"While you were asleep the other night," Trafford began one day as they
sat spinning out their mid-day meal, "I was thinking how badly I had
expressed myself when I talked to you the other day, and what a queer,
thin affair I made of the plans I wanted to carry out. As a matter of
fact, they're neither queer nor thin, but they are unreal in comparison
with the common things of everyday life, hunger, anger, all the
immediate desires. They must be. They only begin when those others are
at peace. It's hard to set out these things; they're complicated and
subtle, and one cannot simplify without falsehood. I don't want to
simplify. The world has gone out of its way time after time through
simplifications and short cuts. Save us from epigrams! And when one
thinks over what one has said, at a little distance,--one wants to go
back to it, and say it all again. I seem to be not so much thinking
things out as reviving and developing things I've had growing in my mind
ever since we met. It's as though an immense reservoir of thought had
filled up in my mind at last and was beginning to trickle over and break
down the embankment between us. This conflict that has been going on
between our life together and my--my intellectual life; it's only just
growing clear in my own mind. Yet it's just as if one turned up a light
on something that had always been there....
"It's a most extraordinary thing to think out, Marjorie, that
antagonism. Our love has kept us so close together and always our
purposes have been--like that." He spread divergent hands. "I've
speculated again and again whether there isn't something incurably
antagonistic between women (that's _you_ generalized, Marjorie) and men
(that's me) directly we pass beyond the conditions of the
individualistic struggle. I believe every couple of lovers who've ever
married have felt that strain. Yet it's not a difference in kind between
us but degree. The big conflict between us has a parallel in a little
internal conflict that goes on; there's something of man in every woman
and a touch of the feminine in every man. But you're nearer as woman to
the immediate personal life of sense and reality than I am as man. It's
been so ever since the men went hunting and fighting and the women kept
hut, tended the children and gathered roots in the little cultivation
close at hand. It's been so perhaps since the female carried and suckled
her child and distinguished one male from another. It may be it will
always be so. Men were released from that close, continuous touch with
physical necessities long before women were. It's only now that women
begin to be released. For ages now men have been wandering from field
and home and city, over the hills and far away, in search of adventures
and fresh ideas and the wells of mystery beyond the edge of the world,
but it's only now that the woman comes with them too. Our difference
isn't a difference in kind, old Marjorie; it's the difference between
the old adventurer and the new feet upon the trail."
"We've got to come," said Marjorie.
"Oh! you've got to come. No good to be pioneers if the race does not
follow. The women are the backbone of the race; the men are just the
individuals. Into this Labrador and into all the wild and desolate
places of thought and desire, if men come you women have to come
too--and bring the race with you. Some day."
"A long day, mate of my heart."
"Who knows how long or how far? Aren't you at any rate here, dear woman
of mine.... (_Surely you are here_)."
He went off at a tangent. "There's all those words that seem to mean
something and then don't seem to mean anything, that keep shifting to
and fro from the deepest significance to the shallowest of claptrap,
Socialism, Christianity.... You know,--they aren't anything really, as
yet; they are something trying to be.... Haven't I said that before,
Marjorie?"
She looked round at him. "You said something like that when you were
delirious," she answered, after a little pause. "It's one of the ideas
that you're struggling with. You go on, old man, and _talk_. We've
months--for repetitions."
"Well, I mean that all these things are seeking after a sort of
co-operation that's greater than our power even of imaginative
realization; that's what I mean. The kingdom of Heaven, the communion of
saints, the fellowship of men; these are things like high peaks far out
of the common life of every day, shining things that madden certain
sorts of men to climb. Certain sorts of us! I'm a religious man, I'm a
socialistic man. These calls are more to me than my daily bread. I've
got something in me more generalizing than most men. I'm more so than
many other men and most other women, I'm more socialistic than you...."
"You know, Marjorie, I've always felt you're a finer individual than me,
I've never had a doubt of it. You're more beautiful by far than I, woman
for my man. You've a keener appetite for things, a firmer grip on the
substance of life. I love to see you do things, love to see you move,
love to watch your hands; you've cleverer hands than mine by far.... And
yet--I'm a deeper and bigger thing than you. I reach up to something you
don't reach up to.... You're in life--and I'm a little out of it, I'm
like one of those fish that began to be amphibian, I go out into
something where you don't follow--where you hardly begin to follow.
"That's the real perplexity between thousands of men and women....
