'I have. It's been more interesting lately than my own paper.'

'Yes.... So Arthur's acquitted without a stain on his character. Poor

mother's rather sick about it. She thought she'd had a Message, you know.

That frightful Ayres woman had a vision in a glass ball of Arthur

knocking Oliver downstairs. I expect you heard. Every one did.... Mother

went round to see her about it the other day, but she still sticks to it.

Poor mother doesn't know what to make of it. Either the ball lied, or the

Ayres woman lied, or Clare is lying. She's forced to the conclusion that

it was the Ayres. So they've had words. I expect they'll make it up

before long. But at present there's rather a slump in Other Side

business.... And she wrote a letter of apology to Arthur. Father made

her, he was so afraid Arthur would bring a libel action.'

'Why didn't he?' I asked, wondering, first, how much of the truth

either Arthur or Jane had suspected all this time, and, secondly, how

much they now knew.

Jane looked at me with her guarded, considering glance.

'Well,' she said, 'I don't mind your knowing. You'd better not let on to

him that I told you, though; he mightn't like it. The fact is, Arthur

thought I'd done it. He thought it was because my manner was so queer, as

if I was trying to hush it up. I was. You see, I thought Arthur had done

it. It seemed so awfully likely. Because, I left them quarrelling. And

Arthur's got an awfully bad temper. And _his_ manner was so queer. We

never talked it out, till two days ago; we avoided talking to each other

at all, almost, after the first. But on that first morning, when he came

round to see me, we somehow succeeded in diddling one another, because we

were each so anxious to shield the other and hush it all up.... Clare

might have saved us both quite a lot of worrying if she'd spoken out at

once and said it was ... an accident.'

Jane's voice was so unemotional, her face and manner so calm, that she

is a very dark horse sometimes. I couldn't tell for certain whether she

had nearly instead of 'an accident' said 'her,' or whether she had

spoken in good faith. I couldn't tell how much she knew, or had been

told, or guessed.

I said, 'I suppose she didn't realise till lately that any one was likely

to be suspected,' and Jane acquiesced.

'Clare's funny,' she said, after a moment.

'People are,' I generalised.

'She has a muddled mind,' said Jane.

'People often have.'

'You never know,' said Jane thoughtfully, 'how much to believe of what

she says.'

'No? I dare say she doesn't quite know herself.'

'She does not,' said Jane. 'Poor old Clare.'

We necessarily left it at that, since Jane didn't, of course, mean to

tell me what story Clare had told of that evening's happenings, and I

couldn't tell Jane the one Clare had told me. I didn't imagine I should

ever be wiser than I was now on the subject, and it certainly wasn't my

business any more.

When I met Clare Potter by chance, a week or two later, on the steps of

the National Gallery with another girl, she flushed, bowed, and passed me

quickly. That was natural enough, after our last interview.

Queer, that those two girls should be sisters. They were an interesting

study to me. Clare, shallow, credulous, weak in the intelligence,

conventional, emotional, sensitive, of the eternal type of orthodox and

timid woman, with profound powers of passion, and that touch of

melodrama, that sense of a situation, which might lead her along strange

paths.... And Jane, level-headed, clear-brained, hard, calm,

straight-thinking, cynical, an egotist to her finger-tips, knowing what

she wanted and going for it, tough in the conscience, and ignorant of

love except in its crudest form of desire for the people and things which

ministered to her personal happiness....

It struck me that the two represented two sides of Potterism--the

intellectual and moral. Clare, the ignorant, muddle-headed

sentimentalist; Jane, reacting against this, but on her part grabbing and

exploiting. Their attitude towards truth (that bugbear of Potterism) was

typical; Clare couldn't see it; Jane saw it perfectly clearly, and would

reject it without hesitation if it suited her book. Clare was like her

mother, only with better, simpler stuff in her; Jane was rather like her

father in her shrewd native wit, only, while he was vulgar in his mind,

she was only vulgar in her soul.

