I
It much affected his relations with those nearest to him,--with Mabel,
with Mr. Fortune, and with Twyning. In those months, and in the months
following, the year changing and advancing in equal excitements and
strong opinions through winter into spring, he found himself
increasingly out of favour at The Precincts and increasingly estranged
in his home. And it was his own fault. Detached and reflective in the
fond detachment of the daily bicycle ride, awake at night mentally
pacing about the assembled parts of his puzzles, he told himself with
complete impartiality that the cause of these effects was entirely of
his own making. "I can't stick shouting and smashing"--"I can't help
seeing the bits of right in the other point of view": those were the
causes. He was so difficult to get on with: that was the effect of the
complaint.
"Really, Sabre, I find it most difficult to get on with you nowadays,"
Mr. Fortune used to say. "We seem never to agree. We are perpetually at
loggerheads. Loggerheads. I do most strongly resent being perpetually
bumped and bruised by unwilling participation in a grinding congestion
of loggerheads."
And Twyning, "Well, I simply can't hit it off with you. That's all there
is to it. I try to be friendly; but if you can't hear Lloyd George's
name without taking up that kind of attitude, well, all I can say is
you're trying to put up social barriers in a place where there's no room
for social barriers, and that's in business."
And Mabel: "Well, if you want to know what I think, I think you're
getting simply impossible to get on with. You simply never think the
same as other people think. I should have thought it was only common
decency at a time like this to stand up for your own class; but, no.
It's always your own class that's in the wrong and the common people who
are in the right."
"Always." He began to hate the word "always." But it was true. In those
exciting and intensely opinionated days it seemed there was never a
subject that came up, whether at The Precincts or at home, but he found
himself on the other side of the argument and giving intense displeasure
because he was on the other side. In Mabel's case--he did not
particularly trouble himself about what Twyning and Fortune thought--but
in Mabel's case, much set on his duty to give her happiness, he came to
prepare with care for the dangerous places of their intercourse. But
never with success. Places whose aggravations drove her to her angriest
protestations of how utterly impossible he was to get on with never
looked dangerous as they were approached: he would ride in to them with
her amicably or with a slack rein,--and suddenly, mysteriously,
unexpectedly, he would be floundering, the relations between them yet a
little more deeply foundered.
Such utterly harmless looking places:
"And those are the people, mind you," said Mabel--not for the first time
"those are the people that we have to lick stamps for Lloyd George for!"
This was because High Jinks had been seen going out for her afternoon
with what Mabel described to Sabre as a trumpery, gee-gaw parasol.
The expression amused him. "Well, why in heaven's name shouldn't High
Jinks buy a trumpery, gee-gaw parasol?"
"I do wish you wouldn't call her High Jinks. Because she can't afford a
trumpery, gee-gaw parasol."
He spoke bemusedly. No need for caution that he could see. "Well, I
don't know--I rather like to see them going out in a bit of finery."
Mabel sniffed. "Well, your taste! Servants look really nice in their
caps and aprons and their black, if they only knew it. In their bit of
finery, as you call it, they look too awful for words."
Signs of flying up. He roused himself to avert it. "Oh, rather. I agree.
What I meant was I think it's rather nice to see them decking themselves
out when they get away from their work. Rather pathetic."
"Pathetic!"
She had flown up!
He said quickly, "No, but look here, Mabel, wait a bit. I ought to have
explained. What I mean is they have a pretty rotten time, all that
class. When High Jinks puts up a trumpery, gee-gaw parasol, she's human.
That's pathetic, only being human once a week and alternate Sundays. And
when you get a life that finds pleasure in a trumpery, gee-gaw parasol,
well that's more pathetic still. See?"
Real anxiety in his "See?" But the thing was done. "No. I absolutely
don't. Pathetic! You really are quite impossible to get on with. I've
given up even trying to understand your ideas. Pathetic!" She gave her
sudden laugh.
"Oh, well," said Sabre.
Deeper foundered!
