devastating importance to Oswald. In his pocket, not folded but crumpled
up, was an insulting letter from Lady Charlotte Sydenham, and the
thought of it was rankling bitterly in his mind.
The days were long past when he could think of the old lady as of
something antediluvian in quality, a queer ungainly megatherium
floundering about in a new age from which her kind would presently
vanish altogether. He was beginning to doubt more and more about her
imminent disappearance. She had greater powers of survival than he had
supposed; he was beginning to think that she might outlive him; there
was much more of her in England than he had ever suspected. All through
the war she, or a voice indistinguishable from hers, had bawled
unchastened in the _Morning Post_; on many occasions he had seemed to
see her hard blue eye and bristling whisker glaring at him through a
kind of translucency in the sheets of _The Times_; once or twice in
France he had recognized her, or something very like her, in red tabs
and gilt lace, at G.H.Q. These were sick fancies no doubt; mere
fantastic intimations of the stout resistances the Anglican culture
could still offer before it loosened its cramping grip upon the future
of England and the world, evidence rather of his own hypersensitized
condition than of any perennial quality in her.
The old lady had played a valiant part in the early stages of the war.
She had interested herself in the persecution of all Germans not related
to royalty, who chanced to be in the country; and had even employed
private detectives in one or two cases that had come under her notice.
She had been forced most unjustly to defend a libel case brought by a
butcher named Sterne, whom she had denounced as of German origin and a
probable poisoner of the community, in the very laudable belief that his
name was spelt Stern. She felt that his indubitable British ancestry and
honesty only enhanced the deception and made the whole thing more
alarming, but the jury, being no doubt tainted with pacifism, thought,
or pretended to think, otherwise. She had had a reconciliation with her
old antagonists the Pankhurst section of the suffragettes, and she had
paid twenty annual subscriptions to their loyal and outspoken
publication _Britannia_, directing twelve copies to be sent to suitable
recipients—Oswald was one of the favoured ones—and herself receiving and
blue-pencilling the remaining eight before despatching them to such
public characters as she believed would be most beneficially cowed or
instructed by the articles she had marked. She also subscribed liberally
to the British Empire Union, an organization so patriotic that it
extended its hostility to Russians, Americans, Irishmen, neutrals,
President Wilson, the League of Nations, and similar infringements of
the importance and dignity of Lady Charlotte and her kind. She remained
at Chastlands, where she had laid in an ample store of provisions quite
early in the war—two sacks of mouldy flour and a side of bacon in an
advanced state of decomposition had been buried at night by Cashel—all
through the Zeppelin raids; and she played a prominent rather than a
pacifying part in the Red Cross politics of that part of Surrey. She
induced several rich Jewesses of Swiss, Dutch, German or Austrian origin
to relieve the movement of their names and, what was still better, of
the frequently quite offensively large subscriptions with which they
overshadowed those who had the right to lead in such matters. She
lectured also in the National Economy campaign on several occasions—for
like most thoughtful women of her class and type, she was deeply shocked
by the stories she had heard of extravagance among our over-paid
munition workers. After a time the extraordinary meanness of the
authorities in restricting her petrol obliged her in self-respect to
throw up this branch of her public work. She was in London during one of
the early Gotha raids, but she conceived such a disgust at the cowardice
of the lower classes on this occasion that she left town the next day
and would not return thither.
The increasing scarcity of petrol and the onset of food rationing, which
threatened to spread all over England, drove her to Ulster—in spite of
the submarine danger that might have deterred a less stout-hearted
woman. She took a small furnished house in a congenial district, and
found herself one of a little circle of ultra-patriotic refugees, driven
like herself from England by un-English restrictions upon the
nourishment of the upper classes and the spread of the pacifist
tendencies of Lord Lansdowne. “If the cowards must make peace,” said
Lady Charlotte, “at least give _me_ leave to be out of it.”
