A haunting desire to go away into solitude grew upon Trafford very
steadily. He wanted intensely to think, and London and Marjorie would
not let him think. He wanted therefore to go away out of London and
Marjorie's world. He wanted, he felt, to go away alone and face God, and
clear things up in his mind. By imperceptible degrees this desire
anticipated its realization. His activities were affected more and more
by intimations of a determined crisis. One eventful day it seemed to him
that his mind passed quite suddenly from desire to resolve. He found
himself with a project, already broadly definite. Hitherto he hadn't
been at all clear where he could go. From the first almost he had felt
that this change he needed, the change by which he was to get out of the
thickets of work and perplexity and distraction that held him captive,
must be a physical as well as a mental removal; he must go somewhere,
still and isolated, where sustained detached thinking was possible....
His preference, if he had one, inclined him to some solitude among the
Himalaya Mountains. That came perhaps from Kim and the precedent of the
Hindoo's religious retreat from the world. But this retreat he
contemplated was a retreat that aimed at a return, a clarified and
strengthened resumption of the world. And then suddenly, as if he had
always intended it, Labrador flashed through his thoughts, like a
familiar name that had been for a time quite unaccountably forgotten.
The word "Labrador" drifted to him one day from an adjacent table as he
sat alone at lunch in the Liberal Union Club. Some bore was reciting the
substance of a lecture to a fellow-member. "Seems to be a remarkable
country," said the speaker. "Mineral wealth hardly glanced at, you know.
Furs and a few score Indians. And at our doors. Practically--at our
doors."
Trafford ceased to listen. His mind was taking up this idea of Labrador.
He wondered why he had not thought of Labrador before.
He had two or three streams of thought flowing in his mind, as a man who
muses alone is apt to do. Marjorie's desire to move had reappeared; a
particular group of houses between Berkeley Square and Park Lane had
taken hold of her fancy, she had urged the acquisition of one upon him
that morning, and this kept coming up into consciousness like a wrong
thread in a tapestry. Moreover, he was watching his fellow-members with
a critical rather than a friendly eye. A half-speculative, half-hostile
contemplation of his habitual associates was one of the queer aspects of
this period of unsettlement. They exasperated him by their massive
contentment with the surface of things. They came in one after another
patting their ties, or pulling at the lapels of their coats, and looked
about them for vacant places with a conscious ease of manner that
irritated his nerves. No doubt they were all more or less successful and
distinguished men, matter for conversation and food for anecdotes, but
why did they trouble to give themselves the air of it? They halted or
sat down by friends, enunciated vapid remarks in sonorous voices, and
opened conversations in trite phrases, about London architecture, about
the political situation or the morning's newspaper, conversations that
ought, he felt, to have been thrown away unopened, so stale and needless
they seemed to him. They were judges, lawyers of all sorts, bankers,
company promoters, railway managers, stockbrokers, pressmen,
politicians, men of leisure. He wondered if indeed they were as opaque
as they seemed, wondered with the helpless wonder of a man of
exceptional mental gifts whether any of them at any stage had had such
thoughts as his, had wanted as acutely as he did now to get right out of
the world. Did old Booch over there, for example, guzzling oysters, cry
at times upon the unknown God in the vast silences of the night? But
Booch, of course, was a member or something of the House of Laymen, and
very sound on the thirty-nine articles--a man who ate oysters like that
could swallow anything--and in the vast silences of the night he was
probably heavily and noisily asleep....
Blenkins, the gentlemanly colleague of Denton in the control of the _Old
Country Gazette_, appeared on his way to the pay-desk, gesticulating
amiably _en-route_ to any possible friend. Trafford returned his
salutation, and pulled himself together immediately after in fear that
he had scowled, for he hated to be churlish to any human being.
Blenkins, too, it might be, had sorrow and remorse and periods of
passionate self-distrust and self-examination; maybe Blenkins could weep
salt tears, as Blenkins no doubt under suitable sword-play would reveal
heart and viscera as quivering and oozy as any man's.
But to Trafford's jaundiced eyes just then, it seemed that if you
slashed Blenkins across he would probably cut like a cheese....
Now, in Labrador----....
So soon as Blenkins had cleared, Trafford followed him to the pay-desk,
and went on upstairs to the smoking-room, thinking of Labrador. Long
ago he had read the story of Wallace and Hubbard in that wilderness.
There was much to be said for a winter in Labrador. It was cold, it was
clear, infinitely lonely, with a keen edge of danger and hardship and
never a letter or a paper.
One could provision a hut and sit wrapped in fur, watching the Northern
Lights....
"I'm off to Labrador," said Trafford, and entered the smoking-room.
It was, after all, perfectly easy to go to Labrador. One had just to
go....
As he pinched the end of his cigar, he became aware of Blenkins, with a
gleam of golden glasses and a flapping white cuff, beckoning across the
room to him. With that probable scowl on his conscience Trafford was
moved to respond with an unreal warmth, and strolled across to Blenkins
and a group of three or four other people, including that vigorous young
politician, Weston Massinghay, and Hart, K.C., about the further
fireplace. "We were talking of you," said Blenkins. "Come and sit down
with us. Why don't you come into Parliament?"
"I've just arranged to go for some months to Labrador."
"Industrial development?" asked Blenkins, all alive.
"No. Holiday."
No Blenkins believes that sort of thing, but of course, if Trafford
chose to keep his own counsel----
"Well, come into Parliament as soon as you get back."
Trafford had had that old conversation before. He pretended
insensibility when Blenkins gestured to a vacant chair. "No," he said,
still standing, "we settled all that. And now I'm up to my neck
in--detail about Labrador. I shall be starting--before the month is
out."
