And it was Parload who had first introduced me to socialism!
Recreant!
The most extraordinary things used to run through my head in those
days. I will confess that my mind ran persistently that evening upon
revolutions after the best French pattern, and I sat on a Committee of
Safety and tried backsliders. Parload was there, among the prisoners,
backsliderissimus, aware too late of the error of his ways. His hands
were tied behind his back ready for the shambles; through the open door
one heard the voice of justice, the rude justice of the people. I was
sorry, but I had to do my duty.
“If we punish those who would betray us to Kings,” said I, with a
sorrowful deliberation, “how much the more must we punish those who
would give over the State to the pursuit of useless knowledge”; and so
with a gloomy satisfaction sent him off to the guillotine.
“Ah, Parload! Parload! If only you’d listened to me earlier, Parload. .
. .”
None the less that quarrel made me extremely unhappy. Parload was my
only gossip, and it cost me much to keep away from him and think evil
of him with no one to listen to me, evening after evening.
That was a very miserable time for me, even before my last visit to
Checkshill. My long unemployed hours hung heavily on my hands. I kept
away from home all day, partly to support a fiction that I was
sedulously seeking another situation, and partly to escape the
persistent question in my mother’s eyes. “Why did you quarrel with Mr.
Rawdon? Why DID you? Why do you keep on going about with a sullen face
and risk offending IT more?” I spent most of the morning in the
newspaper-room of the public library, writing impossible applications
for impossible posts—I remember that among other things of the sort I
offered my services to a firm of private detectives, a sinister breed
of traders upon base jealousies now happily vanished from the world,
and wrote apropos of an advertisement for “stevedores” that I did not
know what the duties of a stevedore might be, but that I was apt and
willing to learn—and in the afternoons and evenings I wandered through
the strange lights and shadows of my native valley and hated all
created things. Until my wanderings were checked by the discovery that
I was wearing out my boots.
The stagnant inconclusive malaria of that time!
I perceive that I was an evil-tempered, ill-disposed youth with a great
capacity for hatred, _but_—
There was an excuse for hate.
It was wrong of me to hate individuals, to be rude, harsh, and
vindictive to this person or that, but indeed it would have been
equally wrong to have taken the manifest offer life made me, without
resentment. I see now clearly and calmly, what I then felt obscurely
and with an unbalanced intensity, that my conditions were intolerable.
My work was tedious and laborious and it took up an unreasonable
proportion of my time, I was ill clothed, ill fed, ill housed, ill
educated and ill trained, my will was suppressed and cramped to the
pitch of torture, I had no reasonable pride in myself and no reasonable
chance of putting anything right. It was a life hardly worth living.
That a large proportion of the people about me had no better a lot,
that many had a worse, does not affect these facts. It was a life in
which contentment would have been disgraceful. If some of them were
contented or resigned, so much the worse for every one. No doubt it was
hasty and foolish of me to throw up my situation, but everything was so
obviously aimless and foolish in our social organization that I do not
feel disposed to blame myself even for that, except in so far as it
pained my mother and caused her anxiety.
Think of the one comprehensive fact of the lock-out!