Considering everything, Ulster was at that time as comfortably and
honourably out of the war as any part of the world, and all that seemed
needed to keep it safely out to the end was a little tactful firmness in
the Dublin Convention. There was plenty of everything in the loyal
province at that time—men, meat, butter, Dublin stout, and
self-righteousness; and Lady Charlotte expanded again like a flower in
the sun. She reverted to driving in a carriage; it was nice to sit once
more behind a stout able-bodied coachman with a cockade, with a perfect
excuse for neutrality, and she still did her best for old England from
eleven to one and often from five to six by writing letters and dabbling
in organization. Oswald she kept in mind continually. Almost daily he
would get newspaper cuttings from her detailing Sinn Fein outrages, or
blue-marked leading articles agitating for a larger share of the
munition industries for Belfast, or good hot stuff, deeply underlined,
from the speeches of Sir Edward Carson. One dastardly Sinn Feiner,
Oswald learnt, had even starved himself to death in gaol, a most
unnatural offence to Lady Charlotte. She warmed up tremendously over the
insidious attempts of the Prime Minister and a section of the press to
get all the armies in France and Italy under one supreme generalissimo
and end the dislocated muddling that had so long prolonged the war. It
was a change that might have involved the replacement of regular
generals by competent ones, and it imperilled everything that was most
dear to the old lady’s heart. It was “_an insult to the King’s
uniform_,” she wrote. “_A revolution. I knew that this sort of thing
would begin if we let those Americans come in. We ought not to have let
them come in. What good are they to us? What can they know of war? A
crowd of ignorant republican renegades! British generals to be
criticized and their prospects injured by French Roman Catholics and
Atheists and chewing, expectorating Yankees and every sort of low
foreigner. What is the world coming to? Sir Douglas Haig has been
exactly where he is for two years. Surely he knows the ground better
than any one else can possibly do._”
Once the theme of Lady Charlotte got loose in Oswald’s poor old brain,
it began a special worry of its own. He found his mind struggling with
assertions and arguments. As this involved trying to remember exactly
what she had said in this letter of hers, and as it was in his pocket,
he presently chose the lesser of two evils and took it out to read
over:—
“_I suppose you have read in the papers what is happening in Clare. The
people are ploughing up grass-land. It is as bad as that man Prothero.
They raid gentlemen’s houses to seize arms; they resist the police. That
man Devil-era—so I must call him—speaks openly of a republic. Devil-era
and Devil-in; is it a coincidence merely? All this comes of our
ill-timed leniency after the Dublin rebellion. When will England learn
the lesson Cromwell taught her? He was a wicked man, he made one great
mistake for which he is no doubt answering to his Maker throughout all
eternity, but he certainly did know how to manage these Irish. If he
could come back now he would be on our side. He would have had his
lesson. Your Bolshevik friends go on murdering and cutting throats, I
see, like true Republicans. Happily the White Guards seem getting the
upper hand in Finland. In the end I suppose we shall be driven to a
peace with the Huns as the worst of two evils. If we do, it will only be
your Bolsheviks and pacifists and strikers and Bolos who will be to
blame._
“_The whining and cowardice of the East Enders disgusts me more and
more. You read, I suppose, the account of the disgraceful panic during
the air raid the other day in the East End, due entirely to foreigners
of military age, mostly, no doubt, your Russian Bolsheviks. I am well
away from such a rabble. I suffer from rheumatism here. I know it is
rheumatism; what you say about gout is nonsense. In spite of its loyalty
Ulster is damp. I pine more and more for the sun and warmth of Italy.
Unwin must needs make herself very tiresome and peevish nowadays. These
are not cheerful times for me. But one must do one’s bit for one’s
country, I suppose, unworthy though it be._
“_So Mr. Peter is back in England again wounded after his flying about
in the air. I suppose he is tasting the delights of matrimony, such as
they are! What an affair! Something told me long ago that it would
happen. I tried to separate them. My instincts warned me, and my
instincts were right. Breed is breed, and the servant strain came out in
her. You can’t say I didn’t warn you. Why you let them marry I cannot
imagine!!! I am sure the young lady could have dispensed with that
ceremony!!!! I still think at times of that queer scene I passed on the
road when I came to Pelham Ford that Christmas. A second string,—no
doubt of it. But Peter was her great chance, of course, thanks to your
folly. Well, let us hope that in the modern way they won’t have any
children, for nothing is more certain than that these inter-breeding
marriages are most harmful, and whether we like it or not you have to
remember they are first cousins, if not in the sight of the law at any
rate in the sight of God, which is what matters in this respect. Mr.
