMING BUSINESS OF MANKIND 220
IX. THE SPIRIT OF THE NEW WORLD 246
X. MARY WRITES 280
XI. THE LAST MEETING 318
XII. THE ARRAIGNMENT OF JEALOUSY 358
THE PASSIONATE FRIENDS
CHAPTER THE FIRST
MR. STRATTON TO HIS SON
§ 1
I want very much to set down my thoughts and my experiences of life. I
want to do so now that I have come to middle age and now that my
attitudes are all defined and my personal drama worked out I feel that
the toil of writing and reconsideration may help to clear and fix many
things that remain a little uncertain in my thoughts because they have
never been fully stated, and I want to discover any lurking
inconsistencies and unsuspected gaps. And I have a story. I have lived
through things that have searched me. I want to tell that story as well
as I can while I am still a clear-headed and active man, and while many
details that may presently become blurred and altered are still rawly
fresh in my mind. And to one person in particular do I wish to think I
am writing, and that is to you, my only son. I want to write my story
not indeed to the child you are now, but to the man you are going to be.
You are half my blood and temperamentally altogether mine. A day will
come when you will realize this, and want to know how life has gone with
me, and then it may be altogether too late for me to answer your
enquiries. I may have become inaccessible as old people are sometimes
inaccessible. And so I think of leaving this book for you--at any rate,
I shall write it as if I meant to leave it for you. Afterwards I can
consider whether I will indeed leave it....
The idea of writing such a book as this came to me first as I sat by the
dead body of your grandfather--my father. It was because I wanted so
greatly such a book from him that I am now writing this. He died, you
must know, only a few months ago, and I went to his house to bury him
and settle all his affairs.
At one time he had been my greatest friend. He had never indeed talked
to me about himself or his youth, but he had always showed an
extraordinary sympathy and helpfulness for me in all the confusion and
perplexities into which I fell. This did not last to the end of his
life. I was the child of his middle years, and suddenly, in a year or
less, the curtains of age and infirmity fell between us. There came an
illness, an operation, and he rose from it ailing, suffering, dwarfed
and altogether changed. Of all the dark shadows upon life I think that
change through illness and organic decay in the thoughts and spirits of
those who are dear and close to us is the most evil and distressing and
inexplicable. Suddenly he was a changeling, a being querulous and
pitiful, needing indulgence and sacrifices.
In a little while a new state of affairs was established. I ceased to
consider him as a man to whom one told things, of whom one could expect
help or advice. We all ceased to consider him at all in that way. We
humored him, put pleasant things before him, concealed whatever was
disagreeable. A poor old man he was indeed in those concluding years,
weakly rebellious against the firm kindliness of my cousin, his
housekeeper and nurse. He who had once been so alert was now at times
astonishingly apathetic. At times an impish malice I had never known in
him before gleamed in little acts and speeches. His talk rambled, and
for the most part was concerned with small, long-forgotten contentions.
It was indistinct and difficult to follow because of a recent loss of
teeth, and he craved for brandy, to restore even for a moment the sense
of strength and well-being that ebbed and ebbed away from him. So that
when I came to look at his dead face at last, it was with something like
amazement I perceived him grave and beautiful--more grave and beautiful
than he had been even in the fullness of life.
All the estrangement of the final years was wiped in an instant from my
mind as I looked upon his face. There came back a rush of memories, of
kind, strong, patient, human aspects of his fatherhood. And I remembered
as every son must remember--even you, my dear, will some day remember
because it is in the very nature of sonship--insubordinations,
struggles, ingratitudes, great benefits taken unthankfully, slights and
disregards. It was not remorse I felt, nor repentance, but a tremendous
regret that so things had happened and that life should be so. Why is
it, I thought, that when a son has come to manhood he cannot take his
father for a friend? I had a curious sense of unprecedented communion
as I stood beside him now. I felt that he understood my thoughts; his
face seemed to answer with an expression of still and sympathetic
patience.
I was sensible of amazing gaps. We had never talked together of love,
never of religion.
All sorts of things that a man of twenty-eight would not dream of hiding
from a coeval he had hidden from me. For some days I had to remain in
his house, I had to go through his papers, handle all those intimate
personal things that accumulate around a human being year by
year--letters, yellowing scraps of newspaper, tokens, relics kept,
accidental vestiges, significant litter. I learnt many things I had
never dreamt of. At times I doubted whether I was not prying, whether I
ought not to risk the loss of those necessary legal facts I sought, and
burn these papers unread. There were love letters, and many such
touching things.
My memories of him did not change because of these new lights, but they
became wonderfully illuminated. I realized him as a young man, I began
to see him as a boy. I found a little half-bound botanical book with
stencil-tinted illustrations, a good-conduct prize my father had won at
his preparatory school; a rolled-up sheet of paper, carbonized and dry
and brittle, revealed itself as a piece of specimen writing, stiff with
boyish effort, decorated in ambitious and faltering flourishes and still
betraying the pencil rulings his rubber should have erased. Already your
writing is better than that. And I found a daguerreotype portrait of him
in knickerbockers against a photographer's stile. His face then was not
unlike yours. I stood with that in my hand at the little bureau in his
bedroom, and looked at his dead face.
The flatly painted portrait of his father, my grandfather, hanging
there in the stillness above the coffin, looking out on the world he had
left with steady, humorous blue eyes that followed one about the
room,--that, too, was revivified, touched into reality and participation
by this and that, became a living presence at a conference of lives.
Things of his were there also in that life's accumulation....
There we were, three Strattons together, and down in the dining-room
were steel engravings to take us back two generations further, and we
had all lived full lives, suffered, attempted, signified. I had a
glimpse of the long successions of mankind. What a huge inaccessible
lumber-room of thought and experience we amounted to, I thought; how
much we are, how little we transmit. Each one of us was but a variation,
an experiment upon the Stratton theme. All that I had now under my hands
was but the merest hints and vestiges, moving and surprising indeed, but
casual and fragmentary, of those obliterated repetitions. Man is a
creature becoming articulate, and why should those men have left so much
of the tale untold--to be lost and forgotten? Why must we all repeat
things done, and come again very bitterly to wisdom our fathers have
achieved before us? My grandfather there should have left me something
better than the still enigma of his watching face. All my life so far
has gone in learning very painfully what many men have learnt before me;
I have spent the greater part of forty years in finding a sort of
purpose for the uncertain and declining decades that remain. Is it not
time the generations drew together and helped one another? Cannot we
begin now to make a better use of the experiences of life so that our
sons may not waste themselves so much, cannot we gather into books that
men may read in an hour or so the gist of these confused and
multitudinous realities of the individual career? Surely the time is
coming for that, when a new private literature will exist, and fathers
and mothers behind their rôles of rulers, protectors, and supporters,
will prepare frank and intimate records of their thought and their
feeling, told as one tells things to equals, without authority or
reserves or discretions, so that, they being dead, their children may
rediscover them as contemporaries and friends.
That desire for self-expression is indeed already almost an instinct
with many of us. Man is disposed to create a traditional wisdom. For me
this book I contemplate is a need. I am just a year and a half from a
bitter tragedy and the loss of a friend as dear as life to me. It is
very constantly in my mind. She opened her mind to me as few people open
their minds to anyone. In a way, little Stephen, she died for you. And I
am so placed that I have no one to talk to quite freely about her. The
one other person to whom I talk, I cannot talk to about her; it is
strange, seeing how we love and trust one another, but so it is; you
will understand that the better as this story unfolds. For eight long
years before the crisis that culminated in her tragic death I never saw
her; yet, quite apart from the shock and distresses of that time, it has
left me extraordinarily lonely and desolate.
And there was a kind of dreadful splendor in that last act of hers,
which has taken a great hold upon my imagination; it has interwoven with
everything else in my mind, it bears now upon every question. I cannot
get away from it, while it is thus pent from utterance.... Perhaps
having written this to you I may never show it you or leave it for you
to see. But yet I must write it. Of all conceivable persons you, when
you have grown to manhood, are the most likely to understand.
§ 2
You did not come to see your dead grandfather, nor did you know very
much about the funeral. Nowadays we do not bring the sweet egotisms, the
vivid beautiful personal intensities of childhood, into the cold, vast
presence of death. I would as soon, my dear, have sent your busy little
limbs toiling up the Matterhorn. I have put by a photograph of my father
for you as he lay in that last stillness of his, that you will see at a
properer time.
Your mother and I wore black only at his funeral and came back colored
again into your colored world, and in a very little while your interest
in this event that had taken us away for a time turned to other, more
assimilable things. But there happened a little incident that laid hold
upon me; you forgot it, perhaps, in a week or less, but I shall never
forget it; and this incident it was that gathered up the fruits of those
moments beside my father's body and set me to write this book. It had
the effect of a little bright light held up against the vague dark
immensities of thought and feeling that filled my mind because of my
father's death.
Now that I come to set it down I see that it is altogether trivial, and
I cannot explain how it is that it is to me so piercingly significant. I
had to whip you. Your respect for the admirable and patient
Mademoiselle Potin, the protectress and companion of your public
expeditions, did in some slight crisis suddenly fail you. In the extreme
publicity of Kensington Gardens, in the presence of your two little
sisters, before a startled world, you expressed an opinion of her, in
two languages and a loud voice, that was not only very unjust, but
extremely offensive and improper. It reflected upon her intelligence and
goodness; it impeached her personal appearance; it was the kind of
outcry no little gentleman should ever permit himself, however deeply he
may be aggrieved. You then, so far as I was able to disentangle the
evidence, assaulted her violently, hurled a stone at her, and fled her
company. You came home alone by a route chosen by yourself, flushed and
wrathful, braving the dangers of Kensington High Street. This, after my
stern and deliberate edict that, upon pain of corporal punishment,
respect and obedience must be paid to Mademoiselle Potin. The logic of
the position was relentless.
But where your behavior was remarkable, where the affair begins to touch
my imagination, was that you yourself presently put the whole business
before me. Alone in the schoolroom, you seem to have come to some
realization of the extraordinary dreadfulness of your behavior. Such
moments happen in the lives of all small boys; they happened to me times
enough, to my dead father, to that grandfather of the portrait which is
now in my study, to his father and his, and so on through long series of
Strattons, back to inarticulate, shock-haired little sinners slinking
fearfully away from the awful wrath, the bellowings and limitless
violence of the hairy Old Man of the herd. The bottom goes out of your
heart then, you are full of a conviction of sin. So far you did but
carry on the experience of the race. But to ask audience of me, to come
and look me in the eye, to say you wanted my advice on a pressing
matter, that I think marks almost a new phase in the long developing
history of father and son. And your account of the fracas struck me as
quite reasonably frank and honest. "I didn't seem able," you observed,
"not to go on being badder and badder."
We discussed the difficulties of our situation, and you passed sentence
upon yourself. I saw to it that the outraged dignity of Mademoiselle
Potin was mocked by no mere formality of infliction. You did your best
to be stoical, I remember, but at last you yelped and wept. Then,
justice being done, you rearranged your costume. The situation was a
little difficult until you, still sobbing and buttoning--you are really
a shocking bad hand at buttons--and looking a very small, tender,
ruffled, rueful thing indeed, strolled towards my study window. "The
pear tree is out next door," you remarked, without a trace of animosity,
and sobbing as one might hiccough.
I suppose there are moments in the lives of all grown men when they come
near to weeping aloud. In some secret place within myself I must have
been a wild river of tears. I answered, however, with the same admirable
detachment from the smarting past that you had achieved, that my study
window was particularly adapted to the appreciation of our neighbor's
pear tree, because of its height from the ground. We fell into a
conversation about blossom and the setting of fruit, kneeling together
upon my window-seat and looking up into the pear tree against the sky,
and then down through its black branches into the gardens all
quickening with spring. We were on so friendly a footing when presently
Mademoiselle Potin returned and placed her dignity or her resignation in
my hands, that I doubt if she believed a word of all my assurances until
the unmistakable confirmation of your evening bath. Then, as I
understood it, she was extremely remorseful to you and indignant against
my violence....
But when I knelt with you, little urchin, upon my window-seat, it came
to me as a thing almost intolerably desirable that some day you should
become my real and understanding friend. I loved you profoundly. I
wanted to stretch forward into time and speak to you, man myself to the
man you are yet to be. It seemed to me that between us there must needs
be peculiar subtleties of sympathy. And I remembered that by the time
you were a man fully grown and emerging from the passionately tumultuous
openings of manhood, capable of forgiving me all my blundering
parentage, capable of perceiving all the justifying fine intention of my
ill-conceived disciplines and misdirections, I might be either an old
man, shriveling again to an inexplicable egotism, or dead. I saw myself
as I had seen my father--first enfeebled and then inaccessibly tranquil.
When presently you had gone from my study, I went to my writing-desk and
drew a paper pad towards me, and sat thinking and making idle marks upon
it with my pen. I wanted to exceed the limits of those frozen silences
that must come at last between us, write a book that should lie in your
world like a seed, and at last, as your own being ripened, flower into
living understanding by your side.
This book, which before had been only an idea for a book, competing
against many other ideas and the demands of that toilsome work for
peace and understanding to which I have devoted the daily energies of my
life, had become, I felt, an imperative necessity between us.
§ 3
And then there happened one of those crises of dread and apprehension
and pain that are like a ploughing of the heart. It was brought home to
me that you might die even before the first pages of this book of yours
were written. You became feverish, complained of that queer pain you had
felt twice before, and for the third time you were ill with
appendicitis. Your mother and I came and regarded your touzled head and
flushed little face on the pillow as you slept uneasily, and decided
that we must take no more risks with you. So soon as your temperature
had fallen again we set about the business of an operation.
We told each other that nowadays these operations were as safe as going
to sleep in your bed, but we knew better. Our own doctor had lost his
son. "That," we said, "was different." But we knew well enough in our
hearts that you were going very near to the edge of death, nearer than
you had ever been since first you came clucking into the world.
The operation was done at home. A capable, fair-complexioned nurse took
possession of us; and my study, because it has the best light, was
transfigured into an admirable operating-room. All its furnishings were
sent away, every cloth and curtain, and the walls and floor were covered
with white sterilized sheets. The high little mechanical table they
erected before the window seemed to me like an altar on which I had to
offer up my son. There were basins of disinfectants and towels
conveniently about, the operator came, took out his array of scalpels
and forceps and little sponges from the black bag he carried, put them
ready for his hand, and then covered them from your sight with a white
cloth, and I brought you down in my arms, wrapped in a blanket, from
your bedroom to the anæsthetist. You were beautifully trustful and
submissive and unafraid. I stood by you until the chloroform had done
its work, and then left you there, lest my presence should in the
slightest degree embarrass the surgeon. The anæsthetic had taken all the
color out of your face, and you looked pinched and shrunken and greenish
and very small and pitiful. I went into the drawing-room and stood there
with your mother and made conversation. I cannot recall what we said, I
think it was about the moorland to which we were going for your
convalescence. Indeed, we were but the ghosts of ourselves; all our
substance seemed listening, listening to the little sounds that came to
us from the study.
Then after long ages there was a going to and fro of feet, a bump, the
opening of a door, and our own doctor came into the room rubbing his
hands together and doing nothing to conceal his profound relief.
"Admirable," he said, "altogether successful." I went up to you and saw
a tumbled little person in the bed, still heavily insensible and moaning
slightly. By the table were bloody towels, and in a shallow glass tray
was a small object like a damaged piece of earthworm. "Not a bit too
soon," said the surgeon, holding this up in his forceps for my
inspection. "It's on the very verge of perforation." I affected a
detached and scientific interest, but the prevailing impression in my
mind was that this was a fragment from very nearly the centre of your
being.
He took it away with him, I know not whither. Perhaps it is now in
spirits in a specimen jar, an example to all medical students of what to
avoid in an appendix; perhaps it was stained and frozen, and
microtomized into transparent sections as they do such things, and
mounted on glass slips and distributed about the world for curious
histologists to wreak their eyes upon. For a time you lay uneasily still
and then woke up to pain. Even then you got a fresh purchase on my
heart. It has always been our custom to discourage weeping and outcries,
and you did not forget your training. "I shan't mind so much, dadda,"
you remarked to me, "if I may yelp." So for a day, by special
concession, you yelped, and then the sting of those fresh wounds
departed.
Within a fortnight, so quickly does an aseptic wound heal up again, you
were running about in the sun, and I had come back, as one comes back to
a thing forgotten, to the first beginnings of this chapter on my desk.
But for a time I could not go on working at it because of the fear I had
felt, and it is only now in June, in this house in France to which we
have come for the summer, with you more flagrantly healthy than I have
ever known you before, that my heart creeps out of its hole again, and I
can go on with my story.
CHAPTER THE SECOND
BOYHOOD
§ 1
I was a Harbury boy as my father and grandfather were before me and as
you are presently to be. I went to Harbury at the age of fourteen. Until
then I was educated at home, first by a governess and then by my
father's curate, Mr. Siddons, who went from us to St. Philip's in
Hampstead, and, succeeding marvellously there, is now Bishop of
Exminster. My father became rector of Burnmore when I was nine; my
mother had been dead four years, and my second cousin, Jane Stratton,
was already his housekeeper. My father held the living until his
resignation when I was nearly thirty. So that all the most
impressionable years of my life centre upon the Burnmore rectory and the
easy spaciousness of Burnmore Park. My boyhood and adolescence
alternated between the ivied red-brick and ancient traditions of Harbury
(and afterwards Christ-church) and that still untroubled countryside.
I was never a town dweller until I married and we took our present house
in Holland Park. I went into London at last as one goes into an arena.
It cramps me and wearies me and at times nearly overwhelms me, but
there it is that the life of men centres and my work lies. But every
summer we do as we have done this year and go to some house in the
country, near to forests or moorland or suchlike open and uncultivated
country, where one may have the refreshment of freedom among natural and
unhurried things. This year we are in a walled garden upon the Seine,
about four miles above Château Galliard, and with the forest reaching up
to the paddock beyond the orchard close....
You will understand better when I have told you my story why I saw
Burnmore for the last time when I was one-and-twenty and why my memories
of it shine so crystalline clear. I have a thousand vivid miniatures of
it in my mind and all of them are beautiful to me, so that I could quite
easily write a whole book of landscapes from the Park alone. I can still
recall quite vividly the warm beauty-soaked sensation of going out into
the morning sunshine of the Park, with my lunch in a little green Swiss
tin under my arm and the vast interminable day all before me, the
gigantic, divinely unconditional day that only boyhood knows, and the
Park so great and various that it was more than two hours' going for me
to reach its eastern fences. I was only a little older then than you are
now. Sometimes I went right up through the woods to the house to
companion with Philip and Guy Christian and their sister--I loved her
then, and one day I was to love her with all my heart--but in those
boyish times I liked most to go alone.
My memories of the Park are all under blue sky and sunshine, with just a
thunderstorm or so; on wet days and cold days I was kept to closer
limits; and it seems to me now rather an intellectual conviction than a
positive memory that save for a few pine-clad patches in the extreme
south-east, its soil was all thick clay. That meant for me only
beautiful green marshes, a number of vividly interesting meres upon the
course of its stream, and a wealth of gigantic oaks. The meres lay at
various levels, and the hand of Lady Ladislaw had assisted nature in
their enrichment with lilies and water plants. There were places of
sedge and scented rush, amidst which were sapphire mists of
forget-me-not for long stretches, skirmishing commandoes of yellow iris
and wide wastes of floating water-lilies. The gardens passed insensibly
into the Park, and beyond the house were broad stretches of grass,
sun-lit, barred with the deep-green shadows of great trees, and animated
with groups and lines of fallow deer. Near the house was an Italianate
garden, with balustradings and statuary, and a great wealth of roses and
flowering shrubs.
Then there were bracken wildernesses in which the does lurked with the
young fawns, and a hollow, shallow and wide, with the turf greatly
attacked by rabbits, and exceptionally threadbare, where a stricken oak,
lightning-stripped, spread out its ghastly arms above contorted rotting
branches and the mysterious skeletons of I should think five several
deer. In the evening-time the woods behind this place of bones--they
were woods of straight-growing, rather crowded trees and standing as it
were a little aloof--became even under the warmest sunset grey and
cold--and as if they waited....
And in the distant corner where the sand was, rose suddenly a steep
little hill, surmounted by a wild and splendid group of pines, through
which one looked across a vale of cornfields at an ancient town that
became strange and magical as the sun went down, so that I was held
gazing at it, and afterwards had to flee the twilight across the windy
spaces and under the dim and darkling trees. It is only now in the
distant retrospect that I identify that far-off city of wonder, and
luminous mist with the commonplace little town, through whose narrow
streets we drove to the railway station. But, of course, that is what it
must have been.
There are persons to be found mixed up in those childish memories,--Lady
Ladislaw, tall and gracious, in dresses of floating blue or grey, or
thin, subtly folding, flowering stuffs, Philip and his sister, Guy, the
old butler, a multitude of fainter figures long become nameless and
featureless; they are far less vivid in my memory than the fine
solitudes of the Park itself--and the dreams I had there.
I wonder if you dream as I dreamt. I wonder whether indeed I dreamt as
now I think I did. Have I, in these latter years, given form and
substance and a name to things as vague in themselves as the urgencies
of instinct? Did I really go into those woods and waving green places as
one keeps a tryst, expectant of a fellowship more free and delicate and
delightful than any I knew. Did I know in those days of nymphs and
dryads and fauns and all those happy soulless beings with which the
desire of man's heart has animated the wilderness. Once certainly I
crawled slowly through the tall bracken and at last lay still for an
interminable while, convinced that so I should see those shadows
populous with fairies, with green little people. How patiently I lay!
But the stems creaked and stirred, and my heart would keep on beating
like a drum in my throat.
It is incredible that once a furry whispering half-human creature with
bright brown eyes came and for a time played with me near where the tall
ferns foam in a broad torrent from between the big chestnuts down to the
upper mere. That must have been real dreaming, and yet now, with all my
sanities and scepticisms, I could half believe it real.
§ 2
You become reserved. Perhaps not exceptionally so, but as all children
become reserved. Already you understand that your heart is very
preciously your own. You keep it from me and everyone, so much so, so
justifiably so, that when by virtue of our kindred and all that we have
in common I get sudden glimpses right into your depths, there mixes with
the swift spasm of love I feel, a dread--lest you should catch me, as it
were, spying into you and that one of us, I know not which, should feel
ashamed.
Every child passes into this secret stage; it closes in from its first
frankness; it carries off the growing jewel of its consciousness to hide
from all mankind.... I think I can see why this should be so, but I
cannot tell why in so many cases no jewel is given back again at last,
alight, ripened, wonderful, glowing with the deep fires of experience. I
think that is what ought to happen; it is what does happen now with true
poets and true artists. Someday I think it will be the life of all
normal human souls. But usually it does not seem to happen at all.
Children pass out of a stage--open, beautiful, exquisitely simple--into
silences and discretions beneath an imposed and artificial life. And
they are lost. Out of the finished, careful, watchful, restrained and
limited man or woman, no child emerges again....
I remember very distinctly how I myself came by imperceptible increments
of reservation to withdraw those early delicacies of judgments, those
original and personal standards and appreciations, from sight and
expression. I can recall specific moments when I perceive now that my
little childish figure stood, as it were, obstinately and with a sense
of novelty in a doorway denying the self within.
It was partly, I think, a simple instinct that drew that curtain of
silences and concealments, it was much more a realization that I had no
power of lucidity to save the words and deeds I sought to make
expressive from complete misunderstanding. But most of all it was the
perception that I was under training and compulsion for ends that were
all askew and irrelevant to the trend of my imaginations, the quality of
my dreams. There was around me something unfriendly to this inner
world--something very ready to pass from unfriendliness to acute
hostility; and if, indeed, I succeeded in giving anything of my inner
self to others, it was only, as people put it, to give myself away.
My nurses, my governess, my tutor, my father, the servants about me,
seemed all bent upon imposing an artificial personality upon me. Only in
a very limited sense did they want me. What they wanted was something
that could be made out of me by extensive suppressions and additions.
They ignored the fact that I had been born with a shape of my own; they
were resolved I should be pressed into a mould and cast.
It was not that they wanted outer conformity to certain needs and
standards--that, I think, would be a reasonable thing enough to
demand--but they wanted me to subdue my most private thoughts to their
ideals. My nurses and my governesses would rate me for my very feelings,
would clamor for gratitude and reproach me bitterly for betraying that I
did not at some particular moment--love.
(Only yesterday I heard Mademoiselle Potin doing that very same thing to
you. "It is that you do not care, Master Steve. It is that you do not
care. You do not want to care.")
They went too far in that invasion of my personal life, but I perceive
quite clearly the present need for most of the process of moulding and
subjugation that children must undergo. Human society is a new thing
upon the earth, an invention of the last ten thousand years. Man is a
creature as yet not freely and instinctively gregarious; in his more
primordial state he must have been an animal of very small groups and
limited associations, an animal rather self-centred and fierce, and he
is still but imperfectly adapted either morally or physically to the
wider social life his crowding interactions force upon him. He still
learns speech and computation and civility and all the devices of this
artificially extended and continually broadening tribal life with an
extreme reluctance. He has to be shaped in the interests of the species,
I admit, to the newer conditions; the growing social order must be
protected from the keen edge of his still savage individuality, and he
must be trained in his own interests to save himself from the
destruction of impossible revolts. But how clumsily is the thing done!
How we are caught and jammed and pressed and crippled into citizenship!
How excessive and crushing is the suppression, and how inadequate!
Every child feels that, even if every child does not clearly know it.
Every child presently begins to hide itself from the confused tyrannies
of the social process, from the searching inspections and injunctions
and interferences of parent and priest and teacher.
"I have got to be _so_," we all say deep down in ourselves and more or
less distinctly according to the lucidities of our minds; "but in my
heart I am _this_."
And in the outcome we all try to seem at least to be _so_, while an
ineffectual rebel struggles passionately, like a beast caught in a trap,
for ends altogether more deep and dangerous, for the rose and the star
and the wildfire,--for beauty and beautiful things. These, we all know
in our darkly vital recesses, are the real needs of life, the obediences
imposed upon us by our crude necessities and jostling proximities, mere
incidentals on our way to those profounder purposes....
And when I write thus of our selves I mean our bodies quite as much as
our imaginations; the two sides of us are covered up alike and put alike
into disguises and unnatural shapes, we are taught and forced to hide
them for the same reasons, from a fear of ourselves and a fear of the
people about us. The sense of beauty, the sense of one's body, the
freedom of thought and of desire and the wonder of life, are all
interwoven strands. I remember that in the Park of Burnmore one great
craving I had was to take off my clothes there altogether, and bathe in
a clear place among loosestrife and meadowsweet, and afterwards lie wet
and naked upon the soft green turf with the sun shining upon me. But I
thought also that that was a very wicked and shameful craving to have,
and I never dared give way to it.
§ 3
As I think of myself and all these glowing secrecies and hidden fancies
within, walking along beside old Siddons, and half listening to his
instructive discourse, I see myself as though I was an image of all
humanity under tuition for the social life.
I write "old Siddons," for so he seemed to me then. In truth he was
scarcely a dozen years older than I, and the other day when I exchanged
salutations with his gaitered presence in the Haymarket, on his way I
suppose to the Athenæum, it struck me that he it is who is now the
younger man. But at Burnmore he was eighteen inches or more above my
head and all the way of school and university beyond me; full of the
world they had fitted him for and eager to impart its doctrines. He went
along in his tweeds that were studiously untidy, a Norfolk jacket of one
clerically-greyish stuff and trousers of another somewhat lighter
pattern, in thick boots, the collar of his calling, and a broad-minded
hat, bearing his face heavenward as he talked, and not so much aware of
me as appreciating the things he was saying. And sometimes he was
manifestly talking to himself and airing his outlook. He carried a
walking-stick, a manly, homely, knobby, donnish walking-stick.
He forced the pace a little, for his legs were long and he had acquired
the habit of strenuous pedestrianism at Oxford with all the other
things; he obliged me to go at a kind of skipping trot, and he preferred
the high roads towards Wickenham for our walks, because they were
flatter and there was little traffic upon them in those days before the
motor car, and we could keep abreast and go on talking uninterruptedly.
That is to say, he could.
What talk it was!
Of all the virtues that the young should have. He spoke of courage and
how splendid it was to accustom oneself not even to feel fear; of truth,
and difficult cases when one might conceivably injure others by telling
the truth and so perhaps, perhaps qualify the rigor of one's integrity,
but how one should never hesitate to injure one's own self in that
matter. Then in another phase he talked of belief--and the
disagreeableness of dissenters. But here, I remember, there was a
discussion. I have forgotten how I put the thing, but in some boyish
phrasing or other I must have thrown out the idea that thought is free
and beliefs uncontrollable. What of conformity, if the truth was that
you doubted? "Not if you make an effort," I remember him saying, "not if
you make an effort. I have had my struggles. But if you say firmly to
yourself, the Church teaches this. If you dismiss mere carping and say
that."
"But suppose you can't," I must have urged.
"You can if you will," he said with a note near enthusiasm. "I have been
through all that. I did it. I dismissed doubts. I wouldn't listen. I
felt, _This won't do. All this leads nowhere._"
And he it was told me the classic story of that presumptuous schoolboy
who went to his Head Master and declared himself an atheist. There were
no dialectics but a prompt horse-whipping. "In after life," said Mr.
Siddons, with unctuous gratification, "he came to recognize that
thrashing as the very best thing that had ever happened to him. The
kindest thing."
"Yes," urged the obstinate rebel within me, "but--the Truth, that
fearless insistence on the Truth!"
I could, however, find nothing effective to say aloud, and Siddons
prevailed over me. That story made my blood boil, it filled me with an
anticipatory hatred of and hostility to Head Masters, and at the same
time there was something in it, brutally truer to the conditions of
human association than any argument.
I do not remember the various steps by which I came to be discussing
doubts so early in my life. I could not have been much more than
thirteen when that conversation occurred. I am I think perhaps
exceptionally unconscious about myself. I find I can recall the sayings
and even the gestures of other people far more distinctly than the
things I said and did myself. Even my dreams and imaginings are more
active than my positive thoughts and proceedings. But I was no doubt
very much stimulated by the literature lying about my home and the
gleans and echoes of controversies that played like summer lightning
round and about the horizons of my world. Over my head and after I had
gone to bed, my father and Siddons were talking, my cousin was listening
with strained apprehensions, there was a new spirit in my father's
sermons; it was the storm of Huxley-Darwin controversies that had at
last reached Burnmore. I was an intelligent little listener, an eager
reader of anything that came to hand, Mr. Siddons had a disposition to
fight his battles over again in his monologues to me; and after all at
thirteen one isn't a baby. The small boy of the lower classes used in
those days to start life for himself long before then.
How dramatic a phase it was in the history of the human mind when
science suddenly came into the vicarages, into all the studies and quiet
places that had been the fastnesses of conviction and our ideals, and
denied, with all the power of evidence it had been accumulating for so
long, and so obscurely and inaggressively, with fossils and strata, with
embryology and comparative anatomy, the doctrine of the historical Fall
and all the current scheme of orthodoxy that was based on that! What a
quickening shock it must have been in countless thousands of educated
lives! And my father after a toughly honest resistance was won over to
Darwinism, the idea of Evolution got hold of him, the idea that life
itself was intolerant of vain repetitions; and he had had to "consider
his position" in the church. To him as to innumerable other honest,
middle-aged and comfortable men, Darwinism came as a dreadful invitation
to go out into the wilderness. Over my head and just out of range of my
ears he was debating that issue with Siddons as a foil and my cousin as
a horrified antagonist. Slowly he was developing his conception of
compromise. And meanwhile he wasn't going out into the wilderness at
all, but punctually to and fro, along the edge of the lawn by the bed of
hollyhocks and through the little green door in the garden wall, and
across the corner of the churchyard to the vestry and the perennial
services and sacraments of the church.
But he never talked to me privately of religion. He left that for my
cousin and Mr. Siddons to do or not to do as they felt disposed, and in
those silences of his I may have found another confirmation of my
growing feeling that religion was from one point of view a thing
somehow remote and unreal, claiming unjustifiable interventions in the
detailed conduct of my life, and from another a peculiar concern of my
father's and Mr. Siddons', to which they went--through the vestry,
changing into strange garments on the way.
§ 4
I do not want to leave the impression which my last section may have
conveyed that at the age of thirteen or thereabouts I walked about with
Mr. Siddons discussing doubt in a candid and intelligent manner and
maintaining theological positions. That particular conversation, you
must imagine with Mr. Siddons somewhat monologuing, addressing himself
not only to my present self, but with an unaccustomed valiance to my
absent father. What I may have said or not said, whether I did indeed
dispute or merely and by a kind of accident implied objections, I have
altogether forgotten long ago.
A boy far more than a man is mentally a discontinuous being. The
drifting chaos of his mind makes its experimental beginnings at a
hundred different points and in a hundred different spirits and
directions; here he flashes into a concrete realization, here into a
conviction unconsciously incompatible; here is something originally
conceived, here something uncritically accepted. I know that I
criticized Mr. Siddons quite acutely, and disbelieved in him. I know
also that I accepted all sorts of suggestions from him quite
unhesitatingly and that I did my utmost to satisfy his standards and
realize his ideals of me.
Like an outer casing to that primordial creature of senses and dreams
which came to the surface in the solitudes of the Park was my
Siddonsesque self, a high-minded and clean and brave English boy,
conscientiously loyal to queen and country, athletic and a good
sportsman and acutely alive to good and bad "form." Mr. Siddons made me
aware of my clothed self as a visible object, I surveyed my garmented
being in mirrors and was trained to feel the "awfulness" of various
other small boys who appeared transitorily in the smaller Park when Lady
Ladislaw extended her wide hospitality to certain benevolent London
associations. Their ill-fitting clothing, their undisciplined outcries,
their slouching, their bad throwing and defective aspirates were made
matters for detestation in my plastic mind. Those things, I was assured,
placed them outside the pale of any common humanity.
"Very unfortunate and all that," said Mr. Siddons, "and uncommonly good
of Lady Ladislaw to have them down. But dirty little cads, Stephen,
dirty little cads; so don't go near 'em if you can help it."
They played an indecent sort of cricket with coats instead of a wicket!
Mr. Siddons was very grave about games and the strict ritual and proper
apparatus for games. He believed that Waterloo was won by the indirect
influence of public school cricket--disregarding many other contributory
factors. We did not play very much, but we "practised" sedulously at a
net in the paddock with the gardener and the doctor's almost grown-up
sons. I thought missing a possible catch was an impropriety. I
studiously maintained the correct attitude, alert and elastic, while I
was fielding. Moreover I had a shameful secret, that I did not really
know where a ball ought to pitch. I wasn't clear about it and I did not
dare to ask. Also until I was nearly thirteen I couldn't bowl overarm.
Such is the enduring force of early suggestion, my dear son, that I feel
a faint twinge of shame as I set this down for your humiliated eyes. But
so it was. May you be more precocious!
Then I was induced to believe that I really liked hunting and killing
things. In the depths of my being I was a gentle and primitive savage
towards animals; I believed they were as subtle and wise as myself and
full of a magic of their own, but Mr. Siddons nevertheless got me out
into the south Warren, where I had often watched the rabbits setting
their silly cock-eared sentinels and lolloping out to feed about
sundown, and beguiled me into shooting a furry little fellow-creature--I
can still see its eyelid quiver as it died--and carrying it home in
triumph. On another occasion I remember I was worked up into a ferocious
excitement about the rats in the old barn. We went ratting, just as
though I was Tom Brown or Harry East or any other of the beastly little
models of cant and cruelty we English boys were trained to imitate. It
was great sport. It was a tremendous spree. The distracted movements,
the scampering and pawing of the little pink forefeet of one squawking
little fugitive, that I hit with a stick and then beat to a shapeless
bag of fur, haunted my dreams for years, and then I saw the bowels of
another still living victim that had been torn open by one of the
terriers, and abruptly I fled out into the yard and was violently sick;
the best of the fun was over so far as I was concerned.
My cousin saved me from the uttermost shame of my failure by saying
that I had been excited too soon after my dinner....
And also I collected stamps and birds' eggs.
Mr. Siddons hypnotized me into believing that I really wanted these
things; he gave me an egg-cabinet for a birthday present and told me
exemplary stories of the wonderful collections other boys had made. My
own natural disposition to watch nests and establish heaven knows what
friendly intimacy with the birds--perhaps I dreamt their mother might
let me help to feed the young ones--gave place to a feverish artful
hunting, a clutch, and then, detestable process, the blowing of the egg.
Of course we were very humane; we never took the nest, but just
frightened off the sitting bird and grabbed a warm egg or so. And the
poor perforated, rather damaged little egg-shells accumulated in the
drawers, against the wished-for but never actually realized day of glory
when we should meet another collector who wouldn't have--something that
we had. So far as it was for anything and not mere imbecile
imitativeness, it was for that.
And writing thus of eggs reminds me that I got into a row with Mr.
Siddons for cruelty.
I discovered there was the nest of a little tit in a hole between two
stones in the rock bank that bordered the lawn. I found it out when I
was sitting on the garden seat near by, learning Latin irregular verbs.
I saw the minute preposterous round birds going and coming, and I found
something so absurdly amiable and confiding about them--they sat
balancing and oscillating on a standard rose and cheeped at me to go and
then dived nestward and gave away their secret out of sheer
impatience--that I could not bring myself to explore further, and kept
the matter altogether secret from the enthusiasm of Mr. Siddons. And in
a few days there were no more eggs and I could hear the hungry little
nestlings making the minutest of fairy hullabaloos, the very finest spun
silk of sound; a tremendous traffic in victual began and I was the
trusted friend of the family.
Then one morning I was filled with amazement and anguish. There was a
rock torn down and lying in the path; a paw had gone up to that little
warm place. Across the gravel, shreds of the nest and a wisp or so of
down were scattered. I could imagine the brief horrors of that night
attack. I started off, picking up stones as I went, to murder that sandy
devil, the stable cat. I got her once--alas! that I am still glad to
think of it--and just missed her as she flashed, a ginger streak,
through the gate into the paddock.
"_Now_ Steve! Now!" came Mr. Siddons' voice behind me....
How can one explain things of that sort to a man like Siddons? I took my
lecture on the Utter Caddishness of Wanton Cruelty in a black rebellious
silence. The affair and my own emotions were not only far beyond my
powers of explanation, but far beyond my power of understanding. Just
then my soul was in shapeless and aimless revolt against something
greater and higher and deeper and darker than Siddons, and his
reproaches were no more than the chattering of a squirrel while a storm
uproots great trees. I wanted to kill the cat. I wanted to kill whatever
had made that cat.
§ 5
Mr. Siddons it was who first planted the conception of Life as a Career
in my mind.
In those talks that did so much towards shaping me into the likeness of
a modest, reserved, sporting, seemly, clean and brave, patriotic and
decently slangy young Englishman, he was constantly reverting to that
view of existence. He spoke of failures and successes, talked of
statesmen and administrators, peerages and Westminster Abbey. "Nelson,"
he said, "was once a clergyman's son like you."
"England has been made by the sons of the clergy."
He talked of the things that led to failure and the things that had made
men prominent and famous.
"Discursiveness ruins a man," I remember him saying. "Choose your goal
and press to it."
"Never do anything needlessly odd. It's a sort of impertinence to all
the endless leaders of the past who created our traditions. Do not
commit yourself hastily to opinions, but once you have done so, stick to
them. The world would far rather have a firm man wrong, than a weak man
hesitatingly right. Stick to them."
"One has to remember," I recall him meditating, far over my head with
his face upturned, "that Institutions are more important than Views.
Very often one adopts a View only to express one's belief in an
Institution.... Men can do with almost all sorts of Views, but only with
certain Institutions. All this Doubt doesn't touch a truth like that.
One does not refuse to live in a house because of the old symbols one
finds upon the door.... If they _are_ old symbols...."
Out of such private contemplations he would descend suddenly upon me.
"What are _you_ going to do with your life, Steve?" he would ask.
"There is no happiness in life without some form of service. Where do
you mean to serve? With your bent for science and natural history, it
wouldn't be difficult for you to get into the I.C.S. I doubt if you'd do
anything at the law; it's a rough game, Steve, though the prizes are
big. Big prizes the lawyers get. I've known a man in the Privy Council
under forty--and that without anything much in the way of a family....
But always one must concentrate. The one thing England will not stand is
a loafer, a wool-gatherer, a man who goes about musing and half-awake.
It's our energy. We're western. It's that has made us all we are."
I knew whither that pointed. Never so far as I can remember did Mr.
Siddons criticize either myself or my father directly, but I understood
with the utmost clearness that he found my father indolent and
hesitating, and myself more than a little bit of a mollycoddle, and in
urgent need of pulling together.
§ 6
Harbury went on with that process of suppressing, encrusting, hardening,
and bracing-up which Mr. Siddons had begun. For a time I pulled myself
together very thoroughly. I am not ungrateful nor unfaithful to Harbury;
in your turn you will go there, you will have to live your life in this
British world of ours and you must learn its language and manners,
acquire its reserves and develop the approved toughness and patterning
of cuticle. Afterwards if you please you may quarrel with it. But don't
when the time comes quarrel with the present conditions of human
association and think it is only with Harbury you quarrel. What man has
become and may become beneath the masks and impositions of civilization,
in his intimate texture and in the depths of his being, I begin now in
my middle age to appreciate. No longer is he an instinctive savage but a
creature of almost incredible variability and wonderful new
possibilities. Marvels undreamt of, power still inconceivable, an empire
beyond the uttermost stars; such is man's inheritance. But for the
present, until we get a mastery of those vague and mighty intimations at
once so perplexing and so reassuring, if we are to live at all in the
multitudinousness of human society we must submit to some scheme of
clumsy compromises and conventions or other,--and for us Strattons the
Harbury system is the most convenient. You will have to go to the old
school.
I went to Rendle's. I just missed getting into college; I was two places
below the lowest successful boy. I was Maxton's fag to begin with, and
my chief chum was Raymond, who is your friend also, and who comes so
often to this house. I preferred water to land, boats to cricket,
because of that difficulty about pitch I have already mentioned. But I
was no great sportsman. Raymond and I shared a boat, and spent most of
the time we gave to it under the big trees near Dartpool Lock, reading
or talking. We would pull up to Sandy Hall perhaps once a week. I never
rowed in any of the eights, though I was urged to do so. I swam fairly
well, and got my colors on the strength of my diving.
On the whole I found Harbury a satisfactory and amusing place, I was
neither bullied nor do I think I greatly bullied, and of all that
furtive and puerile lasciviousness of which one hears so many hints
nowadays--excitable people talk of it as though it was the most
monstrous and singular of vices instead of a slightly debasing but
almost unavoidable and very obvious result of heaping boys together
under the inefficient control of a timid pretentious class of men--of
such uncleanness as I say, scarcely more than a glimpse and a whisper
and a vague tentative talk or so reached me. Little more will reach you,
for that kind of thing, like the hells of Swedenborg, finds its own.
I had already developed my growing instinct for observance to a very
considerable extent under Siddons, and at Harbury I remember myself, and
people remember me, as an almost stiffly correct youth. I was pretty
good at most of the work, and exceptionally so at history, geology, and
the biological side of natural science. I had to restrain my interest in
these latter subjects lest I should appear to be a "swat," and a
modern-side swat at that. I was early in the sixth, and rather a
favorite with old Latimer. He incited me to exercise what he called a
wholesome influence on the younger boys, and I succeeded in doing this
fairly well without any gross interventions. I implied rather than
professed soundly orthodox views about things in general, and I was
extremely careful to tilt my straw hat forward over my nose so as just
not to expose the crown of my head behind, and to turn up my trousers
with exactly that width of margin which the judgment of my
fellow-creatures had decided was correct. My socks were spirited without
being vulgar, and the ties I wore were tied with a studious avoidance
of either slovenliness or priggish neatness. I wrote two articles in the
Harburonian, became something of a debater in the Literacy and
Political, conducted many long conversations with my senior
contemporaries upon religion, politics, sport and social life, and
concealed my inmost thoughts from every human being. Indeed, so
effective had been the training of Harbury and Mr. Siddons, that I think
at that time I came very near concealing them from myself. I could
suppress wonder, I could pass by beauty as if I did not see it, almost I
think I did not see it for a time, and yet I remember it in those years
too--a hundred beautiful things.
Harbury itself is a very beautiful place. The country about it has all
the charm of river scenery in a settled and ancient land, and the great
castle and piled town of Wetmore, cliffs of battlemented grey wall
rising above a dense cluster of red roofs, form the background to
innumerable gracious prospects of great stream-fed trees, level meadows
of buttercups, sweeping curves of osier and rush-rimmed river, the
playing fields and the sedgy, lily-spangled levels of Avonlea. The
college itself is mostly late Tudor and Stuart brickwork, very ripe and
mellow now, but the great grey chapel with its glorious east window
floats over the whole like a voice singing in the evening. And the
evening cloudscapes of Harbury are a perpetual succession of glorious
effects, now serene, now mysteriously threatening and profound, now
towering to incredible heights, now revealing undreamt-of distances of
luminous color. Assuredly I must have delighted in all those aspects, or
why should I remember them so well? But I recall, I mean, no confessed
recognition of them; no deliberate going-out of my spirit, open and
unashamed, to such things.
I suppose one's early adolescence is necessarily the period of maximum
shyness in one's life. Even to Raymond I attempted no extremities of
confidence. Even to myself I tried to be the thing that was expected of
me. I professed a modest desire for temperate and tolerable achievement
in life, though deep in my lost depths I wanted passionately to excel; I
worked hard, much harder than I allowed to appear, and I said I did it
for the credit of the school; I affected a dignified loyalty to queen
and country and church; I pretended a stoical disdain for appetites and
delights and all the arts, though now and then a chance fragment of
poetry would light me like a fire, or a lovely picture stir unwonted
urgencies, though visions of delight haunted the shadows of my
imagination and did not always fly when I regarded them. But on the
other hand I affected an interest in games that I was far from feeling.
Of some boys I was violently jealous, and this also I masked beneath a
generous appreciation. Certain popularities I applauded while I doubted.
Whatever my intimate motives I became less and less disposed to obey
them until I had translated them into a plausible rendering of the
accepted code. If I could not so translate them I found it wise to
control them. When I wanted urgently one summer to wander by night over
the hills towards Kestering and lie upon heather and look up at the
stars and wonder about them, I cast about and at last hit upon the
well-known and approved sport of treacling for moths, as a cloak for so
strange an indulgence.
I must have known even then what a mask and front I was, because I knew
quite well how things were with other people. I listened politely and
respected and understood the admirable explanations of my friends. When
some fellow got a scholarship unexpectedly and declared it was rotten
bad luck on the other chap, seeing the papers he had done, and doubted
whether he shouldn't resign, I had an intuitive knowledge that he
wouldn't resign, and I do not remember any time in my career as the
respectful listener to Mr. Siddons' aspirations for service and
devotion, when I did not perceive quite clearly his undeviating eye upon
a bishopric. He thought of gaiters though he talked of wings.
How firmly the bonds of an old relationship can hold one! I remember
when a few years ago he reached that toiled-for goal, I wrote in a tone
of gratified surprise that in this blatant age, such disinterested
effort as his should receive even so belated a recognition. Yet what
else was there for me to write? We all have our Siddonses, with whom
there are no alternatives but insincerity or a disproportionate
destructiveness. I am still largely Siddonsized, little son, and so, I
fear, you will have to be.
§ 7
The clue to all the perplexities of law and custom lies in this, that
human association is an artificiality. We do not run together naturally
and easily as grazing deer do or feeding starlings or a shoal of fish.
We are a sort of creature which is only resuming association after a
long heredity of extreme separation. We are beings strongly
individualized, we are dominated by that passion which is no more and
no less than individuality in action,--jealousy. Jealousy is a fierce
insistence on ourselves, an instinctive intolerance of our
fellow-creatures, ranging between an insatiable aggression as its
buoyant phase and a savage defensiveness when it is touched by fear. In
our expansive moments we want to dominate and control everyone and
destroy every unlikeness to ourselves; in our recessive phases our homes
are our castles and we want to be let alone.
Now all law, all social order, all custom, is a patch-up and a
concession to this separating passion of self-insistence. It is an
evasion of conflict and social death. Human society is as yet only a
truce and not an alliance.
When you understand that, you will begin to understand a thousand
perplexing things in legislation and social life. You will understand
the necessity of all those restrictions that are called
"conventionality," and the inevitableness of the general hostility to
singularity. To be exceptional is to assert a difference, to disregard
the banked-up forces of jealousy and break the essential conditions of
the social contract. It invites either resentment or aggression. So we
all wear much the same clothing, affect modesty, use the same phrases,
respect one another's "rights," and pretend a greater disinterestedness
than we feel....
You have to face this reality as you must face all reality. This is the
reality of laws and government; this is the reality of customs and
institutions; _a convention between jealousies_. This is reality, just
as the cat's way with the nestlings was reality, and the squealing rat
one smashed in a paroxysm of cruelty and disgust in the barn.
But it isn't the only reality. Equally real is the passionate revolt of
my heart against cruelty, and the deep fluctuating impulse not to
pretend, to set aside fear and jealousy, to come nakedly out of the
compromises and secretive methods of every-day living into the light,
into a wide impersonal love, into a new way of living for mankind....
CHAPTER THE THIRD
INTENTIONS AND THE LADY MARY CHRISTIAN
§ 1
I know that before the end of my Harbury days I was already dreaming of
a Career, of some great and conspicuous usefulness in the world. That
has always haunted my mind and haunts it now. I may be cured perhaps of
the large and showy anticipations of youth, I may have learnt to drop
the "great and conspicuous," but still I find it necessary to believe
that I matter, that I play a part no one else can play in a progress, in
a universal scheme moving towards triumphant ends.
Almost wholly I think I was dreaming of public service in those days.
The Harbury tradition pointed steadfastly towards the state, and all my
world was bare of allurements to any other type of ambition. Success in
art or literature did not appeal to us, and a Harbury boy would as soon
think of being a great tinker as a great philosopher. Science we called
"stinks"; our three science masters were _ex officio_ ridiculous and the
practical laboratory a refuge for oddities. But a good half of our
fathers at least were peers or members of parliament, and our sense of
politics was close and keen. History, and particularly history as it
came up through the eighteenth century to our own times, supplied us
with a gallery of intimate models, our great uncles and grandfathers and
ancestors at large figured abundantly in the story and furnished the
pattern to which we cut our anticipations of life. It was a season of
Imperialism, the picturesque Imperialism of the earlier Kipling phase,
and we were all of us enthusiasts for the Empire. It was the empire of
the White Man's Burthen in those days; the sordid anti-climax of the
Tariff Reform Movement was still some years ahead of us. It was easier
for us at Harbury to believe then than it has become since, in our own
racial and national and class supremacy. We were the Anglo-Saxons, the
elect of the earth, leading the world in social organization, in science
and economic method. In India and the east more particularly we were the
apostles of even-handed justice, relentless veracity, personal
cleanliness, and modern efficiency. In a spirit of adventurous
benevolence we were spreading those blessings over a reluctant and
occasionally recalcitrant world of people for the most part "colored."
Our success in this had aroused the bitter envy and rivalry of various
continental nations, and particularly of France, Russia, and Germany.
But France had been diverted to North Africa, Russia to Eastern Asia,
and Germany was already the most considered antagonist in our path
towards an empire over the world.
This was the spacious and by no means ignoble project of the later
nineties. Most of us Harbury boys, trained as I had been trained to be
uncritical, saw the national outlook in those terms. We knew little or
nothing, until the fierce wranglings of the Free Traders and Tariff
Reformers a few years later brought it home to us, of the commercial,
financial and squalid side of our relations with the vast congeries of
exploited new territories and subordinated and subjugated populations.
We knew nothing of the social conditions of the mass of people in our
own country. We were blankly ignorant of economics. We knew nothing of
that process of expropriation and the exploitation of labor which is
giving the world the Servile State. The very phrase was twenty years
ahead of us. We believed that an Englishman was a better thing in every
way than any other sort of man, that English literature, science and
philosophy were a shining and unapproachable light to all other peoples,
that our soldiers were better than all other soldiers and our sailors
than all other sailors. Such civilization and enterprise as existed in
Germany for instance we regarded as a shadow, an envious shadow,
following our own; it was still generally believed in those days that
German trade was concerned entirely with the dishonest imitation of our
unapproachable English goods. And as for the United States, well, the
United States though blessed with a strain of English blood, were
nevertheless "out of it," marooned in a continent of their own and--we
had to admit it--corrupt.
Given such ignorance, you know, it wasn't by any means ignoble to be
patriotic, to dream of this propagandist Empire of ours spreading its
great peace and culture, its virtue and its amazing and unprecedented
honesty,--its honesty!--round the world.
§ 2
When I look and try to recover those early intentions of mine I am
astonished at the way in which I took them ready-made from the world
immediately about me. In some way I seem to have stopped looking--if
ever I had begun looking--at the heights and depths above and below that
immediate life. I seem to have regarded these profounder realities no
more during this phase of concentration than a cow in a field regards
the sky. My father's vestments, the Burnmore altar, the Harbury pulpit
and Mr. Siddons, stood between me and the idea of God, so that it needed
years and much bitter disillusionment before I discovered my need of it.
And I was as wanting in subtlety as in depth. We did no logic nor
philosophy at Harbury, and at Oxford it was not so much thought we came
to deal with as a mistranslation and vulgarization of ancient and alien
exercises in thinking. There is no such effective serum against
philosophy as the scholarly decoction of a dead philosopher. The
philosophical teaching of Oxford at the end of the last century was not
so much teaching as a protective inoculation. The stuff was administered
with a mysterious gilding of Greek and reverence, old Hegel's monstrous
web was the ultimate modernity, and Plato, that intellectual
journalist-artist, that bright, restless experimentalist in ideas, was
as it were the God of Wisdom, only a little less omniscient (and on the
whole more of a scholar and a gentleman) than the God of fact....
So I fell back upon the empire in my first attempts to unify my life. I
would serve the empire. That should be my total significance. There was
a Roman touch, I perceive, in this devotion. Just how or where I should
serve the empire I had not as yet determined. At times I thought of the
civil service, in my more ambitious moments I turned my thoughts to
politics. But it was doubtful whether my private expectations made the
last a reasonable possibility.
I would serve the empire.
§ 3
And all the while that the first attempts to consolidate, to gather
one's life together into a purpose and a plan of campaign, are going on
upon the field of the young man's life, there come and go and come again
in the sky above him the threatening clouds, the ethereal cirrus, the
red dawns and glowing afternoons of that passion of love which is the
source and renewal of being. There are times when that solicitude
matters no more than a spring-time sky to a runner who wins towards the
post, there are times when its passionate urgency dominates every fact
in his world.
§ 4
One must have children and love them passionately before one realizes
the deep indignity of accident in life. It is not that I mind so much
when unexpected and disconcerting things happen to you or your sisters,
but that I mind before they happen. My dreams and anticipations of your
lives are all marred by my sense of the huge importance mere chance
encounters and incalculable necessities will play in them. And in
friendship and still more here, in this central business of love,
accident rules it seems to me almost altogether. What personalities you
will encounter in life, and have for a chief interest in life, is nearly
as much a matter of chance as the drift of a grain of pollen in the
pine forest. And once the light hazard has blown it has blown, never to
drive again. In other schoolrooms and nurseries, in slum living-rooms
perhaps or workhouse wards or palaces, round the other side of the
earth, in Canada or Russia or China, other little creatures are trying
their small limbs, clutching at things about them with infantile hands,
who someday will come into your life with a power and magic monstrous
and irrational and irresistible. They will break the limits of your
concentrating self, call you out to the service of beauty and the
service of the race, sound you to your highest and your lowest, give you
your chance to be godlike or filthy, divine or utterly ignoble, react
together with you upon the very core and essence of your being. These
unknowns are the substance of your fate. You will in extreme intimacy
love them, hate them, serve them, struggle with them, and in that
interaction the vital force in you and the substance of your days will
be spent.
And who they may chance to be and their peculiar quality and effect is
haphazard, utterly beyond designing.
Law and custom conspire with the natural circumstances of man to
exaggerate every consequence of this accumulating accident, and make it
definite and fatal....
I find it quite impossible now to recall the steps and stages by which
this power of sex invaded my life. It seems to me now that it began very
much as a gale begins, in catspaws upon the water and little rustlings
among the leaves, and then stillness and then a distant soughing again
and a pause, and then a wider and longer disturbance and so more and
more, with a gathering continuity, until at last the stars were hidden,
the heavens were hidden; all the heights and depths of life were
obscured by stormy impulses and passionate desires. I suppose that
quite at the first there were simple curiosities; no doubt they were
vivid at the time but they have left scarcely a trace; there were vague
first intimations of a peculiar excitement. I do remember more
distinctly phases when there was a going-out from myself towards these
things, these interests, and then a reaction of shame and concealment.
And these memories were mixed up with others not sexual at all, and
particularly with the perception of beauty in things inanimate, with
lights seen at twilight and the tender mysteriousness of the dusk and
the confused disturbing scents of flowers in the evening and the
enigmatical serene animation of stars in the summer sky....