Of one thing I was sure: they would both be, on the whole, satisfied with

life, Jane because she would get what she wanted, Clare because she would

be content with little. Clare would inevitably marry; as inevitably, she

would love her husband and her children, and come to regard her passion

for Oliver Hobart and its tragic sequel as a romantic episode of

girlhood, a sort of sowing of wild oats before the real business of life

began. And Jane would, I presumed, ultimately marry Gideon, who was too

good for her, altogether too fine and too good. For Gideon was direct and

keen and passionate, and loved and hated cleanly, and thought finely and

acutely. Gideon wasn't greedy; he took life and its pleasures and

triumphs and amusements in his stride, as part of the day's work; he

didn't seek them out for their own sakes. Gideon lived for causes and

beliefs and ideals. He was temperamentally Christian, though he didn't

happen to believe Christian dogma. He had his alloy, like other people,

of ambition and selfishness, but so much less than, for instance, I have,

that it is absurd that he should be the agnostic and I the professing

Christian.

7

The Christian Church. Sometimes one feels that it is a fantasy, the

flaming ideal one has for it. One thinks of it as a fire, a sword, an

army with banners marching against dragons; one doesn't see how such

power can be withstood, be the dragons never so strong. And then one

looks round and sees it instead as a frail organisation of the lame, the

halt, and the blind, a tepid organisation of the satisfied, the

bourgeois, the conventionally genteel, a helpless organisation of the

ignorant, the half-witted, the stupid; an organisation full to the brim

of cant, humbug, timid orthodoxy, unreality, self-content, and all kinds

of Potterism--and one doesn't see how it can overcome anything whatever.

What is the truth? Where, between these two poles, does the actual

church stand? Or does it, like most of us its members, swing to and from

between them, touching now one, now the other? A Potterite church--yes;

because we are most of us Potterites. An anti-Potterite church--yes,

again; because at its heart is something sharp and clean and fine and

direct, like a sword, which will not let us be contented Potterites, but

which is for ever goading us out of ourselves, pricking us out of our

trivial satisfactions and our egotistic discontents.

I suppose the fact is that the Church can only work on the material it

finds, and do a little here and a little there. It would be a sword in

the hands of such men as Gideon; on the other hand, it can't do much

with the Clare Potters. The real thing frightens them if ever they see

it; the sham thing they mould to their own liking, till it is no more

than a comfortable shelter from the storms of life. It is the world's

Potters who have taken the Church and spoilt it, degraded it to the

poor dull thing it is. It is the Potterism in all of us which at every

turn checks and drags it down. Personally, I can forgive Potterism

everything but that.

What is one to do about it?

PART VI:

TOLD BY R.M.

CHAPTER I

THE END OF A POTTER MELODRAMA

1

While Clare talked to Juke in the vestry, Jane talked to her parents at

Potter's Bar. She was trying to make them drop their campaign against

Gideon. But she had no success. Lady Pinkerton said, 'The claims of Truth

are inexorable. Truth is a hard god to follow, and often demands the

sacrifice of one's personal feelings.' Lord Pinkerton said, 'I think, now

the thing has gone so far, it had better be thoroughly sifted. If Gideon

is innocent, it is only due to him. If he is guilty, it is due to the

public. You must remember that he edits a paper which has a certain

circulation; small, no doubt, but still, a circulation. He is not

altogether like a private and irresponsible person.'

Lady Pinkerton remarked that we are none of us that, we all owe a duty to

society, and so forth.

Then Clare came in, just as they had finished dinner. She would not have

any. Her face was red and swollen with crying. She said she had something

to tell them at once, that would not keep a moment. Mr. Gideon mustn't be

suspected any more of having killed Oliver, for she had done it herself,

after Mr. Gideon had left the house.

They did not believe her at first. She was hysterical, and they all knew

Clare. But she grew more circumstantial about it, till they began to

believe it. After all, they reasoned, it explained her having been so

completely knocked over by the catastrophe.

Jane asked her why she had done it. She said she had only meant to push

him away from her, and he had fallen.

Lady Pinkerton said, 'Push him away, my dear! Then was he ...'

