Marjorie cherished an obstinate hope that Trafford would take up
political questions and go into Parliament. It seemed to her that there
was something about him altogether graver and wider than most of the
active politicians she knew. She liked to think of those gravities
assuming a practical form, of Trafford very rapidly and easily coming
forward into a position of cardinal significance. It gave her general
expenditure a quality of concentration without involving any uncongenial
limitation to suppose it aimed at the preparation of a statesman's
circle whenever Trafford chose to adopt that assumption. Little men in
great positions came to her house and talked with opaque
self-confidence at her table; she measured them against her husband
while she played the admiring female disciple to their half-confidential
talk. She felt that he could take up these questions and measures that
they reduced to trite twaddle, open the wide relevancies behind them,
and make them magically significant, sweep away the encrusting
pettiness, the personalities and arbitrary prejudices. But why didn't he
begin to do it? She threw out hints he seemed blind towards, she
exercised miracles of patience while he ignored her baits. She came near
intrigue in her endeavor to entangle him in political affairs. For a
time it seemed to her that she was succeeding--I have already told of
his phase of inquiry and interest in socio-political work--and then he
relapsed into a scornful restlessness, and her hopes weakened again.
But he could not concentrate his mind, he could not think where to
begin. Day followed day, each with its attacks upon his intention, its
petty just claims, its attractive novelties of aspect. The telephone
bell rang, the letters flopped into the hall, Malcom the butler seemed
always at hand with some distracting oblong on his salver. Dowd was
developing ideas for a reconstructed organization of the factory,
Solomonson growing enthusiastic about rubber-glass, his house seemed
full of women, Marjorie had an engagement for him to keep or the
children were coming in to say good-night. To his irritated brain the
whole scheme of his life presented itself at last as a tissue of
interruptions which prevented his looking clearly at reality. More and
more definitely he realized he wanted to get away and think. His former
life of research became invested with an effect of immense dignity and
of a steadfast singleness of purpose....
But Trafford was following his own lights, upon his own lines. He was
returning to that faith in the supreme importance of thought and
knowledge, upon which he had turned his back when he left pure research
behind him. To that familiar end he came by an unfamiliar route, after
his long, unsatisfying examination of social reform movements and social
and political theories. Immaturity, haste and presumption vitiated all
that region, and it seemed to him less and less disputable that the only
escape for mankind from a continuing extravagant futility lay through
the attainment of a quite unprecedented starkness and thoroughness of
thinking about all these questions. This conception of a needed
Renascence obsessed him more and more, and the persuasion, deeply felt
if indistinctly apprehended, that somewhere in such an effort there was
a part for him to play....
Life is too great for us or too petty. It gives us no tolerable middle
way between baseness and greatness. We must die daily on the levels of
ignoble compromise or perish tragically among the precipices. On the one
hand is a life--unsatisfying and secure, a plane of dulled
gratifications, mean advantages, petty triumphs, adaptations,
acquiescences and submissions, and on the other a steep and terrible
climb, set with sharp stones and bramble thickets and the possibilities
of grotesque dislocations, and the snares of such temptation as comes
only to those whose minds have been quickened by high desire, and the
challenge of insoluble problems and the intimations of issues so complex
and great, demanding such a nobility of purpose, such a steadfastness,
alertness and openness of mind, that they fill the heart of man with
despair....
There were moods when Trafford would, as people say, pull himself
together, and struggle with his gnawing discontent. He would compare his
lot with that of other men, reproach himself for a monstrous greed and
ingratitude. He remonstrated with himself as one might remonstrate with
a pampered child refusing to be entertained by a whole handsome nursery
full of toys. Other men did their work in the world methodically and
decently, did their duty by their friends and belongings, were
manifestly patient through dullness, steadfastly cheerful, ready to meet
vexations with a humorous smile, and grateful for orderly pleasures. Was
he abnormal? Or was he in some unsuspected way unhealthy? Trafford
neglected no possible explanations. Did he want this great Renascence of
the human mind because he was suffering from some subtle form of
indigestion? He invoked, independently of each other, the aid of two
distinguished specialists. They both told him in exactly the same voice
and with exactly the same air of guineas well earned: "What you want,
Mr. Trafford, is a change."