That year was a bad year, a year of world-wide economic
disorganization. Through their want of intelligent direction the great
“Trust” of American ironmasters, a gang of energetic, narrow-minded
furnace owners, had smelted far more iron than the whole world had any
demand for. (In those days there existed no means of estimating any
need of that sort beforehand.) They had done this without even
consulting the ironmasters of any other country. During their period of
activity they had drawn into their employment a great number of
workers, and had erected a huge productive plant. It is manifestly just
that people who do headlong stupid things of this sort should suffer,
but in the old days it was quite possible, it was customary for the
real blunderers in such disasters, to shift nearly all the consequences
of their incapacity. No one thought it wrong for a light-witted
“captain of industry” who had led his workpeople into overproduction,
into the disproportionate manufacture, that is to say, of some
particular article, to abandon and dismiss them, nor was there anything
to prevent the sudden frantic underselling of some trade rival in order
to surprise and destroy his trade, secure his customers for one’s own
destined needs, and shift a portion of one’s punishment upon him. This
operation of spasmodic underselling was known as “dumping.” The
American ironmasters were now dumping on the British market. The
British employers were, of course, taking their loss out of their
workpeople as much as possible, but in addition they were agitating for
some legislation that would prevent—not stupid relative excess in
production, but “dumping”—not the disease, but the consequences of the
disease. The necessary knowledge to prevent either dumping or its
causes, the uncorrelated production of commodities, did not exist, but
this hardly weighed with them at all, and in answer to their demands
there had arisen a curious party of retaliatory-protectionists who
combined vague proposals for spasmodic responses to these convulsive
attacks from foreign manufacturers, with the very evident intention of
achieving financial adventures. The dishonest and reckless elements
were indeed so evident in this movement as to add very greatly to the
general atmosphere of distrust and insecurity, and in the recoil from
the prospect of fiscal power in the hands of the class of men known as
the “New Financiers,” one heard frightened old-fashioned statesmen
asserting with passion that “dumping” didn’t occur, or that it was a
very charming sort of thing to happen. Nobody would face and handle the
rather intricate truth of the business. The whole effect upon the mind
of a cool observer was of a covey of unsubstantial jabbering minds
drifting over a series of irrational economic cataclysms, prices and
employment tumbled about like towers in an earthquake, and amidst the
shifting masses were the common work-people going on with their lives
as well as they could, suffering, perplexed, unorganized, and for
anything but violent, fruitless protests, impotent. You cannot hope now
to understand the infinite want of adjustment in the old order of
things. At one time there were people dying of actual starvation in
India, while men were burning unsalable wheat in America. It sounds
like the account of a particularly mad dream, does it not? It was a
dream, a dream from which no one on earth expected an awakening.
To us youngsters with the positiveness, the rationalism of youth, it
seemed that the strikes and lockouts, the overproduction and misery
could not possibly result simply from ignorance and want of thought and
feeling. We needed more dramatic factors than these mental fogs, these
mere atmospheric devils. We fled therefore to that common refuge of the
unhappy ignorant, a belief in callous insensate plots—we called them
“plots”—against the poor.
You can still see how we figured it in any museum by looking up the
caricatures of capital and labor that adorned the German and American
socialistic papers of the old time.
§ 2
I had cast Nettie off in an eloquent epistle, had really imagined the
affair was over forever—“I’ve done with women,” I said to Parload—and
then there was silence for more than a week.
Before that week was over I was wondering with a growing emotion what
next would happen between us.
I found myself thinking constantly of Nettie, picturing her—sometimes
with stern satisfaction, sometimes with sympathetic remorse—mourning,
regretting, realizing the absolute end that had come between us. At the
bottom of my heart I no more believed that there was an end between us,
than that an end would come to the world. Had we not kissed one
another, had we not achieved an atmosphere of whispering nearness,
breached our virgin shyness with one another? Of course she was mine,
of course I was hers, and separations and final quarrels and harshness
and distance were no more than flourishes upon that eternal fact. So at
least I felt the thing, however I shaped my thoughts.
Whenever my imagination got to work as that week drew to its close, she
came in as a matter of course, I thought of her recurrently all day and
dreamt of her at night. On Saturday night I dreamt of her very vividly.
Her face was flushed and wet with tears, her hair a little disordered,
and when I spoke to her she turned away. In some manner this dream left
in my mind a feeling of distress and anxiety. In the morning I had a
raging thirst to see her.
That Sunday my mother wanted me to go to church very particularly. She
had a double reason for that; she thought that it would certainly
exercise a favorable influence upon my search for a situation
throughout the next week, and in addition Mr. Gabbitas, with a certain
mystery behind his glasses, had promised to see what he could do for
me, and she wanted to keep him up to that promise. I half consented,
and then my desire for Nettie took hold of me. I told my mother I
wasn’t going to church, and set off about eleven to walk the seventeen
miles to Checkshill.
It greatly intensified the fatigue of that long tramp that the sole of
my boot presently split at the toe, and after I had cut the flapping
portion off, a nail worked through and began to torment me. However,
the boot looked all right after that operation and gave no audible hint
of my discomfort. I got some bread and cheese at a little inn on the
way, and was in Checkshill park about four. I did not go by the road
past the house and so round to the gardens, but cut over the crest
beyond the second keeper’s cottage, along a path Nettie used to call
her own. It was a mere deer track. It led up a miniature valley and
through a pretty dell in which we had been accustomed to meet, and so
through the hollies and along a narrow path close by the wall of the
shrubbery to the gardens.