Was he too close, she meant. Clare cried and did not answer. Lady

Pinkerton concluded that Oliver had been trying to kiss Clare, and that

Clare had repulsed him. Jane knew that Lady Pinkerton thought this, and

so did Clare. Jane thought 'Clare means us to think that. That doesn't

mean it's true. Clare hasn't got what Arthur calls a grip on facts.'

Lord Pinkerton said, 'This is very painful, my dears; very painful

indeed. Jane, my dear ...'

He meant that Jane was to go away, because it was even more painful for

her than for the others. But Jane didn't go. It wasn't painful for Jane

really. She felt hard and cold, and as if nothing mattered. She was angry

with Clare for crying instead of explaining what had happened.

Lady Pinkerton said, passing her hand over her forehead in the tired way

she had and shutting her eyes, 'My dear, you are over-wrought. You don't

know what you are saying. You will be able to tell us more clearly in

the morning.'

But Clare said they must believe her now, and Lord Pinkerton must

telephone up to the _Haste_ and have the stuff about the Hobart

Mystery stopped.

'My poor child,' said Lady Pinkerton, 'what has made you suddenly, so

long after, tell us this terrible story?'

Clare sobbed that she hadn't been able to bear it on her mind any more,

and also that she hadn't known till lately that Gideon was suspected.

Lord and Lady Pinkerton looked at each other, wondering what to believe,

then at Jane, wishing she was gone, so that they could ask Clare more

about it. Jane said, 'Don't mind me. I don't mind hearing about it.' Jane

meant to stay. She thought that if she was gone they would persuade Clare

she had dreamed it all and that it had been really Gideon after all.

Jane asked Clare why she had pushed Oliver, thinking that she ought to

explain, and not cry. But still Clare only cried, and at last said she

couldn't ever tell any one. Lady Pinkerton turned pink, and Lord

Pinkerton walked up and down and said, 'Tut tut,' and it was more obvious

than ever what Clare meant.

She added, 'But I never meant, indeed I never meant, to hurt him. He just

fell back, and ...'

'Was killed,' Jane finished for her. Jane thought Clare was like their

mother in trying to avoid plain words for disagreeable things.

Clare cried and cried. 'Oh,' she said, 'I've not had a happy moment

since,' which was as nearly true as these excessive statements ever are.

Lady Pinkerton tried to calm her, and said, 'My poor, dear child, you

don't know what you are saying. You must go to bed now, and tell us in

the morning, when you are more yourself.'

Clare didn't go to bed until Lord Pinkerton had promised to ring up the

_Haste_. Then she went, with Lady Pinkerton, who was crying too now,

because she was beginning to believe the story.

2

Jane didn't know what she believed. She didn't believe what Clare had

implied--that Oliver had tried to kiss her. Because Oliver hadn't been

like that; it wasn't the sort of thing he did. Jane thought it caddish of

Clare to have tried to make them think that of him. But she might, Jane

thought, have been angry with him about something else; she might have

pushed him.... Or she might not; she might be imagining or inventing the

whole thing. You never knew, with Clare.

If it was true, Jane thought, she had been a fool about Arthur. But, if

he hadn't done it, why had he been so queer? Why had he avoided her, and

been so odd and ashamed from the first morning on?

Perhaps, thought Jane, he had suspected Clare.

She would see him to-morrow morning, and ask him.

3

Jane saw Gideon next day. She rang him up, and he came over to Hampstead

after tea.

It was the first time Jane had seen him alone for more than a month. He

looked thin and ill.

Jane loved him. She had loved him through everything. He might have

killed Oliver; it made no difference to her caring for him.

But she hoped he hadn't.

He came into the drawing-room. Jane remembered that other night, when

Oliver--poor Oliver--had been vexed to find him there. Poor Oliver. Poor

Oliver. But Jane couldn't really care. Not really, only gently, and in a

way that didn't hurt. Not as if Gideon were dead and shut away from

everything. Not as if she herself were.

Jane didn't pretend. As Lady Pinkerton would say, the claims of Truth

were inexorable.

