Chesterton, for example; they _hate_ the idea of men working steadily
for any great scheme of effort here. They hold by stagnant standards,
planted deep in the rich mud of life. What’s the Catholic conception of
human life?—guzzle, booze, call the passion of the sexes unclean and
behave accordingly, confess, get absolution, and at it again. Is there
any recognition in Catholicism of the duty of keeping your body fit or
your brain active? They’re worse than the man who buried his talent in a
clean napkin; they bury it in wheezy fat. It’s a sloven’s life. What
have we in common with that? Always they are harking back to the
thirteenth century, to the peasant life amidst dung and chickens. It’s a
different species of mind from ours, with the head and feet turned
backward. What is the good of expecting the Pope, for instance, and his
Church to help us in creating a League of Nations? His aim would be a
world agreement to stop progress, and we want to release it. He wants
peace in order to achieve nothing, and we want peace in order to do
everything. What is the good of pretending that it is the same peace? A
Catholic League of Nations would be a conspiracy of stagnation, another
Holy Alliance. What real world unity can come through them? Every step
on the way to the world state and the real unification of men will be
fought by the stagnant men and the priests. Why blind ourselves to that?
Progress is a religion in itself. Work and learning are our creed. We
cannot make terms with any other creed. The priest has got his God and
we seek our God for ever. The priest is finished and completed and
self-satisfied, and we—we are beginning....”
§ 9
There were two days yet before Peter went back to his work in London.
Saturday dawned blue and fine, and Joan and he determined to spend it in
a long tramp over the Hertfordshire hills and fields. He meant to stand
no nonsense from his foot. “If I can’t walk four miles an hour then I
must do two,” he said. “And if the pace is too slow for you, Joan, you
must run round and round me and bark.” They took a long route by field
and lane through Albury and Furneaux Pelham to the little inn at
Stocking Pelham, where they got some hard biscuits and cheese and
shandygaff, and came home by way of Patmore Heath, and the golden oaks
and the rivulet. And as they went Peter talked of Oswald.
“Naturally he wants to know what we are going to do,” said Peter, and
then, rather inconsequently, “He’s ill.
“This war is like a wasting fever in the blood and in the mind,” said
Peter. “All Europe is ill. But with him it mixes with the old fever.
That splinter at Fricourt was no joke for him. He oughtn’t to have gone
out. He’s getting horribly lean, and his eye is like a garnet.”
“I love him,” said Joan.
But she did not want to discuss Oswald just then.
“About this new theology of yours, Peter,” she said....
“Well?” said Peter.
“What do you mean by this Old Experimenter of yours? Is he—_God_?”
“I don’t know. I thought he was. He’s—— He’s a Symbol. He’s just a
Caricature I make to express how all _this_”—Peter swept his arm across
the sunlit world—“seems to stand to me. If one can’t draw the thing any
better, one has to make a caricature.”
Joan considered that gravely.
“I thought of him first in my dream as the God of the Universe,” Peter
explained.
“You couldn’t love a God like that,” Joan remarked.
“Heavens, _no_! He’s too vast, too incomprehensible. I love you—and
Oswald—and the R.F.C., Joan, and biology. But he’s above and beyond that
sort of thing.”
“Could you pray to him?” asked Joan.
“Not to _him_,” said Peter.
“I pray,” said Joan. “Don’t you?”
“And swear,” said Peter.
“One prays to something—it isn’t oneself.”
“The fashion nowadays is to speak of the God in the Heart and the God in
the Universe.”
“Is it the same God?”
“Leave it at that,” said Peter. “We don’t know. All the waste and muddle
in religion is due to people arguing and asserting that they are the
same, that they are different but related, or that they are different
but opposed. And so on and so on. How can we know? What need is there to
know? In view of the little jobs we are doing. Let us leave it at that.”
Joan was silent for a while. “I suppose we must,” she said.
“And what are we going to do with ourselves,” asked Joan, “when the war
is over?”
“They can’t keep us in khaki for ever,” Peter considered. “There’s a
Ministry of Reconstruction foozling away in London, but it’s never said
a word to me of the some-day that is coming. I suppose it hasn’t learnt
to talk yet.”
“What do you think of doing?” asked Joan.
