Mrs. Rylands found herself at last at peace and with nothing between her and her green leather book. Catherine had hardly gone from the room before she was forgotten.
The couch on which Mrs. Rylands was lying was a very comfortable couch and the jambs of the tall window, the lower border of the orange sun-blind and the parapet of her balcony framed a still picture of the crowning fronds of three palm trees, a single more distant cypress and the light-flood of the sky. The day outside was intensely bright and real and everything within cool, faint-coloured and unsubstantial. Mrs. Rylands’ sensations floated on a great restfulness and contentment; she was sustained by this deep life stream that had entered into her and taken control of her once uneasy self, a self in the profoundest contrast now to Lady Catherine’s restless activity. She had never felt so little disposed to hurry or so serene. This high resolve to think out all her world for Phil and have it clear and plain was quite unruffled by any fret of urgency.
To begin with, she asked herself, “What do I know? What have I that is fundamental?”
“Nothing,” she told herself, with perfect calm.
“Do I believe anything?”
That she thought over. God? Nothing that would have passed for a God in any time but this. No trace of that old gentleman, the God of our Fathers. At the dinner table of the Warwickshire rectory she had been allowed to listen to much modern theology and it had left her with phrases about the Absolute and Comprehensive Love that were hardly more human than the square root of minus one. Yet as her father used to say, the most impossible hypothesis of all was a universe ruled by blind chance. And the most incredible, an evil world. It was something to believe that if one could see it whole, as one never could, and if one could see it through, the everything, was all right. She did believe that. Or was her conviction deeper than belief?
It might be the mere mental reflection of the physical well-being that had succeeded the first resistances of her body to her surrender to destiny. But in a mirror can there ever be any truth more profound than reflection? That floated in her mind like some noiseless moth and soared and passed beyond her.
Should she write this for the first entry in her book: “There is no need to hurry. There is nothing in the whole world to justify fear.”
So far from believing in nothing, this was a tremendous act of faith.
She lay criticising these projected first propositions, indolently and yet clearly. Was this act of faith of hers just then the purring of a well-fed cat upon its cushions? No insect grub was ever cradled in so silky and secure a cocoon as she. For her indeed there might be no hurry and no fear, but what of the general case, the common experience? Wasn’t all the world hurrying, all the world driven by fear? But one hurried to make a speedy end to hurrying, and fear was just an emotional phase in the search for security. A man running from a tiger might be mentally nothing but a passion of fear but, one way or the other, that passion ended. A man running from a tiger was in no fit circumstances to apprehend fundamental truths; a woman caught up for a little while from the intenser stresses of life seemed more happily posed. Fear was an unendurable reality but it was incidental. It was a condition of travel. Just as haste and all struggle were incidental. The final rightness of things was wider; you might only see it incidentally in resting moments, but it was always there. Faith could be more than incidental and was more than incidental. While the water was troubled it couldn’t reflect the sky, but that didn’t prevent the sky being there to await reflection. All religions and philosophies since the world began had insisted that one must get out of the turmoil, somehow, to catch any vision of true realities. And as soon as you got that vision — serenity.
That should be the first entry then, so soon as she got up and could sit down to write it: “There is no need to hurry. There is nothing in the whole world to justify fear.”
After that the Thinker on the sofa rested for a while.
Presently she found a queer little aphorism drifting through her mind with an air of wanting to get into the green leather book: “Faith in good, Faith in God.” Just as easy to believe as deny that there was something directive and friendly and sure of itself, above all the contradictions and behind all the screens. Immense, incomprehensible, stupendous, silent, something that smiled in the starry sky. . . .
Then her mind drifted to the idea that everyone was too troubled about life, so very largely because they had no faith in good. They hurried. Everyone was hurrying. If there was nothing whatever to hurry about then they hurried about games, about politics, about personal disputes. They invented complications to trouble themselves. They accepted conventions and would not look thoroughly into anything because of this uncontrollable hurry. If only they would take longer views and larger views, they would escape from all this stress. It was just there that the importance of Mr. Sempack came in. He did take longer views and larger views and help other people to take them. He presented Progress as large and easy, swift and yet leisurely, sweeping forward by and through and in spite of all the disputations and hasty settlements and patchings up and running to and fro. He conveyed his conviction of a vast forward drive carrying the ordinary scurryings of life upon its surface, great and worth while, that comprehended a larger human life, a finer individual life, a happier life than at present we permitted ourselves to realise. His vision of mankind working its way, albeit still blindly and with tragic blunderings, to a world civilisation and the attainment of ever increasing creative power, gave a standard by which all the happenings of to-day, that swirled us about so confusedly and filled the newspapers so blindingly, could be judged and measured. He must come back to Casa Terragena and he must talk some more; and into the frame of progress he would evoke, his hostess, with her green leather book close at hand and receptive for all the finer phrases, would fit her interpretation of the coal question and the strike question and all the riddles and conflicts of the arena into which Philip had gone down. And Philip would begin writing those letters he had promised and she would get books and read. . . .
At this point Mrs. Rylands’ mind was pervaded by a feeling that work time was over and that it ought to be let out to play. It went off at once like a monkey and ran up and down and about the still palm fronds outside. They were like large feathers, except that the leaflets did not lock together. Was there any reason why they should be so like feathers? Next the stem the leaflets were extraordinarily narrow; she wondered why? Each frond curved over to its end harmoniously and evenly, so that to follow it was like hearing a long cadence, and the leaflets stood up at the arch of the curve and then slanted and each was just the least little bit in the world smaller and slanted the fraction of an inch more steeply than the one below it. Each had a twist so that it was bright bright green and then came round to catch the light and became dazzling silver to its point. Each frond was a keyboard along which the roving eye made visual music. Each played a witty variation on the common theme.
Mrs. Rylands came down out of her privacies in time for lunch, but lunch was a little delayed by the absence of Lady Catherine and Mr. Plantagenet-Buchan. Catherine had flitted off to Ventimiglia. A telegram and some letters had awaited her in the hall, Bombaccio explained, something had excited her very much and off she had gone forthwith in the second car, sweeping up Mr. Plantagenet-Buchan on her way. She had been given the second car because in defiance of all instructions to the contrary, Bombaccio kept the first car for his mistress. He would always do that to the end of things. Lady Catherine was coming back, she was sure to come back, said Bombaccio, but Mrs. Rylands was not to wait lunch.
Mrs. Rylands found Miss Fenimore all alone in the hall reading Saturday’s English newspapers. “Nothing seems settled about the miners,” said Miss Fenimore, handing over The Times, and neither lady glanced at the French and Italian papers at all. Mrs. Rylands found the name of an old school friend among the marriages.
Miss Fenimore said she had been studying botany all the morning. Her hostess asked what book she had been using.
“Oh! I haven’t got a book yet,” said Miss Fenimore. “I’ve just been walking about the garden you know and reading some of the labels, so as to get a General Idea first. One can get books anywhere. . . . I’ve always wanted to know something about botany.”
Then with an immense éclat Lady Catherine returned from Ventimiglia to proclaim the Social Revolution in England. She came in trailing sunlight and conflict with her, a beautiful voice, rich gestures and billowing streamers, Mr. Plantagenet-Buchan holding his own, such as it was, on her outskirts.
“My dear,” she cried. “It’s come! The Impossible has happened. I must go to England to-night — if the Channel boats are still running.”
“What has come?” asked Mrs. Rylands.
“The General Strike. Proclaimed at midnight. They’ve dared to fight us! Haven’t you seen the papers?”
“There’s nothing in the English papers,” said Mrs. Rylands and became aware of Miss Fenimore rustling the French sheets behind her. “Grève générale,” came Miss Fenimore in confirmation. “And a long leader all in italics, I see; Nos pauvres voisins! Now the turn of England has come.”
Bombaccio appeared and took Mr. Plantagenet-Buchan’s hat and cane.
“Don’t wait lunch for me,” said Lady Catherine, sweeping across the hall to the staircase. “I’ll be down in a minute. I’ll have to tell Soames to pack. This has stirred me like great music.”
“Lunch in five minutes,” said Mrs. Rylands to Bombaccio’s enquiring pause and turned to the Italian papers. The General Strike? Because of the miners. But Mr. Baldwin had been quite determined to settle it, and the owners and the government and the miners’ representatives had been holding conference after conference. In the most friendly spirit. Was her picture of it all wrong? What was Philip doing away there? And Colonel Bullace and his braves? And all the people one knew? How skimpy the news in these foreign papers was, the important news, the English news!
Mrs. Rylands was still dazed by the sudden change in the aspect of things in general and of Lady Catherine in particular when the party had assembled at the lunch table. Lady Catherine dominated the situation. “Letters of mine went astray. To Rapallo. Or I should have known before. How amazing it is! How wonderful and stirring!”
“One thing I observe,” began Mr. Plantagenet-Buchan, but Lady Catherine was following her own thoughts and submerged him.
“To think that they have dared!” she cried. “I shall go back as a volunteer — to serve as a nurse, a helper, anything. Captain Fearon-Owen says ——”
“You have heard from him?” asked Mrs. Rylands.
“Two letters. They came together. From Rapallo. And a summons — by wire. Everyone is wanted now, every sort of help. The printers have struck. There are no papers. The railwaymen are out! Not an omnibus in London. For all we know, while we sit here, all the Russians and Yids in Whitechapel may be marching under the red flag to Westminster!”
“You really think so?” said Mrs. Rylands and tried to imagine it.
“There is one thing I think about this business,” Mr. Plantagenet-Buchan tried.
“I wonder if they have machine-guns,” the lady flowed over him. “Three months ago Captain Fearon-Owen wanted a search through the East End for munitions. But nobody would listen to him. And he always said the Royal Mint was much too far to the east for safety. There are always grenadiers there — just a few. They go along the Embankment every morning. A mere handful. Against hundreds of thousands.”
“Like the poor dear Swiss Guard in Paris,” Miss Fenimore shivered. “The Lion of Lucerne.”
“Months ago, Captain Fearon-Owen made a plan. I read it and laughed at it. I thought it was extravagant. I suppose everyone thought it was extravagant. But he had foreseen all this.”
“Foreseen what, my dear?” asked Mrs. Rylands.
“This rising. He was for evacuating the Mint. And having naval forces ready to throw into the Docks right away.”
“Rough on the naval forces,” Mr. Plantagenet-Buchan allowed himself to murmur to some new potatoes.
“The Docks are full of food,” said Lady Catherine, pursuing her strategic meditations.
“There is one aspect of this business,” Mr. Plantagenet-Buchan tried again softly, addressing himself to a freshly acquired potato.
But Lady Catherine was too intent on battle to heed his attempted interpolation. The poor little potato never learnt that one aspect of the business before it vanished from the world. Its end was silence. Did it meet truth and knowledge in those warm darknesses? Who can tell?
“The main danger,” Lady Catherine had to explain, “is the North. Captain Fearon-Owen does not think very much of the Midlands. Labour there is too diversified for unity and too soundly English for insurrection. But the Tyne is a black spot. And the Clyde. Red as it can be. And there’s no reckoning with South Wales. A Welsh mob could be a very ugly mob, excitable and cruel. Especially when it sings. If they chanced on some song like the Marseillaise! Nothing could stop them.”
“You talk as though there was an insurrection, Catherine,” said Mrs. Rylands. “But the French papers speak only of a strike. Isn’t that rather a more passive thing?”
“A General Strike,” said Lady Catherine informingly, and there were trumpets in her voice. She looked like Britannia after putting on her helmet and drawing her sword. “A General Strike is an insurrection.”