Blenkins and Hart simulated interest. "It's immoral," said Blenkins,
"for a man of your standing to keep out of politics."
"It's more than immoral," said Hart; "it's American."
"Solomonson comes in to represent the firm," smiled Trafford, signalled
the waiter for coffee, and presently disentangled himself from their
company.
For Blenkins Trafford concealed an exquisite dislike and contempt; and
Blenkins had a considerable admiration for Trafford, based on extensive
misunderstandings. Blenkins admired Trafford because he was good-looking
and well-dressed, with a beautiful and successful wife, because he had
become reasonably rich very quickly and easily, was young and a Fellow
of the Royal Society with a reputation that echoed in Berlin, and very
perceptibly did not return Blenkins' admiration. All these things filled
Blenkins with a desire for Trafford's intimacy, and to become the
associate of the very promising political career that it seemed to him,
in spite of Trafford's repudiations, was the natural next step in a
deliberately and honourably planned life. He mistook Trafford's silences
and detachment for the marks of a strong, silent man, who was scheming
the immense, vulgar, distinguished-looking achievements that appeal to
the Blenkins mind. Blenkins was a sentimentally loyal party Liberal, and
as he said at times to Hart and Weston Massinghay: "If those other
fellows get hold of him----!"
Blenkins was the fine flower of Oxford Liberalism and the Tennysonian
days. He wanted to be like King Arthur and Sir Galahad, with the merest
touch of Launcelot, and to be perfectly upright and splendid and very,
very successful. He was a fair, tenoring sort of person with an
Arthurian moustache and a disposition to long frock coats. It had been
said of him that he didn't dress like a gentleman, but that he dressed
more like a gentleman than a gentleman ought to dress. It might have
been added that he didn't behave like a gentleman, but that he behaved
more like a gentleman than a gentleman ought to behave. He didn't think,
but he talked and he wrote more thoughtfully in his leaders, and in the
little dialogues he wrote in imitation of Sir Arthur Helps, than any
other person who didn't think could possibly do. He was an orthodox
Churchman, but very, very broad; he held all the doctrines, a
distinguished sort of thing to do in an age of doubt, but there was a
quality about them as he held them--as though they had been run over by
something rather heavy. It was a flattened and slightly obliterated
breadth--nothing was assertive, but nothing, under examination, proved
to be altogether gone. His profuse thoughtfulness was not confined to
his journalistic and literary work, it overflowed into Talks. He was a
man for Great Talks, interminable rambling floods of boyish observation,
emotional appreciation, and silly, sapient comment. He loved to discuss
"Who are the Best Talkers now Alive?" He had written an essay, _Talk in
the Past_. He boasted of week-ends when the Talk had gone on from the
moment of meeting in the train to the moment of parting at Euston, or
Paddington, or Waterloo; and one or two hostesses with embittered
memories could verify his boasting. He did his best to make the club a
Talking Club, and loved to summon men to a growing circle of chairs....
Trafford had been involved in Talks on one or two occasions, and now, as
he sat alone in the corridor and smoked and drank his coffee, he could
imagine the Talk he had escaped, the Talk that was going on in the
smoking room--the platitudes, the sagacities, the digressions, the
sudden revelation of deep, irrational convictions. He reflected upon the
various Talks at which he had assisted. His chief impression of them all
was of an intolerable fluidity. Never once had he known a Talk thicken
to adequate discussion; never had a new idea or a new view come to him
in a Talk. He wondered why Blenkins and his like talked at all.
Essentially they lived for pose, not for expression; they did not
greatly desire to discover, make, or be; they wanted to seem and
succeed. Talking perhaps was part of their pose of great intellectual
activity, and Blenkins was fortunate to have an easy, unforced running
of mind....
Over his cigar Trafford became profoundly philosophical about Talk. And
after the manner of those who become profoundly philosophical he spread
out the word beyond its original and proper intentions to all sorts of
kindred and parallel things. Blenkins and his miscellany of friends in
their circle of chairs were, after all, only a crude rendering of very
much of intellectual activity of mankind. Men talked so often as dogs
bark. Those Talkers never came to grips, fell away from topic to topic,
pretended depth and evaded the devastating horrors of sincerity.
Listening was a politeness amongst them that was presently rewarded with
utterance. Tremendously like dogs they were, in a dog-fancying
neighborhood on a summer week-day afternoon. Fluidity, excessive
abundance, inconsecutiveness; these were the things that made Talk
hateful to Trafford.
Wasn't most literature in the same class? Wasn't nearly all present
philosophical and sociological discussion in the world merely a Blenkins
circle on a colossal scale, with every one looming forward to get in a
deeply thoughtful word edgeways at the first opportunity? Imagine any
one in distress about his soul or about mankind, going to a professor of
economics or sociology or philosophy! He thought of the endless, big,
expensive, fruitless books, the windy expansions of industrious pedantry
that mocked the spirit of inquiry. The fields of physical and biological
science alone had been partially rescued from the floods of human
inconsecutiveness. There at least a man must, on the whole, join on to
the work of other men, stand a searching criticism, justify himself.
Philosophically this was an age of relaxed schoolmen. He thought of
Doctor Codger at Cambridge, bubbling away with his iridescent
Hegelianism like a salted snail; of Doctor Quiller at Oxford, ignoring
Bergson and fulminating a preposterous insular Pragmatism. Each
contradicted the other fundamentally upon matters of universal concern;
neither ever joined issue with the other. Why in the name of humanity
didn't some one take hold of those two excellent gentlemen, and bang
their busy heads together hard and frequently until they either
compromised or cracked?