“Well, first—a good medical degree. Then I can doctor if I have to. But,
if I’m good enough, I shall do research. I’ve a sort of feeling that
along the border line of biology and chemistry I might do something
useful. I’ve some ideas.... I suppose I shall go back to Cambridge for a
bit. We neither of us need earn money at once. It will be queer—after
being a grown-up married man—to go back to proctors and bulldogs. What
are _you_ going to do, Joan, when you get out of uniform?”
“Look after you first, Petah. Oh! it’s worth doing. And it won’t take me
all my time. And then I’ve got my own ideas....”
“Out with ’em, Joan.”
“Well——”
“Well?”
“Petah, I shall learn plumbing.”
“Jobbing?”
“No. And bricklaying and carpentry. All I can. And then I am going to
start building houses.”
“Architect?”
“As little as possible,” said Joan. “No. No beastly Architecture for
Art’s sake for me! Do you remember how people used to knock their heads
about at The Ingle-Nook? I’ve got some money. Why shouldn’t I be able to
build houses as well as the fat builder-men with big, flat thumbs who
used to build houses before the war?”
“Jerry-building?”
“High-class jerry-building, if you like. Cottages with sensible insides,
real insides, and not so much waste space and scamping to make up for
it. They’re half a million houses short in this country already. There’s
something in building appeals to my sort of imagination. And I’m going
to make money, Petah.”
“I love the way you carry your tail,” said Peter. “Always.”
“Well, doing running repairs hardens a woman’s soul.”
“You’ll make more money than I shall, perhaps. But now I begin to
understand all these extraordinary books you’ve been studying.... I
might have guessed.... Why not?”
He limped along, considering it. “Why shouldn’t you?” he said. “A
service flat will leave your hands free.... I’ve always wondered
secretly why women didn’t plunge into that sort of business more.”
“It’s been just diffidence,” said Joan.
“_Click!_” said Peter. “That’s gone, anyhow. If a lot of women do as you
do and become productive for good, this old muddle of a country will sit
up in no time. It doubles the output.... I wonder if the men will like
working under you?”
“There’ll be a boss in the background,” said Joan. “Mr. John Debenham.
Who’ll never turn up. Being, in fact, no more than camouflage for Joan
of that ilk. I shall be just my own messenger and agent.
“One thing I know,” said Joan, “and that is, that I will make a cottage
or a flat that won’t turn a young woman into an old one in ten years’
time. Living in that Jepson flat without a servant has brightened me up
in a lot of ways.... And a child will grow up in my cottages without
being crippled in its mind by awkwardness and ugliness.... This sort of
thing always has been woman’s work really. Only we’ve been so busy
chittering and powdering our silly noses—and laying snares for our
Peters. Who didn’t know what was good for them.”
Peter laughed and was amused. He felt a pleasant assurance that Joan
really was going to build houses.
“Joan,” he said, “it’s a bleak world before us—and I hate to think of
Nobby. He’s so _ill_. But the work—the good hard work—there’s times when
I rather like to think of that.... They were beastly years just before
the war.”
“I hated them,” said Joan.
“But what a lot of stuff there was about!” said Peter. “The petrol!
Given away, practically, along the roadside everywhere. And the joints
of meat. Do you remember the big hams we used to have on the sideboard?
For breakfast. A lot of sausages going sizzle! Eggs galore! Bacon!
Haddock. Perhaps cutlets. And the way one could run off abroad!”
“To Italy,” said Joan dangerously.
“God knows when those times will come back again! Not for years. Not for
our lifetimes.”
“If they came back all at once we’d have indigestion,” said Joan.
“Orgy,” said Peter. “But they won’t.”...
Presently their note became graver.
“We’ve got to live like fanatics. If a lot of us don’t live like
fanatics, this staggering old world of ours won’t recover. It will
stagger and then go flop. And a race of Bolshevik peasants will breed
pigs among the ruins. We owe it to ourselves, we owe it to the world to
prevent that.”
“And we owe it to the ones who have died,” said Joan.
She hesitated, and then she began to tell him something of the part
Wilmington had played in their lives.
