One day about the time of the general strike in England I visited the celebrated garden of La Mortola near Ventimiglia. As I wandered about that lovely place, I passed by an unknown little lady sitting and reading in a shady corner. Her pose reminded me of another little lady who has always been very dear to me. She was making notes upon a slip of paper as she read. I noted how charmingly intent she was upon her book and wondered what it was that held her so firmly. I never discovered. I do not know who she was and I have never seen her again. In all probability she was a tourist like myself and quite unaware that she was destined, in my fancy, to become the mistress of all the beauty about her. She in part, and in part the lady she had recalled. I went my way to the beach and sat there and as I mused on things that were happening in England and Italy and the world at large, that remembered and reinforced personality mingled with my thoughts, became a sort of frame for my thoughts, and this story very much as I have shaped it here presented itself suddenly to my imagination. It jumped into existence. Much of it had been in my mind for some time lacking a form and a personification. Then all at once it was alive. I went home and I began to write. The garden of this book is by no means a replica of the garden of La Mortola, which was merely the inspiring point of departure for this fantasia of ideas, this picture of a mind and of a world in a phase of expectation. Gorge and Caatinga you will seek at La Mortola in vain. But all sorts of things grow upon that wonderful corner of sunlit soil, and this novel, which I dedicate very gratefully to the real owners of the garden, gratefully and a little apologetically because of the freedoms I have taken with their home, is only the least and latest product of its catholic fertility.
H. G. Wells.
The room was long and lofty, a room of scarlet hangings and pale brown stone, unilluminated as yet by any of its red-shaded electric lights. There were two great Italianate fire-places with projecting canopies of carved stone; in one, the olive logs were unlit, in the other the fire, newly begun, burnt and crackled cheerfully; its leaping tongues of flame rejoiced and welcomed the evening. Bare expanses of the beeswaxed floor, sharp edges of the massive furniture, metallic studs and rods and handles and a big inkstand of brass responded by a gay waving of reflections to these glad Hallos. The curtains were not drawn, and the outer world by contrast with this intimate ruddy tumult seemed very cold and still and remote. The tall window at one end gave upon the famous garden which rose steeply behind the house, terrace above terrace, a garden half phantasmal now in the twilight, with masses of pallid blossom foaming over old walls, with winding steps, mighty old jars, great dark trees happily placed, and a profusion of flowers, halted and paraded, by the battalion, by the phalanx, their colours still glowing, but seen beneath deeps of submerging blue, unsubstantial and mysteriously profound as they dissolved away into the gloaming. The other window stared out at the unruffled Mediterranean, dark ultramarine under the fading afterglow of a serene sunset.
A small, fragile, dark-haired woman in a green dress crouched musing in one corner of the long sofa before the fire; her hands clutched the back and her cheek rested on her hands; the reflections danced upon her necklace and bracelet and earrings and the buckles of her shoes, caressed her pretty arms and lit her eyes. Her expression was one of tranquil contentment. In that big room she was like some minute bright insect in the corolla of a gigantic red and orange flower.
At the sound of footsteps in the passage without she sighed, and moving lazily, turned an expectant face to the open door behind her.
There appeared a very exquisite little gentleman of some sixty-odd years. Grey hair streaked with brown flowed back gracefully from a finely modelled face that ended in a neatly pointed beard. The complexion was warm and delicate. At the first glance you would have said he is Spanish and he is wax; and he was neither. But indeed it was as though a Velasquez portrait had left its proper costume upstairs and dressed for dinner. For a moment this pleasant apparition stood clasping its white hands with a sort of confident diffidence, and then came forward with an easy gesture. “Ah-ah! My hostess!” he said.
She held out her hand to him with an indolent smile and did not seem in the least surprised that he took it and kissed it.
“Come and sit down by the fire here,” she said. “I am so glad you have come to us again, Mr. Plantagenet-Buchan. Did they look after you carefully? We got back from Monte Carlo scarcely half an hour ago.”
Mr. Plantagenet-Buchan strolled round the sofa, held out his carefully cherished hands to the blaze, and decided after due consideration to stand rather droopingly by the fireside. “You are sure I am not inconvenient?”
“You just complete us. There was one room free.”
“That pretty room in the tower. Every way, east, west, north and south one has a view.”
She did not explain that dear accommodating Miss Fenimore had been bustled up to the dependence when his telegram came. She had other things in her mind. “You arrived in the afternoon?”
“I lunched on the train. I hired an irresistible automobile at the station. It was painted aluminium colour and adorned with a banner bearing the mystical word ‘Shell.’ And such a courteously exorbitant driver! Although it was sight-seeing day for your gardens and the road at your gates was choked with cars and chars-a-bancs, all your servants, even the porter lady, received me as though I was the one thing they needed to round off their happiness. Your major-domo almost fondled me. Yes, Bombaccio with the Caruso profile. Yours is the perfect household.”
“You have seen none of your fellow guests?”
He reflected. “I have a slight suspicion —— Formally, no. Your major-domo gave me tea in my own room and afterwards I strolled about your gardens and heard them praised in most European languages as well as my mother tongue. One or two Germans. I may be old-fashioned but I don’t feel a European show-place is complete without an occasional ‘prachtvoll’ or ‘wie sch?n!’ I’ve a sneaking pleasure in their return. I feel I may be bullied for it but I can’t help having it.”
His hostess made no attempt to bully him.
He became enthusiastic over some flower in blue spikes, that was new to him.
The lady on the sofa disregarded the blue spikes. “There were one or two people about,” she reflected aloud. “There was Lady Grieswold. She won’t go to Monte Carlo because she loses her head. And always afterwards she is sorry she didn’t go to Monte Carlo because it might have been one of her good days. Did you see her? But probably she went for a walk up in the hills with Miss Fenimore, to avoid Mr. Sempack. And then there was Mr. Sempack.”
“Sempack,” said Mr. Plantagenet-Buchan. “Sem-pack?” and consulted his toes.
“Yes,” said the lady with a sudden hopefulness in her manner, “Mr. Sempack?” Her eyes were less dreamy. She wanted to know.
“In some connection ——”
“Yes. But in what connection?”
Mr. Plantagenet-Buchan went off at a tangent. “As I have walked about the gardens —— A presence . . . Most of your sight-seeing visitors are transitory; they make a round and they go. Or they make two rounds and go. But there has been one individual ——”
The lady thrust out her pretty profile in expectation.
“Rather like a dissenting minister,” he tried, feeling his way. “With that sort of hat. And yet not a real dissenting minister, not one of God’s dissenting ministers.”
Her eager face assured him he was on the right track.
“A dissenting minister, let us say, neither born nor created, not a natural product, but —— how shall I put it? — painted by Augustus John! Very fine but slightly incredible. Legs — endless legs and arms. I mean as to length. Tree-like.”
He considered judicially. “More ungainly — yes, even more ungainly — than Robert Cecil.”
“Yes,” she said in a loud whisper and glanced guiltily over her shoulder at the open door behind her. “Him!”
Mr. Plantagenet-Buchan folded his arms and bit a knuckle. “So that is Mr. Sempack! I saw him. Several times. We kept on meeting. The more we tried not to meet, we met. We sat about in remote corners and even then fate seemed to draw us together. Sempack!”
“You know about him?”
“I’ve heard of the great Mr. Sempack, yes.”
“He writes books,” she supplied helpfully.
“Real books, dear lady. Not books you read. Not novels. Not memoirs. Books that are just books. Like Santayana. Or Lowes Dickinson. Or Bertrand Russell.”
“You’ve read some?”
“No. I’ve always hoped to meet him and save myself that duty. It is a duty. They say —— They say he talks better than he writes. How did he come here?”
“Philip met him. He brought him along from the Roquebrune people.”
“Why?”
“Philip wanted to know if there was going to be a coal strike. He’s fussed about the coal strike.”
“Did Mr. Sempack tell him?”
“Philip hasn’t asked. Yet.”
“I don’t think that’s Sempack’s sort of subject, but one never knows. He might throw some side-lights on the matter.”
“So far,” said the lady, with reflective eyes on the fire, “he hasn’t been very much of a talker. In fact —— He hardly talks at all.”
“Not his reputation.”
“Intelligently out of it.”
“Something not quite conducive in the atmosphere.”
“He seemed almost to be beginning once or twice. But — perhaps they interrupt. He sits about in the garden in that large dispersed way of his, saying he’s perfectly happy and refusing to go anywhere. Sometimes he writes in a little notebook. I don’t think he’s unhappy but he seems rather a waste.”
“You’d like him to talk?”
“We never do get any talk here. I’d love to hear — discussion.”
“Now I wonder,” said Mr. Plantagenet-Buchan and consulted his ring again. “What did I see, the other day?” He stuck up a finger and held it out towards her. “Utopias!” he said. “Quite lately. It must have been in some review. Quite recently. In the Nation I think. Or the Literary Supplement. Yes, I have it. He has been reading and writing about all the Utopias in the world. He’s a Utopographer!”
The lady seemed to weigh the possible meanings of the word. “But what has that to do with the coal strike?”
“Nothing whatever that I can see.”
There was a momentary pause. “Philip jumps at things,” she remarked.
Mr. Plantagenet-Buchan knitted his brows. “Utopographer? Or was it a Utopologist? Or Utopolitan? Not a bad word, Utopolitan. No — it was Utopographer. I read it in one of the weeklies downstairs, the Spectator or the Nation or the Saturday. We might lead the talk rather carelessly towards Utopias and see what happened.”
“We have some awful interrupters here. They don’t listen and suddenly they shout out something about something else. Something — just silly. It may put him off his subject.”
“Then we must pull the talk back to the subject.”
“You may. But he’s difficult. He’s difficult. They disregard him and he seems to disregard them and effaces everything from his mind. When they interrupt he just loses them in thought and the meal. But he’s not unhappy. He likes being here. He says so. He likes Philip. He likes Catherine. It is quite evident he likes Catherine. I think he has been talking to Catherine a little — in the garden.”
“Is Lady Catherine here?”
“Lovelier than ever. Her divorce has made her ten years younger. She’s twenty-five. She’s eighteen. And — it’s funny — but she evidently finds something attractive about Mr. Sempack. And naturally he finds something attractive about her. He isn’t at all the sort of man I should have expected her to find attractive. But of course if she goes and carries him off and makes him talk about his Utopias or whatever they do talk about when she gets him alone, there will be no getting him to talk at large. He’ll be drained.”
Her consultant quite saw that.
“We must think of a plan of campaign,” he brooded. “Broaching the talker. As a dinner table sport. Now what have we given? An interest in Utopias. I don’t think we must use the actual word, ‘Utopia’ . . . No . . . I wonder if I should find that review downstairs.”
From far away came the sound of high heels clicking on a marble staircase. His hostess became very rapid. “That’s Catherine!” she said in parenthesis. “The other people.” She ticked the names off on her fingers ineffectively. “There’s a Colonel Bullace. A great admirer of Joynson-Hicks. He wants to organise British Fascists. Keep the working man down and save him from agitators and all that. Adores Mussolini. His wife’s a darling. Rather a prosy darling if you let her talk, but endlessly kind. Then there’s a couple of tennis-players. They just play tennis. And improve Philip’s game. It tries him dreadfully having his game improved, but he will do it. What a passionate game tennis is nowadays, isn’t it? Mathison’s the name. And Geoffry Rylands is here — Philip’s brother. A foursome. Too good for any of the others. And there’s dear Miss Fenimore. Lady Grieswold I told you. And young Lord and Lady Tamar. He’s at Geneva, doing things for the League of Nations. Such a fine earnest young couple. Oh! and there’s Puppy Clarges and someone else — let me see . . . I said the Bullaces, didn’t I? . . . ”
The clicking heels halted in the doorway.
“Lady Catherine!” said Mr. Plantagenet-Buchan.