I think perhaps that my boyhood was exceptionally free from vulgarizing
influences in this direction. There were few novels in my father's house
and I neither saw nor read any plays until I was near manhood, so that I
thought naturally about love and not rather artificially round and about
love as so many imaginative young people are trained to do. I fell in
love once or twice while I was still quite a boy. These earliest
experiences rarely got beyond a sort of dumb awe, a vague, vast,
ineffectual desire for self-immolation. For a time I remember I
worshipped Lady Ladislaw with all my being. Then I talked to a girl in a
train--I forget upon what journey--but I remember very vividly her quick
color and a certain roguish smile. I spread my adoration at her feet,
fresh and frank. I wanted to write to her. Indeed I wanted to devote all
my being to her. I begged hard, but there was someone called Auntie who
had to be considered, an Atropos for that thread of romance.
Then there was a photograph in my father's study of the Delphic Sibyl
from the Sistine Chapel, that for a time held my heart, and--Yes, there
was a girl in a tobacconist's shop in the Harbury High Street. Drawn by
an irresistible impulse I used to go and buy cigarettes--and sometimes
converse about the weather. But afterwards in solitude I would meditate
tremendous conversations and encounters with her. The cigarettes
increased the natural melancholy of my state and led to a reproof from
old Henson. Almost always I suppose there is that girl in the
tobacconist's shop....
I believe if I made an effort I could disinter some dozens of such
memories, more and more faded until the marginal ones would be
featureless and all but altogether effaced. As I look back at it now I
am struck by an absurd image; it is as if a fish nibbled at this bait
and then at that.
Given but the slightest aid from accidental circumstances and any of
those slight attractions might have become a power to deflect all my
life.
The day of decision arrived when, the Lady Mary Christian came smiling
out of the sunshine to me into the pavilion at Burnmore. With that the
phase of stirrings and intimations was over for ever in my life. All
those other impressions went then to the dusty lumber room from which I
now so slightingly disinter them.
§ 5
We five had all been playmates together. There were Lord Maxton, who was
killed at Paardeberg while I was in Ladysmith, he was my senior by
nearly a year, Philip, who is now Earl Ladislaw and who was about
eighteen months younger than I, Mary, my contemporary within eight days,
and Guy, whom we regarded as a baby and who was called, apparently on
account of some early linguistic efforts, "Brugglesmith." He did his
best to avenge his juniority as time passed on by an enormous length of
limb. I had more imagination than Maxton and was a good deal better
read, so that Mary and I dominated most of the games of Indians and
warfare and exploration in which we passed our long days together. When
the Christians were at Burnmore, and they usually spent three or four
months in the year there, I had a kind of standing invitation to be with
them. Sometimes there would also be two Christian cousins to swell our
party, and sometimes there would be a raid of the Fawney children with a
detestable governess who was perpetually vociferating reproaches, but
these latter were absent-minded, lax young persons, and we did not
greatly love them.
It is curious how little I remember of Mary's childhood. All that has
happened between us since lies between that and my present self like
some luminous impenetrable mist. I know we liked each other, that I was
taller than she was and thought her legs unreasonably thin, and that
once when I knelt by accident on a dead stick she had brought into an
Indian camp we had made near the end of the west shrubbery, she flew at
me in a sudden fury, smacked my face, scratched me and had to be
suppressed, and was suppressed with extreme difficulty by the united
manhood of us three elder boys. Then it was I noted first the blazing
blueness of her eyes. She was light and very plucky, so that none of us
cared to climb against her, and she was as difficult to hold as an eel.
But all these traits and characteristics vanished when she was
transformed.
For what seems now a long space of time I had not seen her or any of the
family except Philip; it was certainly a year or more, probably two;
Maxton was at a crammer's and I think the others must have been in
Canada with Lord Ladislaw. Then came some sort of estrangement between
him and his wife, and she returned with Mary and Guy to Burnmore and
stayed there all through the summer.
I was in a state of transition between the infinitely great and the
infinitely little. I had just ceased to be that noble and potent being,
that almost statesmanlike personage, a sixth form boy at Harbury, and I
was going to be an Oxford undergraduate. Philip and I came down together
by the same train from Harbury, I shared the Burnmore dog-cart and
luggage cart, and he dropped me at the rectory. I was a long-limbed
youngster of seventeen, as tall as I am now, and fair, so fair that I
was still boyish-faced while most of my contemporaries and Philip (who
favored his father) were at least smudgy with moustaches. With the
head-master's valediction and the grave elder-brotherliness of old
Henson, and the shrill cheers of a little crowd of juniors still echoing
in my head, I very naturally came home in a mood of exalted gravity, and
I can still remember pacing up and down the oblong lawn behind the
rockery and the fig-tree wall with my father, talking of my outlook with
all the tremendous _savoir faire_ that was natural to my age, and noting
with a secret gratification that our shoulders were now on a level. No
doubt we were discussing Oxford and all that I was to do at Oxford; I
don't remember a word of our speech though I recall the exact tint of
its color and the distinctive feeling of our measured equal paces in the
sunshine....
I must have gone up to Burnmore House the following afternoon. I went up
alone and I was sent out through the little door at the end of the big
gallery into the garden. In those days Lady Ladislaw had made an Indian
pavilion under the tall trees at the east end of the house, and here I
found her with her cousin Helena Christian entertaining a mixture of
people, a carriageful from Hampton End, the two elder Fawneys and a man
in brown who had I think ridden over from Chestoxter Castle. Lady
Ladislaw welcomed me with ample graciousness--as though I was a
personage. "The children" she said were still at tennis, and as she
spoke I saw Guy, grown nearly beyond recognition and then a shining
being in white, very straight and graceful, with a big soft hat and
overshadowed eyes that smiled, come out from the hurried endearments of
the sunflakes under the shadows of the great chestnuts, into the glow of
summer light before the pavilion.
"Steve arrived!" she cried, and waved a welcoming racquet.
I do not remember what I said to her or what else she said or what
anyone said. But I believe I could paint every detail of her effect. I
know that when she came out of the brightness into the shadow of the
pavilion it was like a regal condescension, and I know that she was
wonderfully self-possessed and helpful with her mother's hospitalities,
and that I marvelled I had never before perceived the subtler sweetness
in the cadence of her voice. I seem also to remember a severe internal
struggle for my self-possession, and that I had to recall my exalted
position in the sixth form to save myself from becoming tongue-tied and
abashed and awkward and utterly shamed.
You see she had her hair up and very prettily dressed, and those
aggressive lean legs of hers had vanished, and she was sheathed in
muslin that showed her the most delicately slender and beautiful of
young women. And she seemed so radiantly sure of herself!
After our first greeting I do not think I spoke to her or looked at her
again throughout the meal. I took things that she handed me with an
appearance of supreme indifference, was politely attentive to the elder
Miss Fawney, and engaged with Lady Ladislaw and the horsey little man in
brown in a discussion of the possibility of mechanical vehicles upon the
high road. That was in the early nineties. We were all of opinion that
it was impossible to make a sufficiently light engine for the purpose.
Afterwards Mary confessed to me how she had been looking forward to our
meeting, and how snubbed I had made her feel....
Then a little later than this meeting in the pavilion, though I am not
clear now whether it was the same or some subsequent afternoon, we are
walking in the sunken garden, and great clouds of purple clematis and
some less lavish heliotrope-colored creeper, foam up against the ruddy
stone balustrading. Just in front of us a fountain gushes out of a
grotto of artificial stalagmite and bathes the pedestal of an absurd
little statuette of the God of Love. We are talking almost easily. She
looks sideways at my face, already with the quiet controlled
watchfulness of a woman interested in a man, she smiles and she talks of
flowers and sunshine, the Canadian winter--and with an abrupt
transition, of old times we've had together in the shrubbery and the
wilderness of bracken out beyond. She seems tremendously grown-up and
womanly to me. I am talking my best, and glad, and in a manner scared at
the thrill her newly discovered beauty gives me, and keeping up my
dignity and coherence with an effort. My attention is constantly being
distracted to note how prettily she moves, to wonder why it is I never
noticed the sweet fall, the faint delightful whisper of a lisp in her
voice before.
We agree about the flowers and the sunshine and the Canadian
winter--about everything. "I think so often of those games we used to
invent," she declares. "So do I," I say, "so do I." And then with a
sudden boldness: "Once I broke a stick of yours, a rotten stick you
thought a sound one. Do you remember?"
Then we laugh together and seem to approach across a painful,
unnecessary distance that has separated us. It vanishes for ever. "I
couldn't now," she says, "smack your face like that, Stephen."
That seems to me a brilliantly daring and delightful thing for her to
say, and jolly of her to use my Christian name too! "I believe I
scratched," she adds.
"You never scratched," I assert with warm conviction. "Never."
"I did," she insists and I deny. "You couldn't."
"We're growing up," she cries. "That's what has happened to us. We shall
never fight again with our hands and feet, never--until death do us
part."
"For better, or worse," I say, with a sense of wit and enterprise beyond
all human precedent.
"For richer, or poorer," she cries, taking up my challenge with a
lifting laugh in her voice.
And then to make it all nothing again, she exclaims at the white lilies
that rise against masses of sweet bay along the further wall....
How plainly I can recall it all! How plainly and how brightly! As we
came up the broad steps at the further end towards the tennis lawn, she
turned suddenly upon me and with a novel assurance of command told me to
stand still. "_There_," she said with a hand out and seemed to survey me
with her chin up and her white neck at the level of my eyes. "Yes. A
whole step," she estimated, "and more, taller than I. You will look down
on me, Stephen, now, for all the rest of our days."
"I shall always stand," I answered, "a step or so below you."
"No," she said, "come up to the level. A girl should be smaller than a
man. You are a man, Stephen--almost.... You must be near six feet....
Here's Guy with the box of balls."
She flitted about the tennis court before me, playing with Philip
against Guy and myself. She punished some opening condescensions with a
wicked vigor--and presently Guy and I were straining every nerve to save
the set. She had a low close serve I remember that seemed perfectly
straightforward and simple, and was very difficult to return.
§ 6
All that golden summer on the threshold of my manhood was filled by
Mary. I loved her with the love of a boy and a man. Either I was with
Mary or I was hoping and planning to be with Mary or I was full of some
vivid new impression of her or some enigmatical speech, some pregnant
nothing, some glance or gesture engaged and perplexed my mind. In those
days I slept the profound sweet sleep of youth, but whenever that deep
flow broke towards the shallows, as I sank into it at night and came out
of it at morning, I passed through dreams of Mary to and from a world of
waking thought of her.
There must have been days of friendly intercourse when it seemed we
talked nothings and wandered and meandered among subjects, but always we
had our eyes on one another. And afterwards I would spend long hours in
recalling and analyzing those nothings, questioning their nothingness,
making out of things too submerged and impalpable for the rough drags of
recollection, promises and indications. I would invent ingenious things
to say, things pushing out suddenly from nothingness to extreme
significance. I rehearsed a hundred declarations.
It was easy for us to be very much together. We were very free that
summer and life was all leisure. Lady Ladislaw was busied with her own
concerns; she sometimes went away for two or three days leaving no one
but an attenuated governess with even the shadow of a claim to interfere
with Mary. Moreover she was used to seeing me with her children at
Burnmore; we were still in her eyes no more than children.... And also
perhaps she did not greatly mind if indeed we did a little fall in love
together. To her that may have seemed a very natural and slight and
transitory possibility....
One afternoon of warm shadows in the wood near the red-lacquered Chinese
bridge, we two were alone together and we fell silent. I was trembling
and full of a wild courage. I can feel now the exquisite surmise, the
doubt of that moment. Our eyes met. She looked up at me with an
unwonted touch of fear in her expression and I laid my hands on her. She
did not recoil, she stood mute with her lips pressed together, looking
at me steadfastly. I can feel that moment now as a tremendous
hesitation, blank and yet full of light and life, like a clear sky in
the moment before dawn....
She made a little move towards me. Impulsively, with no word said, we
kissed.
§ 7
I would like very much to give you a portrait of Mary as she was in
those days. Every portrait I ever had of her I burnt in the sincerity of
what was to have been our final separation, and now I have nothing of
her in my possession. I suppose that in the files of old illustrated
weeklies somewhere, a score of portraits must be findable. Yet
photographs have a queer quality of falsehood. They have no movement and
always there was a little movement about Mary just as there is always a
little scent about flowers. She was slender and graceful, so that she
seemed taller than she was, she had beautifully shaped arms and a
brightness in her face; it seemed to me always that there was light in
her face, more than the light that shone upon it. Her fair, very
slightly reddish hair--it was warm like Australian gold--flowed with a
sort of joyous bravery back from her low broad forehead; the color under
her delicate skin was bright and quick, and her mouth always smiled
faintly. There was a peculiar charm for me about her mouth, a
whimsicality, a sort of humorous resolve in the way in which the upper
lip fell upon the lower and in a faint obliquity that increased with
her quickening smile. She spoke with a very clear delicate intonation
that made one want to hear her speak again; she often said faintly
daring things, and when she did, she had that little catch in the
breath--of one who dares. She did not talk hastily; often before she
spoke came a brief grave pause. Her eyes were brightly blue except when
the spirit of mischief took her and then they became black, and there
was something about the upper and lower lids that made them not only the
prettiest but the sweetest and kindliest eyes in the world. And she
moved with a quiet rapidity, without any needless movements, to do
whatever she had a mind to do....
But how impossible it is to convey the personal charm of a human being.
I catalogue these things and it is as if she moved about silently behind
my stumbling enumeration and smiled at me still, with her eyes a little
darkened, mocking me. That phantom will never be gone from my mind. It
was all of these things and none of these things that made me hers, as I
have never been any other person's....
We grew up together. The girl of nineteen mingles in my memory with the
woman of twenty-five.
Always we were equals, or if anything she was the better of us two. I
never made love to her in the commoner sense of the word, a sense in
which the woman is conceived of as shy, unawakened, younger, more
plastic, and the man as tempting, creating responses, persuading and
compelling. We made love to each other as youth should, we were friends
lit by a passion.... I think that is the best love. If I could wish your
future I would have you love someone neither older and stronger nor
younger and weaker than yourself. I would have you have neither a toy
nor a devotion, for the one makes the woman contemptible and the other
the man. There should be something almost sisterly between you. Love
neither a goddess nor a captive woman. But I would wish you a better
fate in your love than chanced to me.
Mary was not only naturally far more quick-minded, more swiftly
understanding than I, but more widely educated. Mine was the stiff
limited education of the English public school and university; I could
not speak and read and think French and German as she could for all that
I had a pedantic knowledge of the older forms of those tongues; and the
classics and mathematics upon which I had spent the substance of my
years were indeed of little use to me, have never been of any real use
to me, they were ladders too clumsy to carry about and too short to
reach anything. My general ideas came from the newspapers and the
reviews. She on the other hand had read much, had heard no end of good
conversation, the conversation of people who mattered, had thought for
herself and had picked the brains of her brothers. Her mother had let
her read whatever books she liked, partly because she believed that was
the proper thing to do, and partly because it was so much less trouble
to be liberal in such things.
We had the gravest conversations.
I do not remember that we talked much of love, though we were very much
in love. We kissed; sometimes greatly daring we walked hand in hand;
once I took her in my arms and carried her over a swampy place beyond
the Killing Wood, and held her closely to me; that was a great event
between us; but we were shy of one another, shy even of very intimate
words; and a thousand daring and beautiful things I dreamt of saying to
her went unsaid. I do not remember any endearing names from that time.
But we jested and shared our humors, shaped our developing ideas in
quaint forms to amuse one another and talked--as young men talk
together.
We talked of religion; I think she was the first person to thaw the
private silences that had kept me bound in these matters even from
myself for years. I can still recall her face, a little flushed and
coming nearer to mine after avowals and comparisons. "But Stephen," she
says; "if none of these things are really true, why do they keep on
telling them to us? What is true? What are we for? What is Everything
for?"
I remember the awkwardness I felt at these indelicate thrusts into
topics I had come to regard as forbidden.
"I suppose there's a sort of truth in them," I said, and then more
Siddonsesquely: "endless people wiser than we are----"
"Yes," she said. "But that doesn't matter to us. Endless people wiser
than we are have said one thing, and endless people wiser than we are
have said exactly the opposite. It's _we_ who have to understand--for
ourselves.... We don't understand, Stephen."
I was forced to a choice between faith and denial. But I parried with
questions. "Don't you," I asked, "feel there is a God?"
She hesitated. "There is something--something very beautiful," she said
and stopped as if her breath had gone. "That is all I know, Stephen...."
And I remember too that we talked endlessly about the things I was to do
in the world. I do not remember that we talked about the things she was
to do, by some sort of instinct and some sort of dexterity she evaded
that, from the very first she had reserves from me, but my career and
purpose became as it were the form in which we discussed all the
purposes of life. I became Man in her imagination, the protagonist of
the world. At first I displayed the modest worthy desire for respectable
service that Harbury had taught me, but her clear, sceptical little
voice pierced and tore all those pretences to shreds. "Do some decent
public work," I said, or some such phrase.
"But is that All you want?" I hear her asking. "Is that All you want?"
I lay prone upon the turf and dug up a root of grass with my penknife.
"Before I met you it was," I said.
"And now?"
"I want you."
"I'm nothing to want. I want you to want all the world.... _Why
shouldn't you?_"
I think I must have talked of the greatness of serving the empire. "Yes,
but splendidly," she insisted. "Not doing little things for other
people--who aren't doing anything at all. I want you to conquer people
and lead people.... When I see you, Stephen, sometimes--I almost wish I
were a man. In order to be able to do all the things that you are going
to do."
"For you," I said, "for you."
I stretched out my hand for hers, and my gesture went disregarded.
She sat rather crouched together with her eyes gazing far away across
the great spaces of the park.
"That is what women are for," she said. "To make men see how splendid
life can be. To lift them up--out of a sort of timid grubbiness----" She
turned upon me suddenly. "Stephen," she said, "promise me. Whatever you
become, you promise and swear here and now never to be grey and grubby,
never to be humpy and snuffy, never to be respectable and modest and
dull and a little fat, like--like everybody. Ever."
"I swear," I said.
"By me."
"By you. No book to kiss! Please, give me your hand."
§ 8
All through that summer we saw much of each other. I was up at the House
perhaps every other day; we young people were supposed to be all in a
company together down by the tennis lawns, but indeed we dispersed and
came and went by a kind of tacit understanding, Guy and Philip each with
one of the Fawney girls and I with Mary. I put all sorts of
constructions upon the freedom I was given with her, but I perceive now
that we still seemed scarcely more than children to Lady Ladislaw, and
that the idea of our marriage was as inconceivable to her as if we had
been brother and sister. Matrimonially I was as impossible as one of the
stable boys. All the money I could hope to earn for years to come would
not have sufficed even to buy Mary clothes. But as yet we thought little
of matters so remote, glad in our wonderful new discovery of love, and
when at last I went off to Oxford, albeit the parting moved us to much
tenderness and vows and embraces, I had no suspicion that never more in
all our lives would Mary and I meet freely and gladly without
restriction. Yet so it was. From that day came restraints and
difficulties; the shadow of furtiveness fell between us; our
correspondence had to be concealed.
I went to Oxford as one goes into exile; she to London. I would post to
her so that the letters reached Landor House before lunch time when the
sun of Lady Ladislaw came over the horizon, but indeed as yet no one was
watching her letters. Afterwards as she moved about she gave me other
instructions, and for the most part I wrote to her in envelopes
addressed for her by one of the Fawney girls, who was under her spell
and made no enquiry for what purpose these envelopes were needed.
To me of course Mary wrote without restraint. All her letters to me were
destroyed after our crisis, but some of mine to her she kept for many
years; at last they came back to me so that I have them now. And for all
their occasional cheapness and crudity, I do not find anything in them
to be ashamed of. They reflect, they are chiefly concerned with that
search for a career of fine service which was then the chief
preoccupation of my mind, the bias is all to a large imperialism, but it
is manifest that already the first ripples of a rising tide of criticism
against the imperialist movement had reached and were exercising me. In
one letter I am explaining that imperialism is not a mere
aggressiveness, but the establishment of peace and order throughout half
the world. "We may never withdraw," I wrote with all the confidence of a
Foreign Secretary, "from all these great territories of ours, but we
shall stay only to raise their peoples ultimately to an equal
citizenship with ourselves." And then in the same letter: "and if I do
not devote myself to the Empire what else is there that gives anything
like the same opportunity of a purpose in life." I find myself in
another tolerantly disposed to "accept socialism," but manifestly
hostile to "the narrow mental habits of the socialists." The large note
of youth! And in another I am clearly very proud and excited and a
little mock-modest over the success of my first two speeches in the
Union.
On the whole I like the rather boyish, tremendously serious young man of
those letters. An egotist, of course, but what youth was ever anything
else? I may write that much freely now, for by this time he is almost as
much outside my personality as you or my father. He is the young
Stratton, one of a line. I like his gravity; if youth is not grave with
all the great spectacle of life opening at its feet, then surely no age
need be grave. I love and envy his simplicity and honesty. His sham
modesty and so forth are so translucent as scarcely to matter. It is
clear I was opening my heart to myself as I opened it to Mary. I wasn't
acting to her. I meant what I said. And as I remember her answers she
took much the same high tone with me, though her style of writing was
far lighter than mine, more easy and witty and less continuous. She
flashed and flickered. As for confessed love-making there is very
little,--I find at the end of one of my notes after the signature, "I
love you, I love you." And she was even more restrained. Such little
phrases as "Dear Stevenage"--that was one of her odd names for me--"I
wish you were here," or "Dear, _dear_ Stevenage," were epistolary
events, and I would re-read the blessed wonderful outbreak a hundred
times....
Our separation lengthened. There was a queer detached unexpected
meeting in London in December, for some afternoon gathering. I was shy
and the more disconcerted because she was in winter town clothes that
made her seem strange and changed. Then came the devastating intimation
that all through the next summer the Ladislaws were to be in Scotland.
I did my boyish utmost to get to Scotland. They were at Lankart near
Invermoriston, and the nearest thing I could contrive was to join a
reading party in Skye, a reading party of older men who manifestly had
no great desire for me. For more than a year we never met at all, and
all sorts of new things happened to us both. I perceived they happened
to me, but I did not think they happened to her. Of course we changed.
Of course in a measure and relatively we forgot. Of course there were
weeks when we never thought of each other at all. Then would come phases
of hunger. I remember a little note of hers. "Oh Stevenage," it was
scrawled, "perhaps next Easter!" Next Easter was an aching desolation.
The blinds of Burnmore House remained drawn; the place was empty except
for three old servants on board-wages. The Christians went instead to
the Canary Isles, following some occult impulse of Lady Ladislaw's. Lord
Ladislaw spent the winter in Italy.
What an empty useless beauty the great Park possessed during those
seasons of intermission! There were a score of places in it we had made
our own....
Her letters to Oxford would cease for weeks, and suddenly revive and
become frequent. Now and then would come a love-letter that seemed to
shine like stars as I read it; for the most part they were low-pitched,
friendly or humorous letters in a roundish girlish writing that was
maturing into a squarely characteristic hand. My letters to her too I
suppose varied as greatly. We began to be used to living so apart. There
were weeks of silence....
Yet always when I thought of my life as a whole, Mary ruled it. With her
alone I had talked of my possible work and purpose; to her alone had I
confessed to ambitions beyond such modest worthiness as a public school
drills us to affect....
Then the whole sky of my life lit up again with a strange light of
excitement and hope. I had a note, glad and serenely friendly, to say
they were to spend all the summer at Burnmore.
I remember how I handled and scrutinized that letter, seeking for some
intimation that our former intimacy was still alive. We were to meet.
How should we meet? How would she look at me? What would she think of
me?
§ 9
Of course it was all different. Our first encounter in this new phase
had a quality of extreme disillusionment. The warm living creature, who
would whisper, who would kiss with wonderful lips, who would say strange
daring things, who had soft hair one might touch with a thrilling and
worshipful hand, who changed one at a word or a look into a God of
pride, became as if she had been no more than a dream. A self-possessed
young aristocrat in white and brown glanced at me from amidst a group of
brilliant people on the terrace, nodded as it seemed quite carelessly
in acknowledgment of my salutation, and resumed her confident
conversation with a tall stooping man, no less a person than Evesham,
the Prime Minister. He was lunching at Burnmore on his way across
country to the Rileys. I heard that dear laugh of hers, as ready and
easy as when she laughed with me. I had not heard it for nearly three
years--nor any sound that had its sweetness. "But Mr. Evesham," she was
saying, "nowadays we don't believe that sort of thing----"
"There are a lot of things still for you to believe," says Mr. Evesham
beaming. "A lot of things! One's capacity increases. It grows with
exercise. Justin will bear me out."
Beyond her stood an undersized, brown-clad middle-aged man with a big
head, a dark face and expressive brown eyes fixed now in unrestrained
admiration on Mary's laughing face. This then was Justin, the incredibly
rich and powerful, whose comprehensive operations could make and break a
thousand fortunes in a day. He answered Evesham carelessly, with his
gaze still on Mary, and in a voice too low for my straining ears. There
was some woman in the group also, but she has left nothing upon my mind
whatever except an effect of black and a very decorative green sunshade.
She greeted Justin's remark, I remember, with the little yelp of
laughter that characterized that set. I think too there was someone else
in the group; but I cannot clearly recall who....
Presently as I and Philip made unreal conversation together I saw Mary
disengage herself and come towards us. It was as if a princess came
towards a beggar. Absurd are the changes of phase between women and
men. A year or so ago and all of us had been but "the children"
together; now here were I and Philip mere youths still, nobodies, echoes
and aspirations, crude promises at the best, and here was Mary in full
flower, as glorious and central as the Hampton Court azaleas in spring.
"And this is Stephen," she said, aglow with happy confidence.
I made no memorable reply, and there was a little pause thick with mute
questionings.
"After lunch," she said with her eye on mine, "I am going to measure
against you on the steps. I'd hoped--when you weren't looking--I might
creep up----"
"I've taken no advantage," I said.
"You've kept your lead."
Justin had followed her towards us, and now held out a hand to Philip.
"Well, Philip my boy," he said, and defined our places. Philip made some
introductory gesture with a word or so towards me. Justin glanced at me
as one might glance at someone's new dog, gave an expressionless nod to
my stiff movement of recognition, and addressed himself at once to Mary.
"Lady Mary," he said, "I've wanted to tell you----"
I caught her quick eye for a moment and knew she had more to say to me,
but neither she nor I had the skill and alacrity to get that said.
"I wanted to tell you," said Justin, "I've found a little Japanese who's
done exactly what you wanted with that group of dwarf maples."
She clearly didn't understand.
"But what did I want, Mr. Justin?" she asked.
"Don't say that you forget?" cried Justin. "Oh don't tell me you
forget! You wanted a little exact copy of a Japanese house---- I've had
it done. Beneath the trees...."
"And so you're back in Burnmore, Mr. Stratton," said Lady Ladislaw
intervening between me and their duologue. And I never knew how pleased
Mary was with this faithful realization of her passing and forgotten
fancy. My hostess greeted me warmly and pressed my hand, smiled
mechanically and looked over my shoulder all the while to Mr. Evesham
and her company generally, and then came the deep uproar of a gong from
the house and we were all moving in groups and couples luncheonward.
Justin walked with Lady Mary, and she was I saw an inch taller than his
squat solidity. A tall lady in rose-pink had taken possession of Guy,
Evesham and Lady Ladislaw made the two centres of a straggling group who
were bandying recondite political allusions. Then came one or two
couples and trios with nothing very much to say and active ears. Philip
and I brought up the rear silently and in all humility. Even young Guy
had gone over our heads. I was too full of a stupendous realization for
any words. Of course, during those years, she had been doing--no end of
things! And while I had been just drudging with lectures and books and
theorizing about the Empire and what I could do with it, and taking
exercise, she had learnt, it seemed--the World.
§ 10
Lunch was in the great dining-room. There was a big table and two
smaller ones; we sat down anyhow, but the first comers had grouped
themselves about Lady Ladislaw and Evesham and Justin and Mary in a
central orb, and I had to drift perforce to one of the satellites. I
secured a seat whence I could get a glimpse ever and again over Justin's
assiduous shoulders of a delicate profile, and I found myself
immediately engaged in answering the innumerable impossible questions of
Lady Viping, the widow of terrible old Sir Joshua, that devastating
divorce court judge who didn't believe in divorces. His domestic
confidences had I think corrupted her mind altogether. She cared for
nothing but evidence. She was a rustling, incessant, sandy, peering
woman with a lorgnette and rapid, confidential lisping undertones, and
she wanted to know who everybody was and how they were related. This
kept us turning towards the other tables--and when my information failed
she would call upon Sir Godfrey Klavier, who was explaining, rather
testily on account of her interruptions, to Philip Christian and a
little lady in black and the elder Fawney girl just why he didn't
believe Lady Ladislaw's new golf course would succeed. There were two or
three other casual people at our table; one of the Roden girls, a young
guardsman and, I think, some other man whom I don't clearly remember.
"And so that's the great Mr. Justin," rustled Lady Viping and stared
across me.
(I saw Evesham, leaning rather over the table to point some remark at
Mary, and noted her lips part to reply.)
"What _is_ the word?" insisted Lady Viping like a fly in my ear.
I turned on her guiltily.
"Whether it's brachy," said Lady Viping, "or whether it's dolly--_I_ can
never remember?"
I guessed she was talking of Justin's head. "Oh!--brachycephalic," I
said.
I had lost Mary's answer.
"They say he's a woman hater," said Lady Viping. "It hardly looks like
it now, does it?"
"Who?" I asked. "What?--oh!--Justin."
"The great financial cannibal. Suppose she turned him into a
philanthropist! Stranger things have happened. Look!--now. The man's
face is positively tender."
I hated looking, and I could not help but look. It was as if this
detestable old woman was dragging me down and down, down far below all
dignity to her own level of a peeping observer. Justin was saying
something to Mary in an undertone, something that made her glance up
swiftly and at me before she answered, and there I was with my head side
by side with those quivering dyed curls, that flighty black bonnet, that
remorseless observant lorgnette. I could have sworn aloud at the
hopeless indignity of my pose.
I saw Mary color quickly before I looked away.
"Charming, isn't she?" said Lady Viping, and I discovered those infernal
glasses were for a moment honoring me. They shut with a click. "Ham,"
said Lady Viping. "I told him no ham--and now I remember--I like ham. Or
rather I like spinach. I forgot the spinach. One has the ham for the
spinach,--don't you think? Yes,--tell him. She's a perfect Dresden
ornament, Mr. Stratton. She's adorable ... (lorgnette and search for
fresh topics). Who is the dark lady with the slight moustache--sitting
there next to Guy? Sir Godfrey, who is the dark lady? No, I don't mean
Mary Fitton. Over there! Mrs. Roperstone. Ooh. _The_ Mrs. Roperstone.
(Renewed lorgnette and click.) Yes--ham. With spinach. A lot of spinach.
There's Mr. Evesham laughing again. He's greatly amused. Unusual for him
to laugh twice. At least, aloud. (Rustle and adjustment of lorgnette.)
Mr. Stratton, don't you think?--exactly like a little shepherdess. Only
I can't say I think Mr. Justin is like a shepherd. On the whole, more
like a large cloisonné jar. Now Guy would do. As a pair they're
beautiful. Pity they're brother and sister. Curious how that boy manages
to be big and yet delicate. H'm. Mixed mantel ornaments. Sir Godfrey,
how old _is_ Mrs. Roperstone?... You never know on principle. I think I
shall make Mr. Stratton guess. What do you think, Mr. Stratton?... You
never guess on principle! Well, we're all very high principled. (Fresh
exploratory movements of the lorgnette.) Mr. Stratton, tell me; is that
little peaked man near Lady Ladislaw Mr. Roperstone? I thought as much!"
All this chatter is mixed up in my mind with an unusual sense of
hovering attentive menservants, who seemed all of them to my heated
imagination to be watching me (and particularly one clean-shaven,
reddish-haired, full-faced young man) lest I looked too much at the Lady
Mary Christian. Of course they were merely watching our plates and
glasses, but my nerves and temper were now in such a state that if my
man went off to the buffet to get Sir Godfrey the pickled walnuts, I
fancied he went to report the progress of my infatuation, and if a
strange face appeared with the cider cup, that this was a new observer
come to mark the revelation of my behavior. My food embarrassed me. I
found hidden meanings in the talk of the Roden girl and her guardsman,
and an ironical discovery in Sir Godfrey's eye....
I felt indignant with Mary. I felt she disowned me and deserted me and
repudiated me, that she ought in some manner to have recognized me. I
gave her no credit for her speech to me before the lunch, or her promise
to measure against me again. I blinded myself to all her frank
friendliness. I felt she ought not to notice Justin, ought not to answer
him....
Clearly she liked those men to flatter her, she liked it....
I remember too, so that I must have noted it and felt it then as a thing
perceived for the first time, the large dignity of the room, the tall
windows and splendid rich curtains, the darkened Hoppners upon the
walls. I noted too the quality and abundance of the table things, and
there were grapes and peaches, strawberries, cherries and green almonds,
piled lavishly above the waiting dessert plates with the golden knives
and forks, upon a table in the sunshine of the great bay. The very
sunshine filtered through the tall narrow panes from the great chestnut
trees without, seemed of a different quality from the common light of
day....
I felt like a poor relation. I sympathized with Anarchists. We had come
out of the Park now finally, both Mary and I--into this....
"Mr. Stratton I am sure agrees with me."
For a time I had been marooned conversationally, and Lady Viping had
engaged Sir Godfrey. Evidently he was refractory and she was back at me.
"Look at it now in profile," she said, and directed me once more to that
unendurable grouping. Justin again!
"It's a heavy face," I said.
"It's a powerful face. I wouldn't care anyhow to be up against it--as
people say." And the lorgnette shut with a click. "What is this?
Peaches!--Yes, and give me some cream." ...
I hovered long for that measuring I had been promised on the steps, but
either Mary had forgotten or she deemed it wiser to forget.
§ 11
I took my leave of Lady Ladislaw when the departure of Evesham broke the
party into dispersing fragments. I started down the drive towards the
rectory and then vaulted the railings by the paddock and struck across
beyond the mere. I could not go home with the immense burthen of thought
and new ideas and emotions that had come upon me. I felt confused and
shattered to incoherence by the new quality of Mary's atmosphere. I
turned my steps towards the wilder, lonelier part of the park beyond the
Killing Wood, and lay down in a wide space of grass between two
divergent thickets of bracken, and remained there for a very long time.
There it was in the park that for the first time I pitted myself against
life upon a definite issue, and prepared my first experience of defeat.
"I _will_ have her," I said, hammering at the turf with my fist. "I
will. I do not care if I give all my life...."
Then I lay still and bit the sweetness out of joints of grass, and
presently thought and planned.
CHAPTER THE FOURTH
THE MARRIAGE OF THE LADY MARY CHRISTIAN
§ 1
For three or four days I could get no word with Mary. I could not now
come and go as I had been able to do in the days when we were still "the
children." I could not work, I could not rest, I prowled as near as I
could to Burnmore House hoping for some glimpse of her, waiting for the
moment when I could decently present myself again at the house.
When at last I called, Justin had gone and things had some flavor of the
ancient time. Lady Ladislaw received me with an airy intimacy, all the
careful responsibility of her luncheon party manner thrown aside. "And
how goes Cambridge?" she sang, sailing through the great saloon towards
me, and I thought that for the occasion Cambridge instead of Oxford
would serve sufficiently well. "You'll find them all at tennis," said
Lady Ladislaw, and waved me on to the gardens. There I found all four of
them and had to wait until their set was finished.
"Mary," I said at the first chance, "are we never to talk again?"
"It's all different," she said.
"I am dying to talk to you--as we used to talk."
"And I--Stevenage. But---- You see?"
"Next time I come," I said, "I shall bring you a letter. There is so
much----"
"No," she said. "Can't you get up in the morning? Very early--five or
six. No one is up until ever so late."
"I'd stay up all night."
"Serve!" said Maxton, who was playing the two of us and had stopped I
think to tighten a shoe.
Things conspired against any more intimacy for a time. But we got our
moment on the way to tea. She glanced back at Philip, who was loosening
the net, and then forward to estimate the distance of Maxton and Guy.
"They're all three going," she said, "after Tuesday. Then--before six."
"Wednesday?"
"Yes."
"Suppose after all," she threw out, "I can't come."
"Fortunes of war."
"If I can't come one morning I may come another," she spoke hastily, and
I perceived that Guy and Maxton had turned and were waiting for us.
"You know the old Ice House?"
"Towards the gardens?"
"Yes. On the further side. Don't come by the road, come across by the
end of the mere. Lie in the bracken until you see me coming.... I've not
played tennis a dozen times this year. Not half a dozen."
This last was for the boys.
"You've played twenty times at least since you've been here," said Guy,
with the simple bluntness of a brother. "I'm certain."
§ 2
To this day a dewy morning in late August brings back the thought of
Mary and those stolen meetings. I have the minutest recollection of the
misty bloom upon the turf, and the ragged, filmy carpet of gossamer on
either hand, of the warm wetness of every little blade and blossom and
of the little scraps and seeds of grass upon my soaking and discolored
boots. Our footsteps were dark green upon the dew-grey grass. And I feel
the same hungry freshness again at the thought of those stolen meetings.
Presently came the sunrise, blinding, warming, dew-dispelling arrows of
gold smiting through the tree stems, a flood of light foaming over the
bracken and gilding the under sides of the branches. Everything is
different and distinctive in those opening hours; everything has a
different value from what it has by day. All the little things upon the
ground, fallen branches, tussocks, wood-piles, have a peculiar intensity
and importance, seem magnified, because of the length of their shadows
in the slanting rays, and all the great trees seem lifted above the
light and merged with the sky. And at last, a cool grey outline against
the blaze and with a glancing iridescent halo about her, comes Mary,
flitting, adventurous, friendly, wonderful.
"Oh Stevenage!" she cries, "to see you again!"
We each hold out both our hands and clasp and hesitate and rather shyly
kiss.
"Come!" she says, "we can talk for an hour. It's still not six. And
there is a fallen branch where we can sit and put our feet out of the
wet. Oh! it's so good to be out of things again--clean out of
things--with you. Look! there is a stag watching us."
"You're glad to be with me?" I ask, jealous of the very sunrise.
"I am always glad," she says, "to be with you. Why don't we always get
up at dawn, Stevenage, every day of our lives?"
We go rustling through the grass to the prostrate timber she has chosen.
(I can remember even the thin bracelet on the wrist of the hand that
lifted her skirt.) I help her to clamber into a comfortable fork from
which her feet can swing....
Such fragments as this are as bright, as undimmed, as if we had met this
morning. But then comes our conversation, and that I find vague and
irregularly obliterated. But I think I must have urged her to say she
loved me, and beat about the bush of that declaration, too fearful to
put my heart's wish to the issue, that she would promise to wait three
years for me--until I could prove it was not madness for her to marry
me. "I have been thinking of it all night and every night since I have
been here," I said. "Somehow I will do something. In some way--I will
get hold of things. Believe me!--with all my strength."
I was standing between the forking boughs, and she was looking down upon
me.
"Stephen dear," she said, "dear, dear Boy; I have never wanted to kiss
you so much in all my life. Dear, come close to me."
She bent her fresh young face down to mine, her fingers were in my hair.
"My Knight," she whispered close to me. "My beautiful young Knight."
I whispered back and touched her dew fresh lips....
"And tell me what you would do to conquer the world for me?" she asked.
I cannot remember now a word of all the vague threatenings against the
sundering universe with which I replied. Her hand was on my shoulder as
she listened....
But I do know that even on this first morning she left me with a sense
of beautiful unreality, of having dipped for some precious moments into
heroic gossamer. All my world subjugation seemed already as evanescent
as the morning haze and the vanishing dews as I stood, a little hidden
in the shadows of the Killing Wood and ready to plunge back at the first
hint of an observer, and watched her slender whiteness flit
circumspectly towards the house.
§ 3
Our next three or four meetings are not so clearly defined. We did not
meet every morning for fear that her early rising should seem too
punctual to be no more than a chance impulse, nor did we go to the same
place. But there stands out very clearly a conversation in a different
mood. We had met at the sham ruins at the far end of the great
shrubbery, a huge shattered Corinthian portico of rather damaged stucco
giving wide views of the hills towards Alfridsham between its three
erect pillars, and affording a dry seat upon its fallen ones. It was an
overcast morning, I remember probably the hour was earlier; a kind of
twilight clearness made the world seem strange and the bushes and trees
between us and the house very heavy and still and dark. And we were at
cross purpose, for now it was becoming clear to me that Mary did not
mean to marry me, that she dreaded making any promise to me for the
future, that all the heroic common cause I wanted with her, was quite
alien to her dreams.
"But Mary," I said looking at her colorless delicate face, "don't you
love me? Don't you want me?"
"You know I love you, Stevenage," she said. "You know."
"But if two people love one another, they want to be always together,
they want to belong to each other."
She looked at me with her face very intent upon her meaning.
"Stevenage," she said after one of those steadfast pauses of hers, "I
want to belong to myself."
"Naturally," I said with an air of disposing of an argument, and then
paused.
"Why should one have to tie oneself always to one other human being?"
she asked. "Why must it be like that?"
I do not remember how I tried to meet this extraordinary idea. "One
loves," I may have said. The subtle scepticisms of her mind went
altogether beyond my habits of thinking; it had never occurred to me
that there was any other way of living except in these voluntary and
involuntary mutual servitudes in which men and women live and die. "If
you love me," I urged, "if you love me---- I want nothing better in all
my life but to love and serve and keep you and make you happy."
She surveyed me and weighed my words against her own.
"I love meeting you," she said. "I love your going because it means
that afterwards you will come again. I love this--this slipping out to
you. But up there, there is a room in the house that is _my_
place--me--my own. Nobody follows me there. I want to go on living,
Stevenage, just as I am living now. I don't want to become someone's
certain possession, to be just usual and familiar to anyone. No, not
even to you."
"But if you love," I cried.
"To you least of all. Don't you see?--I want to be wonderful to you,
Stevenage, more than to anyone. I want--I want always to make your heart
beat faster. I want always to be coming to you with my own heart beating
faster. Always and always I want it to be like that. Just as it has been
on these mornings. It has been beautiful--altogether beautiful."
"Yes," I said, rather helplessly, and struggled with great issues I had
never faced before.
"It isn't," I said, "how people live."
"It is how I want to live," said Mary.
"It isn't the way life goes."
"I want it to be. Why shouldn't it be? Why at any rate shouldn't it be
for me?"
§ 4
I made some desperate schemes to grow suddenly rich and powerful, and I
learnt for the first time my true economic value. Already my father and
I had been discussing my prospects in life and he had been finding me
vague and difficult. I was full of large political intentions, but so
far I had made no definite plans for a living that would render my
political ambitions possible. It was becoming apparent to me that for a
poor man in England, the only possible route to political distinction is
the bar, and I was doing my best to reconcile myself to the years of
waiting and practice that would have to precede my political début.
My father disliked the law. And I do not think it reconciled him to the
idea of my being a barrister that afterwards I hoped to become a
politician. "It isn't in our temperament, Stephen," he said. "It's a
pushing, bullying, cramming, base life. I don't see you succeeding
there, and I don't see myself rejoicing even if you do succeed. You have
to shout, and Strattons don't shout; you have to be smart and tricky and
there's never been a smart and tricky Stratton yet; you have to snatch
opportunities and get the better of the people and misrepresent the
realities of every case you touch. You're a paid misrepresenter. They
say you'll get a fellowship, Stephen. Why not stay up, and do some
thinking for a year or so. There'll be enough to keep you. Write a
little."
"The bar," I said, "is only a means to an end."
"If you succeed."
"If I succeed. One has to take the chances of life everywhere."
"And what is the end?"
"Constructive statesmanship."
"Not in that way," said my father, pouring himself a second glass of
port, and turned over my high-sounding phrase with a faint hint of
distaste; "Constructive Statesmanship. No. Once a barrister always a
barrister. You'll only be a party politician.... Vulgar men....
Vulgar.... If you succeed that is...."
He criticized me but he did not oppose me, and already in the beginning
of the summer we had settled that I should be called to the bar.
Now suddenly I wanted to go back upon all these determinations. I began
to demand in the intellectual slang of the time "more actuality," and to
amaze my father with talk about empire makers and the greatness of Lord
Strathcona and Cecil Rhodes. Why, I asked, shouldn't I travel for a year
in search of opportunity? At Oxford I had made acquaintance with a son
of Pramley's, the big Mexican and Borneo man, and to him I wrote,
apropos of a half-forgotten midnight talk in the rooms of some common
friend. He wrote back with the suggestion that I should go and talk to
his father, and I tore myself away from Mary and went up to see that
great exploiter of undeveloped possibilities and have one of the most
illuminating and humiliating conversations in the world. He was, I
remember, a little pale-complexioned, slow-speaking man with a humorous
blue eye, a faint, just perceptible northern accent and a trick of
keeping silent for a moment after you had finished speaking, and he
talked to me as one might talk to a child of eight who wanted to know
how one could become a commander-in-chief. His son had evidently
emphasized my Union reputation, and he would have been quite willing, I
perceived, to give me employment if I had displayed the slightest
intelligence or ability in any utilizable direction. But quite
dreadfully he sounded my equipment with me and showed me the emptiness
of my stores.
"You want some way that gives you a chance of growing rich rapidly," he
said. "Aye. It's not a bad idea. But there's others, you know, have
tried that game before ye.
"You don't want riches just for riches but for an end. Aye! Aye! It's
the spending attracts ye. You'd not have me think you'd the sin of
avarice. I'm clear on that about ye.
"Well," he explained, "it's all one of three things we do, you
know--prospecting and forestalling and--just stealing, and the only
respectable way is prospecting. You'd prefer the respectable way, I
suppose?... I knew ye would. Well, let's see what chances ye have."
And he began to probe my practical knowledge. It was like an unfit man
stripping for a medical inspection. Did I know anything of oil, of
rubber, of sugar, of substances generally, had I studied mineralogy or
geology, had I any ideas of industrial processes, of technical
chemistry, of rare minerals, of labor problems and the handling of alien
labor, of the economics of railway management or of camping out in dry,
thinly populated countries, or again could I maybe speak Spanish or
Italian or Russian? The little dons who career about Oxford afoot and
awheel, wearing old gowns and mortarboards, giggling over Spooner's
latest, and being tremendous "characters" in the intervals of concocting
the ruling-class mind, had turned my mind away from such matters
altogether. I had left that sort of thing to Germans and east-end Jews
and young men from the upper-grade board schools of Sheffield and
Birmingham. I was made to realize appalling wildernesses of
ignorance....
"You see," said old Pramley, "you don't seem to know anything whatever.
It's a deeficulty. It'll stand in your way a little now, though no
doubt you'd be quick at the uptake--after all the education they've
given ye.... But it stands in your way, if ye think of setting out to do
something large and effective, just immediately...."
Moreover it came out, I forget now how, that I hadn't clearly grasped
the difference between cumulative and non-cumulative preference
shares....
I remember too how I dined alone that evening in a mood between frantic
exasperation and utter abasement in the window of the Mediated
Universities Club, of which I was a junior member under the
undergraduate rule. And I lay awake all night in one of the austere club
bedrooms, saying to old Pramley a number of extremely able and
penetrating things that had unhappily not occurred to me during the
progress of our interview. I didn't go back to Burnmore for several
days. I had set my heart on achieving something, on returning with some
earnest of the great attack I was to make upon the separating great
world between myself and Mary. I am far enough off now from that angry
and passionate youngster to smile at the thought that my subjugation of
things in general and high finance in particular took at last the form
of proposing to go into the office of Bean, Medhurst, Stockton, and
Schnadhorst upon half commission terms. I was awaiting my father's reply
to this startling new suggestion when I got a telegram from Mary. "We
are going to Scotland unexpectedly. Come down and see me." I went home
instantly, and told my father I had come to talk things over with him. A
note from Mary lay upon the hall-table as I came in and encountered my
father. "I thought it better to come down to you," I said with my
glance roving to find that, and then I met his eye. It wasn't altogether
an unkindly eye, but I winced dishonestly.
"Talking is better for all sorts of things," said my father, and wanted
to know if the weather had been as hot in London as it had been in
Burnmore.
Mary's note was in pencil, scribbled hastily. I was to wait after eleven
that night near the great rose bushes behind the pavilion. Long before
eleven I was there, on a seat in a thick shadow looking across great
lakes of moonlight towards the phantom statuary of the Italianate garden
and the dark laurels that partly masked the house. I waited nearly an
hour, an hour of stillness and small creepings and cheepings and goings
to and fro among the branches.
In the bushes near by me a little green glow-worm shared my vigil.
And then, wrapped about in a dark velvet cloak, still in her white
dinner dress, with shining, gleaming, glancing stones about her dear
throat, warm and wonderful and glowing and daring, Mary came flitting
out of the shadows to me.
"My dear," she whispered, panting and withdrawing a little from our
first passionate embrace, "Oh my dear!... How did I come? Twice before,
when I was a girl, I got out this way. By the corner of the conservatory
and down the laundry wall. You can't see from here, but it's easy--easy.
There's a tree that helps. And now I have come that way to you.
_You!..._
"Oh! love me, my Stephen, love me, dear. Love me as if we were never to
love again. Am I beautiful, my dear? Am I beautiful in the moonlight?
Tell me!...
"Perhaps this is the night of our lives, dear! Perhaps never again will
you and I be happy!...
"But the wonder, dear, the beauty! Isn't it still? It's as if nothing
really stood solid and dry. As if everything floated....
"Everyone in all the world has gone to sleep to-night and left the world
to us. Come! Come this way and peep at the house, there. Stoop--under
the branches. See, not a light is left! And all its blinds are drawn and
its eyes shut. One window is open, _my_ little window, Stephen! but that
is in the shadow where that creeper makes everything black.
"Along here a little further is night-stock. Now--Now! Sniff, Stephen!
Sniff! The scent of it! It lies--like a bank of scented air.... And
Stephen, there! Look!... A star--a star without a sound, falling out of
the blue! It's gone!"
There was her dear face close to mine, soft under the soft moonlight,
and the breath of her sweet speech mingled with the scent of the
night-stock....
That was indeed the most beautiful night of my life, a night of
moonlight and cool fragrance and adventurous excitement. We were
transported out of this old world of dusty limitations; it was as if for
those hours the curse of man was lifted from our lives. No one
discovered us, no evil thing came near us. For a long time we lay close
in one another's arms upon a bank of thyme. Our heads were close
together; her eyelashes swept my cheek, we spoke rarely and in soft
whispers, and our hearts were beating, beating. We were as solemn as
great mountains and as innocent as sleeping children. Our kisses were
kisses of moonlight. And it seemed to me that nothing that had ever
happened or could happen afterwards, mattered against that happiness....
It was nearly three when at last I came back into my father's garden. No
one had missed me from my room and the house was all asleep, but I could
not get in because I had closed a latch behind me, and so I stayed in
the little arbor until day, watching the day break upon long beaches of
pale cloud over the hills towards Alfridsham. I slept at last with my
head upon my arms upon the stone table, until the noise of shooting
bolts and doors being unlocked roused me to watch my chance and slip
back again into the house, and up the shuttered darkened staircase to my
tranquil, undisturbed bedroom.
§ 5
It was in the vein of something evasive in Mary's character that she let
me hear first of her engagement to Justin through the _Times_. Away
there in Scotland she got I suppose new perspectives, new ideas; the
glow of our immediate passion faded. The thing must have been drawing in
upon her for some time. Perhaps she had meant to tell me of it all that
night when she had summoned me to Burnmore. Looking back now I am the
more persuaded that she did. But the thing came to me in London with the
effect of an immense treachery. Within a day or so of the newspaper's
announcement she had written me a long letter answering some argument of
mine, and saying nothing whatever of the people about her. Even then
Justin must have been asking her to marry him. Her mind must have been
full of that question. Then came a storm of disappointment, humiliation
and anger with this realization. I can still feel myself writing and
destroying letters to her, letters of satire, of protest. Oddly enough I
cannot recall the letter that at last I sent her, but it is eloquent of
the weak boyishness of my position that I sent it in our usual furtive
manner, accepted every precaution that confessed the impossibility of
our relationship. "No," she scribbled back, "you do not understand. I
cannot write. I must talk to you."
We had a secret meeting.
With Beatrice Normandy's connivance she managed to get away for the
better part of the day, and we spent a long morning in argument in the
Botanical Gardens--that obvious solitude--and afterwards we lunched upon
ham and ginger beer at a little open-air restaurant near the Broad Walk
and talked on until nearly four. We were so young that I think we both
felt, beneath our very real and vivid emotions, a gratifying sense of
romantic resourcefulness in this prolonged discussion. There is
something ridiculously petty and imitative about youth, something too,
naïvely noble and adventurous. I can never determine if older people are
less generous and imaginative or merely less absurd. I still recall the
autumnal melancholy of that queer, neglected-looking place, in which I
had never been before, and which I have never revisited--a memory of
walking along narrow garden paths beside queer leaf-choked artificial
channels of water under yellow-tinted trees, of rustic bridges going
nowhere in particular, and of a kind of brickwork ruined castle, greatly
decayed and ivy-grown, in which we sat for a long time looking out upon
a lawn and a wide gravel path leading to a colossal frontage of
conservatory.
I must have been resentful and bitter in the beginning of that talk. I
do not remember that I had any command of the situation or did anything
but protest throughout that day. I was too full of the egotism of the
young lover to mark Mary's moods and feelings. It was only afterwards
that I came to understand that she was not wilfully and deliberately
following the course that was to separate us, that she was taking it
with hesitations and regrets. Yet she spoke plainly enough, she spoke
with a manifest sincerity of feeling. And while I had neither the grasp
nor the subtlety to get behind her mind I perceive now as I think things
out that Lady Ladislaw had both watched and acted, had determined her
daughter's ideas, sown her mind with suggestions, imposed upon her a
conception of her situation that now dominated all her thoughts.
"Dear Stephen," reiterated Mary, "I love you. I do, clearly, definitely,
deliberately love you. Haven't I told you that? Haven't I made that
plain to you?"
"But you are going to marry Justin!"
"Stephen dear, can I possibly marry you? Can I?"
"Why not? Why not make the adventure of life with me? Dare!"
She looked down on me. She was sitting upon a parapet of the brickwork
and I was below her. She seemed to be weighing possibilities.
"Why not?" I cried. "Even now. Why not run away with me, throw our two
lives together? Do as lovers have dared to do since the beginning of
things! Let us go somewhere together----"
"But Stephen," she asked softly, "_where_?"
"Anywhere!"
She spoke as an elder might do to a child. "No! tell me where--exactly.
Where would it be? Where should we go? How should we live? Tell me. Make
me see it, Stephen."
"You are too cruel to me, Mary," I said. "How can I--on the spur of the
moment--arrange----?"
"But dear, suppose it was somewhere very grimy and narrow!
Something--like some of those back streets I came through to get here.
Suppose it was some dreadful place. And you had no money. And we were
both worried and miserable. One gets ill in such places. If I loved you,
Stephen--I mean if you and I--if you and I were to be together, I should
want it to be in sunshine, I should want it to be among beautiful
forests and mountains. Somewhere very beautiful...."
"Why not?"
"Because--to-day I know. There are no such places in the world for us.
Stephen, they are dreams."
"For three years now," I said, "I have dreamed such dreams.
"Oh!" I cried out, stung by my own words, "but this is cowardice! Why
should we submit to this old world! Why should we give up--things you
have dreamed as well as I! You said once--to hear my voice--calling in
the morning.... Let us take each other, Mary, now. _Now!_ Let us take
each other, and"--I still remember my impotent phrase--"afterwards count
the cost!"
"If I were a queen," said Mary. "But you see I am not a queen." ...
So we talked in fragments and snatches of argument, and all she said
made me see more clearly the large hopelessness of my desire. "At
least," I urged, "do not marry Justin now. Give me a chance. Give me
three years, Mary, three short years, to work, to do something!"
She knew so clearly now the quality of her own intentions.
"Dear Stephen," she explained, "if I were to come away with you and
marry you, in just a little time I should cease to be your lover, I
should be your squaw. I should have to share your worries and make your
coffee--and disappoint you, disappoint you and fail you in a hundred
ways. Think! Should I be any good as a squaw? How can one love when one
knows the coffee isn't what it should be, and one is giving one's lover
indigestion? And I don't _want_ to be your squaw. I don't want that at
all. It isn't how I feel for you. I don't _want_ to be your servant and
your possession."
"But you will be Justin's--squaw, you are going to marry him!"
"That is all different, Stevenage. Between him and me there will be
space, air, dignity, endless servants----"
"But," I choked. "You! He! He will make love to you, Mary."
"You don't understand, Stephen."
"He will make love to you, Mary. Mary! don't you understand? These
things---- We've never talked of them.... You will bear him children!"
"No," she said.
"But----"
"No. He promises. Stephen,--I am to own myself."
"But--He marries you!"
"Yes. Because he--he admires me. He cannot live without me. He loves my
company. He loves to be seen with me. He wants me with him to enjoy all
the things he has. Can't you understand, Stephen?"
"But do you mean----?"
Our eyes met.
