thousands of men, but except for the difference in scale there was
indeed hardly any difference at all between this scramble towards civil
conflict in Ireland and the rush, swift and noiseless, that was now
carrying central Europe towards immeasurable bloodshed. To kill and
mutilate and waste five human beings in a petty riot is in its essence
no less vile a crime than to kill and mutilate and waste twenty
millions. While the British Tories counted their thousands, the Kaiser
and his general staff reckoned in millions; while the British
“loyalists” were smuggling a few disused machine-guns from Germany,
Krupp’s factories were turning out great guns by the hundred. But the
evil thing was the same evil thing; a system narrow and outworn, full of
a vague fear of human reason and the common sense of mankind, full of
pride and greed and the insolent desire to trample upon men, a great
system of false assumptions and fixed ideas, oppressed by a thirsty
necessity for reassurance, was seeking the refreshment of loud
self-assertion and preparing to drink blood. The militarist system that
centred upon Potsdam had clambered to a point where it had to kill men
or go. The Balkans were the Ulster of Europe. If once this Balkan
trouble settled down, an age of peace might dawn for Europe, and how
would Junkerdom fare then, and where would Frau Bertha sell her goods?
How would the War Lord justify his glories to the social democrat?...
But Oswald, like most Englishmen, was not attending very closely to
affairs upon the Continent. He was preoccupied with the unreason of
Ulster.
Recently he had had a curious interview with Lady Charlotte Sydenham,
and her white excited face and blazing blue eyes insisted now upon
playing the part of mask to the Ulster spirit in his thoughts. She had
had to call him in because she had run short of ready money through
over-subscription to various schemes for arming the northern patriots.
She had sat at her writing-desk with her cap a little over one eye, as
though it was a military cap, and the tuft of reddish hair upon her
cheek more like bristles than ever, and he had walked about the room
contriving disagreeable things to say to her after his wont. He was
disinclined to let her have more money, he confessed; she ought to have
had more sense, he said, than to write off big cheques, cheques beyond
her means, in support of this seditious mischief. If she asked these
people who had taken her money, probably they would let her have some
back to go on with.
This enraged her nicely, as he had meant it to do. She scolded at him. A
nice Sydenham he was, to see his King insulted and his country torn
apart. He who had once worn the Queen’s uniform. Thank God! she herself
was a Parminter and belonged to a sounder strain!
“It’s you who are insulting the King,” Oswald interpolated, “trying to
defy his Acts in Parliament.”
“_Oh!_” cried Lady Charlotte, banging the desk with her freckled fist.
“Oh! Parliament! I’d shoot ’em down! First that vile Budget, then the
attack on the Lords.”
“They passed the Parliament Act,” said Oswald.
“To save themselves from being swamped in a horde of working-men
peers—sitting there in their caps with their dirty boots on the
cushions. Lord Keir Hardie! You’ll want Lord Chimneysweep and Viscount
Cats-meatman next.... Then came that abominable Insurance Act—one thing
worse than another! Setting class against class and giving them ideas!
Then we gave up South Africa to the Boers again! What did we fight for?
Didn’t we buy the country with our blood? Why, my poor cousin Rupert
Parminter was a prisoner in Pretoria for a whole year—thirteen weary
months! For nothing! And now Ireland is to be handed over to priests and
rebels. To _Irishmen_! And I—I am not to lift a finger, not a finger, to
save my King and my Country and my God—when they are all going straight
to the Devil!”
“H’m,” said Oswald, rustling the counterfoils in his hand. “But you
_have_ been lifting your finger, you know!”
“If I could give more——”
“You _have_ given more.”
“I’d give it.”
“Won’t Grimes make a friendly advance? But I suppose you’re up to the
neck with Grimes.... I wonder what interest that little swindler charges
you.”
The old lady could not meet the mild scrutiny of his eye. “You come here
and grin and mock while your country is being handed over to a gang of
God-knows-whos!” she said, staring at her inkpot.
“To whom probably it belongs as much as it does to me,” said Oswald.
“Thank God the army is sound,” said Aunt Charlotte. “Thank God this
doesn’t end with your Parliaments! Mark my words, Oswald! On the day
they raise their Home Rule flag in Ireland there will be men shot
down—men shot down. A grim lesson.”