Gideon came in quickly, looking grave and worried, as if he had something

on his mind.

Jane said, 'Arthur, please tell me. _Did_ you knock Oliver down

that night?'

He stood and stared at her, looking astonished and startled.

Then he said, slowly, 'Oh, I see. You mean, am I going to admit that I

did, when I am accused.... If there's no other way out, I am.... It will

be all right, Jane,' he said very gently. 'You needn't be afraid.'

Jane didn't understand him.

'Then you did it,' she said, and sat down. She felt sick, and her

head swam.

Gideon stood over her, tall and stooping, biting the nail of his

middle finger.

'You see,' Jane said, 'I'd begun to hope last night that you hadn't done

it after all.'

'What are you talking about?' he asked.

Jane said, 'Clare told us that it happened--that he fell--after you had

left the house. So I hoped she might be speaking the truth, and that

you hadn't done it after all. But if you did, we must go on thinking of

ways out.'

'If--I--did,' Gideon said after her slowly. 'You know I didn't, Jane.

Why are you talking like this? What's the use, when I know, and you know,

and you know that I know, the truth about it? It can do no good.'

He was, for the first time, stern and angry with her.

'The truth?' Jane said. 'I wish you'd tell it me, Arthur.'

The truth. If Gideon told her anything, it would be the truth, she knew.

He wasn't like Clare, who couldn't.

But he only looked at her oddly, and didn't speak. Jane looked back into

his eyes, trying to read his mind, and so for a moment he stared down at

her and she stared up at him.

Jane perceived that he had not done it. Had he, then, guessed all this

time that Clare had, and been trying to shield her?

Then, slowly, his face, which had been frowning and tense, changed

and broke up.

'Good God!' he said. 'Tell me the truth, Jane. It _was_ you, wasn't it?'

Then Jane understood.

She said, 'You thought it was _me_.... And I thought it was you! Is it me

you've been so ashamed of all this time then, not yourself?'

'Yes,' he said, still staring at her. 'Of course.... It _wasn't_ you,

then.... And you thought it was me?... But how could you think that,

Jane? I'd have told; I wouldn't have been such a silly fool as to sneak

away and say nothing. You might have known that. You must have had a

pretty poor opinion of me, to think I'd do that.... Good lord, how you

must have loathed me all this time!'

'No, I haven't. Have you loathed me, then?'

He said quickly, 'That's different,' but he didn't explain why.

After a moment he said, 'It was just an accident then, after all.'

'Yes ... Clare was talking to him when he fell.... She's only just told

about it, because you were being suspected. But I never know whether to

believe Clare; she's such a gumph. I had to ask you.... What made you

suspect _me_, by the way?'

'Your manner, that first morning. You dragged me into the dining-room, do

you remember, and talked about how they all thought it was an accident,

and no one would guess if we were careful, and I wasn't to say anything.

What else was I to think? It was really your own fault.'

Jane said, 'Well, anyhow, we're quits. We've both spent six weeks

thinking each other murderers. Now we'll stop.... I don't wonder you

fought shy of me, Arthur.'

He looked at her curiously.

'Didn't you fight shy of me, then? You can hardly have wanted to see much

of me in the circumstances.'

'I didn't, of course. It was awful. Besides, you were so queer and

disagreeable. I thought it was a guilty conscience, but really I suppose

it was disgust.'

'Not disgust. No. Not that.' He seemed to be balancing the word 'disgust'

in his mind, considering it, then rejecting it. 'But,' he said, 'it would

have been difficult to pretend nothing had happened, wouldn't it.... I

didn't blame you, you know, for the thing itself. I knew it must have

been an accident--that you never meant ... what happened.... Well,

anyhow, that's all over. It's been pretty ghastly. Let's forget it....

What Potterish minds you and I must have, Jane, to have built up such a

sensational melodrama out of an ordinary accident. I think Lord Pinkerton

would find me useful on one of his papers; I'm wasted on the _Fact_. You

and I; the two least likely people in the world for such fancies, you'd

think--except Katherine. By the way, Katherine half thought I'd done it,

you know. So did Jukie.'