"Stephen," she said, "I swear."
"But---- He hopes."
"I don't care. He has promised. I have his promise. I shall be free. Oh!
I shall be free--free! He is a different man from you, Stephen. He isn't
so fierce; he isn't so greedy."
"But it parts us!"
"Only from impossible things."
"It parts us."
"It does not even part us, Stevenage. We shall see one another! we shall
talk to one another."
"I shall lose you."
"I shall keep you."
"But I--do you expect me to be content with _this_?"
"I will make you content. Oh! Stephen dear, can't there be love--love
without this clutching, this gripping, this carrying off?"
"You will be carried altogether out of my world."
"If I thought that, Stephen, indeed I would not marry him."
But I insisted we should be parted, and parted in the end for ever, and
there I was the wiser of the two. I knew the insatiable urgency within
myself. I knew that if I continued to meet Mary I should continue to
desire her until I possessed her altogether.
§ 6
I cannot reproduce with any greater exactness than this the quality and
gist of our day-long conversation. Between us was a deep affection, and
instinctive attraction, and our mental temperaments and our fundamental
ideas were profoundly incompatible. We were both still very young in
quality, we had scarcely begun to think ourselves out, we were greatly
swayed by the suggestion of our circumstances, complex, incoherent and
formless emotions confused our minds. But I see now that in us there
struggled vast creative forces, forces that through a long future, in
forms as yet undreamt of, must needs mould the destiny of our race. Far
more than Mary I was accepting the conventions of our time. It seemed to
me not merely reasonable but necessary that because she loved me she
should place her life in my youthful and inexpert keeping, share my
struggles and the real hardships they would have meant for her, devote
herself to my happiness, bear me children, be my inspiration in
imaginative moments, my squaw, helper and possession through the whole
twenty-four hours of every day, and incidentally somehow rear whatever
family we happened to produce, and I was still amazed in the depths of
my being that she did not reciprocate this simple and comprehensive
intention. I was ready enough I thought for equivalent sacrifices. I was
prepared to give my whole life, subordinate all my ambitions, to the
effort to maintain our home. If only I could have her, have her for my
own, I was ready to pledge every hour I had still to live to that
service. It seemed mere perversity to me then that she should turn even
such vows as that against me.
"But I don't want it, Stevenage," she said. "I don't want it. I want you
to go on to the service of the empire, I want to see you do great
things, do all the things we've talked about and written about. Don't
you see how much better that is for you and for me--and for the world
and our lives? I don't want you to become a horrible little specialist
in feeding and keeping me."
"Then--then _wait_ for me!" I cried.
"But--I want to live myself! I don't want to wait. I want a great house,
I want a great position, I want space and freedom. I want to have
clothes--and be as splendid as your career is going to be. I want to be
a great and shining lady in your life. I can't always live as I do now,
dependent on my mother, whirled about by her movements, living in her
light. Why should I be just a hard-up Vestal Virgin, Stephen, in your
honor? You will not be able to marry me for years and years and
years--unless you neglect your work, unless you throw away everything
that is worth having between us in order just to get me."
"But I want _you_, Mary," I cried, drumming at the little green table
with my fist. "I want you. I want nothing else in all the world unless
it has to do with you."
"You've got me--as much as anyone will ever have me. You'll always have
me. Always I will write to you, talk to you, watch you. Why are you so
greedy, Stephen? Why are you so ignoble? If I were to come now and marry
you, it wouldn't help you. It would turn you into--a wife-keeper, into
the sort of uninteresting preoccupied man one sees running after and
gloating over the woman he's bought--at the price of his money and his
dignity--and everything.... It's not proper for a man to live so for a
woman and her children. It's dwarfish. It's enslaving. It's--it's
indecent. Stephen! I'd hate you so." ...
§ 7
We parted at last at a cab-rank near a bridge over the Canal at the
western end of Park Village. I remember that I made a last appeal to her
as we walked towards it, and that we loitered on the bridge, careless of
who might see us there, in a final conflict of our wills. "Before it is
too late, Mary, dear," I said.
She shook her head, her white lips pressed together.
"But after the things that have happened. That night--the moonlight!"
"It's not fair," she said, "for you to talk of that. It isn't fair."
"But Mary. This is parting. This indeed is parting."
She answered never a word.
"Then at least talk to me again for one time more."
"Afterwards," she said. "Afterwards I will talk to you. Don't make
things too hard for me, Stephen."
"If I could I would make this impossible. It's--it's hateful."
She turned to the kerb, and for a second or so we stood there without
speaking. Then I beckoned to a hansom.
She told me Beatrice Normandy's address.
I helped her into the cab. "Good-bye," I said with a weak affectation
of an everyday separation, and I turned to the cabman with her
instructions.
Then again we looked at one another. The cabman waited. "All right,
sir?" he asked.
"Go ahead!" I said, and lifted my hat to the little white face within.
I watched the cab until it vanished round the curve of the road. Then I
turned about to a world that had become very large and empty and
meaningless.
§ 8
I struggled feebly to arrest the course of events. I wrote Mary some
violent and bitter letters. I treated her as though she alone were
responsible for my life and hers; I said she had diverted my energies,
betrayed me, ruined my life. I hinted she was cold-blooded, mercenary,
shameless. Someday you, with that quick temper of yours and your power
of expression, will understand that impulse to write, to pour out a
passionately unjust interpretation of some nearly intolerable situation,
and it is not the least of all the things I owe to Mary that she
understood my passion and forgave those letters and forgot them. I tried
twice to go and see her. But I do not think I need tell you, little son,
of these self-inflicted humiliations and degradations. An angry man is
none the less a pitiful man because he is injurious. The hope that had
held together all the project of my life was gone, and all my thoughts
and emotions lay scattered in confusion....
You see, my little son, there are two sorts of love; we use one name
for very different things. The love that a father bears his children,
that a mother feels, that comes sometimes, a strange brightness and
tenderness that is half pain, at the revelation of some touching aspect
of one long known to one, at the sight of a wife bent with fatigue and
unsuspicious of one's presence, at the wretchedness and perplexity of
some wrong-doing brother, or at an old servant's unanticipated tears,
that is love--like the love God must bear us. That is the love we must
spread from those of our marrow until it reaches out to all mankind,
that will some day reach out to all mankind. But the love of a young man
for a woman takes this quality only in rare moments of illumination and
complete assurance. My love for Mary was a demand, it was a wanton claim
I scored the more deeply against her for every moment of happiness she
gave me. I see now that as I emerged from the first abjection of my
admiration and began to feel assured of her affection, I meant nothing
by her but to possess her, I did not want her to be happy as I want you
to be happy even at the price of my life; I wanted her. I wanted her as
barbarians want a hunted enemy, alive or dead. It was a flaming jealousy
to have her mine. That granted, then I was prepared for all
devotions....
This is how men love women. Almost as exclusively and fiercely I think
do women love men. And the deepest question before humanity is just how
far this jealous greed may be subdued to a more generous passion. The
fierce jealousy of men for women and women for men is the very heart of
all our social jealousies, the underlying tension of this crowded modern
life that has grown out of the ampler, simpler, ancient life of men.
That is why we compete against one another so bitterly, refuse
association and generous co-operations, keep the struggle for existence
hard and bitter, hamper and subordinate the women as they in their turn
would if they could hamper and subordinate the men--because each must
thoroughly have his own.
And I knew my own heart too well to have any faith in Justin and his
word. He was taking what he could, and his mind would never rest until
some day he had all. I had seen him only once, but the heavy and
resolute profile above his bent back and slender shoulders stuck in my
memory.
If he was cruel to Mary, I told her, or broke his least promise to her,
I should kill him.
§ 9
My distress grew rather than diminished in the days immediately before
her marriage, and that day itself stands out by itself in my memory, a
day of wandering and passionate unrest. My imagination tormented me with
thoughts of Justin as a perpetual privileged wooer.
Well, well,--I will not tell you, I will not write the ugly mockeries my
imagination conjured up. I was constantly on the verge of talking and
cursing aloud to myself, or striking aimlessly at nothing with clenched
fists. I was too stupid to leave London, too disturbed for work or any
distraction of my mind. I wandered about the streets of London all day.
In the morning I came near going to the church and making some
preposterous interruptions. And I remember discovering three or four
carriages adorned with white favors and a little waiting crowd outside
that extinguisher-spired place at the top of Regent Street, and
wondering for a moment or so at their common preoccupation, and then
understanding. Of course, another marriage! Of all devilish
institutions!
What was I to do with my life now? What was to become of my life? I can
still recall the sense of blank unanswerableness with which these
questions dominated my mind, and associated with it is an effect of
myself as a small human being, singular and apart, wandering through a
number of London landscapes. At one time I was in a great grey
smoke-rimmed autumnal space of park, much cut up by railings and worn by
cricket pitches, far away from any idea of the Thames, and in the
distance over the tops of trees I discovered perplexingly the clustering
masts and spars of ships. I have never seen that place since. Then the
Angel at Islington is absurdly mixed up with the distresses of this day.
I attempted some great detour thence, and found myself with a dumb
irritation returning to the place from another direction. I remember too
a wide street over which passes a thundering railway bridge borne upon
colossal rounded pillars of iron, and carrying in white and blue some
big advertisement, I think of the _Daily Telegraph_. Near there I
thought a crowd was gathered about the victim of some accident, and
thrusting myself among the people with a vague idea of help, discovered
a man selling a remedy for corns. And somewhere about this north region
I discovered I was faint with hunger, and got some bread and cheese and
beer in a gaudily decorated saloon bar with a sanded floor. I resisted
a monstrous impulse to stay in that place and drink myself into
inactivity and stupefaction with beer.
Then for a long time I sat upon an iron seat near some flower beds in a
kind of garden that had the headstones of graves arranged in a row
against a yellow brick wall. The place was flooded with the amber
sunshine of a September afternoon. I shared the seat with a nursemaid in
charge of a perambulator and several scuffling uneasy children, and I
kept repeating to myself: "By now it is all over. The thing is done."
My sense of the enormity of London increased with the twilight, and
began to prevail a little against my intense personal wretchedness. I
remember wastes of building enterprise, interminable vistas of wide dark
streets, with passing trams, and here and there at strategic corners
coruscating groups of shops. And somewhere I came along a narrow street
suddenly upon the distant prospect of a great monstrous absurd place on
a steep hill against the last brightness of the evening sky, a burlesque
block of building with huge truncated pyramids at either corner, that I
have since learnt was the Alexandra Palace. It was so queer and bulky
that it arrested and held my attention, struck on my memory with an
almost dreamlike quality, so that years afterwards I went to Muswell
Hill to see if indeed there really was such a place on earth, or whether
I had had a waking nightmare during my wanderings....
I wandered far that night, very far. Some girl accosted me, a thin-faced
ruined child younger by a year or so than myself. I remembered how I
talked to her, foolish rambling talk. "If you loved a man, and he was
poor, you'd wait," I said, "you'd stick to him. You'd not leave him
just to get married to a richer man."
We prowled talking for a time, and sat upon a seat somewhere near the
Regent's Park canal. I rather think I planned to rescue her from a
fallen life, but somehow we dropped that topic. I know she kissed me. I
have a queer impression that it came into my head to marry her. I put
all my loose money in her hands at last and went away extraordinarily
comforted by her, I know not how, leaving her no doubt wondering
greatly.
I did not go to bed that night at all, nor to the office next morning. I
never showed myself in the office again. Instead I went straight down to
my father, and told him I wanted to go to the war forthwith. I had an
indistinct memory of a promise I had made Mary to stay in England, but I
felt it was altogether unendurable that I should ever meet her again. My
father sat at table over the remains of his lunch, and regarded me with
astonishment, with the beginnings of protest.
"I want to get away," I said, and to my own amazement and shame I burst
into tears.
"My boy!" he gasped, astonished and terrified. "You've--you've not
done--some foolish thing?"
"No," I said, already wiping the tears from my face, "nothing.... But I
want to go away."
"You shall do as you please," he said, and sat for a moment regarding
his only son with unfathomable eyes.
Then he got up with a manner altogether matter-of-fact, came half-way
round the table and mixed me a whisky and soda. "It won't be much of a
war, I'm told," he said with the syphon in his hands, breaking a
silence. "I sometimes wish--I had seen a bit of soldiering. And this
seems to be an almost unavoidable war. Now, at any rate, it's
unavoidable.... Drink this and have a biscuit."
He turned to the mantelshelf, and filled his pipe with his broad back to
me. "Yes," he said, "you---- You'll be interested in the war. I hope----
I hope you'll have a good time there...."
CHAPTER THE FIFTH
THE WAR IN SOUTH AFRICA
§ 1
Mary and I did not meet again for five years, and for nearly all that
time I remained in South Africa. I went from England a boy; I came back
seasoned into manhood. They had been years of crowded experience, rapid
yet complicated growth, disillusionment and thought. Responsibility had
come to me. I had seen death, I had seen suffering, and held the lives
of men in my hands.
Of course one does not become a soldier on active service at once for
the wishing, and there was not at first that ready disposition on the
part of the home military authorities which arose later, to send out
young enthusiasts. I could ride and shoot fairly well, and accordingly I
decided to go on my own account to Durban--for it was manifest that
things would begin in Natal--and there attach myself to some of the
local volunteer corps that would certainly be raised. This took me out
of England at once, a thing that fell in very well with my mood. I
would, I was resolved, begin life afresh. I would force myself to think
of nothing but the war. I would never if I could help it think of Mary
again.
The war had already begun when I reached Durban. The town was seething
with the news of a great British victory at Dundee. We came into the
port through rain and rough weather and passed a big white liner loaded
up feverishly from steam tenders with wealthy refugees going
England-ward. From two troopships against the wharves there was a great
business of landing horses--the horses of the dragoons and hussars from
India. I spent the best part of my first night in South Africa in the
streets looking in vain for a bedroom, and was helped at last by a
kindly rickshaw Zulu to a shanty where I slept upon three chairs. I
remember I felt singularly unwanted.
The next day I set about my volunteering. By midday I had opened
communications with that extremely untried and problematical body, the
Imperial Light Horse, and in three days more I was in the company of a
mixed batch of men, mostly Australian volunteers, on my way to a place I
had never heard of before called Ladysmith, through a country of
increasing picturesqueness and along a curious curving little line whose
down traffic seemed always waiting in sidings, and consisted of crowded
little trains full of pitiful fugitives, white, brown, and black,
stifled and starving. They were all clamoring to buy food and drink--and
none seemed forthcoming. We shunted once to allow a southbound train to
pass, a peculiar train that sent everyone on to the line to
see--prisoners of war! There they were, real live enemies, rather glum,
looking out at us with faces very like our own--but rather more
unshaven. They had come from the battle of Elandslaagte....
I had never been out of England before except for a little
mountaineering in the French Alps and one walking excursion in the Black
Forest, and the scenery of lower Natal amazed me. I had expected
nothing nearly so tropical, so rich and vivid. There were little
Mozambique monkeys chattering in the thick-set trees beside the line and
a quantity of unfamiliar birds and gaudy flowers amidst the abundant
deep greenery. There were aloe and cactus hedges, patches of unfamiliar
cultivation upon the hills; bunchy, frondy growths that I learnt were
bananas and plantains, and there were barbaric insanitary-looking Kaffir
kraals which I supposed had vanished before our civilization. There
seemed an enormous quantity of Kaffirs all along the line--and all of
them, men, women, and children, were staring at the train. The scenery
grew finer and bolder, and more bare and mountainous, until at last we
came out into the great basin in which lay this Ladysmith. It seemed a
poor unimportant, dusty little street of huts as we approached it, but
the great crests beyond struck me as very beautiful in the morning
light....
I forgot the beauty of those hills as we drew into the station. It was
the morning after the surrender of Nicholson's Nek. I had come to join
an army already tremendously astonished and shattered. The sunny
prospect of a triumphal procession to Pretoria which had been still in
men's minds at Durban had vanished altogether. In rather less than a
fortnight of stubborn fighting we had displayed a strategy that was
flighty rather than brilliant, and lost a whole battery of guns and
nearly twelve hundred prisoners. We had had compensations, our common
soldiers were good stuff at any rate, but the fact was clear that we
were fighting an army not only very much bigger than ours but better
equipped, with bigger guns, better information, and it seemed superior
strategy. We were being shoved back into this Ladysmith and encircled.
This confused, disconcerted, and thoroughly bad-tempered army, whose
mules and bullocks cumbered the central street of the place, was all
that was left of the British Empire in Natal. Behind it was an
unprotected country and the line to Pietermaritzburg, Durban, and the
sea.
You cannot imagine how amazed I felt at it. I had been prepared for a
sort of Kentucky quality in the enemy, illiteracy, pluck, guile and good
shooting, but to find them with more modern arms than our own, more
modern methods! Weren't we there, after all, to teach _them_! Weren't we
the Twentieth and they the Eighteenth Century? The town had been shelled
the day before from those very hills I had admired; at any time it might
be shelled again. The nose of a big gun was pointed out to me by a
blasphemous little private in the Devons. It was a tremendous, a
profoundly impressive, black snout. His opinions of the directing wisdom
at home were unquotable. The platform was a wild confusion of women and
children and colored people,--there was even an invalid lady on a
stretcher. Every non-combatant who could be got out of Ladysmith was
being hustled out that day. Everyone was smarting with the sense of
defeat in progress, everyone was disappointed and worried; one got short
answers to one's questions. For a time I couldn't even find out where I
had to go....
§ 2
I fired my first shot at a fellow-creature within four days of my
arrival. We rode out down the road to the south to search some hills,
and found the Boers in fair strength away to the east of us. We were
dismounted and pushed up on foot through a wood to a grassy crest. There
for the first time I saw the enemy, little respectable-looking
unsoldierlike figures, mostly in black, dodging about upon a ridge
perhaps a mile away. I took a shot at one of these figures just before
it vanished into a gully. One or two bullets came overhead, and I tried
to remember what I had picked up about cover. They made a sound,
_whiff-er-whiff_, a kind of tearing whistle, and there was nothing but a
distant crackling to give one a hint of their direction until they took
effect. I remember the peculiar smell of the grass amidst which I
crouched, my sudden disgust to realize I was lying, and had to lie now
for an indefinite time, in the open sunlight and far from any shade, and
how I wondered whether after all I had wanted to come to this war.
We lay shooting intermittently until the afternoon, I couldn't
understand why; we went forward a little, and at last retired upon
Ladysmith. On the way down to the horses, I came upon my first dead man.
He was lying in a crumpled heap not fifty yards from where I had been
shooting. There he lay, the shattered mirror of a world. One side of his
skull over the ear had been knocked away by a nearly spent bullet, and
he was crumpled up and face upward as though he had struggled to his
feet and fallen back. He looked rather horrible, with blue eyes wide
open and glassily amazed, and the black flies clustering upon his
clotted wound and round his open mouth....
I halted for a moment at the sight, and found the keen scrutiny of a
fellow trooper upon me. "No good waiting for him," I said with an
affectation of indifference. But all through the night I saw him again,
and marvelled at the stupendous absurdity of such a death. I was a
little feverish, I remember, and engaged in an interminable theological
argument with myself, why when a man is dead he should leave so queer
and irrelevant a thing as a body to decay....
I was already very far away from London and Burnmore Park. I doubt if I
thought of Mary at all for many days.
§ 3
It isn't my business to write here any consecutive story of my war
experiences. Luck and some latent quality in my composition made me a
fairly successful soldier. Among other things I have an exceptionally
good sense of direction, and that was very useful to me, and in Burnmore
Park I suppose I had picked up many of the qualities of a scout. I did
some fair outpost work during the Ladysmith siege, I could report as
well as crawl and watch, and I was already a sergeant when we made a
night attack and captured and blew up Long Tom. There, after the fight,
while we were covering the engineers, I got a queer steel ball about the
size of a pea in my arm, a bicycle bearings ball it was, and had my
first experience of an army surgeon's knife next day. It was much less
painful than I had expected. I was also hit during the big assault on
the sixth of January in the left shoulder, but so very slightly that I
wasn't technically disabled. They were the only wounds I got in the war,
but I went under with dysentery before the relief; and though I was by
no means a bad case I was a very yellow-faced, broken-looking
convalescent when at last the Boer hosts rolled northward again and
Buller's men came riding across the flats....
I had seen some stimulating things during those four months of actual
warfare, a hundred intense impressions of death, wounds, anger,
patience, brutality, courage, generosity and wasteful destruction--above
all, wasteful destruction--to correct the easy optimistic patriotism of
my university days. There is a depression in the opening stages of fever
and a feebleness in a convalescence on a starvation diet that leads men
to broad and sober views. (Heavens! how I hated the horse
extract--'chevril' we called it--that served us for beef tea.) When I
came down from Ladysmith to the sea to pick up my strength I had not an
illusion left about the serene, divinely appointed empire of the
English. But if I had less national conceit, I had certainly more
patriotic determination. That grew with every day of returning health.
The reality of this war had got hold of my imagination, as indeed for a
time it got hold of the English imagination altogether, and I was now
almost fiercely keen to learn and do. At the first chance I returned to
active service, and now I was no longer a disconsolate lover taking war
for a cure, but an earnest, and I think reasonably able, young officer,
very alert for chances.
I got those chances soon enough. I rejoined our men beyond Kimberley, on
the way to Mafeking,--we were the extreme British left in the advance
upon Pretoria--and I rode with Mahon and was ambushed with him in a
little affair beyond Koodoosrand. It was a sudden brisk encounter. We
got fired into at close quarters, but we knew our work by that time,
and charged home and brought in a handful of prisoners to make up for
the men we had lost. A few days later we came into the flattened ruins
of the quaintest siege in history....
Three days after we relieved Mafeking I had the luck to catch one of
Snyman's retreating guns rather easily, the only big gun that was taken
at Mafeking. I came upon it unexpectedly with about twenty men, spotted
a clump of brush four hundred yards ahead, galloped into it before the
Boers realized the boldness of our game, shot all the draught oxen while
they hesitated, and held them up until Chambers arrived on the scene.
The incident got perhaps a disproportionate share of attention in the
papers at home, because of the way in which Mafeking had been kept in
focus. I was mentioned twice again in despatches before we rode across
to join Roberts in Pretoria and see what we believed to be the end of
the war. We were too late to go on up to Komatipoort, and had some
rather blank and troublesome work on the north side of the town. That
was indeed the end of the great war; the rest was a struggle with
guerillas.
Everyone thought things were altogether over. I wrote to my father
discussing the probable date of my return. But there were great chances
still to come for an active young officer; the guerilla war was to
prolong the struggle yet for a whole laborious, eventful year, and I was
to make the most of those later opportunities....
Those years in South Africa are stuck into my mind like--like those pink
colored pages about something else one finds at times in a railway
_Indicateur_. Chance had put this work in my way, and started me upon
it with a reputation that wasn't altogether deserved, and I found I
could only live up to it and get things done well by a fixed and extreme
concentration of my attention. But the whole business was so interesting
that I found it possible to make that concentration. Essentially warfare
is a game of elaborate but witty problems in precaution and
anticipation, with amazing scope for invention. You so saturate your
mind with the facts and possibilities of the situation that intuitions
emerge. It did not do to think of anything beyond those facts and
possibilities and dodges and counterdodges, for to do so was to let in
irrelevant and distracting lights. During all that concluding year of
service I was not so much myself as a forced and artificial thing I made
out of myself to meet the special needs of the time. I became a
Boer-outwitting animal. When I was tired of this specialized thinking,
then the best relief, I found, was some quite trivial
occupation--playing poker, yelling in the chorus of some interminable
song one of the men would sing, or coining South African Limericks or
playing burlesque _bouts-rimés_ with Fred Maxim, who was then my second
in command....
Yet occasionally thought overtook me. I remember lying one night out
upon a huge dark hillside, in a melancholy wilderness of rock-ribbed
hills, waiting for one of the flying commandoes that were breaking
northward from Cape Colony towards the Orange River in front of Colonel
Eustace. We had been riding all day, I was taking risks in what I was
doing, and there is something very cheerless in a fireless bivouac. My
mind became uncontrollably active.
It was a clear, still night. The young moon set early in a glow of white
that threw the jagged contours of a hill to the south-east into
strange, weird prominence. The patches of moonshine evaporated from the
summits of the nearer hills, and left them hard and dark. Then there was
nothing but a great soft black darkness below that jagged edge and above
it the stars very large and bright. Somewhere under that enormous
serenity to the south of us the hunted Boers must be halting to snatch
an hour or so of rest, and beyond them again extended the long thin net
of the pursuing British. It all seemed infinitely small and remote,
there was no sound of it, no hint of it, no searchlight at work, no
faintest streamer of smoke nor the reflection of a solitary fire in the
sky....
All this business that had held my mind so long was reduced to
insignificance between the blackness of the hills and the greatness of
the sky; a little trouble, it seemed of no importance under the Southern
Cross. And I fell wondering, as I had not wondered for long, at the
forces that had brought me to this occupation and the strangeness of
this game of war which had filled the minds and tempered the spirit of a
quarter of a million of men for two hard-living years.
I fell thinking of the dead.
No soldier in a proper state of mind ever thinks of the dead. At times
of course one suspects, one catches a man glancing at the pair of boots
sticking out stiffly from under a blanket, but at once he speaks of
other things. Nevertheless some suppressed part of my being had been
stirring up ugly and monstrous memories, of distortion, disfigurement,
torment and decay, of dead men in stained and ragged clothes, with their
sole-worn boots drawn up under them, of the blood trail of a dying man
who had crawled up to a dead comrade rather than die alone, of Kaffirs
heaping limp, pitiful bodies together for burial, of the voices of
inaccessible wounded in the rain on Waggon Hill crying in the night, of
a heap of men we found in a donga three days dead, of the dumb agony of
shell-torn horses, and the vast distressful litter and heavy brooding
stench, the cans and cartridge-cases and filth and bloody rags of a
shelled and captured laager. I will confess I have never lost my horror
of dead bodies; they are dreadful to me--dreadful. I dread their stiff
attitudes, their terrible intent inattention. To this day such memories
haunt me. That night they nearly overwhelmed me.... I thought of the
grim silence of the surgeon's tent, the miseries and disordered ravings
of the fever hospital, of the midnight burial of a journalist at
Ladysmith with the distant searchlight on Bulwana flicking suddenly upon
our faces and making the coffin shine silver white. What a vast trail of
destruction South Africa had become! I thought of the black scorched
stones of burnt and abandoned farms, of wretched natives we had found
shot like dogs and flung aside, rottenly amazed, decaying in infinite
indignity; of stories of treachery and fierce revenges sweeping along in
the trail of the greater fighting. I knew too well of certain
atrocities,--one had to believe them incredibly stupid to escape the
conviction that they were incredibly evil.
For a time my mind could make no headway against its monstrous
assemblage of horror. There was something in that jagged black hill
against the moonshine and the gigantic basin of darkness out of which it
rose that seemed to gather all these gaunt and grisly effects into one
appalling heap of agonizing futility. That rock rose up and crouched
like something that broods and watches.
I remember I sat up in the darkness staring at it.
I found myself murmuring: "Get the proportions of things, get the
proportions of things!" I had an absurd impression of a duel between
myself and the cavernous antagonism of the huge black spaces below me. I
argued that all this pain and waste was no more than the selvedge of a
proportionately limitless fabric of sane, interested, impassioned and
joyous living. These stiff still memories seemed to refute me. But why
us? they seemed to insist. In some way it's essential,--this margin. I
stopped at that.
"If all this pain, waste, violence, anguish is essential to life, why
does my spirit rise against it? What is wrong with me?" I got from that
into a corner of self-examination. Did I respond overmuch to these
painful aspects in life? When I was a boy I had never had the spirit
even to kill rats. Siddons came into the meditation, Siddons, the
essential Englishman, a little scornful, throwing out contemptuous
phrases. Soft! Was I a soft? What was a soft? Something not rough, not
hearty and bloody! I felt I had to own to the word--after years of
resistance. A dreadful thing it is when a great empire has to rely upon
soft soldiers.
Was civilization breeding a type of human being too tender to go on
living? I stuck for a time as one does on these nocturnal occasions at
the word "hypersensitive," going round it and about it....
I do not know now how it was that I passed from a mood so darkened and
sunless to one of exceptional exaltation, but I recall very clearly that
I did. I believe that I made a crowning effort against this despair and
horror that had found me out in the darkness and overcome. I cried in
my heart for help, as a lost child cries, to God. I seem to remember a
rush of impassioned prayer, not only for myself, not chiefly for myself,
but for all those smashed and soiled and spoilt and battered residues of
men whose memories tormented me. I prayed to God that they had not lived
in vain, that particularly those poor Kaffir scouts might not have lived
in vain. "They are like children," I said. "It was a murder of
children.... _By children!_"
My horror passed insensibly. I have to feel the dreadfulness of these
things, I told myself, because it is good for such a creature as I to
feel them dreadful, but if one understood it would all be simple. Not
dreadful at all. I clung to that and repeated it,--"it would all be
perfectly simple." It would come out no more horrible than the things
that used to frighten me as a child,--the shadow on the stairs, the
white moonrise reflected on a barked and withered tree, a peculiar dream
of moving geometrical forms, an ugly illustration in the "Arabian
Nights." ...
I do not know how long I wrestled with God and prayed that night, but
abruptly the shadows broke; and very suddenly and swiftly my spirit
seemed to flame up into space like some white beacon that is set alight.
Everything became light and clear and confident. I was assured that all
was well with us, with us who lived and fought and with the dead who
rotted now in fifty thousand hasty graves....
For a long time it seemed I was repeating again and again with soundless
lips and finding the deepest comfort in my words:--"And out of our
agonies comes victory, out of our agonies comes victory! Have pity on
us, God our Father!"
I think that mood passed quite insensibly from waking to a kind of
clear dreaming. I have an impression that I fell asleep and was aroused
by a gun. Yet I was certainly still sitting up when I heard that gun.
I was astonished to find things darkly visible about me. I had not noted
that the stars were growing pale until the sound of this gun very far
away called my mind back to the grooves in which it was now accustomed
to move. I started into absolute wakefulness. A gun?...
I found myself trying to see my watch.
I heard a slipping and clatter of pebbles near me, and discovered Fred
Maxim at my side. "Look!" he said, hoarse with excitement. "Already!" He
pointed to a string of dim little figures galloping helter-skelter over
the neck and down the gap in the hills towards us.
They came up against the pale western sky, little nodding swaying black
dots, and flashed over and were lost in the misty purple groove towards
us. They must have been riding through the night--the British following.
To them we were invisible. Behind us was the shining east, we were in a
shadow still too dark to betray us.
In a moment I was afoot and called out to the men, my philosophy, my
deep questionings, all torn out of my mind like a page of scribbled
poetry plucked out of a business note-book. Khaki figures were up all
about me passing the word and hurrying to their places. All the
dispositions I had made overnight came back clear and sharp into my
mind. We hadn't long for preparations....
It seems now there were only a few busy moments before the fighting
began. It must have been much longer in reality. By that time we had
seen their gun come over and a train of carts. They were blundering
right into us. Every moment it was getting lighter, and the moment of
contact nearer. Then "Crack!" from down below among the rocks, and there
was a sudden stoppage of the trail of dark shapes upon the hillside.
"Crack!" came a shot from our extreme left. I damned the impatient men
who had shot away the secret of our presence. But we had to keep them at
a shooting distance. Would the Boers have the wit to charge through us
before the daylight came, or should we hold them? I had a swift,
disturbing idea. Would they try a bolt across our front to the left? Had
we extended far enough across the deep valley to our left? But they'd
hesitate on account of their gun. The gun couldn't go that way because
of the gullies and thickets.... But suppose they tried it! I hung
between momentous decisions....
Then all up the dim hillside I could make out the Boers halting and
riding back. One rifle across there flashed.
We held them!...
We had begun the fight of Pieters Nek which ended before midday with the
surrender of Simon Botha and over seven hundred men. It was the crown of
all my soldiering.
§ 4
I came back to England at last when I was twenty-six. After the peace of
Vereeniging I worked under the Repatriation Commission which controlled
the distribution of returning prisoners and concentrated population to
their homes; for the most part I was distributing stock and grain, and
presently manoeuvring a sort of ploughing flying column that the dearth
of horses and oxen made necessary, work that was certainly as hard as if
far less exciting than war. That particular work of replanting the
desolated country with human beings took hold of my imagination, and for
a time at least seemed quite straightforward and understandable. The
comfort of ceasing to destroy!
No one has written anything that really conveys the quality of that
repatriation process; the queer business of bringing these suspicious,
illiterate, despondent people back to their desolated homes, reuniting
swarthy fathers and stockish mothers, witnessing their touchingly
inexpressive encounters, doing what one could to put heart into their
resumption. Memories come back to me of great littered heaps of luggage,
bundles, blankets, rough boxes, piled newly purchased stores, ready-made
doors, window sashes heaped ready for the waggons, slow-moving,
apathetic figures sitting and eating, an infernal squawking of parrots,
sometimes a wailing of babies. Repatriation went on to a parrot
obligato, and I never hear a parrot squawk without a flash of South
Africa across my mind. All the prisoners, I believe, brought back
parrots--some two or three. I had to spread these people out, over a
country still grassless, with teams of war-worn oxen, mules and horses
that died by the dozen on my hands. The end of each individual instance
was a handshake, and one went lumbering on, leaving the children one had
deposited behind one already playing with old ration-tins or hunting
about for cartridge-cases, while adults stared at the work they had to
do.
There was something elementary in all that redistribution. I felt at
times like a child playing in a nursery and putting out its bricks and
soldiers on the floor. There was a kind of greatness too about the
process, a quality of atonement. And the people I was taking back, the
men anyhow, were for the most part charming and wonderful people, very
simple and emotional, so that once a big bearded man, when I wanted him
in the face of an overflowing waggon to abandon about half-a-dozen great
angular colored West Indian shells he had lugged with him from Bermuda,
burst into tears of disappointment. I let him take them, and at the end
I saw them placed with joy and reverence in a little parlor, to become
the war heirlooms no doubt of a long and bearded family. As we shook
hands after our parting coffee he glanced at them with something between
gratitude and triumph in his eyes.
Yes, that was a great work, more especially for a ripening youngster
such as I was at that time. The memory of long rides and tramps over
that limitless veld returns to me, lonely in spite of the creaking,
lumbering waggons and transport riders and Kaffirs that followed behind.
South Africa is a country not only of immense spaces but of an immense
spaciousness. Everything is far apart; even the grass blades are far
apart. Sometimes one crossed wide stony wastes, sometimes came great
stretches of tall, yellow-green grass, wheel-high, sometimes a little
green patch of returning cultivation drew nearer for an hour or so,
sometimes the blundering, toilsome passage of a torrent interrupted our
slow onward march. And constantly one saw long lines of torn and twisted
barbed wire stretching away and away, and here and there one found
archipelagoes as it were in this dry ocean of the skeletons of cattle,
and there were places where troops had halted and their scattered
ration-tins shone like diamonds in the sunshine. Occasionally I struck
talk, some returning prisoner, some group of discharged British soldiers
become carpenters or bricklayers again and making their pound a day by
the work of rebuilding; always everyone was ready to expatiate upon the
situation. Usually, however, I was alone, thinking over this immense now
vanished tornado of a war and this equally astonishing work of healing
that was following it.
I became keenly interested in all this great business, and thought at
first of remaining indefinitely in Africa. Repatriation was presently
done and finished. I had won Milner's good opinion, and he was anxious
for me to go on working in relation to the labor difficulty that rose
now more and more into prominence behind the agricultural re-settlement.
But when I faced that I found myself in the middle of a tangle
infinitely less simple than putting back an agricultural population upon
its land.
§ 5
For the first time in my life I was really looking at the social
fundamental of Labor.
There is something astonishingly naïve in the unconsciousness with which
people of our class float over the great economic realities. All my life
I had been hearing of the Working Classes, of Industrialism, of Labor
Problems and the Organization of Labor; but it was only now in South
Africa, in this chaotic, crude illuminating period of putting a smashed
and desolated social order together again, that I perceived these
familiar phrases represented something--something stupendously real.
There were, I began to recognize, two sides to civilization; one
traditional, immemorial, universal, the side of the homestead, the side
I had been seeing and restoring; and there was another, ancient, too,
but never universal, as old at least as the mines of Syracuse and the
building of the pyramids, the side that came into view when I emerged
from the dusty station and sighted the squat shanties and slender
chimneys of Johannesburg, that uprooted side of social life, that
accumulation of toilers divorced from the soil, which is Industrialism
and Labor and which carries such people as ourselves, and whatever
significance and possibilities we have, as an elephant carries its
rider.
Now all Johannesburg and Pretoria were discussing Labor and nothing but
Labor. Bloemfontein was in conference thereon. Our work of repatriation
which had loomed so large on the southernward veld became here a
business at once incidental and remote. One felt that a little sooner or
a little later all that would resume and go on, as the rains would, and
the veld-grass. But this was something less kindred to the succession of
the seasons and the soil. This was a hitch in the upper fabric. Here in
the great ugly mine-scarred basin of the Rand, with its bare hillsides,
half the stamps were standing idle, machinery was eating its head off,
time and water were running to waste amidst an immense exasperated
disputation. Something had given way. The war had spoilt the Kaffir
"boy," he was demanding enormous wages, he was away from Johannesburg,
and above all, he would no longer "go underground."
Implicit in all the argument and suggestion about me was this profoundly
suggestive fact that some people, quite a lot of people, scores of
thousands, had to "go underground." Implicit too always in the discourse
was the assumption that the talker or writer in question wasn't for a
moment to be expected to go there. Those others, whoever they were, had
to do that for us. Before the war it had been the artless Portuguese
Kaffir, but he alas! was being diverted to open-air employment at
Delagoa Bay. Should we raise wages and go on with the fatal process of
"spoiling the workers," should we by imposing a tremendous hut-tax drive
the Kaffir into our toils, should we carry the labor hunt across the
Zambesi into Central Africa, should we follow the lead of Lord Kitchener
and Mr. Creswell and employ the rather dangerous unskilled white labor
(with "ideas" about strikes and socialism) that had drifted into
Johannesburg, should we do tremendous things with labor-saving
machinery, or were we indeed (desperate yet tempting resort!) to bring
in the cheap Indian or Chinese coolie?
Steadily things were drifting towards that last tremendous experiment.
There was a vigorous opposition in South Africa and in England (growing
there to an outcry), but behind that proposal was the one vitalizing
conviction in modern initiative:--indisputably it would pay, _it would
pay_!...
The human mind has a much more complex and fluctuating process than most
of those explanatory people who write about psychology would have us
believe. Instead of that simple, direct movement, like the movement of a
point, forward and from here to there, one's thoughts advance like an
army, sometimes extended over an enormous front, sometimes in échelon,
sometimes bunched in a column throwing out skirmishing clouds of
emotion, some flying and soaring, some crawling, some stopping and
dying.... In this matter of Labor, for example, I have thought so much,
thought over the ground again and again, come into it from this way and
from that way, that for the life of me I find it impossible to state at
all clearly how much I made of these questions during that Johannesburg
time. I cannot get back into those ancient ignorances, revive my old
astonishments and discoveries. Certainly I envisaged the whole process
much less clearly than I do now, ignored difficulties that have since
entangled me, regarded with a tremendous perplexity aspects that have
now become lucidly plain. I came back to England confused, and doing
what confused people are apt to do, clinging to an inadequate phrase
that seemed at any rate to define a course of action. The word
"efficiency" had got hold of me. All our troubles came, one assumed,
from being "inefficient." One turned towards politics with a bustling
air, and was all for fault-finding and renovation.
I sit here at my desk, pen in hand, and trace figures on the
blotting-paper, and wonder how much I understood at that time. I came
back to England to work on the side of "efficiency," that is quite
certain. A little later I was writing articles and letters about it, so
that much is documented. But I think I must have apprehended too by that
time some vague outline at least of those wider issues in the sæcular
conflict between the new forms of human association and the old, to
which contemporary politics and our national fate are no more than
transitory eddies and rufflings of the surface waters. It was all so
nakedly plain there. On the one hand was the primordial, on the other
the rankly new. The farm on the veld stood on the veld, a thing of the
veld, a thing rooted and established there and nowhere else. The dusty,
crude, brick-field desolation of the Rand on the other hand did not
really belong with any particularity to South Africa at all. It was one
with our camps and armies. It was part of something else, something
still bigger: a monstrous shadowy arm had thrust out from Europe and
torn open this country, erected these chimneys, piled these heaps--and
sent the ration-tins and cartridge-cases to follow them. It was gigantic
kindred with that ancient predecessor which had built the walls of
Zimbabwe. And this hungry, impatient demand for myriads of toilers, this
threatening inundation of black or brown or yellow bond-serfs was just
the natural voice of this colossal system to which I belonged, which had
brought me hither, and which I now perceived I did not even begin to
understand....
One day when asking my way to some forgotten destination, I had pointed
out to me the Grey and Roberts Deep Mine. Some familiarity in the name
set me thinking until I recalled that this was the mine in which I had
once heard Lady Ladislaw confess large holdings, this mine in which
gangs of indentured Chinamen would presently be sweating to pay the
wages of the game-keepers and roadmenders in Burnmore Park....
Yes, this was what I was taking in at that time, but it found
me--inexpressive; what I was saying on my return to England gave me no
intimation of the broad conceptions growing in my mind. I came back to
be one of the many scores of energetic and ambitious young men who were
parroting "Efficiency," stirring up people and more particularly
stirring up themselves with the utmost vigor,--and all the time within
their secret hearts more than a little at a loss....
§ 6
While I had been in South Africa circumstances had conspired to alter my
prospects in life very greatly. Unanticipated freedoms and opportunities
had come to me, and it was no longer out of the question for me to think
of a parliamentary career. Our fortunes had altered. My father had
ceased to be rector of Burnmore, and had become a comparatively wealthy
man.
My second cousin, Reginald Stratton, had been drowned in Finland, and
his father had only survived the shock of his death a fortnight; his
sister, Arthur Mason's first wife, had died in giving birth to a
stillborn child the year before, and my father found himself suddenly
the owner of all that large stretch of developing downland and building
land which old Reginald had bought between Shaddock and Golding on the
south and West Esher station on the north, and in addition of
considerable investments in northern industrials. It was an odd
collusion of mortality; we had had only the coldest relations with our
cousins, and now abruptly through their commercial and speculative
activities, which we had always affected to despise and ignore, I was in
a position to attempt the realization of my old political ambitions.
My cousins' house had not been to my father's taste. He had let it, and
I came to a new home in a pleasant, plain red-brick house, a hundred and
fifty years old perhaps, on an open and sunny hillside, sheltered by
trees eastward and northward, a few miles to the south-west of
Guildford. It had all the gracious proportions, the dignified
simplicity, the roomy comfort of the good building of that time. It
looked sunward; we breakfasted in sunshine in the library, and outside
was an old wall with peach trees and a row of pillar roses heavily in
flower. I had a little feared this place; Burnmore Rectory had been so
absolutely home to me with its quiet serenities, its ample familiar
garden, its greenhouses and intimately known corners, but I perceived I
might have trusted my father's character to preserve his essential
atmosphere. He was so much himself as I remembered him that I did not
even observe for a day or so that he had not only aged considerably but
discarded the last vestiges of clerical costume in his attire. He met me
in front of the house and led me into a wide panelled hall and wrung my
hand again and again, deeply moved and very inexpressive. "Did you have
a good journey?" he asked again and again, with tears in his eyes. "Did
you have a comfortable journey?"
"I've not seen the house," said I. "It looks fine."
"_You're_ a man," he said, and patted my shoulder. "Of course! It was at
Burnmore."
"You're not changed," I said. "You're not an atom changed."
"How could I?" he replied. "Come--come and have something to eat. You
ought to have something to eat."
We talked of the house and what a good house it was, and he took me out
into the garden to see the peaches and grape vine and then brought me
back without showing them to me in order to greet my cousin. "It's very
like Burnmore," he said with his eyes devouring me, "very like. A
little more space and--no services. No services at all. That makes a gap
of course. There's a little chap about here, you'll find--his name is
Wednesday--who sorts my papers and calls himself my secretary.... Not
necessary perhaps but--_I missed the curate_."
He said he was reading more than he used to do now that the parish was
off his hands, and he was preparing material for a book. It was, he
explained later, to take the form of a huge essay ostensibly on Secular
Canons, but its purport was to be no less than the complete
secularization of the Church of England. At first he wanted merely to
throw open the cathedral chapters to distinguished laymen, irrespective
of their theological opinions, and to make each English cathedral a
centre of intellectual activity, a college as it were of philosophers
and writers. But afterwards his suggestions grew bolder, the Articles of
Religion were to be set aside, the creeds made optional even for the
clergy. His dream became more and more richly picturesque until at last
he saw Canterbury a realized Thelema, and St. Paul's a new Academic
Grove. He was to work at that remarkable proposal intermittently for
many years, and to leave it at last no more than a shapeless mass of
memoranda, fragmentary essays, and selected passages for quotation. Yet
mere patchwork and scrapbook as it would be, I still have some thought
of publishing it. There is a large human charity about it, a sun too
broad and warm, a reasonableness too wide and free perhaps for the timid
convulsive quality of our time, yet all good as good wine for the wise.
Is it incredible that a day should come when our great grey monuments to
the Norman spirit should cease to be occupied by narrow-witted parsons
and besieged by narrow-souled dissenters, the soul of our race in exile
from the home and place our fathers built for it?...
If he was not perceptibly changed, I thought my cousin Jane had become
more than a little sharper and stiffer. She did not like my uncle's own
personal secularization, and still less the glimpses she got of the
ampler intentions of his book. She missed the proximity to the church
and her parochial authority. But she was always a silent woman, and made
her comments with her profile and not with her tongue....
"I'm glad you've come back, Stephen," said my father as we sat together
after dinner and her departure, with port and tall silver candlesticks
and shining mahogany between us. "I've missed you. I've done my best to
follow things out there. I've got, I suppose, every press mention
there's been of you during the war and since. I've subscribed to two
press-cutting agencies, so that if one missed you the other fellow got
you. Perhaps you'll like to read them over one of these days.... You
see, there's not been a soldier in the family since the Peninsular War,
and so I've been particularly interested.... You must tell me all the
things you're thinking of, and what you mean to do. This last
stuff--this Chinese business--it puzzles me. I want to know what you
think of it--and everything."
I did my best to give him my ideas such as they were. And as they were
still very vague ideas I have no doubt he found me rhetorical. I can
imagine myself talking of the White Man's Burthen, and how in Africa it
had seemed at first to sit rather staggeringly upon our under-trained
shoulders. I spoke of slackness and planlessness.
"I've come back in search of efficiency." I have no doubt I said that
at any rate.
"We're trying to run this big empire," I may have explained, "with
under-trained, under-educated, poor-spirited stuff, and we shall come a
cropper unless we raise our quality. I'm still Imperialist, more than
ever I was. But I'm an Imperialist on a different footing. I've no great
illusions left about the Superiority of the Anglo-Saxons. All that has
gone. But I do think it will be a monstrous waste, a disaster to human
possibilities if this great liberal-spirited empire sprawls itself
asunder for the want of a little gravity and purpose. And it's here the
work has to be done, the work of training and bracing up and stimulating
the public imagination...."
Yes, that would be the sort of thing I should have said in those days.
There's an old _National Review_ on my desk as I write, containing an
article by me with some of those very phrases in it. I have been looking
at it in order to remind myself of my own forgotten eloquence.
"Yes," I remember my father saying. "Yes." And then after reflection,
"But those coolies, those Chinese coolies. You can't build up an
imperial population by importing coolies."
"I don't like that side of the business myself," I said. "It's detail."
"Perhaps. But the Liberals will turn you out on it next year. And then
start badgering public houses and looting the church.... And then this
Tariff talk! Everybody on our side seems to be mixing up the unity of
the empire with tariffs. It's a pity. Salisbury wouldn't have stood it.
Unity! Unity depends on a common literature and a common language and
common ideas and sympathies. It doesn't unite people for them to be
forced to trade with each other. Trading isn't friendship. I don't trade
with my friends and I don't make friends with my tradesmen. Natural
enemies--polite of course but antagonists. Are you keen over this Tariff
stuff, Steve?"
"Not a bit," I said. "That too seems a detail."
"It doesn't seem to be keeping its place as a detail," said my father.
"Very few men can touch tariffs and not get a little soiled. I hate all
this international sharping, all these attempts to get artificial
advantages, all this making poor people buy inferior goods dear, in the
name of the flag. If it comes to that, damn the flag! Custom-houses are
ugly things, Stephen; the dirty side of nationality. Dirty things,
ignoble, cross, cunning things.... They wake you up in the small hours
and rout over your bags.... An imperial people ought to be an urbane
people, a civilizing people--above such petty irritating things. I'd as
soon put barbed wire along the footpath across that field where the
village children go to school. Or claim that our mushrooms are
cultivated. Or prosecute a Sunday-Society Cockney for picking my
primroses. Custom-houses indeed! It's Chinese. There are things a Great
Country mustn't do, Stephen. A country like ours ought to get along
without the manners of a hard-breathing competitive cad.... If it can't
I'd rather it didn't get along.... What's the good of a huckster
country?--it's like having a wife on the streets. It's no excuse that
she brings you money. But since the peace, and that man Chamberlain's
visit to Africa, you Imperialists seem to have got this nasty spirit all
over you.... The Germans do it, you say!"
My father shut one eye and regarded the color of his port against the
waning light. "Let _'em_," he said.... "Fancy!--quoting the _Germans_!
When I was a boy, there weren't any Germans. They came up after '70.
Statecraft from Germany! And statesmen from Birmingham! German silver
and Electroplated Empires.... No."
"It's just a part of our narrow outlook," I answered from the hearthrug,
after a pause. "It's because we're so--limited that everyone is
translating the greatness of empire into preferential trading and
jealousy of Germany. It's for something bigger than that that I've
returned."
"Those big things come slowly," said my father. And then with a sigh:
"Age after age. They seem at times--to be standing still. Good things go
with the bad; bad things come with the good...."
I remember him saying that as though I could still hear him.
It must have been after dinner, for he was sitting, duskily indistinct,
against the light, with a voice coming out to him. The candles had not
been brought in, and the view one saw through the big plate glass window
behind him was very clear and splendid. Those little Wealden hills in
Surrey and Sussex assume at times, for all that by Swiss standards they
are the merest ridges of earth, the dignity and mystery of great
mountains. Now, the crests of Hindhead and Blackdown, purple black
against the level gold of the evening sky, might have been some
high-flung boundary chain. Nearer there gathered banks and pools of
luminous lavender-tinted mist out of which hills of pinewood rose like
islands out of the sea. The intervening spaces were magnified to
continental dimensions. And the closer lowlier things over which we
looked, the cottages below us, were grey and black and dim, pierced by a
few luminous orange windows and with a solitary street lamp shining like
a star; the village might have been nestling a mountain's height below
instead of a couple of hundred feet.
I left my hearthrug, and walked to the window to survey this.
"Who's got all that land stretching away there; that little blunted
sierra of pines and escarpments I mean?"
My father halted for an instant in his answer, and glanced over his
shoulder.
"Wardingham and Baxter share all those coppices," he remarked. "They
come up to my corner on each side."
"But the dark heather and pine land beyond. With just the gables of a
house among the trees."
"Oh? _that_," he said with a careful note of indifference.
"That's--Justin. You know Justin. He used to come to Burnmore Park."
CHAPTER THE SIXTH
LADY MARY JUSTIN
§ 1
I did not see Lady Mary Justin for nearly seven months after my return
to England. Of course I had known that a meeting was inevitable, and I
had taken that very carefully into consideration before I decided to
leave South Africa. But many things had happened to me during those
crowded years, so that it seemed possible that that former magic would
no longer sway and distress me. Not only had new imaginative interests
taken hold of me but--I had parted from adolescence. I was a man. I had
been through a great war, seen death abundantly, seen hardship and
passion, and known hunger and shame and desire. A hundred disillusioning
revelations of the quality of life had come to me; once for example when
we were taking some people to the concentration camps it had been
necessary to assist at the premature birth of a child by the wayside, a
startlingly gory and agonizing business for a young man to deal with.
Heavens! how it shocked me! I could give a score of such grim
pictures--and queer pictures....
And it wasn't only the earthlier aspects of the life about me but also
of the life within me that I had been discovering. The first wonder and
innocence, the worshipping, dawn-clear passion of youth, had gone out of
me for ever....
§ 2
We met at a dinner. It was at a house the Tarvrilles had taken for the
season in Mayfair. The drawing-room was a big white square apartment
with several big pictures and a pane of plate glass above the fireplace
in the position in which one usually finds a mirror; this showed another
room beyond, containing an exceptionally large, gloriously colored
portrait in pastel--larger than I had ever thought pastels could be.
Except for the pictures both rooms were almost colorless. It was a
brilliant dinner, with a predominating note of ruby; three of the women
wore ruby velvet; and Ellersley was present just back from Arabia, and
Ethel Manton, Lady Hendon and the Duchess of Clynes. I was greeted by
Lady Tarvrille, spoke to Ellersley and Lady Hendon, and then discovered
a lady in a dress of blue and pearls standing quite still under a
picture in the opposite corner of the room and regarding me attentively.
It was Mary. Some man was beside her, a tall grey man with a broad
crimson ribbon, and I think he must have spoken of me to her. It was as
if she had just turned to look at me.
Constantly during those intervening months I had been thinking of
meeting her. None the less there was a shock, not so much of surprise as
of deferred anticipation. There she stood like something amazingly
forgotten that was now amazingly recalled. She struck me in that brief
crowded instant of recognition as being exactly the person she had been
when we had made love in Burnmore Park; there were her eyes, at once
frank and sidelong, the old familiar sweep of her hair, the old familiar
tilt of the chin, the faint humor of her lip, and at the same time she
seemed to be something altogether different from the memories I had
cherished, she was something graver, something inherently more splendid
than they had recorded. Her face lit now with recognition.
I went across to her at once, with some dull obviousness upon my lips.
"And so you are back from Africa at last," she said, still unsmiling. "I
saw about you in the papers.... You had a good time."
"I had great good luck," I replied.
"I never dreamt when we were boy and girl together that you would make a
soldier."
I think I said that luck made soldiers.
Then I think we found a difficulty in going on with our talk, and began
a dull little argument that would have been stupidly egotistical on my
part if it hadn't been so obviously merely clumsy, about luck making
soldiers or only finding them out. I saw that she had not intended to
convey any doubt of my military capacity but only of that natural
insensitiveness which is supposed to be needed in a soldier. But our
minds were remote from the words upon our lips. We were like aphasiacs
who say one thing while they intend something altogether different. The
impulse that had brought me across to her had brought me up to a wall of
impossible utterances. It was with a real quality of rescue that our
hostess came between us to tell us our partners at the dinner-table,
and to introduce me to mine. "You shall have him again on your other
side," she said to Lady Mary with a charming smile for me, treating me
as if I was a lion in request instead of the mere outsider I was.
We talked very little at dinner. Both of us I think were quite unequal
to the occasion. Whatever meetings we had imagined, certainly neither of
us had thought of this very possible encounter, a long disconcerting
hour side by side. I began to remember old happenings with an
astonishing vividness; there within six inches of me was the hand I had
kissed; her voice was the same to its lightest shade, her hair flowed
off her forehead with the same amazingly familiar wave. Was she too
remembering? But I perhaps had changed altogether....
"Why did you go away as you did?" she asked abruptly, when for a moment
we were isolated conversationally. "Why did you never write?"
She had still that phantom lisp.
"What else could I do?"
She turned away from me and answered the man on her left, who had just
addressed her....
When the mid-dinner change came we talked a little about indifferent
things, making a stiff conversation like a bridge over a torrent of
unspoken intimacies. We discussed something; I think Lady Tarvrille's
flowers and the Cape Flora and gardens. She told me she had a Japanese
garden with three Japanese gardeners. They were wonderful little men to
watch. "Humming-bird gardeners," she called them. "They wear their
native costume."
"We are your neighbors in Surrey," she said, going off abruptly from
that. "We are quite near to your father."
She paused with that characteristic effect of deliberation in her
closed lips. Then she added: "I can see the trees behind your father's
house from the window of my room."
"Yes," I said. "You take all our southward skyline."
She turned her face to me with the manner of a great lady adding a new
acquaintance to her collection. But her eyes met mine very steadily and
intimately. "Mr. Stratton," she said--it was the first time in her life
she had called me that--"when we come back to Surrey I want you to come
and see me and tell me of all the things you are going to do. Will you?"
§ 3
That meeting, that revival, must have been late in November or early in
December. Already by that time I had met your mother. I write to you,
little son, not to you as you are now, but to the man you are someday to
be. I write to understand myself, and, so far as I can understand, to
make you understand. So that I want you to go back with me for a time
into the days before your birth, to think not of that dear spirit of
love who broods over you three children, that wise, sure mother who
rules your life, but of a young and slender girl, Rachel More, younger
then than you will be when at last this story comes into your hands. For
unless you think of her as being a girl, if you let your present
knowledge of her fill out this part in our story, you will fail to
understand the proportions of these two in my life. So I shall write of
her here as Rachel More, as if she were someone as completely
dissociated from yourself as Lady Mary; as if she were someone in the
story of my life who had as little to do with yours.