“Some perhaps killed by your own particular cheques,” said Oswald. “Who
knows?”
“I hope so,” said Lady Charlotte, with a quiver of deep passion in her
voice. “I hope so sincerely. If I could think I had caused the death of
one of those traitors.... If it could be Lloyd George!”...
But that was too much apparently even for Lady Charlotte to hope for.
Oswald, when he had come to her, had fully intended to let her have
money to go on with, but now he was changing his mind. He had thought of
her hitherto just as a grotesque figure in his life, part of the joke of
existence, but now with this worry of the Irish business in his mind he
found himself regarding her as something more than an individual. She
seemed now to be the accentuated voice of a whole class, the embodiment
of a class tradition. He strolled back from the window and stood with
his hands deep in his trouser pockets—which always annoyed her—and his
head on one side, focusing the lady.
“My dear Aunt,” he said, “what right have you to any voice in politics
at all? You know, you’re pretty—ungracious. The world lets you have this
money—and you spend it in organizing murder.”
“_The world lets me have this money!_” cried Lady Charlotte, amazed and
indignant. “Why!” she roared, “it’s MY money!”
In that instant the tenets of socialism, after a siege lasting a quarter
of a century, took complete possession of Oswald’s mind. In that same
instant she perceived it. “Any one can see you’re a Liberal and a
Socialist yourself,” she cried. “You’d shake hands with Lloyd George
tomorrow. Yes, you would. Why poor foolish Vincent made _you_ trustee——!
He might have known! _You_ a sailor! A faddy invalid! Mad on blacks. I
suppose you’d give your precious Baganda Home Rule next! And him always
so sound on the treatment of the natives! Why! he kicked a real judge—a
native judge—Inner Temple and all the rest of it—out of his railway
compartment. Kicked him. Bustled him out neck and crop. Awayed with him!
Oh, if he could see you now! Insulting me! Standing up for all these
people, blacks, Irishmen, strikers, anything. Sneering at the dear old
Union Jack they want to tear to pieces.”
“Well,” said Oswald as she paused to take breath. “You’ve got yourself
into this mess and you must get along now till next quarter day as well
as you can. I can’t help you and you don’t deserve to be helped.”
“You’ll not let me spend my own money?”
“You’ve fired off all the money you’re entitled to. You’ll probably kill
a constable—or some decent little soldier boy from Devon or Kent....
Good God! Have you _no_ imagination?...”
It was the most rankling encounter he had ever had with her. Either he
was losing tolerance for her or she was indeed becoming more noisy and
ferocious. She haunted his thoughts for a long time, and his thoughts of
her, so intricate is our human composition, were all mixed up with
sympathy and remorse for the petty cash troubles in which he had left
her....
But what a pampered, evil soul she had always been! Never in all her
life had she made or grown or got one single good thing for mankind. She
had lived in great expensive houses, used up the labour of innumerable
people, bullied servants, insulted poor people, made mischief. She was
like some gross pet idol that mankind out of whim kept for the sake of
its sheer useless ugliness. He found himself estimating the weight of
food and the tanks of drink she must have consumed, the carcases of oxen
and sheep, the cartloads of potatoes, the pyramids of wine bottles and
stout bottles she had emptied. And she had no inkling of gratitude to
the careless acquiescent fellow-creatures who had suffered her so long
and so abundantly. At the merest breath upon her clumsy intolerable
dignity she clamoured for violence and cruelty and killing, and would
not be appeased. An old idol! And she was only one of a whole class of
truculent, illiterate harridans who were stirring up bad blood in half
the great houses of London, and hurrying Britain on to an Irish civil
war. No! She wasn’t as funny as she seemed. Not nearly so funny. She was
too like too many people for that. Too like most people?
Did that go too far?
After all there was a will for good in men; even this weary Irish
business had not been merely a conflict of fixed ideas, there had been,
too, real efforts on the part of countless people to get the tangle
straightened out. There were creative forces at work in men—even in
Ireland. And also there was youth.
His thoughts came back to the figure of Peter, standing on the head of
Howth and calling for a new world.
“I’ll pit my Peter,” he said, “against all the Aunt Charlottes in
creation.... In the long run, that is.”
He was blind—was not all Europe blind?—to the vast disaster that hung
over him and his and the whole world, to the accumulated instability of
the outworn social and political façade that now tottered to a crash.