It was plain that in the absence of the other patriots, lunch was going to be a solo. A cowed feeling came over Mrs. Rylands. She had always felt that someday Catherine would up and cow her and now that day had come. Bombaccio too looked cowed, as cowed as Bombaccio could look. There was no checking Lady Catherine by offering her vegetables. One had a feeling all through the lunch as though one was eating in church. One could not fight it down. But what a marvel Catherine was, what a chameleon! For days she had been a shadow and echo of Mr. Sempack, a goad in that excellent man’s loins. Now it was as if a record had been whisked off a gramophone and replaced by another, of an entirely different character. One heard the British patriot marching to battle and saw a forest of waving union Jacks, one heard the lumbering artillery, the jingle-jangle of cavalry, the loud purring of tanks defiling into industrial towns at dawn. One heard the threatening whirr of aeroplanes dispersing dangerous meetings in public squares. And amidst the storm, and over the storm and through the storm one heard of Captain Fearon-Owen.
“Captain Fearon-Owen says there must be no weakness. There must be no faltering. Not even in the highest quarters.”
“But surely——!” protested Miss Fenimore.
“The King is too kind,” said Lady Catherine.
Then reflectively: “Of course I must fly from Paris. At Dover there will be no trains. I shall telegraph from Mentone to Le Bourget to keep a place.
“Flying over England in revolt. Watching them striking and striking — far below. Dreadful! — but exciting!”
Afterwards Mrs. Rylands tried to gather together and preserve some of the handsomer thistles that thrust themselves up through the jungle heat of Lady Catherine’s mood. But she found much of it was lost for ever, gone like tropical vegetation in the moment of its flourishing.
The government she learnt might falter — or some of it. Mr. Baldwin was an ineffective man. Captain Fearon-Owen was not sure of Worthington Evans; he would have far preferred Winston at the War Office. Jix at the Home Office was a godsend however. He was truly strong. He never reprieved. Quiet, almost nervous in appearance, a slender man with a round boyish face — but he never never reprieved. Practically. Well — impatient at what seemed detraction of her idol —“once perhaps.” But vigorous action he was sure to support. Occasions might arise, said Captain Fearon-Owen, when it would be necessary to “take over” initiative from “falterers in positions of responsibility.”
“You cannot always be sending back for instructions,” said Lady Catherine darkly.
“Now it has come,” said Lady Catherine, “I am glad it has come,” and sat still for some moments with a quiet smile on her handsome animated face.
“There is a little point I have noticed,” Mr. Plantagenet-Buchan reflected, with the nutcrackers in his hand — for by that time they had got to dessert. “I have observed ——”
Lady Catherine was not heeding him. “It makes one feel frightfully Nietszchean,” she said. “Suppose England too has to fall back on a dictatorship!”
“I suppose,” said Mrs. Rylands with an innocence that seemed almost too obvious to her, “that would have to be Captain Fearon-Owen?”
But Lady Catherine was exalted above all ridicule. “Anyhow it was he who saw it clearest,” she said and bestirred herself for the chasing of Soames.
“Mr. Sempack,” Mrs. Rylands began, but her guest did not heed that once so interesting name.
“Leadership,” said Lady Catherine, standing up splendidly, “is the supreme gift of the gods.”
She went off to pack for civil warfare like a child going to be dressed for a treat.
Lady Catherine and her maid departed in the late afternoon after a flurried and unconsoling tea and left an atmosphere of crisis and dismay behind them. After lunch Mrs. Rylands tried to sleep according to her régime, but the gaunt spectacle of dear old England, the unimaginable spectacle of dear old England torn by a monstrous civil conflict, with a massacre of the sentinels at the Royal Mint and a sinister rabble marching upon Westminster; Scotland Yard more like the Bastille than ever and machine-guns making a last harvest of resistance down the Mall before the sack of Buckingham Palace began, kept her awake. These were preposterous notions, but failing any other images it was difficult to keep them off the screen of her mind. What could this strike of a whole people be like in reality and why had no one realised the advent of this frightful clash of classes in time?
She just lay awake and stared at the blank of her imagination as some gravelled author destitute of detail might stare painfully at a sheet of paper.
When at last Lady Catherine had truly gone, it was as if earth and silence had suddenly swallowed a Primrose League fair with five large roundabouts and a brass band. She turned round to find Mr. Plantagenet-Buchan behind her appreciating the calm.
“Marvellous energy,” he said.
“She will be a great help,” said Cynthia with unusual asperity.
“There is one thing I observe,” said Mr. Plantagenet-Buchan.
“Let us have some fresh tea,” said Mrs. Rylands, “and sit down and try to restore our minds to order.”
Then his words awakened a familiar echo in her mind. Surely he had said them before — as far as that! Several times. And several times been interrupted.
Of course he had! He had been trying to make this remark ever since he and Lady Catherine had come back from Ventimiglia. Perhaps he had been trying to make it even in Ventimiglia. It was a shame! Mrs. Rylands turned to him brightly. “You were saying, Mr. Plantagenet-Buchan?”
He laughed deprecatingly. “Well,” he preluded.
“There is one little thing about this crisis, dear lady,” he said, and made the diamond glitter; “one small consoling thing. If you will consult those French and Italian papers. You will see that while on the one hand they proclaim the outbreak of the social war and the probable end of the British Empire, they note, less conspicuously but I think more convincingly, that the franc is still falling and the pound sterling still holding its own even against our own more than golden dollar.”
“And that means?”
“That everyone does not take this crisis quite so seriously as Lady Catherine. Suppose we wait a day more before we despair of England. I can quite believe that even now — Westminster is not in flames. I am convinced even that dinner will be served quite normally in Buckingham Palace to-night.”
“And meanwhile,” smiled his hostess, “unless Bombaccio has heard the call of his union, we might have a little fresh tea.”
Miss Fenimore leapt to the bell.
They moved into the lower part of the hall and Mr. Plantagenet-Buchan yielded himself to the largest arm-chair with a sigh of contentment that it was difficult to disconnect altogether from the recent departure of their lovely friend.
There were some moments of silence.
“This man at Torre Pellice,” began Mr. Plantagenet-Buchan in a reflective voice, “this man I am proposing to visit, has a very fine taste indeed. He collects. He has a curiosity and a liveliness of mind that I find most enviable. In these times of conflict and dispersal it is rather nice to think of a collector — and of a few minor things anyhow being put out of immediate danger of breakage.”
He paused. Miss Fenimore made a purr of approval and Mrs. Rylands instructed Bombaccio about the fresh tea. Mr. Plantagenet-Buchan continued meditatively.
“One sort of thing he collected for a time were those prostrate trumpets of coloured glass in which the early Victorians put flowers. ‘Cornucopias,’ I fancy they were called. Typically there was a solid, heavy slab of alabaster-like substance and on this the cornucopia reposed and often by a pretty fancy its lower end was finished off by an elegant hand of metal and the cornucopia became a sleeve. These cornucopias may have interbred a little with those cups they call rhytons which end in a head below. There must have been a great abundance of them at one time in early Victorian England, and they are still to be found in considerable variety, in purple and blue and coloured glass and in dead white glass with spangles and in imitation marble. At one time no dinner table could have been complete without a pair, probably matching a glass epergne. My friend discovered one in a little back street shop in Pimlico. At first he knew so little about these things that he accumulated single ones and only realised later that they must go in pairs. He was happy for a time. Until he began to detect the tracks of some abler seeker in this field. Another — others perhaps — were collecting. He came upon articles — in the Connoisseur, in other art magazines. The situation became plainer. The harvest had been gathered in. Mr. Frank Galsworthy, the painter who has that beautiful cottage garden in Surrey, had got so far ahead with them, that my friend could not hope to do more than glean after him. So my friend turned his attention to Welsh love spoons.
“Do you know of them? Do you know what they are? They are wonderful exploits in carving. (Thank you, that is exactly as I like it. One lump only.) They used to be made — perhaps some are still made — by Welsh lovers when they were courting. They were carved all out of one chosen piece of good oak. There would be a spoon and then at the end of its short handle a chain of links and it would all end in a hook or a whistle. The links would be free and there would be perhaps an extra bit, a barred cage with little balls running about inside; the whole contraption made out of one solid piece of timber. I never imagined the Welsh were such artists at wood carving. I suppose Mr. Jones would sit at the side of the beloved while he did it. Love spoons. What an answer to Caradoc Evans! You have heard the mysterious word ‘spooning.’ It is said to come from that.”
Miss Fenimore was greatly delighted at this unexpected etymology. Her pleasure cried aloud.
Her sudden nervous laughter, a certain glow, might have led a careless observer to suppose her an adept at spooning. She slaked her excitement by attention to the teapot. There was a brief interval of cake-offering. Miss Fenimore offered cake to Mr. Plantagenet-Buchan and Mr. Plantagenet-Buchan offered cake to Mrs. Rylands and Miss Fenimore and Mrs. Rylands offered cake to Mr. Plantagenet-Buchan and Mr. Plantagenet-Buchan took some cake.
“I am afraid,” said Mr. Plantagenet-Buchan biting his cake, “that I am too hopelessly indolent and inconsecutive ever to make a good collector or else I think I should have devoted myself to bergamotes.”
“I thought they were a kind of pear,” said Mrs. Rylands.
“A kind of orange, primarily. But the name is also used for a delicious silly sort of little leather box made years ago in the country round about Grasse. You may have seen one by chance. They still lurk, looking rather depressed and dirty, in those queer corners of old curiosity shops where one finds little bits of silver and impossible rings. It is a box of leather, yes, but the skin of which the leather is made is orange skin and it is polished and faintly stained and has a dainty little flower or so painted upon it. The boxes are oval or heart-shaped; you know the delicate insinuations of that age. These bergamotes must be, most of them, a hundred years old or more and yet when you open them and snuff inside you can persuade yourself that the faint flavour of orange clings to them yet, scent that was brewed in the sunshine when Louis Philippe was King.”
Mr. Plantagenet-Buchan could not have chosen a better theme to exorcise the flare of unrest and alarm that had blown about the Casa Terragena household for the past three hours.
Mr. Plantagenet-Buchan was quite charming that night. It was to be his last night, he intimated ever so gently, and to-morrow he would make his devious way by local trains to Torre Pellice and his collector friend. For it really seemed there was a friend.
After dinner there was a luminous peacefulness in the world outside and an unusual warmth, the rising moon had pervaded heaven with an intense blue and long slanting bars of dreamy light lifted themselves from the horizontal towards the vertical, slowly and indolently amidst the terraces and trees and bushes. At two or three in the morning when everyone was asleep they would stand erect like sentinel spears.
“I think I could walk a little,” said Mrs. Rylands and they went outside upon the terrace and down the steps to the path that led through the close garden with the tombstone of Amoena Lucina to the broad way that ended at last in a tall jungle of subtly scented nocturnal white flowers. They were tall responsible looking flowers. The moonlight among their petals armed them with little scimitars and bucklers of silver. Among these flowers were moths, great white moths, so that it seemed as if ever and again a couple of blossoms became detached and pirouetted together. Hostess and guest — for Miss Fenimore, with her instinctive tact, did not join them — promenaded this broad dim path, to and fro, and Mr. Plantagenet-Buchan spread his Epicurean philosophy unchallenged before Mrs. Rylands’ enquiring intelligence.
He had been much struck by his own impromptu antithesis of Loveliness to Loneliness and this he now developed as a choice between the sense of beauty and the sense of self. He began apropos of Lady Catherine and her excited interest in present things. “How strange it is that she should incessantly want to do, when all that need be asked of her more than of anyone else is surely that she should simply be.”
He passed easily into personal exposition.