II
And precisely the same word--pathetic--came up between them in the
matter of Miss Bypass. Miss Bypass was companion to Mrs. Boom Bagshaw,
the mother of Mr. Boom Bagshaw. Mabel hated Miss Bypass because Miss
Bypass was, she said, the rudest creature she ever met. And "of course"
Sabre took the opposite view--the ridiculous and maddening view--that
her abominably rude manner was not rude but pathetic.
The occasion was an afternoon call paid at the vicarage. Of all houses
in the Garden Home Sabre most dreaded and feared the vicarage. He paid
this call, with shuddering, in pursuance of his endeavour to
do with Mabel things that gave her pleasure. (And in the most
uncongenial of them, as this call at the vicarage, he used to think,
characteristically, "After all, I haven't got the decency to do what
she's specially asked--give up the bike ride.")
The Vicarage drawing-room was huge, handsomely furnished, much adorned
with signed portraits of royal and otherwise celebrated persons, and
densely crowded with devoted parishioners. Among them the Reverend Boom
Bagshaw moved sulkily to and fro; amidst them, on a species of raised
throne, Mrs. Boom Bagshaw gave impressive audience. The mother of the
Reverend Boom Bagshaw was a massive and formidable woman who seemed to
be swaddled in several hundred garments of heavy crêpe and stiff satin.
She bore a distinct resemblance to Queen Victoria; but there was stuff
in her and upon her to make several Queen Victorias. About the room, but
chiefly, as Sabre thought, under his feet, fussed her six very small
dogs. There were called Fee, Fo and Fum, which were brown toy Poms; and
Tee, To, Tum, which were black toy Poms, and the six were the especial
care and duty of Miss Bypass. Every day Miss Bypass, who was tall and
pale and ugly, was to be seen striding about Penny Green and the Garden
Home in process of exercising the dogs; the dogs, for their part,
shrilling their importance and decorating the pavements in accordance
with the engaging habits of their lovable characteristics. In the
drawing-room Miss Bypass occupied herself in stooping about after the
six, extracting bread and butter from their mouths--they were not
allowed to eat bread and butter--and raising them for the adoring
inspection of visitors unable at the moment either to adore Mr. Boom
Bagshaw or to prostrate themselves before the throne of Queen Victoria
Boom Bagshaw.
Few spoke to Miss Bypass. Those who did were answered in the curiously
defiant manner which was her habit and which was called by Mabel
abominably rude, and by Sabre pathetic. As he and Mabel were taking
their leave, he had Miss Bypass in momentary conversation, Mabel
standing by.
"Hullo, Miss Bypass. Haven't managed to see you in all this crowd.
How're things with you?"
"I'm perfectly well, thank you."
"Been reading anything lately? I saw you coming out of the library the
other day with a stack of books."
Miss Bypass gave the impression of bracing herself, as though against
suspected attack. "Yes, and they were for my own reading, thank you. I
suppose you thought they were for Mrs. Boom Bagshaw."
Certainly her manner was extraordinarily hostile. Sabre took no notice.
"No, I bet they were your own. You're a great reader, I know."
Her tone was almost bitter. "I suppose you think I read nothing but
Dickens and that sort of thing."
"Well, you might do a good deal worse, you know. There's no one like
Dickens, taking everything together."
She flushed. You could almost see she was going to say something rude.
"That's a very kind thing to say to uneducated people, Mr. Sabre. It
makes them think it isn't education that prevents them enjoying more
advanced writers. But I don't suffer from that, as it so happens. I
daresay some of my reading would be pretty hard even for you."
Sabre felt Mabel pluck at his sleeve. He glanced at her. Her face was
very angry. Miss Bypass, delivered of her sharp words, was deeper
flushed, her head drawn back. He smiled at her. "Why, I'm sure it would,
Miss Bypass. I tell you what, we must have a talk about reading one day,
shall we? I think it would be rather jolly to exchange ideas."
An extraordinary and rather alarming change came over Miss Bypass's hard
face. Sabre thought she was going to cry. She said in a thick voice,
"Oh, I don't really read anything particularly good. It's only--Mr.
Sabre, thank you." She turned abruptly away.
When they were outside, Mabel said, "How extraordinary you are!"
"Eh? What about?"
"Making up to that girl like that! I never heard such rudeness as the
way she spoke to you." Sabre said, "Oh, I don't know."