Massacre, famine, social confusion, world-wide destruction, long years
of death and torment were close at hand; the thinnest curtain of time, a
mere month of blue days now, hung between him and the thunderous
overture of the world disaster.
“I pit my Peter,” he repeated, “against all the Aunt Charlottes in
creation.”
§ 10
All novels that run through the years of the great war must needs be
political novels and fragments of history. In August, 1914, that
detachment of human lives from history, that pretty picaresque disorder
of experiences, that existence like a fair with ten thousand different
booths, which had gone on for thousands of years, came to an end. We
were all brought into a common drama. Something had happened so loud and
insistent that all lives were focused upon it; it became a leading
factor in every life, the plot of every story, the form of all our
thoughts. It so thrust itself upon mankind that the very children in the
schools about the world asked “why has this thing happened?” and could
not live on without some answer. The Great War summoned all human beings
to become political animals, time would brook no further evasion.
August, 1914, was the end of adventure and mental fragmentation for the
species; it was the polarization of mankind.
Other books have told, innumerable books that have yet to come will
tell, of the rushing together of events that culminated in the breach of
the Belgian frontier by the German hosts. Our story has to tell only of
how that crisis took to itself and finished and crowned the education of
these three people with whom we are concerned. Of the three, Oswald and
Joan spent nearly the whole of July at Pelham Ford. Peter came down from
Cambridge for a day or so and then, after two or three days in London
for which he did not clearly account, he went off to the Bernese
Oberland to climb with a party of three other Trinity men. There was a
vague but attractive project at the back of his mind, which he did not
confide to Oswald or Joan, of going on afterwards into north Italy to a
little party of four or five choice spirits which Hetty was to organize.
They could meet on the other side of the Simplon. Perhaps they would
push on into Venezia. They would go for long tramps amidst sweet
chestnut trees and ripening grapes, they would stay in the vast, roomy,
forgotten inns of sleepy towns whose very stables are triumphs of
architecture, they would bathe amidst the sunlit rocks of quiet lakes.
Wherever they went in that land the snow and blue of the distant Alps
would sustain the sweet landscape as music sustains a song.
Hetty had made it all fantastically desirable. She had invented it and
woven details about it one afternoon in her studio. She knew north Italy
very well; it was not the first amusing journey in that soft, delicious
land that she had contrived. Peter was tremendously excited to think of
the bright possibilities of such an adventure, and yet withal there was
a queer countervailing feeling gnawing amidst his lusty anticipations.
Great fun it would be, tremendous fun, with a little spice of sin in it,
and why not? Only somehow he had a queer unreasonable feeling that Joan
ought to share his holidays. Old Joan who looked at him with eyes that
held a shadow of sorrow; who made him feel that she knew more than she
could possibly know. He wished Joan, too, had some spree in
contemplation—not of course quite the same sort of spree. A decent
girl’s sort of spree. Just the tramp part. He wished he could tell Joan
of what was in hand, that there wasn’t this queer embarrassment between
them. Joan had her car of course....
Oswald had recently bought Joan a pretty little ten-horsepower Singer
car, a two-seater, in which she was to run about the country at her own
free will. It was one of several attempts he had recently made to
brighten life for Joan. He was beginning to watch her very closely; he
did not clearly understand the thoughts and imaginations that made her
so grave and feverish at times, but he knew that she was troubled. The
girl’s family resemblance to his Dolly had caught his mind. He thought
she was more like Dolly than she was because her image constantly before
him was steadily replacing Dolly’s in his mind. And he liked very much
to sit beside her and watch her drive. At five-and-forty miles an hour
her serene profile was divine. She had a good mechanical intelligence
and her nerve was perfect; the little car lived in her hands and had the
precision of movement of an animal.