“I treat myself,” he said, “as a piece of bric-à-brac in this wonderful collection, the universe, a piece that differs from the other odd, quaint and amusing pieces, simply because my eye happens to be set in it. Here in this lovely garden, which is so irrelevant to all the needless haste and turmoil of life, I can be perfectly happy. I am perfectly happy — to-night. My chief complaint against existence is that it happens too much and keeps on hurrying by. Before you can appreciate it in the least. I seem always to be trying to pick up exquisite things it drops, with all the crowding next things jostling and thrusting my poor stooping back. Get out of the way there! Eager to trample my treasure before I can even make it a treasure. Like trying to pick up a lost pearl in the middle of the Place de la Concorde. If I could plan my own fate, I would like to live five hundred years in a world in which nothing of any importance ever happened at all. A world like a Chinese plate. I should have a little sinecure perhaps or I should perform some graceful functions in the ceremonies of a religion that had completely lost whatever reality it ever had.”
Mrs. Rylands was not unmindful of her duty to the little green leather book that waited in her sitting-room.
“You do not believe in God?” she asked, to be perfectly clear.
“In loveliness, I believe. And I delight in gods. But in God —— How it would spoil this perfect night, this crystal sky, this silver peace, if one thought it was not precisely the pure loveliness it is! Without an arrière pensée. If one had to turn it all into allegory and guess what it meant! If one even began to suspect that it was just a way of signalling something to us, on the part of a Supreme Personage!”
“But if one took it simply as a present from him?”
“That would be better. Then the only duty in life would be to accept and enjoy. And God would sit over us like some great golden Buddha, smiling, blessing and not minding in the least. Not signifying in the least.”
“That is all very well for happy and pampered people like ourselves, living in houses and gardens like this one.”
“One can start in search of beauty from any starting point and one is still a pilgrim even if one dies by the way.”
“But most human beings start from such frightful starting points. They hardly get a glimpse of beauty.”
“Not sunlight? Not the evening compositions of clouds and sun? The sunsets in Mr. Bennett’s Five Towns are the loveliest in the world. I assure you. The beauty of London Docks again? Or it may be music heard by chance from an open window in the street? Or flowers?”
He shook his head gravely, almost regretfully. “Everyone can find beauty. Think of the beauty of sunlight at the end of a tunnel.”
“I am afraid the world is full of crippled and driven lives. They’re hungry and afraid. What chance of seeing beauty have most poor people — anywhere? Even when it is under their noses. You can’t see beauty with miserable eyes. Beauty does not make happiness; it only comes to the happy. Latterly that has begun to haunt me dreadfully.”
“No,” said Mr. Plantagenet-Buchan. “That is wrong. Don’t spoil to-night.”
“But they pay for this! Haven’t we a duty to them?”
“Surely as much duty to this night, to leave it serene.”
“I can’t feel like that. I can’t forget this dismal coal strike, the trouble of it, the people out of work, the anxiety, the need in millions of poor worried brains.”
“My dear lady! they chose it. They need not have been born.”
Came a pause as the great modern topic of restriction was faced.
“But it is rather difficult for a child, which doesn’t exist, and isn’t perhaps going to exist for some time, to weigh all the pros and cons and decide ——”
“Its parents and guardians, its godfathers and godmothers wherein it was made, could act for it. It isn’t consulted as a whole so to speak, its constituents are consulted — tacitly. And it has at any rate its own blind Will to Live. Most parentage is inadvertent. What a precious relief is the thought of birth control! The time is coming when it will be practically impossible to tempt anyone to get born except under the most hopeful and favourable circumstances.”
“But meanwhile?”
“I am like the great Mr. Sempack; I refuse to be eaten up by meanwhile.”
“Meanwhile one must live.”
“As calmly as possible. As inactively appreciative as possible. It is just because one must live that one tries to give oneself wholly to a night like this. How rarely do even such favoured ones as we are get an hour so smooth and crystalline as this! The stillness! The chief fault I have with living is the way life rushes us about. Rushes everyone about. What a hurry, what a scurry is history! Think of all the hosts and armies and individuals that have thrust and shoved and whacked their mules and horses along this very Via Aurelia in your garden. Which to-night is just a deep black pit smothered in ivy. Grave of innumerable memories. If we went down there to-night to that old paved track I wonder if we should see their ghosts! Romans and Carthaginians, Milanese and Burgundians, French and Italians, kings and bishops and conquerors and fugitives. It would be a fit punishment for all their hurry and violence to find them there. It would serve them right for all their wicked inattention to loveliness, to put them back again upon their paces and make them repeat them over and over, over and over, night after night, century after century. . . . ”
Mr. Plantagenet-Buchan was smitten by a bright idea. “Perhaps someday some later Einstein will take out patents and contrive a way of slowing down time. Without affecting our perceptions. Then we shall not be everlastingly hurried on by strikes and wars and passions and meal-times and bed-times. With the newspapers rustling and flying through the air like witches in a storm.
“But I chatter on and on, my dear Mrs. Rylands. You set me talking. And I am trying to forget the Social Revolution now in progress and how we are all to be swept away. Or else saved by Captain Fearon-Owen, was it? and Lady Catherine. Whichever is the worse.
“Before we go in, may we just walk up that path above the house to the little bridge over the gorge beyond the herbarium and the laboratory? Do you know it? By night? There the hillside goes up very steeply and everything, the trees and even the rocks, seems to be drawn up too in a kind of magical unanimity. You must see it by moonlight. An immense flamboyance of black and white. Stupendous shadows. I discovered it last night as I prowled about the garden before turning it. It streams up and up and up, and over it brood the wet black precipices of the mountains, endlessly vertical, with little threads of silver. The eye follows it up. It is like all the Gothic in the world multiplied by ten. It is like listening to some tremendous crescendo. Farther than this he cannot go, you say, and he goes farther. At the top the precipices fairly overhang. One stands on the bridge at the foot of it, minute, insignificant, overawed. . . .
“By daylight it is nothing very wonderful. Hardly anything at all.”
Mr. Plantagenet-Buchan had scarcely gone from Casa Terragena before Mr. Sempack reappeared. Mrs. Rylands had walked part of the way up to the road gate with Mr. Plantagenet-Buchan, and after wishing him farewell she had turned off to a seat beneath some Japanese medlars where there were long orderly beds of violets like the planche of a Grasse violet grower, and a level path of pebble mosaic that led round the headland towards the rocky portals of the Caatinga. She had brought the green leather book with her, because his talk overnight had set her thinking. She found herself in the closest sympathy and the completest intellectual disagreement with the things he had said.
Just as she felt that at the core of things was courage, so she had an irrational conviction that, properly seen, the general substance of things was beauty. To Mr. Plantagenet-Buchan’s craving to lead a life of pure appreciation she found a temperamental response. She could quite easily relax into that pose. But also she perceived something selective, deliberate and narrowing in his attitude. He reminded her of those people, now happily becoming old-fashioned, who will not look at a lovely landscape except through a rolled-up newspaper or some such frame. Or of people who cannot admire flowers without picking them. He seemed to think that the appreciation of beauty was a kind of rescue work; to take the lovely thing and trim it up and carry it off. But she thought it was a matter of recognition and acceptance. So while in practice he was for sealing up himself and his sensations in a museum case as it were with beauty, she was for lying open to the four winds of heaven, sure that beauty would come and remain. And while he posed as a partisan of beauty even against the idea of God, her idea of an ever deepening and intensifying realisation of the beauty in things was inseparably mingled with the conception of discovering God. He and she could perceive the poignant delight of a star suddenly flashing through forest leaves with a complete identity of pleasure and a complete divergence of thought. And so while art for him was quintessence, for her it was only a guide.
But while she was still struggling with this difficult disentanglement of assents and dissents that her analysis of Mr. Plantagenet-Buchan required, and before she had made a single entry in the green leather book as a result of these exercises, she became aware of Mr. Sempack descending the winding path that was the main route of communication between the gates and the house. Beside him a requisitioned under-gardener bore his knapsack and valise and answered such questions and agreed with such opinions as the great Utopologist’s Italian permitted him to make.
It was Mr. Sempack. And he was changed.
Recognition was followed by astonishment. He was greatly changed. He was different altogether. More erect — rampant. No longer had he the quality of rocky scenery; he had the quality of rocky scenery that had arisen and tossed its mane and marched. “Tossing its mane” mixed oddly with rocky scenery, but that was how it came to her. His hair had all been thrust and combed back from his forehead, violently, so that the effect of his head, considered largely, had become leonine; he lifted his roughly handsome profile and seemed to snuff the air. He had no hat! Hitherto he and his hat had been inseparable out of doors but now he neither wore nor carried one. What could he have done with his hat? Moreover his cravat had suffered some exchange, had become large and loose and as it were, it was too far off to be certain, black silk, tied with the extravagance natural to a Latin man of genius, but otherwise remarkable and improper. And he walked erect with a certain conscious rectitude and large confident strides and assisted himself with a bold stout walking stick. Mrs. Rylands could not remember that stick; she had an impression he had gone off with an umbrella. At any rate he had gone off with the appearance of having an umbrella. She became eager to scrutinise this renascent Sempack closelier. She stood up for the moment to give her voice play and make herself more conspicuous. “Mr. Sempack,” she cried, “Mr. Sem-pack!”
He heard. He turned eagerly. Just for a moment a shade of disappointment may have betrayed itself in his bearing. He hesitated, waved the stick, glanced down towards the house and then after a word or so with his garden man, submitted to his obvious fate and ascended the steps to her.
“You’ve come back to us,” she said, so giving him the very latest news as he approached.
“I’ve had a splendid time among the hills,” he answered in that fine large voice of his. “How endlessly beautiful and unexpected France can be! And what lonely places! How are you?”
He was now standing in front of her.
“I’m better and happier, thanks to some good advice I had.”
“If it was of service,” he said. “Yes, you look ever so much better. Indeed you look radiantly well. How are the others?”
“Scattered for the most part.”
He did not seem to mind about that. “Where is Lady Catherine?” he asked.
As he spoke he looked at the cypresses and magnolias that masked most of the house from him and then up and down the slopes about them for the lovely figure he sought. How easy a thing, Mrs. Rylands reflected, it was to make a man over confident. He’d gone off to make up his mind about Lady Catherine, it was only too evident, and here he was back with his mind made up, made up indeed altogether, and quite oblivious to the fact that Lady Catherine had gone on living at her own natural pace, during his interval of indecision. He became aware of a pause in answering his enquiry. His eyes came back to the face of his hostess. (Surely he had not been clipping those once too discursive eyebrows! But he had!) She tried to impart her information as though it was of no deep interest to either of them.
“Lady Catherine,” she said, “has gone to England.”
Mr. Sempack was a child when it came to concealing his feelings. “Gone to England!” he cried. “I was convinced she would stay here.”
“She was restless,” said Mrs. Rylands.
“But I was restless!” protested Mr. Sempack, opening vast gulfs of implication.
“She went yesterday.”
“But why has she gone? Why should she go to England?”
“When the news of the strike came it lit her up like a rocket and off she went fizz-bang,” said Mrs. Rylands.
“But why?”
“To save the country.”
“But this strike,” said Mr. Sempack, “is nothing at all. Just political nonsense. Why should she go to England?”
She found her respect for Mr. Sempack collapsing like a snowman before a bonfire. She ceased to scrutinise his improvements. “I’m not responsible for Lady Catherine,” she said and smoothed the nice back of the green leather book. “She’s gone.”
It seemed to dawn upon Mr. Sempack that he was forgetting his manners. He had stood in front of her without the slightest intention of staying beside her. Now he gave one last reproachful glance down the hill towards the paths, terraces, lawns, windows and turrets where Lady Catherine ought to have been waiting for him, and then came slowly and sat down beside his hostess. The first exhilaration of his bearing had already to a large extent evaporated.