"It seems to me that the primitive socialism of Christianity and all the
stuff of modern socialism that matters is really aiming--almost
unconsciously, I admit at times--at one simple end, at the release of
the human spirit from the individualistic struggle----
"You used 'release' the other day, Marjorie? Of course, I remember. It's
queer how I go on talking after you have understood."
"It was just a flash," said Marjorie. "We have intimations. Neither of
us really understands. We're like people climbing a mountain in a mist,
that thins out for a moment and shows valleys and cities, and then
closes in again, before we can recognize them or make out where we are."
Trafford thought. "When I talk to you, I've always felt I mustn't be too
vague. And the very essence of all this is a vague thing, something we
shall never come nearer to it in all our lives than to see it as a
shadow and a glittering that escapes again into a mist.... And yet it's
everything that matters, everything, the only thing that matters truly
and for ever through the whole range of life. And we have to serve it
with the keenest thought, the utmost patience, inordinate veracity....
"The practical trouble between your sort and my sort, Marjorie, is the
trouble between faith and realization. You demand the outcome. Oh! and I
hate to turn aside and realize. I've had to do it for seven years.
Damnable years! Men of my sort want to understand. We want to
understand, and you ask us to make. We want to understand atoms, ions,
molecules, refractions. You ask us to make rubber and diamonds. I
suppose it's right that incidentally we should make rubber and
diamonds. Finally, I warn you, we will make rubber unnecessary and
diamonds valueless. And again we want to understand how people react
upon one another to produce social consequences, and you ask us to put
it at once into a draft bill for the reform of something or other. I
suppose life lies between us somewhere, we're the two poles of truth
seeking and truth getting; with me alone it would be nothing but a
luminous dream, with you nothing but a scramble in which sooner or later
all the lamps would be upset.... But it's ever too much of a scramble
yet, and ever too little of a dream. All our world over there is full of
the confusion and wreckage of premature realizations. There's no real
faith in thought and knowledge yet. Old necessity has driven men so hard
that they still rush with a wild urgency--though she goads no more.
Greed and haste, and if, indeed, we seem to have a moment's breathing
space, then the Gawdsaker tramples us under."
"My dear!" cried Marjorie, with a sharp note of amusement. "What _is_ a
Gawdsaker?"
"Oh," said Trafford, "haven't you heard that before? He's the person who
gets excited by any deliberate discussion and gets up wringing his hands
and screaming, 'For Gawd's sake, let's _do_ something _now!_' I think
they used it first for Pethick Lawrence, that man who did so much to run
the old militant suffragettes and burke the proper discussion of woman's
future. You know. You used to have 'em in Chelsea--with their hats. Oh!
'Gawdsaking' is the curse of all progress, the hectic consumption that
kills a thousand good beginnings. You see it in small things and in
great. You see it in my life; Gawdsaking turned my life-work to cash and
promotions, Gawdsaking----Look at the way the aviators took to flying
for prizes and gate-money, the way pure research is swamped by
endowments for technical applications! Then that poor ghost-giant of an
idea the socialists have;--it's been treated like one of those unborn
lambs they kill for the fine skin of it, made into results before ever
it was alive. Was there anything more pitiful? The first great dream and
then the last phase! when your Aunt Plessington and the district
visitors took and used it as a synonym for Payment in Kind.... It's
natural, I suppose, for people to be eager for results, personal and
immediate results--the last lesson of life is patience. Naturally they
want reality, naturally! They want the individual life, something to
handle and feel and use and live by, something of their very own before
they die, and they want it now. But the thing that matters for the race,
Marjorie, is a very different thing; it is to get the emerging thought
process clear and to keep it clear--and to let those other hungers go.
We've got to go back to England on the side of that delay, that arrest
of interruption, that detached, observant, synthesizing process of the
mind, that solvent of difficulties and obsolescent institutions, which
is the reality of collective human life. We've got to go back on the
side of pure science--literature untrammeled by the preconceptions of
the social schemers--art free from the urgency of immediate utility--and
a new, a regal, a god-like sincerity in philosophy. And, above all,
we've got to stop this Jackdaw buying of yours, my dear, which is the
essence of all that is wrong with the world, this snatching at
everything, which loses everything worth having in life, this greedy
confused realization of our accumulated resources! You're going to be a
non-shopping woman now. You're to come out of Bond Street, you and your
kind, like Israel leaving the Egyptian flesh-pots. You're going to be
my wife and my mate.... Less of this service of things. Investments in
comfort, in security, in experience, yes; but not just spending any
more...."