'I'm inclined now to think that K thought I had, that evening she came to

see me. She was rather sick with me for letting you be accused.'

'A regular Potter melodrama,' said Gideon. 'It might be in one of your

mother's novels or your father's papers. That just shows, Jane, how

infectious a thing Potterism is. It invades the least likely homes, and

upsets the least likely lives. Horrible, catching disease.'

Gideon was walking up and down the room in his restless way, playing with

the things on the tables. He stopped suddenly, and looked at Jane.

'Jane,' he said, 'we won't, you and I, have any more secrets and

concealments between us. They're rotten things. Next time it occurs to

you that I've committed a crime, ask me if it is so. And I'll do the same

to you, at whatever risk of being offensive. We'll begin now by telling

each other what we feel.... You know I love you, my dear.'

Oh, yes, Jane knew that. She said, 'I suppose I do, Arthur.'

He said, 'Then what about it? Do you ...' and she said, 'Rather, of

course I do.'

Then they kissed each other, and settled to get married next May or June.

The baby was coming in January.

'You'll have to put up with baby, you know, Arthur,' Jane said.

'Of course, poor little kid. I rather like them. It's rough luck on it

not having a father of its own. I'll try to be decent to it.'

That would be queer, thought Jane, Arthur being decent to Oliver's kid; a

boy, perhaps, with Oliver's face and Oliver's mind. Poor little kid: but

Jane would love it, and Arthur would be decent to it, and its

grandparents would spoil it; it would be their favourite, if any more

came. They wouldn't like the others, because they would be Gideon's. They

might look like little Yids. Perhaps there wouldn't be any others. Jane

wasn't keen. They were all right when they were there--jolly little

comics, all slippy in their baths, like eels--but they were an

unspeakable nuisance while on the way. A rotten system.

4

All next day Jane felt like stopping people in the streets and shouting

at them, 'Arthur didn't do it. Nor did I. It was only that silly ass,

Clare, or else it was an accident.' For even now Jane wasn't sure which

she thought.

But the only person to whom she really said it was Katherine. One told

Katherine things, because she was as deep and as quiet as the grave.

Also, if Jane hadn't told her what Clare had said, she would have gone on

thinking it was Jane, and Jane didn't like that. Jane did not care to

give Katherine more reasons for making her feel cheap than necessary. She

would always think Jane cheap, anyhow, because Jane only cared about

having a good time, and Katherine thought one should care chiefly about

one's job. Jane supposed she was cheap, but didn't much care. She felt

she would rather be herself. She had a better time, and would have a

better time still before she had done; better than Johnny, with the

rubbishy books he was writing and making his firm bring out for him and

feeling so pleased with. Jane knew she could write better stuff than

Johnny could, any day. And her books would be in addition to Gideon, and

babies, and other amusing things.

Jane told Katherine Clare's story. Katherine said, 'H'm. Perhaps. I

wonder. It's as likely as not all bumkum that she pushed him. She was

probably talking to him when he fell, and got worked up about it later.

The Potter press and Leila Yorke touch. However, you never know. Quite a

light push might do it. Those stairs of yours are awful. I really advise

you to be careful, Jane.'

'You thought I'd done it, didn't you, old thing?'

'For a bit, I did. For a bit I thought it was Arthur. So did Jukie. You

never know. Any one might push any one else. Even Clare may have.'

'You must have thought I was a pretty mean little beast, to let Arthur be

suspected without owning up.'

'I did,' Katherine admitted. 'Selfish ...'

She was looking at Jane in her considering way. Her bright blue eyes

seemed always to go straight through what she was looking at, like

X-rays. When she looked at Jane now, she seemed somehow to be seeing in

her not only the present but the past. It was as if she remembered, and

was making Jane remember, all kinds of old things Jane had done. Things

she had done at Oxford; things she had done since; things Katherine

neither blamed nor condemned, but just took into consideration when

thinking what sort of a person Jane was. You had the same feeling with

Katherine that you had sometimes with Juke, of being analysed and

understood all through. You couldn't diddle either of them into thinking

you any nicer than you were. Jane didn't want to. It was more restful

just to be taken for what one was. Oliver had been always idealising her.