“Forgive me,” he said. “I quite expected to find Lady Catherine here. We had a sort of argument together. It had excited me. But, as you say, she has gone. And the American gentleman with the hyphenated name? Who had an effect of being manicured all over. What was he called? Mr. Plantagenet-Buchan?”
“Went this morning. To Torre Pellice above Turin.”
“And Miss Fenimore?”
“Is with us still.”
“I’m so surprised she’s gone. You see I don’t attach any great importance to this General Strike in England. So that I can’t imagine anyone going off — a woman particularly. . . . I may be mistaken. . . . ”
“It has stopped all the English newspapers,” said Mrs. Rylands. “And most of the English trains. It has thrown millions of people out of employment. There is talk of famine through the interruption of food supplies.”
“An acute attack of Sundays in the place of the usual week. But why should it affect Lady Catherine?”
It was not Mrs. Rylands’ business to answer that.
“Are you sure she went on account of the General Strike?”
Mrs. Rylands had serious thoughts of losing her temper. “That was the reason she gave,” she said, in the tone of one who loses interest in a topic. But Mr. Sempack had a habit of pursuing his own line of thought with a certain regardlessness for other people.
“She may have gone to demonstrate her point of view in our argument,” he surmised. Mrs. Rylands, being in better possession of the facts, thought it a very foolish surmise but she offered no comment.
“The matter at issue between us,” said Mr. Sempack, prodding up the pathway with the stout stick, “had of course, extraordinarily far-reaching implications. Reduced to its simplest terms it was this, Is the current surface of things a rational reality?”
Mrs. Rylands wanted to laugh. She regarded Mr. Sempack’s profile, gravely intent on spoiling her excellent path. She was filled with woman’s instinctive pity for man. Every man is a moody child, she thought, every man in the world. But the children must not be spoilt. “So that was why you went off for a walking tour?” she remarked, intelligently.
“I thought we both needed to think over our differences,” he said.
“And you still don’t think — what is it? — that the current surface of things is — whatever it is?”
“No,” he said and excavated a quite large chunk of earth and smashed it to sandy fragments in front of his boots. “But I suppose this flight to England is to show me that the issues between us are not false issues but real, and that while I dream and theorise, she can play a part. . . . I wish she hadn’t gone. There is nothing happening in England at all that is not perfectly preposterous. Utterly preposterous. Political life in England becomes more and more like Carnival.”
He shrugged his shoulders. The large tie became a little askew. “Carnival without a police. Well — that is political life everywhere nowadays. . . . ”
As this was manifestly not the subject under discussion between them a silence of perhaps half a minute supervened. Then Mr. Sempack bestirred himself.
“She has gone,” he said, “just because she likes Carnival. And that is the truth of the matter.”
He glanced sideways at his hostess as if he hoped she would contradict him.
But she did nothing of the sort. She reflected and bore her witness with a considered effect. “Mr. Sempack,” she said, “I know Catherine. And that is the truth of the matter.”
“I thought it was.”
His bones did move about under his skin, because they were doing so now. He dug industriously at the path through another long silence. “Forgive my moodiness and my rudeness. And my confidences. My almost involuntary confidences. As you know perfectly well already, I am in the ridiculous position of having fallen in love with Lady Catherine; and it isn’t any the less disorganising for being utterly absurd. It has made me, I perceive, absurd. To fall in love, as I have done, is — to reverberate melodrama. It is as unreal as an opium dream and one knows it is unreal. Yet one clings with a certain obstinacy. . . . I expected —— Heaven knows what I expected! But that is no reason, is it? why I should come and set myself down here and interrupt your writing in that extremely pretty book of yours and dig large holes in your path.”
“The paths were made for man and not man for the paths,” said Mrs. Rylands. “I wish all my gardeners worked as you have done for the last few minutes. I am sorry for what has happened. Catherine is one of those people who ought not to be allowed about loose.”
“I may go to England,” he said after he had digested that. “I am preposterously dislocated. I do not know what to do.”
“But in England, won’t the melodrama lie in wait for you?”
“Perhaps I wish it would. At present, my mind and my thoughts — are just swirling about. I can’t go on writing. I might of course go into Italy.”
“Meanwhile stay here. For a day or so anyhow. There are all sorts of things I would like to hear you talk about. If you could talk about them. And this garden has a place for almost any mood. No one shall worry you. If I dared I would ask you about a score of things that perplex me.”
“You are very kind to suffer me,” he said.
She shook her head and smiled and then stood up.
“I think you have done enough to my path this morning,” she said. “Look at it!”
He made some clumsy and ineffective attempts to repair the mischief of his immense hands with his immense feet, and then came hurrying after her down the steps.
That evening after dinner they sat in the great room upstairs before a fire of logs in the Italianate fire-place, and Mr. Sempack without any allusion whatever to Lady Catherine talked about Thought and Action and the change of tempo as well as of scale that was coming upon human concerns. Mrs. Rylands lay on the big sofa and Mr. Sempack occupied an arm-chair beside her. Miss Fenimore assisted at the conversation on the other side of the fire-place. She played also a slow difficult patterning patience on a card table with two packs of cards, a patience that kept her lips moving, not always inaudibly with, “Black Knave goes on Queen and red ten on Knave, but what then? All these come up, nine, eight, seven, but does that free a space. Won’t do. Won’t do.”
She had excused herself for her patience. “I can hear just as well,” she said, “and it seems to steady my attention. I don’t think I miss the least little thing you say.”
Sometimes her patience kept her quite busy and sometimes she would leave it alone and just sit back with the residue of her deck in hand and take a long deep swig of whatever Mr. Sempack was saying. Then she would sigh and resume her attack on her cards, visibly refreshed.
Although Mr. Sempack never made the ghost of an allusion to Lady Catherine, it was quite plain to Mrs. Rylands that the gist of his talks with that lady lay under the rambling discourse like bones beneath the contours of a limb. When he talked of the greater importance of the man of science to the politician, he was really exonerating himself from her charge of political impotence and insignificance, and when he declared that with the abolition of distance through the increasing ease of communication in the world, there had come such an enlargement and complication of political issues that they could no longer be dealt with dramatically in a day or a week, she felt that he was still trying to disabuse Lady Catherine from her delusion that decisive incidents at elections, scenes in the House and displays of “personality” at Cabinet meetings could have any real influence any longer upon the course of human affairs. He talked casually and indolently as things came into his head, but Mrs. Rylands perceived that the green leather book would profit considerably by the things he was saying.
His remarks joined on very directly to that earlier talk, that successful social evening, that had so pleased her, that renewal of the legendary glories of the Souls — and it was still not a fortnight ago! He revived the vision of a greater civilisation ahead, a world civilisation, in which the pursuit of science would be the chief industry and increasing power an annual crop. That vision had a little faded from Mrs. Rylands’ mind. He restored it to probability and even to imminence. It became reality again and all the social and political conflicts of to-day mere temporary disorders, like battles and contests of hobbledehoys amidst advertisement-covered hoardings on the vacant site of some great building. War became a declining habit that mankind was shaking off. And those troubles in England were no more than a legacy of barbaric methods that would still win coal by hand labour and make a private profit out of a common necessity. Some day we should win our coal out of the earth in so different a fashion that there would be neither myriads of dingy toilers nor groups of owners concerned with it at all, and from the point of view of the larger issue therefore, the dispute between them was a false issue that led nowhere and settled nothing at all. Even as they disputed, the grounds of the differences were dissolving under their feet.
But there were certain things that the green leather book would want to know to-morrow morning and Mrs. Rylands sought elucidation.
“I see the world could be changed, ought to be changed, from all its present confusions,” she agreed. “Things do not change themselves. Much of this progress so far has taken people by surprise. Now the surprise is over and we see the steps, the enormous steps that have to be made, if we are to pass from this — this complex muddle of affairs — to the world civilisation. You speak as though that would certainly be brought about. But who are the people who are bringing it about?”
“The scientific minded people,” said Mr. Sempack. “The people who think ahead.”
“I see that people of that sort are adding to the vision of the great age coming, filling in details, helping our imaginations to smooth over difficulties. You alone have done wonderful things to make the prospectus credible. But it is still only a prospectus. Are people taking shares? Are any of these people who talk and wish so well, doing anything to bring the World Utopia about?”
“I think, yes,” said Mr. Sempack after a slight pause.
She felt she was pressing him, but she wanted to know. “How?” she asked.
“By making it increasingly evident that it is possible and bringing people to realise that it is desirable — a refuge from the vast dangers that threaten us all, while with the immensely powerful weapons of to-day we stick to antiquated moral and social traditions.”
“Yes, but ——” said Mrs. Rylands.
She gathered all her forces. She wasn’t trying to argue with him but she did want to be able to face the candid pages of the green leather book to-morrow without any inconvenient queries arising — finished and sure in what she had to write. She had to write it as plainly as she could and then she had to copy out her exercise and send it to her fellow student Philip, who would be, she felt certain, quite wonderful at jabbing in destructive questions.
“You see, Mr. Sempack, this is my difficulty. I see the world abounding in projects for doing things better. People who write about that sort of thing write about it, and we read it when we are in the reading mood and want our imaginations stirring. But the mass of people just go on. I suppose that if you told all that you are telling me to a miner and said that there were to be no miners at all in the new world, but only very clever boring machines, and ways of taking air into the pit to burn the coal and make power there instead of digging it out and so on, I doubt if he would be ready to bring the change about. He would think of himself and say that though it was bad enough to be an underpaid miner, perhaps not employed too regularly, but still getting a sort of living, it might be worse to be in a world where he wasn’t wanted at all.”
“He could be changed.”
“Not all at once. He’d have his missus and the kids and his dog and his habits. Would he want to be changed? Changed I mean in his nature, as you would change him. More money perhaps he would like and a rather better house. But what more? And take the mine-owner: you can’t expect him to welcome and help his own abolition.”
“The new things will come gradually enough to smooth over that sort of thing.”
“If somebody wants them. But who is going to want them? I’m asking, because I really want to know, Mr. Sempack, who is going to want them enough to take a lot of pains to bring them about? Many of us no doubt want them vaguely and generally but do any of us want them particularly and fiercely enough to get them past the awkward turns and difficult corners?”
“They involve the clear promise of an ampler life.”
“I don’t worry you with my persistent questions? They are silly questions I know, but they puzzle me.”
“Not a bit silly. You argue very closely. Go on.”
“Well, this clear promise of an ampler life. Suppose you said to a cat, ‘Come, I will teach you to swim and dive like a seal and fly like a bat,’ and so on, ‘if only you will stop catching the songbirds in my garden,’ and suppose the cat were to say, ‘Life is short. It is fun to think of such things and they make me yearn to leave the little birds alone and eat fish, but all the same this means a frightful change in my habits. I might prove less adaptable than you suppose. I might die before I adapted. I do get along fairly well as it is. Have you ever seen me go up a tree? Or jump and catch a young nestling in the air? Do you mind if I just go on being a cat?’”
Mr. Sempack nodded and smiled thoughtfully at the fire and left his hostess free to continue.
“All the sorts of people I see about me, all the soldiers we know for example; they are most liberal-minded about war I find and about the League of Nations and that sort of thing, provided there is no serious interference with soldiering.”
“They will get most horribly gassed in the next war.”
“They hope to gas first. But even if they think the outlook a little unpleasant in that way, they still have no idea of how they are going to change over. Or what they are going to change into. And meanwhile — meanwhile they go on being soldiers.”
“They will be changed over,” said Mr. Sempack largely.
“But who will change them over? Directly one goes out of a talk like this back into one’s everyday life, one finds everyone more or less in the same position — doing something in the present system, hanging on to it, dreading dislocation, objecting to any improvement that really touches them. But otherwise quite liberal-minded and progressive.”