A tall young woman, with a lovely body sheathed in pale gold, dusky-haired, dark-blue eyed, smiled at them both. She had a very engaging smile, impudent, friendly, disarming. Her wide gaze swept the great room.
“Isn’t Mr. Sempack down?” she asked her hostess.
And then remembering her manners she advanced to greet Mr. Plantagenet-Buchan.
“Come and conspire with us, Catherine,” said Mrs. Rylands after a little pause for reflection. “Mr. Plantagenet-Buchan says Mr. Sempack is a great talker. So far — except perhaps to you — he’s buried his talent. Come and tell us how we are to get him talking to-night.”
They did it between them and there was wonderful talking that night, a talk that delighted Mrs. Rylands altogether. It was like the talks her mother used to tell of in the great days of Clouds and Stanway, in the happy eighties when Lady Elcho and all the “Souls” were young and Lord Balfour was “Mr. Arthur” and people used to read Robert Louis Stevenson’s Talk and Talkers in the hope of improving their style. Mr. Plantagenet-Buchan was bright and skilful and Lady Catherine was characteristically generous in giving away a vintage that might have been reserved for her alone, and Philip most unexpectedly helped with one intelligent question and Lord Tamar with two. Mr. Sempack once started, proved to be as great a talker as his reputation demanded, he could interest and inform and let in contributors while keeping them in order, and the evening was tremendously entertaining and quite different from any other evening over which Mrs. Rylands had presided at Casa Terragena.
There were moments of difficulty. The Mathisons were visibly disconcerted and alarmed by the strong, persistent drive towards such high-brow and devastating topics as what was going to happen to the world, what could be made to happen to the world, and how things could be made to happen. Their eyes met in only too evident protest against such “rot.” The evening before they had had quite a good time, comparing notes with Geoffry Rylands and Puppy Clarges about the different tennis courts upon the Riviera and shouting, “Oh! that’s a scorcher if you like!” or “Talk about a cinder track!” and expressing opinions about the ankles of Miss Wills and the terrible and scandalous dispute about the balls and whether Suzanne was ever likely to marry, nice sensible stuff, as it seemed to them. Now they were pushed aside. They couldn’t get in. Nor could Geoffry nor Puppy help them. These four were scattered among the high-brows. Colonel Bullace was interested — positively interested, in a hostile way indeed, but interested. Once he interrupted. And Mrs. Bullace got loose for a time with a story about how down in Ventimiglia that day she had attempted to rescue a donkey from ill-treatment by a man it didn’t belong to, and who wasn’t, as a matter of fact, ill-treating it, and indeed who possibly had never been aware of the existence of the donkey until she called his attention to it, and how nice everybody had been about it, and had taken her part when the man became insulting. She began it unexpectedly and apropos of nothing. “Ow,” she said suddenly, “such a funny thing!” But that had been a lacuna, and the great talk was joined up again before she had nearly done.
The great talk had reassembled itself after every interruption and triumphed over all that might have slain it in its immaturity and grown into a great edifice of interest. After dinner and a little interlude the men came up, and while the low-brow contingent was excreted to the bridge tables, the interested people gathered as a matter of course round the fire and went on talking. They went on talking and it was a great success, and little Mrs. Rylands felt that even Lady Elcho or Lady Sassoon, bright stars in her mother’s memories, could never have presided over a better one. And at midnight, they were still talking, Mr. Sempack talking, Mr. Plantagenet-Buchan talking, Catherine talking, the Tamars both interested (unless she was pretending awfully well), Philip hanging on every word — unexpected Philip could be at times! — Miss Fenimore drinking it in. But she would drink anything in; it was her r?le. Even Colonel Bullace, whenever he was dummy, came and listened, and he was mostly dummy with such a chronic over-caller as Lady Grieswold for a partner.
It was wonderful how varied and yet how consistent the great talk was, how its topics went about and around and interwove and remained parts of one topic. Mrs. Rylands was reminded of a phrase Mr. Plantagenet-Buchan had used once for some music, “a cathedral of sound.” This was a cathedral of ideas. A Gothic cathedral. Everything said had a sort of freedom and yet everything belonged.
That evening had been tremendously entertaining, a glory, a thing to remember, but though the spirit may be extremely spirited the flesh is often weak.
At midnight Mrs. Rylands suddenly gave way. Right up to the moment of her crisis her attention had been held quite pleasantly, then suddenly it vanished. Abruptly she went like sour milk in thundery weather. Fatigue smote her and an overwhelming desire to close and put away the great talk and go to bed.
There was no phase of transition. It was like a clock striking suddenly on her brain. It said, “Enough. You have listened enough. You have looked intelligent enough. They have all had enough. Pack them off to bed and go to bed yourself.”
She sat up on one of the pedestals that stood on either side of the fire and nothing in her pensive and appreciative pose betrayed the swift change within her. A moment before she had been a happy hostess blessing her gathering. Now she waited like an assassin for the moment to strike, and all her soul was hostile. And they went on, Mr. Sempack talking, Mr. Plantagenet-Buchan talking, Catherine talking, the Tamars interested (unless she was pretending awfully well), Philip hanging on every word and Miss Fenimore drinking it in. They might go on for hours yet — hours!
Mrs. Rylands invented something. She invented it in an instant. It flashed into her mind completed and exact. She would have it made directly she got to London, and bring it back with her next winter. A solid looking brass clock to go with the big inkstand on the table. It should strike — just once in a day. Every twenty-four hours it should strike, slowly, impressively, imperatively — midnight. Never anything else. Midnight. Or perhaps to bring it home to them, fourteen or fifteen. Or four and twenty sound and full. The evening curfew. Why had no one thought of such clocks before? And sometimes one would put it on and sometimes one would put it back, and if it had a little stud somewhere that one could touch — or make Philip touch — without anyone else noticing it, one might prevent it striking. . . . Or just blow everything to bits by making it strike. . . .
In the natural course of things the bridge players started the go-to-bed break-up before half-past eleven, but to-night the bridge was bewitched it seemed. It made a background of muffled sounds to the great talk. Everyone was overcalling over there; that was quite plain; tempers were going to pieces; and the games were holding out obstinately beneath vast avalanches of penalties that impended above the line. Sounds of subdued quarrelling came from Mrs. Bullace and Lady Grieswold. Each had arrived at the stage of hatred for her partner. At the other table Geoffry was losing facetiously to the Mathisons, a close-playing couple, and Puppy was getting more and more acridly witty. Who was it sitting just hidden by the bowl of roses? Mr. Haulbowline, Mrs. Bullace’s partner. It was Mr. Haulbowline that Mrs. Rylands had forgotten when she had given the list of her guests to Mr. Plantagenet-Buchan. Why did one always forget Mr. Haulbowline?
The current of Mrs. Rylands’ thoughts was interrupted. Something she realised had taken her by the cheeks and throat, something she knew she must control at any cost, a tension of the muscles. Just in time she bit her finger and suppressed the yawn, and then with a stern effort brought her mind back to the great talk. Now it was Mr. Sempack who was talking, and it seemed to her he was talking as though the only person in the room was Lady Catherine. Was that imagination? It was remarkable how those two entirely incongruous people attracted each other. They certainly did attract each other. When Mr. Sempack looked at Lady Catherine his eyes positively glowed.
It was astonishing that any woman could be attracted by Mr. Sempack! He was so entirely different from Philip. It was wonderful how cleverly Mr. Plantagenet-Buchan had hit him off. Of course now that he was in evening dress he was not so much like a dissenting minister, but he was still incredibly gawky. It was clever of Mr. Plantagenet-Buchan to have thought of Lord Cecil. Mr. Sempack really was more gawky than Lord Cecil; much more. How Mr. Plantagenet-Buchan observed things! And how acute and intimate it was of him — since he was American — to call him Robert Cecil still. Gawky! Mr. Sempack was the gawkiest man she had ever looked at. He became monstrous as she scrutinised him. He became a black blot on the scene, that had the remotest resemblance to a human form. His joints made her think of a cow, just as Philip’s always made her think of a cat. It was awful to think how he could be joined together at the joints. Her pensive pose permitted her to examine his foot; his far-flung foot as he sat deep in the sofa. He had crossed his legs and his foot seemed to be held out for inspection. It waved about as if it challenged comment. His shoe reminded her of a cattle boat adapted to passenger service. His socks fell in folds over his ankle. Probably this man whom everyone was listening to as if he was an oracle, had never found out there were such things as sock suspenders in the world. An oracle who had never heard of sock suspenders! It was quite possible. Men were incredibly stupid — especially intellectual men — about everything of practical importance in the world. Even what they knew they couldn’t apply, whereas a woman could apply even what she didn’t know. . . . They didn’t know when to leave off. . . . Or, she suddenly amended, they left off too soon. Above the sock an inch of healthily hairy skin displayed itself and then a thin edge of Jaeger underclothing. Undyed, all-wool, slightly frayed underclothing. And Catherine found him attractive!
Very probably if Philip wasn’t looked after he’d —— No, it was impossible. He was like a different sort of animal. He would pull up his socks by instinct.
Mrs. Rylands, with an expression of intelligent attention, considered her guest’s face. No one could have guessed from her quiet eyes that her reason had fled and only an imp was left in possession.
His bones, this imp remarked, positively ran wild under his skin as he talked. What could one call such features? Rambling? Roughhewn? It was like a handsome face seen through a distorting mirror. It was like one of those cliffs where people find a resemblance to a face. There was a sort of strength, a massiveness. The chin. It was a hygienic chin; the sort of chin people wear so as to give fair play to every toe. . . .
Mrs. Rylands had a momentary feeling that she was falling asleep. What had she been thinking about? About his chin — chins and toes —— She meant his chin was like the toe of a sensible boot, not pointed. It was really a double chin. Not a downwards double, not fat, but a sideways double chin. “Cleft” did they call it? And the nose one might call shapely — different on each side, but shapely on each side. A nose with a lot of character — but difficult to follow. And big! Like the nose Mr. Gladstone grew in his late days. For people’s noses grow — longer and longer — all their lives. This nose — how would it end? Something thoughtful about those deep overhung eyes there was, and the wrinkles made them seem kindly and humorous. But why didn’t someone tell a man like that to get his eyebrows cut? There was no need to have such eyebrows, no need whatever. Unkempt. Sprouting. Bits of hair on his cheeks too. A face that ought to be weeded. She would not look at his ears — for fear. Some woman ought to take him in hand. But not Catherine! That would be Beauty and the Beast. How venturesome Catherine was! — had always been!
His voice was not unpleasant. Perhaps it was his voice that attracted Catherine.
He was saying: “Work. We have to work for the sake of the work and take happiness for the wild flower it is. Some day men will grow their happinesses in gardens, a great variety of beautiful happinesses, happinesses under glass, happinesses all the year round. Such things are not for us. They will come. Meanwhile ——”
“Meanwhile,” Lord Tamar echoed in a tone of edification. Just the word. He was really looking up at Mr. Sempack. He, too, was attracted. Lady Tamar’s emotional response also was very convincing.
But what were they talking about? Her garden? Happiness in little pots, happiness bedded out? Mrs. Rylands blinked to make sure she was awake.
Then came a pause and Mr. Plantagenet-Buchan delivered himself. “I perceive I have been meanwhiling all my life. Meanwhiling. . . . Have I been living? You make me question it. Have I just been meanwhiling away my life?”
He paused and seemed faintly dissatisfied with what he had said. “Eheu! fugaces,” he sighed.
It sounded awfully clever. And rather sad in a brilliant sort of way. But what it meant now, was another matter. She had lost the thread long ago. Bother! Mrs. Rylands roused herself to smile brightly at Mr. Plantagenet-Buchan. Anyhow, it was as if they were coming to some sort of conclusion and she felt she must offer him every encouragement. Then, with a sudden determination, she stood up. She could endure this talk no longer. After all, it was her house. The bridge parties far away down the room came to her aid, belatedly like Blücher, but now they came.
