As Miss Grammont and Sir Richmond Hardy fulfilled the details of his
excellent programme and revised their impressions of the past and their
ideas about the future in the springtime sunlight of Wiltshire and
Somerset, with Miss Seyffert acting the part of an almost ostentatiously
discreet chorus, it was inevitable that their conversation should
become, by imperceptible gradations, more personal and intimate. They
kept up the pose, which was supposed to represent Dr. Martineau’s
philosophy, of being Man and Woman on their Planet considering its
Future, but insensibly they developed the idiosyncrasies of their
position. They might profess to be Man and Woman in the most general
terms, but the facts that she was the daughter not of Everyman but old
Grammont and that Sir Richmond was the angry leader of a minority upon
the Fuel Commission became more and more important. “What shall we do
with this planet of ours?” gave way by the easiest transitions to “What
are you and I doing and what have we got to do? How do you feel about it
all? What do you desire and what do you dare?”
It was natural that Sir Richmond should talk of his Fuel Commission to
a young woman whose interests in fuel were even greater than his own.
He found that she was very much better read than he was in the recent
literature of socialism, and that she had what he considered to be a
most unfeminine grasp of economic ideas. He thought her attitude
towards socialism a very sane one because it was also his own. So far as
socialism involved the idea of a scientific control of natural resources
as a common property administered in the common interest, she and he
were very greatly attracted by it; but so far as it served as a form of
expression for the merely insubordinate discontent of the many with
the few, under any conditions, so long as it was a formula for class
jealousy and warfare, they were both repelled by it. If she had had any
illusions about the working class possessing as a class any profounder
political wisdom or more generous public impulses than any other class,
those illusions had long since departed. People were much the same, she
thought, in every class; there was no stratification of either rightness
or righteousness.
He found he could talk to her of his work and aims upon the Fuel
Commission and of the conflict and failure of motives he found in
himself, as freely as he had done to Dr. Martineau and with a surer
confidence of understanding. Perhaps his talks with the doctor had got
his ideas into order and made them more readily expressible than they
would have been otherwise. He argued against the belief that any
class could be good as a class or bad as a class, and he instanced the
conflict of motives he found in all the members of his Committee and
most so in himself. He repeated the persuasion he had already confessed
to Dr. Martineau that there was not a single member of the Fuel
Commission but had a considerable drive towards doing the right thing
about fuel, and not one who had a single-minded, unencumbered drive
towards the right thing. “That,” said Sir Richmond, “is what makes life
so interesting and, in spite of a thousand tragic disappointments, so
hopeful. Every man is a bad man, every man is a feeble man and every
man is a good man. My motives come and go. Yours do the same. We vary in
response to the circumstances about us. Given a proper atmosphere, most
men will be public-spirited, right-living, generous. Given perplexities
and darkness, most of us can be cowardly and vile. People say you cannot
change human nature and perhaps that is true, but you can change its
responses endlessly. The other day I was in Bohemia, discussing Silesian
coal with Benes, and I went to see the Festival of the Bohemian Sokols.
Opposite to where I sat, far away across the arena, was a great bank of
men of the Sokol organizations, an unbroken brown mass wrapped in their
brown uniform cloaks. Suddenly the sun came out and at a word the whole
body flung back their cloaks, showed their Garibaldi shirts and became
one solid blaze of red. It was an amazing transformation until one
understood what had happened. Yet nothing material had changed but the
sunshine. And given a change in laws and prevailing ideas, and the
very same people who are greedy traders, grasping owners and revolting
workers to-day will all throw their cloaks aside and you will find them
working together cheerfully, even generously, for a common end.
They aren’t traders and owners and workers and so forth by any inner
necessity. Those are just the ugly parts they play in the present drama.
Which is nearly at the end of its run.”
“That’s a hopeful view,” said Miss Grammont. “I don’t see the flaw in
it--if there is a flaw.”
“There isn’t one,” said Sir Richmond. “It is my chief discovery about
life. I began with the question of fuel and the energy it affords
mankind, and I have found that my generalization applies to all
human affairs. Human beings are fools, weaklings, cowards, passionate
idiots,--I grant you. That is the brown cloak side of them, so to speak.