“The forces of change will override them. Change of conditions is incessant.”
“But change may go any way, Mr. Sempack. There is no one steering change. Why shouldn’t it go hither and thither? It raises up; it may cast down.”
“Why not?” asked Mr. Sempack of the flaring olive knots.
“We may ‘meanwhile’ for ever. People may be driven this way and that. Some may go down and some up. Old types may vanish and new ones come. Some of that may be progress but some of that may be loss. Nature gives no real guarantee. Change may go on until men are blue things three feet high and rats hunt them as we hunt rats and your great civilisation may never arrive — never arrive at all. It may have loomed up and receded and loomed up again and been talked about again as you talk about it, and then things may have slipped back and slipped back more and gone on slipping back. And the rats may have got bolder and the disease germs more dwarfing and crippling, and energy may have ebbed.”
“Touché,” said Mr. Sempack and paused tremendously.
Mrs. Rylands adjusted a cushion and regarded him expectantly before lying back more comfortably.
“It’s come out,” said Miss Fenimore and made a great triumphant scrabbling with her cards. “They don’t often come out.”
“That is precisely the question that occupies my mind nowadays — dominantly,” said Mr. Sempack, disregarding Miss Fenimore. “My life has been so largely given to thought and the project. . . . After all, all this constructive Utopianism is a growth of very recent years. . . . But I do see that a time comes — and in the case of these matters the time may be here already — when these creative ideas must come down into the market place, among the hawkers and the cheats and the Carnival maskers, and fight to impose themselves. Science can never be really pure science. Science sprang from practical curiosities and justifies and refreshes itself by practical applications. Yet it must go apart to work out its riddles. There is a rhythm in these things. Thought must be neither too close nor too aloof from actuality. There has been a need in the past century to take social and economic generalisations a little way off from current politics and active business and work them out into a new, broader, deeper, modern project. That in its main lines is done. Now, we, who have gone apart, have to come back. We have got clear to the conception of a possible world peace, a world economic system, a common currency, and unparalleled freedoms, growths and liberties. . . . ”
“Yes?” said Mrs. Rylands.
“We have at last made it seem extremely credible and possible.”
“Yes?”
“And ‘how to get there?’ remains still with hardly the barest rudiments of an answer. A League of Nations. Vague projects of social revolution. Pious intentions. Practical futility.”
“And meanwhile?” whispered Mrs. Rylands.
“I do not even know whether the same type of mind that has mastered the first can work out the second problem. Perhaps there is a difference of personality needed, just as there is perhaps a difference between the pure scientific man and the scientific commercial man. It may be because I am realising that this business is entering upon a new phase that I find I am writing freely no longer and that I am restless and attracted by unseasonable hankerings for experience and at last — I confess it — disposed to go back to look into these queer troubles in England. I have had a dream, a ridiculous dream, of being revitalised. The Sacred Fount — of passion.”
He seemed to remember the presence of Miss Fenimore and abandoned what might have become a fresh confidence.
“I do not know. I do not know whether men of my kind have to turn into men of action or whether they have to turn over all they have thought-out and worked-out to men of action. A young man like your Philip attracts me, just because he seems to have all the vigour, flexibility and aggressiveness, that my type of withdrawn, persistently sceptical, habitually sceptical enquirer, does not possess. I do not know. I wish I did. And there you are! I am afraid I have left that question of yours, Mrs. Rylands, very largely open.”
He seemed to have finished and then he resumed.
“It may be that this concrete conception of human progress awaits its philosophy and its religion. Idea must clothe itself in will. The new civilisation will call for devotion — something more than the devotion of thinking and writing at one’s leisure. It may need martyrs — as well as recluses. And leaders as well as prophets. It will call for co-operative action, for wide disciplines. . . . ”
He stood up before the fire, a great shambling figure that cast a huge caricature in shadow on the wall opposite.
“I think I will go back to England in a day or so — anyhow — if only to see why people can struggle with such courage and passion for ends that do not seem to me to have any real relation to the Civilisation of the World at all. Hitherto I have been thinking so much of what I am after myself that it may be good for me, for a change, just to find out what other people are after. And why none of them seem to be after the only thing that I think makes life worth living.
“Yes,” he reflected, ”make your World Civilisation. That is just what Lady Catherine told me. You, with your questions, repeat the challenge. . . . I wonder if at bottom, Mrs. Rylands, both the scientific investigator and the philosopher are not profoundly indolent men. They work — I admit they work — continuously — but how they fortify themselves against interruptions and counter strokes and irrelevant issues!”
His thoughts seemed to Mrs. Rylands to glance suddenly in a different direction. ”Essentially“ he said, “they must be celibate. . . . ”
Mr. Sempack had come to the end of his meditations. His hostess and Miss Fenimore wished him good-night. He was left to consume two glasses of barley water and put out the lights.
Philip’s “first real letter,” so he called it, came on the day of Mr. Sempack’s departure for England. There had been an “arrived safe” telegram from London and a pencil scrawl of affectionate “rubbidge” so he put it, with various endearments and secret and particular names, that he had posted in Paris. That was just carrying on. But this she felt was something momentous. It came while she was resting on her bed, through sheer laziness, and she felt its importance so much that for a time she could not open it. It was a fat letter, a full letter, it was over the two ounces, fivepence ha’penny worth of letter, and inside there was going to be something — something she had never had before — Philip mentally, all out, according to his promise. She was going to learn fresh and important things about him. She was going to scrutinise his mental quality as she had never done before.
What sort of a letter was it going to be? She had a shadow of fear in her mind. Things said can be forgotten. Or you recall the manner and edit and rearrange the not too happy words. Things written hammer at the eye and repeat themselves inexorably. Written clumsiness becomes monstrous clumsy. So far she had never had anything more from Philip than a note. His notes were good, queer in their phrasing but with an odd way of conveying tenderness. . . . Philip would be Philip. She took courage and tore open the distended envelope.
She found half a dozen fascicles each pinned together. It was neither like a letter nor like a proper manuscript, but it was like Philip. The paper was of various sorts, some of it from their house in South Street, some from the Reform Club, some from Brooks’ and some ruled foolscap of unknown origin carefully torn into half-sheets so as to pack comfortably with the spread out notepaper. Somewhere he had got hold of a blue pencil and numbered the fascicles with large numbers, one, two, three and so forth, emphasised by a circle. The fascicle numbered one, was
“General Instructions for a little Cynner to read these Lubrications.”
Lucubrations?
Then this touching design and appeal:
Be merciful
“My dearest Cynthia, wife,” it went on, “I find it pretty hard to set down all my impressions of things here. Which is all the more reason I suppose why I should begin to set down my impressions. It’s hard to make it go, one, two, three, and away. I just can’t make the stuff I have to tell you flow off my pen as trained chaps like old Sempack seem able to do. Whatever he has to say seems to begin at one place and go right through to an end, missing nothing by the way. I’ve been reading in some of his books. In fact I’ve been reading him no end. People talk about ‘writing’ and I’ve always thought before it meant purple patches and lovely words, but this sort of thing also is writing; driving ten topics in a team together — and getting somewhere, getting through doors and narrow places and home to where you want to go. I seem to begin at half a dozen places and it is only after a time that one finds that this joins up with that. I’ve made half a dozen starts and here most of them are.
“This is a sort of student’s notebook. I’ve helped it out with diagrams and here and there pictures seem to have got themselves in when I wasn’t looking. But it is a multiplex affair here. Here in England I mean — not in this letter. An imbrolio. It isn’t a straight story. You take Part numbered Two and then Three and so on in the order of the numbers, and I think at the end you’ll get the hang of what I’m thinking all right. Forgive some of the spelling, and all the heavy lumpish way of putting things. If I do much of this sort of thing I shall have to take lessons from Sempack and Bertrand Russell, how to be clear if complex. As you said, we’ve got to know each other — even if it hurts. So I’ve done my best. I don’t think I’ve struck any attitudes.
“If you despise me over this stuff — well, it had to be. Better than not knowing each other. Better than that. Truly. Dear Cynthia, my Friend. All you said to me about being truly near, mind more than body, went to my heart. Both.”
That was the substance of Part One. Followed a sort of index and a few remarks about each part, that were simply preparatory matter. Rather businesslike preparatory matter. He must have written that index after all the rest was done.
She held Part One in her hand and thought for some moments. Queer! This wasn’t her Philip; the Philip she had known for a wonderful year. But it was not inharmonious with her Philip. It was an extension of him, the wider Philip. It was at once a little strange and more intimate. It was very honest; that was the first thing about it. And it had a quality of strength. It was extraordinary that a man who had been as close to her as he had been, with such warmth and laughter and delight, should still betray so plainly a maidenly bashfulness over the nakedness of his prose and the poverty of his spelling. Bodies one can strip in half a minute. Now — and he knew it — he was revealing his mind.
And then the drawing. She had never suspected him of skill, but there was skill in the way he got what he wanted to express over to her. The figure of himself, a little oafish and anxious. And herself. He didn’t spare her littleness. And yet plainly he couldn’t draw — as she judged drawing. There were several other drawings. . . .
She glanced at Part Three. But these looked more like the figures one scribbles on blotting paper. Perhaps it would be plainer when she came to them in order.
She took up Part Two which was entitled:
“General Observations on the General Strike.
“Firstly, I am disposed to call this General Strike the Silliest Thing in the History of England. I don’t know whether I would stick to that. What old Muzzleton used to get red in the nose working us up about, what he used to call ‘Our Island Story,’ is full of dam silly things. But this is a monstrous dam silly affair, my Cynthia. It is a tangle of false issues from beginning to end. So silly one can’t take sides. One is left gibbering helplessly as the silly affair unrolls itself.
“Imagine a procession of armoured cars and tanks going through the dear old East End of London to protect vans of food-stuffs nobody has the least idea of touching. After the strikers have guaranteed a food supply! A sort of Lord Mayor’s day crowd of sightseers and chaps like old Bullace in tin helmets — you know, helmets against shrapnel!! stern and solum. If presently they began to throw pots of shrapnel out of the East End top windows, old Bullace’s little bit of brains will be as safe as safe.
“Then imagine a labour movement which imagines it is appealling to the general public against the goverment. Which nevertheless has called out all the printers and stopped the newspapers! As the goverment has seized its own one paper, I mean the labour paper, and monopolises, the goverment does, the wireless, the labour movement is making its appeal inaudibly. As a consequence that side of the dispute has become almost invisible. You see police and soldiers and all that, but all you see or hear of the strike side is that it isn’t there. The engineers and the railway men and the printers aren’t there. Just a bit of speaking at a corner or a handbill put in your hand. Pickets lurking. A gap. Silence.”
Mrs. Rylands pulled up abruptly, went back from the beginning of the next sentence, scrutinised a word. It was “goverment.” And down the sheet and over, she found it repeated. And what did it matter if he did take the “n” out of government, so long as his head was clear?
“The strike stopped all the buses, trams, trains, etc., etc. The streets are full morning and evening of a quite cheerful (so far) crowd of clerks, shop people and suchlike walking to business or walking home, getting casual pick-ups from passing motor cars. General disposition to treat it as a lark. Thanks chiefly to the weather. Most buses are off the streets. Some are being run by volunteers and they go anyhow, anywhere and anybody rides. They get their windows broken a bit and there is often a bobby by the driver. Some have wire over their windows and one or two I saw with a motor car full of special constables going in front of them. Convoy. There is a story of some being burnt but I can’t find out if that is true. The voice of the gearbox is heard in the land and the young gentlemen volunteers don’t bother much about collecting fares. For some unknown reason most of them have come to the job in plus fours. Pirate buses having the time of their lives. Disposition of crowds to collect at central positions and stand about and stare. Police and soldiers in quantity lurking darkly up back streets, ready aye ready for trouble that never comes, and feeling I think rather fools. They seem uneasy when you go and look at them. What are they all waiting for? They’ve sworn-in quantities of special constables and I’ve had a row with Uncle Robert on that score, because I won’t be sworn-in and set an example. All his men-servants have been sworn-in and are on the streets with armlets and truncheons. The specials just walk about, trying to avoid being followed by little boys; harmless earnest middle-class chaps they are for the most part.
