THE MAKING OF A BIGOT
THE
MAKING OF A BIGOT
BY
ROSE MACAULAY
Author of “The Lee Shore,” “Views and Vagabonds,” etc.
HODDER AND STOUGHTON
LONDON NEW YORK TORONTO
TO D. F. C.
“How various is man! How multiplied his experience, his outlook, his
conclusions!”--H. BELLOC.
“And every single one of them is right.”--R. KIPLING.
“The rational human faith must armour itself with prejudice in an age of
prejudices.”--G. K. CHESTERTON.
CONTENTS
PAGE
CHAPTER I.
CAMBRIDGE 9
CHAPTER II.
ST. GREGORY’S 21
CHAPTER III.
PLEASANCE COURT 38
CHAPTER IV.
HEATHERMERE 52
CHAPTER V.
DATCHERD AND THE VICAR 62
CHAPTER VI.
THE DEANERY AND THE HALL 80
CHAPTER VII.
VISITORS AT THE DEANERY 102
CHAPTER VIII.
THE VISITORS GO 127
CHAPTER IX.
THE CLUB 142
CHAPTER X.
DATCHERD’S RETURN 167
CHAPTER XI.
THE COUNTRY 189
CHAPTER XII.
HYDE PARK TERRACE 209
CHAPTER XIII.
MOLLY 230
CHAPTER XIV.
UNITY 254
CHAPTER XV.
ARNOLD 270
CHAPTER XVI.
EILEEN 276
CHAPTER XVII.
CONVERSION 286
CHAPTER I.
CAMBRIDGE.
It was Trinity Sunday, full of buttercups and cuckoos and the sun. In
Cambridge it was a Scarlet Day. In colleges, people struggling through a
desert of Tripos papers or Mays rested their souls for a brief space in
a green oasis, and took their lunch up the river. In Sunday schools,
teachers were telling of the shamrock, that ill-considered and
peculiarly inappropriate image conceived by a hard-pressed saint.
Everywhere people were being ordained.
Miss Jamison met Eddy Oliver in Petty Cury, while she was doing some
house-to-house visiting with a bundle of leaflets that looked like
tracts. She looked at him vaguely, then suddenly began to take an
interest in him.
“Of course,” she said, with decision, “you’ve got to join, too.”
“Rather,” he said. “Tell me what it is. I’m sure it’s full of truth.”
“It’s the National Service League. I’m a working associate, and I’m
persuading people to join. It’s a good thing, really. Were you at the
meeting yesterday?”
“No, I missed that. I was at another meeting, in point of fact. I often
am, you know.” He said it with a touch of mild perplexity. It was so
true.
She was turning over the sheaf of tracts.
“Let me see: which will meet your case? Leaflet M, the Modern
Sisyphus--that’s a picture one, and more for the poor; so simple and
graphic. P is better for you. HAVE YOU EVER THOUGHT what war is, and
what it would be like to have it raging round your own home? HAVE YOU
EVER THOUGHT what your feelings would be if you heard that an enemy had
landed on these shores, and you knew that you were ignorant of the means
by which you could help to defend your country and your home? YOU
PROBABLY THINK that if you are a member of a rifle club, and know how to
shoot, you have done all that is needed. But--well, you haven’t, and so
on, you know. You’d better take P. And Q. Q says ‘Are you a Liberal?
Then join the League, because, etc. Are you a Democrat? Are you a
Socialist? Are you a Conservative? Are you----’ ”
“Yes,” said Eddy, “I’m everything of that sort. It won’t be able to
think of anything I’m not.”
She thought he was being funny, though he wasn’t; he was speaking the
simple truth.
“Anyhow,” she said, “you’ll find good reasons there why you should
join, whatever you are. Just think, you know, suppose the Germans
landed.” She supposed that for a little, then got on to physical
training and military discipline, how important they are.
Eddy said when she paused, “Quite. I think you are utterly right.” He
always did, when anyone explained anything to him; he was like that; he
had a receptive mind.