I had met her in September. The house my father lived in is about twelve
miles away from your mother's home at Ridinghanger, and I was taken over
by Percy Restall in his motor-car. Restall had just become a convert to
this new mode of locomotion, and he was very active with a huge,
malignant-looking French car that opened behind, and had a kind of poke
bonnet and all sorts of features that have since disappeared from the
automobile world. He took everyone that he could lay hands upon for
rides,--he called it extending their range, and he called upon everyone
else to show off the car; he was responsible for more introduction and
social admixture in that part of Surrey than had occurred during the
previous century. We punctured in the Ridinghanger drive, Restall did
his own repairs, and so it was we stayed for nearly four hours and
instead of a mere caller I became a familiar friend of the family.
Your mother then was still not eighteen, a soft white slip of being,
tall, slender, brown-haired and silent, with very still deep dark eyes.
She and your three aunts formed a very gracious group of young women
indeed; Alice then as now the most assertive, with a gay initiative and
a fluent tongue; Molly already a sun-brown gipsy, and Norah still a
pig-tailed thing of lank legs and wild embraces and the pinkest of swift
pink blushes; your uncle Sidney, with his shy lank moodiness, acted the
brotherly part of a foil. There were several stray visitors, young men
and maidens, there were always stray visitors in those days at
Ridinghanger, and your grandmother, rosy and bright-eyed, maintained a
gentle flow of creature comforts and kindly but humorous observations. I
do not remember your grandfather on this occasion; probably he wasn't
there.
There was tea, and we played tennis and walked about and occasionally
visited Restall, who was getting dirtier and dirtier, and crosser and
crosser at his repairs, and spreading a continually more remarkable
assemblage of parts and instruments over the grass about him. He looked
at last more like a pitch in the Caledonian market than a decent country
gentleman paying an afternoon call. And then back to more tennis and
more talk. We fell into a discussion of Tariff Reform as we sat taking
tea. Two of the visitor youths were strongly infected by the new
teachings which were overshadowing the outlook of British Imperialism.
Some mean phrase about not conquering Africa for the German bagman, some
ugly turn of thought that at a touch brought down Empire to the level of
a tradesman's advantage, fell from one of them, and stirred me to sudden
indignation. I began to talk of things that had been gathering in my
mind for some time.
I do not know what I said. It was in the vein of my father's talk no
doubt. But I think that for once I may have been eloquent. And in the
midst of my demand for ideals in politics that were wider and deeper
than artful buying and selling, that looked beyond a vulgar aggression
and a churl's dread and hatred of foreign things, while I struggled to
say how great and noble a thing empire might be, I saw Rachel's face.
This, it was manifest, was a new kind of talk to her. Her dark eyes were
alight with a beautiful enthusiasm for what I was trying to say, and
for what in the light of that glowing reception I seemed to be.
I felt that queer shame one feels when one is taken suddenly at the full
value of one's utmost expressions. I felt as though I had cheated her,
was passing myself off for something as great and splendid as the Empire
of my dreams. It is hard to dissociate oneself from the fine things to
which one aspires. I stopped almost abruptly. Dumbly her eyes bade me go
on, but when I spoke again it was at a lower level....
That look in Rachel's eyes remained with me. My mind had flashed very
rapidly from the realization of its significance to the thought that if
one could be sure of that, then indeed one could pitch oneself high.
Rachel, I felt, had something for me that I needed profoundly, without
ever having known before that I needed it. She had the supreme gifts of
belief and devotion; in that instant's gleam it seemed she held them out
to me.
Never before in my life had it seemed credible to me that anyone could
give me that, or that I could hope for such a gift of support and
sacrifice. Love as I had known it had been a community and an alliance,
a frank abundant meeting; but this was another kind of love that shone
for an instant and promised, and vanished shyly out of sight as I and
Rachel looked at one another.
Some interruption occurred. Restall came, I think, blackened by
progress, to drink a cup of tea and negotiate the loan of a kitchen
skewer. A kitchen skewer it appeared was all that was needed to complete
his reconstruction in the avenue. Norah darted off for a kitchen skewer,
while Restall drank. And then there was a drift to tennis, and Rachel
and I were partners. All this time I was in a state of startled
attention towards her, full of this astounding impression that something
wonderful and unprecedented had flowed out from her towards my life,
full too of doubts now whether that shining response had ever occurred,
whether some trick of light and my brain had not deceived me. I wanted
tremendously to talk to her, and did not know how to begin in any
serious fashion. Beyond everything I wanted to see again that deep onset
of belief....
"Come again," said your grandmother to me, "come again!" after she had
tried in vain to make Restall stay for an informal supper. I was all for
staying, but Restall said darkly, "There are the Lamps."
"But they will be all right," said Mrs. More.
"I can't trust 'em," said Restall, with a deepening gloom. "Not after
_that_." The motor-car looked self-conscious and uncomfortable, but said
nothing by way of excuse, and Restall took me off in it like one whose
sun has set for ever. "I wouldn't be surprised," said Restall as we went
down the drive, "if the damned thing turned a somersault. It might
do--anything." Those were the brighter days of motoring.
The next time I went over released from Restall's limitations, and
stayed to a jolly family supper. I found remarkably few obstacles in my
way to a better acquaintance with Rachel. You see I was an entirely
eligible and desirable young man in Mrs. More's eyes....
§ 4
When I recall these long past emotions again, I am struck by the
profound essential difference between my feelings for your mother and
for Mary. They were so different that it seems scarcely rational to me
that they should be called by the same name. Yet each was love,
profoundly deep and sincere. The contrast lies, I think, in our relative
ages, and our relative maturity; that altered the quality of all our
emotions. The one was the love of a man of six-and-twenty, exceptionally
seasoned and experienced and responsible for his years, for a girl still
at school, a girl attractively beautiful, mysterious and unknown to him;
the other was the love of coevals, who had been playmates and intimate
companions, and of whom the woman was certainly as capable and wilful as
the man.
Now it is exceptional for men to love women of their own age, it is the
commoner thing that they should love maidens younger and often much
younger than themselves. This is true more particularly of our own
class; the masculine thirties and forties marry the feminine twenties,
all the prevailing sentiment and usage between the sexes rises naturally
out of that. We treat this seniority as though it were a virile
characteristic; we treat the man as though he were a natural senior, we
expect a weakness, a timid deference, in the girl. I and Mary had loved
one another as two rivers run together on the way to the sea, we had
grown up side by side to the moment when we kissed; but I sought your
mother, I watched her and desired her and chose her, very tenderly and
worshipfully indeed, to be mine. I do not remember that there was any
corresponding intention in my mind to be hers. I do not think that that
idea came in at all. She was something to be won, something playing an
inferior and retreating part. And I was artificial in all my attitudes
to her, I thought of what would interest her, what would please her, I
knew from the outset that what she saw in me to rouse that deep, shy
glow of exaltation in her face was illusion, illusion it was my business
to sustain. And so I won her, and long years had to pass, years of
secret loneliness and hidden feelings, of preposterous pretences and
covert perplexities, before we escaped from that crippling tradition of
inequality and looked into one another's eyes with understanding and
forgiveness, a woman and a man.
I made no great secret of the interest and attraction I found in Rachel,
and the Mores made none of their entire approval of me. I walked over on
the second occasion, and Ridinghanger opened out, a great flower of
genial appreciation that I came alone, hiding nothing of its dawning
perception that it was Rachel in particular I came to see.
Your grandmother's match-making was as honest as the day. There was the
same salad of family and visitors as on the former afternoon, and this
time I met Freshman, who was destined to marry Alice; there was tea,
tennis, and, by your grandmother's suggestion, a walk to see the sunset
from the crest of the hill. Rachel and I walked across the breezy
moorland together, while I talked and tempted her to talk.
What, I wonder, did we talk about? English scenery, I think, and African
scenery and the Weald about us, and the long history of the Weald and
its present and future, and at last even a little of politics. I had
never explored the mind of a girl of seventeen before; there was a
surprise in all she knew and a delight in all she didn't know, and about
herself a candor, a fresh simplicity of outlook that was sweeter than
the clear air about us, sweeter than sunshine or the rising song of a
lark. She believed so gallantly and beautifully, she was so perfectly,
unaffectedly and certainly prepared to be a brave and noble person--if
only life would let her. And she hadn't as yet any suspicion that life
might make that difficult....
I went to Ridinghanger a number of times in the spring and early summer.
I talked a great deal with Rachel, and still I did not make love to her.
It was always in my mind that I would make love to her, the heavens and
earth and all her family were propitious, glowing golden with consent
and approval, I thought she was the most wonderful and beautiful thing
in life, and her eyes, the intonation of her voice, her hurrying color
and a hundred little involuntary signs told me how she quickened at my
coming. But there was a shyness. I loved her as one loves and admires a
white flower or a beautiful child--some stranger's child. I felt that I
might make her afraid of me. I had never before thought that to make
love is a coarse thing. But still at high summer when I met Mary again
no definite thing had been said between myself and Rachel. But we knew,
each of us knew, that somewhere in a world less palpable, in fairyland,
in dreamland, we had met and made our vows.
§ 5
You see how far my imagination had gone towards readjustment when Mary
returned into my life. You see how strange and distant it was to meet
her again, changed completely into the great lady she had intended to
be, speaking to me with the restrained and practised charm of a woman
who is young and beautiful and prominent and powerful and secure. There
was no immediate sense of shock in that resumption of our broken
intercourse, it seemed to me that night simply that something odd and
curious had occurred. I do not remember how we parted that evening or
whether we even saw each other after dinner was over, but from that hour
forth Mary by insensible degrees resumed her old predominance in my
mind. I woke up in the night and thought about her, and next day I found
myself thinking of her, remembering things out of the past and recalling
and examining every detail of the overnight encounter. How cold and
ineffective we had been, both of us! We had been like people resuming a
disused and partially forgotten language. Had she changed towards me?
Did she indeed want to see me again or was that invitation a mere
demonstration of how entirely unimportant seeing me or not seeing me had
become?
Then I would find myself thinking with the utmost particularity of her
face. Had it changed at all? Was it altogether changed? I seemed to have
forgotten everything and remembered everything; that peculiar slight
thickness of her eyelids that gave her eyes their tenderness, that light
firmness of her lips. Of course she would want to talk to me, as now I
perceived I wanted to talk to her.
Was I in love with her still? It seemed to me then that I was not. It
had not been that hesitating fierceness, that pride and demand and
doubt, which is passionate love, that had made all my sensations strange
to me as I sat beside her. It had been something larger and finer,
something great and embracing, a return to fellowship. Here beside me,
veiled from me only by our transient embarrassment and the tarnish of
separation and silences, was the one person who had ever broken down the
crust of shy insincerity which is so incurably my characteristic and
talked intimately of the inmost things of life to me. I discovered now
for the first time how intense had been my loneliness for the past five
years. I discovered now that through all those years I had been hungry
for such talk as Mary alone could give me. My mind was filled with talk,
filled with things I desired to say to her; that chaos began to take on
a multitudinous expression at the touch of her spirit. I began to
imagine conversations with her, to prepare reports for her of those new
worlds of sensation and activity I had discovered since that boyish
parting.
But when at last that talk came it was altogether different from any of
those I had invented.
She wrote to me when she came down into Surrey and I walked over to
Martens the next afternoon. I found her in her own sitting-room, a
beautiful characteristic apartment with tall French windows hung with
blue curtains, a large writing-desk and a great litter of books. The
room gave upon a broad sunlit terrace with a balustrading of yellowish
stone, on which there stood great oleanders. Beyond was a flower garden
and then the dark shadows of cypresses. She was standing as I came in to
her, as though she had seen me coming across the lawns and had been
awaiting my entrance. "I thought you might come to-day," she said, and
told the manservant to deny her to other callers. Again she produced
that queer effect of being at once altogether the same and altogether
different from the Mary I had known. "Justin," she said, "is in Paris.
He comes back on Friday." I saw then that the change lay in her bearing,
that for the easy confidence of the girl she had now the deliberate
dignity and control of a married woman--a very splendidly and spaciously
married woman. Her manner had been purged of impulse. Since we had met
she had stood, the mistress of great houses, and had dealt with
thousands of people.
"You walked over to me?"
"I walked," I said. "It is nearly a straight path. You know it?"
"You came over the heather beyond our pine wood," she confirmed. And
then I think we talked some polite unrealities about Surrey scenery and
the weather. It was so formal that by a common impulse we let the topic
suddenly die. We stood through a pause, a hesitation. Were we indeed to
go on at that altitude of cold civility? She turned to the window as if
the view was to serve again.
"Sit down," she said and dropped into a chair against the light, looking
away from me across the wide green space of afternoon sunshine. I sat
down on a little sofa, at a loss also.
"And so," she said, turning her face to me suddenly, "you come back into
my life." And I was amazed to see that the brightness of her eyes was
tears. "We've lived--five years."
"You," I said clumsily, "have done all sorts of things. I hear of
you--patronizing young artists--organizing experiments in village
education."
"Yes," she said, "I've done all sorts of things. One has to. Forced,
unreal things for the most part. You I expect have done--all sorts of
things also.... But yours have been real things...."
"All things," I remarked sententiously, "are real. And all of them a
little unreal. South Africa has been wonderful. And now it is all over
one doubts if it really happened. Like that incredulous mood after a
storm of passion."
"You've come back for good?"
"For good. I want to do things in England."
"Politics?"
"If I can get into that."
Again a pause. There came the characteristic moment of deliberation that
I remembered so well.
"I never meant you," she said, "to go away.... You could have written.
You never answered the notes I sent."
"I was frantic," I said, "with loss and jealousy. I wanted to forget."
"And you forgot?"
"I did my best."
"I did my best," said Mary. "And now---- Have you forgotten?"
"Nothing."
"Nor I. I thought I had. Until I saw you again. I've thought of you
endlessly. I've wanted to talk to you. We had a way of talking together.
But you went away. You turned your back as though all that was
nothing--not worth having. You--you drove home my marriage, Stephen. You
made me know what a thing of sex a woman is to a man--and how little
else...."
She paused.
"You see," I said slowly. "You had made me, as people say, in love with
you.... I don't know--if you remember everything...."
She looked me in the eyes for a moment.
"I hadn't been fair," she said with an abrupt abandonment of accusation.
"But you know, Stephen, that night---- I meant to explain. And
afterwards.... Things sometimes go as one hasn't expected them to go,
even the things one has planned to say. I suppose--I treated
you--disgustingly."
I protested.
"Yes," she said. "I treated you as I did--and I thought you would stand
it. I _knew_, I knew then as well as you do now that male to my female
you wouldn't stand it, but somehow--I thought there were other things.
Things that could override that...."
"Not," I said, "for a boy of one-and-twenty."
"But in a man of twenty-six?"
I weighed the question. "Things are different," I said, and then, "Yes.
Anyhow now--if I may come back penitent,--to a friendship."
We looked at one another gravely. Faintly in our ears sounded the music
of past and distant things. We pretended to hear nothing of that, tried
honestly to hear nothing of it. I had not remembered how steadfast and
quiet her face could be. "Yes," she said, "a friendship."
"I've always had you in my mind, Stephen," she said. "When I saw I
couldn't marry you, it seemed to me I had better marry and be free of
any further hope. I thought we could get over that. 'Let's get it over,'
I thought. Now--at any rate--we have got over that." Her eyes verified
her words a little doubtfully. "And we can talk and you can tell me of
your life, and the things you want to do that make life worth living.
Oh! life has been _stupid_ without you, Stephen, large and expensive and
aimless....Tell me of your politics. They say--Justin told me--you think
of parliament?"
"I want to do that. I have been thinking---- In fact I am going to
stand." I found myself hesitating on the verge of phrases in the quality
of a review article. It was too unreal for her presence. And yet it was
this she seemed to want from me. "This," I said, "is a phase of great
opportunities. The war has stirred the Empire to a sense of itself, to a
sense of what it might be. Of course this Tariff Reform row is a squalid
nuisance; it may kill out all the fine spirit again before anything is
done. Everything will become a haggle, a chaffering of figures.... All
the more reason why we should try and save things from the commercial
traveller. If the Empire is anything at all, it is something infinitely
more than a combination in restraint of trade...."
"Yes," she said. "And you want to take that line. The high line."
"If one does not take the high line," I said, "what does one go into
politics for?"
"Stephen," she smiled, "you haven't lost a sort of simplicity---- People
go into politics because it looks important, because other people go
into politics, because they can get titles and a sense of influence
and--other things. And then there are quarrels, old grudges to serve."
"These are roughnesses of the surface."
"Old Stephen!" she cried with the note of a mother. "They will worry you
in politics."
I laughed. "Perhaps I'm not altogether so simple."
"Oh! you'll get through. You have a way of going on. But I shall have
to watch over you. I see I shall have to watch over you. Tell me of the
things you mean to do. Where are you standing?"
I began to tell her a little disjointedly of the probabilities of my
Yorkshire constituency....
§ 6
I have a vivid vignette in my memory of my return to my father's house,
down through the pine woods and by the winding path across the deep
valley that separated our two ridges. I was thinking of Mary and nothing
but Mary in all the world and of the friendly sweetness of her eyes and
the clean strong sharpness of her voice. That sweet white figure of
Rachel that had been creeping to an ascendancy in my imagination was
moonlight to her sunrise. I knew it was Mary I loved and had always
loved. I wanted passionately to be as she desired, the friend she
demanded, that intimate brother and confederate, but all my heart cried
out for her, cried out for her altogether.
I would be her friend, I repeated to myself, I would be her friend. I
would talk to her often, plan with her, work with her. I could put my
meanings into her life and she should throw her beauty over mine. I
began already to dream of the talk of to-morrow's meeting....
§ 7
And now let me go on to tell at once the thing that changed life for
both of us altogether, that turned us out of the courses that seemed
set for us, our spacious, successful and divergent ways, she to the
tragedy of her death and I from all the prospects of the public career
that lay before me to the work that now, toilsomely, inadequately and
blunderingly enough, I do. It was to pierce and slash away the
appearances of life for me, it was to open my way to infinite
disillusionment, and unsuspected truths. Within a few weeks of our
second meeting Mary and I were passionately in love with one another; we
had indeed become lovers. The arrested attractions of our former love
released again, drew us inevitably to that. We tried to seem outwardly
only friends, with this hot glow between us. Our tormented secret was
half discovered and half betrayed itself. There followed a tragi-comedy
of hesitations and disunited struggle. Within four months the crisis of
our two lives was past....
It is not within my purpose to tell you, my son, of the particular
events, the particular comings and goings, the chance words, the chance
meetings, the fatal momentary misunderstandings that occurred between
us. I want to tell of something more general than that. This
misadventure is in our strain. It is our inheritance. It is a
possibility in the inheritance of all honest and emotional men and
women. There are no doubt people altogether cynical and adventurous to
whom these passions and desires are at once controllable and permissible
indulgences without any radiation of consequences, a secret and
detachable part of life, and there may be people of convictions so
strong and simple that these disturbances are eliminated, but we
Strattons are of a quality neither so low nor so high, we stoop and
rise, we are not convinced about our standards, and for many
generations to come, with us and with such people as the Christians, and
indeed with most of our sort of people, we shall be equally desirous of
free and intimate friendship and prone to blaze into passion and
disaster at that proximity.
This is one of the essential riddles in the adaptation of such human
beings as ourselves to that greater civilized state of which I dream. It
is the gist of my story. It is one of the two essential riddles that
confront our kind. The servitude of sex and the servitude of labor are
the twin conditions upon which human society rests to-day, the two
limitations upon its progress towards a greater social order, to that
greater community, those uplands of light and happy freedom, towards
which that Being who was my father yesterday, who thinks in myself
to-day, and who will be you to-morrow and your sons after you, by his
very nature urges and must continue to urge the life of mankind. The
story of myself and Mary is a mere incident in that gigantic, scarce
conscious effort to get clear of toils and confusions and encumbrances,
and have our way with life. We are like little figures, dots ascendant
upon a vast hillside; I take up our intimacy for an instant and hold it
under a lens for you. I become more than myself then, and Mary stands
for innumerable women. It happened yesterday, and it is just a part of
that same history that made Edmond Stratton of the Hays elope with
Charlotte Anstruther and get himself run through the body at Haddington
two hundred years ago, which drove the Laidlaw-Christians to Virginia in
'45, gave Stratton Street to the moneylenders when George IV. was
Regent, and broke the heart of Margaret Stratton in the days when
Charles the First was king. With our individual variations and under
changed conditions the old desires and impulses stirred us, the old
antagonisms confronted us, the old difficulties and sloughs and
impassable places baffled us. There are times when I think of my history
among all those widespread repeated histories, until it seems to me that
the human Lover is like a creature who struggles for ever through a
thicket without an end....
There are no universal laws of affection and desire, but it is
manifestly true that for the most of us free talk, intimate association,
and any real fellowship between men and women turns with an extreme
readiness to love. And that being so it follows that under existing
conditions the unrestricted meeting and companionship of men and women
in society is a monstrous sham, a merely dangerous pretence of
encounters. The safe reality beneath those liberal appearances is that a
woman must be content with the easy friendship of other women and of one
man only, letting a superficial friendship towards all other men veil
impassable abysses of separation, and a man must in the same way have
one sole woman intimate. To all other women he must be a little blind, a
little deaf, politely inattentive. He must respect the transparent,
intangible, tacit purdah about them, respect it but never allude to it.
To me that is an intolerable state of affairs, but it is reality. If you
live in the spirit of any other understanding you will court social
disaster. I suppose it is a particularly intolerable state of affairs to
us Strattons because it is in our nature to want things to seem what
they are. That translucent yet impassible purdah outrages our veracity.
And it is plain to me that our social order cannot stand and is not
standing the tensions it creates. The convention that passions and
emotions are absent when they are palpably present broke down between
Mary and myself, as it breaks down in a thousand other cases, as it
breaks down everywhere. Our social life is honeycombed and rotten with
secret hidden relationships. The rigid, the obtuse and the
unscrupulously cunning escape; the honest passion sooner or later flares
out and destroys.... Here is a difficulty that no bullying imposition of
arbitrary rules on the one hand nor any reckless abandonment of law on
the other, can solve. Humanity has yet to find its method in sexual
things; it has to discover the use and the limitation of jealousy. And
before it can even begin to attempt to find, it has to cease its present
timid secret groping in shame and darkness and turn on the light of
knowledge. None of us knows much and most of us do not even know what is
known.
§ 8
The house is very quiet to-day. It is your mother's birthday, and you
three children have gone with her and Mademoiselle Potin into the forest
to celebrate the occasion. Presently I shall join you. The sunlit
garden, with its tall dreaming lilies against the trellised vines upon
the wall, the cedars and the grassy space about the sundial, have that
distinguished stillness, that definite, palpable and almost outlined
emptiness which is so to speak your negative presence. It is like a
sheet of sunlit colored paper out of which your figures have been cut.
There is a commotion of birds in the jasmine, and your Barker reclines
with an infinite tranquillity, a masterless dog, upon the lawn. I take
up this writing again after an interval of some weeks. I have been in
Paris, attending the Sabotage Conference, and dealing with those
intricate puzzles of justice and discipline and the secret sources of
contentment that have to be solved if sabotage is ever to vanish from
labor struggles again. I think a few points have been made clearer in
that curious riddle of reconciliations....
Now I resume this story. I turn over the sheets that were written and
finished before my departure, and come to the notes for what is to
follow.
Perhaps my days of work in Paris have carried my mind on beyond the
point at which I left the narrative. I sit as it were among a pile of
memories that are now all disordered and mixed up together, their proper
sequences and connexions lost. I cannot trace the phases through which
our mutual passion rode up through the restrained and dignified
intentions of our friendship. But I know that presently we were in a
white heat of desire. There must have been passages that I now
altogether forget, moments of tense transition. I am more and more
convinced that our swiftest, intensest, mental changes leave far less
vivid memories than impressions one receives when one is comparatively
passive. And of this phase in my life of which I am now telling I have
clear memories of a time when we talked like brother and sister, or like
angels if you will, and hard upon that came a time when we were planning
in all our moments together how and when and where we might meet in
secret and meet again.
Things drift with a phantom-like uncertainty into my mind and pass
again; those fierce motives of our transition have lost now all stable
form and feature, but I believe there was a curious tormenting urgency
in our jealousy of those others, of Justin on my part and of Rachel on
hers. At first we had talked quite freely about Rachel, had discussed my
conceivable marriage with her. We had indeed a little forced that topic,
as if to reassure ourselves of the honesty of our new footing. But the
force that urged us nearer pervaded all our being. It was hard enough to
be barred apart, to snatch back our hands from touching, to avoid each
other's eyes, to hurry a little out of the dusk towards the lit house
and its protecting servants, but the constant presence and suggestion of
those others from whom there were no bars, or towards whom bars could be
abolished at a look, at an impulse, exacerbated that hardship, roused a
fierce insatiable spirit of revolt within us. At times we grew angry
with each other's formalism, came near to quarrelling....
I associate these moods with the golden stillnesses of a prolonged and
sultry autumn, and with slowly falling leaves....
I will not tell you how that step was taken, it matters very little to
my story, nor will I tell which one of us it was first broke the
barriers down.
§ 9
But I do want to tell you certain things. I want to tell you them
because they are things that affect you closely. There was almost from
the first a difference between Mary and myself in this, that I wanted to
be public about our love, I wanted to be open and defiant, and
she--hesitated. She wanted to be secret. She wanted to keep me; I
sometimes think that she was moved to become my mistress because she
wanted to keep me. But she also wanted to keep everything else in her
life,--her position, her ample freedoms and wealth and dignity. Our love
was to be a secret cavern, Endymion's cave. I was ready enough to do
what I could to please her, and for a time I served that secrecy, lied,
pretended, agreed to false addresses, assumed names, and tangled myself
in a net-work of furtive proceedings. These are things that poison and
consume honest love.
You will learn soon enough as you grow to be a man that beneath the
respectable assumptions of our social life there is an endless intricate
world of subterfuge and hidden and perverted passion,--for all passion
that wears a mask is perversion--and that thousands of people of our
sort are hiding and shamming about their desires, their gratifications,
their true relationships. I do not mean the open offenders, for they are
mostly honest and gallant people, but the men and women who sin in the
shadows, the people who are not clean and scandalous, but immoral and
respectable. This underworld is not for us. I wish that I who have
looked into it could in some way inoculate you now against the
repetition of my misadventure. We Strattons are daylight men, and if I
work now for widened facilities of divorce, for an organized freedom and
independence of women, and greater breadth of toleration, it is because
I know in my own person the degradations, the falsity, the bitterness,
that can lurk beneath the inflexible pretentions of the established code
to-day.
And I want to tell you too of something altogether unforeseen that
happened to us, and that was this, that from the day that passion
carried us and we became in the narrower sense of the word lovers, all
the wider interests we had in common, our political intentions, our
impersonal schemes, began to pass out of our intercourse. Our situation
closed upon us like a trap and hid the sky. Something more intense had
our attention by the feet, and we used our wings no more. I do not think
that we even had the real happiness and beauty and delight of one
another. Because, I tell you, there is no light upon kiss or embrace
that is not done with pride. I do not know why it should be so, but
people of our race and quality are a little ashamed of mere
gratification in love. Always we seem in my memory to have been
whispering with flushed cheeks, and discussing
interminably--_situation_. Had something betrayed us, might something
betray, was this or that sufficiently cunning? Had we perhaps left a
footmark or failed to burn a note, was the second footman who was
detailed as my valet even now pausing astonished in the brushing of my
clothes with our crumpled secret in his hand? Between myself and the
clear vision of this world about me this infernal net-work of
precautions spread like a veil.
And it was not only a matter of concealments but of positive deceptions.
The figure of Justin comes back to me. It is a curious thing that in
spite of our bitter antagonism and the savage jealousy we were to feel
for one another, there has always been, and there remains now in my
thought of him, a certain liking, a regret at our opposition, a quality
of friendliness. His broad face, which the common impression and the
caricaturist make so powerful and eagle-like, is really not a brutal or
heavy face at all. It is no doubt aquiline, after the fashion of an
eagle-owl, the mouth and chin broad and the eyes very far apart, but
there is a minute puckering of the brows which combines with that queer
streak of brown discoloration that runs across his cheek and into the
white of his eyes, to give something faintly plaintive and pitiful to
his expression, an effect enhanced by the dark softness of his eyes.
They are gentle eyes; it is absurd to suppose them the eyes of a
violently forceful man. And indeed they do not belie Justin. It is not
by vehemence or pressure that his wealth and power have been attained;
it is by the sheer detailed abundance of his mind. In that queer big
brain of his there is something of the calculating boy and not a little
of the chess champion; he has a kind of financial gift, he must be rich,
and grows richer. What else is there for him to do? How many times have
I not tried to glance carelessly at his face and scrutinize that look in
his eyes, and ask myself was that his usual look, or was it lit by an
instinctive jealousy? Did he perhaps begin to suspect? I had become a
persistent visitor in the house, he might well be jealous of such minor
favors as she showed me, for with him she talked but little and shared
no thoughts. His manner with her was tinctured by an habituated despair.
They were extraordinarily polite and friendly with one another....
I tried a hundred sophistications of my treachery to him. I assured
myself that a modern woman is mistress and owner of herself; no chattel,
and so forth. But he did not think so, and neither she nor I were
behaving as though we thought so. In innumerable little things we were
doing our best tacitly to reassure him. And so you see me shaking hands
with this man, affecting an interest in his topics and affairs, staying
in his house, eating his food and drinking his wine, that I might be the
nearer to his wife. It is not the first time that has been done in the
world, there are esoteric codes to justify all I did; I perceive there
are types of men to whom such relationships are attractive by the very
reason of their illicit excitement. But we Strattons are honest people,
there is no secretive passion in our blood; this is no game for us;
never you risk the playing of it, little son, big son as you will be
when you read this story. Perhaps, but I hope indeed not, this may reach
you too late to be a warning, come to you in mid-situation. Go through
with it then, inheritor of mine, and keep as clean as you can, follow
the warped honor that is still left to you--and if you can, come out of
the tangle....
It is not only Justin haunts the memories of that furtive time, but
Rachel More. I see her still as she was then, a straight, white-dressed
girl with big brown eyes that regarded me now with perplexity, now with
a faint dismay. I still went over to see her, and my manner had changed.
I had nothing to say to her now and everything to hide. Everything
between us hung arrested, and nothing could occur to make an end.
I told Mary I must cease my visits to the Mores. I tried to make her
feel my own sense of an accumulating cruelty to Rachel. "But it explains
away so much," she said. "If you stop going there--everyone will talk.
Everything will swing round--and point here."
"Rachel!" I protested.
"No," she said, overbearing me, "you must keep on going to Ridinghanger.
You must. You must." ...
For a long time I had said nothing to Mary of the burthen these
pretences were to me; it had seemed a monstrous ingratitude to find the
slightest flaw in the passionate love and intimacy she had given me. But
at last the divergence of our purposes became manifest to us both. A
time came when we perceived it clearly and discussed it openly. I have
still a vivid recollection of a golden October day when we had met at
the edge of the plantation that overlooks Bearshill. She had come
through the gardens into the pine-wood, and I had jumped the rusty
banked stream that runs down the Bearshill valley, and clambered the
barbed wire fence. I came up the steep bank and through a fringe of
furze to where she stood in the shade; I kissed her hand, and discovered
mine had been torn open by one of the thorns of the wire and was
dripping blood. "Mind my dress," she said, and we laughed as we kissed
with my arm held aloof.
We sat down side by side upon the warm pine needles that carpeted the
sand, and she made a mothering fuss about my petty wound, and bound it
in my handkerchief. We looked together across the steep gorge at the
blue ridge of trees beyond. "Anyone," she said, "might have seen us this
minute."
"I never thought," I said, and moved a foot away from her.
"It's too late if they have," said she, pulling me back to her. "Over
beyond there, that must be Hindhead. Someone with a telescope----!"
"That's less credible," I said. And it occurred to me that the grey
stretch of downland beyond must be the ridge to the west of
Ridinghanger.
"I wish," I said, "it didn't matter. I wish I could come and go and
fear nobody--and spend long hours with you--oh! at our ease."
"Now," she said, "we spend short hours. I wonder if I would like----
It's no good, Stephen, letting ourselves think of things that can't be.
Here we are. Kiss that hand, my lover, there, just between wrist and
thumb--the little hollow. Yes, exactly there."
But thoughts had been set going in my mind. "Why," I said presently,
"should you always speak of things that can't be? Why should we take all
this as if it were all that there could be? I want long hours. I want
you to shine all the day through on my life. Now, dear, it's as if the
sun was shown ever and again, and then put back behind an eclipse. I
come to you half-blinded, I go away unsatisfied. All the world is dark
in between, and little phantom _yous_ float over it."
She rested her cheek on her hand and looked at me gravely.
"You are hard to satisfy, brother heart," she said.
"I live in snatches of brightness and all the rest of life is waiting
and thinking and waiting."
"What else is there? Haven't we the brightness?"
"I want you," I said. "I want _you_ altogether."
"After so much?"
"I want the more. Mary, I want you to come away with me. No, listen!
this life--don't think I'm not full of the beauty, the happiness, the
wonder---- But it's a suspense. It doesn't go on. It's just a dawn,
dear, a splendid dawn, a glory of color and brightness and freshness and
hope, and--no sun rises. I want the day. Everything else has stopped
with me and stopped with you. I do nothing with my politics now,--I
pretend. I have no plans in life except plans for meeting you and again
meeting you. I want to go on, I want to go on with you and take up work
and the world again--you beside me. I want you to come out of all this
life--out of all this immense wealthy emptiness of yours----"
"Stop," she said, "and listen to me, Stephen."
She paused with her lips pressed together, her brows a little knit.
"I won't," she said slowly. "I am going on like this. I and you are
going to be lovers--just as we are lovers now--secret lovers. And I am
going to help you in all your projects, hold your party together--for
you will have a party--my house shall be its centre----"
"But Justin----"
"He takes no interest in politics. He will do what pleases me."
I took some time before I answered. "You don't understand how men feel,"
I said.
She waited for what else I had to say. I lay prone, and gathered
together and shaped and reshaped a little heap of pine needles. "You
see---- I can't do it. I want you."
She gripped a handful of my hair, and tugged hard between each word.
"Haven't you got me?" she asked between her teeth. "What more _could_
you have?"
"I want you openly."
She folded her arms beneath her. "_No_," she said.
For a little while neither of us spoke.
"It's the trouble of the deceit?" she asked.
"It's--the deceit."
"We can stop all that," she said.
I looked up at her face enquiringly.
"By having no more to hide," she said, with her eyes full of tears. "If
it's nothing to you----"
"It's everything to me," I said. "It's overwhelming me. Oh Mary, heart
of my life, my dear, come out of this! Come with me, come and be my
wife, make a clean thing of it! Let me take you away, and then let me
marry you. I know it's asking you--to come to a sort of poverty----"
But Mary's blue eyes were alight with anger. "Isn't it a clean thing
_now_, Stephen?" she was crying. "Do you mean that you and I aren't
clean now? Will you never understand?"
"Oh clean," I answered, "clean as Eve in the garden. But can we keep
clean? Won't the shadow of our falsehoods darken at all? Come out of it
while we are still clean. Come with me. Justin will divorce you. We can
stay abroad and marry and come back."
Mary was kneeling up now with her hands upon her knees.
"Come back to what?" she cried. "Parliament?--after that? You _boy!_ you
sentimentalist! you--you duffer! Do you think I'd let you do it for your
own sake even? Do you think I want you--spoilt? We should come back to
mope outside of things, we should come back to fret our lives out. I
won't do it, Stephen, I won't do it. End _this_ if you like, break our
hearts and throw them away and go on without them, but to turn all our
lives into a scandal, to give ourselves over to the mean and the
malicious, a prey to old women--and _you_ damned out of everything! A
man partly forgiven! A man who went wrong for a woman! _No!_"
She sprang lightly to her feet and stood over me as I knelt before her.
"And I came here to be made love to, Stephen! I came here to be loved!
And you talk that nonsense! You remind me of everything--wretched!"
She lifted up her hands and then struck down with them, a gesture of
infinite impatience. Her face as she bent to me was alive with a
friendly anger, her eyes suddenly dark. "You _duffer_!" she repeated....
§ 10
Discovery followed hard upon that meeting. I had come over to Martens
with some book as a pretext; the man had told me that Lady Mary awaited
me in her blue parlor, and I went unannounced through the long gallery
to find her. The door stood a little ajar, I opened it softly so that
she did not hear me, and saw her seated at her writing-desk with her
back to me, and her cheek and eyebrow just touched by the sunlight from
the open terrace window. She was writing a note. I put my hand about her
shoulder, and bent to kiss her as she turned. Then as she came round to
me she started, was for a moment rigid, then thrust me from her and rose
very slowly to her feet.
I turned to the window and became as rigid, facing Justin. He was
standing on the terrace, staring at us, with a face that looked stupid
and inexpressive and--very white. The sky behind him, appropriately
enough, was full of the tattered inky onset of a thunderstorm. So we
remained for a lengthy second perhaps, a trite _tableau vivant_. We two
seemed to hang helplessly upon Justin, and he was the first of us to
move.
He made a queer, incomplete gesture with one hand, as if he wanted to
undo the top button of his waistcoat and then thought better of it. He
came very slowly into the room. When he spoke his voice had neither rage
nor denunciation in it. It was simply conversational. "I felt this was
going on," he said. And then to his wife with the note of one who
remarks dispassionately on a peculiar situation. "Yet somehow it seemed
wrong and unnatural to think such a thing of you."
His face took on something of the vexed look of a child who struggles
with a difficult task. "Do you mind," he said to me, "will you go?"
I took a moment for my reply. "No," I said. "Since you know at last----
There are things to be said."
"No," said Mary, suddenly. "Go! Let me talk to him."
"No," I said, "my place is here beside you."
He seemed not to hear me. His eyes were fixed on Mary. He seemed to
think he had dismissed me, and that I was no longer there. His mind was
not concerned about me, but about her. He spoke as though what he said
had been in his mind, and no doubt it had been in his mind, for many
days. "I didn't deserve this," he said to her. "I've tried to make your
life as you wanted your life. It's astonishing to find--I haven't. You
gave no sign. I suppose I ought to have felt all this happening, but it
comes upon me surprisingly. I don't know what I'm to do." He became
aware of me again. "And _you_!" he said. "What am I to do? To think that
you--while I have been treating her like some sacred thing...."
The color was creeping back into his face. Indignation had come into
his voice, the first yellow lights of rising jealousy showed in his
eyes.
"Stephen," I heard Mary say, "will you leave me to talk to my husband?"
"There is only one thing to do," I said. "What is the need of talking?
We two are lovers, Justin." I spoke to both of them. "We two must go out
into the world, go out now together. This marriage of yours--it's no
marriage, no real marriage...."
I think I said that. I seem to remember saying that; perhaps with other
phrases that I have forgotten. But my memory of what we said and did,
which is so photographically clear of these earlier passages that I
believe I can answer for every gesture and nearly every word that I have
set down, becomes suddenly turbid. The high tension of our first
confrontation was giving place to a flood of emotional impulse. We all
became eager to talk, to impose interpretations and justifications upon
our situation. We all three became divided between our partial attention
to one another and our urgent necessity to keep hold of our points of
view. That I think is the common tragedy of almost all human conflicts,
that rapid breakdown from the first cool apprehension of an issue to
heat, confusion, and insistence. I do not know if indeed we raised our
voices, but my memory has an effect of raised voices, and when at last I
went out of the house it seemed to me that the men-servants in the hall
were as hushed as beasts before a thunderstorm, and all of them quite
fully aware of the tremendous catastrophe that had come to Martens. And
moreover, as I recalled afterwards with astonishment, I went past them
and out into the driving rain unprotected, and not one of them stirred
a serviceable hand....
What was it we said? I have a vivid sense of declaring not once only but
several times that Mary and I were husband and wife "in the sight of
God." I was full of the idea that now she must inevitably be mine. I
must have spoken to Justin at times as if he had come merely to confirm
my view of the long dispute there had been between us. For a while my
mind resisted his extraordinary attitude that the matter lay between him
and Mary, that I was in some way an interloper. It seemed to me there
was nothing for it now but that Mary should stand by my side and face
Justin with the world behind him. I remember my confused sense that
presently she and I would have to go straight out of Martens. And she
was wearing a tea-gown, easy and open, and the flimsiest of slippers.
Any packing, any change of clothing, struck me as an incredible
anti-climax. I had visions of our going forth, hand in hand. Outside was
the soughing of a coming storm, a chill wind drove a tumult of leaves
along the terrace, the door slammed and yawned open again, and then came
the rain. Justin, I remember, still talking, closed the door. I tried to
think how I could get to the station five miles away, and then what we
could do in London. We should seem rather odd visitors to an
hotel--without luggage. All this was behind my valiant demand that she
should come with me, and come now.
And then my mind was lanced by the thin edge of realization that she did
not intend to come now, and that Justin was resolved she should not do
so. After the first shock of finding herself discovered she had stood
pale but uncowed before her bureau, with her eyes rather on him than on
me. Her hands, I think, were behind her upon the edge of the writing
flap, and she was a little leaning upon them. She had the watchful alert
expression of one who faces an unanticipated but by no means
overwhelming situation. She cast a remark to me. "But I do not want to
come with you," she said. "I have told you I do not want to come with
you." All her mind seemed concentrated upon what she should do with
Justin. "You must send him away," he was saying. "It's an abominable
thing. It must stop. How can you dream it should go on?"
"But you said when you married me I should be free, I should own myself!
You gave me this house----"
"What! To disgrace myself!"
I was moved to intervene.
"You must choose between us, Mary," I cried. "It is impossible you
should stay here! You cannot stay here."
She turned upon me, a creature at bay. "Why shouldn't I stay here? Why
must I choose between two men? I want neither of you. I want myself. I'm
not a thing. I'm a human being. I'm not your thing, Justin--nor yours,
Stephen. Yet you want to quarrel over me--like two dogs over a bone. I
am going to stay here--in my house! It's my house. I made it. Every room
of it is full of me. Here I am!"
She stood there making this magnificently extravagant claim; her eyes
blazing blue, her hair a little dishevelled with a strand across her
cheek.
Both I and Justin spoke together, and then turned in helpless anger upon
one another. I remember that with the clumsiest of weak gestures he bade
me begone from the house, and that I with a now rather deflated
rhetoric answered I would go only with Mary at my side. And there she
stood, less like a desperate rebel against the most fundamental social
relations than an indignant princess, and demanded of us and high
heaven, "Why should I be fought for? Why should I be fought for?"
And then abruptly she gathered her skirts in her hand and advanced.
"Open that door, Stephen," she said, and was gone with a silken whirl
and rustle from our presence.
We were left regarding one another with blank expressions.
Her departure had torn the substance out of our dispute. For the moment
we found ourselves left with a new situation for which there is as yet
no tradition of behavior. We had become actors in that new human comedy
that is just beginning in the world, that comedy in which men still
dispute the possession and the manner of the possession of woman
according to the ancient rules, while they on their side are determining
ever more definitely that they will not be possessed....
We had little to say to one another,--mere echoes and endorsements of
our recent declarations. "She must come to me," said I. And he, "I will
save her from that at any cost."
That was the gist of our confrontation, and then I turned about and
walked along the gallery towards the entrance, with Justin following me
slowly. I was full of the wrath of baffled heroics; I turned towards him
with something of a gesture. Down the perspective of the white and empty
gallery he appeared small and perplexed. The panes of the tall French
windows were slashed with rain....
§ 11
I forget now absolutely what I may have expected to happen next. I
cannot remember my return to my father's house that day. But I know that
what did happen was the most unanticipated and incredible experience of
my life. It was as if the whole world of mankind were suddenly to turn
upside down and people go about calmly in positions of complete
inversion. I had a note from Mary on the morning after this discovery
that indeed dealt with that but was otherwise not very different from
endless notes I had received before our crisis. It was destroyed, so
that I do not know its exact text now, but it did not add anything
material to the situation, or give me the faintest shadow to intimate
what crept close upon us both. She repeated her strangely thwarting
refusal to come away and live with me. She seemed indignant that we had
been discovered--as though Justin had indulged in an excess of existence
by discovering us. I completed and despatched to her a long letter I had
already been writing overnight in which I made clear the hopeless
impossibility of her attitude, vowed all my life and strength to her,
tried to make some picture of the happiness that was possible for us
together, sketched as definitely as I could when and where we might meet
and whither we might go. It must have made an extraordinary jumble of
protest, persuasion and practicality. It never reached her; it was
intercepted by Justin.
I have gathered since that after I left Martens he sent telegrams to Guy
and Philip and her cousin Lord Tarvrille. He was I think amazed beyond
measure at this revelation of the possibilities of his cold and distant
wife, with a vast passion of jealousy awaking in him, and absolutely
incapable of forming any plan to meet the demands of his extraordinary
situation. Guy and Philip got to him that night, Tarvrille came down
next morning, and Martens became a debate. Justin did not so much
express views and intentions as have them extracted from him; it was
manifest he was prepared for the amplest forgiveness of his wife if only
I could be obliterated from their world. Confronted with her brothers,
the two men in the world who could be frankly brutal to her, Mary's
dignity suffered; she persisted she meant to go on seeing me, but she
was reduced to passionate tears.
Into some such state of affairs I came that morning on the heels of my
letter, demanding Lady Mary of a scared evasive butler.
Maxton and Tarvrille appeared: "Hullo, Stratton!" said Tarvrille, with a
fine flavor of an agreeable chance meeting. Philip had doubts about his
greeting me, and then extended his reluctant hand with a nervous grin to
excuse the delay.
"I want to see Lady Mary," said I, stiffly.
"She's not up yet," said Tarvrille, with a hand on my shoulder. "Come
and have a talk in the garden."
We went out with Tarvrille expanding the topic of the seasons. "It's a
damned good month, November, say what you like about it." Philip walked
grimly silent on my other hand.
"And it's a damned awkward situation you've got us into, Stratton," said
Tarvrille, "say what you like about it."
"It isn't as though old Justin was any sort of beast," he reflected,
"or anything like that, you know. He's a most astonishing decent chap,
clean as they make them."
"This isn't a beastly intrigue," I said.
"It never is," said Tarvrille genially.
"We've loved each other a long time. It's just flared out here."
"No doubt of that," said Tarvrille. "It's been like a beacon to all
Surrey."
"It's one of those cases where things have to be readjusted. The best
thing to do is for Mary and me to go abroad----"
"Yes, but does Mary think so?"
"Look here!" said Philip in a voice thick with rage. "I won't have Mary
divorced. I won't. See? I won't."
"What the devil's it got to do with _you_?" I asked with an answering
flash of fury.
Tarvrille's arm ran through mine. "Nobody's going to divorce Mary," he
said reassuringly. "Not even Justin. He doesn't want to, and nobody else
can, and there you are!"
"But we two----"
"You two have had a tremendously good time. You've got found out--and
there you are!"
"This thing has got to stop absolutely now," said Philip and echoed with
a note of satisfaction in his own phrasing, "absolutely _now_."
"You see, Stratton," said Tarvrille as if he were expanding Philip's
assertion, "there's been too many divorces in society. It's demoralizing
people. It's discrediting us. It's setting class against class.
Everybody is saying why don't these big people either set about
respecting the law or altering it. Common people are getting too
infernally clear-headed. Hitherto it's mattered so little.... But we
can't stand any more of it, Stratton, now. It's something more than a
private issue; it's a question of public policy. We can't stand any more
divorces."
He reflected. "We have to consider something more than our own personal
inclinations. We've got no business to be here at all if we're not a
responsible class. We owe something--to ourselves."
It was as if Tarvrille was as concerned as I was for this particular
divorce, as if he struggled with a lively desire to see me and Mary
happily married after the shortest possible interval. And indeed he
manifestly wasn't unsympathetic; he had the strongest proclivity for the
romantic and picturesque, and it was largely the romantic
picturesqueness of renunciation that he urged upon me. Philip for the
most part maintained a resentful silence; he was a clenched anger
against me, against Mary, against the flaming possibilities that
threatened the sister of Lord Maxton, that most promising and
distinguished young man.
Of course their plans must have been definitely made before this talk,
probably they had made them overnight, and probably it was Tarvrille had
given them a practicable shape, but he threw over the whole of our talk
so satisfying a suggestion of arrest and prolonged discussion that it
never occurred to me that I should not be able to come again on the
morrow and renew my demand to see Mary. Even when next day I turned my
face to Martens and saw the flag had vanished from the flagstaff, it
seemed merely a token of that household's perturbation. I thought the
house looked oddly blank and sleepy as I drew near, but I did not
perceive that this was because all the blinds were drawn. The door upon
the lawn was closed, and presently the butler came to open it. He was in
an old white jacket, and collarless. "Lady Mary!" he said. "Lady Mary
has gone, sir. She and Mr. Justin went yesterday after you called."
"Gone!" said I. "But where?"
"I _think_ abroad, sir."
"Abroad!"
"I _think_ abroad."
"But---- They've left an address?"
"Only to Mr. Justin's office," said the man. "Any letters will be
forwarded from there."
I paused upon the step. He remained stiffly deferential, but with an air
of having disposed of me. He reproved me tacitly for forgetting that I
ought to conceal my astonishment at this disappearance. He was indeed an
admirable man-servant. "Thank you," said I, and dropped away defeated
from the door.
I went down the broad steps, walked out up the lawn, and surveyed house
and trees and garden and sky. To the heights and the depths and the
uttermost, I knew now what it was to be amazed....
§ 12
I had felt myself an actor in a drama, and now I had very much the
feeling an actor would have who answers to a cue and finds himself in
mid-stage with the scenery and the rest of the cast suddenly vanished
behind him. By that mixture of force and persuasion which avails itself
of a woman's instinctive and cultivated dread of disputes and raised
voices and the betrayal of contention to strangers, by the sheer tiring
down of nerves and of sleepless body and by threats of an immediate
divorce and a campaign of ruin against me, these three men had obliged
Mary to leave Martens and go with them to Southampton, and thence they
took her in Justin's yacht, the _Water-Witch_, to Waterford, and thence
by train to a hired house, an adapted old castle at Mirk near Crogham in
Mayo. There for all practical purposes she was a prisoner. They took
away her purse, and she was four miles from a pillar-box and ten from a
telegraph office. This house they had taken furnished without seeing it
on the recommendation of a London agent, and in the name of Justin's
solicitor. Thither presently went Lady Ladislaw, and an announcement
appeared in the _Times_ that Justin and Lady Mary had gone abroad for a
time and that no letters would be forwarded.
I have never learnt the particulars of that abduction, but I imagine
Mary astonished, her pride outraged, humiliated, helpless, perplexed and
maintaining a certain outward dignity. Moreover, as I was presently to
be told, she was ill. Guy and Philip were, I believe, the moving spirits
in the affair; Tarvrille was their apologetic accomplice, Justin took
the responsibility for what they did and bore the cost, he was bitterly
ashamed to have these compulsions applied to his wife, but full now of a
gusty fury against myself. He loved Mary still with a love that was
shamed and torn and bleeding, but his ruling passion was that infinitely
stronger passion than love in our poor human hearts, jealousy. He was
prepared to fight for her now as men fight for a flag, tearing it to
pieces in the struggle. He meant now to keep Mary. That settled, he was
prepared to consider whether he still loved her or she him....
Now here it may seem to you that we are on the very verge of romance.
Here is a beautiful lady carried off and held prisoner in a wild old
place, standing out half cut off from the mainland among the wintry
breakers of the west coast of Ireland. Here is the lover, baffled but
insistent. Here are the fierce brothers and the stern dragon husband,
and you have but to make out that the marriage was compulsory, irregular
and, on the ground of that irregularity, finally dissoluble, to furnish
forth a theme for Marriott Watson in his most admirable and adventurous
vein. You can imagine the happy chances that would have guided me to the
hiding-place, the trusty friend who would have come with me and told the
story, the grim siege of the place--all as it were _sotto voce_ for fear
of scandal--the fight with Guy in the little cave, my attempted
assassination, the secret passage. Would to heaven life had those rich
simplicities, and one could meet one's man at the end of a sword! My
siege of Mirk makes a very different story from that.
In the first place I had no trusted friend of so extravagant a
friendship as such aid would demand. I had no one whom it seemed
permissible to tell of our relations. I was not one man against three or
four men in a romantic struggle for a woman. I was one man against
something infinitely greater than that, I was one man against nearly all
men, one man against laws, traditions, instincts, institutions, social
order. Whatever my position had been before, my continuing pursuit of
Mary was open social rebellion. And I was in a state of extreme
uncertainty how far Mary was a willing agent in this abrupt
disappearance. I was disposed to think she had consented far more than
she had done to this astonishing step. Carrying off an unwilling woman
was outside my imaginative range. It was luminously clear in my mind
that so far she had never countenanced the idea of flight with me, and
until she did I was absolutely bound to silence about her. I felt that
until I saw her face to face again, and was sure she wanted me to
release her, that prohibition held. Yet how was I to get at her and hear
what she had to say? Clearly it was possible that she was under
restraint, but I did not know; I was not certain, I could not prove it.
At Guildford station I gathered, after ignominious enquiries, that the
Justins had booked to London. I had two days of nearly frantic
inactivity at home, and then pretended business that took me to London,
for fear that I should break out to my father. I came up revolving a
dozen impossible projects of action in my mind. I had to get into touch
with Mary, at that my mind hung and stopped. All through the twenty-four
hours my nerves jumped at every knock upon my door; this might be the
letter, this might be the telegram, this might be herself escaped and
come to me. The days passed like days upon a painful sick-bed, grey or
foggy London days of an appalling length and emptiness. If I sat at home
my imagination tortured me; if I went out I wanted to be back and see if
any communication had come. I tried repeatedly to see Tarvrille. I had
an idea of obtaining a complete outfit for an elopement, but I was
restrained by my entire ignorance of what a woman may need. I tried to
equip myself for a sudden crisis by the completest preparation of every
possible aspect. I did some absurd and ill-advised things. I astonished
a respectable solicitor in a grimy little office behind a queer little
court with trees near Cornhill, by asking him to give advice to an
anonymous client and then putting my anonymous case before him.
"Suppose," said I, "it was for the plot of a play." He nodded gravely.
My case as I stated it struck me as an unattractive one.
"Application for a Writ of Habeas Corpus," he considered with eyes that
tried to remain severely impartial, "by a Wife's Lover, who wants to
find out where she is.... It's unusual. You will be requiring the
husband to produce her Corpus.... I don't think--speaking in the same
general terms as those in which you put the circumstances, it would be
likely to succeed.... No."
Then I overcame a profound repugnance and went to a firm of private
detectives. It had occurred to me that if I could have Justin,
Tarvrille, Guy or Philip traced I might get a clue to Mary's
hiding-place. I remember a queer little office, a blusterous,
frock-coated creature with a pock-marked face, iron-grey hair, an
eyeglass and a strained tenor voice, who told me twice that he was a
gentleman and several times that he would prefer not to do business than
to do it in an ungentlemanly manner, and who was quite obviously ready
and eager to blackmail either side in any scandal into which spite or
weakness admitted his gesticulating fingers. He alluded vaguely to his
staff, to his woman helpers, "some personally attached to me," to his
remarkable underground knowledge of social life--"the illicit side."
What could he do for me? There was nothing, I said, illicit about me.
His interest waned a little. I told him that I was interested in
certain financial matters, no matter what they were, and that I wanted
to have a report of the movements of Justin and his brothers-in-law for
the past few weeks and for a little time to come. "You want them
watched?" said my private enquiry agent, leaning over the desk towards
me and betraying a slight squint. "Exactly," said I. "I want to know
what sort of things they are looking at just at present."
"Have you any inkling----?"
"None."
"If our agents have to travel----"
I expressed a reasonable generosity in the matter of expenses, and left
him at last with a vague discomfort in my mind. How far mightn't this
undesirable unearth the whole business in the course of his
investigations? And then what could he do? Suppose I went back forthwith
and stopped his enquiries before they began! I had a disagreeable
feeling of meanness that I couldn't shake off; I felt I was taking up a
weapon that Justin didn't deserve. Yet I argued with myself that the
abduction of Mary justified any such course.
As I was still debating this I saw Philip. He was perhaps twenty yards
ahead of me, he was paying off a hansom which had just put him down
outside Blake's. "Philip," I cried, following him up the steps and
overtaking him and seizing his arm as the commissionaire opened the door
for him. "Philip! What have you people done with Mary? Where is Mary?"
He turned a white face to me. "How dare you," he said with a catch of
the breath, "mention my sister?"
I spoke in an undertone, and stepped a little between him and the man at
the door in order that the latter might not hear what I said. "I want
to see her," I expostulated. "I _must_ see her. What you are doing is
not playing the game. I've _got_ to see her."