“As might be expected Winston has gone clean off his head. He hasn’t been as happy since he crawled on his belly and helped snipe in Sidney Street. Whatever anyone else may think, Winston believes he is fighting a tremendous revolution and holding it down, fist and jaw. He careers about staring, inactive, gaping, crowded London, looking for barricades. I wish I could throw one for him.”
In the margin Mr. Philip had eked out his prose with a second illustration.
Winston doing Everything
“The goverment has taken over the Morning Post office and machinery and made Winston edit a sort of emergency goverment rag called the British Gazette. Baldwin’s idea seems to be to get the little devil as far away from machine guns as possible and keep him busy. Considerable task. His paper is the most lop-sided rag you ever. It would be a disgrace to any goverment. The first number is all for the suppression of Trade unions, a most desperate attempt to provoke them to the fighting pitch.
“I met Mornington at the Club; he is mixed up with the Morning Post somehow and he says the office is simply congested with young Tories who have fancied themselves as writers for years. For them it’s perfect Heaven. They’ve collared most of the Morning Post paper; they are grabbing all The Times paper pro bono Winstono. The Times still puts out a little sheet but they say it will have to stop in a week or ten days — in favour of Winston’s splutter. That seems to me nearly the maddest thing of all. The Labour people have had their own Daily Herald suppressed. Instead they are trying and failing to go a peg below Winston with a sort of bulletin newsheet called the British Worker. But Winston has a scheme for stealing their paper supply, raiding their office and breaking them up in the name of the British Constitution. Like undergraduates at election time. Isn’t it all bottomlessly silly? Most of the papers seem to be handing out something, a half-sheet or suchlike just to say ‘Jack’s alive,’ and you happen upon it and buy it by chance. Fellows try and sell you typewritten stuff with the latest from the broadcasting for sixpence or a shilling, and here and there you see bulletins stuck up outside churches and town halls. In the west end they display Winston’s British Gazette in the smart shop windows. I suppose their plate glass insurance covers risks like that. But perhaps they realise there isn’t much risk.
“I just go along the streets talking to people in the character of an intelligent young man from New Zealand. I say I don’t rightly understand what the strike is about and ask them to explain. I get a different story each time. ’Who is striking?’ ‘Oh!’ they say, ‘It’s a general strike!’ ‘Are you?’ I ask. ‘No fear!’ Some of them say it is in sympathy with the miners. But they never know the rights and wrongs about the miners. Very few of them know if the miners have struck or whether it is a lock-out. They don’t know which is the pig-headest, the miners or the mine-owners, and yet you’d think they would be curious about that. And the whole country is disorganised, no papers, no trains, no trams, and, this morning, no taxis. Post offices are still going on, but the labour people talk of bringing out what they call their second line. That will stop letters, telegrams, gas and electric light and power, it seems. If the second line really comes out — which Hind says is rather doubtful. So if I am swallowed up by silence all of a sudden you will know it is the second line you have to blame. Unless Winston happens to have got hold of a machine gun and shot me suddenly in the back.
“But I don’t think that will happen while he has ink and paper. Don’t you worry about that.
“Well, there’s some features of this General Strike. Not a bit like a revolution. Far more as if a new sort of day not quite a weekday and not quite a Good Friday had happened. I don’t know whether what I have told you will make any sort of picture for you. There are foreign reporters in London and probably you will get it in the French papers or the Paris edition of the New York Herald. The essence of it is, miners locked out, transport workers of all sorts striking, printers striking, Winston probably certifiable but no doctors can get near him to do it, soldiers and police going about with loaded guns looking for a Revolution that isn’t there, Jix inciting the police to be violent at the least provocation, and the general public, like me, agape. All London agape. And over it all this for a Prime Minister —
Trusty old Baldwin keeps on doing nuffin
“Here endeth Part Two.”
The third fascicle was headed:
“What Labour thinks it is doing.
“Here, my dear Cynthia, I am going to set down what I can make out of how this strike came about. It is a queer history, but you can check it back and fill it out in details by the newspaper files I marked for you before I left Casa Terragena. This muddle has been tangling itself up for years. These are matter the Rylands family, branch as well as root (which is for current purposes Uncle Robert) ought to have some ideas about.
“After the war, you must understand, to go back to beginnings, Great Britain had a boom time for coal. It had a little boom in 1919. Then there was dislocation and trouble turning on de-control after the war and bringing men back from the army, problems of men taken on and so on. There was a Royal Commission and a very startling report called the Sankey Report, pointing out how wastefully British coal was won and proposing ‘Nationalisation,’ and that was followed by a strike — I think the year after. But it was possible to fix fairly good wages for the men just then. All Europe wanted coal, the French coal regions were all devastated area and Poincaré danced into the Ruhr and put that supply out of gear too. English coal prices mounted, wages mounted, we got in thousands of fresh miners from the agricultural workers over and above the war drift to the mines. There was a time when coal stood at ￡4 a ton. I mean we were selling it at that. Not for long of course. Even when it fell back below 40/- it was still a big price for us. Exports rose to huge figures. The miners and the coal-owners purred together and nobody bothered about Sankey and nationalisation. Say the top of ‘23.
“Then we deflated the pound, and also continental coal-winning began to recover.
“By 1924 the slump was plain in the sight to all men. Coal prices couldn’t be kept at the old level. There was trouble about wages in 1924 and a new arrangement which we owners dropped last year. Time, said the coal-owners, to take in sail. Naturally they kept mum about the stuff they’d put away during the boom years. Merely ‘business’ to do that. They just looked round for someone else to make up the current deficit, John Taxpayer was called upon, and Baldwin (a bit of a coal-owner himself) made him fork out the Coal Subsidy until he would stand it no longer. Then the coal-owners made what seemed to them the reasonable proposal that the miners should take lower wages-not a small reduction but a drop of twenty per cent, one shilling in five — work longer hours and (though this wasn’t clearly stated) a lot of them become unemployed. Obviously longer hours means fewer men.
“The reply of the miners was a most emphatic ‘No.’ I sympathise. Though as a rational creature I see that there are now more miners in Britain than can ever be employed at the boom rates or perhaps at any rates again, I see also how the miners who have settled down on the high rates feel about it. Their main representative is a man named Cook and he says ‘Not a penny off the pay; not a second on the day.’ If I had to live like a miner I should say the same. I’d rather die than come down below the present level. I have just happened upon a little book called Easingden by a man named Sinclair and it gives a flat, straightforward account of the life of a miner. I half suspect some connexion between Easingden and Edensoke, but never mind that. No frills about his story and to the best of my knowledge and belief dead true. It’s a grimy nightmare of a life. I am going to send it to you. When you read it, you will agree with me that it is intolerable to think of Englishmen — many of whom fought in the Great War to save me and you among others from the Hun — having to go a single step lower than that cramped, sordid, hopeless drudgery. Let the coal-owner, who didn’t foresee, who failed to reorganise on modern lines in his boom days, who has got a tidy pile stowed away, let him pay the racket now and not take it out of the flesh and blood of the people.
“My Lord Edensoke says what country wants work. This was meant to be a cigar but is an anachronism that came with old brandy later hard work never hurt anyone Philip tis champagne in the glass N. B. our celebrated pink
“That’s what the miner feels and partly thinks. The hoards of the successful, he thinks, ought to be the elastic pads we fall back upon in a squeeze; not the living bodies of the miners and their families.
“The miners never professed to organise business and make reserves, they thought the clever fellows were seeing to that. Their job was to hew coal. They say they didn’t suppose the clever fellows were just out to get away with profits and leave them in the lurch. So that a lot of them now are feeling decidedly Communist and would like to go out and hew at the clever fellows. I should, Cynthia, if I were a miner.
“The new Coal Commission although it is all Herbert Samuels and business men and not a Justice Sankey upon it and no one to speak for the miners, admits a lot of reasonableness in the miners’ case. But the coal-owners say in effect, ‘Not a penny out of our hoards, not a shadow of sacrifice from us!‘ They propose to knock wages down to the tune of a shilling in five and practically don’t offer to bear any equivalent hardship on their own part. I had it out — or partly had it out with Uncle Robert last night. ‘Partly,’ because he got so obviously cross that my natural respect for the head of the family made me shut up. He was all for the unreasonableness of the miners in not making any concessions. Stern and dignified and rude. Wouldn’t say what was to be done with the miners who will have to be laid off whatever concessions the poor devils make. The more concessions they make in hours, the more will get laid off. He wouldn’t say whether the shilling in five was his last word or not. And he got really vicious on the subject of Cook.
“‘At present,’ said his lordship, ‘all discussion is in abeyance. The whole social order has been struck at — and has to be defended.’ Repeated it. Raised his hand with an air of finality.
“Baldwin and Co just went from one party to the other wringing their hands or pretending to wring their hands — I’ve got something to say about that — and repeating, ‘Do please be reasonable,’ instead of taking us coal-owners by the scruff of the neck as they should have done and saying ‘Share the loss like decent men.’ If the coal-owners won’t give way, said Baldwin and Co in effect, then the miners must. Nothing was done. The coal-owners simply demanded lower wages and more work and prepared for a general lock-out if the miners didn’t knuckle under. And that is how things were between the coal-owners and the miners.
“In a country that had honest newspapers and clear heads all this would have brought such a storm about the ears of the coal-owners that they would have met the men half-way — three quarters of the way, in a hurry. They would have sat up all night sweating apologies and drawing up more and more generous schemes to ease off the situation. And the public would have insisted on the deal. But the country never got the story plain and clear. How could it judge?
“Now here it is the General Council of the Trade unions comes in. The miners are a part of that and have raised this coal puzzle at the Congress of the Trade unions for the last two years. The General Council of the Trade unions declares, and I myself think rightly, that the attack to reduce the miners is only a preliminary to a general reduction, railway men, engineers, industrials of all sorts. Common cause. So the T.U.C. takes a hand and you get a sort of four-cornered game, (1) T.U.C., (2) miners (Cook very vocal, too vocal), (3) goverment and (4) owners. (1) and (2) are theoretically partners: (3) and (4) profess not to be — but I am afraid are. If the miners are locked out, if nothing is done, then says the T.U.C. we shall have to call out the railwaymen, transport workers, engineers, postal employees and so forth and so on. ‘That,’ says the goverment, ‘is a general strike. It isn’t an industrial dispute; it’s politics. It’s an attack on the goverment of the land.’ Says the T.U.C., ‘Damn you! Why don’t you be the goverment of the land? We aren’t going to let the miners be downed in this fashion, politics or not. Something has to be done. We don’t want a strike of this sort but if there is a miners’ lock-out, some such strike there will have to be.’