They went through field after field, through gates and over stiles and
by a coppice spangled with primroses, while she told him of the part
that Wilmington had played in bringing them together; Wilmington who was
now no more than grey soil where the battle still raged in France. Many
were the young people who talked so of dead friends in those days. Their
voices became grave and faintly deferential, as though they had invoked
a third presence to mingle with their duologue. They were very careful
to say nothing and to think as little as possible that might hurt
Wilmington’s self-love.
Presently they found themselves speculating again about the kind of
world that lay ahead of them—whether it would be a wholly poor world or
a poverty-struck world infested and devastated by a few hundred
millionaires and their followings. Poor we were certain to be. We should
either be sternly poor or meanly poor. But Peter was disposed to doubt
whether the war millionaires would “get away with the swag.”
“There’s too much thinking and reading nowadays for that,” said Peter.
“They won’t get away with it. This is a new age, Joan. If they try that
game they won’t have five years’ run.”
No, it would be a world generally poor, a tired but chastened world
getting itself into order again.... Would there be much music in the
years ahead? Much writing or art? Would there be a new theatre and the
excitement of first nights again? Should we presently travel by
aeroplane, and find all the world within a few days’ journey? They were
both prepared to resign themselves to ten years’ of work and scarcity,
but they both clung to the hope of returning prosperity and freedom
after that.
“Well, well, Joan,” said Peter, “these times teach us to love. I’m
crippled. We’ve got to work hard. But I’m not unhappy. I’m happier than
I was when I had no idea of what I wanted in life, when I lusted for
everything and was content with nothing, in the days before the war. I’m
a wise old man now with my stiff wrist and my game leg. You change
everything, Joan. You make everything worth while.”
“I’d like to think it was me,” said Joan idiomatically.
“It’s you....
“After all there must be some snatches of holiday. I shall walk with you
through beautiful days—as we are doing today—days that would only be
like empty silk purses if it wasn’t that they held you in them. Scenery
and flowers and sunshine mean nothing to me—until you come in. I’m blind
until you give me eyes. Joan, do you know how beautiful you are? When
you smile? When you stop to think? Frowning a little. When you look—yes,
just like that.”
“_No!_” said Joan, but very cheerfully.
“But you are—you are endlessly beautiful. Endlessly. Making love to
Joan—it’s the intensest of joys. Every time—— As if one had just
discovered her.”
“There’s a certain wild charm about Petah,” Joan admitted, “for a coarse
taste.”
“After all, whether it’s set in poverty or plenty,” said Peter; “whether
it’s rational or irrational, making love is still at the heart of us
humans.”...
For a time they exulted shamelessly in themselves. They talked of the
good times they had had together in the past. They revived memories of
Bungo Peter and the Sagas that had slumbered in silence since the first
dawn of adolescence. She recalled a score of wonderful stories and
adventures that he had altogether forgotten. She had a far clearer and
better memory for such things than he. “D’you remember lightning slick,
Petah? And how the days went faster? D’you remember how he put lightning
slick on his bicycle?”...
But Peter had forgotten that.
“And when we fought for that picshua you made of Adela,” Joan said.
“When I bit you.... It was my first taste of you, Petah. You tasted
dusty....”
“I suppose we’ve always had a blind love for each other,” said Peter,
“always.”
“I hated you to care for any one but myself,” said Joan, “since ever I
can remember. I hated even Billy.”
“It’s well we found out in time,” said Peter.
“_I_ found out,” said Joan.
“Ever since we stopped being boy and girl together,” said Peter, “I’ve
never been at peace in my nerves and temper till now.... Now I feel as
though I swung free in life, safe, sure, content.”
“_Content_,” weighed Joan suspiciously. “But you’re still in love with
me, Petah?”
“Not particularly _in_ love,” said Peter. “No. But I’m loving you—as the
June sun loves an open meadow, shining all over it. I shall always love
you, Joan, because there is no one like you in all the world. No one at
all. Making love happens, but love endures. How can there be
companionship and equality except between the like?—who can keep step,
who can climb together, joke broad and shameless, and never struggle for
the upper hand? And where in all the world shall I find that, Joan, but
in you? Listen to wisdom, Joan! There are two sorts of love between men
and women, and only two—love like the love of big carnivores who know
their mates and stick to them, or love like some man who follows a woman
home because he’s never seen anything like her before. I’ve done with
that sort of love for ever. There’s men who like to exaggerate every
difference in women. They pretend women are mysterious and dangerous and
wonderful. They like sex served up with lies and lingerie.... Where’s
the love in that? Give me my old brown Joan.”