But they are not such fools and so forth that they can’t do pretty well
materially if once we hammer out a sane collective method of getting and
using fuel. Which people generally will understand--in the place of
our present methods of snatch and wrangle. Of that I am absolutely
convinced. Some work, some help, some willingness you can get out of
everybody. That’s the red. And the same principle applies to most labour
and property problems, to health, to education, to population, social
relationships and war and peace. We haven’t got the right system, we
have inefficient half-baked systems, or no system at all, and a wild
confusion and war of ideas in all these respects. But there is a right
system possible none the less. Let us only hammer our way through to the
sane and reasonable organization in this and that and the other human
affairs, and once we have got it, we shall have got it for good. We may
not live to see even the beginnings of success, but the spirit of order,
the spirit that has already produced organized science, if only there
are a few faithful, persistent people to stick to the job, will in the
long run certainly save mankind and make human life clean and splendid,
happy work in a clear mind. If I could live to see it!”
“And as for us--in our time?”
“Measured by the end we serve, we don’t matter. You know we don’t
matter.”
“We have to find our fun in the building and in our confidence that we
do really build.”
“So long as our confidence lasts there is no great hardship,” said Sir
Richmond.
“So long as our confidence lasts,” she repeated after him.
“Ah!” cried Sir Richmond. “There it is! So long as our confidence lasts!
So long as one keeps one’s mind steady. That is what I came away with
Dr. Martineau to discuss. I went to him for advice. I haven’t known him
for more than a month. It’s amusing to find myself preaching forth to
you. It was just faith I had lost. Suddenly I had lost my power of work.
My confidence in the rightness of what I was doing evaporated. My will
failed me. I don’t know if you will understand what that means. It
wasn’t that my reason didn’t assure me just as certainly as ever that
what I was trying to do was the right thing to try to do. But somehow
that seemed a cold and personally unimportant proposition. The life had
gone out of it....”
He paused as if arrested by a momentary doubt.
“I don’t know why I tell you these things,” he said.
“You tell them me,” she said.
“It’s a little like a patient in a hydropath retailing his ailments.”
“No. No. Go on.”
“I began to think now that what took the go out of me as my work went
on was the lack of any real fellowship in what I was doing. It was the
pressure of the opposition in the Committee, day afterday. It was being
up against men who didn’t reason against me but who just showed by
everything they did that the things I wanted to achieve didn’t matter
to them one rap. It was going back to a home, lunching in clubs, reading
papers, going about a world in which all the organization, all the
possibility of the organization I dream of is tacitly denied. I don’t
know if it seems an extraordinary confession of weakness to you,
but that steady refusal of the majority of my Committee to come into
co-operation with me has beaten me--or at any rate has come very near to
beating me. Most of them you know are such able men. You can FEEL their
knowledge and commonsense. They, and everybody about me, seemed busy and
intent upon more immediate things, that seemed more real to them than
this remote, theoretical, PRIGGISH end I have set for myself....”
He paused.
“Go on,” said Miss Grammont. “I think I understand this.”
“And yet I know I am right.”
“I know you are right. I’m certain. Go on.
“If one of those ten thousand members of the Sokol Society had thrown
back his brown cloak and shown red when all the others still kept them
selves cloaked--if he was a normal sensitive man--he might have felt
something of a fool. He might have felt premature and presumptuous. Red
he was and the others he knew were red also, but why show it? That is
the peculiar distress of people like ourselves, who have some sense
of history and some sense of a larger life within us than our merely
personal life. We don’t want to go on with the old story merely. We want
to live somehow in that larger life and to live for its greater ends and
lose something unbearable of ourselves, and in wanting to do that we are
only wanting to do what nearly everybody perhaps is ripe to do and will
presently want to do. When the New Age Martineau talks about begins to
come it may come very quickly--as the red came at Prague. But for the
present everyone hesitates about throwing back the cloak.”
“Until the cloak becomes unbearable,” she said, repeating his word.
“I came upon this holiday in the queerest state. I thought I was ill.
I thought I was overworked. But the real trouble was a loneliness that
robbed me of all driving force. Nobody seemed thinking and feeling with
me.... I have never realized until now what a gregarious beast man is.
It needed only a day or so with Martineau, in the atmosphere of ideas
and beliefs like my own, to begin my restoration. Now as I talk to
you--That is why I have clutched at your company. Because here you are,
coming from thousands of miles away, and you talk my ideas, you fall
into my ways of thought as though we had gone to the same school.”
“Perhaps we HAVE gone to the same school,” she said.
“You mean?”
“Disappointment. Disillusionment. Having to find something better in
life than the first things it promised us.”
“But you--? Disappointed? I thought that in America people might be
educating already on different lines--”
“Even in America,” Miss Grammont said, “crops only grow on the ploughed
land.”