Grimes, who has studied these things in his leisure time, tells me that
there is a very great probability indeed that any child will be blind or
malformed or consumptive, let us hope the latter, if not actually
still-born, which, of course, would be the best thing that could
possibly happen...._”
§ 5
At this point Oswald became aware of Joan coming out of the house
towards him.
He looked at his watch. “Much too early yet, Joan,” he said.
“Yes, but I want to be meeting him,” said Mrs. Joan....
So they walked down to the station and waited for a long time on the
platform. And Joan said very little to Oswald because she was musing
pleasantly.
When the train came in neither Joan nor Peter took much notice of Oswald
after the first greeting. I do not see what else he could have expected;
they were deeply in love and they had been apart for a couple of weeks,
they were excited by each other and engrossed in each other. Oswald
walked beside them up the road—apart. “I’ve got some work,” he said
abruptly in the hall. “See you at lunch,” and went into his study and
shut the door upon them, absurdly disappointed.
§ 6
Peter came on Wednesday. It was not until Friday that Oswald found an
opportunity to deliver his valediction. But he had rehearsed it, or
rather he had been rehearsing experimental fragments of it for most of
the night before. On Thursday night the cloudy malaise of his mind broke
and cleared. Things fell into their proper places in his thoughts, and
he could feel that his ideas were no longer distorted and confused. The
valediction appeared, an ordered discourse. If only he could hold out
through a long talk he felt he would be able to make himself plain to
them....
He lay in the darkness putting together phrase after phrase, sentence
after sentence, developing a long and elaborate argument, dipping down
into parentheses, throwing off footnotes, resuming his text. For the
most part Joan and Peter remained silent hearers of this discourse; now
his ratiocination glowed so brightly that they were almost forgotten,
now they came into the discussion, they assisted, they said helpful and
understanding things, they raised simple and obvious objections that
were beautifully overcome.
“What is education up to?” he would begin. “What is education?”
Then came a sentence that he repeated in the stillness of his mind quite
a number of times. “Consider this beast we are, this thing man!” He did
not reckon with Peter’s tendency to prompt replies.
He would begin in the broadest, most elementary way. “Consider this
beast we are, this thing man!” so he framed his opening: “a creature
restlessly experimental, mischievous and destructive, as sexual as a
monkey, and with no really strong social instincts, no such tolerance of
his fellows as a deer has, no such instinctive self-devotion as you find
in a bee or an ant. A solitary animal, a selfish animal. And yet this
creature has now made for itself such conditions that it _must_ be
social. Must be. Or destroy itself. Continually it invents fresh means
by which man may get at man to injure him or help him. That is one view
of the creature, Peter, from your biological end.” Here Peter was to
nod, and remain attentively awaiting the next development. “And at the
same time, there grows upon us all a sense of a common being and a
common interest. Biologically separate, we unify spiritually. More and
more do men feel, ’I am not for myself! There is something in me—that
belongs to a greater being than myself—of which I am a part.’... I won’t
philosophize. I won’t say which may be in the nature of cause and which
of effect here. You can put what I have said in a dozen different ways.
We may say, ’The individual must live in the species and find his
happiness there’—that is—Biologese. _Our_ language, Peter. Or we can
quote, ’I am the True Vine and ye are the Branches.’” Oswald’s mind
rested on that for a time. “That is not _our_ language, Peter, but it is
the same idea. Essentially it is the same idea. Or we can talk of the
’One and the Many.’ We can say we all live in the mercy of Allah, or if
you are a liberal Jew that we are all a part of Israel. It seems to me
that all these formulæ are so much spluttering and variation over one
idea. Doesn’t it to you? Men can quarrel mortally even upon the question
of how they shall say ’Brotherhood.’...” Here for a time Oswald’s mind
paused.