In my memory that walk through the park before I came upon Nettie
stands out very vividly. The long tramp before it is foreshortened to a
mere effect of dusty road and painful boot, but the bracken valley and
sudden tumult of doubts and unwonted expectations that came to me,
stands out now as something significant, as something unforgettable,
something essential to the meaning of all that followed. Where should I
meet her? What would she say? I had asked these questions before and
found an answer. Now they came again with a trail of fresh implications
and I had no answer for them at all. As I approached Nettie she ceased
to be the mere butt of my egotistical self-projection, the custodian of
my sexual pride, and drew together and became over and above this a
personality of her own, a personality and a mystery, a sphinx I had
evaded only to meet again.
I find a little difficulty in describing the quality of the old-world
love-making so that it may be understandable now.
We young people had practically no preparation at all for the stir and
emotions of adolescence. Towards the young the world maintained a
conspiracy of stimulating silences. There came no initiation. There
were books, stories of a curiously conventional kind that insisted on
certain qualities in every love affair and greatly intensified one’s
natural desire for them, perfect trust, perfect loyalty, lifelong
devotion. Much of the complex essentials of love were altogether
hidden. One read these things, got accidental glimpses of this and
that, wondered and forgot, and so one grew. Then strange emotions,
novel alarming desires, dreams strangely charged with feeling; an
inexplicable impulse of self-abandonment began to tickle queerly
amongst the familiar purely egotistical and materialistic things of
boyhood and girlhood. We were like misguided travelers who had camped
in the dry bed of a tropical river. Presently we were knee deep and
neck deep in the flood. Our beings were suddenly going out from
ourselves seeking other beings—we knew not why. This novel craving for
abandonment to some one of the other sex, bore us away. We were ashamed
and full of desire. We kept the thing a guilty secret, and were
resolved to satisfy it against all the world. In this state it was we
drifted in the most accidental way against some other blindly seeking
creature, and linked like nascent atoms.
We were obsessed by the books we read, by all the talk about us that
once we had linked ourselves we were linked for life. Then afterwards
we discovered that other was also an egotism, a thing of ideas and
impulses, that failed to correspond with ours.
So it was, I say, with the young of my class and most of the young
people in our world. So it came about that I sought Nettie on the
Sunday afternoon and suddenly came upon her, light bodied, slenderly
feminine, hazel eyed, with her soft sweet young face under the shady
brim of her hat of straw, the pretty Venus I had resolved should be
wholly and exclusively mine.
There, all unaware of me still, she stood, my essential feminine, the
embodiment of the inner thing in life for me—and moreover an unknown
other, a person like myself.
She held a little book in her hand, open as if she were walking along
and reading it. That chanced to be her pose, but indeed she was
standing quite still, looking away towards the gray and lichenous
shrubbery wall and, as I think now, listening. Her lips were a little
apart, curved to that faint, sweet shadow of a smile.
§ 3
I recall with a vivid precision her queer start when she heard the
rustle of my approaching feet, her surprise, her eyes almost of dismay
for me. I could recollect, I believe, every significant word she spoke
during our meeting, and most of what I said to her. At least, it seems
I could, though indeed I may deceive myself. But I will not make the
attempt. We were both too ill-educated to speak our full meanings, we
stamped out our feelings with clumsy stereotyped phrases; you who are
better taught would fail to catch our intention. The effect would be
inanity. But our first words I may give you, because though they
conveyed nothing to me at the time, afterwards they meant much.
“_You_, Willie!” she said.
“I have come,” I said—forgetting in the instant all the elaborate
things I had intended to say. “I thought I would surprise you—”
“Surprise me?”
“Yes.”
She stared at me for a moment. I can see her pretty face now as it
looked at me—her impenetrable dear face. She laughed a queer little
laugh and her color went for a moment, and then so soon as she had
spoken, came back again.
“Surprise me at what?” she said with a rising note.