“Game!” shouted Puppy. “And the two hundred and fifty ought to save us from the worst of it. We’re well out of it, partner!”
A great stirring of chairs. Both bridge tables on the move. Mr. Plantagenet-Buchan also standing up. Lady Tamar standing up. Everyone on the move, thank God! Philip guiding Colonel Bullace quite needlessly to the drinks on the far table. Mr. Haulbowline following Colonel Bullace, unobtrusively but resolutely, like a pointer following a Scotch terrier. Suddenly the men remember that Puppy will take a whisky, Mr. Haulbowline stands aside and Colonel Bullace pours out her allowance with an air of having approached the tray for that sole purpose. The other tray? The other tray is all right. Geoffry is getting lemonade for Lady Catherine. . . .
Now was the moment for the hostess to say: “We have had a wonderful talk to-night, Mr. Sempack. You scatter ideas like a fir tree scatters pollen.”
She had thought of that in the interlude after dinner, while all the women were saying things about him. He did scatter ideas. She had said it over to herself several times since, to make sure it was still there. But what she said was: “You scatter pollen like a freeze scats ideese. I hope you will sleep well, Mr. Sempack, and not hear too much of the sea.”
She said her little sentence rather rapidly and mechanically, because she had repeated it over too often; she touched his knuckly hand and smiled her sweetest and left him bowing. In the passage she let her yawn loose and the happy thing nearly dislocated her pretty jaw.
It was only when she was undressing that she realised with a start what it was she had said. Never! But she was horribly certain about it. “Freeze scats ideese?” or had it been “Fleeze”? What could he have made of it? Perhaps now, with that vast serious expression of his on that vast serious face, he was repeating it over to himself upstairs.
It was hopeless even to try to make Philip understand what she was laughing at. So she just laughed and laughed, and then Philip lifted her up in his arms and kissed her and soothed her, and she cried a tear or so for no particular reason, Philip being such a dear, and then she was put into bed somehow and went to sleep.
And the last thing she heard was Philip reproaching himself. “I ought to have sent you to bed before, my little wife. You’ve tired your dear self out.”
To many hearers the great talk that was set going in Casa Terragena by Mr. Sempack, would have seemed far less wonderful and original than it did to Mrs. Rylands and the group of young people with her that listened to him. For, after all, it was little more than a gathering together and a fitting together of the main creative suggestions for the regulation of human affairs that have accumulated so richly in the last few score years. It did not seem in the least wonderful to Mr. Plantagenet-Buchan, though he allowed it to interest and amuse him. Mr. Plantagenet-Buchan was quite sure he had heard it all before, but then, like most highly cultivated and Europeanised Americans, he had trained himself to feel in that way about everything, and to smile gently and to intimate it quietly, with a sort of conspicuous unobtrusiveness. He knew that the one thing forbidden to an American was to be na?ve. An American to hold his own must not rest under that suspicion. He must never be na?ve, never surprised, never earnest. Only by the most inflexible tortuosity, by the most persistent evasiveness, by an exquisite refinement sustained with iron resolution, and a cynicism that never fails to be essential, can he hope to establish his inaccessible remoteness from either Log Cabin or White House; and maintain his self-respect among the sophistication of Europe.
So Mr. Plantagenet-Buchan played the part of a not too urgently needed prompter to Mr. Sempack, helped him out discreetly, and ticked off his points as he made them with the air of one fully prepared for everything that came.
The ground effect of Mr. Sempack upon which all his other effects were built, was his large and unchallengeable intimation of the transitory and provisional nature of the institutions and customs and usages, the forms and appliances and resources amidst which he and his interlocutors were living. He not only had the quality of not really belonging to them himself and of reaching back before they existed and forward to when they would have gone, but he imposed the same quality of relative permanence upon the thoughts of his hearers. He had the quality less of being ephemeral than of sitting with his hearers and watching everything else go by.
The human mind discovered itself relatively immortal amidst evanescent things. This beautiful house became like a tent that would presently be folded up and taken away and the celebrated gardens like a great bouquet of flowers that had been brought from the ends of the earth, just to be looked at and to delight for a little while and then to die and be dispersed. The house was built about a Saracenic watchtower for its core; wherever its foundations had extended buried fragments of polished marble and busts and broken provincial statuary had recalled its Roman predecessor; but at the touch of Sempack these marble gods and emperors became no more than the litter of the last tenant, his torn photographs and out-of-date receipts. The Via Aurelia ran deeply through the grounds between high walls, and some one had set up, at a bridge where the gardens crossed this historical gully, a lettered-stone to recall that on this documented date or that, this emperor and that pope, Nicolo Machiavelli and Napoleon the First, had ridden past. These ghosts seemed scarcely remoter than the records of recent passages in the big leather-bound Visitors’ Book in the Hall, Mr. Gladstone and King Edward the Seventh, the Austrian Empress and Mr. Keir Hardie.
Occasionally tombstones that had stood beside the high road were unearthed by changes in the garden. One inscribed quite simply “Amoena Lucina,” just that and nothing more, was like a tender sigh that had scarcely passed away. Mrs. Rylands had set it up again in a little walled close of turf and purple flowers. People talked there of Lucina as though she might still hear.
Over everything hung a promise of further transformations, for the Italians had a grandiose scheme for reviving the half obliterated tracks of the Via Aurelia as a modern motoring road to continue the Grande Corniche. Everything passed here and everything went by; fashions of life and house and people and ideas; it seemed that they passed very swiftly indeed, when one measured time by a scale that would take in those half disinterred skeletons of Cro-Magnon men and Grimaldi men who lay, under careful glass casings now, in the great cave of the Rochers Rouges just visible from the dining-room windows. That great cave was still black with the ashes of prehistoric fires, as plain almost as the traces of yesterday’s picnic. Even the grisly sub-man with his rude flint-chipped stakes, was here a thing of overnight. His implements were scattered and left in the deeper layers of the silted cave, like the toys of a child that has recently been sent to bed. With a wave of his ample hand Mr. Sempack could allude to the whole span of the human story.
“Utopias, you say, deny the thing that is,” said Mr. Sempack. “Why, yesterday and to-morrow deny the thing that is!”
He made Mrs. Rylands feel like someone who wakes up completely in the compartment of an express train, which between sleeping and waking she had imagined to be a house.
Colonel Bullace had to hear that his dear British Empire had hardly lasted a lifetime. “Its substantial expansion came with the steamships,” said Mr. Sempack; “it is held together by the steamship. How much longer will the steamship endure?”
Before the steamship it was no more than the shrunken vestiges of the Empire of George III. Most of America was lost. Our rule in India was a trader’s dominion not a third of its present extent. Canada, the Cape were coast settlements.
Now Colonel Bullace was of that variety of Englishman which believes as an article of faith that the union Jack has “braved a thousand years the battle and the breeze” since 1800. If anyone had told him that the stars and stripes was the older of the two flags he would have become homicidal. A steamship Empire! What of Nelson and our wooden walls? What of John Company? What of Raleigh? What of Agincourt? He had a momentary impulse to rise up and kill Mr. Sempack, but he was calling his hand, a rather difficult hand, just then and one must put first things first.
And while Mr. Sempack made respect for any established powerful thing seem the delusion of children still too immature to realise the reality of change, at the same time he brought the idea of the strangest and boldest innovations in the ways of human life within the range of immediately practicable things. In the past our kind had been hustled along by change: now it was being given the power to make its own changes. He did not preach the coming of the Great Age; he assumed it. He put it upon the sceptic to show why it should not arrive. He treated the advancement and extension of science as inevitable. As yet so few people do that. Science might be delayed in its progress or accelerated, but how could its process stop? And how could the fluctuating extravagances of human folly resist for ever the steady drive towards the realisations of that ever growing and ever strengthening body of elucidation? There was none of the prophetic visionary about the ungainly Mr. Sempack as he sat deep and low on the sofa. He made the others seem visionaries. Simply he asked them all to be reasonable.
For a time the talk had dealt with various main aspects of this Millennium which Mr. Sempack spoke of so serenely, as a probable and perhaps inevitable achievement for our distressed and confused species. He displayed a large and at times an almost exasperating patience. It was only yesterday, so to speak, that the idea of mankind controlling its own destiny had entered human thought. Were there Utopias before the days of Plato? Mr. Sempack did not know of any. And the idea of wilful and creative change was still a strange and inassimilable idea to most people. There were plenty of people who were no more capable of such an idea than a rabbit. His large grey eye had rested for a moment on Colonel Bullace and drifted pensively to the Mathisons.
“The problem is to deal with them,” Mrs. Rylands had reflected, following the indication of the large grey eye.
“They will all die,” said Lord Tamar.
“And plenty more get born,” said Philip, following his own thoughts to the exclusion of these present applications.
“You don’t consult the cat when you alter the house,” said Mr. Sempack.
“But is such concealment, exactly what one might call — democracy?” asked Mr. Plantagenet-Buchan in mock protest.
“You don’t even turn the cat out of the room when you discuss your alterations,” said Mr. Sempack, and dismissed democracy.
It was only nowadays that the plan before mankind was becoming sufficiently clear and complete for us to dream of any organised and deliberate effort to realise it. The early Utopias never pretended to be more than suggestions. Too often seasoned by the deprecatory laugh. But there had been immense liberations of the human imagination in the last two centuries. Our projects grew more and more courageous and comprehensive. Every intelligent man without some sort of kink was bound to believe a political world unity not only possible but desirable. Everyone who knew anything about such matters was moving towards the realisation that the world needed one sort of money and not many currencies, and would be infinitely richer and better if it was controlled as one economic system. These were new ideas, just as once the idea of circumnavigating the world had been a new idea, but they spread, they would pervade.
“But to materialise them?” said the young man from Geneva.
“That will come. The laboratory you work in is only the first of many. The League of Nations is the mere first sketch of a preliminary experiment.”
Lord Tamar betrayed a partisan solicitude for his League of Nations. He thought it was more than that.
Parliaments of Nations, said Mr. Sempack, offered no solution of the riddle of war. Every disagreement reopened the possibility of war. Every enduring peace in the world had been and would have to be a peace under one government. When people spoke of the Pax Romana and the Pax Britannica they meant one sovereignty. Every sovereignty implied an internal peace; every permanent peace a practical sovereignty. For the Pax Mundi there could be only one sovereignty. It was a little hard for people who had grown up under old traditions of nation and empire to realise that and to face its consequences; but there was always a new generation coming along, ready to take new ideas seriously. People were learning history in a new spirit and their political imaginations were being born again. The way might be long and difficult to that last Pax, but not so long and difficult as many people with their noses in their newspapers, supposed.
“If one could believe that,” sighed Lady Tamar.
Mr. Sempack left his politics and economics; his sure hope of the One World State and the One World Business floating benevolently in their mental skies; and talked of the reflection upon the individual life of a scientific order of human affairs. It was remarkable, he thought, how little people heeded the things that the medical and physiological and psychological sciences were saying to them. But these things came to them only through a haze of distortion, caricatured until they lost all practical significance, disguised as the foolish fancies of a race of oddly gifted eccentrics. There was a great gulf fixed between the scientific man and the ordinary man, the press. So that the generality had no suspicion of the releases from pain and fatigue, the accessions of strength, the control over this and that embarrassing function or entangling weakness, that science could afford even now.
Still less could it imagine the mines of power and freedom that these first hand-specimens foretold. Contemporary psychology, all unsuspected by the multitude, was preparing the ground for an education that would disentangle men from a great burthen of traditional and innate self deception; it was pointing the road to an ampler and finer social and political life. The moral atmosphere of the world, just as much as the population and hunger of the world, was a controllable thing — when men saw fit to control it. For a moment or so as Mr. Sempack talked, it seemed to Mrs. Rylands that the room was pervaded by presences, by tall, grave, friendly beings, by anticipatory ghosts of man to come, happy, wise and powerful. It was as if they were visiting the past at Casa Terragena as she had sometimes visited the sleeping bones in the caves at Rochers Rouges. Why had they come into the room? Was it because these friendly and interested visitants were the children of such thoughts as this great talk was bringing to life?