They ran across country to Warwick and Stratford-on-Avon, and slept the
night in Warwick; they went to Newmarket and round to Chelmsford and
Dovercourt, which was also an overnight excursion. These were their
longer expeditions. They made afternoon runs to St. Albans, Hitchin,
Baldock, Bedford, Stevenage and Royston. Almost every fine day they made
some trip. While she drove or while they walked about some unfamiliar
town the cloud seemed to lift from Joan’s mind, she became as fresh and
bright as a child. And she talked more and more freely to Oswald. She
talked more abundantly than Peter and much less about ideas. She talked
rather of scenery and customs and atmospheres. She seemed to have a far
more concrete imagination than Peter, to accept the thing that was with
none of his reluctance. She would get books about Spain, about the South
Sea Islands, about China, big books of travel and description, from the
London Library, and so assimilate them that she seemed to be living
imaginatively for days together in these alien atmospheres. She wanted
to know about Uganda. She was curious about the native King. There were
times when Oswald was reminded of some hungry and impatient guest in a
restaurant reading over an over-crowded and perplexing menu.
She did not read many plays or novels nor any poetry. She mentioned
casually one day to Oswald that such reading either bored her or
disturbed her. She read a certain amount of philosophy, but manifestly
now as a task. And she was incessantly restless. She had no mother nor
sisters, no feminine social world about her; she suffered from a
complete lack of all those distracting and pacifying routines and all
those restraints of habit and association that control the lives of more
normally placed girls. Her thoughts, stimulated by her uncontrolled
reading, ran wild. One morning she was up an hour before dawn, and let
herself out of the house and walked over the hills nearly to Newport
before breakfast, coming back with skirts and shoes wet with dew and
speckled with grass seeds and little burrs. She spent that afternoon
asleep in the hammock. And she would play fitfully at the piano or the
pianola after dinner and then wander out, a restless white sprite, into
the garden. One night early in the month she persuaded Oswald to go for
a long moonlight walk with her along the road to Ware.
There was a touch of dream quality in that walk for both of them. They
had never been together in moonlight before. She ceased to be Joan and
became at once something very strange and wonderful and very intimate, a
magic phantom of womanhood, a creature no longer of flesh and blood but
of pallor and shadow, whose hair was part of the universal dusk and her
eyes two stars. And he, too, walking along and sometimes talking as if
he talked to the lonely sky, and sometimes looking down out of the
dimness closely at her, he had lost his age and his scars and become the
utmost dignity of a man. They walked sometimes on a road of misty
brightness and sometimes through deep pools of shadow and sometimes
amidst the black bars and lace cast by tree stems and tree branches, and
she made him talk of the vast spaces of Africa and the long trails
through reed and forest, and of great animals standing still and
invisible close at hand, hidden by the trickery of their colourings, and
how he had gone all alone into the villages of savage people who had
never before set eyes on a European. And she talked with a whisper and
sigh in her voice of how she, too, would like to go into wild and remote
lands—“if I could go off with a man like you.” And it seemed to him for
a time that this sweet voice beside him was not truly Joan’s but
another’s, and that he walked once more with the dearest wish he had
ever wished in his life.
He talked to her of moonlight and starlight in the tropics, of a
wonderful pale incandescence that shines out above the grave of the
sunset when the day has gone, of fireflies and of phosphorescent seas,
and of the distant sounds of drumming and chanting and the remote blaze
of native bonfires seen through black tree stems in the night. He
talked, too, of the howling of beasts at night, and of the sudden
roaring of lions, and at that she drew closer to him.
When at last it was time for her to turn she did not want to turn. “I
have been happy,” she said. “I have been happy. Let us go on. Why should
we go back?”
As if she was not always happy. She pulled at his arm like a child....
And as they came home she came close to him, and for long spaces they
said not a word to one another.
But at the water splash in the village she had a queer impulse. The
water splash appeared ahead of them, an incessant tumult of silver in
which were set jewels of utter blackness and shining diamonds. She
looked and tugged him by the arm.
“Let us walk through the water, dear Nobby!” she said. “I want to feel
it about my feet. Do! Do! Do! It will hardly cover our shoes....”
A queer impulse that was of hers but, what was queerer, it found the
completest response in him. “All right,” he said, as though this was the
most commonplace suggestion possible; and very gravely, and as if it was
some sort of rite, he let her lead him through the water. They were
indeed both very grave....
They walked up to the house in silence....
“Good night, Nobby dear,” said Joan, leaning suddenly over by the newel
of the stairs, and kissed him, as the moonlight kisses, a kiss as soft
and cool as ever awakened Endymion....