He embarked upon a great and wonderful parenthesis upon religious
intolerance in which at last he lost himself completely.
“I don’t see that men need fall out about religion,” was his main
proposition.
“There was a time when I was against all religions. I denounced
priestcraft and superstition and so on.... That is past. That is past. I
want peace in the world.... Men’s minds differ more about _initial_
things than they do about _final_ things. Some men think in images,
others in words and abstract ideas—but yet the two sorts can think out
the same practical conclusions. A lot of these chapels and churches only
mean a difference in language.... Difference in dialect.... Often they
don’t mean the same things, those religious people, by the same words,
but often contrariwise they mean the same things by quite different
words. The deaf man says the dawn is bright and red, and the blind man
says it is a sound of birds. It is the same dawn. The same dawn.... One
man says ’God’ and thinks of a person who is as much of a person as Joan
is, and another says ’God’ and thinks of an idea more abstract than the
square root of minus one. That’s a tangle in the primaries of thought
and not a difference in practical intention. One can argue about such
things for ever.... One can make a puzzle with a bit of wire that will
bother and exasperate people for hours. Is it any wonder, then, if
stating what is at the root of life bothers and exasperates people?...
“Personally, I should say now that all religions are right, and none of
them very happy in the words and symbols they choose. And none of them
are calm enough—not calm enough. Not peaceful enough. They are all
floundering about with symbols and metaphors, and it is a pity they will
not admit it.... Why will people never admit their intellectual
limitations in these matters?... All the great religions have this in
common, this idea in common; they profess to teach the universal
brotherhood of man and the universal reign of justice. Why argue about
phrases? Why not put it in this fashion?”...
For a long time Oswald argued about phrases before he could get back to
the main thread of his argument....
“Men have to be unified. They are driven to seek Unity. And they are
still with the individualized instincts of a savage.... See then what
education always has to be! The process of taking this imperfectly
social, jealous, deeply savage creature and socializing him. The
development of education and the development of human societies are one
and the same thing. Education makes the social man. So far as schooling
goes, it is quite plainly that. You teach your solitary beast to read
and write, you teach him to express himself by drawing, you teach him
other languages perhaps, and something of history and the distribution
of mankind. What is it all but making this creature who would naturally
possess only the fierce, narrow sociability of a savage family in a
cave, into a citizen in a greater community? That is how I see it. That
primarily is what has been done to you. An uneducated man is a man who
can talk to a few score familiar people with a few hundred words. You
two can talk to a quarter of mankind. With the help of a little
translation you can get to understandings with most of mankind.... As a
child learns the accepted language and the accepted writing and the laws
and rules of life it learns the community. Watching the education of you
two has made me believe more and more in the idea that, over and above
the enlargement of expression and understanding, education is the state
explaining itself to and incorporating the will of the individual....
“Yes—but what state? What state? Now we come to it....”
Oswald began to sketch out a universal history. There is no limit to
these intellectual enterprises of the small hours.
“All history is the record of an effort in man to form communities, an
effort against resistance—against instinctive resistance. There seems no
natural and proper limit to a human community. (That’s my great point,
that. That is what I have to tell them.) That is the final teaching of
History, Joan and Peter; the very quintessence of History; that
limitlessness of the community. As soon as men get a community of any
size organized, it begins forthwith to develop roads, wheels, writing,
ship-building, and all manner of things which presently set a fresh
growth growing again. Let that, too, go on. Presently comes steam,
mechanical traction, telegraphy, the telephone, wireless, aeroplanes;
and each means an extension of range, and each therefore demands a
larger community.... There seems no limit to the growth of states. I
remember, Peter, a talk we had; we agreed that this hackneyed analogy
people draw between the life and death of animals and the life and death
of states was bad and silly. It isn’t the same thing, Joan, at all. An
animal, you see, has a limit of size; it develops no new organs for
further growth when it has reached that limit, it breeds its successors,
it ages naturally; when it dies, it dies for good and all and is cleared
away. Exactly the reverse is true of a human community. Exactly? Yes,
exactly. If it can develop its educational system steadily—note that—if
it can keep up communications, a State can go on indefinitely,
conquering, ousting, assimilating. Even an amoeba breaks up after
growth, but a human community need not do so. And so far from breeding
successors it kills them if it can—like Frazer’s priest—where was
it?—Aricia? The priest of Diana. The priest of The _Golden Bough_....”