“There is no inexorable necessity for any sustained human unhappiness,” said Mr. Sempack; “none at all. There is no absolute reason whatever why every child born should not be born happily into a life of activity and interest and happiness. If there is, I have never heard of it. Tell me what it is.”
“Bombaccio,” said Mr. Plantagenet-Buchan, glancing over his shoulder to make sure that the servants were out of the room, “is a Catholic. He believes there was a Fall.”
“Do we?” asked Mr. Sempack.
Puppy Clarges made a furtive grimace over her cigarette at Geoffry, but the doctrine of the Fall went by default.
“But then,” asked Mrs. Bullace, “why isn’t everyone happy now?”
“Secondary reasons,” Mr. Plantagenet-Buchan asserted. “There may be no invincible barrier to an earthly Paradise, but still we have to find the way.”
“It takes a long time,” said Philip.
“Everything that is longer than a lifetime is a long time,” said Mr. Sempack. “But for all practical purposes, you must remember, so soon as we pass that limit, nothing is very much longer than anything else.”
Mr. Plantagenet-Buchan, after an instant’s thought, agreed with that as warmly as if he had met a long lost friend, but at the first impact it reminded Mrs. Rylands rather unpleasantly of attempts to explain Einstein.
“It does not matter if it uses up six generations or six hundred,” Mr. Plantagenet-Buchan endorsed.
“Except to the generations,” said Philip.
“But who wants this world of prigs?” came the voice of Geoffry in revolt.
“I do for one,” said Mr. Sempack.
“It would bore me to death.”
“Lots of us are bored almost to violence by things as they are. More will be. Progress has always been a battle of the bored against the contented and the hopeless. If you like this world with its diseases and frustrations, its toil and blind cravings and unsatisfied wants, its endless quarrellings and its pointless tyrannies and cruelties, the pettiness of its present occupations in such grotesque contrast with the hard and frightful violence to which it is so plainly heading, if you like this world, I say, defend it. But I want to push it into the past as completely as I can and as fast as I can before it turns to horror. So I shall be against you. I am for progress. I believe in progress. Work for progress is the reallest thing in life to me. If some messenger came to me and said with absolute conviction to me, ‘This is all. It can never be any better,’ I would not go on living in it for another four and twenty hours.”
Geoffry seemed to have no retort ready. His face had assumed the mulish expression of a schoolboy being preached at. This fellow, confound him! had language. And splashed it about at dinner time! Long sentences! Bookish words! Philip might as well have let in a field preacher. Field Preacher, that’s what he was. That should be his name. Geoffry nodded his head as who should say, “We’ve heard all that,” and helped himself in a businesslike way to butter. A fellow must have butter whatever trash he has to hear. You wouldn’t have him wait until all the jawing was finished before he took butter.
“Not much to quarrel with to my mind,” said Mr. Plantagenet-Buchan, “in a world that can give us such a sunset as we had to-night. This spacious room. And all these lovely flowers.”
“But there will still be sunsets and flowers, in any sort of human world,” said Mr. Sempack.
Mr. Plantagenet-Buchan was a little belated with his reply but it opened profound philosophical issues and he liked it and was content. “Against a background,” he said, “perhaps not dark enough to do them justice.”
After the move upstairs, when all those members of the party who lived and were satisfied with the present, the Bullaces and the Mathisons and Geoffry and Lady Grieswold and Puppy and Mr. Haulbowline, had gone apart to their happiness in bridge, the talk about Mr. Sempack and his great world of peace, justice and splendid work to come, had turned chiefly on the quality of the obstacles and entanglements that still kept men back from that promised largeness of living. The persistence of his creative aim impressed Mrs. Rylands as heroic, but it was mingled with a patience that seemed to her almost inhuman.
“There is a time element in all these things,” said Mr. Sempack. “In one newspaper downstairs there was a report of the conference of some political organisation, I think the Independent Labour Party, and they had adopted as their ‘cry,’ so to speak, and with great enthusiasm, ‘Socialism in Our Time.’ The newspaper made a displayed head-line of it. What did they mean by that? Humbug? Something to catch the very young? Or a real proposal to change this competitive world into a communistic system, change its spirit, its intricate, undefined and often untraceable methods in twenty or thirty years? Face round against the trend of biology in that short time. Take nature and tradition by the throat and win at the first onset. A small group of ill-informed people. Fantastic! To believe in the possibility of change at that pace is as absurd as not to believe in change at all.”
A distant “Hear, Hear!” came from the bridge table.
“Table, partner!” the voice of Lady Grieswold reproved.
Colonel Bullace made no further sign.
“Nevertheless all these changes are going to be made and they may be made much sooner — I am sure they will be made much sooner — than most of us suppose. Change in human affairs goes with an acceleration. . . . ”
He went on with this reasonableness of his that balanced so perplexingly between cold cruelty and heroic determination. The world was not ready yet for the achievement of its broader and greater changes. Knowledge had grown greatly, but it had to grow enormously and be enormously diffused before things could be handled on such a scale as would give a real world peace, a world system of economics, a universal disciplined and educated life. The recent progress of psychology had been very great, but it was still only beginning. Until it had gone further we could do no more than speculate and sketch the developments of the political life of mankind and of education and religious teaching that would usher in the new phase. There was a minimum of time needed for every advance in thought and knowledge. We might help and hurry on the process up to a certain limit, but there was that limit. Until that knowledge had been sought and beaten out, we were workers without tools, soldiers without weapons. Meanwhile ——
“Easy for us to sit here and be patient, but what of the miner, cramped and wet, in the dark and the foul air, faced with a lock-out in May?” said Philip.
“I can’t help him,” said Mr. Sempack serenely.
“Immediately,” said Philip.
“Heaven knows if I can ever help him. Why should I pretend? If he strikes I may send a little money, but that is hardly help. Why pretend? I am no use to him. Just as I couldn’t help if presently there came a wireless call — have you a wireless here?”
“In the kitchen,” said Mrs. Rylands. “They like the music.”
“To say that some shiploads of people were burning and sinking in the South Atlantic. No help is possible at this distance. Just as there is nothing that any of us can do for the hundreds of thousands of people who are at this present moment dying of cancer. It is no good thinking about such things.”
The landscape of Mr. Sempack’s face hardly altered. There may have been the ghost of a sigh in his voice. “It is no good getting excited by such things. It may even do harm.
“The disease of cancer will be banished from life by calm, unhurrying, persistent men and women, working, with every shiver of feeling controlled and suppressed, in hospitals and laboratories. And the motive that will conquer cancer will not be pity nor horror; it will be curiosity to know how and why.”
“And the desire for service,” said Lord Tamar.
“As the justification of that curiosity,” said Mr. Sempack, “but not as the motive. Pity never made a good doctor, love never made a good poet. Desire for service never made a discovery.”
“But that miner,” said Philip, and after his fashion left his sentence incomplete.
“The miner is cramped between the strata — in the world of ideas just as much as in the mine. We cannot go and lift the strata off him, suddenly, in the twinkling of an eye. He has his fight to fight with the mine-owner, who is as blind. In his fashion. Which is — physically at least — I admit — a more comfortable fashion.”
Philip’s troubled eyes rested for a moment on his pretty wife.
“The miners are finding life intolerable, the mine-owners are greedy not only for what they have but more; the younger Labour people want to confuse the issue by a general strike and a push for what they call the Social Revolution.”
“What exactly do they mean by that?” asked Lord Tamar.
“Nothing exactly. The Communists have persuaded themselves that social discontent is a creative driving force in itself. It isn’t. Indignation never made a good revolution, and I never heard of a dinner yet, well cooked by a starving cook. All that these troubles can do is to ease or increase the squeeze on the miners and diminish or increase the totally unnecessary tribute to the coal-owners — at the price of an uncertain amount of general disorganisation and waste. My own sympathies are with the miners and I tax my coal bill twenty-five per cent, and send it to them. But I cherish no delusions about that struggle. There is no solution in all that strife and passion. It is just a dog-fight. The minds of people have to be adjusted to new ideas before there is an end to this sweating of men in the darkness. People have to realise that winning coal is a public need and service, like the high road and the post office. A service that has to be paid for and taken care of. Everybody profits by cheap accessible coal. A coal-owner’s royalties are as antiquated as a toll gate. Some day it will be clear to everyone, as it is clear to any properly informed person now, that if the state paid all the costs of exploiting coal in the country and handed the stuff out at prices like — say ten shillings a ton, the stimulation of every sort of production would be so great, the increase, that is, on taxable wealth would be so great, as to yield a profit, a quite big profit, to the whole community. The miners would become a public force like the coastguards or the firemen. . . . ”
“You think that is possible?” asked Philip.
“I know. It’s plain. But it’s not plain to everyone. Facts and possibilities have to be realised. Imaginations have to be lit and kept lit. Certain obstructive wickednesses in all of us ——”
Mr. Sempack stopped. He never finished a sentence needlessly.
“But coal winning isn’t confined to its country of origin,” said Philip. “There is the export trade.”
“Which twists the question round completely,” said Lord Tamar.
“When you subsidise coal getting in England you subsidise industrial competition abroad,” said Philip.
“Exactly. While we still carry on the economic life of the world in these compartments and pigeon-holes we call sovereign states,” said Mr. Sempack, “we cannot handle any of these other issues. Nothing for it but makeshift and piecemeal.”
“Till the Millennium,” said Philip.
“Till the light grows brighter,” said Sempack and added meditatively: “It does grow brighter. Perhaps not from day to day, but from year to year.”
They went on to talk about the moral training that was needed if modern communities were to readjust their economic life to the greater and more unified methods that were everywhere offering themselves, and when they talked of that Mr. Sempack made the schools and colleges of to-day seem more provisional and evanescent even than our railways and factories. Beyond their translucent and fading forms, he evoked a vision of a wide, free and active life for all mankind. In the foreground, confusions, conflicts, wastes, follies, possible wars and destructions; on the slopes beyond, the promise and a little gathering band of the illuminated, who questioned, who analysed, who would presently plan and set new methods and teaching going. Nothing in the whole world was so important as the mental operations, the realisations and disseminations of these illuminated people, these creative originatory people who could not be hurried, but who might so easily be delayed, without whom, except for accident, nothing could be achieved. Where was the plain and solvent discussion needed to liberate minds from a thousand current obsessions and limitations? Where were the schools of the new time? They had not come yet. Where were the mighty armies of investigators? Nothing as yet but guerilla bands that wandered in the wilderness and happened upon this or that.
The self-discovery, the mutual discovery, of those who constituted this illuminated minority, became the main theme. They dawned. As yet they did but dawn upon themselves. They fought against nature within themselves and without. They fought against darkness without and within. Large phrases stuck out in Mrs. Rylands’ memories of this talk, like big crystals in a rock.
“The immense inattentions of mankind . . . ”
“Subconscious evasions and avoidances . . . ”
“Our alacrity for distractions . . . ”
“The disposition of the human mind to apprehend, to assent and then to disregard, to understand and yet flag and fail, before the bare thought of a translation into action . . . ”
“The terror of isolation because of our insecure gregariousness. We try to catch every epidemic of error for fear of singularity . . . ”
“Minds as wild as rabbits and as ready to go underground . . . ”
“When you want them to hunt in a pack,” Mr. Plantagenet-Buchan had assisted at this point. . . .
“The disposition of everything human to inflame and make a sore about a minor issue, that will presently kill all the wider interests concerned . . . ”
The great talk rambled on and all its later phases were haunted by the idea that embodies itself in that word “Meanwhile.” In the measure in which one saw life plainly the world ceased to be a home and became the mere site of a home. On which we camped. Unable as yet to live fully and completely.