"Don't know! When you spoke to her so politely and the way she answered
you! And then you reply quite pleasantly--"
He laughed. "You didn't expect me to give her a hard punch in the eye,
did you?"
"No, of course I didn't expect you to give her a hard punch in the eye.
But I should have thought you'd have had more sense of your own dignity
than to take no notice and invite her to have a talk one day."
He thought, "Here we are again!" He said, "Well, but look, Mabel. I
don't think she means it for rudeness. She is rude of course, beastly
rude; but, you know, that manner of hers always makes me feel
frightfully sorry for her."
"Sorry!"
"Yes, haven't you noticed many people like her with that defiant sort of
way of speaking--people not very well educated, or very badly off, or in
rather a dependent position, and most frightfully conscious of it. They
think every one is looking down on them, or patronising them, and the
result is they're on the defensive all the time. Well, that's awfully
pathetic, you know, all your life being on the defensive; back against
the wall; can't get away; always making feeble little rushes at the mob.
By Jove, that's pathetic, Mabel."
She said, "I'm not listening, you know."
He was startled. "Eh?"
"I say I'm not listening. I always know that whenever I say anything
about any one I dislike, you immediately start making excuses for them,
so I simply don't listen."
He mastered a sudden feeling within him. "Well, it wasn't very
interesting," he said.
"No, it certainly wasn't. Pathetic!" She gave her sudden burst of
laughter. "You think such extraordinary things pathetic; I wonder you
don't start an orphanage!"
He halted and faced her. "Look here, I think I'll leave you here. I
think I'll go for a bit of a walk."
Pretty hard, sometimes, not to--
III
At The Precincts the increasing habit of seeing the other side of things
was confined, in its increasing exemplifications of how impossible he
was to get on with, to the furiously exciting incidents of public
affairs; but the result was the same; the result was that, just as, on
opening his door on return home at night, he had that chill and rather
eerie feeling of stepping into an empty house, so, on entering the
office of a morning, he came to have again that sensation that it was a
deserted habitation into which he was stepping; no welcome here; no
welcome there. He began to look forward with a new desire for the escape
and detachment of the bicycle ride; he began to approach its termination
at either end with a sense of apprehension, gradually of dismay.
They were as unexpected, the conflicts of opinion, in the office as they
were at home. The subject would come up, he would enter it according to
his ideas and without foreseeing trouble, and suddenly he would find
himself in acute opposition and giving acute offence because he was in
acute opposition.
The Suffragettes! The day when Mr. Fortune received through the post
letters upon which militancy had squirted its oppression and its
determination in black and viscid form through the aperture of the
letter box. "And you're sticking up for them!" declared Mr. Fortune in a
very great passion. "You're deliberately sticking up for them.
You--pah!--pouff!--paff! I have got the abominable stuff all over my
fingers."
Sabre displayed the "wrinkled-up nut" of his Puzzlehead boyhood. "I'm
not sticking up for them. I detest their methods as much as you do. I
think they're monstrous and indefensible. All I said was that, things
being as they are, you can't help seeing that their horrible ways are
bringing the vote a jolly sight nearer than it's ever been before.
Millions of people who never would have thought about woman suffrage are
thinking about it now. These women are advertising it as it never could
be advertised by calmly talking about it, and you can't get anything
nowadays except by shouting and smashing and abusing and advertising. I
only wish you could. No one listens to reason. It's got to be what they
call a whirlwind campaign or go without. That's not sticking up for
them. It's simply recognising a rotten state of affairs."
"And I say to you," returned Mr. Fortune, scrubbing furiously at his
fingers with a duster, "and I say to you what I seem to be perpetually
forced to say to you, that your ideas are becoming more and more
_repugnant_ to me. There's not a solitary subject comes up between us
but you adopt in it what I desire to call a stubborn and contumacious
attitude towards me. Whoof!" He blew a cyclonic blast down the speaking
tube. "Send Parker up here. Parker! Send _Parker_ up here! Parker!
_Parker! Parker!_ Pah! Pouff! Paff! Now it's all over the speaking tube!