"Let go of my arm, sir!" cried he, and suddenly I felt a whirlwind of
rage answering the rage in his eyes. The pent-up exasperation of three
weeks rushed to its violent release. He struck me in the face with the
hand that was gripped about his umbrella. He meant to strike me in the
face and then escape into his club, but before he could get away from me
after his blow I had flung out at him, and had hit him under the
jawbone. My blow followed his before guard or counter was possible. I
hit with all my being. It was an amazing flare up of animal passion;
from the moment that I perceived he was striking at me to the moment
when both of us came staggering across the door-mat into the dignified
and spacious hall-way of Blake's, we were back at the ancestral ape, and
we did exactly what the ancestral ape would have done. The arms of the
commissionaire about my waist, the rush of the astonished porter from
his little glass box, two incredibly startled and delighted pages, and
an intervening member bawling out "Sir! Sir!" converged to remind us
that we were a million years or so beyond those purely arboreal days....
We seemed for a time to be confronted before an audience that hesitated
to interfere. "How dare you name my sister to me?" he shouted at me, and
brought to my mind the amazing folly of which he was capable. I
perceived Mary's name flung to the four winds of heaven.
"You idiot, Philip!" I cried. "I don't _know_ your sister. I've not seen
her--scarcely seen her for years. I ask you--I ask you for a match-box
or something and you hit me."
"If you dare to speak to her----!"
"You fool!" I cried, going nearer to him and trying to make him
understand. But he winced and recoiled defensively. "I'm sorry," I said
to the commissionaire who was intervening. "Lord Maxton has made a
mistake."
"Is he a member?" said someone in the background, and somebody else
suggested calling a policeman. I perceived that only a prompt retreat
would save the whole story of our quarrel from the newspapers. So far as
I could see nobody knew me there except Philip. I had to take the risks
of his behavior; manifestly I couldn't control it. I made no further
attempt to explain anything to anybody. Everyone was a little too
perplexed for prompt action, and so the advantage in that matter lay
with me. I walked through the door, and with what I imagined to be an
appearance of the utmost serenity down the steps. I noted an ascending
member glance at me with an expression of exceptional interest, but it
was only after I had traversed the length of Pall Mall that I realized
that my lip and the corner of my nostril were both bleeding profusely. I
called a cab when I discovered my handkerchief scarlet, and retreated to
my flat and cold ablutions. Then I sat down to write a letter to
Tarvrille, with a clamorous "Urgent, Please forward if away" above the
address, and tell him at least to suppress Philip. But within the club
that blockhead, thinking of nothing but the appearances of our fight and
his own credit, was varying his assertion that he had thrashed me, with
denunciations of me as a "blackguard," and giving half a dozen men a
highly colored, improvised, and altogether improbable account of my
relentless pursuit and persecution of Lady Mary Justin, and how she had
left London to avoid me. They listened, no doubt, with extreme avidity.
The matrimonial relations of the Justins had long been a matter for
speculative minds.
And while Philip was doing this, Guy, away in Mayo still, was writing a
tender, trusting, and all too explicit letter to a well-known and
extremely impatient lady in London to account for his continued absence
from her house. "So that is it!" said the lady, reading, and was at
least in the enviable position of one who had confirmatory facts to
impart....
And so quite suddenly the masks were off our situation and we were open
to an impertinent world. For some days I did not realize what had
happened, and lived in hope that Philip had been willing and able to
cover his lapse. I went about with my preoccupation still, as I
imagined, concealed, and with an increasing number of typed letters from
my private enquiry agent in my pocket containing inaccurate and
worthless information about the movements of Justin, which appeared to
have been culled for the most part from a communicative young policeman
stationed at the corner nearest to the Justins' house, or expanded from
_Who's Who_ and other kindred works of reference. The second letter, I
remember, gave some particulars about the financial position of the
younger men, and added that Justin's credit with the west-end tradesmen
was "limitless," points upon which I had no sort of curiosity
whatever....
I suppose a couple of hundred people in London knew before I did that
Lady Mary Justin had been carried off to Ireland and practically
imprisoned there by her husband because I was her lover. The thing
reached me at last through little Fred Riddling, who came to my rooms in
the morning while I was sitting over my breakfast. "Stratton!" said he,
"what is all this story of your shaking Justin by the collar, and
threatening to kill him if he didn't give up his wife to you? And why do
you want to fight a duel with Maxton? What's it all about? Fire-eater
you must be! I stood up for you as well as I could, but I heard you
abused for a solid hour last night, and there was a chap there simply
squirting out facts and dates and names. Got it all.... What have you
been up to?"
He stood on my hearthrug with an air of having called for an explanation
to which he was entitled, and he very nearly got one. But I just had
some scraps of reserve left, and they saved me. "Tell me first," I said,
delaying myself with the lighting of a cigarette, "the particulars ...
as you heard them."
Riddling embarked upon a descriptive sketch, and I got a minute or so to
think.
"Go on," I said with a note of irony, when he paused. "Go on. Tell me
some more. Where did you say they have taken her; let us have it right."
By the time his little store had run out I knew exactly what to do with
him. "Riddling," said I, and stood up beside him suddenly and dropped my
hand with a little added weight upon his shoulder, "Riddling, do you
know the only right and proper thing to do when you hear scandal about a
friend?"
"Come straight to him," said Riddling virtuously, "as I have done."
"No. Say you don't believe it. Ask the scandal-monger how he knows and
insist on his telling you--insist. And if he won't--be very, very rude
to him. Insist up to the quarrelling point. Now who were those people?"
"Well--that's a bit stiff.... One chap I didn't know at all."
"You should have pulled him up and insisted upon knowing who he was, and
what right he had to lie about me. For it's lying, Riddling. Listen! It
isn't true that I'm besieging Lady Mary Justin. So far from besieging
her I didn't even know where she was until you told me. Justin is a
neighbor of my father's and a friend of mine. I had tea with him and his
wife not a month ago. I had tea with them together. I knew they were
going away, but it was a matter of such slight importance to me, such
slight importance"--I impressed this on his collarbone--"that I was left
with the idea that they were going to the south of France. I believe
they are in the south of France. And there you are. I'm sorry to spoil
sport, but that's the bleak unromantic truth of the matter."
"You mean to say that there is nothing in it all?"
"Nothing."
He was atrociously disappointed. "But everybody," he said, "everybody
has got something."
"Somebody will get a slander case if this goes on. I don't care what
they've got."
"Good Lord!" he said, and stared at the rug. "You'll take your oath----"
He glanced up and met my eye. "Oh, of course it's all right what you
say." He was profoundly perplexed. He reflected. "But then, I say
Stratton, why did you go for Maxton at Blake's? _That_ I had from an
eye-witness. You can't deny a scrap like that--in broad daylight. Why
did you do that?"
"Oh _that's_ it," said I. "I begin to have glimmerings. There's a little
matter between myself and Maxton...." I found it a little difficult to
improvise a plausible story.
"But he said it was his sister," persisted Riddling. "He said so
afterwards, in the club."
"Maxton," said I, losing my temper, "is a fool and a knave and a liar.
His sister indeed! Lady Mary! If he can't leave his sister out of this
business I'll break every bone of his body." ... I perceived my temper
was undoing me. I invented rapidly but thinly. "As a matter of fact,
Riddling, it's quite another sort of lady has set us by the ears."
Riddling stuck his chin out, tucked in the corners of his mouth, made
round eyes at the breakfast things and, hands in pockets, rocked from
heels to toes and from toes to heels. "I see Stratton, yes, I see. Yes,
all this makes it very plain, of course. Very plain.... Stupid thing,
scandal is.... Thanks! no, I won't have a cigarette."
And he left me presently with an uncomfortable sense that he did see,
and didn't for one moment intend to restrain his considerable histrionic
skill in handing on his vision to others. For some moments I stood
savoring this all too manifest possibility, and then my thoughts went
swirling into another channel. At last the curtain was pierced. I was no
longer helplessly in the dark. I got out my Bradshaw, and sat with the
map spread out over the breakfast things studying the routes to Mayo.
Then I rang for Williams, the man I shared with the two adjacent
flat-holders, and told him to pack my kit-bag because I was suddenly
called away.
§ 13
Many of the particulars of my journey to Ireland have faded out of my
mind altogether. I remember most distinctly my mood of grim elation that
at last I had to deal with accessible persons again....
The weather was windy and violent, and I was sea-sick for most of the
crossing, and very tired and exhausted when I landed. Williams had
thought of my thick over-coat and loaded me with wraps and rugs, and I
sat in the corner of a compartment in that state of mental and bodily
fatigue that presses on the brows like a painless headache. I got to
some little junction at last where I had to wait an hour for a
branch-line train. I tasted all the bitterness of Irish hospitality, and
such coffee as Ireland alone can produce. Then I went on to a station
called Clumber or Clumboye, or some such name, and thence after some
difficulty I got a car for my destination. It was a wretched car in
which hens had been roosting, and it was drawn by a steaming horse that
had sores under its mended harness.
An immense wet wind was blowing as we came over the big hill that lies
to the south of Mirk. Everything was wet, the hillside above me was
either intensely green sodden turf or great streaming slabs of
limestone, seaward was a rocky headland, a ruin of a beehive shape, and
beyond a vast waste of tumbling waters unlit by any sun. Not a tree
broke that melancholy wilderness, nor any living thing but ourselves.
The horse went stumblingly under the incessant stimulation of the
driver's lash and tongue....
"Yonder it is," said my man, pointing with his whip, and I twisted
round to see over his shoulder, not the Rhine-like castle I had
expected, but a long low house of stone upon a headland, backed by a
distant mountain that vanished in a wild driven storm of rain as I
looked. But at the sight of Mirk my lassitude passed, my nerves
tightened, and my will began to march again. Now, thought I, we bring
things to an issue. Now we come to something personal and definite. The
vagueness is at an end. I kept my eyes upon the place, and thought it
more and more like a prison as we drew nearer. Perhaps from that window
Mary was looking for me now. Had she wondered why I did not come to her
before? Now at any rate I had found her. I sprang off the car, found a
bell-handle, and set the house jangling.
The door opened, and a little old man appeared with his fingers thrust
inside his collar as though he were struggling against strangulation. He
regarded me for a second, and spoke before I could speak.
"What might you be wanting?" said he, as if he had an answer ready.
"I want to see Lady Mary Justin," I said.
"You can't," he said. "She's gone."
"Gone!"
"The day before yesterday she went to London. You'll have to be getting
back there."
"She's gone to London."
"No less."
"Willingly?"
The little old man struggled with his collar. "Anyone would go
willingly," he said, and seemed to await my further commands. He eyed me
obliquely with a shadow of malice in his eyes.
It was then my heart failed, and I knew that we lovers were beaten. I
turned from the door without another word to the janitor. "Back," said I
to my driver, and got up behind him.
But it is one thing to decide to go back, and another to do it. At the
little station I studied time-tables, and I could not get to England
again without a delay of half a day. Somewhere I must wait. I did not
want to wait where there was any concourse of people. I decided to stay
in the inn by the station for the intervening six hours, and get some
sleep before I started upon my return, but when I saw the bedroom I
changed my plan and went down out of the village by a steep road towards
the shore. I wandered down through the rain and spindrift to the very
edge of the sea, and there found a corner among the rocks a little
sheltered from the wind, and sat, inert and wretched; my lips salt, my
hair stiff with salt, and my body wet and cold; a miserable defeated
man. For I had now an irrational and entirely overwhelming conviction of
defeat. I saw as if I ought always to have seen that I had been pursuing
a phantom of hopeless happiness, that my dream of ever possessing Mary
again was fantastic and foolish, and that I had expended all my strength
in vain. Over me triumphed a law and tradition more towering than those
cliffs and stronger than those waves. I was overwhelmed by a sense of
human weakness, of the infinite feebleness of the individual man against
wind and wave and the stress of tradition and the ancient usages of
mankind. "We must submit," I whispered, crouching close, "we must
submit." ...
Far as the eye could reach the waves followed one another in long
unhurrying lines, an inexhaustible succession, rolling, hissing,
breaking, and tossing white manes of foam, to gather at last for a
crowning effort and break thunderously, squirting foam two hundred feet
up the streaming faces of the cliffs. The wind tore and tugged at me,
and wind and water made together a clamor as though all the evil voices
in the world, all the violent passions and all the hasty judgments were
seeking a hearing above the more elemental uproar....
§ 14
And while I was in this phase of fatigue and despair in Mayo, the scene
was laid and all the other actors were waiting for the last act of my
defeat in London. I came back to find two letters from Mary and a little
accumulation of telegrams and notes, one written in my flat, from
Tarvrille.
Mary's letters were neither of them very long, and full of a new-born
despair. She had not realized how great were the forces against her and
against us both. She let fall a phrase that suggested she was ill. She
had given in, she said, to save herself and myself and others from the
shame and ruin of a divorce, and I must give in too. We had to agree not
to meet or communicate for three years, and I was to go out of England.
She prayed me to accept this. She knew, she said, she seemed to desert
me, but I did not know everything,--I did not know everything,--I must
agree; she could not come with me; it was impossible. _Now_ certainly it
was impossible. She had been weak, but I did not know all. If I knew all
I should be the readier to understand and forgive her, but it was part
of the conditions that I could not know all. Justin had been generous,
in his way.... Justin had everything in his hands, the whole world was
behind him against us, and I must give in. Those letters had a quality I
had never before met in her, they were broken-spirited. I could not
understand them fully, and they left me perplexed, with a strong desire
to see her, to question her, to learn more fully what this change in her
might mean.
Tarvrille's notes recorded his repeated attempts to see me, I felt that
he alone was capable of clearing up things for me, and I went out again
at once and telegraphed to him for an appointment.
He wired to me from that same house in Mayfair in which I had first met
Mary after my return. He asked me to come to him in the afternoon, and
thither I went through a November fog, and found him in the drawing-room
that had the plate glass above the fireplace. But now he was vacating
the house, and everything was already covered up, the pictures and their
frames were under holland, the fine furniture all in covers of faded
stuff, the chandeliers and statues wrapped up, the carpets rolled out of
the way. Even the window-curtains were tucked into wrappers, and the
blinds, except one he had raised, drawn down. He greeted me and
apologized for the cold inhospitality of the house. "It was convenient
here," he said. "I came here to clear out my papers and boxes. And
there's no chance of interruptions."
He went and stood before the empty fireplace, and plunged into the
middle of the matter.
"You know, my dear Stratton, in this confounded business my heart's with
you. It has been all along. If I could have seen a clear chance before
you--for you and Mary to get away--and make any kind of life of
it--though she's my cousin--I'd have helped you. Indeed I would. But
there's no sort of chance--not the ghost of a chance...."
He began to explain very fully, quite incontrovertibly, that entire
absence of any chance for Mary and myself together. He argued to the
converted. "You know as well as I do what that romantic flight abroad,
that Ouidaesque casa in some secluded valley, comes to in reality. All
round Florence there's no end of such scandalous people, I've been among
them, the nine circles of the repenting scandalous, all cutting one
another."
"I agree," I said. "And yet----"
"What?"
"We could have come back."
Tarvrille paused, and then leant forward. "No."
"But people have done so. It would have been a clean sort of divorce."
"You don't understand Justin. Justin would ruin you. If you were to take
Mary away.... He's a queer little man. Everything is in his hands.
Everything always is in the husband's hands in these affairs. If he
chooses. And keeps himself in the right. For an injured husband the law
sanctifies revenge....
"And you see, you've got to take Justin's terms. He's changed. He didn't
at first fully realize. He feels--cheated. We've had to persuade him.
There's a case for Justin, you know. He's had to stand--a lot. I don't
wonder at his going stiff at last. No doubt it's hard for you to see
that. But you have to see it. You've got to go away as he
requires--three years out of England, you've got to promise not to
correspond, not to meet afterwards----"
"It's so extravagant a separation."
"The alternative is--not for you to have Mary, but for you two to be
flung into the ditch together--that's what it comes to, Stratton.
Justin's got his case. He's set like--steel. You're up against the law,
up against social tradition, up against money--any one of those a man
may fight, but not all three. And she's ill, Stratton. You owe her
consideration. You of all people. That's no got-up story; she's truly
ill and broken. She can no longer fly with you and fight with you,
travel in uncomfortable trains, stay in horrible little inns. You don't
understand. The edge is off her pluck, Stratton."
"What do you mean?" I asked, and questioned his face.
"Just exactly what I say."
A gleam of understanding came to me....
"Why can't I see her?" I broke in, with my voice full of misery and
anger. "Why can't I see her? As if seeing her once more could matter so
very greatly now!"
He appeared to weigh something in his mind. "You can't," he said.
"How do I know that she's not being told some story of my abandonment of
her? How do I know she isn't being led to believe I no longer want her
to come to me?"
"She isn't," said Tarvrille, still with that arrested judicial note in
his voice. "You had her letters?" he said.
"Two."
"Yes. Didn't they speak?"
"I want to see her. Damn it, Tarvrille!" I cried with sudden tears in
my smarting eyes. "Let _her_ send me away. This isn't---- Not treating
us like human beings."
"Women," said Tarvrille and looked at his boot toes, "are different from
men. You see, Stratton----"
He paused. "You always strike me, Stratton, as not realizing that women
are weak things. We've got to take _care_ of them. You don't seem to
feel that as I do. Their moods--fluctuate--more than ours do. If you
hold 'em to what they say in the same way you hold a man--it isn't
fair...."
He halted as though he awaited my assent to that proposition.
"If you were to meet Mary now, you see, and if you were to say to her,
come--come and we'll jump down Etna together, and you said it in the
proper voice and with the proper force, she'd do it, Stratton. You know
that. Any man knows a thing like that. And she wouldn't _want_ to do
it...."
"You mean that's why I can't see her."
"That's why you can't see her."
"Because we'd become--dramatic."
"Because you'd become--romantic and uncivilized."
"Well," I said sullenly, realizing the bargain we were making, "I
won't."
"You won't make any appeal?"
"No."
He made no answer, and I looked up to discover him glancing over his
shoulder through the great glass window into the other room. I stood up
very quickly, and there in the further apartment were Guy and Mary,
standing side by side. Our eyes met, and she came forward towards the
window impulsively, and paused, with that unpitying pane between us....
Then Guy was opening the door for her and she stood in the doorway. She
was in dark furs wrapped about her, but in the instant I could see how
ill she was and how broken. She came a step or so towards me and then
stopped short, and so we stood, shyly and awkwardly under Guy and
Tarvrille's eyes, two yards apart. "You see," she said, and stopped
lamely.
"You and I," I said, "have to part, Mary. We---- We are beaten. Is that
so?"
"Stephen, there is nothing for us to do. We've offended. We broke the
rules. We have to pay."
"By parting?"
"What else is there to do?"
"No," I said. "There's nothing else." ...
"I tried," she said, "that you shouldn't be sent from England."
"That's a detail," I answered.
"But your politics--your work?"
"That does not matter. The great thing is that you are ill and
unhappy--that I can't help you. I can't do anything.... I'd go anywhere
... to save you.... All I can do, I suppose, is to part like this and
go."
"I shan't be--altogether unhappy. And I shall think of you----"
She paused, and we stood facing one another, tongue-tied. There was only
one word more to say, and neither of us would say it for a moment.
"Good-bye," she whispered at last, and then, "Don't think I deserted
you, Stephen my dear. Don't think ill of me. I couldn't come--I couldn't
come to you," and suddenly her face changed slowly and she began to
weep, my fearless playmate whom I had never seen weeping before; she
began to weep as an unhappy child might weep.
"Oh my Mary!" I cried, weeping also, and held out my arms, and we clung
together and kissed with tear-wet faces.
"No," cried Guy belatedly, "we promised Justin!"
But Tarvrille restrained his forbidding arm, and then after a second's
interval put a hand on my shoulder. "Come," he said....
And so it was Mary and I parted from one another.
CHAPTER THE SEVENTH
BEGINNING AGAIN
§ 1
In operas and romances one goes from such a parting in a splendid
dignity of gloom. But I am no hero, and I went down the big staircase of
Tarvrille's house the empty shuck of an abandoned desire. I was acutely
ashamed of my recent tears. In the centre of the hall was a marble
figure swathed about with yellow muslin. "On account of the flies," I
said, breaking our silence.
My words were far too unexpected for Tarvrille to understand. "The
flies," I repeated with an air of explanation.
"You're sure she'll be all right?" I said abruptly.
"You've done the best thing you can for her."
"I suppose I have. I have to go." And then I saw ahead of me a world
full of the tiresome need of decisions and arrangements and empty of all
interest. "Where the _devil_ am I to go, Tarvrille? I can't even get out
of things altogether...."
And then with a fresh realization of painful difficulties ahead: "I have
to tell this to my father. I've got to explain---- And he thought--he
expected----"
Tarvrille opened the half of the heavy front door for me, hesitated,
and came down the broad steps into the chilly grey street and a few
yards along the pavement with me. He wanted to say something that he
found difficult to say. When at last he did find words they were quite
ridiculous in substance, and yet at the time I took them as gravely as
he intended them. "It's no good quoting Marcus Aurelius," said
Tarvrille, "to a chap with his finger in the crack of a door."
"I suppose it isn't," I said.
"One doesn't want to be a flatulent ass of course," said Tarvrille,
"still----"
He resumed with an air of plunging. "It will sound just rot to you now,
Stratton, but after all it comes to this. Behind us is
a--situation--with half-a-dozen particular persons. Out here--I mean
here round the world--before you've done with them--there's a thousand
million people--men and women."
"Oh! what does that matter to me?" said I.
"Everything," said Tarvrille. "At least--it ought to."
He stopped and held out his hand. "Good-bye, Stratton--good luck to you!
Good-bye."
"Yes," I said. "Good-bye."
I turned away from him. The image of Mary crying as a child cries
suddenly blinded me and blotted out the world.
§ 2
I want to give you as clearly as I can some impression of the mental
states that followed this passion and this collapse. It seems to me one
of the most extraordinary aspects of all that literature of speculative
attack which is called psychology, that there is no name and no
description at all of most of the mental states that make up life.
Psychology, like sociology, is still largely in the scholastic stage, it
is ignorant and intellectual, a happy refuge for the lazy industry of
pedants; instead of experience and accurate description and analysis it
begins with the rash assumption of elements and starts out upon
ridiculous syntheses. Who with a sick soul would dream of going to a
psychologist?...
Now here was I with a mind sore and inflamed. I did not clearly
understand what had happened to me. I had blundered, offended, entangled
myself; and I had no more conception than a beast in a bog what it was
had got me, or the method or even the need of escape. The desires and
passionate excitements, the anger and stress and strain and suspicion of
the last few months had worn deep grooves in my brain, channels without
end or issue, out of which it seemed impossible to keep my thoughts. I
had done dishonorable things, told lies, abused the confidence of a
friend. I kept wrestling with these intolerable facts. If some momentary
distraction released me for a time, back I would fall presently before I
knew what was happening, and find myself scheming once more to reverse
the accomplished, or eloquently restating things already intolerably
overdiscussed in my mind, justifying the unjustifiable or avenging
defeat. I would dream again and again of some tremendous appeal to Mary,
some violent return and attack upon the situation....
One very great factor in my mental and moral distress was the uncertain
values of nearly every aspect of the case. There is an invincible sense
of wild rightness about passionate love that no reasoning and no
training will ever altogether repudiate; I had a persuasion that out of
that I would presently extract a magic to excuse my deceits and
treacheries and assuage my smarting shame. And round these deep central
preoccupations were others of acute exasperation and hatred towards
secondary people. There had been interventions, judgments upon
insufficient evidence, comments, and often quite justifiable comments,
that had filled me with an extraordinary savagery of resentment.
I had a persuasion, illogical but invincible, that I was still entitled
to all the respect due to a man of unblemished honor. I clung fiercely
to the idea that to do dishonorable things isn't necessarily to be
dishonorable.... This state of mind I am describing is, I am convinced,
the state of every man who has involved himself in any affair at once
questionable and passionate. He seems free, but he is not free; he is
the slave of the relentless paradox of his position.
And we were all of us more or less in deep grooves we had made for
ourselves, Philip, Guy, Justin, the friends involved, and all in the
measure of our grooves incapable of tolerance or sympathetic
realization. Even when we slept, the clenched fist of the attitudes we
had assumed gave a direction to our dreams.
You see the same string of events that had produced all this system of
intense preoccupations had also severed me from the possible resumption
of those wider interests out of which our intrigue had taken me. I had
had to leave England and all the political beginnings I had been
planning, and to return to those projects now, those now impossible
projects, was to fall back promptly into hopeless exasperation....
And then the longing, the longing that is like a physical pain, that
hunger of the heart for some one intolerably dear! The desire for a
voice! The arrested habit of phrasing one's thoughts for a hearer who
will listen in peace no more! From that lonely distress even rage, even
the concoction of insult and conflict, was a refuge. From that pitiless
travail of emptiness I was ready to turn desperately to any offer of
excitement and distraction.
From all those things I was to escape at last unhelped, but I want you
to understand particularly these phases through which I passed; it falls
to many and it may fall to you to pass through such a period of darkness
and malign obsession. Make the groove only a little deeper, a little
more unclimbable, make the temperament a little less sanguine, and
suicide stares you in the face. And things worse than suicide, that
suicide of self-respect which turns men to drugs and inflammatory vices
and the utmost outrageous defiance of the dreaming noble self that has
been so despitefully used. Into these same inky pools I have dipped my
feet, where other men have drowned. I understand why they drown. And my
taste of misdeed and resentment has given me just an inkling of what men
must feel who go to prison. I know what it is to quarrel with a world.
§ 3
My first plan when I went abroad was to change my Harbury French, which
was poor stuff and pedantic, into a more colloquial article, and then go
into Germany to do the same thing with my German, and then perhaps to
remain in Germany studying German social conditions--and the quality of
the German army. It seemed to me that when the term of my exile was over
I might return to England and re-enter the army. But all these were very
anæmic plans conceived by a tired mind, and I set about carrying them
out in a mood of slack lassitude. I got to Paris, and in Paris I threw
them all overboard and went to Switzerland.
I remember very clearly how I reached Paris. I arrived about sunset--I
suppose at St. Lazare or the Gare du Nord--sent my luggage to the little
hotel in the Rue d'Antin where I had taken rooms, and dreading their
loneliness decided to go direct to a restaurant and dine. I remember
walking out into the streets just as shops and windows and street lamps
were beginning to light up, and strolling circuitously through the clear
bright stir of the Parisian streets to find a dinner at the Café de la
Paix. Some day you will know that peculiar sharp definite excitement of
Paris. All cities are exciting, and each I think in a different way. And
as I walked down along some boulevard towards the centre of things I saw
a woman coming along a side street towards me, a woman with something in
her body and something in her carriage that reminded me acutely of Mary.
Her face was downcast, and then as we converged she looked up at me, not
with the meretricious smile of her class but with a steadfast, friendly
look. Her face seemed to me sane and strong. I passed and hesitated. An
extraordinary impulse took me. I turned back. I followed this woman
across the road and a little way along the opposite pavement. I remember
I did that, but I do not remember clearly what was in my mind at the
time; I think it was a vague rush towards the flash of companionship in
her eyes. There I had seemed to see the glimmer of a refuge from my
desolation. Then came amazement and reaction. I turned about and went on
my way, and saw her no more.
But afterwards, later, I went out into the streets of Paris bent upon
finding that woman. She had become a hope, a desire.
I looked for her for what seemed a long time, half an hour perhaps or
two hours. I went along, peering at the women's faces, through the
blazing various lights, the pools of shadowy darkness, the flickering
reflections and transient glitter, one of a vast stream of slow-moving
adventurous human beings. I crossed streams of traffic, paused at
luminous kiosks, became aware of dim rows of faces looking down upon me
from above the shining enamel of the omnibuses.... My first intentness
upon one person, so that I disregarded any distracting intervention,
gave place by insensible degrees to a more general apprehension of the
things about me. That original woman became as it were diffused. I began
to look at the men and women sitting at the little tables behind the
panes of the cafés, and even on the terraces--for the weather was still
dry and open. I scrutinized the faces I passed, faces for the most part
animated by a sort of shallow eagerness. Many were ugly, many vile with
an intense vulgarity, but some in that throng were pretty, some almost
gracious. There was something pathetic and appealing for me in this
great sweeping together of people into a little light, into a weak
community of desire for joy and eventfulness. There came to me a sense
of tolerance, of fellowship, of participation. From an outer darkness
of unhappiness or at least of joylessness, they had all come hither--as
I had come.
I was like a creature that slips back again towards some deep waters out
of which long since it came, into the light and air. It was as if old
forgotten things, prenatal experiences, some magic of ancestral
memories, urged me to mingle again with this unsatisfied passion for
life about me....
Then suddenly a wave of feeling between self-disgust and fear poured
over me. This vortex was drawing me into deep and unknown things.... I
hailed a passing _fiacre_, went straight to my little hotel, settled my
account with the proprietor, and caught a night train for Switzerland.
All night long my head ached, and I lay awake swaying and jolting and
listening to the rhythms of the wheels, Paris clean forgotten so soon as
it was left, and my thoughts circling continually about Justin and
Philip and Mary and the things I might have said and done.
§ 4
One day late in February I found myself in Vevey. I had come down with
the break-up of the weather from Montana, where I had met some Oxford
men I knew and had learned to ski. I had made a few of those vague
acquaintances one makes in a winter-sport hotel, but now all these
people were going back to England and I was thrown back upon myself once
more. I was dull and angry and unhappy still, full of self-reproaches
and dreary indignations, and then very much as the sky will sometimes
break surprisingly through storm clouds there began in me a new series
of moods. They came to me by surprise. One clear bright afternoon I sat
upon the wall that runs along under the limes by the lake shore, envying
all these people who were going back to England and work and usefulness.
I thought of myself, of my career spoilt, my honor tarnished, my
character tested and found wanting. So far as English politics went my
prospects had closed for ever. Even after three years it was improbable
that I should be considered by the party managers again. And besides, it
seemed to me I was a man crippled. My other self, the mate and
confirmation of my mind, had gone from me. I was no more than a
mutilated man. My life was a thing condemned; I had joined the ranks of
loafing, morally-limping, English exiles.
I looked up. The sun was setting, a warm glow fell upon the dissolving
mountains of Savoy and upon the shining mirror of the lake. The
luminous, tranquil breadth of it caught me and held me. "I am done for."
The light upon the lake and upon the mountains, the downward swoop of a
bird over the water and something in my heart, gave me the lie.
"What nonsense!" I said, and felt as if some dark cloud that had
overshadowed me had been thrust back.
I stared across at Savoy as though that land had spoken. Why should I
let all my life be ruled by the blunders and adventures of one short
year of adventure? Why should I become the votary of a train of
consequences? What had I been dreaming of all this time? Over there were
gigantic uplands I had never seen and trodden; and beyond were great
plains and cities, and beyond that the sea, and so on, great spaces and
multitudinous things all round about the world. What did the things I
had done, the things I had failed to do, the hopes crushed out of me,
the tears and the anger, matter to _that_? And in some amazing way this
thought so took possession of me that the question seemed also to carry
with it the still more startling collateral, what then did they matter
to me? "Come out of yourself," said the mountains and all the beauty of
the world. "Whatever you have done or suffered is nothing to the
inexhaustible offer life makes you. We are you, just as much as the past
is you."
It was as though I had forgotten and now remembered how infinitely
multitudinous life can be. It was as if Tarvrille's neglected words to
me had sprouted in the obscurity of my mind and borne fruit....
I cannot explain how that mood came, I am doing my best to describe it,
and it is not easy even to describe. And I fear that to you who will
have had I hope no experience of such shadows as I had passed through,
it is impossible to convey its immense elation.... I remember once I
came in a boat out of the caves of Han after two hours in the darkness,
and there was the common daylight that is nothing wonderful at all, and
its brightness ahead there seemed like trumpets and cheering, like
waving flags and like the sunrise. And so it was with this mood of my
release.
There is a phrase of Peter E. Noyes', that queer echo of Emerson whom
people are always rediscovering and forgetting again, a phrase that
sticks in my mind,--"Every living soul is heir to an empire and has
fallen into a pit." It's an image wonderfully apt to describe my change
of mental attitude, and render the contrast between those intensely
passionate personal entanglements that had held me tight and that wide
estate of life that spreads about us all, open to all of us in just the
measure that we can scramble out of our individual selves--to a more
general self. I seemed to be hanging there at the brim of my stale and
painful den, staring at the unthought-of greatness of the world, with an
unhoped-for wind out of heaven blowing upon my face.
I suppose the intention of the phrase "finding salvation," as religious
people use it, is very much this experience. If it is not the same thing
it is something very closely akin. It is as if someone were scrambling
out of a pit into a largeness--a largeness that is attainable by every
man just in the measure that he realizes it is there.
I leave these fine discriminations to the theologian. I know that I went
back to my hotel in Vevey with my mind healed, with my will restored to
me, and my ideas running together into plans. And I know that I had come
out that day a broken and apathetic man.
§ 5
The next day my mood declined again; it was as if that light, that sense
of release that had shone so clear and strong in my mind, had escaped
me. I sought earnestly to recover it. But I could not do so, and I found
my old narrow preoccupations calling urgently to me again.
I thought that perhaps I might get back those intimations of outlook and
relief if I clambered alone into some high solitude and thought. I had
a crude attractive vision of myself far above the heat and noise,
communing with the sky. It was the worst season for climbing, and on the
spur of the moment I could do nothing but get up the Rochers de Naye on
the wrong side, and try and find some eyrie that was neither slippery
nor wet. I did not succeed. In one place I slipped down a wet bank for
some yards and held at last by a root; if I had slipped much further I
should not be writing here now; and I came back a very weary and bruised
climber, without any meditation....
Three nights after when I was in bed I became very lucidly awake--it
must have been about two or three in the morning--and the vision of life
returned to me, with that same effect of enlargement and illumination.
It was as if the great stillness that is behind and above and around the
world of sense did in some way communicate with me. It bade me rouse my
spirit and go on with the thoughts and purposes that had been stirring
and proliferating in my mind when I had returned to England from the
Cape. "Dismiss your passion." But I urged that that I could not do;
there was the thought of Mary subjugated and weeping, the smarting
memory of injury and defeat, the stains of subterfuge and discovery, the
aching separation. No matter, the stillness answered, in the end all
that is just to temper you for your greater uses.... I cannot forget, I
insisted. Do not forget, but for the present this leads you no whither;
this chapter has ended; dismiss it and turn to those other things. You
are not only Stephen Stratton who fell into adultery; in these silences
he is a little thing and far away; here and with me you are
Man--Everyman--in this round world in which your lot has fallen. But
Mary, I urged, to forget Mary is a treason, an ingratitude, seeing that
she loved me. But the stillness did not command me to forget her, but
only to turn my face now to the great work that lies before mankind. And
that work? That work, so far as your share goes, is first to understand,
to solve, and then to achieve, to work out in the measure of yourself
that torment of pity and that desire for order and justice which
together saturate your soul. Go about the world, embrue yourself with
life, make use of that confusedly striving brain that I have lifted so
painfully out of the deadness of matter....
"But who are you?" I cried out suddenly to the night. "Who are you?"
I sat up on the side of my bed. The dawn was just beginning to break up
the featureless blackness of the small hours. "This is just some odd
corner of my brain," I said....
Yet---- How did I come to have this odd corner in my brain? What _is_
this lucid stillness?...
§ 6
Let me tell you rather of my thoughts than of my moods, for there at
least one comes to something with a form that may be drawn and a
substance that is measurable; one ceases to struggle with things
indefinable and the effort to convey by metaphors and imaginary voices
things that are at once bodiless and soundless and lightless and yet
infinitely close and real. And moreover with that mysterious and subtle
change of heart in me there came also a change in the quality and range
of my ideas. I seemed to rise out of a tangle of immediacies and
misconceptions, to see more largely and more freely than I had ever done
before.
I have told how in my muddled and wounded phase I had snatched at the
dull project of improving my languages, and under the cloak of that
spying a little upon German military arrangements. Now my mind set such
petty romanticism on one side. It had recovered the strength to look on
the whole of life and on my place in it. It could resume the ideas that
our storm of passion had for a time thrust into the background of my
thoughts. I took up again all those broad generalizations that had
arisen out of my experiences in South Africa, and which I had been not
so much fitting into as forcing into the formulæ of English politics; I
recalled my disillusionment with British Imperialism, my vague but
elaborating apprehension of a profound conflict between enterprise and
labor, a profound conflict between the life of the farm and the life of
trade and finance and wholesale production, as being something far truer
to realities than any of the issues of party and patriotism upon which
men were spending their lives. So far as this rivalry between England
and Germany, which so obsessed the imagination of Europe, went, I found
that any faith I may have had in its importance had simply fallen out of
my mind. As a danger to civilization, as a conceivable source of
destruction and delay, it was a monstrous business enough, but that in
the long run it mattered how or when they fought and which won I did not
believe. In the development of mankind the thing was of far less
importance than the struggle for Flanders or the wars of France and
Burgundy. I was already coming to see Europe as no more than the
dog's-eared corner of the page of history,--like most Europeans I had
thought it the page--and my recovering mind was eager and open to see
the world beyond and form some conception of the greater forces that lay
outside our insularities. What is humanity as a whole doing? What is the
nature of the world process of which I am a part? Why should I drift
from cradle to grave wearing the blinkers of my time and nationality, a
mere denizen of Christendom, accepting its beliefs, its stale
antagonisms, its unreal purposes? That perhaps had been tolerable while
I was still an accepted member of the little world into which my lot had
fallen, but now that I was thrust out its absurdity glared. For me the
alternative was to be a world-man or no man. I had seemed sinking
towards the latter: now I faced about and began to make myself what I
still seek to make myself to-day, a son of mankind, a conscious part of
that web of effort and perplexity which wraps about our globe....
All this I say came into my mind as if it were a part of that recovery
of my mind from its first passionate abjection. And it seemed a simple
and obvious part of the same conversion to realize that I was ignorant
and narrow, and that, too, in a world which is suffering like a beast in
a slime pit by reason of ignorance and narrowness of outlook, and that
it was my manifest work and purpose to make myself less ignorant and to
see and learn with all my being. It came to me as a clear duty that I
should get out of the land of hotels and leisure and go seeking the
facts and clues to human inter-relationship nearer the earthy roots of
things, and I turned my thoughts to India and China, those vast enigmas
of human accumulation, in a spirit extraordinarily like that of some
mystic who receives a call. I felt I must go to Asia and from Asia
perhaps round the world. But it was the greatness of Asia commanded me.
I wanted to see the East not as a spectacle but as the simmering vat in
which the greater destiny of man brews and brews....
§ 7
It was necessary to tell my father of my intentions. I made numerous
beginnings. I tore up several letters and quarrelled bitterly with the
hotel pens. At first I tried to describe the change that had happened to
my mind, to give him some impression of the new light, the release that
had come to me. But how difficult this present world is with its tainted
and poisoned phrases and its tangled misunderstandings! Here was I
writing for the first time in my life of something essentially religious
and writing it to him whose profession was religion, and I could find no
words to convey my meaning to him that did not seem to me fraught with
the possibilities of misinterpretation. One evening I made a desperate
resolve to let myself go, and scrawled my heart out to him as it seemed
that night, a strange, long letter. It was one of the profoundest
regrets that came to me when I saw him dead last winter that I did not
risk his misunderstanding and post that letter. But when I re-read it in
the next morning's daylight it seemed to me so rhetorical, so full
of--what shall I call it?--spiritual bombast, it so caricatured and
reflected upon the deep feelings sustaining me, that I could not post it
for shamefacedness, and I tore it up into little pieces and sent
instead the briefest of notes.
"I am doing no good here in Switzerland," I wrote. "Would you mind if I
went east? I want to see something of the world outside Europe. I have a
fancy I may find something to do beyond there. Of course, it will cost
rather more than my present allowance. I will do my best to economize.
Don't bother if it bothers you--I've been bother enough to you...."
He replied still more compactly. "By all means. I will send you some
circular notes, Poste Restante, Rome. That will be on your way. Good
wishes to you, Stephen. I'm glad you want to go east instead of just
staying in Switzerland."
I sit here now and wonder, little son, what he thought, what he
supposed, what he understood.
I loved my father, and I began to perceive he loved me wonderfully. I
can imagine no man I would have sooner had for a priest than him; all
priestcraft lays hands if it can, and with an excellent wisdom, upon the
titles and dignity of fatherhood; and yet here am I left to guessing--I
do not know whether my father ever worshipped, whether he ever prayed
with his heart bared to God. There are times when the inexpressiveness
of life comes near to overwhelming me, when it seems to me we are all
asleep or entranced, and but a little way above the still cows who stand
munching slowly in a field. Why couldn't we and why didn't we talk
together?... We fear bathos too much, are shyly decent to the pitch of
mania. We have neither the courage of our bodies nor of our souls....
I went almost immediately to Rome. I stayed in Rome some days, getting
together an outfit, and incidentally seeing that greater city of the
dead in whose embrace the modern city lies. I was now becoming
interested in things outside my grooves, though my grooves were still
there, deep and receptive, and I went about the place at last almost
eagerly, tracing the outlines of that great departed city on whose
colossal bones the churches and palaces of the middle ages cluster like
weeds in the spaces and ruins of a magnificent garden. I found myself
one day in the Forum, thinking of that imperialism that had built the
Basilica of Julius Cæsar, and comparing its cramped vestiges with that
vaster second administrative effort which has left the world the
monstrous arches of Constantine. I sat down over against these last
among the ruins of the Vestals' House, and mused on that later
reconstruction when the Empire, with its science aborted and its
literature and philosophy shrivelled to nothing, its social fabric
ruined by the extravagances of financial adventure and its honor and
patriotism altogether dead, united itself, in a desperate effort to
continue, with all that was most bickeringly intolerant and destructive
in Christianity--only to achieve one common vast decay. All Europe to
this day is little more than the sequel to that failure. It is the Roman
Empire in disintegration. The very churches whose domes rise to the
northward of the ancient remains are built of looted stones and look
like parasitic and fungoid growths, and the tourists stream through
those spaces day by day, stare at the marble fragments, the arches, the
fallen carvings and rich capitals, with nothing greater in their minds
and nothing clearer....
I discovered I was putting all this into the form of a letter to Mary.
I was writing to her in my mind, as many people talk to themselves. And
I remember that I wandered upon the Palatine Hill musing over the idea
of writing a long letter to her, a long continuous letter to her, a sort
of diary of impressions and ideas, that somewhen, years ahead, I might
be able to put into her hands.
One does not carry out such an idea into reality; it is so much easier
to leave the letter imagined and unwritten if there lives but little
hope of its delivery; yet for many years I kept up an impalpable
correspondence in my thoughts, a stream of expression to which no answer
came--until at last the habits of public writing and the gathering
interests of a new rôle in life diverted it to other ends.
§ 8
One morning on the way from Brindisi to Egypt I came up on deck at dawn
because my mind was restless and I could not sleep. Another solitary
passenger was already up, so intently watching a pink-lit rocky
coast-line away to the north of us that for a time he did not observe
me.
"That's Crete," he said, when at last he became aware of me close at
hand.
"Crete!" said I.
"Yes," he said, "Crete."
He came nearer to me. "That, sir," he said with a challenging emphasis,
"is the most wonderful island I've ever yet set eyes on,--quite the most
wonderful."
"Five thousand years ago," he remarked after a pause that seemed to me
to be calculated, "they were building palaces there, better than the
best we can build to-day. And things--like modern things. They had
bathrooms there, beautifully fitted bathrooms--and admirable
sanitation--admirable. Practically--American. They had better artists to
serve them than your King Edward has, why! Minos would have laughed or
screamed at all that Windsor furniture. And the things they made of
gold, sir--you couldn't get them done anywhere to-day. Not for any
money. There was a Go about them.... They had a kind of writing,
too--before the Phoenicians. No man can read it now, and there it is.
Fifty centuries ago it was; and to-day--They grow oranges and lemons.
And they riot.... Everything else gone.... It's as if men struggled up
to a certain pitch and then--grew tired.... All this Mediterranean; it's
a tired sea...."
That was the beginning of a curious conversation. He was an American, a
year or so younger than myself, going, he said, "to look at Egypt."
"In our country," he explained, "we're apt to forget all these
worked-out regions. Too apt. We don't get our perspectives. We think the
whole blessed world is one everlasting boom. It hit me first down in
Yucatan that that wasn't so. Why! the world's littered with the remains
of booms and swaggering beginnings. Americanism!--there's always been
Americanism. This Mediterranean is just a Museum of old Americas. I
guess Tyre and Sidon thought they were licking creation all the time.
It's set me thinking. What's _really_ going on? Why--anywhere,--you're
running about among ruins--anywhere. And ruins of something just as good
as anything we're doing to-day. Better--in some ways. It takes the heart
out of you...."
It was Gidding, who is now my close friend and ally. I remember very
vividly the flavor of morning freshness as we watched Crete pass away
northward and I listened to his talk.
"I was coming out of New York Harbor a month ago and looking back at the
skyscrapers," he said, "and suddenly it hit me in the mind;--'That's
just the next ruin,' I thought."
I remember that much of our first talk, but the rest of it now is
indistinct.
We had however struck up an acquaintance, we were both alone, and until
he left me on his way to Abydos we seem now to have been conversing all
the time. And almost all the time we were discussing human destiny and
the causes of effort and decay, and whether the last few ascendant
centuries the world has seen have in them anything more persistent than
the countless beginnings that have gone before.
"There's Science," said I a little doubtfully.
"At Cnossus there they had Dædalus, sir, fifty centuries ago. Dædalus!
He was an F.R.S. all right. I haven't a doubt he flew. If they hadn't
steel they had brass. We're too conceited about our little modern
things."
§ 9
I found something very striking and dramatic in the passage from Europe
to Asia. One steams slowly through a desert that comes up close to the
ship; the sand stretches away, hillock and mound beyond hillock and
mound; one sees camels in the offing stringing out to some ancient
destination; one is manifestly passing across a barrier,--the canal has
changed nothing of that. Suez is a first dab of tumultuous Orientalism,
noisy and vivid. And then, after that gleam of turmoil, one opens out
into the lonely dark blue waters of the Red Sea. Right and left the
shore is a bitter, sun-scorched desolation; eastward frowns a great
rampart of lowering purple mountains towering up to Sinai. It is like no
European landscape. The boat goes slowly as if uncharted dangers lurked
ahead. It is a new world with a new atmosphere. Then comes wave upon
wave of ever more sultry air, and the punkahs begin to swing and the
white clothes appear. Everyone casts off Europe, assumes an Asiatic
livery. The very sun, rushing up angrily and abruptly after a heated
night, is unfamiliar, an Asiatic sun.
And so one goes down that reef-fringed waterway to Aden; it is studded
with lonely-looking lighthouses that burn, it seems, untended, and
sometimes in their melancholy isolation swing great rhythmic arms of
light. And then, land and the last lateen sails of Aden vanishing
together, one stands out into the hot thundery monotonies of the Indian
Ocean; into imprisonment in a blue horizon across whose Titan ring the
engines seem to throb in vain. How one paces the ship day by day, and
eats and dozes and eats again, and gossips inanely and thanks Heaven
even for a flight of flying fish or a trail of smoke from over the
horizon to take one's mind a little out of one's oily quivering
prison!... A hot portentous delay; a sinister significant pause; that is
the voyage from Europe to India still.
I suppose by the time that you will go to India all this prelude will
have vanished, you will rattle through in a train-de-luxe from Calais,
by way of Baku or Constantinople; you will have none of this effect of
a deliberate sullen approach across limitless miles of sea. But that is
how I went to India. Everything seemed to expand; I was coming out of
the frequent landfalls, the neighborly intimacies and neighborly
conflicts of the Mediterranean into something remoter; into larger seas
and greater lands, rarer communications and a vaster future....
To go from Europe to Asia is like going from Norway to Russia, from
something slight and "advanced" to something massive and portentous. I
felt that nearly nine years ago; to-day all Asia seems moving forward to
justify my feelings....
And I remember too that as I went down the Red Sea and again in the
Indian Ocean I had a nearly intolerable passion of loneliness. A wound
may heal and still leave pain. I was coming out of Europe as one comes
out of a familiar house into something larger and stranger, I seemed but
a little speck of life, and behind me, far away and silent and receding,
was the one other being to whom my thoughts were open. It seemed very
cruel to me that I could not write to her.
Such moods were to come to me again and again, and particularly during
the inactivities of voyages and in large empty spaces and at night when
I was weary. At other times I could banish and overcome them by forcing
myself to be busy and by going to see novel and moving things.
CHAPTER THE EIGHTH
THIS SWARMING BUSINESS OF MANKIND
§ 1
I do not think I could now arrange into a consecutive history my
travellings, my goings and returnings in my wandering effort to see and
comprehend the world. And certainly even if I could arrange my facts I
should still be at a loss to tell of the growth of ideas that is so much
more important than any facts, to trace the increasing light to its
innumerable sources, to a chink here, to a glowing reflection there, to
a leap of burning light from some long inert darkness close at hand. But
steadily the light grew, and this vast world of man, in which our world,
little son, is the world of a limited class in a small island, began to
take on definite forms, to betray broad universal movements; what seemed
at first chaotic, a drift and tangle of passions, traditions, foolish
ideas, blundering hostilities, careless tolerances, became confusedly
systematic, showed something persistent and generalized at work among
its multitudinous perplexity.
I wonder now if I can put before you very briefly the main
generalizations that were growing up in my mind during my exile, the
simplified picture into which I translated the billions of sights and
sounds and--smells, for every part of the world has its distinctive
olfactory palette as much as its palette of colors--that rained daily
and nightly upon my mind.
Before, my eyes again as I sit here in this quiet walled French garden,
the great space before the Jumna Musjid at Delhi reappears, as I saw it
in the evening stillness against a glowing sky of gold, and the memory
of countless worshippers within, praying with a devotion no European
displays. And then comes a memory of that long reef of staircases and
temples and buildings, the ghats of Benares, in the blazing morning sun,
swarming with a vast multitude of multicolored people and the water also
swarming with brown bodies. It has the colors of a bed of extravagantly
splendid flowers and the light that is Indian alone. Even as I sit here
these places are alive with happening. It is just past midday here; at
this moment the sun sinks in the skies of India, the Jumna Musjid
flushes again with the glow of sunset, the smoke of evening fires
streams heavenward against its subtle lines, and upon those steps at
Benares that come down the hillside between the conquering mosque of
Aurangzeb and the shining mirror of the Ganges a thousand silent seated
figures fall into meditation. And other memories recur and struggle with
one another; the crowded river-streets of Canton, the rafts and
houseboats and junks innumerable, riding over inky water, begin now to
twinkle with a thousand lights. They are ablaze in Osaka and Yokohama
and Tokio, and the swarming staircase streets of Hong Kong glitter with
a wicked activity now that night has come. I flash a glimpse of Burmese
temples, of villages in Java, of the sombre purple masses of the walls
of the Tartar city at Pekin with squat pagoda-guarded gates. How those
great outlines lowered at me in the twilight, full of fresh memories and
grim anticipations of baseness and violence and bloodshed! I sit here
recalling it--feeling it all out beyond the trellised vine-clad wall
that bounds my physical vision.... Vast crowded world that I have seen!
going from point to point seeking for clues, for generalities, until at
last it seems to me that there emerges--something understandable.
I think I have got something understandable out of it all.
What a fantastically courageous thing is this mind of ours! My thoughts
seem to me at once presumptuous and inevitable. I do not know why it is
that I should dare, that any of us should dream of this attempt to
comprehend. But we who think are everyone impelled to this amazing
effort to get it all together into some simple generality. It is not
reason but a deep-seated instinct that draws our intelligence towards
explanations, that sets us perpetually seeking laws, seeking statements
that will fit into infinite, incessantly interweaving complexities, and
be true of them all! There is I perceive a valiant and magnificent
stupidity about the human mind, a disregard of disproportion and
insufficiency--like the ferret which will turn from the leveret it has
seized to attack even man if he should interfere. By these desperate
feats of thinking it is that our species has achieved its victories. By
them it survives. By them it must stand the test of ultimate survival.
Some forgotten man in our ancestry--for every begetting man alive was in
my individual ancestry and yours three thousand years ago--first dared
to think of the world as round,--an astounding temerity. He rolled up
the rivers and mountains, the forests and plains and broad horizons
that stretched beyond his ken, that seemed to commonsense to go on
certainly for ever, into a ball, into a little ball "like an orange."
Magnificent feat of the imagination, outdoing Thor's deep draught of the
sea! And once he had done it, all do it and no one falters at the deed.
You are not yet seven as I write and already you are serenely aware that
you live upon a sphere. And in much the same manner it is that we, who
are sociologists and economists, publicists and philosophers and what
not, are attempting now to roll up the vast world of facts which concern
human intercourse, the whole indeed of history and archæology, into some
similar imaginable and manageable shape, that presently everyone will be
able to grasp.
I suppose there was a time when nobody bothered at all about the shape
of the earth, when nobody had even had the idea that the earth could be
conceived as having a shape, and similarly it is true that it is only in
recent centuries that people have been able to suppose that there was a
shape to human history. It is indeed not much more than a century since
there was any real emergence from theological assumptions and pure
romanticism and accidentalism in these matters. Old Adam Smith it was,
probing away at the roots of economics, who set going the construction
of ampler propositions. From him spring all those new interpretations
which have changed the writing of history from a record of dramatic
reigns and wars and crises to an analysis of economic forces. How
impossible it would be for anyone now to write that great chapter of
Gibbon's in which he sweeps together into one contempt the history of
sixty Emperors and six hundred years of time. His note of weariness and
futility vanishes directly one's vision penetrates the immediate
surface. Those Heraclians and Isaurians and Comneni were not history, a
schoolboy nowadays knows that their record is not history, knows them
for the mere scum upon the stream.
And still to-day we have our great interpretations to make. Ours is a
time of guesses, theories and provisional generalizations. Our phase
corresponds to the cosmography that was still a little divided between
discs and domes and spheres and cosmic eggs; that was still a thousand
years from measuring and weighing a planet. For a long time my mind
hovered about the stimulating theories of Socialism and particularly
about those more systematic forms of Socialist teaching that centre
about Karl Marx. He rose quite naturally out of those early economists
who saw all the world in terms of production and saving. He was a
necessary step for me at least, on the way to understanding. For a time
I did so shape the world in my mind that it seemed to me no more than a
vast enterprise for the organization and exploitation of labor. For a
time I thought human life was essentially a labor problem, that working
and controlling work and lending and selling and "speculating" made the
essential substance of human life, over which the forms of politics ran
as the stripes of a tiger's skin run and bend over its living muscles. I
followed my period in thinking that. You will find in Ferrero's "Roman
Decline," which was published early in this century, and which waits for
you in the library, almost exactly the method of interpretation that was
recommending itself to me in 1904 and 1905.
Well, the labor problem concerns a great--_substantial_, shall I
say?--in human society. It is only I think the basis and matter of
society, not its shape and life and reality, but it had to be
apprehended before I could get on to more actual things. Insensibly the
idea that contemporary political forms mattered very fundamentally to
men, was fading out of my mind. The British Empire and the German
Empire, the Unity of Italy, and Anglo-Saxon ascendency, the Yellow Peril
and all the other vast phantoms of the World-politician's mythology were
fading out of my mind in those years, as the Olympic cosmogony must have
faded from the mind of some inquiring Greek philosopher in the days of
Heraclitus. And I revised my history altogether in the new light. The
world had ceased to be chaotic in my mind; it had become a vast if as
yet a quite inconclusive drama between employer and employed.
It makes a wonderful history, this history of mankind as a history of
Labor, as a history of the perpetual attempts of an intelligent minority
to get things done by other people. It does not explain how that
aggression of the minority arose nor does it give any conception of a
primordial society which corresponds with our knowledge of the realities
of primitive communities. One begins rather in the air with a human
society that sells and barters and sustains contracts and permits land
to be privately owned, and having as hastily as possible got away from
that difficulty of beginnings, having ignored the large areas of the
world which remain under a pacific and unprogressive agriculture to this
day, the rest of the story becomes extremely convincing and
illuminating. It does indeed give a sustaining explanation to a large
part of recorded history, this generalization about the proclivity of
able and energetic people to make other people do things. One ignores
what is being done as if that mattered nothing, and concentrates upon
the use and enslavement of men.
One sees that enslavement to labor progressing from crude directness to
the most subtly indirect methods. The first expedient of enterprise was
the sword and then the whip, and still there are remote and ugly corners
of the world, in the Mexican Valle Nazionale or in Portuguese South
Africa, where the whip whistles still and the threat of great suffering
and death follows hard upon the reluctant toiler. But the larger part of
our modern slavery is past the stage of brand and whip. We have fallen
into methods at once more subtle and more effective. We stand
benevolently in front of our fellow man, offering, almost as if it were
food and drink and shelter and love, the work we want him to do; and
behind him, we are acutely aware, is necessity, sometimes quite of our
making, as when we drive him to work by a hut-tax or a poll tax or a
rent, that obliges him to earn money, and sometimes not so obviously of
our making, sometimes so little of our making that it is easy to believe
we have no power to remove it. Instead of flicking the whip, we groan at
last with Harriet Martineau at the inexorable laws of political economy
that condemn us to comfort and direction, and those others to toil and
hardship and indignity....