“You can become,” said Miss Jamison, getting to the gist of the matter,
“a guinea member, or a penny adherent, or a shilling associate, or a
more classy sort of associate, that pays five shillings and gets all
kinds of literature.”
“I’ll be that,” said Eddy Oliver, who liked nearly all kinds of
literature.
So Miss Jamison got out her book of vouchers on the spot, and enrolled
him, receiving five shillings and presenting a blue button on which was
inscribed the remark, “The Path of Duty is the Path of Safety.”
“So true,” said Eddy. “A jolly good motto. A jolly good League. I’ll
tell everyone I meet to join.”
“There’ll be another meeting,” said Miss Jamison, “next Thursday. Of
course you’ll come. We want a good audience this time, if possible. We
never have one, you know. There’ll be lantern slides, illustrating
invasion as it would be now, and invasion as it would be were the
National Service League Bill passed. Tremendously exciting.”
Eddy made a note of it in his Cambridge Pocket Diary, a small and
profusely inscribed volume without which he never moved, as his
engagements were numerous, and his head not strong.
He wrote below June 8th, “N.S.L., 8 p.m., Guildhall, small room.” For
the same date he had previously inscribed, “Fabians, 7.15, Victoria
Assembly Rooms,” “E.C.U. Protest Meeting, Guildhall, large room, 2.15,”
and “Primrose League Fête, Great Shelford Manor, 3 p.m.” He belonged to
all these societies (they are all so utterly right) and many others more
esoteric, and led a complex and varied life, full of faith and hope.
With so many right points of view in the world, so many admirable, if
differing, faiths, whither, he demanded, might not humanity rise?
Himself, he joined everything that came his way, from Vegetarian
Societies to Heretic Clubs and Ritualist Guilds; all, for him, were full
of truth. This attitude of omni-acceptance sometimes puzzled and worried
less receptive and more single-minded persons; they were known at times
even to accuse him, with tragic injustice, of insincerity. When they did
so, he saw how right they were; he entirely sympathised with their point
of view.
At this time he was nearly twenty-three, and nearly at the end of his
Cambridge career. In person he was a slight youth, with intelligent
hazel eyes under sympathetic brows, and easily ruffled brown hair, and a
general air of receptive impressionability. Clad not unsuitably in grey
flannels and the soft hat of the year (soft hats vary importantly from
age to age), he strolled down King’s Parade. There he met a man of his
own college; this was liable to occur in King’s Parade. The man said he
was going to tea with his people, and Eddy was to come too. Eddy did so.
He liked the Denisons; they were full of generous enthusiasm for certain
things--(not, like Eddy himself, for everything). They wanted Votes for
Women, and Liberty for Distressed Russians, and spinning-looms for
everyone. They had inspired Eddy to want these things, too; he belonged,
indeed, to societies for promoting each of them. On the other hand, they
did not want Tariff Reform, or Conscription, or Prayer Book Revision
(for they seldom read the Prayer Book), and if they had known that Eddy
belonged also to societies for promoting these objects, they would have
remonstrated with him.
Professor Denison was a quiet person, who said little, but listened to
his wife and children. He had much sense of humour, and some
imagination. He was fifty-five. Mrs. Denison was a small and engaging
lady, a tremendous worker in good causes; she had little sense of
humour, and a vivid, if often misapplied, imagination. She was
forty-six. Her son Arnold was tall, lean, cynical, intelligent, edited a
university magazine (the most interesting of them), was president of a
Conversation Society, and was just going into his uncle’s publishing
house. He had plenty of sense of humour (if he had had less, he would
have bored himself to death), and an imagination kept within due bounds.
He was twenty-three. His sister Margery was also intelligent, but,
notwithstanding this, had recently published a book of verse; some of it
was not so bad as a great many people’s verse. She also designed
wall-papers, which on the whole she did better. She had an unequal sense
of humour, keen in certain directions, blunt in others, like most
people’s; the same description applies to her imagination. She was
twenty-two.