Trafford brought his mind to bear upon the instances of contentment
about him. He developed an opinion that all men and many women were
potentially at least as restless as himself. A huge proportion of the
usage and education in modern life struck upon him now as being a
training in contentment. Or rather in keeping quiet and not upsetting
things. The serious and responsible life of an ordinary prosperous man
fulfilling the requirements of our social organization fatigues and
neither completely satisfies nor completely occupies. Still less does
the responsible part of the life of a woman of the prosperous classes
engage all her energies or hold her imagination. And there has grown up
a great informal organization of employments, games, ceremonies, social
routines, travel, to consume these surplus powers and excessive
cravings, which might otherwise change or shatter the whole order of
human living. He began to understand the forced preoccupation with
cricket and golf, the shooting, visiting, and so forth, to which the
young people of the economically free classes in the community are
trained. He discovered a theory for hobbies and specialized interests.
He began to see why people go to Scotland to get away from London, and
come to London to get away from Scotland, why they crowd to and fro
along the Riviera, swarm over Switzerland, shoot, yacht, hunt, and
maintain an immense apparatus of racing and motoring. Because so they
are able to remain reasonably contented with the world as it is. He
perceived, too, that a man who has missed or broken through the training
to this kind of life, does not again very readily subdue himself to the
security of these systematized distractions. His own upbringing had been
antipathetic to any such adaptations; his years of research had given
him the habit of naked intimacy with truth, filled him with a craving
for reality and the destructive acids of a relentless critical method.
He began to understand something of the psychology of vice, to
comprehend how small a part mere sensuality, how large a part the spirit
of adventure and the craving for illegality, may play, in the career of
those who are called evil livers. Mere animal impulses and curiosities
it had always seemed possible to him to control, but now he was
beginning to apprehend the power of that passion for escape, at any
cost, in any way, from the petty, weakly stimulating, competitive
motives of low-grade and law-abiding prosperity....
For a time Trafford made an earnest effort to adjust himself to the
position in which he found himself, and make a working compromise with
his disturbing forces. He tried to pick up the scientific preoccupation
of his earlier years. He made extensive schemes, to Solomonson's great
concern, whereby he might to a large extent disentangle himself from
business. He began to hunt out forgotten note-books and yellowing sheets
of memoranda. He found the resumption of research much more difficult
than he had ever supposed possible. He went so far as to plan a
laboratory, and to make some inquiries as to site and the cost of
building, to the great satisfaction not only of Marjorie but of his
mother. Old Mrs. Trafford had never expressed her concern at his
abandonment of molecular physics for money-making, but now in her
appreciation of his return to pure investigation she betrayed her sense
of his departure.
But in his heart he felt that this methodical establishment of virtue by
limitation would not suffice for him. He said no word of this scepticism
as it grew in his mind. Marjorie was still under the impression that he
was returning to research, and that she was free to contrive the steady
preparation for that happier day when he should assume his political
inheritance. And then presently a queer little dispute sprang up between
them. Suddenly, for the first time since he took to business, Trafford
found himself limiting her again. She was disposed, partly through the
natural growth of her circle and her setting and partly through a
movement on the part of Mrs. Halford Wallace, to move from Sussex Square
into a larger, more picturesquely built house in a more central
position. She particularly desired a good staircase. He met her
intimations of this development with a curious and unusual irritation.
The idea of moving bothered him. He felt that exaggerated annoyance
which is so often a concomitant of overwrought nerves. They had a
dispute that was almost a quarrel, and though Marjorie dropped the
matter for a time, he could feel she was still at work upon it.