“Not so beastly brown,” said Joan.
“Joan _nature_.”
“Tut, tut!” said Joan.
“There’s people who scent themselves to make love,” said Peter.
“Experienced Petah,” said Joan.
“I’ve read of it,” said Peter, and a little pause fell between them....
“Every one ought to be like us,” said Joan sagely, with the spring
sunshine on her dear face.
“It takes all sorts to make a world,” said Peter.
“Everybody ought to have a lover,” said Joan. “Everybody. There’s no
clean life without it.”...
“We’ve been through some beastly times, Joan. We’ve run some beastly
risks.... We’ve just scrambled through, Joan, to love—as I scrambled
through to life. After being put down and shot at.”...
Presently Joan suspected a drag in Peter’s paces and decided at the
sight of a fallen tree in a little grass lane to profess fatigue. They
sat down upon the scaly trunk, just opposite to where a gate pierced a
budding hedge and gave a view of a long, curved ridge of sunlit blue,
shooting corn with red budding and green-powdered trees beyond, and far
away a woldy upland rising out of an intervening hidden valley. And
Peter admitted that he, too, felt a little tired. But each was making a
pretence for the sake of the other.
“We’ve rediscovered a lot of the old things, Joan,” said Peter. “The war
has knocked sense into us. There wasn’t anything to work for, there
wasn’t much to be loyal to in the days of the Marconi scandals and the
Coronation Durbar. Slack times, more despair in them by far than in
these red days. Rotten, aimless times.... Oh! the world’s not done
for....
“I don’t grudge my wrist or my leg,” said Peter. “I can hop. I’ve still
got five and forty years, fifty years, perhaps, to spend. In this new
world.”...
He said no more for a time. There were schemes in his head, so immature
as yet that he could not even sketch them out to her.
He sat with his eyes dreaming, and Joan watched him. There was much of
the noble beast in this Peter of hers. In the end now, she was
convinced, he was going to be an altogether noble beast. Through her. He
was hers to cherish, to help, to see grow.... He was her chosen man....
Depths that were only beginning to awaken in Joan were stirred. She
would sustain Peter, and also presently she would renew Peter. A time
would come when this dear spirit would be born again within her being,
when the blood in her arteries and all the grace of her body would be
given to a new life—to new lives, that would be beautiful variations of
this dearest tune in the music of the world.... They would have courage;
they would have minds like bright, sharp swords. They would lift their
chins as Peter did.... It became inconceivable to Joan that women could
give their bodies to bear the children of unloved men. “_Dear_ Petah,”
her lips said silently. Her heart swelled; her hands tightened. She
wanted to kiss him....
Then in a whim of reaction she was moved to mockery.
“Do you feel so _very_ stern and strong, dear Petah?” she whispered
close to his shoulder.
He started, surprised, stared at her for a moment, and smiled into her
eyes.
“Old Joan,” he said and kissed her....
§ 10
When he returned to the house on Monday morning after he had seen the
two young people off, a burthen of desolation came upon Oswald.
It was a loneliness as acute as a physical pain. It was misery. If they
had been dead, he could not have been more unhappy. The work that had
been the warm and living substance of fifteen years was now finished and
done. The nest was empty. The road and the stream, the gates and the
garden, the house and the hall, seemed to ache with emptiness and
desertion. He went into their old study, from which they had already
taken a number of their most intimate treasures, and which was now as
disordered as a room after a sale. Most of their remaining personal
possessions were stacked ready for removal; discarded magazines and
books and torn paper made an untidy heap beside the fireplace. “I could
not feel a greater pain if I had lost a son,” he thought, staring at
these untidy vestiges.
He went to his own study and sat down at his desk, though he knew there
was no power of attention in him sufficient to begin work.
Mrs. Moxton, for reasons best known to herself, was interested in his
movements that morning. She saw him presently wander into the garden and
then return to the hall. He took his cap and stick and touched the bell.
“I’ll not be back to lunch, Mrs. Moxton,” he called.