Eddy and Arnold found them having tea in the garden, with two brown
undergraduates and a white one. The Denisons belonged to the East and
West Society, which tries to effect a union between the natives of these
two quarters of the globe. It has conversazioni, at which the brown men
congregate at one end of the room and the white men at the other, and
both, one hopes, are happy. This afternoon Mrs. Denison and her daughter
were each talking to a brown young man (Downing and Christ’s), and the
white young man (Trinity Hall) was being silent with Professor Denison,
because East is East and West is West, and never the twain shall meet,
and really, you can’t talk to blacks. Arnold joined the West; Eddy, who
belonged to the above-mentioned society, helped Miss Denison to talk to
her black.
Rather soon the East went, and the West became happier.
Miss Denison said, “Dorothy Jamison came round this afternoon, wanting
us to join the National Service League or something.”
Mrs. Denison said, snippily, “Dorothy ought to know better,” at the same
moment that Eddy said, “It’s a jolly little League, apparently. Quite
full of truth.”
The Hall man said that his governor was a secretary or something at
home, and kept having people down to speak at meetings. So he and the
Denisons argued about it, till Margery said, “Oh, well, of course,
you’re hopeless. But I don’t know what Eddy means by it. _You_ don’t
want to encourage militarism, surely, Eddy.”
Eddy said surely yes, shouldn’t one encourage everything? But really,
and no ragging, Margery persisted, he didn’t belong to a thing like
that?
Eddy showed his blue button.
“Rather, I do. HAVE YOU EVER THOUGHT what war is, and what it would be
like to have it raging round your own home? Are you a democrat? Then
join the League.”
“Idiot,” said Margery, who knew him well enough to call him so.
“He believes in everything. I believe in nothing,” Arnold explained. “He
accepts; I refuse. He likes three lumps of sugar in his tea; I like
none. He had better be a journalist, and write for the _Daily Mail_, the
_Clarion_, and the _Spectator_.”
“What _are_ you going to do when you go down?” Margery asked Eddy,
suspiciously.
Eddy blushed, because he was going for a time to work in a Church
settlement. A man he knew was a clergyman there, and had convinced him
that it was his duty and he must. The Denisons did not care about Church
settlements, only secular ones; that, and because he had a clear, pale
skin that showed everything, was why he blushed.
“I’m going to work with some men in Southwark,” he said, embarrassed.
“Anyhow, for a time. Help with boys’ clubs, you know, and so on.”
“Parsons?” inquired Arnold, and Eddy admitted it, where upon Arnold
changed the subject; he had no concern with Parsons.
The Denisons were so shocked at Eddy, that they let the Hall man talk
about the South African match for quite two minutes. They were probably
afraid that if they didn’t Eddy might talk about the C.I.C.C.U., which
would be infinitely worse. Eddy was perhaps the only man at the moment
in Cambridge who belonged simultaneously to the C.I.C.C.U., the Church
Society, and the Heretics. (It may be explained for the benefit of the
uninitiated that the C.I.C.C.U. is Low Church, and the Church Society is
High Church, and the Heretics is no church at all. They are all
admirable societies).
Arnold said presently, interrupting the match, “If I keep a second-hand
bookshop in Soho, will you help me, Eddy?”
Eddy said he would like to.
“It will be awfully good training for both of us,” said Arnold. “You’ll
see much more life that way, you know, than at your job in Southwark.”
Arnold had manfully overcome his distaste for alluding to Eddy’s job in
Southwark, in order to make a last attempt to snatch a brand from the
burning.
But Eddy, thinking he might as well be hanged for a sheep as a lamb,
said,
“You see, my people rather want me to take Orders, and the Southwark job
is by way of finding out if I want to or not. I’m nearly sure I don’t,
you know,” he added, apologetically, because the Denisons were looking
so badly disappointed in him.