I am by no means recovered yet, Sabre, I am very far from being yet
recovered, from your remarks yesterday on the Welsh Church
Disestablishment Bill. Let me remind you again that your attitude was
not only very painful to me in my capacity of one in Holy Orders, it was
also outrageously opposed to the traditions and standing of this firm.
We are out of sympathy, Sabre. We are seriously out of sympathy; and let
me tell you that you would do well to reflect whether we are not
dangerously out of sympathy. Let me--"
The door porter entered in the venerable presence of the summoned
Parker, much agitated.
Sabre began, "If you can't see what I said about the Disestablishment
Bill--"
"I did not see; I do not see; I cannot see and I shall not see. I--"
Sabre moved towards his door. "Well, I'd better be attending to my work.
If anything I've said annoyed you, it certainly was not intended to."
And there followed him into his room, "Pumice stone! Pumice stone!
Pumice stone! Go to the chemist's and get some pumice stone.... Very
well then, sir, don't stand there staring at me, sir!"
IV
Like living in two empty houses: empty this end; empty that end. More
frequently, for these estrangements, appealed to him the places of his
refuge: the room of his mind, that private chamber wherein, retired, he
assembled the parts of his puzzles; that familiar garment in which,
invested, he sat among the fraternity of his thoughts; the evenings with
Young Perch and old Mrs. Perch; the evenings with Mr. Fargus.
Most strongly of all called another refuge; and this, because it called
so strongly, he kept locked. Nona.
They met no more frequently than, prior to her two years' absence, they
had been wont to meet in the ordinary course of neighbourly life; and
their lives, by their situations, were much detached. Northrepps was
only visited, never resided at for many months together.
His resolution was not to force encounters. Once, very shortly after
that day of her disclosure, he had said to her, "Look here, we're not
going to have any arranged meetings, Nona. I'm not strong enough--not
strong enough to resist. I couldn't bear it."
She answered, "You're too strong, Marko. You're too strong to do what
you think you ought not to do; it isn't not being strong enough."
He told her she was very wrong. "That's giving me strength of character.
I haven't any strength of character at all. That's been my failing all
my life. I tell you what I've got instead. I've got the most
frightfully, the most infernally vivid sense of what's right in my own
personal conduct. Lots of people haven't. I envy them. They can do what
they like. But I know what I ought to do. I know it so absolutely that
there's no excuse for me when I don't do it, certainly no credit if I
do. I go in with my eyes open or I stay out merely because my eyes are
open. There's nothing in that. If it's anything it's contemptible."
She said, "Teach me to be contemptible."
V
In those words he had expressed his composition. What he had not
revealed--that very vividness of sense of what was right (and what was
wrong) in his conduct forbidding it--was the corroding struggle to
preserve the path of his duty. Because of that struggle he kept locked
the refuge that Nona was to him in his dismays. He would have no
meetings with her save only such as thrice happy chance and most kind
circumstance might apportion. That was within the capacity of his
strength. He could "at least" (he used to think) prevent his limbs from
taking him to her. But his mind--his mind turned to her; automatically,
when he was off his guard, as a swing door ever to its frame;
frantically, when he would abate it, as a prisoned animal against its
bars. By day, by night, in Fortune's company, in Mabel's company, in
solitude, his mind turned to her. This was the refuge he kept locked,
using the expression and envisaging it.
He used to think, "Of course I fail. Of course she's always in my mind.
But while I make the effort to prevent it, while I do sometimes manage
to wrench my mind away, I'm keeping fit; I'm able to go on putting up
some sort of a fight. I'm able to help her."
To help her! But helping her, unfolding before her in his own measured
words, as one pronouncing sentence, rectitude's austere asylum for
their pains, watching her while she listened, hearing her gentle
acquiescence,--these were most terrible to his governance upon himself.
VI
He said one day, "You see, there's this, Nona. Life's got one. We're in
the thing. All the time you've got to go on. You can't go back one
single second. What you've done, you've done. It may take only a minute
in the doing, or in the saying, but it's done, or said, for all your
life, perhaps for the whole of some one else's life as well. That's
terrific, Nona.