“But the T.U.C. wasn’t very resolute about all that. That’s a nasty point in my story. Not the only one. They backed up the miners but they didn’t quite back them up. Several of the Labour Leaders, chaps of the court suit and evening dress type, were running about London, weeks and weeks ago, pulling long faces and saying, ‘The extremists are forcing our hands. We don’t want the general strike. We’re perfectly peaceful snobs on the make. We are indeed. It’s an attempt at revolution; we admit it. Do something — even if it only looks like something.’ Mornington met two of them. Those were practically their words. They started out upon a series of conferences with the goverment. Conferences and more conferences. Suggestions, schemes. Running to and fro — T.U.C. at Downing Street. T.U.C. goes to the miners. To and fro. Talk about the Eleventh Hour. But in England nobody ever believes there is an Eleventh Hour until it comes. Like the war. Cook going on all the time like a musical box that can’t leave off: ‘Not a penny off the pay, not a second on the day.’ Twenty speeches a day and still at it in his sleep.
“My dear, I don’t know if you will make head or tail of this rigmarole so far. I set it down as well as I can. But try and get that situation clear — which brings things up to last week-end. Miners, inflexible; owners, inflexible. Goverment ambiguous, T.U.C. forcible feeble, rather warning about the General Strike than promising it. And doing nothing hard and strong to prepare for it. Under-prepared while the goverment was over-prepared.
“And here I must conclude my Part Three because I have already been writing about the next stage in Part Four. Go on to Part number Four.”
Mrs. Rylands did.
Part Four was headed:
“The Goverment isn’t playing straight.
“Here little Cynna comes the stuff that troubles my mind most. I don’t think Baldwin and his goverment have played a straight game. I don’t think the miners and the rank and file of the workers are getting a square deal. I think that Baldwin and Co are consciously or subconsciously on the side of the coal-owner and the profit extractor, and that they mean to let the workers down. They are making an Asset of Cook and his not listening to reason. I’ve had that smell in my nose for some time. Even at Casa Terragena. Churchill’s first number of the British Gazette stank of it. Gave the whole thing away.
“They didn’t want to prevent a General Strike. They wanted it to happen. They wanted it to happen so as to distract attention from the plain justice of the case as between miners and coal-owners. And between workers generally and employers and business speculators generally, in a world of relative shrinkage. They wanted the chance of a false issue, to readjust with labour nearer the poverty line.
“You may say that is a serious charge to make against any goverment. But consider the facts. Consider what happened last Sunday night. Probably you haven’t got the facts of Sunday night over there yet. It’s the ugliest, most inexplicable night in the record of our quiet little Baldwin. If after all there does happen to be a Last Judgment, Master Stanley will be put through it hard and good about Sunday May 2nd. Or to be more exact, Monday May 3rd. ‘Put that pipe down Sir,’ the great flaming Angel will say, ‘We want to see your face.’
“We shall all want to see his face.
“What happened was this. The Trade union leaders were haggling and conferring between the miners and the cabinet all Sunday and they really seemed to be getting to a delaying compromise, and something like a deal. If the goverment really meant to make a deal. Late in the night the Trade union leaders at Downing Street, had hammered out some sort of reply to certain cabinet proposals. They went back to the conference room with it. And they found the room empty and dark and the lights out.
“The goverment had thrown down the negotiations. They came into a darkened room and were told that the goverment had gone away. Gone home!
“Bit dramatic that, anyhow.
“Why?
“My dear, you might guess at a thousand reasons. Some compositors at the Daily Mail had refused to set up an anti-labour leading article! The Daily Mail! I have never been able to understand how the Daily Mail is able to get compositors to set up any of its articles. But this thing I have a nasty feeling was foreseen. The coup was prepared. It was too clumsy, too out of proportion, to be a genuine thing. Forthwith the cabinet hear of the Daily Mail hitch. Remarkably quick. ‘It’s come off,’ I guess some one said. ‘Get on with the break.’ Like a shot the cabinet responded. Like an actor answering his cue. The goverment snatched at the excuse of that little Daily Mail printing-office strike to throw down the whole elaborate sham of negotiating for peace. They called the bluff of the poor old vacillating T.U.C. ‘This is the general strike and we are ready,’ said they. Off flew Winston and the heroic set to get busy, and Mr. Baldwin went to bed.
“The empty room. The lights put out. The labour leaders peering into it, astonished and not a little scared. Like sheep at the gate of a strange field. Don’t forget that picture, Cynthia.
“And since then the goverment hasn’t been a goverment. It’s been like a party trying to win an election. By fair means or foul. It’s stifled all discussion. It’s made broadcasting its call boy. It is playing the most extraordinarily dirty tricks in shutting up people and concealing facts. I’ve just heard things — but these I’ll tell you later. And all the rights and wrongs as between miners and coal-owners have vanished into thin air. Which is what the goverment wanted to happen. Q.E.F. as Mr. Euclid used to say.
“That ends my fourth section.”
Mrs. Rylands reflected for a time. Philip had told his story well. It sounded — credible. For the first time she seemed to be realising what this queer business in England meant. And yet there were difficulties. She must think it over. Some of it startled her and much that he had to say sounded excessively uncompromising. His note was one of combatant excitement. But then he was not living in the soft air of a great Italian garden which makes everything seem large and gentle and intricate. She must read those marked papers downstairs. But now what else had he to say? Part Five was headed:—
“Why did the Goverment want the Strike to happen?
“And now, my dear wife, I want to write of something more difficult. But it’s about the state of mind of the sort of people to which after all we belong. It’s about more than the General Strike.
“I’ve been about at the Club; I lunched at the Carlton with Silverbaum; I spent an evening with Hind and Mornington and their crew at Hind’s flat. And more particularly I’ve studied the words and proceedings of our esteemed uncle Lord Edensoke and of our honoured and trusted partner Sir Revel Cokeson, not to mention Mr. Gumm, the burly British Mr. Gumm. You remember them?
“Let me try and get it set down, as it has come to me. There is a feeling in the air that Britain is going down. I don’t mean that there is any sort of crash in view, but that industrially and financially she is being passed and overshadowed. She is in for a time of relative if not of absolute shrinkage. We may never be able to employ the same mass of skilled and semi-skilled labour that we have done in the past.
“I am not telling you here what I believe. Never mind what I believe. I am telling you what is in the minds and not very far from openly showing upon the surface of the minds of a lot of these people. Uncle Robert practically said as much. One of those speeches of his that begin, ‘My dear boy.’ One of those speeches of his that seem to admit that so far he has been lying but that now we have really come to it. And one has been getting the same sort of thing for a long time between the lines of such a paper as the Morning Post. Well, here is my reading of hearts. They think that there is shrinkage and hard times ahead and they think that it is the mass of workers who will have to bear the burthen. Because otherwise it will fall on — ourselves. Labour in Great Britain has seen its sunniest days. That is what they think.
“I suppose one has to face a certain loss of pre-eminence in the world for England. I don’t like it, but I suppose we have to. We were the boss country of the Nineteenth Century and the Nineteenth Century is over. Possibly there will not be a boss country in the Twentieth Century. Or it may be America. But it isn’t going to be us and we have to face up to that. That I say has got into the minds of pretty nearly all the sort of protected people, established people, go-about-the-globe people, financial and business people, who support the present goverment. And it takes two forms in its expression just according as intelligent meanness or unintelligent prejudice prevails in their minds.
“First Class; The intelligent mean wealthy people of Great Britain want to shove the bigger part of the impoverishment due to our relative shrinkage in the world upon the workers. They want a scrap that will cripple and discredit the Trade unions. Then they will reduce wages and at the same time cut down social services and popular education. So they will be able to go on for quite a long time as they are now and even recover some of their investments abroad and — to make these economies possible — we shall just breed and train cheaper and more miserable common English people.
“But they are not the majority of their sort, this class are not. They are just the mean left hand of Baldwin and Co. The right hand, which is heavier and lumpier, is able to be more honest because it is more stupid. Let us come to them.
“Second Class; The unintelligent wealthy people in Great Britain. The majority. On them too for some time the unpleasant realisation that Great Britain is shrinking in world importance has been growing. It seems to have grown with a rush since the coal trade began to look groggy after deflation. Perhaps it has grown too much. But this sort cannot accept it as the others do — clearly. All ideas turn to water and feelings in their minds. This is the sort that disputes the plainest facts if they are disagreeable. It is too horrible an idea for them. So it remains a foreign growth in their minds. Their Empire threatened! Their swagger and privileges going! Their air of patronage to all the rest of the world undermined! They refuse the fact.
“The more I hear our sort of people talk and see how they are behaving over this strike, the more I am reminded of some Gold Coast nigger who is suffering from the first intimations of old age and thinks he is bewitched and will get all right again if he only finds out and kills the witch. They lie awake at nights and hear the Empire, their Empire — for they’ve never given the working man a dog’s chance in it — creaking. They think of China up, India up, Russia not caring a damn for them — and the Americans getting patronising to the nth degree. Foreign investments shrunken and no means of restoring them. These people here about me, the wealthy Tory sort of people, the chaps in the Clubs, the men and women in the boxes and stalls and restaurants and night clubs, the Ascot people and the gentle jazzers, are not thinking of the rights and wrongs of the miners and the trade union people at all, and of fair play and what’s a straight deal with the men. Their attention will not rest on that. It seems unable to rest on that. The men are just a pawn in their game of foreign investment. The plain story I have told to you about the mines and the strike has passed right under their noses and they have missed the substance of it altogether. They have something larger and vaguer in their minds; this shrinkage of their credit as a class; this arrest in growth and vigour of their Empire, the Empire of their class — because that is all it is; its loss of moral power, the steady evaporation of its world leadership in finance and industry; the realisation — and they have it now in their bones if not in their intelligences, even the stupidest of them — that new and greater things are dawning upon the world. They are too-ill-educated and self-centred and consciously incompetent to accept these things fully and try to adapt themselves to new conditions. They become puzzled and frightened and quarrelsome at the bare thought of these new conditions — which threaten them — with extinction — or worse — with education. On no terms will they learn. That is too horrible. So they go frantic. They bristle up to fight. They want a great fight against time and fate. Before time and fate overtake them. They dream that perhaps if there was a tremendous scrap of some sort now, now while they are still fairly strong, somehow at the end of it this creeping rot, this loss of go, in all they value and of all that makes them swagger people, would be abolished and made an end to. It would be lost in the uproar and at the end they would find themselves back on the top of things, strong and hearty again without any doubts, without a single doubt, just as they used to be. Making decisions for everyone, universally respected, America put back in its place, all the world at the salute again.
“That I am convinced is what the Winston-Bullace state of mind amounts to — as distinguished from the more cold-blooded types you find like our thin-lipped Uncle Robert. That is Class Two.
“But what is the enemy? I say it is time and fate, geography and necessity. Sempack I suppose would say it was the spread of scientific and mechanical progress about the world which is altering the proportions of every blessed thing in life, so that (Sempack is my witness) a world system has to come. But you can’t fight time and fate and scientific and mechanical progress. You don’t get a chap like Bullace grasping an idea like that. And Bullace is our class, Cynthia; he is the rule and we are the exceptions. For him therefore it has to be a conspiracy. If he finds his blessed Empire is losing the game, or to put it more exactly, if he finds the game is evaporating away from his blessed Empire, then there must be cheating. There is an enemy bewitching us and there ought to be a witch-smelling. (If only it was half as simple!)
“They call the witch Bolshevism. The Red Red Witch of the World. They pretend to themselves that there is a great special movement afoot to overthrow British trade, British prestige and the British Empire. Wicked men from Moscow are the real source of all our troubles. The miners are just their ‘tools.’ You remember old fool Bullace saying that. If it wasn’t for Moscow the miners would like lower pay and longer hours. Ask for them. So you just take something that you call Bolshevism by the throat and kill it, and everyone will be happy.
“You can call almost anything Bolshevism for this purpose. You tackle that something and kill it and then the dear old Nineteenth Century will be restored and go on for ever and ever and ever.