And through the consideration of these latter later aspects it was that
I came at last to those subtler problems of tacit self-deception, of
imperfect and unwilling apprehension, of innocently assumed advantages,
of wilfully disregarded unfairness; and also to all those other problems
of motive, those forgotten questions of why we make others work for us
long after our personal needs are satisfied, why men aggrandize and
undertake, which gradually have become in my mind the essential problems
of human relationship, replacing the crude problems of labor altogether
in that position, making _them_ at last only questions of contrivance
and management on the way to greater ends.
I have come to believe now that labor problems are problems merely by
the way. They have played their part in a greater scheme. This phase of
expropriation and enslavement, this half designed and half unconscious
driving of the duller by the clever, of the pacific by the bolder, of
those with weak appetites and imaginations by those with stronger
appetites and imaginations, has been a necessary phase in human
development. With my innate passionate desire to find the whole world
purposeful, I cannot but believe that. But however necessary it has
been, it is necessary no longer. Strangest of saviors, there rises over
the conflicts of mankind the glittering angular promise of the machine.
There is no longer any need for slavery, open or disguised. We do not
need slaves nor toilers nor mere laborers any more; they are no longer
essential to a civilization. Man has ridden on his brother man out of
the need of servitude. He struggles through to a new phase, a phase of
release, a phase when leisure and an unexampled freedom is possible to
every human being. Is possible. And it is there one halts seeing that
splendid possibility of aspiration and creation before mankind--and
seeing mankind for the most part still downcast, quite unaware or
incredulous, following the old rounds, the grooves of ancient and
superseded assumptions and subjections....
But here I will not trace in any detail the growth of my conviction
that the ancient and heavy obligation to work hard and continually
throughout life has already slipped from man's shoulders. Suffice it
that now I conceive of the task before mankind as a task essentially of
rearrangement, as a problem in relationships, extremely complex and
difficult indeed, but credibly solvable. During my Indian and Chinese
journey I was still at the Marxist stage. I went about the east looking
at labor, watching its organization and direction, seeing great
interests and enterprises replace the diffused life of an earlier phase;
the disputes and discussions in the Transvaal which had first opened my
mind to these questions came back to me, and steadily I lost my interest
in those mere political and national issues with their paraphernalia of
kings and flags and governments and parties that had hitherto blinded me
to these more fundamental interactions.
§ 2
It happened that in Bombay circumstances conspired to bring the crude
facts of labor enslavement vividly before me. I found a vigorous
agitation raging in the English press against the horrible sweating that
was going on in the cotton mills, I met the journalist most intimately
concerned in the business on my second day in India, and before a week
was out I was hard at work getting up the question and preparing a
memorandum with him on the possibility of immediate legislative
intervention. The very name of Bombay, which for most people recalls a
spacious and dignified landfall, lateen sails, green islands and
jutting precipices, a long city of trees and buildings like a bright and
various breakwater between the great harbor and the sea, and then
exquisite little temples, painted bullock carriages, Towers of Silence,
Parsis, and an amazingly kaleidoscopic population,--is for me a reminder
of narrow, foetid, plague-stricken streets and tall insanitary
tenement-houses packed and dripping with humanity, and of terrible
throbbing factories working far into the night, blazing with electric
light against the velvet-black night-sky of India, damp with the
steam-clouds that are maintained to moisten the thread, and swarming
with emaciated overworked brown children--for even the adults, spare and
small, in those mills seem children to a western eye.
I plunged into this heated dreadful business with a passionate interest
and went back to the Yacht Club only when the craving for air and a good
bath and clean clothes and space and respect became unendurable. I waded
deep in labor, in this process of consuming humanity for gain, chasing
my facts through throbbing quivering sheds reeking of sweat and
excrement under the tall black-smoking chimneys,--chasing them in very
truth, because when we came prying into the mills after the hour when
child-labor should cease, there would be a shrill whistle, a patter of
feet and a cuffing and hiding of the naked little creatures we were
trying to rescue. They would be hidden under rugs, in boxes, in the most
impossible places, and we dragged them out scared and lying. Many of
them were perhaps seven years old at most; and the adults--men and women
of fourteen that is to say--we could not touch at all, and they worked
in that Indian heat, in a noisome air drenched with steam for fourteen
and fifteen hours a day. And essential to that general impression is a
memory of a slim Parsi mill-manager luminously explaining the inherited
passion for toil in the Indian weaver, and a certain bulky Hindu with a
lemon-yellow turban and a strip of plump brown stomach showing between
his clothes, who was doing very well, he said, with two wives and five
children in the mills.
That is my Bombay, that and the columns of crossed circles marking
plague cases upon the corners of houses and a peculiar acrid smell, and
the polychromatic stir of crowded narrow streets between cliffs of
architecture with carved timbers and heavy ornamentations, into which
the sun strikes obliquely and lights a thousand vivid hues....
Bombay, the gateway of what silly people were still calling in those
days "the immemorial East," Bombay, which is newer than Boston or New
York, Bombay which has grown beneath the Englishman's shadow out of a
Portuguese fort in the last two hundred years....
§ 3
I came out of these dark corners presently into the sunblaze of India. I
was now intensely interested in the whole question of employment and
engaged in preparing matter for my first book, "Enterprise and India,"
and therein you may read how I went first to Assam and then down to
Ceylon following up this perplexing and complicated business of human
enslavement to toil, exercised by this great spectacle of human labor,
and at once attracted by and stimulated by and dissatisfied with those
socialist generalizations that would make all this vast harsh spectacle
of productive enterprise a kind of wickedness and outrage upon humanity.
And behind and about the things I was looking for were other things for
which I was not looking, that slowly came into and qualified the
problem. It dawned upon me by degrees that India is not so much one
country as a vast spectacle of human development at every stage, in
infinite variety. One ranges between naked savages and the most
sophisticated of human beings. I pursued my enquiries about great modern
enterprises, about railway labor, canal labor, tea-planting, across vast
stretches of country where men still lived, illiterate, agricultural,
unprogressive and simple, as men lived before the first stirrings of
recorded history. One sees by the tanks of those mud-built villages
groups of women with brass vessels who are identical in pose and figure
and quality with the women modelled in Tanagra figures, and the droning
wall-wheel is the same that irrigated the fields of ancient Greece, and
the crops and beasts and all the life is as it was in Greece and Italy,
Phoenicia and Judea before the very dawn of history.
By imperceptible degrees I came to realize that this matter of
expropriation and enslavement and control, which bulks so vastly upon
the modern consciousness, which the Socialists treat as though it was
the comprehensive present process of mankind, is no more than one aspect
of an overlife that struggles out of a massive ancient and traditional
common way of living, struggles out again and again--blindly and always
so far with a disorderly insuccess....
I began to see in their proper proportion the vast enduring normal human
existence, the peasant's agricultural life, unlettered, laborious and
essentially unchanging on the one hand, and on the other those
excrescences of multitudinous city aggregation, those stormy excesses of
productive energy that flare up out of that life, establish for a time
great unstable strangenesses of human living, palaces, cities, roads,
empires, literatures, and then totter and fall back again into ruin. In
India even more than about the Mediterranean all this is spectacular.
There the peasant goes about his work according to the usage of fifty
thousand years. He has a primitive version of religion, a moral
tradition, a social usage, closely adapted by countless years of trial
and survival to his needs, and the whole land is littered with the
vestiges and abandoned material of those newer, bolder, more
experimental beginnings, beginnings that merely began.
It was when I was going through the panther-haunted palaces of Akbar at
Fatehpur Sikri that I first felt how tremendously the ruins of the past
may face towards the future; the thing there is like a frozen wave that
rose and never broke; and once I had caught that light upon things, I
found the same quality in all the ruins I saw, in Amber and Vijayanagar
and Chitor, and in all that I have seen or heard of, in ancient Rome and
ancient Verona, in Pæstum and Cnossus and ancient Athens. None of these
places was ever really finished and done with; the Basilicas of Cæsar
and Constantine just as much as the baths and galleries and halls of
audience at Fatehpur Sikri express not ends achieved but thwarted
intentions of permanence. They embody repulse and rejection. They are
trials, abandoned trials, towards ends vaguely apprehended, ends felt
rather than known. Even so was I moved by the Bruges-like emptinesses of
Pekin, in the vast pretensions of its Forbidden City, which are like a
cry, long sustained, that at last dies away in a wail. I saw the place
in 1905 in that slack interval after the European looting and before the
great awakening that followed the Russo-Japanese war. Pekin in a century
or so may be added in its turn to the list of abandoned endeavors.
Insensibly the sceptre passes.... Nearer home than any of these places
have I imagined the same thing; in Paris it seemed to me I felt the
first chill shadow of that same arrest, that impalpable ebb and
cessation at the very crest of things, that voice which opposes to all
the hasty ambitions and gathering eagerness of men: "It is not here, it
is not yet."
Only the other day as I came back from Paris to this quiet place and
walked across the fields from the railway station to this house, I saw
an old woman, a grandmother, a bent old crone with two children playing
about her as she cut grass by the wayside, and she cut it, except that
her sickle was steel, exactly as old women were cutting grass before
there was writing, before the dawn of history, before men laid the first
stones one upon the other of the first city that ever became a ruin....
You see Civilization has never yet existed, it has only continually and
obstinately attempted to be. Our Civilization is but the indistinct
twilight before the dawn. It is still only a confused attempt, a
flourish out of barbarism, and the normal life of men, the toiling
earthy life of the field and the byre, goes on still like a stream that
at once supports and carries to destruction the experimental ships of
some still imperfect inventor. India gives it all from first to last,
and now the modern movement, the latest half-conscious struggle of the
New Thing in mankind, throws up Bombay and Calcutta, vast feverish
pustules upon the face of the peninsula, bridges the sacred rivers with
hideous iron lattice-work and smears the sky of the dusty ruin-girdled
city of Delhi,--each ruin is the vestige of an empire,--with the black
smoke of factory chimneys.
Altogether scattered over that sun-burnt plain there are the remains of
five or six extinguished Delhis, that played their dramas of frustration
before the Delhi of the Great Mogul. This present phase of human
living--its symbol at Delhi is now, I suppose, a scaffold-bristling pile
of neo-Georgian building--is the latest of the constructive synthetic
efforts to make a newer and fuller life for mankind. Who dares call it
the last? I question myself constantly whether this life we live to-day,
whether that too, is more than a trial of these blind constructive
forces, more universal perhaps, more powerful perhaps than any
predecessor but still a trial, to litter the world with rusting material
when the phase of recession recurs.
But yet I can never quite think that is so. This time, surely, it is
different. This time may indeed be the beginning of a permanent change;
this time there are new elements, new methods and a new spirit at work
upon construction that the world has never known before. Mankind may be
now in the dawn of a fresh phase of living altogether. It is possible.
The forces of construction are proportionally gigantic. There was never
so much clear and critical thought in the world as there is now, never
so large a body of generally accessible knowledge and suggestion, never
anything like the same breadth of outlook, the same universality of
imaginative freedom. That is so in spite of infinite turmoil and
confusion. Moreover the effort now is less concentrated, less dramatic.
There is no one vital center to the modern movement which disaster can
strike or decay undermine. If Paris or New York slacken and grow dull
and materialist, if Berlin and London conspire for a mutual destruction,
Tokio or Baku or Valparaiso or Christiania or Smyrna or Delhi will
shelter and continue the onward impetus.
And this time too it is not any one person, any one dynasty, any one
cult or race which carries our destiny. Human thought has begun to free
itself from individual entanglements and dramatic necessities and
accidental standards. It becomes a collective mind, a collective will
towards achievement, greater than individuals or cities or kingdoms or
peoples, a mind and will to which we all contribute and which none of us
may command nor compromise by our private errors. It ceases to be
aristocratic; it detaches itself from persons and takes possession of us
all. We are involved as it grows free and dominant, we find ourselves,
in spite of ourselves, in spite of quarrels and jealousies and
conflicts, helping and serving in the making of a new world-city, a new
greater State above our legal States, in which all human life becomes a
splendid enterprise, free and beautiful, whose aptest symbol in all our
world is a huge Gothic Cathedral lit to flame by the sun, whose scheme
is the towering conquest of the universe, whose every little detail is
the wrought-out effort of a human soul....
Such were the ideas that grew together in my mind as I went about India
and the East, across those vast sunlit plains, where men and women still
toil in their dusty fields for a harsh living and live in doorless
hovels on floors of trampled cow-dung, persecuted by a hundred hostile
beasts and parasites, caught and eaten by tigers and panthers as cats
eat mice, and grievously afflicted by periodic famine and pestilence,
even as men and women lived before the dawn of history, for untold
centuries, for hundreds of thousands of years.
§ 4
How strange we English seem in India, a little scattered garrison. Are
we anything more than accidental, anything more than the messenger-boy
who has brought the impetus of the new effort towards civilization
through the gates of the East? Are we makers or just a means, casually
taken up and used by the great forces of God?
I do not know, I have never been able to tell. I have never been able to
decide whether we are the greatest or the dullest of peoples.
I think we are an imaginative people with an imagination at once
gigantic, heroic and shy, and also we are a strangely restrained and
disciplined people who are yet neither subdued nor subordinated....
These are flat contradictions to state, and yet how else can one render
the paradox of the English character and this spectacle of a handful of
mute, snobbish, not obviously clever and quite obviously ill-educated
men, holding together kingdoms, tongues and races, three hundred
millions of them, in a restless fermenting peace? Again and again in
India I would find myself in little circles of the official
English,-supercilious, pretentious, conventional, carefully "turned out"
people, living gawkily, thinking gawkily, talking nothing but sport and
gossip, relaxing at rare intervals into sentimentality and levity as
mean as a banjo tune, and a kind of despairful disgust would engulf me.
And then in some man's work, in some huge irrigation scheme, some feat
of strategic foresight, some simple, penetrating realization of
deep-lying things, I would find an effect, as if out of a thickly rusted
sheath one had pulled a sword and found it--flame....
I recall one evening I spent at a little station in Bengal, between
Lucknow and Delhi, an evening given over to private theatricals. The
theatre was a huge tent, and the little roughly improvised stage was lit
by a row of oil footlights and so small as barely to give a foothold for
the actors and actresses in the more crowded scenes. About me were the
great people, the colonel's wife, a touring young man of family,
officers and the wife of the manager of the big sugar refinery close at
hand. Behind were English of a more dubious social position, also
connected with the sugar refinery, a Eurasian family or so, very dressy
and aggressive and terribly snubbed, and then I think various Portuguese
and other nondescripts and groups of non-commissioned officers and men,
some with their wives. The play, admirably chosen, was that
crystallization of liberal Victorian snobbery, _Caste_, and I remember
there was a sub-current of amusement because the young officer who
played--what _is_ the name of the hero's friend? I forget--had in the
haste of his superficiality adopted a moustache that would not keep on
and an eyeglass that would not keep in.
Everybody was acting very badly, nobody was word-perfect and a rasping
prompter would not keep ahead as he ought to have done; the scenery and
the make-ups were daubs, and I was filled with amazement that having
quite wantonly undertaken to do this thing these people could then do it
so slackly. Then a certain sudden warmth in the applause about me
quickened my attention, and I realized the satirical purport of drunken
old father Eccles, and the moral intention of his son-in-law, the
plumber. Between them they expressed the whole duty of the workingman as
the prosperous Victorians conceived it. He was to work hard always at
any job he could find for any wages he could get, and if he didn't he
was a "drunken shirker" and the dupe of "paid agitators." A comforting
but misleading doctrine. And here were these people a decade on in the
twentieth century, with Time, Death, and Judgment close upon them, still
eagerly applauding, eager to excuse their minds with this one-sided,
ungracious, old-fashioned nonsense, that has done so much to intensify
the deepening class antagonisms that strain us now at home almost to the
breaking point!
How amazingly, it seemed, those people didn't understand and wouldn't
understand any class but their own, any race but their own, any usage
other than their use! Covertly I surveyed the colonel's profile. It
expressed nothing but entire satisfaction with these disastrous
interpretations. What a weather-worn thought-free face that grizzled
veteran showed the world!
I was seized with a sudden curiosity to see how the private soldiers
behind me were taking old Eccles. I turned round to discover cropped
heads and faces as expressionless as masks, and behind them dusky faces
watching very alertly, and then other dusky faces, Eurasians, inferiors,
servants, natives.
Then at a sharp edge the glare of our lighting ceased and the canvas
walls of our narrow world of illusion opened into a vast blue twilight.
At the opening stood two white-clad Sikhs, very, very still and
attentive, watching the performance, and beyond them was a great space
of sky over a dim profile of trees and roofs and a minaret, a sky
darkling down to the flushed red memory--such a short memory it is in
India--of a day that had gone for ever.
I remained staring at that for some time.
"Isn't old Eccles _good_?" whispered the colonel's wife beside me, and
recalled me to the play....
Somehow that picture of a narrow canvas tent in the midst of immensities
has become my symbol for the whole life of the governing English, the
English of India and Switzerland and the Riviera and the West End and
the public services....
But they are not England, they are not the English reality, which is a
thing at once bright and illuminating and fitful, a thing humorous and
wise and adventurous--Shakespeare, Dickens, Newton, Darwin, Nelson,
Bacon, Shelley--English names every one--like the piercing light of
lanterns swinging and swaying among the branches of dark trees at night.
§ 5
I went again to Ceylon to look into the conditions of Coolie
importation, and then I was going back into Assam once more, still in
the wake of indentured labor, when I chanced upon a misadventure. I had
my first and only experience of big game shooting in the Garo Hills, I
was clawed out of a tree by a wounded panther, he missed his hold and I
got back to my branch, but my shoulder was put out, my thigh was badly
torn, and my blood was poisoned by the wound. I had an evil
uncomfortable time. My injury hampered me greatly, and for a while it
seemed likely I should be permanently lamed. I had to keep to vehicles
and reasonably good roads. I wound up my convalescence with a voyage to
Singapore, and from thence I went on rather disconnectedly to a number
of exploratory journeys--excursions rather than journeys--into China. I
got to Pekin and then suddenly faced back to Europe, returning overland
through Russia.
I wanted now to study the conditions of modern industrialism at its
sources, and my disablement did but a little accelerate a return already
decided upon. I had got my conception of the East as a whole and of the
shape of the historical process. I no longer felt adrift in a formless
chaos of forces. I perceived now very clearly that human life is
essentially a creative struggle out of the usage of immemorial years,
that the synthesis of our contemporary civilization is this creative
impulse rising again in its latest and greatest effort, the creative
impulse rising again, as a wave rises from the trough of its
predecessors, out of the ruins of our parent system, imperial Rome. But
this time, and for the first time, the effort is world-wide, and China
and Iceland, Patagonia and Central Africa all swing together with us to
make--or into another catastrophic failure to make--the Great State of
mankind. All this I had now distinctly in my mind. The new process I
perceive had gone further in the west; was most developed in the west.
The lighter end lifts first. So back I came away from the great body of
mankind, which is Asia, to its head. And since I was still held by my
promise from returning to England I betook myself first to the Pas de
Calais and then to Belgium and thence into industrial Germany, to study
the socialistic movement at its sources.
And I was beginning to see too very clearly by the time of my return
that what is confusedly called the labor problem is really not one
problem at all, but two. There is the old problem, the problem as old as
Zimbabwe and the pyramids, the declining problem, the problem of
organizing masses of unskilled labor to the constructive ends of a Great
State, and there is the new modification due to machinery, which has
rendered unskilled labor and labor of a low grade of skill almost
unnecessary to mankind, added coal, oil, wind and water, the elementary
school and the printing-press to our sources of power, and superseded
the ancient shepherding and driving of men by the possibility of their
intelligent and willing co-operation. The two are still mixed in every
discussion, even as they are mixed in the practice of life, but
inevitably they will be disentangled. We break free from slavery, open
or disguised, just as we illuminate and develop this disentanglement....
I have long since ceased to trouble about the economics of human
society. Ours are not economic but psychological difficulties. There is
enough for everyone, and only a fool can be found to deny it. But our
methods of getting and making are still ruled by legal and social
traditions from the time before we had tapped these new sources of
power, before there was more than enough for everyone, and when a bare
supply was only secured by jealous possession and unremitting toil. We
have no longer to secure enough by a stern insistence. We have come to a
plenty. The problem now is to make that plenty go round, and _keep it
enough_ while we do.
Our real perplexities are altogether psychological. There are no valid
arguments against a great-spirited Socialism but this, that people will
not. Indolence, greed, meanness of spirit, the aggressiveness of
authority, and above all jealousy, jealousy for our pride and vanity,
jealousy for what we esteem our possessions, jealousy for those upon
whom we have set the heavy fetters of our love, a jealousy of criticism
and association, these are the real obstacles to those brave large
reconstructions, those profitable abnegations and brotherly feats of
generosity that will yet turn human life--of which our individual lives
are but the momentary parts--into a glad, beautiful and triumphant
co-operation all round this sunlit world.
If but humanity could have its imagination touched----
I was already beginning to see the great problem of mankind as indeed
nothing other than a magnification of the little problem of myself, as a
problem in escape from grooves, from preoccupations and suspicions,
precautions and ancient angers, a problem of escape from these spiritual
beasts that prowl and claw, to a new generosity and a new breadth of
view.
For all of us, little son, as for each of us, salvation is that. We have
to get away from ourselves to a greater thing, to a giant's desire and
an unending life, ours and yet not our own.
§ 6
It is a queer experience to be even for a moment in the grip of a great
beast. I had been put into the fork of a tree, so that I could shoot
with the big stem behind my back. The fork wasn't, I suppose, more than
a score of feet from the ground. It was a safe enough place from a
tiger, and that is what we expected. We had been misled by our tracker,
who had mistaken the pugs of a big leopard for a tiger's,--they were
over rocky ground for the most part and he had only the spoor of a
chance patch of half-dried mud to go upon. The beast had killed a goat
and was beaten out of a thicket near by me in which he had been lying
up. The probability had seemed that he would go away along a tempting
ravine to where Captain Crosby, who was my host, awaited him; I, as the
amateur, was intended to be little more than a spectator. But he broke
back towards the wing of the line of beaters and came across the sunlit
rocks within thirty yards of my post.
Seen going along in that way, flattened almost to the ground, he wasn't
a particularly impressive beast, and I shot at his shoulder as one might
blaze away at a rabbit,--perhaps just a little more carefully, feeling
as a Lord of Creation should who dispenses a merited death. I expected
him either to roll over or bolt.
Then instantly he was coming in huge bounds towards me....
He came so rapidly that he was covered by the big limb of the tree on
which I was standing until he was quite beneath me, and my second shot,
which I thought in the instant must have missed him, was taken rapidly
as he crouched to spring up the trunk.
Then you know came a sort of astonishment, and I think,--because
afterwards Crosby picked up a dropped cartridge at the foot of the
tree--that I tried to reload. I believe I was completely incredulous
that the beast was going to have me until he actually got me. The thing
was too completely out of my imaginative picture. I don't believe I
thought at all while he was coming up the tree. I merely noted how
astonishingly he resembled an angry cat. Then he'd got my leg, he was
hanging on to it first by two claws and then by one claw, and the whole
weight of him was pulling me down. It didn't seem to be my leg. I wasn't
frightened, I felt absolutely nothing, I was amazed. I slipped, tried to
get a hold on the tree trunk, felt myself being hauled down, and then
got my arm about the branch. I still clung to my unloaded gun as an
impoverished aristocrat might cling to his patent of nobility. That was,
I felt, my answer for him yet.
I suppose the situation lasted a fraction of a second, though it seemed
to me to last an interminable time. Then I could feel my leggings rip
and his claw go scoring deeply down my calf. That hurt in a kind of
painless, impersonal interesting way. Was my leg coming off? Boot? The
weight had gone, that enormous weight!
He'd missed his hold altogether! I heard his claws tear down the bark of
the tree and then his heavy, soft fall upon the ground.
I achieved a cat-like celerity. In another second I was back in my fork
reloading, my legs tucked up as tightly as possible.
I peered down through the branches ready for him. He wasn't there. Not
up the tree again?... Then I saw him making off, with a halting gait,
across the scorching rocks some thirty yards away, but I could not get
my gun into a comfortable position before he was out of sight behind a
ridge.... I wondered why the sunlight seemed to be flickering like an
electric light that fails, was somehow aware of blood streaming from my
leg down the tree-stem; it seemed a torrent of blood, and there was a
long, loose ribbon of flesh very sickening to see; and then I fainted
and fell out of the tree, bruising my arm and cheek badly and
dislocating my shoulder in the fall.... Some of the beaters saw me fall,
and brought Crosby in sufficient time to improvise a _torniquet_ and
save my life.
CHAPTER THE NINTH
THE SPIRIT OF THE NEW WORLD
§ 1
I met Rachel again in Germany through the devices of my cousin the
Fürstin Letzlingen. I had finished seeing what I wanted to see in
Westphalia and I was preparing to go to the United States. There I
thought I should be able to complete and round off that large view of
the human process I had been developing in my mind. But my departure was
delayed by an attack of influenza that I picked up at a Socialist
Congress in Munich, and the dear Durchlaucht, hearing of this and having
her own views of my destiny, descended upon me while I was still in bed
there, made me get up and carried me off in her car, to take care of me
herself at her villa at Boppard, telling me nothing of any fellow-guests
I might encounter.
She had a villa upon the Rhine under a hill of vineyards, where she
devoted herself--she was a widow--to matchmaking and belated regrets for
the childlessness that necessitated a perpetual borrowing of material
for her pursuit. She had a motor-car, a steam-launch, several rowing
boats and canoes, a tennis-lawn, a rambling garden, a devious house and
a rapid mind, and in fact everything that was necessary for throwing
young people together. She made her surprise seem easy and natural, and
with returning health I found myself already back upon my old footing of
friendly intimacy with Rachel.
I found her a new and yet a familiar Rachel. She had grown up, she was
no longer a schoolgirl, crystalline clear with gleams of emotion and
understanding, and what she had lost in transparency she had gained in
depth. And she had become well-informed, she had been reading very
widely and well, I could see, and not simply reading but talking and
listening and thinking. She showed a vivid interest in the current of
home politics,--at that time the last government of Mr. Balfour was
ebbing to its end and my old Transvaal friends, the Chinese coolies,
were to avenge themselves on their importers. The Tariff Reformers my
father detested were still struggling to unseat the Premier from his
leadership of Conservatism....
It was queer to hear once more, after my Asiatic wanderings and
dreamings, those West-End dinner-table politics, those speculations
about "Winston's" future and the possibility of Lloyd George or Ramsay
Macdonald or Macnamara taking office with the Liberals and whether there
might not ultimately be a middle party in which Haldane and Balfour,
Grey and the Cecils could meet upon common ground. It seemed now not
only very small but very far off. She told me too of the huge popularity
of King Edward. He had proved to be interested, curious, understanding
and clever, an unexpectedly successful King. She described how he was
breaking out of the narrow official limits that had kept his mother in a
kind of social bandbox, extending his solvent informality of
friendliness to all sorts of men. He had won the heart of Will Crooks,
the labor member for Poplar, for example, made John Burns a social
success and warmed all France for England.
I surveyed this novel picture of the English throne diffusing
amiability.
"I suppose it's what the throne ought to do," said Rachel. "If it can't
be inspiration, at any rate it can tolerate and reconcile and take the
ill-bred bitterness out of politics."
"My father might have said that."
"I got that from your father," she said; and added after a momentary
pause, "I go over and talk to him."
"You talk to my father!"
"I like to. Or rather I listen and take it in. I go over in the
afternoon. I go sometimes twice or three times a week."
"That's kind of you."
"Not at all. You see---- It sounds impudent, I know, for a girl to say
so, but we've so many interests in common."
§ 2
I was more and more interested by Rachel as the days went on. A man must
be stupid who does not know that a woman is happy in his presence, and
for two years now and more I had met no one with a very strong personal
feeling for me. And quite apart from that, her mind was extraordinarily
interesting to me because it was at once so active and so clear and so
limited by her entirely English circumstances. She had the prosperous
English outlook. She didn't so much see the wide world as get glimpses
of it through the tangle of Westminster and of West End and week-end
limitations. She wasn't even aware of that greater unprosperous England,
already sulking and darkling outside her political world, that greater
England which was presently to make its first audible intimations of
discontent in that remarkable anti-climax to King George's Coronation,
the Railway Strike. India for her was the land of people's cousins,
Germany and the German Dreadnoughts bulked far larger, and all the
tremendous gathering forces of the East were beyond the range of her
imagination. I set myself to widen her horizons.
I told her something of the intention and range of my travels, and
something of the views that were growing out of their experiences.
I have a clear little picture in my mind of an excursion we made to that
huge national Denkmal which rears its head out of the amiable vineyards
of Assmannshausen and Rudesheim over against Bingen. We landed at the
former place, went up its little funicular to eat our lunch and drink
its red wine at the pleasant inn above, and then strolled along through
the woods to the monument.
The Fürstin fell behind with her unwilling escort, a newly arrived
medical student from England, a very pleasant youngster named Berwick,
who was all too obviously anxious to change places with me. She devised
delays, and meanwhile I, as yet unaware of the state of affairs, went on
with Rachel to that towering florid monument with its vast gesticulating
Germania, which triumphs over the conquered provinces.
We fell talking of war and the passions and delusions that lead to war.
Rachel's thoughts were strongly colored by those ideas of a natural
rivalry between Germany and England and of a necessary revenge for
France which have for nearly forty years diverted the bulk of European
thought and energy to the mere waste of military preparations. I jarred
with an edifice of preconceptions when I scoffed and scolded at these
assumptions.
"Our two great peoples are disputing for the leadership of the world," I
said, "and meanwhile the whole world sweeps past us. We're drifting into
a quarrelsome backwater."
I began to tell of the fermentation and new beginnings that were
everywhere perceptible throughout the East, of the vast masses of human
ability and energy that were coming into action in China and India, of
the unlimited future of both North and South America, of the mere
accidentalness of the European advantage. "History," I said, "is already
shifting the significance out of Western Europe altogether, and we
English cannot see it; we can see no further than Berlin, and these
Germans can think of nothing better than to taunt the French with such
tawdry effigies as _this_! Europe goes on to-day as India went on in the
eighteenth century, making aimless history. And the sands of opportunity
run and run...."
I shrugged my shoulders and we stood for a little while looking down on
the shining crescent of the Rhine.
"Suppose," said Rachel, "that someone were to say that--in the House."
"The House," I said, "doesn't hear things at my pitch. Bat outcries. Too
shrill altogether."
"It might. If _you_----"
She halted, hesitated for a moment on the question and asked abruptly:
"When are you coming back to England, Mr. Stratton?"
"Certainly not for six months," I said.
A movement of her eyes made me aware of the Fürstin and Berwick emerging
from the trees. "And then?" asked Rachel.
I didn't want to answer that question, in which the personal note
sounded so clearly. "I am going to America to see America," I said, "and
America may be rather a big thing to see."
"You must see it?"
"I want to be sure of it--as something comprehensive. I want to get a
general effect of it...."
Rachel hesitated, looked back to measure the distance of the Fürstin and
her companion and put her question again, but this time with a
significance that did not seem even to want to hide itself. "_Then_ will
you come back?" she said.
Her face flamed scarlet, but her eyes met mine boldly. Between us there
was a flash of complete understanding.
My answer, if it was lame and ungallant to such a challenge, was at
least perfectly honest. "I can't make up my mind," I said. "I've been
near making plans--taking steps.... Something holds me back...."
I had no time for an explanation.
"I can't make up my mind," I repeated.
She stood for a moment rather stiffly, staring away towards the blue
hills of Alsace.
Then she turned with a smiling and undisturbed countenance to the
Fürstin. Her crimson had given place to white. "The triumph of it," she
said with a slight gesture to the flamboyant Teutonism that towered
over us, and boldly repeating words I had used scarcely five minutes
before, "makes me angry. They conquered--ungraciously...."
She had overlooked something in her effort to seem entirely
self-possessed. She collapsed. "My dear!" she cried,--"I forgot!"
"Oh! I'm only a German by marriage!" cried the Fürstin. "And I can
assure you I quite understand--about the triumph of it...." She surveyed
the achievement of her countrymen. "It is--ungracious. But indeed it's
only a sort of artlessness if you see the thing properly.... It's not
vulgarity--it's childishness.... They've hardly got over it yet--their
intense astonishment at being any good at war.... That large throaty
Victory! She's not so militant as she seems. She's too plump.... Of
course what a German really appreciates is nutrition. But I quite agree
with you both.... I'm beginning to want my tea, Mr. Stratton....
Rachel!"
Her eyes had been on Rachel as she chattered. The girl had turned to the
distant hills again, and had forgotten even to pretend to listen to the
answer she had evoked. Now she came back sharply to the sound of her
name.
"Tea?" said the Fürstin.
"Oh!" cried Rachel. "Yes. Yes, certainly. Rather. Tea."
§ 3
It was clear to me that after that I must as people say "have things
out" with Rachel. But before I could do anything of the sort the
Fürstin pounced upon me. She made me sit up that night after her other
guests had gone to their rooms, in the cosy little turret apartment she
called her study and devoted to the reading of whatever was most
notorious in contemporary British fiction. "Sit down," said she, "by the
fire in that chair there and tell me all about it. It's no good your
pretending you don't know what I mean. What are you up to with her, and
why don't you go straight to your manifest destiny as a decent man
should?"
"Because manifestly it isn't my destiny," I said.
"Stuff," said the Fürstin.
"You know perfectly well why I am out of England."
"Everybody knows--except of course quite young persons who are being
carefully brought up."
"Does _she_ know?"
"She doesn't seem to."
"Well, that's what I want to know."
"Need she know?"
"Well, it does seem rather essential----"
"I suppose if you think so----"
"Will you tell her?"
"Tell her yourself, if she must be told. Down there in Surrey, she
_must_ have seen things and heard things. But I don't see that she wants
a lot of ancient history."
"If it is ancient history!"
"Oh! two years and a half,--it's an Era."
I made no answer to that, but sat staring into the fire while my cousin
watched my face. At length I made my confession. "I don't think it is
ancient history at all," I said. "I think if I met Mary again now----"
"You mean Lady Mary Justin?"
"Of course."
"It would be good for your mind if you remembered to call her by her
proper name.... You think if you met her again you two would begin to
carry on. But you see,--you aren't going to meet her. Everybody will see
that doesn't happen."
"I mean that I---- Well----"
"You'd better not say it. Besides, it's nonsense. I doubt if you've
given her a thought for weeks and weeks."
"Until I came here perhaps that was almost nearly true. But you've
stirred me up, sweet cousin, and old things, old memories and habits
have come to the surface again. Mary wrote herself over my life--in all
sorts of places.... I can't tell you. I've never talked of her to
anyone. I'm not able, very well, to talk about my feelings.... Perhaps a
man of my sort--doesn't love twice over."
I disregarded a note of dissent from my cousin. "That was all so magic,
all my youth, all my hope, all the splendid adventure of it. Why should
one pretend?... I'm giving none of that to Rachel. It isn't there any
more to give...."
"One would think," remarked the Fürstin, "there was no gift of healing."
She waited for me to speak, and then irritated by my silence struck at
me sharply with that wicked little tongue of hers.
"Do you think that Lady Mary Justin thinks of you--as you think of her?
Do you think she hasn't settled down?"
I looked up at her quickly.
"She's just going to have a second child," the Fürstin flung out.
Yes, that did astonish me. I suppose my face showed it.
"That girl," said the Fürstin, "that clean girl would have sooner
died--ten thousand deaths.... And she's never--never been anything to
you."
I think that for an instant she had been frightened at her own words.
She was now quite angry and short of breath. She had contrived a rapid
indignation against Mary and myself.
"I didn't know Mary had had any child at all," I said.
"This makes two," said the Fürstin, and held up a brace of fingers,
"with scarcely a year and a half between them. Not much more anyhow....
It was natural, I suppose. A natural female indecency. I don't blame
her. When a woman gives in she ought to do it thoroughly. But I don't
see that it leaves _you_ much scope for philandering, Stephen, does
it?... And there you are, and here is Rachel. And why don't you make a
clean job of your life?..."
"I didn't understand."
"I wonder what you imagined."
I reflected. "I wonder what I did. I suppose I thought of Mary--just as
I had left her--always."
I remained with my mind filled with confused images of Mary, memories,
astonishment....
I perceived the Fürstin was talking.
"Maundering about," she was saying, "like a huntsman without a horse....
You've got work to do--blood in your veins. I'm not one of your ignorant
women, Stephen. You ought to have a wife...."
"Rachel's too good," I said, at the end of a pause and perceiving I had
to say something, "to be that sort of wife."
"No woman's too good for a man," said the Fürstin von Letzlingen with
conviction. "It's what God made her for."
§ 4
My visit to Boppard was drawing to an end before I had a clear
opportunity to have things out with Rachel. It was in a little garden,
under the very shadow of that gracious cathedral at Worms, the sort of
little garden to which one is admitted by ringing a bell and tipping a
custodian. I think Worms is in many respects one of the most beautiful
cathedrals I have ever seen, so perfectly proportioned, so delicately
faded, so aloof, so free from pride or presumption, and it rises over
this green and flowery peace, a towering, lithe, light brown, sunlit,
easy thing, as unconsciously and irrelevantly splendid as a tall ship in
the evening glow under a press of canvas. We looked up at it for a time
and then went on with the talk to which we had been coming slowly since
the Fürstin had packed us off for it, while she went into the town with
Berwick to buy toys for her gatekeeper's children. I had talked about
myself, and the gradual replacement of my ambition to play a part in
imperial politics by wider intentions. "You know," I asked abruptly,
"why I left England?"
She thought through the briefest of pauses. "No," she decided at last.
"I made love," I said, "to Lady Mary Justin, and we were found out. We
couldn't go away together----"
"Why not?" she interjected.
"It was impossible."
For some moments neither of us spoke. "Something," she said, and then,
"Some vague report," and left these fragments to be her reply.
"We were old playmates; we were children together. We
have--something--that draws us to each other. She--she made a mistake in
marrying. We were both very young and the situation was difficult. And
then afterwards we were thrown together.... But you see that has made a
great difference to my life; it's turned me off the rails on which men
of my sort usually run. I've had to look to these other things....
They've become more to me than to most people if only because of
that...."
"You mean these ideas of yours--learning as much as you can about the
world, and then doing what you can to help other people to a better
understanding."
"Yes," I said.
"And that--will fill your life."
"It ought to."
"I suppose it ought. I suppose--you find--it does."
"Don't you think it ought to fill my life?"
"I wondered if it did."
"But why shouldn't it?"
"It's so--so cold."
My questioning silence made her attempt to explain.
"One wants life more beautiful than that," she said. "One wants----
There are things one needs, things nearer one."
We became aware of a jangling at the janitor's bell. Our opportunity for
talk was slipping away. And we were both still undecided, both
blunderingly nervous and insecure. We were hurried into clumsy phrases
that afterwards we would have given much to recall.
"But how could life be more beautiful," I said, "than when it serves big
human ends?"
Her brows were knit. She seemed to be listening for the sound of the
unlocking gate.
"But," she said, and plunged, "one wants to be loved. Surely one needs
that."
"You see, for me--that's gone."
"Why should it be gone?"
"It is. One doesn't begin again. I mean--myself. _You_--can. You've
never begun. Not when you've loved--loved really." I forced that on her.
I over emphasized. "It was real love, you know; the real thing.... I
don't mean the mere imaginative love, blindfold love, but love that
sees.... I want you to understand that. I loved--altogether...."
Across the lawn under its trim flowering-trees appeared Berwick loaded
with little parcels, and manifestly eager to separate us, and the
Fürstin as manifestly putting on the drag.
"There's a sort of love," I hurried, "that doesn't renew itself ever.
Don't let yourself believe it does. Something else may come in its
place, but that is different. It's youth,--a wonderful newness.... Look
at that youngster. _He_ can love you like that. I've watched him. He
does. You know he does...."
"Yes," she said, as hurriedly; "but then, you see, I don't love him."
"You don't?"
"I can't."
"But he's such a fresh clean human being----"
"That's not all," said Rachel. "That's not all.... You don't
understand."
The two drew near. "It is so hard to explain," she said. "Things that
one hardly sees for oneself. Sometimes it seems one cannot help oneself.
You can't choose. You are taken...." She seemed about to say something
more, and stopped and bit her lip.
In another moment I was standing up, and the Fürstin was calling to us
across ten feet of space. "Such amoosin' little toyshops. We've got a
heap of things. Just look at him!"
He smiled over his load with anxious eyes upon our faces.
"Ten separate parcels," he said, appealing for Rachel's sympathy. "I'm
doing my best not to complain."
And rather adroitly he contrived to let two of them slip, and captured
Rachel to assist him.
He didn't relinquish her again.
§ 5
The Fürstin and I followed them along the broad, pleasant, tree-lined
street towards the railway station.
"A boy of that age ought not to marry a girl of that age," said the
Fürstin, breaking a silence.
I didn't answer.
"Well?" she said, domineering.
"My dear cousin," I said, "I know all that you have in your mind. I
admit--I covet her. You can't make me more jealous than I am. She's
clean and sweet--it is marvellous how the God of the rest of the world
can have made a thing so brave and honest and wonderful. She's better
than flowers. But I think I'm going away to-night, nevertheless."
"You don't mean you're going to carry chivalry to the point of giving
that boy a chance--for he hasn't one while you're about."
"No. You see--I want to give Rachel a chance. You know as well as I
do--the things in my mind."
"That you've got to forget."
"That I don't forget."
"That you're bound in honor to forget. And who could help you better?"
"I'm going," I said and then, wrathfully, "If you think I want to use
Rachel as a sort of dressing--for my old sores----"
I left the sentence unfinished.
"Oh _nonsense_!" cried the Fürstin, and wouldn't speak to me again until
we got to that entirely Teutonic "art" station that is not the least
among the sights of Worms.
"Sores, indeed!" said the Fürstin presently, as we walked up the end of
the platform.
"There's nothing," said the Fürstin, with an unusual note of petulance,
"she'd like better."
"I can't think what men are coming to," she went on. "You're in love
with her, or you wouldn't be so generous. And she's head over heels with
you. And here you are! I'll give you one more chance----"
"I won't take it," I interrupted. "It isn't fair. I tell you I won't
take it. I'll go two days earlier to prevent you. Unless you promise
me---- Of course I see how things are with her. She's not a sphinx. But
it isn't fair. It isn't. Not to her, or to him--or myself. _He's_ got
some claims. He's got more right to her than I...."
"A boy like that! No man has any rights about women--until he's thirty.
And as for me and all the pains _I've_ taken---- Oh! I _hate_ Worms.
Dust and ashes! Well here thank heaven! comes the train. If nothing else
could stir you, Stephen, at least I could have imagined some decent
impulse of gratitude to me. Stephen, you're disgusting. You've
absolutely spoilt this trip for me--absolutely. When only a little
reasonableness on your part---- Oh!"
She left her sentence unfinished.
Berwick and I had to make any conversation that was needed on the way
back to Boppard. Rachel did not talk and the Fürstin did not want to.
§ 6
Directly I had parted from Rachel's questioning eyes I wanted to go back
to them. It seems to me now that all the way across to America, in that
magnificent German liner I joined at Hamburg, I was thinking in confused
alternations of her and of Mary. There are turns of thought that still
bring back inseparably with them the faint echo of the airs of the
excellent but industrious band that glorified our crossing.
I had been extraordinarily shocked and concerned at the thought of Mary
bearing children. It is a grotesque thing to confess but I had never let
myself imagine the possibility of such a thing for her who had been so
immensely mine....
We are the oddest creatures, little son, beasts and barbarians and
brains, neither one nor the other but all confusedly, and here was I who
had given up Mary and resigned her and freed myself from her as I
thought altogether, cast back again into my old pit by the most obvious
and necessary consequence of her surrender and mine. And it's just there
and in that relation that we men and women are so elaborately insecure.
We try to love as equals and behave as equals and concede a level
freedom, and then comes a crisis,--our laboriously contrived edifice of
liberty collapses and we perceive that so far as sex goes the woman
remains to the man no more than a possession--capable of loyalty or
treachery.
There, still at that barbaric stage, the situation stands. You see I had
always wanted to own Mary, and always she had disputed that. That is our
whole story, the story of an instinctive subjugation struggling against
a passionate desire for fellowship. She had denied herself to me, taken
herself away; that much I could endure; but now came this blazing fact
that showed her as it seemed in the most material and conclusive
way--overcome. I had storms of retrospective passion at the thoroughness
of her surrender.... Yes, and that's in everyone of us,--in everyone. I
wonder if in all decent law-abiding London there lives a single healthy
adult man who has not at times longed to trample and kill....
For once I think the Fürstin miscalculated consequences. I think I
should have engaged myself to Rachel before I went to America if it had
not been for the Fürstin's revelation, but this so tore me that I could
no longer go on falling in love again, naturally and sweetly. No man
falls in love if he has just been flayed.... I could no longer think of
Rachel except as a foil to Mary. I was moved to marry her by a new set
of motives; to fling her so to speak in Mary's face, and from the fierce
vulgarity of that at least I recoiled--and let her go as I have told
you.
§ 7
I had thought all that was over.
I remember my struggles to recover my peace.
I remember how very late one night I went up to the promenade deck to
smoke a cigar before turning in. It was a warm moonlight night. The
broad low waves of ebony water that went seething past below, foamed
luminous and were streaked and starred with phosphorescence. The
recumbent moon, past its full and sinking westward, seemed bigger than I
had ever seen it before, and the roundness of the watery globe was
manifest about the edge of the sky. One had that sense so rare on land,
so common in the night at sea, of the world as a conceivable sphere, and
of interstellar space as of something clear and close at hand.
There came back to me again that feeling I had lost for a time in
Germany of being not myself but Man consciously on his little planet
communing with God.
But my spirit was saying all the time, "I am still in my pit, in my pit.
After all I am still in my pit."
And then there broke the answer on my mind, that all our lives we must
struggle out of our pits, that to struggle out of our pit is this life,
there is no individual life but that, and that there comes no escape
here, no end to that effort, until the release of death. Continually or
frequently we may taste salvation, but never may we achieve it while we
are things of substance. Each moment in our lives we come to the test
and are lost again or saved again. To be assured of one's security is to
forget and fall away.
And standing at the rail with these thoughts in my mind, suddenly I
prayed....
I remember how the engine-throbs beat through me like the beating of a
heart, and that far below, among the dim lights that came up from the
emigrants in the steerage, there was a tinkling music as I prayed and a
man's voice singing a plaintive air in some strange Slavonic tongue.
That voice of the invisible singer and the spirit of the unknown
song-maker and the serenity of the sky, they were all, I perceived, no
more and no less than things in myself that I did not understand. They
were out beyond the range of understanding. And yet they fell into the
completest harmony that night with all that I seemed to understand....
§ 8
The onset of New York was extraordinarily stimulating to me. I write
onset. It is indeed that. New York rides up out of the waters, a cliff
of man's making; its great buildings at a distance seem like long
Chinese banners held up against the sky. From Sandy Hook to the great
landing stages and the swirling hooting traffic of the Hudson River
there fails nothing in that magnificent crescendo of approach.
And New York keeps the promise of its first appearance. There is no
such fulness of life elsewhere in all the world. The common man in the
streets is a bigger common man than any Old World city can show,
physically bigger; there is hope in his eyes and a braced defiance. New
York may be harsh and blusterous and violent, but there is a breeze from
the sea and a breeze of fraternity in the streets, and the Americans of
all peoples in the world are a nation of still unbroken men.
I went to America curious, balancing between hope and scepticism. The
European world is full of the criticism of America, and for the matter
of that America too is full of it; hostility and depreciation
prevail,--overmuch, for in spite of rawness and vehemence and a scum of
blatant, oh! quite asinine folly, the United States of America remains
the greatest country in the world and the living hope of mankind. It is
the supreme break with the old tradition; it is the freshest and most
valiant beginning that has ever been made in human life.
Here was the antithesis of India; here were no peasants whatever, no
traditional culture, no castes, no established differences (except for
the one schism of color); this amazing place had never had a famine,
never a plague; here were no temples and no priesthoods dominating the
lives of the people,--old Trinity church embedded amidst towering
sky-scrapers was a symbol for as much as they had of all that; and here
too there was no crown, no affectations of an ancient loyalty, no
visible army, no traditions of hostility, for the old defiance of
Britain is a thing now ridiculous and dead; and everyone I met had an
air as if he knew that to-morrow must be different from to-day and
different and novel and remarkable by virtue of himself and such as
himself.
I went about New York, with the incredulous satisfaction of a man who
has long doubted, to find that after all America was coming true. The
very clatter pleased me, the crowds, the camp-like slovenliness, a
disorder so entirely different from the established and accepted
untidiness of China or India. Here was something the old world had never
shown me, a new enterprise, a fresh vigor. In the old world there is
Change, a mighty wave now of Change, but it drives men before it as if
it were a power outside them and not in them; they do not know, they do
not believe; but here the change is in the very blood and spirit of
mankind. They breathe it in even before the launch has brought their
feet to Ellis Island soil. In six months they are Americanized. Does it
matter that a thing so gigantic should be a little coarse and blundering
in detail, if this stumbling giant of the new time breaks a gracious
relic or so in his eager clutch and treads a little on the flowers?
§ 9
And in this setting of energy and activity, towering city life and
bracing sea breezes, I met Gidding again, whom I had last seen departing
into Egypt to look more particularly at the prehistoric remains and the
temples of the first and second dynasty at Abydos. It was at a
dinner-party, one of those large gatherings that welcome interesting
visitors. It wasn't, of course, I who was the centre of interest, but a
distinguished French portrait painter; I was there as just any guest. I
hadn't even perceived Gidding until he came round to me in that
precious gap of masculine intercourse that ensues upon the departure of
the ladies. That gap is one of the rare opportunities for conversation
men get in America.
"I don't know whether you will remember me," he said, "but perhaps you
remember Crete--in the sunrise."
"And no end of talk afterwards," I said, grasping his hand, "no end--for
we didn't half finish. Did you have a good time in Egypt?"
"I'm not going to talk to you about Egypt," said Gidding. "I'm through
with ruins. I'm going to ask you--you know what I'm going to ask you."
"What I think of America. It's the same inevitable question. I think
everything of it. It's the stepping-off place. I've come here at last,
because it matters most."
"That's what we all want to believe," said Gidding. "That's what we want
you to tell us."
He reflected. "It's immense, isn't it, perfectly immense? But---- I am
afraid at times we're too disposed to forget just what it's all about.
We've got to be reminded. That, you know, is why we keep on asking."
He went on to question me where I had been, what I had done, what I made
of things. He'd never, he said, forgotten our two days' gossip in the
Levant, and all the wide questions about the world and ourselves that we
had broached then and left so open. I soon found myself talking very
freely to him. I am not a ready or abundant talker, but Gidding has the
knack of precipitating my ideas. He is America to my Europe, and at his
touch all that has been hanging in concentrated solution in my mind
comes crystallizing out. He has to a peculiar degree that directness
and simplicity which is the distinctive American quality. I tried to
explain to his solemnly nodding head and entirely intelligent eyes just
exactly what I was making of things, of the world, of humanity, of
myself....
It was an odd theme for two men to attempt after dinner, servants
hovering about them, their two faces a little flushed by wine and good
eating, their keen interest masked from the others around them by a
gossiping affectation, their hands going out as they talked for matches
or cigarette, and before we had gone further than to fling out a few
intimations to each other our colloquy was interrupted by our host
standing up and by the general stir that preluded our return to feminine
society. "We've got more to say than this," said Gidding. "We've got to
_talk_." He brought out a little engagement book that at once drew out
mine in response. And a couple of days after, we spent a morning and
afternoon together and got down to some very intimate conversation. We
motored out to lunch at a place called Nyack, above the Palisades, we
crossed on a ferry to reach it, and we visited the house of Washington
Irving near Yonkers on our way.
I've still a vivid picture in my mind of the little lawn at Irvington
that looks out upon the rushing steel of Hudson River, where Gidding
opened his heart to me. I can see him now as he leant a little forward
over the table, with his wrists resting upon it, his long clean-shaven
face very solemn and earnest and grey against the hard American sunlight
in the greenery about us, while he told me in that deliberate American
voice of his and with the deliberate American solemnity, of his desire
to "do some decent thing with life."
He was very anxious to set himself completely before me, I remember, on
that occasion. There was a peculiar mental kinship between us that even
the profound differences of our English and American trainings could not
mask. And now he told me almost everything material about his life. For
the first time I learnt how enormously rich he was, not only by reason
of his father's acquisitions, but also because of his own almost
instinctive aptitude for business. "I've got," he said, "to begin with,
what almost all men spend their whole lives in trying to get. And it
amounts to nothing. It leaves me with life like a blank sheet of paper,
and nothing in particular to write on it."
"You know," he said, "it's--exasperating. I'm already half-way to
three-score and ten, and I'm still wandering about wondering what to do
with this piece of life God has given me...."
He had "lived" as people say, he had been in scrapes and scandals,
tasted to the full the bitter intensities of the personal life; he had
come by a different route to the same conclusions as myself, was as
anxious as I to escape from memories and associations and feuds and that
excessive vividness of individual feeling which blinds us to the common
humanity, the common interest, the gentler, larger reality, which lies
behind each tawdrily emphatic self....
"It's a sort of inverted homoeopathy I want," he said. "The big thing to
cure the little thing...."
But I will say no more of that side of our friendship, because the ideas
of it are spread all through this book from the first page to the
last.... What concerns me now is not our sympathy and agreement, but
that other aspect of our relations in which Gidding becomes impulse and
urgency. "Seeing we have these ideas," said he,--"and mind you there
must be others who have them or are getting to them, for nobody thinks
all alone in this world,--seeing we have these ideas what are we going
to _do_?"
§ 10
That meeting was followed by another before I left New York, and
presently Gidding joined me at Denver, where I was trying to measure the
true significance of a labor paper called _The Appeal to Reason_ that,
in spite of a rigid boycott by the ordinary agencies for news
distribution went out in the middle west to nearly half a million
subscribers, and was filled with such a fierceness of insurrection
against labor conditions, such a hatred, blind and impassioned, as I had
never known before. Gidding remained with me there and came back with me
to Chicago, where I wanted to see something of the Americanization of
the immigrant, and my survey of America, the social and economic problem
of America, resolved itself more and more into a conference with him.
There is no more fruitless thing in the world than to speculate how life
would have gone if this thing or that had not happened. Yet I cannot
help but wonder how far I might have travelled along the lines of my
present work if I had gone to America and not met Gidding, or if I had
met him without visiting America. The man and his country are
inextricably interwoven in my mind. Yet I do think that his simplicity
and directness, his force of initiative that turned me from a mere
enquirer into an active writer and organizer, are qualities less his in
particular than America's in general. There is in America a splendid
crudity, a directness that cleared my spirit as a bracing wind will
sweep the clouds from mountain scenery. Compared with our older
continents America is mankind stripped for achievement. So many things
are not there at all, need not be considered; no institutional
aristocracy, no Kaisers, Czars, nor King-Emperors to maintain a
litigious sequel to the Empire of Rome; it has no uneducated immovable
peasantry rooted to the soil, indeed it has no rooting to the soil at
all; it is, from the Forty-ninth Parallel to the tip of Cape Horn, one
triumphant embodiment of freedom and deliberate agreement. For I mean
all America, Spanish-speaking as well as English-speaking; they have
this detachment from tradition in common. See how the United States, for
example, stands flatly on that bare piece of eighteenth-century
intellectualism the Constitution, and is by virtue of that a structure
either wilful and intellectual or absurd. That sense of incurable
servitude to fate and past traditions, that encumbrance with ruins,
pledges, laws and ancient institutions, that perpetual complication of
considerations and those haunting memories of preceding human failures
which dwarf the courage of destiny in Europe and Asia, vanish from the
mind within a week of one's arrival in the New World. Naturally one
begins to do things. One is inspired to do things. One feels that one
has escaped, one feels that the time is _now_. All America, North and
South alike, is one tremendous escape from ancient obsessions into
activity and making.
And by the time I had reached America I had already come to see that
just as the issues of party politics at home and international politics
abroad are mere superficialities above the greater struggle of an
energetic minority to organize and exploit the labor of the masses of
mankind, so that struggle also is only a huge incident in the still more
than half unconscious impulse to replace the ancient way of human living
by a more highly organized world-wide social order, by a world
civilization embodying itself in a World State. And I saw now how that
impulse could neither cease nor could it on the other hand realize
itself until it became conscious and deliberate and merciful, free from
haste and tyranny, persuasive and sustained by a nearly universal
sympathy and understanding. For until that arrives the creative forces
must inevitably spend themselves very largely in blind alleys, futile
rushes and destructive conflicts. Upon that our two minds were agreed.
"We have," said Gidding, "to understand and make understanding. That is
the real work for us to do, Stratton, that is our job. The world, as you
say, has been floundering about, half making civilization and never
achieving it. Now _we_, I don't mean just you and me, Stratton,
particularly, but every intelligent man among us, have got to set to and
make it thorough. There is no other sane policy for a man outside his
private passions but that. So let's get at it----"
I find it now impossible to trace the phases by which I reached these
broad ideas upon which I rest all my work, but certainly they were
present very early in my discussions with Gidding. We two men had been
thinking independently but very similarly, and it is hard to say just
what completing touches either of us gave to the other's propositions.