"Nona, that's how life gets us; there's just one way we can get life and
that's by thinking forward before we do a thing. By remembering that
it's going to be there for always. What's in our hearts for one another,
Nona, is no hurt to to-morrow or to next year or to twenty years hence,
either to our own lives or to any one else's--no hurt while it's only
there and not expressed, or acted on. I've never told you what's in my
heart for you, nor you told me what's in your heart for me. It must
remain like that. Once that goes, everything goes. It's only a question
of time after that. And after that, again, only a question of time
before one of us looks back and wishes for the years over again."
She made the smallest motion of dissent.
He said, "Yes. There's right and wrong, Nona. Nothing else in between.
No compromise. No way of getting round them or over them. You must be
either one thing or the other. Once we took a step towards wrong, there
it is for ever, and all its horrible things with it--deceit,
concealment, falsehood, subterfuge, pretence: vile and beastly things
like that. I couldn't endure them; and I much less could endure thinking
I had caused you to suffer them. And then on through that mire to
dishonour.--It's easy, it sounds rather fine, to say the world well lost
for love; but honour, honour's not well lost for anything. You can't
replace it. I couldn't--"
The austere asylum of their pains. He looked back upon it as he had
unfolded it. He looked forward across it as, most stern and bleak, it
awaited them. He cried with a sudden loudness, as though he protested,
not before her, but before arbitrament in the high court of destiny,
"But I cannot help you upward; I can only lead you downward."
She said, "Upward, Marko. You help me upward."
Her gentle acquiescence!
There swept upon him, as one reckless in sudden surge of intoxication,
most passionate desire to take her in his arms; and on her lips to crush
to fragments the barriers of conduct he had in damnable sophistries
erected; and in her ears to breathe, "You are beloved to me! Honour,
honesty, virtue, rectitude--words, darling, words, words, words!
Beloved, let the foundations of the world go spinning, so we have love."
He called most terribly upon himself, and his self answered him; but
shaken by that most fierce onset he said thickly, "I'll have this. If
ever it grows too hard for you, tell me--tell me."
VII
It must be kept locked. In grievous doubt of his own strength, in
loneliness more lonely for his doubt, more deeply, as advancing summer
lengthened out his waking solitude, he explored among his inmost
thoughts; more eagerly, in relief from their perplexities, turned to the
companionship of Fargus and the Perches. How very, very glad they
always were to see him! It was the strong happiness they manifested in
greeting him that most deeply gave the pleasure he had in their company.
He often pondered the fact. It was, in their manifestation of it, as
though he brought them something,--something very pleasurable to them
and that they much wanted. Certainly he, for his own part, received such
from them: a sense of warmth, a kindling of the spirit, a glowing of all
his affections and perceptions.
His mind would explore curiously along this train of thought. He came to
determine that infinitely the most beautiful thing in life was a face
lighting up with the pleasure of friendship: in its apotheosis
irradiating with the wonder of love. That frequent idea of his of the
"wanting something" look in the faces of half the people one saw: he
thought that the greeting of some one loved might well be a touching of
the quality that was to seek. The weariest and the most wistful faces
were sheerly transfigured by it. But he felt it was not entirely the
secret. The greeting passed; the light faded; the wanting returned. But
he determined the key to the solution lay within that ambit. The
happiness was there. It was here in life, found, realised in loving
meeting, as warmth is found on stepping from shadow into the sun. The
thing lacking was something that would fix it, render it permanent,
establish it in the being as the heart is rooted in the
body.--Something? What?
He thought, "Well, why is it that children's faces are always happy?
There's something they must lose as they grow out of childhood. It's not
that cares and troubles come; the absurd troubles of childhood are just
as terrific troubles to them as grown-ups' cares are to grown-ups. No,
it is that something is lost. Well, what had I as a child that I have
not as a man? Would it be hope? Would it be faith? Would it be belief?"
He thought, "I wonder if they're all the same, those three--belief,
faith, hope? Belief in hope. Faith in hope. It may be. Is it that a
child knows no limitation to hope? It can hope impossible things. But a
man hopes no further than he can see--I wonder--"
And suddenly, in one week, life from its armoury discharged two events
upon him. In the next week one upon the world.