“Very well, sir,” said Mrs. Moxton, unseen upon the landing above,
nodding her head approvingly.
At first the world outside was as lonely as his study.
He went up the valley along the high road for half a mile, and then took
a winding lane under almost overhanging boughs—the hawthorn leaves now
were nearly out and the elder quite—up over the hill and thence across
fields and through a wood until he came to where the steep lane runs
down to Braughing. And by that time, although the spring-time world was
still immensely lonely and comfortless, he no longer felt that
despairful sense of fresh and irremediable loss with which he started.
He was beginning to realize now that he had always been a solitary
being; that all men, even in crowds, carry a certain solitude with them;
and loneliness thus lifted to the level of a sustained and general
experience ceased to feel like a dagger turning in his heart.
Down the middle of Braughing village, among spaces of grass, runs the
little Quin, now a race of crystalline water over pebbly shallows and
now a brown purposefulness flecked with foam, in which reeds bend and
recover as if they kept their footing by perpetual feats of dexterity.
There are two fords, and midway between them a little bridge with a
handrail on which Oswald stayed for a time, watching the lives and
adventures of an endless stream of bubbles that were begotten thirty
feet away where the eddy from the depths beneath a willow root dashed
against a bough that bobbed and dipped in the water. He found a great
distraction and relief in following their adventures. On they came,
large and small, in strings, in spinning groups, busy bubbles, quiet
bubbles, dignified solitary bubbles, and passed a dangerous headland of
watercress and ran the gauntlet between two big stones and then, if they
survived, came with a hopeful rush for the shadow under the bridge and
vanished utterly....
For all the rest of the day those streaming bubbles glittered and raced
and jostled before Oswald’s eyes, and made a veil across his personal
desolation. His mind swung like a pendulum between two ideas; those
bubbles were like human life; they were not like human life....
Philosophy is the greatest of anodynes.
“Why is a man’s life different from a bubble? Like a bubble he is born
of the swirl of matter, like a bubble he reflects the universe, he is
driven and whirled about by forces he does not comprehend, he shines
here and is darkened there and is elated or depressed he knows not why,
and at last passes suddenly out into the darkness....”
In the evening Oswald sat musing by his study fire, his lamp unlit. He
sat in an attitude that had long become habitual to him, with the
scarred side of his face resting upon and hidden by his hand. His walk
had wearied him, but not unpleasantly, his knee was surprisingly free
from pain, and he was no longer acutely unhappy. The idea, a very
engaging idea, had come into his head that it was not really the
education of Joan and Peter that had come to an end, but his own. They
were still learners—how much they had still to learn! At Peter’s age he
had not yet gone to Africa. They had finished with school and college
perhaps, but they were but beginning in the university of life. Neither
of them had yet experienced a great disillusionment, neither of them had
been shamed or bitterly disappointed; they had each other. They had seen
the great war indeed, and Peter knew now what wounds and death were
like—but he himself had been through that at one-and-twenty. Neither had
had any such dark tragedy as, for example, if one of them had been
killed, or if one of them had betrayed and injured the other. Perhaps
they would always have fortunate lives.
But he himself had had to learn the lesson to the end. His life had been
a darkened one. He had loved intensely and lost. He had had to abandon
his chosen life work when it was barely half done. He had a present
sense of the great needs of the world, and he was bodily weak and
mentally uncertain. He would spend days now of fretting futility, unable
to achieve anything. He loved these dear youngsters, but the young
cannot give love to the old because they do not yet understand. He was
alone. And yet, it was strange, he kept on. With such strength as he had
he pursued his ends. Those two would go on, full of hope, helping one
another, thinking together, succeeding. The lesson he had learnt was
that without much love, without much vitality, with little hope of
seeing a single end achieved for which he worked, he could still go on.
He drifted through his memories, seeking for the motives that had driven
him on from experience to experience. But while he could remember the
experiences it was very hard now to recover any inkling of his motives.
He remembered himself at school as a violent egotist, working hard,
openly and fairly, for his ascendancy in the school games, working hard
secretly for his school position. It seemed now as though all that time
he had been no more than a greed and a vanity.... Was that fair to
himself? Or had he forgotten the redeeming dreams of youth?...