We found ourselves rather than arrived at the conception of ourselves
as the citizens neither of the United States nor of England but of a
state that had still to come into being, a World State, a great unity
behind and embracing the ostensible political fabrics of to-day--a unity
to be reached by weakening antagonisms, by developing understandings and
toleration, by fostering the sense of brotherhood across the ancient
bounds.
We believed and we believe that such a creative conception of a human
commonweal can be fostered in exactly the same way that the idea of
German unity was fostered behind the dukedoms, the free cities and
kingdoms of Germany, a conception so creative that it can dissolve
traditional hatreds, incorporate narrower loyalties and replace a
thousand suspicions and hostilities by a common passion for collective
achievement, so creative that at last the national boundaries of to-day
may become obstacles as trivial to the amplifying good-will of men as
the imaginary line that severs Normandy from Brittany, or Berwick from
Northumberland.
And it is not only a great peace about the earth that this idea of a
World State means for us, but social justice also. We are both convinced
altogether that there survives no reason for lives of toil, for
hardship, poverty, famine, infectious disease, for the continuing
cruelties of wild beasts and the greater multitude of crimes, but
mismanagement and waste, and that mismanagement and waste spring from no
other source than ignorance and from stupid divisions and jealousies,
base patriotisms, fanaticisms, prejudices and suspicions that are all no
more than ignorance a little mingled with viciousness. We have looked
closely into this servitude of modern labor, we have seen its injustice
fester towards syndicalism and revolutionary socialism, and we know
these things for the mere aimless, ignorant resentments they are;
punishments, not remedies. We have looked into the portentous threat of
modern war, and it is ignorant vanity and ignorant suspicion, the
bargaining aggression of the British prosperous and the swaggering
vulgarity of the German junker that make and sustain that monstrous
European devotion to arms. And we are convinced there is nothing in
these evils and conflicts that light may not dispel. We believe that
these things can be dispelled, that the great universals, Science which
has limitations neither of race nor class, Art which speaks to its own
in every rank and nation, Philosophy and Literature which broaden
sympathy and banish prejudice, can flood and submerge and will yet flow
over and submerge every one of these separations between man and man.
I will not say that this Great State, this World Republic of civilized
men, is our dream, because it is not a dream, it is a manifestly
reasonable possibility. It is our intention. It is what we are
deliberately making and what in a little while very many men and women
will be making. We are secessionists from all contemporary nationalities
and loyalties. We have set ourselves with all the capacity and energy at
our disposal to create a world-wide common fund of ideas and knowledge,
and to evoke a world-wide sense of human solidarity in which the
existing limitations of political structure must inevitably melt away.
It was Gidding and his Americanism, his inborn predisposition to
innovation and the large freedom of his wealth that turned these ideas
into immediate concrete undertakings. I see more and more that it is
here that we of the old European stocks, who still grow upon the old
wood, differ most from those vigorous grafts of our race in America and
Africa and Australia on the one hand and from the renascent peoples of
the East on the other: that we have lost the courage of youth and have
not yet gained the courage of desperate humiliations, in taking hold of
things. To Gidding it was neither preposterous nor insufferably
magnificent that we should set about a propaganda of all science, all
knowledge, all philosophical and political ideas, round about the
habitable globe. His mind began producing concrete projects as a
fire-work being lit produces sparks, and soon he was "figuring out" the
most colossal of printing and publishing projects, as a man might work
out the particulars for an alteration to his bathroom. It was so
entirely natural to him, it was so entirely novel to me, to go on from
the proposition that understanding was the primary need of humanity to
the systematic organization of free publishing, exhaustive discussion,
intellectual stimulation. He set about it as a company of pharmacists
might organize the distribution of some beneficial cure.
"Say, Stratton," he said, after a conversation that had seemed to me
half fantasy; "Let's _do_ it."
There are moments still when it seems to me that this life of mine has
become the most preposterous of adventures. We two absurd human beings
are spending our days and nights in a sustained and growing attempt to
do what? To destroy certain obsessions and to give the universal human
mind a form and a desire for expression. We have put into the shape of
one comprehensive project that force of released wealth that has already
dotted America with universities, libraries, institutions for research
and enquiry. Already there are others at work with us, and presently
there will be a great number. We have started an avalanche above the old
politics and it gathers mass and pace....
And there never was an impulse towards endeavor in a human heart that
wasn't preposterous. Man is a preposterous animal. Thereby he ceases to
be a creature and becomes a creator, he turns upon the powers that made
him and subdues them to his service; by his sheer impudence he
establishes his claim to possess a soul....
But I need not write at all fully of my work here. This book is not
about that but about my coming to that. Long before this manuscript
reaches your hands--if ultimately I decide that it shall reach your
hands--you will be taking your share, I hope, in this open conspiracy
against potentates and prejudices and all the separating powers of
darkness.
§ 11
I would if I could omit one thing that I must tell you here, because it
goes so close to the very core of all this book has to convey. I wish I
could leave it out altogether. I wish I could simplify my story by
smoothing out this wrinkle at least and obliterating a thing that was at
once very real and very ugly. You see I had at last struggled up to a
sustaining idea, to a conception of work and duty to which I could
surely give my life. I had escaped from my pit so far. And it was
natural that now with something to give I should turn not merely for
consolation and service but for help and fellowship to that dear human
being across the seas who had offered them to me so straightly and
sweetly. All that is brave and good and as you would have me, is it not?
Only, dear son, that is not all the truth.
There was still in my mind, for long it remained in my mind, a
bitterness against Mary. I had left her, I had lost her, we had parted;
but from Germany to America and all through America and home again to my
marriage and with me after my marriage, it rankled that she could still
go on living a life independent of mine. I had not yet lost my desire to
possess her, to pervade and dominate her existence; my resentment that
though she loved me she had first not married me and afterwards not
consented to come away with me was smouldering under the closed hatches
of my mind. And so while the better part of me was laying hold of this
work because it gave me the hope of a complete distraction and escape
from my narrow and jealous self, that lower being of the pit was also
rejoicing in the great enterprises before me and in the marriage upon
which I had now determined, because it was a last trampling upon my
devotion to Mary, because it defied and denied some lurking claims to
empire I could suspect in her. I want to tell you that particularly
because so I am made, so you are made, so most of us are made. There is
scarcely a high purpose in all the world that has no dwarfish footman at
its stirrup, no base intention over which there does not ride at least
the phantom of an angel.
Constantly in those days, it seems to me now, I was haunted by my own
imagination of Mary amiably reconciled to Justin, bearing him children,
forgetful of or repudiating all the sweetness, all the wonder and beauty
we had shared.... It was an unjust and ungenerous conception, I knew it
for a caricature even as I entertained it, and yet it tormented me. It
stung me like a spur. It kept me at work, and if I strayed into
indolence brought me back to work with a mind galled and bleeding....
§ 12
And I suppose it is mixed up with all this that I could not make love
easily and naturally to Rachel. I could not write love-letters to her.
There is a burlesque quality in these scruples, I know, seeing that I
was now resolved to marry her, but that is the quality, that is the
mixed texture of life. We overcome the greater things and are
conscience-stricken by the details.
I wouldn't, even at the price of losing her--and I was now passionately
anxious not to lose her--use a single phrase of endearment that did not
come out of me almost in spite of myself. At any rate I would not cheat
her. And my offer of marriage when at last I sent it to her from Chicago
was, as I remember it, almost business-like. I atoned soon enough for
that arid letter in ten thousand sweet words that came of themselves to
my lips. And she paid me at any rate in my own coin when she sent me her
answer by cable, the one word "Yes."
And indeed I was already in love with her long before I wrote. It was
only a dread of giving her a single undeserved cheapness that had held
me back so long. It was that and the perplexity that Mary still gripped
my feelings; my old love for her was there in my heart in spite of my
new passion for Rachel, it was blackened perhaps and ruined and changed
but it was there. It was as if a new crater burnt now in the ampler
circumference of an old volcano, which showed all the more desolate and
sorrowful and obsolete for the warm light of the new flames....
How impatiently I came home! Thoughts of England I had not dared to
think for three long years might now do what they would in me. I dreamt
of the Surrey Hills and the great woods of Burnmore Park, of the
changing skies and stirring soft winds of our grey green Motherland.
There was fog in the Irish Sea, and we lost the better part of a day
hooting our way towards Liverpool while I fretted about the ship with
all my luggage packed, staring at the grey waters that weltered under
the mist. It was the longest day in my life. My heart was full of
desire, my eyes ached for the little fields and golden October skies of
England, England that was waiting to welcome me back from my exile with
such open arms. I was coming home,--home.
I hurried through London into Surrey and in my father's study, warned by
a telegram, I found a bright-eyed, resolute young woman awaiting me,
with the quality about her of one who embarks upon a long premeditated
adventure. And I found too a family her sisters and her brother all
gladly ready for me, my father too was a happy man, and on the eighth of
November in 1906 Rachel and I were married in the little church at
Shere. We stayed for a week or so in Hampshire near Ringwood, the season
was late that year and the trees still very beautiful; and then we went
to Portofino on the Ligurian coast.
There presently Gidding joined us and we began to work out the schemes
we had made in America, the schemes that now fill my life.
CHAPTER THE TENTH
MARY WRITES
§ 1
It was in the early spring of 1909 that I had a letter from Mary.
By that time my life was set fully upon its present courses, Gidding and
I had passed from the stage of talking and scheming to definite
undertakings. Indeed by 1909 things were already organized upon their
present lines. We had developed a huge publishing establishment with one
big printing plant in Barcelona and another in Manchester, and we were
studying the peculiar difficulties that might attend the establishment
of a third plant in America. Our company was an English company under
the name of Alphabet and Mollentrave, and we were rapidly making it the
broadest and steadiest flow of publication the world had ever seen. Its
streams already reached further and carried more than any single firm
had ever managed to do before. We were reprinting, in as carefully
edited and revised editions as we could, the whole of the English,
Spanish and French literature, and we were only waiting for the release
of machinery to attack German, Russian and Italian, and were giving each
language not only its own but a very complete series of good
translations of the classical writers in every other tongue. We had a
little band of editors and translators permanently in our service at
each important literary centre. We had, for example, more than a score
of men at work translating Bengali fiction and verse into English,--a
lot of that new literature is wonderfully illuminating to an intelligent
Englishman--and we had a couple of men hunting about for new work in
Arabic. We meant to give so good and cheap a book, and to be so
comprehensive in our choice of books, excluding nothing if only it was
real and living, on account of any inferiority of quality, obscurity of
subject or narrowness of demand, that in the long run anybody, anywhere,
desiring to read anything would turn naturally and inevitably to our
lists.
Ours was to be in the first place a world literature. Then afterwards
upon its broad currents of distribution and in the same forms we meant
to publish new work and new thought. We were also planning an
encyclopædia. Behind our enterprise of translations and reprints we were
getting together and putting out a series of guide-books, gazetteers,
dictionaries, text-books and books of reference, and we were organizing
a revising staff for these, a staff that should be constantly keeping
them up to date. It was our intention to make every copy we printed bear
the date of its last revision in a conspicuous place, and we hoped to
get the whole line of these books ultimately upon an annual basis, and
to sell them upon repurchasing terms that would enable us to issue a new
copy and take back and send the old one to the pulping mill at a narrow
margin of profit. Then we meant to spread our arms wider, and
consolidate and offer our whole line of text-books, guide-books and
gazetteers, bibliographies, atlases, dictionaries and directories as a
new World Encyclopædia, that should also annually or at longest
biennially renew its youth.
So far we had gone in the creation of a huge international organ of
information, and of a kind of gigantic modern Bible of world literature,
and in the process of its distribution we were rapidly acquiring an
immense detailed knowledge of the book and publishing trade, finding
congestions here, neglected opportunities there, and devising and
drawing up a hundred schemes for relief, assistance, amalgamation and
rearrangement. We had branches in China, Japan, Peru, Iceland and a
thousand remote places that would have sounded as far off as the moon to
an English or American bookseller in the seventies. China in particular
was a growing market. We had a subsidiary company running a flourishing
line of book shops in the east-end of London, and others in New Jersey,
Chicago, Buenos Ayres, the South of France, and Ireland. Incidentally we
had bought up some thousands of miles of Labrador forest to ensure our
paper supply, and we could believe that before we died there would not
be a corner of the world in which any book of interest or value whatever
would not be easily attainable by any intelligent person who wanted to
read it. And already we were taking up the more difficult and ambitious
phase of our self-appointed task, and considering the problem of using
these channels we were mastering and deepening and supplementing for the
stimulation and wide diffusion of contemporary thought.
There we went outside the province of Alphabet and Mollentrave and into
an infinitely subtler system of interests. We wanted to give sincere and
clear-thinking writers encouragement and opportunity, to improve the
critical tribunal and make it independent of advertising interests, so
that there would be a readier welcome for luminous thinking and writing
and a quicker explosion of intellectual imposture. We sought to provide
guides and intelligencers to contemporary thought. We had already set up
or subsidized or otherwise aided a certain number of magazines and
periodicals that seemed to us independent-spirited, out-spoken and well
handled, but we had still to devise our present scheme of financing
groups of men to create magazines and newspapers, which became their own
separate but inalienable property after so many years of success.
But all this I hope you will already have become more or less familiar
with when this story reaches your hands, and I hope by the time it does
so we shall be far beyond our present stage of experiment and that you
will have come naturally to play your part in this most fascinating
business of maintaining an onward intellectual movement in the world, a
movement not simply independent of but often running counter to all
sorts of political and financial interests. I tell you this much here
for you to understand that already in 1909 and considering the business
side of my activities alone, I was a hard worker and very strenuously
employed. And in addition to all this huge network of enterprises I had
developed with Gidding, I was still pretty actively a student. I
wasn't--I never shall be--absolutely satisfied with my general ideas. I
was enquiring keenly and closely into those problems of group and crowd
psychology from which all this big publishing work has arisen, and
giving particular attention to the war-panics and outbreaks of
international hostility that were then passing in deepening waves
across Europe. I had already accumulated a mass of notes for the book
upon "Group Jealousy in Religious Persecution, Racial Conflicts and War"
which I hope to publish the year after next, and which therefore I hope
you will have read long before this present book can possibly come to
you. And moreover Rachel and I had established our home in London--in
the house we now occupy during the winter and spring--and both you and
your little sister had begun your careers as inhabitants of this earth.
Your little sister had indeed but just begun.
And then one morning at the breakfast-table I picked a square envelope
out of a heap of letters, and saw the half-forgotten and infinitely
familiar handwriting of Lady Mary Justin.... The sight of it gave me an
odd mixture of sensations. I was startled, I was disturbed, I was a
little afraid. I hadn't forgiven her yet; it needed but this touch to
tell me how little I had forgotten....
§ 2
I sat with it in my hand for a moment or so before I opened it,
hesitating as one hesitates before a door that may reveal a dramatic
situation. Then I pushed my chair a little back from the table and
ripped the envelope.
It was a far longer letter than Mary had ever written me in the old
days, and in a handwriting as fine as ever but now rather smaller. I
have it still, and here I open its worn folds and, except for a few
trifling omissions, copy it out for you.... A few trifling omissions, I
say,--just one there is that is not trifling, but that I must needs
make....
You will never see any of these letters because I shall destroy them so
soon as this copy is made. It has been difficult--or I should have
destroyed them before. But some things can be too hard for us....
This first letter is on the Martens note-paper; its very heading was
familiar to me. The handwriting of the earlier sentences is a little
stiff and disjointed, and there are one or two scribbled obliterations;
it is like someone embarrassed in speaking; and then it passes into her
usual and characteristic ease....
And as I read, slowly my long-cherished anger evaporated, and the real
Mary, outspoken and simple, whom I had obscured by a cloud of fancied
infidelities, returned to me....
"My dear Stephen," she begins, "About six weeks ago I saw in the _Times_
that you have a little daughter. It set me thinking, picturing you with
a mite of a baby in your arms--what _little_ things they are,
Stephen!--and your old face bent over it, so that presently I went to my
room and cried. It set me thinking about you so that I have at last
written you this letter.... I love to think of you with wife and
children about you Stephen,--I heard of your son for the first time
about a year ago, but--don't mistake me,--something wrings me too....
"Well, I too have children. Have you ever thought of me as a mother? I
am. I wonder how much you know about me now. I have two children and the
youngest is just two years old. And somehow it seems to me that now that
you and I have both given such earnests of our good behavior, such
evidence that _that_ side of life anyhow is effectually settled for us,
there is no reason remaining why we shouldn't correspond. You are my
brother, Stephen, and my friend and my twin and the core of my
imagination, fifty babies cannot alter that, we can live but once and
then die, and, promise or no promise, I will not be dead any longer in
your world when I'm not dead, nor will I have you, if I can help it, a
cold unanswering corpse in mine....
"Too much of my life and being, Stephen, has been buried, and I am in
rebellion. This is a breach of the tomb if you like, an irregular
private premature resurrection from an interment in error. Out of my
alleged grave I poke my head and say Hello! to you. Stephen, old friend!
dear friend! how are you getting on? What is it like to you? How do you
feel? I want to know about you.... I'm not doing this at all furtively,
and you can write back to me, Stephen, as openly as your heart desires.
I have told Justin I should do this. I rise, you see, blowing my own
Trump. Let the other graves do as they please....
"Your letters will be respected, Stephen.... If you choose to rise also
and write me a letter.
"Stephen, I've been wanting to do this for--for all the time. If there
was thought-reading you would have had a thousand letters. But formerly
I was content to submit, and latterly I've chafed more. I think that as
what they call passion has faded, the immense friendliness has become
more evident, and made the bar less and less justifiable. You and I have
had so much between us beyond what somebody the other day--it was in a
report in the _Times_, I think--was calling _Materia Matrimoniala_. And
of course I hear about you from all sorts of people, and in all sorts
of ways--whatever you have done about me I've had a woman's sense of
honor about you and I've managed to learn a great deal without asking
forbidden questions. I've pricked up my ears at the faintest echo of
your name.
"They say you have become a publisher with an American partner, a sort
of Harmsworth and Nelson and Times Book Club and Hooper and Jackson all
rolled into one. That seems so extraordinary to me that for that alone I
should have had to write to you. I want to know the truth of that. I
never see any advertisement of Stratton & Co. or get any inkling of what
it is you publish. Are you the power behind the respectable Murgatroyd
and the honest Milvain? I know them both and neither has the slightest
appearance of being animated by you. And equally perplexing is your
being mixed up with an American like that man Gidding in Peace
Conferences and Social Reform Congresses and so forth. It's
so--Carnegieish. There I'm surer because I've seen your name in reports
of meetings and I've read your last two papers in the _Fortnightly_. I
can't imagine you of all people, with your touch of reserve, launching
into movements and rubbing shoulders with faddists. What does it mean,
Stephen? I had expected to find you coming back into English
politics--speaking and writing on the lines of your old beginning,
taking up that work you dropped--it's six years now ago. I've been
accumulating disappointment for two years. Mr. Arthur, you see, on our
side,"--this you will remember was in 1909--"still steers our devious
party courses, and the Tariff Reformers have still to capture us. Weston
Massinghay was comparing them the other night, at a dinner at the
Clynes', to a crowded piratical galley trying to get alongside a good
seaman in rough weather. He was very funny about Leo Maxse in the poop,
white and shrieking with passion and the motion, and all the capitalists
armed to the teeth and hiding snug in the hold until the grappling-irons
were fixed.... Why haven't you come into the game? I'd hoped it if only
for the sake of meeting you again. What are you doing out beyond there?
"We are in it so far as I can contrive. But I contrive very little. We
are pillars of the Conservative party--on that Justin's mind is firmly
settled--and every now and then I clamor urgently that we must do more
for it. But Justin's ideas go no further than writing cheques--doing
more for the party means writing a bigger cheque--and there are moments
when I feel we shall simply bring down a peerage upon our heads and bury
my ancient courtesy title under the ignominy of a new creation. He would
certainly accept it. He writes his cheque and turns back at the earliest
opportunity to his miniature gardens and the odd little freaks of
collecting that attract him. Have you ever heard of chintz oil jars?
'No,' you will say. Nor has anyone else yet except our immediate circle
of friends and a few dealers who are no doubt industriously increasing
the present scanty supply. We possess three. They are matronly shaped
jars about two feet or a yard high, of a kind of terra-cotta with wooden
tops surmounted by gilt acorns, and they have been covered with white
paint and on this flowers and birds and figures from some very rich old
chintz have been stuck very cunningly, and then everything has been
varnished--and there you are. Our first and best was bought for
seven-and-sixpence, brought home in the car, put upon a console table
on the second landing and worshipped. It's really a very pleasant mellow
thing to see. Nobody had ever seen the like. Guests, sycophantic people
of all sorts were taken to consider it. It was looked at with heads at
every angle, one man even kept his head erect and one went a little
upstairs and looked at it under his arm. Also the most powerful lenses
have been used for a minute examination, and one expert licked the
varnish and looked extremely thoughtful and wise at me as he turned the
booty over his gifted tongue. And now, God being with us, we mean to
possess every specimen in existence--before the Americans get hold of
the idea. Yesterday Justin got up and motored sixty miles to look at an
alleged fourth....
"Oh my dear! I am writing chatter. You perceive I've reached the
chattering stage. It is the fated end of the clever woman in a good
social position nowadays, her mind beats against her conditions for the
last time and breaks up into this carping talk, this spume of
observation and comment, this anecdotal natural history of the
restraining husband, as waves burst out their hearts in a foam upon a
reef. But it isn't chatter I want to write to you.
"Stephen, I'm intolerably wretched. No creature has ever been gladder to
have been born than I was for the first five and twenty years of my
life. I was full of hope and I was full, I suppose, of vanity and rash
confidence. I thought I was walking on solid earth with my head reaching
up to the clouds, and that sea and sky and all mankind were mine for the
smiling. And I am nothing and worse than nothing, I am the ineffectual
mother of two children, a daughter whom I adore--but of her I may not
tell you--and a son,--a son who is too like his father for any fury of
worship, a stolid little creature.... That is all I have done in the
world, a mere blink of maternity, and my blue Persian who is scarcely
two years old, has already had nine kittens. My husband and I have never
forgiven each other the indefinable wrong of not pleasing each other;
that embitters more and more; to take it out of each other is our rôle;
I have done my duty to the great new line of Justin by giving it the
heir it needed, and now a polite and silent separation has fallen
between us. We hardly speak except in company. I have not been so much
married, Stephen, I find, as collected, and since our tragic
misadventure--but there were beautiful moments, Stephen, unforgettable
glimpses of beauty in that--thank God, I say impenitently for that--the
door of the expensively splendid cabinet that contains me, when it is
not locked, is very discreetly--watched. I have no men friends, no
social force, no freedom to take my line. My husband is my official
obstacle. We barb the limitations of life for one another. A little
while ago he sought to chasten me--to rouse me rather--through jealousy,
and made me aware indirectly but a little defiantly of a young person of
artistic gifts in whose dramatic career he was pretending a conspicuous
interest. I was jealous and roused, but scarcely in the way he desired.
'This,' I said quite cheerfully, 'means freedom for _me_, Justin,'--and
the young woman vanished from the visible universe with an incredible
celerity. I hope she was properly paid off and not simply made away with
by a minion, but I become more and more aware of my ignorance of a
great financier's methods as I become more and more aware of them....
"Stephen, my dear, my brother, I am intolerably unhappy. I do not know
what to do with myself, or what there is to hope for in life. I am like
a prisoner in a magic cage and I do not know the word that will release
me. How is it with you? Are you unhappy beyond measure or are you not;
and if you are not, what are you doing with life? Have you found any
secret that makes living tolerable and understandable? Write to me,
write to me at least and tell me that.... Please write to me.
"Do you remember how long ago you and I sat in the old Park at Burnmore,
and how I kept pestering you and asking you what is all this _for_? And
you looked at the question as an obstinate mule looks at a narrow bridge
he could cross but doesn't want to. Well, Stephen, you've had
nearly--how many years is it now?--to get an answer ready. What _is_ it
all for? What do you make of it? Never mind my particular case, or the
case of Women with a capital _W_, tell me _your_ solution. You are
active, you keep doing things, you find life worth living. Is publishing
a way of peace for the heart? I am prepared to believe even that. But
justify yourself. Tell me what you have got there to keep your soul
alive."
§ 3
I read this letter to the end and looked up, and there was my home about
me, a room ruddy-brown and familiar, with the row of old pewter things
upon the dresser, the steel engravings of former Strattons that came to
me from my father, a convex mirror exaggerating my upturned face. And
Rachel just risen again sat at the other end of the table, a young
mother, fragile and tender-eyed. The clash of these two systems of
reality was amazing. It was as though I had not been parted from Mary
for a day, as though all that separation and all that cloud of bitter
jealousy had been a mere silence between two people in the same room.
Indeed it was extraordinarily like that, as if I had been sitting at a
desk, imagining myself alone, reading my present life as one reads in a
book at a shaded lamp, and then suddenly that silent other had spoken.
And then I looked at the page of my life before me and became again a
character in the story.
I met the enquiry in Rachel's eyes. "It's a letter from Mary Justin," I
said.
She did not answer for a few moments. She became interested in the flame
of the little spirit lamp that kept her coffee hot. She finished what
she had to do with that and then remarked, "I thought you two were not
to correspond."
"Yes," I said, putting the letter down; "that was the understanding."
There was a little interval of silence, and then I got up and went to
the fireplace where the bacon and sausages stood upon a trivet.
"I suppose," said Rachel, "she wants to hear from you again."
"She thinks that now we have children, and that she has two, we can
consider what was past, past and closed and done with, and she wants to
hear--about me.... Apart from everything else--we were very great
friends."
"Of course," said Rachel with lips a little awry, "of course. You must
have been great friends. And it's natural for her to write."
"I suppose," she added, "her husband knows."
"She's told him, she says...."
Her eye fell on the letter in my hand for the smallest fraction of a
second, and it was as if hastily she snatched away a thought from my
observation. I had a moment of illuminating embarrassment. So far we had
contrived to do as most young people do when they marry, we had sought
to make our lives unreservedly open to one another, we had affected an
entire absence of concealments about our movements, our thoughts. If
perhaps I had been largely silent to her about Mary it was not so much
that I sought to hide things from her as that I myself sought to forget.
It is one of the things that we learn too late, the impossibility of any
such rapid and wilful coalescences of souls. But we had maintained a
convention of infinite communism since our marriage; we had shown each
other our letters as a matter of course, shared the secrets of our
friends, gone everywhere together as far as we possibly could.
I wanted now to give her the letter in my hand to read--and to do so was
manifestly impossible. Something had arisen between us that made out of
our unity two abruptly separated figures masked and veiled. Here were
things I knew and understood completely and that I could not even
describe to Rachel. What would she make of Mary's "Write to me. Write to
me"? A mere wish to resume.... I would not risk the exposure of Mary's
mind and heart and unhappiness, to her possible misinterpretation....
That letter fell indeed like a pitiless searchlight into all that
region of differences ignored, over which we had built the vaulted
convention of our complete mutual understanding. In my memory it seems
to me now as though we hung silent for quite a long time over the
evasions that were there so abruptly revealed.
Then I put the letter into my pocket with a clumsy assumption of
carelessness, and knelt down to the fender and sausages.
"It will be curious," I said, "to write to her again.... To tell her
about things...."
And then with immense interest, "Are these Chichester sausages you've
got here, Rachel, or some new kind?"
Rachel roused herself to respond with an equal affectation, and we made
an eager conversation about bacon and sausages--for after that startling
gleam of divergence we were both anxious to get back to the
superficialities of life again.
§ 4
I did not answer Mary's letter for seven or eight days.
During that period my mind was full of her to the exclusion of every
other interest. I re-read all that she had to say many times, and with
each reading the effect of her personality deepened. It was all so
intensely familiar, the flashes of insight, the blazing frankness, the
quick turns of thought, and her absurd confidence in a sort of sane
stupidity that she had always insisted upon my possessing. And her
unembarrassed affectionateness. Her quick irregular writing seemed to
bring back with it the changing light in her eyes, the intonations of
her voice, something of her gesture....
I didn't go on discussing with myself whether we two ought to
correspond; that problem disappeared from my thoughts. Her challenge to
me to justify myself took possession of my mind. That thrust towards
self-examination was the very essence of her ancient influence. How did
I justify myself? I was under a peculiar compulsion to answer that to
her satisfaction. She had picked me up out of my work and accumulating
routines with that demand, made me look at myself and my world again as
a whole.... I had a case. I have a case. It is a case of passionate
faith triumphing over every doubt and impossibility, a case real enough
to understand for those who understand, but very difficult to state. I
tried to convey it to her.
I do not remember at all clearly what I wrote to her. It has disappeared
from existence. But it was certainly a long letter. Throughout this book
I have been trying to tell you the growth of my views of life and its
purpose, from my childish dreams and Harbury attitudes to those ideas of
human development that have made me undertake the work I do. It is not
glorious work I know, as the work of great artists and poets and leaders
is glorious, but it is what I find best suits my gifts and my want of
gifts. Greater men will come at last to build within my scaffoldings. In
some summary phrasing I must have set out the gist of this. I must have
explained my sense of the supreme importance of mental clarification in
human life. All this is manifest in her reply. And I think too I did my
best to tell her plainly the faith that was in me, and why life seemed
worth while to me....
Her second letter came after an interval of only a few days from the
despatch of mine. She began abruptly.
"I won't praise your letter or your beliefs. They are fine and
large--and generous--like you. Just a little artificial (but you will
admit that), as though you had felt them _give_ here and there and had
made up your mind they shouldn't. At times it's oddly like looking at
the Alps, the real Alps, and finding that every now and then the
mountains have been eked out with a plank and canvas Earl's Court
background.... Yes, I like what you say about Faith. I believe you are
right. I wish I could--perhaps some day I shall--light up and _feel_ you
are right. But--but---- That large, _respectable_ project, the increase
of wisdom and freedom and self-knowledge in the world, the calming of
wars, the ending of economic injustice and so on and so on----
"When I read it first it was like looking at a man in profile and
finding him solid and satisfactory, and then afterwards when I thought
it all over and looked for the particular things that really matter to
me and tried to translate it into myself--nothing is of the slightest
importance in the world that one cannot translate into oneself--then I
began to realize just how amazingly deficient you are. It was like
walking round that person in profile and finding his left side wasn't
there--with everything perfect on the right, down to the buttons. A kind
of intellectual Lorelei--sideways. You've planned out your
understandings and tolerances and enquiries and clearings-up as if the
world were all just men--or citizens--and nothing doing but racial and
national and class prejudices and the exacting and shirking of labor,
and you seem to ignore altogether that man is a sexual animal
first--first, Stephen, first--that he has that in common with all the
animals, that it made him indeed because he has it more than they
have--and after that, a long way after that, he is the
labor-economizing, war-and feud-making creature you make him out to be.
A long way after that....
"Man is the most sexual of all the beasts, Stephen. Half of him,
womankind, rather more than half, isn't simply human at all, it's
specialized, specialized for the young, not only naturally and
physically as animals are, but mentally and artificially. Womankind
isn't human, it's reduced human. It's 'the sex' as the Victorians used
to say, and from the point of view of the Lex Julia and the point of
view of Mr. Malthus, and the point of view of biologists and saints and
artists and everyone who deals in feeling and emotion--and from the
point of view of all us poor specialists, smothered up in our clothes
and restrictions--the future of the sex is the centre of the whole
problem of the human future, about which you are concerned. All this
great world-state of your man's imagination is going to be wrecked by us
if you ignore us, we women are going to be the Goths and Huns of another
Decline and Fall. We are going to sit in the conspicuous places of the
world and _loot_ all your patient accumulations. We are going to abolish
your offspring and turn the princes among you into undignified slaves.
Because, you see, specialized as we are, we are not quite specialized,
we are specialized under duress, and at the first glimpse of a chance we
abandon our cradles and drop our pots and pans and go for the vast and
elegant side possibilities--of our specialization. Out we come, looking
for the fun the men are having. Dress us, feed us, play with us! We'll
pay you in excitement,--tremendous excitement. The State indeed! All
your little triumphs of science and economy, all your little
accumulations of wealth that you think will presently make the struggle
for life an old story and the millennium possible--_we spend_. And all
your dreams of brotherhood!--we will set you by the ears. We hold
ourselves up as my little Christian nephews--Philip's boys--do some
coveted object, and say _Quis?_ and the whole brotherhood shouts
'_Ego!_' to the challenge.... Back you go into Individualism at the word
and all your Brotherhood crumbles to dust again.
"How are you going to remedy it, how are you going to protect that Great
State of your dreams from this anti-citizenship of sex? You give no
hint.
"You are planning nothing, Stephen, nothing to meet this. You are
fighting with an army all looting and undisciplined, frantic with the
private jealousies that centre about _us_, feuds, cuts, expulsions,
revenges, and you are giving out orders for an army of saints. You treat
us as a negligible quantity, and we are about as negligible as a fire in
the woodwork of a house that is being built....
"I read what I have written, Stephen, and I perceive I have the makings
of a fine scold in me. Perhaps under happier conditions----... I should
certainly have scolded you, constantly, continually.... Never did a man
so need scolding.... And like any self-respecting woman I see that I use
half my words in the wrong meanings in order to emphasize my point. Of
course when I write woman in all that has gone before I don't mean
woman. It is a woman's privilege to talk or write incomprehensibly and
insist upon being understood. So that I expect you already to understand
that what I mean isn't that men are creative and unselfish and brotherly
and so forth and that women are spoiling and going to spoil the
game--although and notwithstanding that is exactly what I have
written--but that humans are creative and unselfish et cetera and so
forth, and that it is their sexual, egotistical, passionate side (which
is ever so much bigger relatively in a woman than in a man, and that is
why I wrote as I did) which is going to upset your noble and beautiful
apple-cart. But it is not only that by nature we are more largely and
gravely and importantly sexual than men but that men have shifted the
responsibility for attraction and passion upon us and made us pay in
servitude and restriction and blame for the common defect of the
species. So that you see really I was right all along in writing of this
as though it was women when it wasn't, and I hope now it is unnecessary
for me to make my meaning clearer than it is now and always has been in
this matter. And so, resuming our discourse, Stephen, which only my
sense of your invincible literalness would ever have interrupted, what
are you going to do with us?
"I gather from a hint rather than accept as a statement that you propose
to give us votes.
"Stephen!--do you really think that we are going to bring anything to
bear upon public affairs worth having? I know something of the
contemporary feminine intelligence. Justin makes no serious objection to
a large and various circle of women friends, and over my little
sitting-room fire in the winter and in my corners of our various gardens
in the summer and in walks over the heather at Martens and in Scotland
there are great talks and confessions of love, of mental freedom, of
ambitions, and belief and unbelief--more particularly of unbelief. I
have sometimes thought of compiling a dictionary of unbelief, a great
list of the things that a number of sweet, submissive,
value-above-rubies wives have told me they did not believe in. It would
amaze their husbands beyond measure. The state of mind of women about
these things, Stephen, is dreadful--I mean about all these
questions--you know what I mean. The bold striving spirits do air their
views a little, and always in a way that makes one realize how badly
they need airing--but most of the nicer women are very chary of talk,
they have to be drawn out, a hint of opposition makes them start back or
prevaricate, and I see them afterwards with their husbands, pretty
silken furry feathery jewelled _silences_. All their suppression doesn't
keep them orthodox, it only makes them furtive and crumpled and creased
in their minds--in just the way that things get crumpled and creased if
they are always being shoved back into a drawer. You have only to rout
about in their minds for a bit. They pretend at first to be quite
correct, and then out comes the nasty little courage of the darkness.
Sometimes there is even an apologetic titter. They are quite
emancipated, they say; I have misunderstood them. Their emancipation is
like those horrid white lizards that grow in the Kentucky caves out of
the sunlight. They tell you they don't see why they shouldn't do this or
that--mean things, underhand things, cheap, vicious, sensual things....
Are there, I wonder, the same dreadful little caverns in men? I doubt
it. And then comes a situation that really tries their quality.... Think
of the quandary I got into with you, Stephen. And for my sex I'm rather
a daring person. The way in which I went so far--and then ran away. I
had a kind of excuse--in my illness. That illness! Such a queer untimely
feminine illness....
"We're all to pieces, Stephen. That's what brought down Rome. The women
went to pieces then, and the women are going to pieces to-day. What's
the good of having your legions in the Grampians and marching up to
Philae, while the wives are talking treason in your houses? It's no good
telling us to go back to the Ancient Virtues. The Ancient Virtues
haven't _kept_. The Ancient Virtues in an advanced state of decay is
what was the matter with Rome and what is the matter with us. You can't
tell a woman to go back to the spinning-wheel and the kitchen and the
cradle, when you have power-looms, French cooks, hotels, restaurants and
modern nurseries. We've overflowed. We've got to go on to a lot of New
Virtues. And in all the prospect before me--I can't descry one clear
simple thing to do....
"But I'm running on. I want to know, Stephen, why you've got nothing to
say about all this. It must have been staring you in the face ever since
I spent my very considerable superfluous energies in wrecking your
career. Because you know I wrecked it, Stephen. I _knew_ I was wrecking
it and I wrecked it. I knew exactly what I was doing all the time. I had
meant to be so fine a thing for you, a mothering friend, to have that
dear consecutive kindly mind of yours steadying mine, to have seen you
grow to power over men, me helping, me admiring. It was to have been so
fine. So fine! Didn't I urge you to marry Rachel, make you talk of her.
Don't you remember that? And one day when I saw you thinking of Rachel,
saw a kind of pride in your eyes!--suddenly I couldn't stand it. I went
to my room after you had gone and thought of you and her until I wanted
to scream. I couldn't bear it. It was intolerable. I was violent to my
toilet things. I broke a hand-glass. Your dignified, selfish,
self-controlled Mary _smashed_ a silver hand-mirror. I never told you
that. You know what followed. I pounced on you and took you. Wasn't I--a
soft and scented hawk? Was either of us better than some creature of
instinct that does what it does because it must? It was like a gust of
madness--and I cared, I found, no more for your career than I cared for
any other little thing, for honor, for Rachel, for Justin, that stood
between us....
"My dear, wasn't all that time, all that heat and hunger of desire, all
that secret futility of passion, the very essence of the situation
between men and women now? We are all trying most desperately to be
human beings, to walk erect, to work together--what was your
phrase?--'in a multitudinous unity,' to share what you call a common
collective thought that shall rule mankind, and this tremendous force
which seizes us and says to us: 'Make that other being yours, bodily
yours, mentally yours, wholly yours--at any price, no matter the price,'
bars all our unifications. It splits the whole world into couples
watching each other. Until all our laws, all our customs seem the
servants of that. It is the passion of the body swamping the brain; it's
an ape that has seized a gun, a beautiful modern gun. Here am I,
Justin's captive, and he mine, he mine because at the first escapade of
his I get my liberty. Here are we two, I and you, barred for ever from
the sight of one another, and I and you writing--I at any rate--in spite
of the ill-concealed resentment of my partner. We're just two, peeping
through our bars, of a universal multitude. Everywhere this prison of
sex. Have you ever thought just all that it means when every woman in
the world goes dressed in a costume to indicate her sex, her cardinal
fact, so that she dare not even mount a bicycle in knickerbockers, she
has her hair grown long to its longest because yours is short, and
everything conceivable is done to emphasize and remind us (and you) of
the fundamental trouble between us? As if there was need of reminding!
Stephen, is there no way out of this? Is there no way at all? Because if
there is not, then I had rather go back to the hareem than live as I do
now imprisoned in glass--with all of life in sight of me and none in
reach. I had rather Justin beat me into submission and mental
tranquillity and that I bore him an annual--probably deciduous--child. I
can understand so well now that feminine attitude that implies, 'Well,
if I must have a master, then the more master the better.' Perhaps that
is the way; that Nature will not let us poor humans get away from sex,
and I am merely--what is it?--an abnormality--with whiskers of enquiry
sprouting from my mind. Yet I don't feel like that....
"I'm pouring into these letters, Stephen, the concentrated venom of
years of brooding. My heart is black with rebellion against my lot and
against the lot of woman. I have been given life and a fine position in
the world, I made one fatal blunder in marrying to make these things
secure, and now I can do nothing with it all and I have nothing to do
with it. It astounds me to think of the size of our establishments,
Stephen, of the extravagant way in which whole counties and great
countries pay tribute to pile up the gigantic heap of wealth upon which
we two lead our lives of futile entanglement. In this place alone there
are fourteen gardeners and garden helps, and this is not one of our
garden places. Three weeks ago I spent a thousand pounds on clothes in
one great week of shopping, and our yearly expenditure upon personal
effect, upon our magnificence and our margins cannot be greatly less
than forty-five thousand pounds. I walk about our house and gardens, I
take one of the carriages or one of the automobiles and go to some large
pointless gathering of hundreds and thousands and thousands of pounds,
and we walk about and say empty little things, and the servants don't
laugh at us, the butlers don't laugh at us, the people in the street
tolerate us.... It has an effect of collective insanity.... You know the
story of one of those dear Barons of the Cinque Ports--a decent
plumber-body from Rye or Winchelsea--one of the six--or eight--who
claimed the privilege of carrying the canopy over the King"--she is
speaking of King Edward's coronation of course--"how that he was
discovered suddenly to be speaking quite audibly to the sacred presence
so near to him: 'It is very remarkable--we should be here, your
majesty--very remarkable.' And then he subsided--happily unheard--into
hopeless embarrassment. That is exactly how I feel, Stephen. I feel I
can't stand it much longer, that presently I shall splutter and spoil
the procession....
"Perhaps I don't properly estimate our position in the fabric, but I
can't get away from the feeling that everything in social life leads up
to this--to us,--the ridiculous canopy. If so, then the universe
means--_nothing_; it's blowing great forms and shapes as a swamp blows
bubbles; a little while ago it was megatheriums and plesiosauriums--if
that's the name for them--and now it is country-houses and motor-cars
and coronation festivals. And in the end--it is all nonsense, Stephen.
It is utter nonsense.
"If it isn't nonsense, tell me what it is. For me at any rate it's
nonsense, and for every intelligent woman about me--for I talk to some
of them, we indulge in seditious whisperings and wit--and there isn't
one who seems to have been able to get to anything solider than I have
done. Each of us has had her little fling at maternity--about as much as
a washerwoman does in her odd time every two or three years--and that is
our uttermost reality. All the rest,--trimmings! We go about the world,
Stephen, dressing and meeting each other with immense ceremony, we have
our seasonal movements in relation to the ritual of politics and sport,
we travel south for the Budget and north for the grouse, we play games
to amuse the men who keep us--not a woman would play a game for its own
sake--we dabble with social reform and politics, for which few of us
care a rap except as an occupation, we 'discover' artists or musicians
or lecturers (as though we cared), we try to believe in lovers or, still
harder, try to believe in old or new religions, and most of us--I
don't--do our best to give the gratifications and exercise the
fascinations that are expected of us....
"Something has to be done for women, Stephen. We are the heart of life,
birth and begetting, the home where the future grows, and your schemes
ignore us and slide about over the superficialities of things. We are
spoiling the whole process of progress, we are turning all the
achievements of mankind to nothingness. Men invent, create, do miracles
with the world, and we translate it all into shopping, into a glitter of
dresses and households, into an immense parade of pride and excitement.
We excite men, we stir them to get us and keep us. Men turn from their
ideas of brotherhood to elaborate our separate cages....
"I am Justin's wife; not a thing in my heavens or my earth that is not
subordinated to that.
"Something has to be done for women, Stephen, something--urgently--and
nothing is done until that is done, some release from their intolerable
subjection to sex, so that for us everything else in life, respect,
freedom, social standing, is entirely secondary to that. But what has to
be done? We women do not know. Our efforts to know are among the most
desolating of spectacles. I read the papers of those suffrage women; the
effect is more like agitated geese upon a common than anything human has
a right to be.... That's why I turn to you. Years ago I felt, and now I
know, there is about you a simplicity of mind, a foolishness of faith,
that is stronger and greater than the cleverness of any woman alive. You
are one of those strange men who take high and sweeping views--as larks
soar. It isn't that you yourself are high and sweeping.... No, but still
I turn to you. In the old days I used to turn to you and shake your mind
and make you think about things you seemed too sluggish to think about
without my clamor. Once do you remember at Martens I shook you by the
ears.... And when I made you think, you thought, as I could never do.
Think now--about women.
"Stephen, there are moments when it seems to me that this futility of
women, this futility of men's effort _through_ women, is a fated
futility in the very nature of things. We may be saddled with it as we
are with all the animal infirmities we have, with appendixes and
suchlike things inside of us, and the passions and rages of apes and a
tail--I believe we have a tail curled away somewhere, haven't we?
Perhaps mankind is so constituted that badly as they get along now they
couldn't get along at all if they let women go free and have their own
way with life. Perhaps you can't have _two_ sexes loose together. You
must shut up one. I've a horrible suspicion that all these anti-suffrage
men like Lord Cromer and Sir Ray Lankester must know a lot about life
that I do not know. And that other man Sir Something-or-other Wright,
who said plainly that men cannot work side by side with women because
they get excited.... And yet, you know, women have had glimpses of a
freedom that was not mischievous. I could have been happy as a Lady
Abbess--I must have space and dignity, Stephen--and those women had
things in their hands as no women have things in their hands to-day.
They came to the House of Lords. But they lost all that. Was there some
sort of natural selection?...
"Stephen, you were made to answer my mind, and if you cannot do it
nobody can. What is your outlook for women? Are we to go back to
seclusion or will it be possible to minimize sex? If you are going to
minimize sex how are you going to do it? Suppression? There is plenty of
suppression now. Increase or diminish the pains and penalties? My
nephew, Philip's boy, Philip Christian, was explaining to me the other
day that if you boil water in an open bowl it just boils away, and that
if you boil it in a corked bottle it bangs everything to pieces, and
you have, he says, 'to look out.' But I feel that's a bad image.
Boiling-water isn't frantically jealous, and men and women are. But
still suppose, suppose you trained people not to make such an awful fuss
about things. _Now_ you train them to make as much fuss as possible....
"Oh bother it all, Stephen! Where's your mind in these matters? Why
haven't you tackled these things? Why do you leave it to _me_ to dig
these questions into you--like opening a reluctant oyster? Aren't they
patent? You up and answer them, Stephen--or this correspondence will
become abusive...."
§ 5
It was true that I did ignore or minimize sexual questions as much as I
could. I was forced now to think why I did this. That carried me back to
those old days of passion, memories I had never stirred for many years.
And I wrote to Mary that there was indeed no reason but a reasonable
fear, that in fact I had dismissed them because they had been beyond my
patience and self-control, because I could not think very much about
them without an egotistical reversion to the bitterness of my own case.
And in avoiding them I was only doing what the great bulk of men in
business and men in affairs find themselves obliged to do. They train
themselves not to think of the rights and wrongs of sexual life, not to
tolerate liberties even in their private imaginations. They know it is
like carrying a torch into a powder magazine. They feel they cannot
trust their own minds beyond the experience, tested usages, and
conventions of the ages, because they know how many of those who have
ventured further have been blinded by mists and clouds of rhetoric, lost
in inexplicable puzzles and wrecked disastrously. There in those half
explored and altogether unsettled hinterlands, lurk desires that sting
like adders and hatreds cruel as hell....
And then I went on--I do not clearly remember now the exact line of
argument I adopted--to urge upon her that our insoluble puzzles were not
necessarily insoluble puzzles for the world at large, that no one
soldier fights anything but a partial battle, and that it wasn't an
absolute condemnation of me to declare that I went on living and working
for social construction with the cardinal riddles of social order, so
far as they affected her, unsolved. Wasn't I at any rate preparing
apparatus for that huge effort at solution that mankind must ultimately
make? Wasn't this dredging out and deepening of the channels of thought
about the best that we could hope to do at the present time, seeing that
to launch a keel of speculation prematurely was only to strand oneself
among hopeless reefs and confusions? Better prepare for a voyage
to-morrow than sail to destruction to-day.
Whatever I put in that forgotten part of my letter was put less
strikingly than my first admissions, and anyhow it was upon these that
Mary pounced to the disregard of any other point. "There you are," she
wrote, with something like elation, "there is a tiger in the garden and
you won't talk or think about it for fear of growing excited. That is my
grievance against so much historical and political and social
discussion; its hopeless futility because of its hopeless omissions. You
plan the world's future, taking the women and children for granted, with
Egotistical Sex, as you call it, a prowling monster upsetting
everything you do...."
But I will not give you that particular letter in its order, nor its
successors. Altogether she wrote me twenty-two letters, and I one or two
more than that number to her, and--a thing almost inevitable in a
discussion by correspondence--there is a lot of overlapping and
recapitulation. Those letters spread over a space of nearly two and a
half years. Again and again she insists upon the monstrous exaggeration
of the importance of sex in human life and of the need of some reduction
of its importance, and she makes the boldest experimental suggestions
for the achievement of that end. But she comes slowly to recognize that
there is a justification for an indirect attack, that sex and the
position of women do not constitute the primary problem in that
bristling system of riddles that lies like a hostile army across the
path of mankind. And she realized too that through art, through science
and literature and the whole enquiring and creative side of man's
nature, lies the path by which those positions are to be outflanked, and
those eternal-looking impossibles and inconceivables overcome. Here is a
fragment--saturated with the essence of her thought. Three-quarters of
her earlier letters are variations on this theme....
"What you call 'social order,' Stephen, all the arrangements seem to me
to be _built_ on subjection to sex even more than they are built (as you
say) on labor subjection. And this is an age of release, you say it is
an age of release for the workers and they know it. And so do the women.
Just as much. 'Wild hopes' indeed! The workers' hopes are nothing to the
women's! It is not only the workers who are saying let us go free,
manage things differently so that we may have our lives relieved from
this intolerable burthen of constant toil, but the women also are saying
let us go free. They are demanding release just as much from their
intolerable endless specialization as females. The tramp on the roads
who won't work, the swindler and the exploiter who contrive not to work,
the strikers who throw down their tools, no longer for twopences and
sixpences as you say but because their way of living is no longer
tolerable to them, and we women, who don't bear children or work or
help; we are all in one movement together. We are part of the General
Strike. I have been a striker all my life. We are doing nothing--by the
hundred thousand. Your old social machine is working without us and in
spite of us, it carries us along with it and we are sand in the
bearings. I'm not a wheel, Stephen, I'm grit. What you say about the
reactionaries and suppressionists who would stifle the complaints of
labor and crush out its struggles to be free, is exactly true about the
reactionaries and suppressionists who would stifle the discussion of the
woman's position and crush out her hopes of emancipation...."
And here is a page of the peculiar doubt that was as characteristic of
her as the quick changes of her eyes. It gives just that pessimistic
touch that tempered her valiant adventurousness, that gave a color at
last to the tragedy of her death....
"Have you ever thought, Stephen, that perhaps these (repressionist)
people are righter than you are--that if the worker gets free he _won't_
work and that if the woman gets free she won't furl her sex and stop
disturbing things? Suppose she _is_ wicked as a sex, suppose she _will_
trade on her power of exciting imaginative men. A lot of these new
women run with the hare and hunt with the hounds, beguile some poor
innocent of a man to ruin them and then call in fathers, brother,
husbands, friends, chivalry, all the rest of it, and make the best of
both sides of a sex. Suppose we go on behaving like that. After we've
got all our emancipations. Suppose that the liberation of common people
simply means loafing, no discipline, nothing being done, an end to labor
and the beginning of nothing to replace it, and that the liberation of
women simply means the elaboration of mischief. Suppose that it is so.
Suppose you are just tumbling the contents of the grate into the middle
of the room. Then all this emancipation _is_ a decay, even as
conservative-minded people say,--it's none the less a decay because we
want it,--and the only thing to stop it is to stop it, and to have more
discipline and more suppression and say to women and the common people:
'Back to the Sterner Virtues; Back to Servitude!' I wish I hadn't these
reactionary streaks in my thoughts, but I have and there you are...."
And then towards the second year her letters began to break away from
her preoccupation with her position as a woman and to take up new
aspects of life, more general aspects of life altogether. It had an
effect not of her having exhausted the subject but as if, despairing of
a direct solution, she turned deliberately to the relief of other
considerations. She ceased to question her own life, and taking that for
granted, wrote more largely of less tangible things. She remembered that
she had said that life, if it was no more than its present appearances,
was "utter nonsense." She went back to that. "One says things like
that," she wrote "and not for a moment does one believe it. I grumble
at my life, I seem to be always weakly and fruitlessly fighting my life,
and I love it. I would not be willingly dead--for anything. I'd rather
be an old match-woman selling matches on a freezing night in the streets
than be dead. Nothing nonsensical ever held me so tightly or kept me so
interested. I suppose really I am full of that very same formless faith
on which you rely. But with me it's not only shapeless but
intangible.... I nibble at religion. I am immensely attracted. I stand
in the doorway. Only when they come out to persuade me to come in I am
like a shy child and I go away. The temples beguile me and the music,
but not the men. I feel I want to join _it_ and they say 'join _us_.'
They are--like vergers. Such small things! Such dreadful little
_arguing_ men! They don't let you come in, they want you to say they are
right. All the really religious people seem to be outside nowadays and
all the pretending, cheating, atheistical, vain and limited people
within....
"But the beautiful things religion gives! The beauty! Do you know Saint
Paul's, Stephen? Latterly I have been there time after time. It is the
most beautiful interior in all the world, so great, so sombrely
dignified, so perfectly balanced--and filled with such wonderful music,
brimming with music just as crystal water brims in a bowl of crystal.
The other day I went there, up into a little gallery high up under the
dome, to hear Bach's Passion Music, the St. Matthew Passion. One hangs
high and far above the little multitudes below, the white-robed singers,
the white-robed musicians, ranks and ranks, the great organ, the rows
and rows and rows of congregation, receding this way, that way, into the
haze of the aisle and the transepts, and out of it all streams the
sound and the singing, it pours up past you like a river, a river that
rushes upward to some great sea, some unknown sea. The whole place is
music and singing.... I hang on to the railings, Stephen, and weep--I
have to weep--and I wonder and wonder....
"One prays then as naturally as one drinks when one is thirsty and cold
water comes to hand. I don't know whom I pray to, but I pray;--of course
I pray. Latterly, Stephen, I have been reading devotional works and
trying to catch that music again. I never do--definitely. Never. But at
times I put down the book and it seems to me that surely a moment ago I
heard it, that if I sit very still in a moment I shall hear it again.
And I can feel it is there, I know it is there, like a bat's cry,
pitched too high for my ears. I know it is there, just as I should still
know there was poetry somewhere if some poor toothless idiot with no
roof to his mouth and no knowledge of any but the commonest words tried
to read Shelley to me....
"I wish I could pray with you, Stephen; I wish I could kneel down
somewhere with you of all people and pray."
§ 6
Presently our correspondence fell away. The gaps between our letters
lengthened out. We never wrote regularly because for that there must be
a free exchange upon daily happenings, and neither of us cared to dwell
too closely on our immediate lives. We had a regard for one another that
left our backgrounds vague and shadowy. She had made her appeal across
the sundering silences to me and I had answered, and we had poured out
certain things from our minds. We could not go on discussing. I was a
very busy man now, and she did not write except on my replies.
For a gap of nearly four months neither of us had anything to say in a
letter at all. I think that in time our correspondence might have
altogether died away. Then she wrote again in a more familiar strain to
tell me of certain definite changes of relationship and outlook. She
said that the estrangement between herself and Justin had increased
during the past year; that they were going to live practically apart;
she for the most part in the Surrey house where her two children lived
with their governesses and maids. But also she meant to snatch weeks and
seasons for travel. Upon that they had been disputing for some time. "I
know it is well with the children," she wrote; "why should I be in
perpetual attendance? I do nothing for them except an occasional kiss,
or half-an-hour's romping. Why should one pretend? Justin and I have
wrangled over this question of going away, for weeks, but at last
feminine persistence has won. I am going to travel in my own fashion and
see the world. With periodic appearances at his side in London and
Scotland. We have agreed at least on one thing, and that is upon a
companion; she is to be my secretary in title, my moral guarantor in
fact, and her name which is her crowning glory is Stella Summersley
Satchel. She is blonde, erect, huffy-mannered and thoroughly up to both
sides of her work. I partly envy her independence and rectitude--partly
only. It's odd and quite inconsistent of me that I don't envy her
altogether. In theory I insist that a woman should not have charm,--it
is our undoing. But when I meet one without it----!
"I shall also trail a maid, but I guess that young woman will learn what
it is to be left behind in half the cities of Europe before I have done
with her. I always lose my maids. They are so much more passive and
forgettable than luggage--abroad that is. And Justin usually in the old
days used to remember about them. And his valet used to see after
them,--a most attentive man. Justin cannot, he says, have his wife
abroad with merely a companion; people would talk; maid it must be as
well. And so in a week or less I shall start, unusually tailor-made, for
South Germany and all that jolly country, companioned and maided. I
shall tramp--on the feet God has given me--in stout boots. Miss
Summersley Satchel marches, I understand, like the British infantry but
on a vegetarian 'basis,'--fancy calling your nourishment a 'basis'!--the
maid and so forth by _Èilgut_...."