Oswald picked up his thread again after a long, half dreaming excursion
in Frazer-land.
“It is just this limitlessness, this potential immortality of States
that makes all the confusion and bloodshed of history. What is happening
in the world today? What is the essence of it all? The communities of
today are developing _range_, faster than ever they did: aeroplanes,
guns, swifter ships, everywhere an increasing range of action. That is
the most important fact to grasp about the modern world. It is the key
fact in politics. From the first dawn of the human story you see man in
a kind of a puzzled way—how shall I put it?—_pursuing the boundary of
his possible community_. Which always recedes. Which recedes now faster
than ever. Until it brings him to a fatal war and disaster. Over and
over again it is the same story. If you had a coloured historical atlas
of the world, the maps would be just a series of great dabs of empire,
spreading, spreading—coming against resistances—collapsing. Each dab
tries to devour the world and fails. There is no natural limit to a
human community, no limit in time or space—except one.
“Genus _Homo_, species _Sapiens_, Mankind, that is the only limit.”
(Peter, perhaps, might be led up to saying that.)...
“What has the history of education always been? A series of little
teaching chaps trying to follow up and _fix_ the fluctuating boundaries
of communities”—an image came into Oswald’s head that pleased him and
led him on—“like an insufficient supply of upholsterers trying to
overtake and tack down a carpet that was blowing away in front of a
gale. An insufficient supply of upholsterers.... And the carpet always
growing as it blows. That’s good.... They were trying to fix something
they hadn’t clearly defined. And you have a lot of them still hammering
away at their tacks when the edge of the carpet has gone on far
ahead.... That was really the state of education in England when I took
you two young people in hand; the carpet was in the air and most of the
schoolmasters, schoolmistresses, writers, teachers, journalists, and all
who build up and confirm ideas were hammering in tacks where the carpet
had been resting the day before yesterday.... But a lot were not even
hammering. No. They just went easy. Yes, that is what I mean when I say
that education was altogether at loose ends.... But Germany was
different; Germany was teaching and teaching in schools, colleges,
press, everywhere, this new Imperialism of hers, a sort of patriotic
melodrama, with Britain as Carthage and Berlin instead of Rome. They
pointed the whole population to that end. They _taught_ this war. All
over the world a thousand other educational systems pointed in a
thousand directions....
“So Germany set fire to the Phœnix....
“Only one other great country had any sort of state education.
Real state education that is. The United States was also
teaching citizenship, on a broader if shallower basis; a wider
citizenship—goodwill to all mankind. Shallower. Shallower certainly. But
it was there. A republican culture. Candour ... generosity.... The world
has still to realize its debt to the common schools of America....
“This League of Free Nations, of which all men are dreaming and talking,
this World Republic, is the rediscovered outline, the proper teaching of
all real education, the necessary outline now of human life.... There is
nothing else to do, nothing else that people of our sort can do at all,
nothing but baseness, grossness, vileness, and slavery unless we live
now as a part of that process of a world peace. Our lives have got to be
political lives. All lives have to be made political lives. We can’t run
about _loose_ any more. This idea of a world-wide commonwealth, this
ideal of an everlasting world-peace in which we are to live and move and
have our being, has to be built up in every school, in every mind, in
every lesson. ‘You belong. You belong. And the world belongs to
you.’...”
What ought one to teach when one teaches geography, for instance, but
the common estate of mankind? Here, the teacher should say, are
mountains and beautiful cities you may live to see. Here are plains
where we might grow half the food of mankind! Here are the highways of
our common life, and here are pleasant bye-ways where you may go! All
this is your inheritance. Your estate. To rejoice in—and serve. But is
that how geography is taught?...