Since nothing was in order, nothing was completely right. We lived provisionally. There was no just measure of economic worth; we had to live unjustly. Even if we did not rob, “findings keepings” was our motto. Did we consider ourselves overpaid, to whom could we repay? Were we to relinquish all it would vanish like a drop in the thirsty ocean of the underpaid and unproductive. We were justified in taking life as we found it; in return if we had ease and freedom we ought to do all that we could to increase knowledge and bring the great days of a common world-order nearer, a universal justice, the real civilisation, the consummating life, the days that would justify the Martyrdom of Man. In many matters we still did not know right from wrong. We did not so much live as discuss and err. The whole region of sexual relations, for example, was still a dark forest, unmapped; we blundered through it by instinct. We followed such tracks as we found and we could not tell if they had been made by men or brutes. We could not tell if they led to the open or roundabout to a lair. We followed them, or we distrusted them and struggled out of them through the thorns.
“But a glimpse now and then of a star!” said Mr. Plantagenet-Buchan — his best thing, he reflected, that evening.
“Or a firefly,” said Lady Catherine.
The psychologist, the physiologist, would clear that jungle in time. In time.
All sorts of beautiful and splendid things might happen in this world. (The large gaze of Mr. Sempack rested for a moment on Lady Catherine.) But they happened accidentally; you could not make a complete life of them. You could not take a life or a group of lives and give it a perfect existence, secluded and apart, in a blundering world. Man was a social creature and you could not be gods in Italy while there remained a single suffering cripple in China or Peru; you could not be a gentleman entirely, while a single underpaid miner cursed the coal he won for you. The nearest one could get to perfection in life now was to work for the greatness to come. And not trouble too much about one’s incidental blunders, one’s incidental falls from grace.
“Work,” he said and reflected. “We have to work for the work and take happiness for the wild flower it is. Some day men will cultivate their happinesses in gardens, a great variety of beautiful happinesses, happinesses grown under glass, happinesses all the year round. Such things are not for us. They will come. Meanwhile ——”
“Meanwhile,” echoed Lord Tamar.
Came that pause just before Mrs. Rylands asserted herself.
And then it was Mr. Plantagenet-Buchan had made his rather sad little summing-up; his sense of the gist of it all, given with his very formal and disciplined laugh, bright without being vulgar. “I perceive I have been meanwhiling all my life. Meanwhiling . . . Have I been living?” (Shrug of the shoulders and gesture of the hands.) “No, I have been meanwhiling away my time.”
And for once his own bright observation pierced back and searched and pricked himself. But it wasn’t real enough to end upon. Unsatisfactory.
“Eheu! fugaces!” he sighed, an indisputably elegant afterthought. Though something Greek would have been better. Or something a little less — familiar. But then people were so apt to miss the point if it was Greek or unhackneyed. And besides he had not on the spur of the moment been able to think of anything Greek and unhackneyed. Compromise always. Compromise. Meanwhile.
He became preoccupied and noted nothing of Mrs. Rylands’ remarkable good-night speech to Mr. Sempack.
For quite a long time he sat on his bed in his charming room in the tower before he began to undress, brooding in a state of quite unusual dissatisfaction upon himself, regardless of the beautiful views south, north, east and west of him, the coast and the mountains and the silhouetted trees. He liked to think of his existence as a very perfect and polished and finished thing indeed and he had been wounded by his own witticism about “meanwhiling away his life.” And this was entangled with another unpleasant and novel idea, that if one’s refinement was effective or even perceptible it couldn’t really be refinement. Some of these Europeans achieved a sort of accidentalness in their refinement. They left you in doubt about it. Should one go so far as to leave people in doubt about it? Was there such a thing as being aggressively refined?
Presently Mr. Plantagenet-Buchan stood up and regarded himself in his mirror, varying the point of view until at last he was ogling himself gravely over his shoulder. He stretched out his hands, his very remarkable white hands. Then he pirouetted right round until he came into his thoughtful attitude with his arms folded, as if consulting his diamond ring.
He was comparing himself with Mr. Sempack. He was struggling with the perplexing possibilities that there might be a profounder subtlety than he had hitherto suspected in the barest statement of fact and opinion, and a sort of style in a physical appearance that looked as though it had been shot out on a dump from a cart.
His discontent deepened. “Little humbug!” he said to the elegance in the mirror. Its expression remained unfriendly.
He touched brutality. “Little ass!” he said.
He turned from the mirror, sharply, and began to undress, methodically, after his manner.
Next morning Mrs. Rylands could better grasp the great talk and its implications. She lay in bed and contemplated it as she sipped her morning tea and it looked just as it had looked before she gave way to her fatigue, a very fine talk indeed and immensely interesting — to Philip and everyone. She forgot her last phase and the awful things she had thought about Mr. Sempack and remembered only her happy plagiarism from Mr. Plantagenet-Buchan, a “cathedral of ideas.” It was indeed like a great cathedral in her memory. It had sent her to bed exhausted it is true; but is anything worth having unless it exhausts you? It had stirred up Philip. That diabolical lapse had faded from her mind like a dream that comes between sleeping and waking.
It was impossible she found to recall how the talk had developed, but now that hardly mattered. The real value of a talk is not how it goes but what it leaves in your memory, which is one reason perhaps why dialogues in books are always so boring to read. Even Plato was boring. Jowett’s Plato had been one of the acutest disappointments in her life. She remembered how she had got the “Symposium” volume out of her father’s library and struggled with it in the apple tree. She had expected something like a bag of unimagined jewels. In any talk much of what was said was like the wire stage of a clay model and better forgotten as soon as it was covered over. But what was left from last night was a fabric plain and large in its incompleted outline, in which she felt her mind could wander about very agreeably and very profitably whenever she was so disposed. And in which Philip’s mind might be wandering even now.
This morning however she had little energy for such exploration. She approved of the great talk and blessed it and felt that it had added very much to her life. But she surveyed it only from the outside. The chief thing in her consciousness was that she was very comfortable and that she did not intend to get up. She would lie and think. But so far it seemed likely to be pure thought she would produce, without any contamination with particular things. She was very comfortable, propped up by pillows in her extensive bed.
She was, also, had she been able to see herself, very pretty. She was wearing a silk bed-jacket that just repeated a little more intensely the sapphire colour beneath her lace bedspread. It was trimmed with white fur. Her ruffled hair made her look like a very jolly but rather fragile boy. A great canopy supported by bed-posts of carved wood did its utmost to enhance the importance of the mistress of Casa Terragena. The dressing table with its furnishings of silver and shining enamel and cut and coloured glass, enforced the idea that whatever size the lady chose to be, it was the duty of her bedroom to treat her as an outsize in gracious ladies. The curtains of the window to the south-east still shut out the sunlight, but the western window was wide open and showed a stone-pine in the nearer distance, a rocky promontory, and then far away the sunlit French coast and Mentone and Cap Martin.
The day was fine but not convincingly fine. Over the sea was a long line of woolly yet possibly wicked little clouds putting their heads together. But so often in this easy climate such conspiracies came to nothing.
She wasn’t going down to breakfast; she did not intend indeed to go down until lunch. She was taking the fullest advantage of her state to be thoroughly lazy and self-indulgent and lie and play with her mind. Or doze as the mood might take her. Philip and Catherine and Geoffry and dear Miss Fenimore and everybody, let alone Bombaccio the major-domo and his morning minion, would see that everybody was given coffee and tea and hot rolls and eggs and bacon and fruit and Dundee marmalade, according to their needs. They would all see to each other and Bombaccio would see to all of them. Just think. She would not force her thinking or think anything out, but she would let her thoughts run.
This onset of maternity about which feminists and serious spinsters made such a fuss, was proving to be not at all the dreadful experience she had prepared herself to face. Soft folds of indolent well-being seemed to be wrapping about her, fold upon fold.
After all, bearing heirs to the Rylands’ millions was a very easy and pleasant sort of work to do in the world. Almost too easy and pleasant when one considered the pay. Smooth. Gentle. Living to the tune of a quiet murmur. She remembered something her Sussex aunt, Aunt Janet Nicholas, Aunt Janet the prolific, had once said. “It makes you feel less and less like being Brighton and more and more like being the Downs.” The Downs, the drowsy old Downs in summer sunshine. The tiny harebells in the turf. The velvet sound of bees. A peacefulness of body and soul. And yet one could think as clearly and pleasantly as ever. Or at least one seemed to think.
She had an idea, a by no means imperative idea, that presently when she had done with realising how comfortable she was, her thoughts might after all take a stroll about the aisles and cloisters of the overnight discussion, but instead she found herself thinking alternatively of two more established prepossessions. One was Philip and his interest in the talk and the other, which somehow ought to be quite detached from him and yet which seemed this morning to be following the thought of him like a shadow, was —Stupids.
Philip’s interest in this discussion had surprised her, and yet it was only the culminating fact to something that had been very present to her mind for some little time. She was convinced — and she had always been convinced — that Philip’s mind was a very vigorous and able one, a mind of essential nobility and limitless possibilities, but so soon as she had got over the emotion and amazement of the wonderful marriage that had lifted her out of the parental Hampshire rectory to be the mistress of three lovely homes, and begun really to look at Philip and consider him not as a love god but as a human being, she had perceived a certain restrictedness in his intellectual equipment. Apparently he had read scarcely anything of the slightest importance in the world; he had gone through the educational furnaces of Eton and had a year at Oxford before the war, unscathed by sound learning of any sort. The smell of intellectual fire had not passed upon him. Not a hair of his head had been singed by it. He was amazingly inexpressive and inarticulate. If he knew the English language, for some reason he cut most of it dead. And he opened a book about as often as he took medicine, which was never.
Yet he seemed to know a lot of things and every now and then she found she had to admit him not only cleverer but more knowledgeable than she was. If he had read little, he had picked up a lot. He had been a good soldier under Allenby, they said, especially in the East. In spite of his youth men had been glad to follow him. And in spite of his silences all sorts of intelligent people respected him. Mr. Plantagenet-Buchan and Mr. Sempack betrayed no contempt nor pity for such rare remarks as he made. They were infrequent but sound. He conducted, or at any rate helped to conduct, business operations that were still extremely vague to her, operations that she had gathered had to do mainly with steel. When he went into Parliament, and he was nursing Sealholme to that end, he would, she was sure, be quite a good member of Parliament. And yet — she knew it and still her mind struggled against the admission — there was something that was lacking. A vigour, an expansion. His mind refused to be militant, was at best reserved and a commentary. Dear and adorable Philip! Was it treason to think as much? Was it treason to want him perfect?
Her own family was an old Whig family with traditions of intellectual aggressiveness. She had cousins who were university professors, and her home, so close and convenient for Oxford, had been actively bookish and alive to poetry and painting. She had listened to good talk before she was fifteen. She had not always understood, but she had listened soundly. She had grown up into the idea that there was this something eminently desirable that you got from the literature of the world, that was conveyed insidiously by great music, and by all sorts of cared-for and venerated lovely things. It went with a frequent fine use of the mind, a conscious use, and it took all science by the way. It was an inward and spiritual grace, this something, that was needed to make the large, handsome and magnificently prosperous things of life worth while. She had not so much thought out these ideas to their definiteness, as apprehended their existence established in her mind. And when all the storm of meeting this glorious happy Philip and attracting him and being loved by him and marrying him and becoming the most fortunate of young women subsided, there were these values, still entrenched, reflecting upon all that she had achieved.
There in the middle of her world ruled this sun-god, this dear friend and lover, active, quietly amused, bringing her with such an adorable pride and such adorable humility to the homes of his fathers, giving, exhibiting; and yet as one settled into this life, as day followed day, and one began to realise what the routines and usages, the interests and entertainments amounted to, there arose this whisper of discontent, this rebellious idea that still something was lacking.
The life was so large and free and splendid in comparison with anything that she might reasonably have hoped for, that there seemed a whiff of ingratitude even in thinking that it was also rather superficial.