§ 7
After the letter containing that announcement she wrote to me twice
again, once from Oban and then after a long interval from Siena. The
former was a scornfully minute description of the English at their
holidays and how the conversation went among the women after dinner.
"They are like a row of Japanese lanterns, all blown out long ago and
swinging about in a wind," she wrote--an extravagant image that yet
conveys something of the large, empty, unilluminating effect of a sort
of social intercourse very vividly. In the second letter she was
concerned chiefly with the natural beauty of Italy and how latterly she
had thrice wept at beautiful things, and what this mystery of beauty
could be that had such power over her emotions.
"All up the hillside before the window as I write the herbage is thick
with anemones. They aren't scattered evenly and anyhow amongst the other
things but in little clusters and groups that die away and begin again,
like the repetitions of an air in some musical composition. I have been
sitting and looking at them for the better part of an hour, loving them
more and then more, and the sweet sunlight that is on them and in among
them.... How marvellous are these things, Stephen! All these little
exquisite things that are so abundant in the world, the gleaming lights
and blossoms, the drifting scents! At times these things bring me to
weeping.... I can't help it. It is as if God who is so stern and high,
so terrible to all our appeals, took pity for a moment and saw fit to
speak very softly and tenderly...."
That was the last letter I was ever to have from her.
CHAPTER THE ELEVENTH
THE LAST MEETING
§ 1
In the summer of 1911 immediately after the coronation of King George
there came one of those storms of international suspicion that ever and
again threaten Europe with war. It seems to have been brewed by some
German adepts at Welt-Politik, those privileged makers of giant bombs
who sit at the ears of foreign ministers suggesting idiotic wickedness,
and it was brewed with a sublime ignorance of nearly every reality in
the case. A German warship without a word of notice seized Agadir on the
Atlantic coast of Morocco, within the regions reserved to French
influence; an English demand for explanations was uncivilly disregarded
and England and France and presently Germany began vigorous preparations
for war. All over the world it was supposed that Germany had at last
flung down the gauntlet. In England the war party was only too eager to
grasp what it considered to be a magnificent opportunity. Heaven knows
what the Germans had hoped or intended by their remarkable coup; the
amazing thing to note is that they were not prepared to fight, they had
not even the necessary money ready and they could not get it; they had
perhaps never intended to fight, and the autumn saw the danger disperse
again into diplomatic bickerings and insincerely pacific professions.
But in the high summer the danger had not dispersed, and in common with
every reasonable man I found myself under the shadow of an impending
catastrophe that would have been none the less gigantic and tragic
because it was an imbecility. It was an occasion when everyone needs
must act, however trivially disproportionate his action may be to the
danger. I cabled Gidding who was in America to get together whatever
influences were available there upon the side of pacific intervention,
and I set such British organs as I could control or approach in the same
direction. It seemed probable that Italy would be drawn into any
conflict that might ensue; it happened that there was to be a Conference
of Peace Societies in Milan early in September, and thither I decided to
go in the not very certain hope that out of that assemblage some form of
European protest might be evolved.
That August I was very much run down. I had been staying in London
through almost intolerably hot weather to attend a Races Congress that
had greatly disappointed me. I don't know particularly now why I had
been disappointed nor how far the feeling was due to my being generally
run down by the pressure of detailed work and the stress of thinking
about large subjects in little scraps of time. But I know that a kind of
despair came over me as I sat and looked at that multicolored assembly
and heard in succession the heavy platitudes of white men, the slick,
thin cleverness of Hindoos, the rich-toned florid rhetoric of negroes. I
lost sight of any germ of splendid possibility in all those people, and
saw all too plainly the vanity, the jealousy, the self-interests that
show up so harshly against the professions of every altruistic movement.
It seemed all such a windy business against the firm prejudices, the
vast accumulated interests that grind race against race. We had no
common purpose at all at that conference, no proposal to hold us
together. So much of it was like bleating on a hillside....
I wanted a holiday badly, and then came this war crisis and I felt
unable to go away for any length of time. Even bleating it seemed to me
was better than acquiescence in a crime against humanity. So to get
heart to bleat at Milan I snatched at ten days in the Swiss mountains en
route. A tour with some taciturn guide involving a few middling climbs
and glacier excursions seemed the best way of recuperating. I had never
had any time for Switzerland since my first exile there years ago. I
took the advice of a man in the club whose name I now forget--if ever I
knew it, a dark man with a scar--and went up to the Schwarzegg Hut above
Grindelwald, and over the Strahlegg to the Grimsel. I had never been up
into the central mass of the Bernese Oberland before, and I was amazed
and extraordinarily delighted by the vast lonely beauty of those
interminable uplands of ice. I wished I could have lingered up there.
But that is the tragedy of those sunlit desolations; one may not stay;
one sees and exclaims and then looks at a watch. I wonder no one has
ever taken an arctic equipment up into that wilderness, and had a good
healing spell of lonely exaltation. I found the descent from the
Strahlegg as much of a climb as I was disposed to undertake; for an hour
we were coming down frozen snow that wasn't so much a slope as a
slightly inclined precipice....
From the Grimsel I went over the Rhone glacier to the inn on the Furka
Pass, and then, paying off my guide and becoming frankly a pedestrian, I
made my way round by the Schöllenen gorge to Goeschenen, and over the
Susten Joch to the Susten Pass and Stein, meaning to descend to
Meiringen.
But I still had four days before I went on to Italy, and so I decided to
take one more mountain. I slept at the Stein inn, and started in the
morning to do that agreeable first mountain of all, the Titlis, whose
shining genial head attracted me. I did not think a guide necessary, but
a boy took me up by a track near Gadmen, and left me to my Siegfried map
some way up the great ridge of rocks that overlooks the Engstlen Alp. I
a little overestimated my mountaineering, and it came about that I was
benighted while I was still high above the Joch Pass on my descent. Some
of this was steep and needed caution. I had to come down slowly with my
folding lantern, in which a reluctant candle went out at regular
intervals, and I did not reach the little inn at Engstlen Alp until long
after eleven at night. By that time I was very tired and hungry.
They told me I was lucky to get a room, only one stood vacant; I should
certainly not have enjoyed sleeping on a billiard table after my day's
work, and I ate a hearty supper, smoked for a time, meditated emptily,
and went wearily to bed.
But I could not sleep. Usually, I am a good sleeper, but ever and again
when I have been working too closely or over-exerting myself I have
spells of wakefulness, and that night after perhaps an hour's heavy
slumber I became thinly alert and very weary in body and spirit, and I
do not think I slept again. The pain in my leg that the panther had torn
had been revived by the day's exertion. For the greater part of my life
insomnia has not been disagreeable to me. In the night, in the
stillness, one has a kind of detachment from reality, one floats there
without light, without weight, feeling very little of one's body. One
has a certain disembodiment and one can achieve a magnanimity of
thought, forgiveness and self-forgetfulness that are impossible while
the body clamors upon one's senses. But that night, because, I suppose,
I was so profoundly fatigued, I was melancholy and despondent. I could
feel again the weight of the great beast upon me as he clawed me down
and I clung--desperately, in that interminable instant before he lost
his hold....
Yes, I was extraordinarily wretched that night. I was filled with
self-contempt and self-disgust. I felt that I was utterly weak and vain,
and all the pretensions and effort of my life mere florid, fruitless
pretensions and nothing more. I had lost all control over my mind.
Things that had seemed secondary before became primary, difficult things
became impossible things. I had been greatly impeded and irritated in
London by the manoeuvres of a number of people who were anxious to make
capital out of the crisis, self-advertising people who wanted at any
cost to be lifted into a position of unique protest.... You see, that
unfortunate Nobel prize has turned the advocacy of peace into a highly
speculative profession; the qualification for the winner is so vaguely
defined that a vast multitude of voluntary idealists has been created
and a still greater number diverted from the unendowed pursuit of human
welfare in other directions. Such a man as myself who is known to
command a considerable publicity is necessarily a prey to those moral
_entrepreneurs_. All sorts of ridiculous and petty incidents had forced
this side of public effort upon me, but hitherto I had been able to say,
with a laugh or sigh as the case warranted, "So much is dear old
humanity and all of us"; and to remember the great residuum of nobility
that remained. Now that last saving consideration refused to be
credible. I lay with my body and my mind in pain thinking these people
over, thinking myself over too with the rest of my associates, thinking
drearily and weakly, recalling spites, dishonesties and vanities, feuds
and absurdities, until I was near persuaded that all my dreams of wider
human understandings, of great ends beyond the immediate aims and
passions of common everyday lives, could be at best no more than the
refuge of shy and weak and ineffective people from the failure of their
personal lives....
We idealists are not jolly people, not honest simple people; the strain
tells upon us; even to ourselves we are unappetizing. Aren't the burly,
bellowing fellows after all righter, with their simple natural hostility
to everything foreign, their valiant hatred of everything unlike
themselves, their contempt for aspiring weakness, their beer and lush
sentiment, their here-to-day-and-gone-tomorrow conviviality and
fellowship? Good fellows! While we others, lost in filmy speculations,
in moon-and-star snaring and the chase of dreams, stumble where even
they walk upright....
You know I have never quite believed in myself, never quite believed in
my work or my religion. So it has always been with me and always, I
suppose, will be. I know I am purblind, I know I do not see my way
clearly nor very far; I have to do with things imperfectly apprehended.
I cannot cheat my mind away from these convictions. I have a sort of
hesitation of the soul as other men have a limp in their gait. God, I
suppose, has a need for lame men. God, I suppose, has a need for blind
men and fearful and doubting men, and does not intend life to be
altogether swallowed up in staring sight. Some things are to be reached
best by a hearing that is not distracted by any clearer senses. But so
it is with me, and this is the innermost secret I have to tell you.
I go valiantly for the most part I know, but despair is always near to
me. In the common hours of my life it is as near as a shark may be near
a sleeper in a ship; the thin effectual plank of my deliberate faith
keeps me secure, but in these rare distresses of the darkness the plank
seems to become transparent, to be on the verge of dissolution, a sense
of life as of an abyssmal flood, full of cruelty, densely futile,
blackly aimless, penetrates my defences....
I don't think I can call these stumblings from conviction unbelief; the
limping man walks for all his limping, and I go on in spite of my falls.
"Though he slay me yet will I trust in him...."
I fell into an inconsecutive review of my life under this light that
touched every endeavor with the pale tints of failure. And as that flow
of melancholy reflection went on, it was shot more and more frequently
with thoughts of Mary. It was not a discursive thinking about Mary but a
definite fixed direction of thought towards her. I had not so thought of
her for many years. I wanted her, I felt, to come to me and help me out
of this distressful pit into which my spirit had fallen. I believed she
could. I perceived our separation as an irreparable loss. She had a
harder, clearer quality than I, a more assured courage, a readier, surer
movement of the mind. Always she had "lift" for me. And then I had a
curious impression that I had heard her voice calling my name, as one
might call out in one's sleep. I dismissed it as an illusion, and then I
heard it again. So clearly that I sat up and listened--breathless....
Mixed up with all this was the intolerable uproar and talking of a
little cascade not fifty yards from the hotel. It is curious how
distressing that clamor of running water, which is so characteristic of
the Alpine night, can become. At last those sounds can take the likeness
of any voice whatever. The water, I decided, had called to me, and now
it mocked and laughed at me....
The next morning I descended at some late hour by Swiss reckoning, and
discovered two ladies in the morning sunlight awaiting breakfast at a
little green table. One rose slowly at the sight of me, and stood and
surveyed me with a glad amazement.
§ 2
There she stood real and solid, a little unfamiliar in her tweeds and
with her shining eyes intimate and unforgettable, as though I had never
ceased to see them for all those intervening years. And bracing us both
and holding back our emotion was, quite unmistakably, Miss Summersley
Satchel, a blonde business-like young woman with a stumpy nose very
cruelly corrugated and inflamed by a pince-nez that savagely did much
more than its duty by its name. She remained seated, tilting her chair
a little, pushing herself back from the table and regarding
me--intelligently.
It was one of those moments in life when one is taken unawares. I think
our common realization of the need of masking the reality of our
encounter, the hasty search in our minds for some plausible face upon
this meeting, must have been very obvious to the lady who observed us.
Mary's first thought was for a pseudonym. Mine was to make it plain we
met by accident.
"It's Mr.--Stephen!" said Mary.
"It's you!"
"Dropped out of the sky!"
"From over there. I was benighted and go there late."
"Very late?"
"One gleam of light--and a yawning waiter. Or I should have had to break
windows.... And then I meet you!"
Then for a moment or so we were silent, with our sense of the immense
gravity of this position growing upon us. A little tow-headed waiter-boy
appeared with their coffee and rolls on a tray poised high on his hand.
"You'll have your coffee out here with us?" said Mary.
"Where else?" said I, as though there was no conceivable alternative,
and told the tow-headed waiter.
Belatedly Mary turned to introduce me to her secretary: "My friend Miss
Summersley Satchel. Mr.--Stephen." Miss Satchel and I bowed to each
other and agreed that the lake was very beautiful in the morning light.
"Mr. Stephen," said Mary, in entirely unnecessary explanation, "is an
old friend of my mother's. And I haven't seen him for years. How is
Mrs. Stephen--and the children?"
I answered briefly and began to tell of my climb down the Titlis. I
addressed myself with unnecessary explicitness to Miss Satchel. I did
perhaps over-accentuate the extreme fortuitousness of my appearance....
From where I stood, the whole course of the previous day after I had
come over the shoulder was visible. It seemed a soft little shining
pathway to the top, but the dangers of the descent had a romantic
intensification in the morning light. "The rule of the game," said I,
"is that one stops and waits for daylight. I wonder if anyone keeps that
rule."
We talked for a time of mountains, I still standing a little aloof until
my coffee came. Miss Summersley Satchel produced that frequent and most
unpleasant bye-product of a British education, an intelligent interest
in etymology. "I wonder," she said, with a brow of ruffled omniscience
and eyeing me rather severely with a magnified eye, "why it is _called_
Titlis. There must be _some_ reason...."
Presently Miss Satchel was dismissed indoors on a transparent excuse and
Mary and I were alone together. We eyed one another gravely. Perhaps all
the more gravely because of the wild excitement that was quickening our
pulse and breathing, and thrilling through our nerves. She pushed back
the plate before her and put her dear elbows on the table and dropped
her chin between her hands in an attitude that seemed all made of little
memories.
"I suppose," she said, "something of this kind was bound to happen."
She turned her eyes to the mountains shining in the morning light. "I'm
glad it has happened in a beautiful place. It might have
been--anywhere."
"Last night," I said, "I was thinking of you and wanting to hear your
voice again. I thought I did."
"I too. I wonder--if we had some dim perception...."
She scanned my face. "Stephen, you're not much changed. You're looking
well.... But your eyes--they're dog-tired eyes. Have you been working
too hard?"
"A conference--what did you call them once?--a Carnegieish conference in
London. Hot weather and fussing work and endless hours of weak grey
dusty speeches, and perhaps that clamber over there yesterday was too
much. It _was_ too much. In India I damaged a leg.... I had meant to
rest here for a day."
"Well,--rest here."
"With you!"
"Why not? Now you are here."
"But---- After all, we've promised."
"It's none of our planning, Stephen."
"It seems to me I ought to go right on--so soon as breakfast is over."
She weighed that with just the same still pause, the same quiet moment
of lips and eyes that I recalled so well. It was as things had always
been between us that she should make her decision first and bring me to
it.
"It isn't natural," she decided, "with the sun rising and the day still
freshly beginning that you should go or that I should go. I've wanted to
meet you like this and talk about things,--ten thousand times. And as
for me Stephen I _won't_ go. And I won't let you go if I can help it.
Not this morning, anyhow. No. Go later in the day if you will, and let
us two take this one talk that God Himself has given us. We've not
planned it. It's His doing, not ours."
I sat, yielding. "I am not so sure of God's participation," I said. "But
I know I am very tired, and glad to be with you. I can't tell you how
glad. So glad---- I think I should weep if I tried to say it...."
"Three, four, five hours perhaps--even if people know. Is it so much
worse than thirty minutes? We've broken the rules already; we've been
flung together; it's not our doing, Stephen. A little while longer--adds
so little to the offence and means to us----"
"Yes," I said, "but--if Justin knows?"
"He won't."
"Your companion?"
There was the briefest moment of reflection. "She's discretion itself,"
she said.
"Still----"
"If he's going to know the harm is done. We may as well be hung for a
sheep as a lamb. And he won't know. No one will know."
"The people here."
"Nobody's here. Not a soul who matters. I doubt if they know my name....
No one ever talks to me."
I sat in the bright sunshine, profoundly enervated and quite convinced,
but still maintaining out of mere indolence a show of hesitation....
"You take the good things God sends you, Stephen--as I do. You stay and
talk with me now, before the curtain falls again. We've tired of
letters. You stay and talk to me.
"Here we are, Stephen, and it's the one chance that is ever likely to
come to us in all our lives. We'll keep the point of honor; and you
shall go to-day. But don't let's drive the point of honor into the
quick. Go easy Stephen, old friend.... My dear, my dear! What has
happened to you? Have you forgotten? Of course! Is it possible for you
to go, mute, with so much that we can say.... And these mountains and
this sunlight!..."
I looked up to see her with her elbows on the table and her hands
clasped under her chin; that face close to mine, her dear blue eyes
watching me and her lips a little apart.
No other human being has ever had that effect upon me, so that I seem to
feel the life and stir in that other body more than I feel my own.
§ 3
From the moment when I confessed my decision to stay we gave no further
thought to the rightfulness or wisdom of spending the next few hours
together. We thought only of those hours. Things lent themselves to us.
We stood up and walked out in front of the hotel and there moored to a
stake at the edge of the water was a little leaky punt, the one vessel
on the Engstlen See. We would take food with us as we decided and row
out there to where the vast cliffs came sheer from the water, out of
earshot or interference and talk for all the time we had. And I remember
now how Mary stood and called to Miss Satchel's window to tell her of
this intention, and how I discovered again that exquisite slender grace
I knew so well.
You know the very rowing out from the shore had in it something sweet
and incredible. It was as if we were but dreaming together and might at
any moment awaken again, countless miles and a thousand things apart. I
rowed slowly with those clumsy Swiss oars that one must thrust forward,
breaking the smooth crystal of the lake, and she sat sideways looking
forward, saying very little and with much the same sense I think of
enchantment and unreality. And I saw now for the first time as I watched
her over my oars that her face was changed; she was graver and, I
thought, stronger than the Mary I had known.
Even now I can still doubt if that boat and lake were real. And yet I
remember even minute and irrelevant details of the day's impressions
with an extraordinary and exquisite vividness. Perhaps it is that very
luminous distinctness which distinguishes these events from the common
experiences of life and puts them so above the quality of things that
are ordinarily real.
We rowed slowly past a great headland and into the bay at the upper end
of the water. We had not realized at first that we could row beyond the
range of the hotel windows. The rock that comes out of the lake is a
clear dead white when it is dry, and very faintly tinted, but when it is
wetted it lights warmly with flashes and blotches of color, and is seen
to be full of the most exquisite and delicate veins. It splinters
vertically and goes up in cliffs, very high and sculptured, with a
quality almost of porcelain, that at a certain level suddenly become
more rude and massive and begin to overhang. Under the cliffs the water
is very deep and blue-green, and runs here and there into narrow clefts.
This place where we landed was a kind of beach left by the recession of
the ice, all the rocks immediately about us were ice-worn, and the place
was paved with ice-worn boulders. Two huge bluffs put their foreheads
together above us and hid the glacier from us, but one could feel the
near presence of ice in the air. Out between them boiled a little
torrent, and spread into a hundred intercommunicating channels amidst
the great pebbles. And those pebbles were covered by a network of
marvellously gnarled and twisted stems bearing little leaves and
blossoms, a network at once very ancient and very fresh, giving a
peculiar gentleness and richness to the Alpine severity that had dwarfed
and tangled them. It was astounding that any plant could find
nourishment among those stones. The great headland, with patches of
yellowish old snow still lingering here and there upon its upper masses,
had crept insensibly between us and the remote hotel and now hid it
altogether. There was nothing to remind us of the world that had
separated us, except that old and leaky boat we had drawn up upon the
stones at the limpid water's edge.
"It is as if we had come out of life together," she whispered, giving a
voice to my thought.
She sat down upon a boulder and I sat on a lower slab a yard or so away,
and we looked at one another. "It's still unreal," she said.
I felt awkward and at a loss as I sat there before her, as a man unused
to drawing-rooms might feel in the presence of a strange hostess.
"You are so _you_," I said; "so altogether my nearest thing--and so
strange too, so far off, that I feel--shy....
"I'm shy," I repeated. "I feel that if I speak loudly all this will
vanish...."
I looked about me. "But surely this is the most beautiful place in the
whole world! Is it indeed in the world?"
"Stephen, my dear," she began presently, "what a strange thing life is!
Strange! The disproportions! The things that will not fit together. The
little things that eat us up, and the beautiful things that might save
us and don't save us, don't seem indeed to have any meaning in regard to
ordinary sensible affairs.... This _beauty_....
"Do you remember, Stephen, how long ago in the old park you and I talked
about immortality and you said then you did not want to know anything of
what comes after life. Even now do you want to know? You are too busy
and I am not busy enough. I want to be sure, not only to know, but to
know that it is so, that this life--no, not _this_ life, but that life,
is only the bleak twilight of the morning. I think death--just dead
death--after the life I have had is the most impossible of ends.... You
don't want--particularly? I want to passionately. I _want_ to live
again--out of this body, Stephen, and all that it carves with it, to be
free--as beautiful things are free. To be free as this is free--an
exquisite clean freedom....
"I can't believe that the life of this earth is all that there is for
us--or why should we ever think it strange? Why should we still find the
ordinary matter-of-fact things of everyday strange? We do--because they
aren't--_us_.... Eating. Stuffing into ourselves thin slices of what
were queer little hot and eager beasts.... The perpetual need to do such
things. And all the mad fury of sex, Stephen!... We don't live, we
suffocate in our living bodies. They storm and rage and snatch; it isn't
_us_, Stephen, really. It can't be us. It's all so excessive--if it is
anything more than the first furious rush into existence of beings that
will go on--go on at last to quite beautiful real things. Like this
perhaps. To-day the world is beautiful indeed with the sun shining and
love shining and you, my dear, so near to me.... It's so incredible that
you and I must part to-day. It's as if--someone told me the sun was a
little mad. It's so perfectly natural to be with you again...."
Her voice sank. She leant a little forward towards me. "Stephen, suppose
that you and I were dead to-day. Suppose that when you imagined you were
climbing yesterday, you died. Suppose that yesterday you died and that
you just thought you were still climbing as you made your way to me.
Perhaps you are dead up there on the mountain and I am lying dead in my
room in this hotel, and this is the Great Beginning....
"Stephen, I am talking nonsense because I am so happy to be with you
here...."
§ 4
For a time we said very little. Then irregularly, disconnectedly, we
began to tell each other things about ourselves.
The substance of our lives seemed strangely objective that day; we had
as it were come to one another clean out of our common conditions. She
told me of her troubles and her secret weaknesses; we bared our spirits
and confessed. Both of us had the same tale of mean and angry and hasty
impulses, both of us could find kindred inconsistencies, both had an
exalted assurance that the other would understand completely and forgive
and love. She talked for the most part, she talked much more than I,
with a sort of wonder at the things that had happened to her, and for
long spaces we did not talk at all nor feel the need of talking, and
what seems very strange to me now, seeing that we had been impassioned
lovers, we never kissed; we never kissed at all; I do not even remember
that I thought of kissing her. We had a shyness between us that kept us
a little apart, and I cannot remember that we ever touched one another
except that for a time she took me and led me by the hand towards a
little place of starry flowers that had drawn her eyes and which she
wished me to see. Already for us two our bodies were dead and gone. We
were shy, shy of any contact, we were a little afraid of one another,
there was a kind of awe between us that we had met again.
And in that strange and beautiful place her fancy that we were dead
together had a fitness that I cannot possibly convey to you. I cannot
give you by any writing the light and the sweet freshness of that high
desolation. You would need to go there. What was lovely in our talk,
being said in that setting, would seem but a rambling discourse were I
to write it down,--as I believe that even now I could write it
down--word for word almost, every thought of it, so fresh does it remain
with me....
My dear, some moments are eternal. It seems to me that as I write to
tell you of this I am telling you not of something that happened two
years ago but of a thing immortal. It is as if I and Mary were together
there holding the realities of our lives before us as though they were
little sorry tales written in books upon our knees....
§ 5
It was still in the early afternoon that we came down again across the
meandering ice-water streams to our old boat, and pushed off and rowed
slowly out of that magic corner back to every-day again....
Little we knew to what it was we rowed.
As we glided across the water and rounded the headland and came slowly
into view of the hotel again, Mary was reminded of our parting and for a
little while she was disposed to make me remain. "If you could stay a
little longer," she said,--"Another day? If any harm is done, it's
done."
"It has been beautiful," I said, "this meeting. It's just as if--when I
was so jaded and discouraged that I could have put my work aside and
despaired altogether,--some power had said, 'Have you forgotten the
friendship I gave you?' ... But we shall have had our time. We've
met,--we've seen one another, we've heard one another. We've hurt no
one...."
"You will go?"
"To-day. Before sunset. Isn't it right that I should go?"
"Stay," she whispered, with a light in her eyes.
"No. I dare not."
She did not speak for a long time.
"Of course," she said at last, "you're right. You only said--I would
have said it for you if you had not. You're so right, Stephen.... I
suppose, poor silly little things, that if you stayed we should
certainly begin making love to each other. It would be--necessary. We
should fence about a little and then there it would be. No barrier--to
stop us. And neither of us wants it to happen. It isn't what we want.
You would become urgent, I suppose, and I should be--coquettish. In
spite of ourselves that power would make us puppets. As if already we
hadn't made love.... I could find it in my heart now.... Stephen I could
_make_ you stay....
"Oh! Why are we so tormented, Stephen? In the next world we shall meet,
and this will trouble us no longer. The love will be there--oh, the love
will be there, like something that has at last got itself fully born,
got itself free from some queer clinging seed-case....
"We shall be rid of jealousy, Stephen, that inflammation of the mind,
that bitterness, that pitiless sore, so that I shan't be tormented by
the thought of Rachel and she will be able to tolerate me. She was so
sweet and wonderful a girl--with those dark eyes. And I've never done
her justice--never. Nor she me. I snatched you from her. I snatched
you....
"Someday we shall be different.... All this putting oneself round
another person like a fence, against everyone else, almost against
everything else; it's so wicked, so fierce.
"It's so possible to be different. Sometimes now, sometimes for long
parts of a day I have no base passions at all--even in this life. To be
like that always! But I can't see clearly how these things can be; one
dreams of them in a kind of luminous mist, and if one looks directly at
them, they vanish again...."
§ 6
And at last we came to the landing, and moored the little boat and
walked up the winding path to the hotel. The dull pain of separation was
already upon us.
I think we had forgotten Miss Summersley Satchel altogether. But she
appeared as we sat down to tea at that same table at which we had
breakfasted, and joined us as a matter of course. Conceivably she found
the two animated friends of the morning had become rather taciturn.
Indeed there came a lapse of silence so portentous that I roused myself
to effort and told her, all over again, as I realized afterwards, the
difficulties that had benighted me upon Titlis. Then Miss Satchel
regaled Mary with some particulars of the various comings and goings of
the hotel. I became anxious to end this tension and went into the inn to
pay my bill and get my knapsack. When I came out Mary stood up.
"I'll come just a little way with you, Stephen," she said, and I could
have fancied the glasses of the companion flashed to hear the surname of
the morning reappear a Christian name in the afternoon....
"Is that woman behind us safe?" I asked, breaking the silence as we went
up the mountain-side.
Mary looked over her shoulder for a contemplative second.
"She's always been--discretion itself."
We thought no more of Miss Satchel.
"This parting," said Mary, "is the worst of the price we have to
pay.... Now it comes to the end there seem a thousand things one hasn't
said...."
And presently she came back to that. "We shan't remember this so much
perhaps. It was there we met, over there in the sunlight--among those
rocks. I suppose--perhaps--we managed to say something...."
As the ascent grew steeper it became clear that if I was to reach the
Melch See Inn by nightfall, our moment for parting had come. And with a
"Well," and a white-lipped smile and a glance at the Argus-eyed hotel,
she held out her hand to me. "I shall live on this, brother Stephen,"
she said, "for years."
"I too," I answered....
It was wonderful to stand and face her there, and see her real and
living with the warm sunlight on her, and her face one glowing
tenderness. We clasped hands; all the warm life of our hands met and
clung and parted.
I went on alone up the winding path,--it zigzags up the mountain-side in
full sight of the hotel for the better part of an hour--climbing
steadily higher and looking back and looking back until she was just a
little strip of white--that halted and seemed to wave to me. I waved
back and found myself weeping. "You fool!" I said to myself, "Go on";
and it was by an effort that I kept on my way instead of running back to
her again. Presently the curvature of the slope came up between us and
hid her altogether, hid the hotel, hid the lakes and the cliffs....
It seemed to me that I could not possibly see her any more. It was as if
I knew that sun had set for ever.
§ 7
I lay at the Melch See Inn that night, and rose betimes and started down
that wild grey gorge in the early morning light. I walked to Sachseln,
caught an early train to Lucerne and went on in the afternoon to Como.
And there I stayed in the sunshine taking a boat and rowing alone far up
the lake and lying in it, thinking of love and friendship and the
accidents and significance of my life, and for the most part not
thinking at all but feeling, feeling the glow of our meeting and the
finality of our separation, as one feels the clear glow of a sunset when
the wind rises and the cold night draws near. Everything was pervaded by
the sense of her. Just over those mountains, I thought, is Mary. I was
alone in my boat, but her presence filled the sky. It seemed to me that
at any moment I could go to her. And the last vestige of any cloud
between us for anything we had done or failed to do in these crises of
distress and separation, had vanished and gone altogether.
In the afternoon I wrote to Rachel. I had not written to her for three
days, and even now I told her nothing of my meeting with Mary. I had not
written partly because I could not decide whether I should tell her of
that or not; in the end I tried to hide it from her. It seemed a little
thing in regard to her, a thing that could not hurt her, a thing as
detached from her life and as inconsecutive as a dream in my head.
Three days later I reached Milan, a day before the formal opening of the
Peace Congress. But I found a telegram had come that morning to the
Poste Restante to banish all thought of my pacific mission from my
mind. It came from Paris and its blue ribbon of text ran:
_"Come back at once to London. Justin has been told of our meeting
and is resolved upon divorce. Will do all in my power to explain
and avert but feel you should know at once."_
There are some things so monstrously destructive to all we hold dear
that for a time it is impossible to believe them. I remember now that as
I read that amazing communication through--at the first reading it was a
little difficult to understand because the Italian operator had guessed
at one or two of the words, no real sense of its meaning came to me.
That followed sluggishly. I felt as one might feel when one opens some
offensive anonymous letter or hears some preposterous threat.
"What _nonsense_!" I said, faint-heartedly. I stood for a time at my
bedroom window trying to shake this fact altogether off my mind. But it
stayed, and became more and more real. Suddenly with a start I perceived
it was real. I had to do things forthwith.
I rang the bell and asked for an _Orario_. "I shan't want these rooms. I
have to go back to England," I said. "Yes,--I have had bad news." ...
§ 8
"We've only got to explain," I told myself a hundred times during that
long sleepless journey. The thundering wheels so close beneath my head
echoed: "Explain. Oh yes! Explain! Explain! Explain!"
And something, a voice to which I would not listen, urged: "Suppose
they do not choose to believe what you explain."
When I sat face to face with Maxwell Hartington, my solicitor, in his
ink-splashed, dirty, yellow-grained room with its rows of black tin
boxes, I could no longer ignore that possibility. Maxwell Hartington sat
back in his chair after his fashion, listening to my story, breathing
noisily through his open mouth, perspiring little beads and looking more
out of condition than ever. I never knew a man so wine-sodden and so
sharp-witted.
"That's all very well, Stratton," he said, "between ourselves. Very
unfortunate and all that sort of thing. But it doesn't satisfy Justin
evidently; and we've got to put a different look on it if we can, before
we go before a jury: You see----" He seemed to be considering and
rejecting unpalatable phrases "They won't understand."
"But," I said, "after all--, a mere chance of the same hotel. There must
be more evidence than that."
"You spent the night in adjacent rooms," he said dryly.
"Adjacent rooms!" I cried.
He regarded me for a moment with something bordering on admiration.
"Didn't you know?" he said.
"No."
"They've routed that out. You were sleeping with your two heads within a
yard of one another anyhow. Thirty-six you had, and she had
thirty-seven."
"But," I said and stopped.
Maxwell Hartington's admiration gave place I think to a slight
resentment at my sustained innocence. "And Lady Mary changed rooms with
her secretary two nights before--to be near the vacant room. The
secretary went into number 12 on the floor below,--a larger room, at
thirteen francs a day, and one not exposed to the early daylight...."
He turned over a paper on his desk. "You didn't know, of course," he
said. "But what I want to have"--and his voice grew wrathful--"is sure
evidence that you didn't know. No jury on earth is going to believe you
didn't know. No jury!---- Why,"--his mask dropped--"no man on earth is
going to believe a yarn like that! If that's all you have, Stratton----"
§ 9
Our London house was not shut up--two servants were there on board-wages
against the possibility of such a temporary return as I was now
making--Rachel was away with you three children at Cromingham. I had not
told her I was returning to London, and I had put up at one of my clubs.
Until I had had a second interview with Maxwell Hartington I still would
not let myself think that it was possible that Mary and I would fail
with our explanations. We had the common confidence of habitually
unchallenged people that our word would be accepted. I had hoped indeed
to get the whole affair settled and abolished without anything of it
coming to Rachel's ears. Then at my leisure I should be able to tell her
exactly how things had come about. But each day made it clearer that
things were not going to be settled, that the monstrous and the
incredible was going to happen and that Justin had set his mind
implacably upon a divorce. My sense of complete innocence had already
been shaken by Maxwell Hartington; I had come to perceive that we had
been amazingly indiscreet, I was beginning to think we had been
criminally indiscreet.
I saw Maxwell Hartington for a second time, and it became clear to me I
must abandon any hope of keeping things further from Rachel. I took my
luggage round to my house, to the great astonishment of the two
servants,--they had supposed of course that I was in Italy--and then
went down on the heels of a telegram to Rachel. I forget the wording of
that telegram, but it was as little alarming as possible; I think I said
something about "back in London for documents; shall try to get down to
you." I did not specify any particular train or indeed state definitely
that I was coming that day.
I had never been to Cromingham before. I went to the house you occupied
on the Esplanade and learnt that you were all upon the beach. I walked
along the sea-wall scrutinizing the various bright groups of children
and nursemaids and holiday people that were scattered over the sands. It
was a day of blazing sunshine, and, between the bright sky and the
silver drabs of the sand stretched the low levels of a sea that had its
customary green-grey touched for once with something of the sapphire
glow of the Mediterranean. Here and there were gay little umbrella tents
or canvas shelters, and a bather or so and pink and white wading
children broke the dazzling edge of foam. And I sought you with a kind
of reluctance as though finding you would bring nearer the black
irrational disaster that hung over us all.
And when I found you at last you were all radiantly happy and healthy,
the prettiest of families, and only your mother was touched with any
gravity deeper than the joy of sunshine and sea. You and Mademoiselle
Potin--in those days her ministrations were just beginning--were busy
constructing a great sea-wall that should really and truly stop the
advancing tide. Rachel Two was a little apart, making with infinite
contentment an endless multitude of conical sand pies with her little
tin pail. Margaret, a pink inarticulate lump, scrabbled in the warm sand
under Jessica's care. Your mother sat and watched you--thoughtfully. And
before any of you knew that I was there my shadow fell across you all.
You accepted my appearance when I ought to have been in Italy with the
unquestioning confidence with which you still take all my comings and
goings. For you, Italy, America, any place is just round the corner. I
was kissed with affection but haste, and you got back to your sand-works
as speedily as possible. I inspected Rachel Two's mounds,--she was
giving them the names of her various aunts and uncles--and patted the
crowing Margaret, who ignored me. Rachel had sprung to her feet and
kissed me and now hovered radiant over me as I caressed you youngsters.
It was all so warm, so real, that for an instant the dark threat that
hung over us all vanished from my skies, to return with the force of a
blow.
"And what has brought you back?" said Rachel. "I had expected a month of
widowhood. What can have brought you back?"
The dancing gladness in her eyes vanished swiftly as she waited for an
answer to her question. She caught the note of tragedy from my face.
"Why have you come back from Italy?" she asked in an altered voice.
"Rachel," I said taking her arm, with a desolating sense of the
futility in my gesture of protection; "let us walk along the beach. I
want to tell you something---- Something rather complicated."
"Is there going to be war, Stephen?" she asked abruptly.
It seemed then that this question which merely concerned the welfare of
a hundred million people or so and pain, destruction and disaster beyond
measure, was the most trivial of digressions.
"No," I said. "I haven't thought about the war."
"But I thought--you were thinking of nothing else."
"This has put it out of my head. It's something---- Something disastrous
to us."
"Something has happened to our money?"
"I wish that was all."
"Then what is it?" Her mind flashed out. "It has something to do with
Mary Justin."
"How did you know that?"
"I guessed."
"Well. It is. You see--in Switzerland we met."
"You _met_!"
"By accident. She had been staying at the hotel on Engstlen Alp."
"You slept there!" cried Rachel.
"I didn't know she was in the hotel until the next day."
"And then you came away!"
"That day."
"But you talked together?"
"Yes."
"And for some reason---- You never told me, Stephen! You never told me.
And you met. But---- Why is this, disaster?"
"Because Justin knows and he means to divorce her--and it may be he
will succeed...."
Rachel's face had become white, for some time she said nothing. Then
slowly, "And if he had not known and done that--I should never have
known."
I had no answer to make to that. It was true. Rachel's face was very
still, and her eyes stared at the situation laid bare to her.
"When you began," she choked presently, "when she wrote--I knew--I
felt----"
She ceased for fear she might weep, and for a time we walked in silence.
"I suppose," she said desperately at last, "he will get his divorce."
"I am afraid he will."
"There's no evidence--you didn't...."
"No."
"And I never dreamt----!"
Then her passion tore at her. "Stephen my dear," she wept, "you didn't?
you didn't? Stephen, indeed you didn't, did you? You kept faith with me
as a husband should. It was an accident--a real accident--and there was
no planning for you to meet together. It was as you say? I've never
doubted your word ever--I've never doubted you."
Well, at any rate I could answer that plainly, and I did.
"And you know, Stephen," she said, "I believe you. And I _can't_ believe
you. My heart is tormented. Why did you write to her? Why did you two
write and go on writing? And why did you tell me nothing of that
meeting? I believe you because I can't do anything but believe you. It
would kill me not to believe you in a thing that came so near to us. And
yet, there it is, like a knife being twisted in my heart--that you met.
Should I have known of your meeting, Stephen--ever? I know I'm talking
badly for you.... But this thing strikes me suddenly. Out of this clear
beautiful sky! And the children there--so happy in the sunshine! I was
so happy. So happy. With you coming.... It will mean shames and
law-courts and newspapers, losses of friends, losses of money and
freedom.... My mother and my people!... And you and all the work you
do!... People will never forget it, never forgive it. They will say you
promised.... If she had never written, if she had kept to her
bargain----"
"We should still have met."
"Stephen!... Stephen, you must bear with me...."
"This is a thing," I said, "that falls as you say out of the sky. It
seemed so natural--for her to write.... And the meeting ... it is like
some tremendous disaster of nature. I do not feel I have deserved it. It
is--irrational. But there it is, little Rachel of my heart, and we have
to face it. Whatever happens we have to go on. It doesn't alter the work
we have to do. If it clips our wings--we have to hop along with clipped
wings.... For you--I wish it could spare you. And she--she too is a
victim, Rachel."
"She need not have written," said Rachel. "She need not have written.
And then if you had met----"
She could not go on with that.
"It is so hard," I said, "to ask you to be just to her--and me. I wish I
could have come to you and married you--without all that legacy--of
things remembered.... I was what I was.... One can't shake off a thing
in one's blood. And besides--besides----"
I stopped helplessly.
§ 10
And then Mary came herself to tell me there would be no divorce.
She came to me unexpectedly. I had returned to town that evening, and
next morning as I was sitting down in my study to answer some
unimportant questions Maxwell Hartington had sent me, my parlormaid
appeared. "Can you speak," she asked, "to Lady Mary Justin?"
I stood up to receive my visitor.
She came in, a tall dark figure, and stood facing me in silence until
the door had closed behind her. Her face was white and drawn and very
grave. She stooped a little, I could see she had had no sleep, never
before had I seen her face marked by pain. And she hesitated.... "My
dear!" I said; "why have you come to me?"
I put a chair for her and she sat down.
For a moment she controlled herself with difficulty. She put her hand
over her eyes, she seemed on the verge of bitter weeping....
"I came," she said at last.... "I came. I had to come ... to see you."
I sat down in a chair beside her.
"It wasn't wise," I said. "But--never mind. You look so tired, my dear!"
She sat quite still for a little while.
Then she moved her arm as though she felt for me blindly, and I put my
arms about her and drew her head to my shoulder and she wept....
"I knew," she sobbed, "if I came to you...."
Presently her weeping was over.
"Get me a little cold water, Stephen," she said. "Let me have a little
cold water on my face. I've got my courage now again. Just then,--I was
down too low. Yes--cold water. Because I want to tell you--things you
will be glad to hear."
"You see, Stephen," she said--and now all her self-possession had
returned; "there mustn't be a divorce. I've thought it all out. And
there needn't be a divorce."
"Needn't be?"
"No."
"What do you mean?"
"I can stop it."
"But how?"
"I can stop it. I can manage---- I can make a bargain.... It's very
sweet, dear Stephen, to be here talking to you again."
She stood up.
"Sit at your desk, my dear," she said. "I'm all right now. That water
was good. How good cold things can be! Sit down at your desk and let me
sit here. And then I will talk to you. I've had such a time, my dear.
Ah!"
She paused and stuck her elbows on the desk and looked me in the eyes.
And suddenly that sweet, frank smile of hers swept like sunshine across
the wintry desolation of her face. "We've both been having a time," she
said. "This odd little world,--it's battered us with its fists. For such
a little. And we were both so ridiculously happy. Do you remember it,
the rocks and the sunshine and all those twisted and tangled little
plants? And how the boat leaked and you baled it out! And the parting,
and how you trudged up that winding path away from me! A grey figure
that stopped and waved--a little figure--such a virtuous figure! And
then, this storm! this _awful_ hullabaloo! Lawyers, curses, threats----.
And Stella Summersley Satchel like a Fury of denunciation. What hatred
that woman has hidden from me! It must have accumulated.... It's
terrible to think, Stephen, how much I must have tried her.... Oh! how
far away those Alps are now, Stephen! Like something in another life....
And here we are!--among the consequences."
"But,--you were saying we could stop the divorce."
"Yes. We can. I can. But I wanted to see you,--before I did. Somehow I
don't feel lonely with you. I had to see you.... It's good to see you."
She looked me in the face. Her tired eyes lit with a gleam of her former
humor.
"Have you thought," she asked, "of all that will happen if there is a
divorce?"
"I mean to fight every bit of it."
"They'll beat you."
"We'll see that."
"But they will. And then?"
"Why should one meet disaster half way?"
"Stephen!" she said; "what will happen to you when I am not here to make
you look at things? Because I shan't be here. Not within reach of
you.... There are times when I feel like a mother to you. Never more
than now...."
And then with rapid touches she began to picture the disaster before
me. She pictured the Court and our ineffectual denials, she made me
realize the storm of hostility that was bound to burst over us. "And
think of me," she said. "Stripped I shall be and outcast."
"Not while I live!"
"But what can you do for me? You will have Rachel. How can you stand by
me? You can't be cruel to Rachel. You know you can't be cruel to Rachel.
Look me in the face, Stephen; tell me. Yes.... Then how can you stand by
me?"
"Somehow!" I cried foolishly and stopped.
"They'll use me to break your back with costs and damages. There'll be
those children of yours to think of...."
"My God!" I cried aloud. "Why do you torment me? Haven't I thought
enough of those things?... Haven't I seen the ruin and the shame, the
hopeless trap, men's trust in me gone, my work scattered and ended
again, my children growing up to hear this and that exaggeration of our
story. And you----. All the bravery of your life scattered and wasted.
The thing will pursue us all, cling to us. It will be all the rest of
our lives for us...."
I covered my face with my hands.
When I looked up, her face was white and still, and full of a strange
tenderness. "I wouldn't have you, Stephen--I wouldn't have you be cruel
to Rachel.... I just wanted to know--something.... But we're wandering.
We're talking nonsense. Because as I said, there need be no divorce.
There will be no divorce at all. That's what I came to tell you. I shall
have to pay--in a way, Stephen.... Not impossibly. Don't think it is
anything impossible...."
Then she bit her lips and sat still....
"My dear," I whispered, "if we had taken one another at the
beginning...."
But she went on with her own thoughts.
"You love those little children of yours," she said. "And that trusting
girl-wife.... Of course you love them. They're yours. Oh! they're so
deeply--yours.... Yours...."
"Oh my dear! don't torture me! I do love them. But I love you too."
"No," she said, "not as you do them."
I made a movement of protest.
"No," she said, whitely radiant with a serenity I had never seen before
in her face. "You love me with your brain. With your soul if you like. I
_know_, my poor bleeding Stephen!--Aren't those tears there? Don't mind
my seeing them, Stephen.... Poor dear! Poor dear!.... You love _them_
with your inmost heart. Why should you mind that I see you do?... All my
life I've been wrong, Stephen, and now I know too late. It's the things
we own we love, the things we buy with our lives.... Always I have been
hard, I've been a little hard.... Stephen, my dear, I loved you, always
I have loved you, and always I have tried to keep myself.... It's too
late.... I don't know why I am talking like this.... But you see I can
make a bargain now--it's not an impossible bargain--and save you and
save your wife and save your children----"
"But how?" I said, still doubting.
"Never mind how, Stephen. Don't ask me how now. Nothing very difficult.
Easy. But I shall write you no more letters--see you--no more. Never.
And that's why I had to come, you see, why I was able to come to you,
just to see you and say good-bye to you, and take leave of you, dear
Love that I threw away and loved too late...."
She bit her lip and faced me there, a sweet flushed living thing, with a
tear coursing down her cheek, and her mouth now firm and steady.
"You can stop this divorce?" I said, "But how, Mary?"
"No, don't ask me how. At a price. It's a bargain. No, no! Don't think
that,--a bargain with Justin, but not degrading. Don't, my dear, let the
thought of it distress you. I have to give earnests.... Never, dear,
never through all the dusty rest of life again will you and I speak
together. Never! Even if we come face to face once more--no word...."
"Mary," I said, "what is it you have to do? You speak as if---- What is
it Justin demands?"
"No! do not ask me that.... Tell me--you see we've so much to talk
about, Stephen--tell me of all you are going to do. Everything. Because
I've got to make a great vow of renunciation--of you. Not to think
again--not even to think of you again.... No, no. I'm not even to look
for you in the papers any more. There's to be no tricks this time. And
so you see I want to fill up my mind with you. To store myself with you.
Tell me your work is worth it--that it's not like the work of everyone.
Tell me, Stephen--_that_. I want to believe that--tremendously. Don't be
modest now. That will be cruel. I want to believe that I am at last to
do something that is worth doing, something not fruitless...."
"Are you to go into seclusion," I asked suddenly, "to be a nun----?"
"It is something like that," she said; "very like that. But I have
promised--practically--not to tell you that. Tell me your soul, Stephen,
now. Give me something I may keep in my mind through--through all those
years of waiting...."
"But where?" I cried. "What years of waiting?"
"In a lonely place, my dear--among mountains. High and away. Very
beautiful, but lonely. A lake. Great rocks.... Yes,--like that place. So
odd.... I shall have so much time to think, and I shall have no
papers--no news. I mustn't talk to you of that. Don't let me talk to you
of that. I want to hear about this world, this world I am going to
leave, and how you think you are going on fighting in the hot and dusty
struggle--to make the world cool and kind and reasonable, to train minds
better, to broaden ideas ... all those things you believe in. All those
things you believe in and stick to--even when they are dull. Now I am
leaving it, I begin to see how fine it is--to fight as you want to
fight. A tiresome inglorious lifelong fight.... You really believe,
Stephen?"
§ 11
And then suddenly I read her purpose.
"Mary," I cried, and stood up and laid my hand upon her arm, "Tell me
what is it you mean to do. What do you mean to do?"
She looked up at me defensively and for a moment neither of us spoke.
"Mary," I said, and could not say what was in my thoughts.
"You are wrong," she lied at last....
She stood up too and faced me. I held her shoulder and looked into her
eyes.
The gong of my little clock broke the silence.
"I must go, Stephen," she said. "I did not see how the time was slipping
by."
I began to entreat her and she to deny. "You don't understand," she
said, "you don't understand. Stephen!--I had hoped you would understand.
You see life,--not as I see it. I wanted--all sorts of splendid things
and you--begin to argue. You are shocked, you refuse to understand....
No. No. Take your hands off me, Stephen dear, and let me go. Let me go!"
"But," I said, stupid and persistent, "what are you going to do?"
"I've told you. Stephen. I've told you. As much as I can tell you. And
you think--this foolish thing. As though I could do that! Stephen, if I
promise, will you let me go?..."
§ 12
My mind leaps from that to the moment in the afternoon, when torn by
intolerable distresses and anxiety I knocked and rang, and again knocked
at the door of the house she occupied in South Street, with the
intention of making one last appeal to her to live--if, indeed, it was
death she had in mind. I had let her go from me and instantly a hundred
neglected things had come into my head. I could go away with her, I
could threaten to die with her; it seemed to me that nothing in all the
world mattered if only I could thrust back the dark hand of death to
which she had so manifestly turned. I knew, I knew all along that her
extorted promise would not bind her. I knew and I let the faintest
shadow of uncertainty weaken and restrain me. And I went to her too
late. I saw instantly that I was too late when the door opened and
showed me the scared face of a young footman whose eyes were red with
tears.
"Are you Doctor----?" he asked of my silence.
"I want----" I said. "I must speak to Lady Mary."
He was wordless for a moment. "She--she died, sir," he said. "She's died
suddenly." His face quivered, he was blubbering. He couldn't say
anything more; he stood snivelling in the doorway.
For some moments I remained confronting him as if I would dispute his
words. Some things the mind contests in the face of invincible
conviction. One wants to thrust back time....
CHAPTER THE TWELFTH
THE ARRAIGNMENT OF JEALOUSY
§ 1
I sit here in this graciously proportioned little room which I shall
leave for ever next week, for already your mother begins to pack for
England again. I look out upon the neat French garden that I have
watched the summer round, and before me is the pile of manuscript that
has grown here, the story of my friendship and love for Mary and of its
tragic end, and of all the changes of my beliefs and purposes that have
arisen out of that. I had meant it to be the story of my life, but how
little of my life is in it! It gives, at most, certain acute points,
certain salient aspects. I begin to realize for the first time how thin
and suggestive and sketchy a thing any novel or biography must be. How
we must simplify! How little can we convey the fullness of life, the
glittering interests, the interweaving secondary aspects, the dawns and
dreams and double refractions of experience! Even Mary, of whom I have
labored to tell you, seems not so much expressed as hidden beneath these
corrected sheets. She who was so abundantly living, who could love like
a burst of sunshine and give herself as God gives the world, is she here
at all in this pile of industrious inexpert writing?
Life is so much fuller than any book can be. All this story can be
read, I suppose, in a couple of hours or so, but I have been living and
reflecting upon and reconsidering the substance of it for over forty
years. I do not see how this book can give you any impression but that
of a career all strained upon the frame of one tragic relationship, yet
no life unless it is a very short young life can have that simplicity.
Of all the many things I have found beautiful and wonderful, Mary was
the most wonderful to me, she is in my existence like a sunlit lake seen
among mountains, of all the edges by which life has wrought me she was
the keenest. Nevertheless she was not all my life, nor the form of all
my life. For a time after her death I could endure nothing of my home, I
could not bear the presence of your mother or you, I hated the
possibility of consolation, I went away into Italy, and it was only by
an enormous effort that I could resume my interest in that scheme of
work to which my life is given. But it is manifest I still live, I live
and work and feel and share beauty....
It seems to me more and more as I live longer, that most poetry and most
literature and particularly the literature of the past is discordant
with the vastness and variety, the reserves and resources and
recuperations of life as we live it to-day. It is the expression of life
under cruder and more rigid conditions than ours, lived by people who
loved and hated more naïvely, aged sooner and died younger than we do.
Solitary persons and single events dominated them as they do not
dominate us. We range wider, last longer, and escape more and more from
intensity towards understanding. And already this astounding blow begins
to take its place among other events, as a thing strange and terrible
indeed, but related to all the strangeness and mystery of life, part of
the universal mysteries of despair and futility and death that have
troubled my consciousness since childhood. For a time the death of Mary
obscured her life for me, but now her living presence is more in my mind
again. I begin to see that it is the reality of her existence and not
the accidents of her end that matter most. It signifies less that she
should have flung out of life when it seemed that her living could only
have meant disaster to herself and to all she loved, than that all her
life should have been hampered and restricted. Through all her life this
brave and fine and beautiful being was for the most part of her
possibilities, wasted in a splendid setting, magnificently wasted if you
will, but wasted.
§ 2
It was that idea of waste that dominated my mind in a strange interview
I had with Justin. For it became necessary for me to see Justin in order
that we should stamp out the whispers against her that followed her
death. He had made it seem an accidental death due to an overdose of the
narcotic she employed, but he had not been able to obliterate altogether
the beginnings of his divorce proceedings. There had been talk on the
part of clerks and possible witnesses. But of all that I need not tell
you here; what matters is that Justin and I could meet without hatred or
violence. I met a Justin grey-haired and it seemed to me physically
shrunken, more than ever slow-speaking, with his habit of attentive
silences more marked and that dark scar spread beyond his brows.
We had come to our parting, we had done our business with an
affectation of emotional aloofness, and then suddenly he gripped me by
the arm. "Stratton," he said, "we two---- We killed her. We tore her to
pieces between us...."
I made no answer to this outbreak.
"We tore her to pieces," he repeated. "It's so damned silly. One gets
angry--like an animal."
I became grotesquely anxious to assure him that, indeed, she and I had
been, as they say, innocent throughout our last day together. "You were
wrong in all that," I said. "She kept her faith with you. We never
planned to meet and when we met----. If we had been brother and
sister----. Indeed there was nothing."
"I suppose," he said, "I ought to be glad of that. But now it doesn't
seem to matter very much. We killed her.... What does that matter to me
now?"
§ 3
And it is upon this effect of sweet and beautiful possibilities, caught
in the net of animal jealousies and thoughtless motives and ancient
rigid institutions, that I would end this writing. In Mary, it seems to
me, I found both womanhood and fellowship, I found what many have dreamt
of, love and friendship freely given, and I could do nothing but clutch
at her to make her my possession. I would not permit her to live except
as a part of my life. I see her now and understand her better than when
she was alive, I recall things that she said and wrote and it is clear
to me, clearer perhaps than it ever was to her, that she, with her
resentment at being in any sense property, her self-reliant thought, her
independence of standard, was the very prototype of that sister-lover
who must replace the seductive and abject womanhood, owned, mastered and
deceiving, who waste the world to-day. And she was owned, she was
mastered, she was forced into concealment. What alternative was there
for her? What alternative is there for any woman? She might perhaps have
kept her freedom by some ill-paid work and at the price of every other
impulse in her swift and eager nature. She might have become one of
those poor neuters, an independent woman.... Life was made impossible
for her and she was forced to die, according to the fate of all untimely
things. She was destroyed, not merely by the unconsidered, undisciplined
passions of her husband and her lover, but by the vast tradition that
sustains and enforces the subjugation of her sex. What I had from her,
and what she was, is but a mere intimation of all that she and I might
have made of each other and the world.
And perhaps in this story I have said enough for you to understand why
Mary has identified herself with something world-wide, has added to
herself a symbolical value, and why it is I find in the whole crowded
spectacle of mankind, a quality that is also hers, a sense of fine
things entangled and stifled and unable to free themselves from the
ancient limiting jealousies which law and custom embody. For I know that
a growing multitude of men and women outwear the ancient ways. The
blood-stained organized jealousies of religious intolerance, the
delusions of nationality and cult and race, that black hatred which
simple people and young people and common people cherish against all
that is not in the likeness of themselves, cease to be the undisputed
ruling forces of our collective life. We want to emancipate our lives
from this slavery and these stupidities, from dull hatreds and
suspicion. The ripening mind of our race tires of these boorish and
brutish and childish things. A spirit that is like hers, arises and
increases in human affairs, a spirit that demands freedom and gracious
living as our inheritance too long deferred, and I who loved her so
blindly and narrowly now love her spirit with a dawning understanding.
I will not be content with that compromise of jealousies which is the
established life of humanity to-day. I give myself, and if I can I will
give you, to the destruction of jealousy and of the forms and shelters
and instruments of jealousy, both in my own self and in the thought and
laws and usage of the world.
THE END
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