“This is what I mean when I say that this trouble here is on a false issue. The miners and workers haven’t the ghost of an idea of what they are up against. They are out because their lives are squalid and their prospects dismal. They object to carrying all the hardship of the shrinkage of England’s overseas interests and investments. To them it is just the old story of the employer trying to screw them down. They don’t connect it yet with the decline of Britain as a world market and a world bank or anything of the sort. The reactionary party in the goverment, the ‘sojers’ as we call it, on the other hand are prancing about saving the country from an imaginary Social Revolution. You see the miss?
“The goverment lot, both Class One and Class Two, wants a fight. Class One to shift their losses on to labour and Class Two to exorcise the phantom of decay. Class One just wants to win. But if Class Two gets the least chance to make it a real bloody fight it will. They want to bully and browbeat and shoot and confuse everything in wrath and hate. They will make silly arrests; they will provoke. If they get a chance of firing into a crowd, they will do it. If they can have an Amritsar in Trafalgar Square they will. They want to beat the Reds and then tie up the Trade unions hand and foot — and trample. And that, my dear, is the dangerous side of the present situation.
“What adds to its danger is that the miners are being led too stiffly. I sympathise with them, but I see they aren’t playing to win — anything solid. If Cook can, he will give our Bullaces an excuse. Cook is Bullace in reverse. Perhaps there is some Moscow about Cook. Or he shares a dream with Bullace. He dreams Bullace’s nightmare as a paradise. Both dreamers.
“So far our patient, humorous, common English hasn’t given the goverment a chance. But anywhere now, an accident might happen. Some silly provocation. An ugly crowd. Or pure misunderstanding. It’s touch and go these days. I have said it is a silly situation, but also it is a dangerous one. And above all it is a game of false issues. Nothing fairly meeting anything else. Nothing being plainly put, the real world situation least of all. Two different things. Labour wanting to be comfortable in a time of slump and the old Empire lot wanting to feel as lordly as ever in a spell of decline. And the common man with his head spinning. This sort of thing:—”
Came a queer little drawing of which Mrs. Rylands only discovered the import after some moments of attention.
Labour Mr. Englishman The Goverment N.B. The fellow on the right has a gun.
“There my dear Cynna is a long history, tediously told, but I think it gives the general shape of this business here in England up to date. On one hand workers striking wisely or not, against shrinkage and going down in the scale of life; on the other a goverment, a governing class, all of our sort, coal-owners, landowners, industrials and financiers, anticking about, believing or pretending to believe we are fighting Red Revolution, and setting out in good earnest under cover of that to kill or cripple trade unionism and labourism generally. Much good it will do their blessed Empire if they do. Against time and fate.
“But can you imagine the solemn glory of an owl like Jix, in the midst of all this? Can you imagine what I have to put up with at the club from the old fools and the young fools burning to ‘give these Bolsheviks a lesson’? And the tension in the air when I go to investigate Uncle Robert. Meanwhile the reasonable, kindly, unsuspicious English common public is so puzzled, so good-humoured, so willing to do anything that seems tolerant and helpful and fair, and so ignorant of any of the realities!
“Hind told me yesterday of a bus-driver who had struck, in all loyalty to his trade union and then went and hunted up the young gentleman from Oxford who had been put in charge of his bus, just to tell him a few points he ought to know about handling a great heavy bus. What was it the old Pope said? Non Angli sed Angeli— simple-minded angels. Fancy trying to shift mere pecuniary losses on to the daily lives of men of that quality!”
So ended the Fifth Part. The sixth and last part was headed simply:—
“About myself and Cynthia.
“And now lastly, my darling, what am I doing? Nothing. Going about with my mouth open in the wonderful spectacle of England paralysed by its own confusion of mind. Baiting Uncle Robert. Reading the dreams of Mr. Sempack and comparing them with the ideas of the British Gazette. Learning something perhaps about the way this extraordinary world of ours, as Sempack would call it, fumbles along. And writing to you.
“I don’t know what to do Cynthia? I don’t know where to take hold. This is a world change being treated as a British political and social row. Its roots are away in world finance, gold and the exchanges, and all sorts of abstruse things. It isn’t London or Yorkshire or New York or Moscow; it’s everywhere. Part of everywhere. Where we all live nowadays. No. 1, The Universe, Time. I sympathise with the strikers but I don’t really see what good this general strike is going to do, even if it does all it proposes to do. Throw everything out of gear, but what then? The goverment would have to resign. Who would come in if the goverment went out? Unheard of labour men? Snobs and spouters. Miscellaneous liberal leaders. What difference is there — except for the smell of tobacco — between Asquith and Baldwin? Lloyd George saving the country? Half the liberals and all the labour leaders would see the country in boiling pitch before they let it be saved by Lloyd George Communism and start again? There aren’t three thousand Communists in England and half of them aren’t English.
“On the other hand, I won’t do a hand’s turn to break the strike.
“I feel most horribly no good at all. I have twenty-two thousand a year, I’m a pampered child of this England and I don’t belong anywhere. Dear Uncle Robert drives our great concerns and our fifth share, or thereabouts, is like a trunk tied behind an automobile. I’m an overpaid impostor. Nobody knows me. I’ve got no authority. If I said anything it wouldn’t matter. It would be like someone shouting at the back of a meeting. And even if it did matter it wouldn’t matter, because free speech is now suppressed. There are no newspapers and the broadcasting is given over to twaddle — there was a fellow gassing most improvingly about ants and grasshoppers yesterday — mixed up with slabs of biassed news and anti-strike propaganda. You see one is just carried along by the stream of events — and the stream is hopelessly silly.
“And that brings me round, Heart of my World, to all we were talking about before I left you. How good it was to talk like that just at the end and how good those talks were! People like us, as you said, ought to do. But what are we to do and how are we to do? Where do we come in? It is all very well for old prophet Sempack to lift his mighty nose and talk of the great progressive movements that will ultimately sweep all these things away, but will they? Are they sweeping them away? Even ultimately? This muddle, this dislocated leaderless country, finding its level in a new world so clumsily and dangerously, this crazy fight against a phantom revolution, is Reality. It is England 1926. Sempackia isn’t Reality; this is Reality. People smile about the streets and make dry jokes in our English way, but hundreds of thousands must be hiding worry almost beyond bearing. Anxiety untold, hardship and presently hunger. And the outlook —bad. At any time there may be shooting and killing. Sempack’s great glowing golden happy world is only a dream. A remote dream. I cannot tell you how remote from this disorganised London here.
“All very well to talk of the ultimate reasonableness of mankind, but what chance has ultimate reasonableness when some atavism like Winston collars all the paper for his gibberings and leaves you with nothing to print your appeals to the ultimate reasonableness on; or when a lot of young roughs like your Italian Fascists break up everyone who writes or speaks against their imbecile ideas about the universe and Italy?
“This ultimate reasonableness of Sempack’s is a rare thing, a hothouse plant. It’s the last fine distillation of human hope. It lives in just a few happy corners of the world, in libraries and liberal households. If you smash the greenhouse glass or turn off the hot water it will die. How is it ever coming into the open air, to face crowds and sway millions?
“If he is back there with you I wish you would ask him that. Drive him hard, Cynthia. He ought to come over here.
“Last night my mind was so puzzled and troubled I could not sleep. I turned out long after midnight and prowled down through Westminster and out along the Thames Embankment. There were not so many lights as usual and all those flaring advertisements about whisky and dental cream and suchlike helps to the soul weren’t lit. Economy of power. It made the bridges seem browner and the little oily lights on barges and boats more significant and it gave the moon a chance on the steely black water. I thought you might be looking at the same old moon — at that very moment. It looked hard and a bit cold over here but with you it must have been bigger and soft and kindly. There were very few people about and not a tram running. Cold. Such few people as did pass were for the most part hurrying — home I suppose. I looked at the moon and thought how you would presently be reading over the things I have been trying to tell you and how perplexing they were. I had a great heartache for you, to be with you. I wished I could talk to you instead of just writing to you. Do you remember — it isn’t a week yet, how I sat beside you on your balcony above the old palm trees and talked to you? Not very much. How much I would say now that I couldn’t say then!
“I wandered along the Embankment wondering what was brewing beneath all this frightful foolishness of the strike. Things are surely brewing that will affect all our lives, change all the prospects of that child of ours. A country that has been very proud and great and rather stupidly and easily great, learning its place in a new world. A finer world perhaps later — but bleak and harsh at present.
“London rather darkened, rather unusually quiet — in spite of its good humour — has something about it ——
“Awe?
“It’s like Bovril. I mean, so much of the world’s life is still concentrated here. London is a very wonderful city. I don’t think it is just because I am English that I think that.
“I stood and looked back at the Houses of Parliament and Big Ben and thought of the way the members must be going to and fro in that empty resounding maze of a place with its endless oak-lined passages, everyone rather at a loss as to what was to happen next. Saying silly things to each other, little jokes and so on because they can’t think of anything sensible to say. Futile lot they are at Westminster nowadays when anything real shows its teeth at them. There would probably be more people than usual, but trade union sort of people, standing about in the lobbies. No sight seers. Not the usual mixed crowd. . . .
“My mind ran on to all these riddles we have to guess together, you and I, if we are not to be lost in the general futility. If we are not to be swept along just as everything here is being swept along by forces, too misunderstood to be used or controlled. I thought of what a sterling thing you are so that you almost persuade me I can be sterling. And it came to me all over again that I wasn’t nearly as good a thing as even I might be, nor making nearly enough of myself in spite of all my freedoms and money and position. Nor were any of the people who were wrapped up in the vast, ungracious, mean quarrel made up of fear and hot misunderstandings and the meanness and cowardice of comfortable wealth. Millions of strikers saying their life wasn’t good enough — like some big thing talking in its sleep. And the anti-revolutionaries being firm and unflexible like an uneasy dream when your fist gets clenched. Why didn’t any of these people seem able to wake up? Why was I only awake in gleams and moments like that moment?
“I got into a sort of exalted state out there on the Embankment in the cold moonlight.
“‘Good God!’ I said to you — I said it to you; you can’t imagine how much I have talked to you lately, trying to explain things —‘Can none of us get together in the world to make something of it better than such silly squabbling and conflict as this? Is it a lie that there ever were martyrs — that men have died for causes and set out upon crusades? Is religion over for ever and the soul of man gone dead? And if it isn’t, why is there none of it here? Why are these people all jammed against each other like lumpish things against the grating of a drain? Why is there no league for clear-headedness? Why are there no Fascisti of the Light to balance the black Fascists? Why are none of us banded together to say “Stop!” all these politicians’ tricks, these shams, to scrap all the old prejudices and timidities, to take thought — and face the puzzle of the British position and the real future of England and the world, face it generously, mightily — like men?’
“That much I said or some such thing. I seemed to have a gleam of something — not yet. It is too much to get put together yet. Now I am trying to get what I said and thought back again and to write it down and send it to you so that you can know what I said.”
Abruptly it ended, “Philip.”
That apparently was all that Philip had intended to send, but in addition there was a loose sheet on which he had been thinking and which had evidently got itself among the fasciculi by mistake.
He had jotted down disconnected sentences.
“The common man,” she read, “wants to do nothing with general affairs — wants to be left alone. Why not leave him alone?”
There was a sort of Debit and Credit account. On the credit side was written: “A man who doesn’t think conserves energy. Parties of reaction like the Fascists, parties of dogma like the Communists, are full of energy. They get something done. They get the wrong thing done but it is done. Independent thought, critical thought, has no chance against them.”
On the Debit side she read: “In the long run intelligence wins,” and then: “does it?” and mere scribbling. Across the lower half of the sheet ran one word very slowly written in a large fair hand, “Organisation.”
Much smaller: “Intelligence plus energy.”
Then beginning very large and ending very small, a row of interrogation marks.