It wasn’t, she told herself, that this new life that made her a great lady wasn’t good enough for her. She was a lucky woman. Her estimate of herself was balanced and unexacting. She had never been able to make up her mind whether she was rather more than usually clever or rather more than usually stupid; she was inclined to think both. It wasn’t a question of how this new life became her, but how it became Philip. The point was that it was somehow not good enough for Philip. And, if this wasn’t a paradox, as if Philip wasn’t as yet quite good enough for himself.
And still more evasive and subtle was her recent apprehension of the fact that Philip himself knew that somehow he wasn’t quite good enough for himself. This new perception had reached back, as it were, and supplied an explanation of why Philip had come out of a world of alert and brilliant women, to her of all people. Because about her that had been a sort of schoolgirl prestige of knowledge and cleverness, and perhaps for him that had seemed to promise just whatever it was that would supply that haunting yet impalpable insufficiency. Instead of which, she reflected, here in this almost regal apartment, she had given him a dewy passion of love, worship, physical, but physical as tears and moonlight, and now this promise of a child.
Had he forgotten, in his new phase of grateful protectiveness, what need it was had first brought them together?
Quite recently, and after being altogether blind to it, she had discovered these gropings out towards something more than the current interests of his happy and healthy days. He was questioning things. But he was questioning them as though he had forgotten she existed. He was, for example, quite markedly exercised by this question of a possible coal strike in England. With amazement she had become aware how keenly he was interested. For all she knew the Rylands’ millions were deeply involved in coal, but it wasn’t, she was assured, on any personal account that he was interested.
Beyond the question of the miners, there was something more. He was concerned about England. She had thought at first that, like nearly all his class, he took the Empire and the social system, and so forth, for granted, and the secret undertow of her mind, her memories of talk at the parental table, had made it seem a little wanting in him to treat such questionable things as though they were fundamental and inalterable. But now she realised he was beginning to penetrate these assumptions. There had been an illuminating little encounter, about a week ago, with Colonel Bullace — on the night of Colonel Bullace’s arrival.
Philip never discussed; he was too untrained to discuss. But he would suddenly ask quite far-reaching questions and then take your answer off to gnaw it over at leisure. Or he would drop remarks, like ultimatums, days or weeks after you had answered his questions. And a couple of these rare questions of his were fired that night at Colonel Bullace.
“What’s all this about British Fascists?” asked Philip, out of the void.
“Eh!” said Colonel Bullace, and accumulated force. “Very necessary organisation.”
Philip had remained patiently interrogative.
“Pat’s pretty deep in it,” dear Mrs. Bullace had explained in her simple disarming way.
The picture of the scene came back to Mrs. Rylands. It was a foursome that evening; the Bullaces had been the first of this present party to arrive. She recalled Colonel Bullace’s face. He was like a wiry-haired terrier. No, he was more like a Belgian griffon — with that big eyeglass, he was more like a one-eyed Belgian griffon. What a queer thing it must be to be a nice little, rather silly little woman like Mrs. Bullace and be married to a man like that, a sort of canine man. She supposed — for example — one would have to kiss that muzzle. Embrace the man! Mrs. Rylands stirred uneasily under her lace bedspread at the thought. He had talked about the dangers of Communism in England, of the increasing insubordination of labour, of the gold of Moscow, and the need there was to “check these Bolsheviks.” All in sentences that were like barks. She did not remember very clearly what he said; it sounded like nonsense out of the Daily Mail. It probably was. What she remembered was Philip’s grave face and how, abruptly, it came to her again as though she had never seen or felt it before, how handsome he was, how fine he was and how almost intolerably she loved him.
“You mean to say, you would like to provoke a general strike now? And smash the Trade unions?”
“Put ’em in their place.”
“But if you resort to ‘firmness’ now — if Joynson-Hicks and his fellow Fascists in the Cabinet, and your Daily Mail and Morning Post party, do succeed in bringing off a fight and humiliating and beating the workers and splitting England into two camps ——”
Philip found his sentence too involved and dropped it. “How many men will you leave beaten?” he asked. “How many Trade unionists are there?”
Colonel Bullace didn’t seem to know.
“Some millions of them? Englishmen?”
“Dupes of Moscow!” said Colonel Bullace. “Dupes of Moscow.”
“A day will come,” added Colonel Bullace defiantly, “when they will be grateful to us for the lesson — grateful.”
Philip had considered that for a moment and then he had sighed deeply and said, “Oh! Let’s go to bed,” and it seemed to her that never before had she heard those four words used so definitely for calling a man a fool.
And afterwards he had come into her room, still darkly thoughtful. He had kissed her good-night almost absent-mindedly and then stood quite still for a minute perhaps at the open window looking out at the starlight. “I don’t understand all this stuff,” he said at last, to himself almost as much as to her. “I don’t understand what is going on and has been going on for some time. This British Fascist stuff and so on. . . . I wonder if anyone does? These work-people — and their hours and lives, and what they will stand and what they won’t. It’s all — beyond anything I know about.”
He stood silent for a time.
“Wages went down. Now — unemployment is growing and growing.
“Nobody seems to know.” It was like a sigh.
“Suppose they smash things up.”
Then in his catlike way he was gone, without a sound except the soft click of the door.
Perplexed Philip!
Perplexing Philip!
She looked now at the window against which he had stood and wondered how she might help him. He was the most difficult and comprehensive problem she had ever faced. This social struggle that it seemed hung over England had risen disregarded while she had been giving herself wholly to love. She did not know any of the details of the coal subsidies and coal compromises, that had produced this present situation about which everybody was growing anxious. It had all come on suddenly, so far as her knowledge went, in a year or so. And now here she was, useless to her man. It was no good pestering him with ill-informed questions. She would have to read, she would have to find out before she approached him.
It was queerly characteristic of Philip that he had pounced upon Mr. Sempack at the Fortescues’ at Roquebrune and brought him over, without a word of explanation. She guessed Mr. Sempack had talked about coal and labour at Roquebrune. Philip had something instinctive and inexplicable in his actions; he seemed to do things without any formulated reason; he had felt the need of talk as a dog will sometimes feel the need of grass and fall upon it and devour it. But she reproached herself that he should have had to discover this need for himself.
Talk. That she reflected had been one of the great things that had been missing in the opening months of married life. This morning it was clearly apparent to her that so spacious and free a life as hers and Philip’s here in Casa Terragena had no right to exist without a steady flow of lucid and thorough talking.
That was a final precision of something that had been evolving itself in her mind since first she had been taken up into the beauty and comfort of this Italian palace. From the outset there had been a faint murmuring in her conscience, a murmuring she spoke of at times as her “Socialism.” She squared this murmuring with her continued intense enjoyment of her new life by explaining to herself that people were given these magnificent homes and famous and entrancing gardens and scores of servants and gardeners and airy lovely rooms with luminous views of delicately sunlit coastlines, so that they might lead beautiful exemplary lives that would enrich the whole world. For the dresses and furnishings, the graces and harmonies of life at Casa Terragena were finally reflected in beauty and better living all down the social scale. No Socialist State, she was sure, with everything equal and “divided up” could create and maintain such a garden as hers, such a tradition of gardening. That was why she was not a political socialist. Because she had to be a custodian of beauty and the finer life. That had been her apology for her happiness, and it was the underlying motive in her discontent and in her sense of something wanting, that their life was not sustaining her apology. They had been given the best of everything and they were not even producing the best of themselves. They were living without quality.
That was it, they had been living without quality.
Tennis, she reflected, by day and bridge by night.
He was not living like an aristocrat, he was living like a suburban clerk in the seventh heaven of suburbanism.
He was doing so and yet he didn’t want to do so. He was in some way hypnotised against his secret craving to do the finest and best with himself. And he was trying to find a way of release to be the man, the leader, the masterful figure in human affairs she surely believed he might be.
How to help him as he deserved to be helped, when one was clever and understanding perhaps but not very capable, not very brilliant, and when one was so easily fatigued. How to help him now particularly when one was invaded and half submerged by the needs of another life?
That was a strand of thought familiar now to Mrs. Rylands and it twisted its way slowly through her clear unhurrying mind for the tenth time perhaps or the twentieth time, with little variations due to the overnight talk and with an extension now from Philip to a score of great houses she had visited in England and wonderful dances and assemblies where she had seen so many other men and women after his type, so expensive, so free and so materially happy. With something inexpressive and futile shadowing their large magnificence. And interweaving with this and embracing it now with a suggestion almost of explanation, was a still more intimate strand in her philosophy, her long established conviction that there was a great excess of Stupids in the world.
Stupids were the enemy. This grey film that rested upon things, this formalism, this shallowness, this refusal to take life in a grand and adventurous way, were all the work of Stupids. Stupids were her enemies as dogs are the enemies of cats.
Her conception of life as a war for self-preservation against Stupids dated from the days when she had been a small, fragile, but intractable child, much afflicted by governesses in her father’s rambling Warwickshire rectory. Stupids were lumps. Stupids were obstacles. Stupids were flatteners and diluters and spoilers of exciting and delightful things. They told you not to and said it was dinner time. They wanted you to put on galoshes. They said you mustn’t be too eager to excel and that everyone would laugh at you. “Don’t over-do it,” they said. In the place of your lovely things which they marred, they had disgusting gustoes of their own. They made ineffable Channel-crossing faces when one said sensible things about religion and they abased themselves in an inelegant collapse of loyalty before quite obviously commonplace people, and quite obviously absurd institutions. And they wanted you to! And made fusses and scenes when you didn’t! Oh! Stupids! She met them in the country-side, she met them again at Somerville College where she had imagined she would be released into a company of free and vigorous virgins.
And now in this new life of great wealth and distinction, in which it ought to be so easy for men and women to become at least as noble as their furniture and at least as glorious as their gardens, there were moments when it seemed to her that Stupid was King.
She came back to her idea of Philip as awakening, as endeavouring to awake, from something that hypnotised him, that had caught him and hypnotised him quite early in life. He had been caught by Stupids and made to respect their opinions and their standards; he had been trained to a great and biased toleration of Stupids, so that they pervaded his life and wasted his time and interrupted his development. The Stupids at school had persuaded him that work was nothing and games were everything. The Stupids of his set had insisted that most of the English language was a mistake. The Stupids of this world set their heavy faces against all thought. She saw Philip as struggling in a sort of Stupid quicksand, needing help and not knowing where to find it, and she herself by no means secure, frantic to help and unable.
What if she were to try to do more than she did in making an atmosphere for Philip? The irruption and effect of Mr. Sempack had set her enquiring whether there were not perhaps quite a lot of other stimulating people to be found, and whether perhaps it wasn’t a wife’s place to collect them. Mr. Plantagenet-Buchan of course was clever, clever and dexterous, but he did not stimulate, and there were moments when Philip stared at some of Mr. Plantagenet-Buchan’s good things as though he couldn’t imagine why on earth they had been said. Tamars were intelligent but self-contained, they liked to wander off about the garden, just the two of them, she evidently listening to an otherwise rather silent young man, and Lady Catherine again was intelligent but quite uncultivated, a mental wild rose, a rambler, a sprawling sweet-briar. Philip seemed to avoid Tamar, which was natural perhaps since Tamar showed an equal shyness of Philip, but also he and Lady Catherine avoided each other, which was odd seeing how charming they both were. But all the others of the party ——?
The little face on the pillow meditated the inevitable verdict reluctantly. The loyalty of the hostess battled against an invincible truthfulness.
Stupids! . . .
She had got together a houseful of Stupids. . . .
Pervasive and contagious Stupids. The struggle overnight to get the great talk going had been a serious one, exemplary, illuminating. Nowadays people like the Bullaces, the Mathisons, and Puppy Clarges, seemed to assume they had the conversational right of way. They had no respect for consecutiveness. They hated to listen. They felt effaced unless they had something to vociferate, and it hardly mattered to them what they vociferated.