Life was at high tide in Joan that July, and everything in her was
straining at its anchors. All her being was flooded with the emotional
intimations that she was a woman, that she had to be beautiful and
hasten to meet exquisite and profoundly significant experiences; none of
her instincts told her that the affairs of the world drew to an issue
that would maim and kill half the youths she knew and torment and alter
her own and every life about her. She was haunted and distressed day and
night—for the trouble got into her dreams—by Peter’s evident love-making
with Hetty and Huntley’s watchful eyes, and she saw nothing of the red
eyes of war and the blood-lust that craved for all her generation. Peter
was making love—making love to Hetty. Peter was making love to Hetty.
And Joan was left at home in a fever of desertion. Her brotherhood with
Peter which had been perhaps the greatest fact of her girlhood was
breaking down under the exasperation of their separation and her
jealousy, and Huntley was steadily and persistently invading her
imagination....
Women and men alike are love-hungry creatures; women even more so than
men. It is not beauty nor strength nor goodness that hearts go to so
much as attention. To know that another human being thinks of us,
esteems us above all our secret estimates, has a steadfast and consuming
need of us, is the supreme reassurance of life. And when women’s hearts
are distressed by vague passions and a friendless insecurity they will
go out very readily even to a cripple who watches and waits.
Huntley was one of those men for whom women are the sole interest in
life. If he had been obliged to master a mathematical problem he would
have thought he struggled with a Muse and so achieved it. He watched
them and waylaid them for small and great occasions. He understood
completely these states of wild impatience that possess the feminine
mind. He had no brotherliness nor fatherliness in his composition: his
sole conception of this trouble of the unmated was of an opportunity for
himself. A little patience, a little thought—and it was very delightful
thought, a little pleasant skill, and all this vague urgency would
become a gift for him.
But never before had Huntley met any one so fresh and youthfully
beautiful as Joan. There were times when he could doubt whether he was
the magnetizer or the magnetized. He had kissed her but he was not sure
that she had kissed him. Some day she should kiss him of her own free
will. He thought now almost continuously of Joan. The only work he could
get on with was a novel into which he put things he had imagined about
Joan. He wrote her long letters and planned for days to get an hour’s
conversation with her. And he would go for long walks and spend all the
time composing letters or scheming dramatic conversations that never
would happen in reality because Joan missed all her cues.
It was rather by instinct than by any set scheme that he did his utmost
to convert her vague unrest into a discontent with all her
circumstances, to shape her thoughts to the idea that her present life
was a prison-house of which he held the key of escape. He suggested in a
score of different ways to her mind that outside her present prison was
a wonderland of beauty and excitement. He was clever enough to catch
from her talk her love of the open, of fresh air and sunlight. He had
more than a suspicion of Hetty Reinhart’s plans; he conveyed them by
shadowy hints. Why should not Joan too defy convention? She could tell
Oswald a story of a projected walk with some other girl at Cambridge,
and slip away to Huntley. They had always been the best of companions.
Why shouldn’t they take a holiday together?
And why not?
What was there to fear? Couldn’t she trust Huntley? Couldn’t she trust
herself?
To which something deep in Joan’s composition replied that this was but
playing with passion and romance, and she wanted passion and romance.
She wanted a reality—unendurably. And it was clear as day to her that
she did not want passion and romance with Huntley. He was a strange
being to her really, not differing as man does from woman but as dog
does from cat; hidden deep down perhaps was some mysterious difference
of race; he could amuse her and interest her because he was queer and
unexpected, but he was not of her kind. Like to like was the way of the
Sydenham blood. He offered and pointed to all that seemed to her
necessary to make life right and to end this aching suspense—except that
he was a stranger....
The long sunny days of June dragged by. Suppose after all she were to
slip away to Huntley. It would be a spree, it would be an excitement.
Did he matter so much after all?...
Peter sent a postcard and said he thought he would go on “with some
people into Italy.”
She had known—all along—that that was coming.
She went out the night after that postcard came into the garden alone.
It was a still and sultry evening, and she stifled even in the open air.
She wanted to go up into the arbour and to sit there and think. She
could not understand the quiver of anger that ran through her being like
the shiver of the current on the surface of a stream. All the trees and
bushes about her were dark and shapeless lumps of blackness and as she
went up the path she trod on two snails.
“Damn them!” she said at the second scrunch. “Phew! What a night. Full
of things that crawl about in the darkness. Full of _beastly_
things....”
A little owl mewed and mocked wickedly among the trees.