Mrs. Denison said kindly, “I think I should tell your people straight
out that you can’t. It’s a tiresome little jar, I know, but honestly, I
don’t believe it’s a bit of use members of a family pretending that they
see life from the same angle when they don’t.”
Eddy said, “Oh, but I think we do, in a way. Only----”
It was really rather difficult to explain. He did indeed see life from
the same angle as the rest of his family, but from many other angles as
well, which was confusing. The question was, could one select some one
thing to be, clergyman or anything else, unless one was very sure that
it implied no negations, no exclusions of the other angles? That was,
perhaps, what his life in Southwark would teach him. Most of the clergy
round his own home--and, his father being a Dean, he knew many--hadn’t,
it seemed to him, learnt the art of acceptance; they kept drawing lines,
making sheep and goat divisions, like the Denisons.
The Hall man, feeling a little embarrassed because they were getting
rather intimate and personal, and probably would like to get more so if
he were not there, went away. He had had to call on the Denisons, but
they weren’t his sort, he knew. Miss Denison and her parents frightened
him, and he didn’t get on with girls who dressed artistically, or wrote
poetry, and Arnold Denison was a conceited crank, of course. Oliver was
a good sort, only very thick with Denison for some reason. If he was
Oliver, and wanted to do anything so dull as slumming with parsons in
Southwark, he wouldn’t be put off by anything the Denisons said.
“Why don’t _you_ get your tie to match your socks, Eddy?” Arnold asked,
with a yawn, when Egerton had gone.
His mother, a hospitable lady, and kind to Egertons and all others who
came to her house, told him not to be disagreeable. Eddy said, truly,
that he wished he did, and that it was a capital idea and looked
charming.
“Egertons do look rather charming, quite often,” Margery conceded. “I
suppose that’s something after all.”
Mrs. Denison added, (exquisite herself, she had a taste for neatness):
“Their hair and their clothes are always beautifully brushed; which is
more than yours are, Arnold.”
Arnold lay back with his eyes shut, and groaned gently. Egerton had
fatigued him very much.
Eddy thought it was rather nice of Mrs. Denison and Margery to be kind
about Egerton because he had been to tea. He realised that he himself
was the only person there who was neither kind nor unkind about Egerton,
because he really liked him. This the Denisons would have hopelessly
failed to understand, or, probably, to believe; if he had mentioned it
they would have thought he was being kind, too. Eddy liked a number of
people who were ranked by the Denisons among the goats; even the rowing
men of his own college, which happened to be a college where one didn’t
row.
Mrs. Denison asked Eddy if he would come to lunch on Thursday to meet
some of the Irish players, whom they were putting up for the week. The
Denisons, being intensely English and strong Home Rulers, felt, besides
the artistic admiration for the Abbey Theatre players common to all, a
political enthusiasm for them as Nationalists, so putting three of them
up was a delightful hospitality. Eddy, who shared both the artistic and
the political enthusiasm, was delighted to come to lunch. Unfortunately
he would have to hurry away afterwards to the Primrose League Fête at
Great Shelford, but he did not mention this.
Consulting his watch, he found he was even now due at a meeting of a
Sunday Games Club to which he belonged, so he said goodbye to the
Denisons and went.
“Mad as a hatter,” was Arnold’s languid comment on him when he had gone;
“but well-intentioned.”
“But,” said Margery, “I can’t gather that he intends anything at all.
He’s so absurdly indiscriminate.”
“He intends everything,” her father interpreted. “You all, in this
intense generation, intend much too much; Oliver carries it a little
further than most of you, that’s all. His road to his ultimate
destination is most remarkably well-paved.”
“Oh, poor boy,” said Mrs. Denison, remonstrating. She went in to finish
making arrangements for a Suffrage meeting.
Margery went to her studio to hammer jewellery for the Arts and Crafts
Exhibition.
Professor Denison went to his study to look over Tripos papers.
Arnold lay in the garden and smoked. He was the least energetic of his
family, and not industrious.