How stupid and needless Colonel Bullace’s intervention had been! And how characteristic of all his tribe of Stupids!
He had pricked up his ears at the word Utopia and coughed and turned a rather deeper pink; and after the third repetition and apropos of nothing in particular, he had addressed Mr. Sempack in an abrupt, caustic and aggressive manner. He cut across an unfinished sentence to do so.
“I suppose, Sir,” he had said, ”you find your Utopia in Moscow?”
Mr. Sempack had regarded him as a landscape might regard a puppy. “What makes you suppose that?” he asked.
“Well! isn’t it so, Sir? Isn’t it so?”
Mr. Sempack had turned away his face again. “No,” he said over his shoulder and resumed his interrupted sentence.
Then Bombaccio, wisest and most wonderful of servants, had nudged Colonel Bullace’s elbow with the peas and the new potatoes and diverted his attention and effaced him. But surely it was wrong to have people in one’s house at all if they required that amount of suppression. Yet how often in the last few months had she heard talk effaced by Stupids like Colonel Bullace. Full of ready-made opinions they were, full of suspicions they would not even assuage by listening to what they wanted to condemn.
Dear Miss Fenimore again was a demi-Stupid, a Stupid in effect, an acquiescent Stupid, willing perhaps but diluent to everything that had point and quality, and Lady Grieswold had been knowingly and wilfully invited as a Stupid, a bridge Stupid to gratify and complete the Bullaces. Her bridge was awful it seemed, but then Mrs. Bullace’s bridge was awful.
The Mathisons were a less clamorous sort of Stupid than Colonel Bullace, but more insidious and perhaps more deadly. They did not contradict and deny fine things; silently they denied. These Mathisons had been brought along by Philip and Geoffry and they were to exercise him at tennis. They did, every day. For two of his best hours in the morning and sometimes after tea Philip strove to play a better game than the Mathisons, with either Geoffry or Puppy as his partner. It tried him. It exasperated him. He detested and despised Mathison, she perceived, as much as she did, but he would not let him go and he would always play against him. He could not endure, and that was where the Stupids had him fast, that a man so inferior as Mathison, so cheap-minded, so flat-mannered, should have the better of him at anything.
They all conspired to put it upon Phil that his form at tennis mattered. She would go down to the court helplessly distressed to see her god, hot and over-polite and in a state of furious self-control, while Puppy and the others — who was it? — Miss Fenimore and some one? Mr. Haulbowline! that shadow, sat in wicker chairs and either applauded or regretted — working him up.
She smiled and affected interest and all the time her soul was crying out: “Philip, my darling! It’s the cream of your strength and the heart of your day you’re giving to the conquest of Mr. Mathison. And it doesn’t matter in the least. It doesn’t matter in the very least, whether you beat him or whether you don’t.”
Geoffry too it seemed played a better game than Philip. But that was an accepted superiority.
Geoffry was a deeper, more complex kind of Stupid altogether than these others. And yet so like Philip; as like Philip as a mask is like a face. Geoffry was the bad brother of the family; he had been sent down from Eton; he did nothing; he looked at his sister-in-law askance. Philip was too kind to him. He drifted in and out of Casa Terragena at his own invitation. A moral Stupid, she knew he was, with challenge and disbelief in his eyes, and yet with a queer hold upon Philip. And an occult understanding with Puppy. When Geoffry was about, Philip would rather die than say a serious thing.
And then as the accent upon all this Stupid side of the house-party was Puppy Clarges, strident and hard, a conflict of scent and cigarette smoke, with the wit of a music hall and an affectedly flat loud voice. She was tall as Catherine, but she had no grace, no fluency of line. Her body ran straight and hard and then suddenly turned its corners as fast as possible.
No, they made an atmosphere, an atmosphere in which it was impossible for Philip to get free from his limitations. It was his wife’s task — if it was anyone’s task — to dispel that atmosphere. Drive it out by getting in something better — of which Mr. Sempack was to be regarded as a type.
It wasn’t going to be easy to change this loose Terragena atmosphere. It was not to be thought of that a wife should set brother against brother . . .
Her mind was too indolent this morning to face baffling problems. For a time it lost itself and then she found herself thinking again with a certain unavoidable antagonism of Puppy Clarges. Why was a girl of that sort tolerated? She was rude, she was troublesome, she was occasionally indecent and she professed to be unchaste. Yet when Mrs. Rylands had mentioned the possibility of Puppy moving on somewhere, if other visitors were to be invited, Philip had said: “Oh, don’t turn out old Puppy. She’s all right. She’s amusing. She’s very good fun. She’s so good for Lady Tamar.”
The shadow of perplexed speculation rested upon the pretty face against the pillows. It was not so much that Mrs. Rylands disliked Puppy as that she failed so completely and distressingly even to begin to understand the reaction of her world to this angular and aggressive young woman.
Puppy boasted by implication and almost by plain statement of her lovers.
Who could love that body of pot-hooks and hangers? Love was an affair of beauty; first and last it had to be beautiful. How could anyone set about making love to Puppy? When men made love — Mrs. Rylands generalised boldly from the one man she knew — when men made love, they were adorably diffident, they trembled, they were inconceivably, wonderfully tender and worshipful. Love, when one dared to think of love, came into one’s mind as a sacrament, a miracle, a mutual dissolution, as whispers in the shadows, as infinite loveliness and a glory. Love was pity, was tears, was a great harmony of all that was gentle, gracious, proud and aspiring in existence, towering up to an ecstasy of sense and spirit. But Puppy? The very thought of Puppy and a lover was obscene.
And she had lovers.
How different must be their quality from Philip’s!
The idea came from nowhere into Mrs. Rylands’ mind that life had two faces and that one was hidden from her. Life and perhaps everything in life had two faces. This queer idea had come into her mind like an uninvited guest. She had always thought before of Stupids as defective and troublesome people against whom one had to maintain one’s life, but against whom there was no question whatever of being able to maintain one’s life. But suppose there was something behind the Stupid in life, nearly as great, if not quite as great as greatness, nearly as great, if not quite so great as nobility and beauty?
Suppose one lay in bed too long, and held emptiness of life, idleness, shallowness, noise and shamelessness, too cheaply? Suppose while one lay in bed, they stole a march upon one?
The mistress of Casa Terragena lay very still for some moments and then her hand began to feel for the bell-push that was swathed in the old-fashioned silk bell-pull behind her. She had decided to get up.
There was a waterless part of the gardens at Terragena that was called the Caatinga. Nobody knew why it had that name; there was no such word in Italian and whatever justifications old Rylands had for its use were long since forgotten. Possibly it was Spanish-American or a fragment from some Red Indian tongue. The Caatinga was a region of high brown rocky walls and ribs and buttresses and recesses and hard extensive flats of sunburnt stone, through which narrow winding paths and steps had been hewn from one display to another; one came into its reverberating midday heat through two cavernous arches of rock with a slope of streaming mesembryanthemum, fleshy or shrivelled, between them, and a multitude of agaves in thorny groups, of gigantic prickly pears in intricate contortions, of cactuses and echinocactus, thick jungles of spiky and leathery exotics, gave a strongly African quality to its shelves and plateau and ridges and theatre-like bays. Only the wide variety of the plants and an occasional label betrayed the artificiality of this crouching, malignantly defensive vegetation. “African,” said some visitors, but others, less travelled or more imaginative, said: “This might be in some other planet, in Mars or in the moon.” Or they said it looked like life among the rocks under the sea.
Some obscure sympathy with a scene that was at once as real as Charing Cross and as strange as a Utopia may have drawn Mr. Sempack to this region, away from the more familiar beauties and prettinesses of Casa Terragena. At any rate, he made it his resort; he spread out his loose person upon such rare stony seats as were to be found there and either basked meditatively or read or wrote in a little notebook, his soft black felt hat thrust back so that its brim was a halo.
And thither also, drawn by still obscurer forces, came Lady Catherine, slightly dressed in crêpe georgette and carrying an immense green-lined sun umbrella that had once belonged to the ancestral Rylands. She stood over Mr. Sempack like Venus in a semi-translucent mist. She spoke with a mingling of hostility and latent proprietorship in her manner. “You will either blister or boil if you sit up here to-day,” she said.
“I like it,” said Mr. Sempack without disputing her statement, or showing any disposition to rearrange himself.
She remained standing over him. She knew that her level-browed face, looked-up-to and a little fore-shortened, was at its bravest and most splendid. “We seem able to talk of nothing down here but the things you said the other night.”
Mr. Sempack considered this remark without emotion. “The Mathisons?”
“They never talk. They gibber sport and chewed Daily Mail. But the others ——”
“Mrs. Bullace?”
“She’s a little hostile to you. You don’t mind?”
“I like her. But still ——”
“She thinks you’ve set our minds working and she doesn’t like minds working. I suppose it’s because the Colonel’s makes such unpleasant noises when it works. She said —— How did she put it? That you had taken all the chez-nouziness out of Casa Terragena.”
“You made me talk.”
“I loved it.”
“I didn’t want to talk and disturb people.”
“I wanted you to.”
“I do go on, you know, when I’m started.”
“You do. And you did it so well that almost you persuaded me to be a Utopian. But I’ve been thinking it over.” The lady spoke lightly and paused, and only a sudden rotation of the large umbrella betrayed the deceptiveness of her apparent calm. “It’s nonsense you know. It’s all nonsense. I don’t believe a word of it, this spreading web of science of yours, that will grow and grow until all our little affairs are caught by it and put in place like flies.” She indicated a vast imaginary spider’s web with the extended fingers of her large fine hand. She threw out after the rest, “Geometrical,” a premeditated word that had somehow got itself left out of her premeditated speech. “You won’t alter human life like that.”
Mr. Sempack lifted one discursive eyebrow an inch or so and regarded her with a mixture of derision and admiration. “It won’t affect you much,” he said, “but life will alter as I have said.”
“No,” said the lady firmly.
Mr. Sempack shrugged his face at the prickly pears.
Lady Catherine considered the locality and perched herself on a lump of rock so high that her legs extended straight in front of her. His note-making must stop for awhile. “It doesn’t matter in the least what is going to happen on the other side of time,” she said. “You make it seem to, but it doesn’t.”
“Things are happening now,” said Mr. Sempack.
Lady Catherine decided to ignore that. She had prepared certain observations while she had been dressing that morning and she meant to make them. She was not going to be deflected by unexpected replies. “As I thought it over the fallacy of all you said became plain to me. The fallacy of it. It became ridiculous. I saw that life is going to be what it has always been, competition, struggle, strong people seizing opportunities, honest people keeping faith, some people being loyal and brave and fine — and all that, and others mean and wicked. There will always be flags and kings and empires for people to be loyal to. Religion will always come back; we need it in our troubles. Life is always going to be an adventure. Always. For the brave. Nothing will change very much — in these permanent things. There will be only changes of fashion. What you said about people all becoming one was nonsense — becoming unified and forgetting themselves and even their own honour. I just woke up and saw it was nonsense.”
“You just lost your grip on what I had been saying,” said Mr. Sempack.
“It was an awakening.”
“It was a relapse.”
Lady Catherine reverted to her mental notes. “I shook it off. I looked at myself and I looked at the sunshine and I saw you had just been talking my world away. And leaving nothing in the place of it. I went downstairs and there on the terrace were those six Roman busts that have been dug up there, faces exactly like the faces of people one sees to-day, the silly one with the soft beard most of all, and I went out past that old tombstone, you know, the one with an inscription to the delightful Lucina, that Mrs. Rylands has just had put up again, and I thought of how there had been just such a party as we are, in the Roman villa that came before the Rylands. Perhaps Lucina was like Cynthia. I think she was. Very likely there was a Greek Sophist to anticipate you. All hairy and dogmatic but rather attractive. Talking wickedly about the Empire because he thought it really didn’t matter. And hundreds and hundreds of years ahead, somebody will still be living in this delightful spot and people will be making love and eating and playing and hearing the latest news and talking about how different everything will be in the days to come. Sur la Pierre Blanche. There will still be a good Bombaccio keeping the servants in order and little maids slipping out to make love to the garden-boys under the trees when the fireflies dance. And there you are!”
“There am I not,” said Mr. Sempack. “But there most evidently you are.”
He waved his dispersed limbs about for some seconds, it reminded her of the octopus in the Monaco Aquarium, collected them and came to a sitting position, facing her.
“Talking of sane things to you is like talking to a swan,” he said. “Or a bird of paradise.”
She smiled her most queenly at him and waited for more.
“You seem to understand language,” he said. “But unless it refers to you, in your world of acceptance and illusion, it means nothing to you at all.”
“You mean that my healthy mind, being a thoroughly healthy mind, rejects nonsense.”
“I admit its health. I regret its normality. But what it rejects is the unpalatable and the irrelevant. The truth is as irrelevant to you as a chemical balance to a butterfly.”
“And to you?”
“I am disposed to make myself relevant to the truth. It is my peculiarity.”
Lady Catherine had a giddy feeling that the talk was terribly high and intellectual. But she held on pluckily. “I don’t admit that your truth is the truth. I stick to my own convictions. I believe in the things that are, the human things.” She gathered herself for a great effort of expression. She let the umbrella decline until it lay upturned at her side, throwing up a green tone into her shadows. “I believe that the things that don’t matter, aren’t,” she announced triumphantly.
“Your world is flat?” he verified.
“It has its hills and valleys,” she corrected.
“But as for its being a globe?”
She took the point magnificently. “Mere words,” she said. “Just a complicated way of saying that you can keep on going west and get home without a return ticket.”
“An odd fact,” he helped her, “but not one to brood upon.”
“But you brood on things like that.”
“You have a philosophy.”
“Common sense.” And she restored the umbrella to its duty.
“Suppose the world is a ball,” she returned to the charge, “that doesn’t make it a pill that you can swallow. It doesn’t even make it a ball you can play football with. But you go about believing that because it is round, presently you will be able to trundle it about.”
“You have quite a good philosophy,” he said.
“It works — anyhow,” she retorted.
“I did not know that you ran your life on nearly such a good road-bed. I think —— I think your philosophy is as good as mine. So far as your present activities are concerned. I didn’t imagine you had thought it out to this extent.”
“I thought it out last night and this morning because your talk had bothered me.”
Mr. Sempack made no reply for some moments. He remained regarding her in silence with an expression on his face that she had seen before on other faces. And when he spoke, what he said was to begin with, similar to other speeches that had followed that expression in her previous experiences.
“I suppose that many people have told you that you are extraordinarily beautiful and young and proud and clever?”
She met his eyes with studied gravity, though she was really very much elated to have got this much from the great Mr. Sempack. “Shall I pretend I don’t think I’m good looking?” she asked.
“You are and you are full of life, happy in yourself, sure of yourself and of your power, through us, over your universe. Naturally your time is the present. Naturally you are wholly in the drama, and you don’t want even to think of the time before the curtain went up and still less of the time when the curtain will come down. You are Life, at the crest. Your philosophy expresses that. Your religion is just touching for luck and returning thanks. I wouldn’t alter your philosophy. But most of us are not like you. What is life for you is ‘Meanwhile’ for most of us.”
“There is too much meanwhile in the world,” said Lady Catherine after a moment’s reflection, and met his eyes more than ever.
“What would you have us do?”
“Believe as I do that things are here and now.”
Mr. Sempack’s eyes fell to her feet. His thoughts seemed to have sunken to great profundities. Still musing darkly he stood up and lifted his eyes to her face. “Well,” he said, with the shadow of a sigh in his voice; “here goes.”
And taking her by the elbow of the arm that held the umbrella and by the opposite shoulder, in his own extensive hands, he drew her into a standing position and kissed her very seriously and thoroughly on the mouth. She received his salutation with an almost imperceptible acquiescence. It was a very good serious kiss. He kissed her without either unseemly haste or excessive delay. But his body was quivering, which was as it should be. They stood close together for some moments while the kiss continued. His hands fell from her. Then, as if it explained everything, he said: “I wanted to do that.”
“And I hope you are satisfied?” she said with the laugh of one who protests astonishment.
“Not satisfied but — assuaged. Shall we sit down again? You will find it much more comfortable if you sit beside me here.”
“You are the most remarkable man I have ever met,” she said, and obeyed his suggestion.
“I rarely do things of this sort,” said Mr. Sempack, as though he was saying that the weather was fine. He adjusted his hat, his respectable, almost clerical hat, which showed a disposition to retire from his brazen brow altogether.
“You are a really wonderful man,” said Lady Catherine, leaning towards him, and her expression was simple and sincere.
“You are a really wonderful man,” she repeated before he could reply, “and now I feel I can talk to you plainly. I have never met anyone for a long time who has impressed me as you have done. You are — an astonishing discovery.”
Mr. Sempack had half turned towards her so that they sat side by side and face to face with their glowing faces quite close together. It was extraordinary that a man who was so ungainly a week and a room’s breadth away should become quite attractive and exciting and with the nicest, warmest eyes at a distance of a few inches. But it was so. “It is rare,” he said, “that I come back so completely to the present as you have made me do.”
“Come back to the present and reality,” she urged. “For good. That is what I wanted to say to you. I have been watching you all these days and wondering about you. You are the most exciting thing here. Much the most exciting thing. You have a force and an effect. You have a tremendous effect of personality. I never met anyone with so much personality. And you go so straight for things. I know all the political people at home who matter in the least. And not one of them matters in the least. There is not one who has your quality of strength and conviction; not one. Why do you keep out of things? Instead of talking and writing of what is coming; why don’t you make it come?”
“Oh!” said Mr. Sempack and recoiled a little.
“You could dominate,” she said.
“I wasn’t thinking of politics or dominating just then,” he explained. “I was thinking of — you.”
“That’s thrown in. But there has to be a setting. You seem to be masterful and yet you decline to be masterful. I am excited by you and I want you masterful. I want to see you — mastering things. The world is waiting for confident and masterful men. See how Italy has snatched at Mussolini. See how everything at home waits for a decisive voice and a firm hand. It wants a man who is sure as you are sure to grip all this sedition and discontent and feeble mindedness. All parties the same. I’m not taking sides. Philip doesn’t seem to know his own mind for five minutes together. And he owns coal galore.”
Mr. Sempack had gradually turned from her during this speech. “Philip?” he questioned himself in a whisper. He drooped perceptibly.
His tone when he spoke was calmly elucidatory.
“When we were talking about those things the other night,” he remarked, “I did my best to explain just why it was that one could not do anything very much of a positive sort now. Perhaps what I said wasn’t clear. The thing that has to happen before anything real can crystallise out in the way of a new state of affairs is a great change in the ideas of people at large. That is the real job in hand at present. Reconstructing people’s ideas. To the best of my ability I am making my contribution to that now. I don’t see what else can be done.”
He was looking at her no longer. He gave her his profile. The glow seemed to have gone out of him.
“But that is not living,” she said, with a faint flavour of vexation in her voice. “Meanwhile you must have a life of your own, a life that hurts and excites.”
He regarded her gravely. “That I suppose is why I kissed you.”
She met his eyes and perceived that the glow had not vanished beyond recall.
“Live now — instead of all this theorising,” she whispered. “You are so strange a person —— You could make an extraordinary figure.”
He turned from her, pulled up a great knee with his long hands, slanted his head on one side, considered the proposition.
“You think”; he weighed it; “I should project myself upon the world, flapping and gesticulating, making a great noise. It wouldn’t you know be a lucid statement, but it would no doubt have an air. A prophetic raven. Something between Peter the Hermit, William Jennings Bryan and the great Mr. Gladstone on campaign? Leading people stupendously into unthought-of ditches. And leaving them.” He turned an eye on her and it occurred to her to ask herself, though she could not wait for the answer, whether he was laughing either at her or at himself. He shook his head slowly from side to side. “No,” he concluded.
“We have to learn from the men of science,” he supplemented, “that the way to be effective in life is to avoid being personally great — or any such glories and excitements.”
“But how can a woman enter into the life of a man who just sits about and thinks and tries it over in talk and writes it down?”
“My dear — you are my dear, you know — she can’t. But do you dream that some day you and I perhaps might ride together into a conquered city? Beauty and the Highbrow.”
“You could do great things.”
“After the election, our carriage, horses taken out, dragged by the shouting populace to the Parliament House.”
“You caricature.”
“Not so very much. You are, my dear, the loveliest thing alive. I can’t imagine anything more sweet and strong — and translucent. I am altogether in love with you. My blood runs through my veins, babbling about you and setting every part of me afire. You stir me like great music. You fill me with inappeasable regrets. But —— Between us there is a great gulf fixed. I live to create a world and you are the present triumph of created things.”
She said nothing but she willed herself to be magnetic and intoxicating.
Mr. Sempack however was carried past her siren radiations by the current of his thoughts.
“I doubt,” he reflected, “if life has very much more use for a perfect thing, for finished grace and beauty, than an artist has for his last year’s masterpiece. Life grows the glorious fruit — and parts from it. The essential fact about life is imperfection. Life that ceases to struggle away from whatever it is towards something that it isn’t, is ceasing to be life.”
“Just as if I were inactive!” she remarked.
“You’re splendidly active,” he said with a smile like sunlight breaking over rugged scenery: “but it’s all in a set and defined drama. Which is nearing the end of its run.”
“You mean — I am no positive good in the world at all. A back number.”
“Good! You’re necessary. For the excitement, disappointment, and humiliation of the people who will attack the real creative tasks. Consider what you are doing! Out of whim. Out of curiosity. You shine upon me, you dazzle me, you are suddenly friendly to me and tender to me. I forget my self-forgetfulness. I dare to kiss you. It seems almost incredible to me but you —— You make it seem possible that I might go far with your loveliness. You bring me near to forgetting what I am, a thing like an intellectual Megatherium, slow but sturdy, mixed up with joints like a rockfall and a style like St. Simeon Stylites — and infinite tedious toil of the spirit — and you make me dream of the pride of a lover.”
“Dream,” she whispered, and radiated a complete Aurora Borealis.
But the mental inertia of Mr. Sempack was very great. Certain things were in his mind to say and he went on saying them.
“I don’t want to be brought back to this sort of thing. After I have so painfully — got away from it. I don’t want to have my illusions restored. It unmakes one. It is necessary before one can do one solitary good thing in life that one should be humiliated and totally disillusioned about oneself. One isn’t born to any living reality until one has escaped from one’s prepossession with the personal life. The personal life branches off from the stem to die. The reality of life is to contribute. . . . ”
His expression ceased to be indifferent and became obstinate. He was beginning to feel and struggle against her nearness. But he held on for a time.
“All the things in human life that are worth while have been done by clumsy and inelegant people, by people in violent conflict with themselves, by people who blundered and who remain blundering people. They hurt themselves and awake. You know nothing of the inner life of the ungracious. You know nothing of being born as a soul. The bitterness. The reluctant search for compensations. The acceptance of the fact that service must be our beauty. But now this freak of yours brings back to me the renunciations, the suppressions and stifling of desire, that began in my boyhood and darkened my adolescence. I thought I had built myself up above all these things.”
“You are — majestic,” she whispered.
“Oh, nonsense!” He groaned it and, wavering for a moment, turned upon her hungrily and drew her to him.
No soundly beautiful woman has ever doubted that a man is better than a mirror for the realisation of her delight in herself, and it was with the profoundest gratification that Lady Catherine sensed the immense appreciations of his embrace. Her kiss, her rewarding and approving kiss, was no ordinary kiss, for she meant to plant an ineffaceable memory.