Gideon didn't do that; he knew her too well. Only he didn't bother much

about what she was, not being either a priest or a scientific chemist,

but a man in love.

'By the way,' said Katherine, 'are you and Arthur going to get married?'

Jane told her in May or June.

Katherine, who was lighting a cigarette, looked at Jane without smiling.

The flame of the match shone into her face, and it was white and cold

and quiet.

'She doesn't think I'm good enough for Arthur,' Jane thought. And anyhow,

K didn't, Jane knew, think much of marriage at all. Most women, if you

said you were going to get married, assumed it was a good thing. They

caught hold of you and kissed you. If you were a man, other men slapped

you on the back, or shook hands or something. They all thought, or

pretended to think, it was a fine thing you were doing. They didn't

really think so always. Behind their eyes you could often see them

thinking other things about it--wondering if you would like it, or why

you chose that one, and if it was because you preferred him or her to any

one else or because you couldn't get any one else. Or they would be

pitying you for stopping being a bachelor or spinster and having to grow

up and settle down and support a wife or manage servants and babies. But

all that was behind; they didn't show it; they would say, 'Good for you,

old thing,' and kiss you or shake your hand.

Katherine did neither to Jane. She hadn't when it was Oliver Hobart,

because she hadn't thought it a suitable marriage. She didn't, now it was

Arthur Gideon, perhaps for the same reason. She didn't talk about it. She

talked about something else.

CHAPTER II

ENGAGED TO BE MARRIED

1

The fine weather ended. Early October had been warm, full of golden

light, with clear, still evenings. Later the wind blustered, and it was

cold. Sometimes Jane felt sick; that was the baby. But not often. She

went about all right, and she was writing--journalism and a novel. She

thought she would perhaps send it in for a prize novel competition in the

spring, only she felt no certainty of pleasing the three judges, all so

very dissimilar. Jane's work was a novel about a girl at school and

college and thereafter. Perhaps it would be the first of a trilogy;

perhaps it would not. The important thing was that it should be well

reviewed. How did one work that? You could never tell. Some things were

well reviewed, others weren't. Partly luck it was, thought Jane. Novels

were better treated usually than they deserved. Verse about as well as it

deserved, which, however, wasn't, as a rule, saying very much. Some kinds

of book were unkindly used--anthologies of contemporary verse, for

instance. Someone would unselfishly go to the trouble of collecting some

of the recent poetical output which he or she personally preferred and

binding it up in a pleasant portable volume, and you would think all that

readers had to do was to read what they liked in it, if anything, and

leave out the rest and be grateful. Instead, it would be slated by

reviewers, and compared to the Royal Academy, and to a literary signpost

pointing the wrong way, and other opprobrious things; as if an anthology

could point to anything but the taste of the compiler, which of course

could not be expected to agree with any one else's; tastes never do. The

thing was, thought Jane, to hit the public taste with the right thing at

the right moment. Another thing was to do better than Johnny. That should

be possible, because Jane _was_ better than Johnny; had always been. Only

there was this baby, which made her feel ill before it came, and would

need care and attention afterwards. It wasn't fair. If Johnny married and

had a baby it wouldn't get in his way, only in its mamma's. It was a

handicap, like your frock (however short it was) when you were climbing.

You had got round that by taking it off and climbing in knickerbockers,

but you couldn't get round a baby. And Jane wanted the baby too.

'I suppose I want everything,' said Jane.

Johnny wanted everything too. He got a lot. He got love. He was

polygamous by nature, and usually had more than one girl on hand. That

autumn he had two. One was Nancy Sharpe, the violinist. They were always

about together. People who didn't know either of them well, thought they

would get engaged. But neither of them wanted that. The other girl was a

different kind: the lovely, painted, music-hall kind you don't meet. No

one thought Johnny would marry her, of course. They merely passed the

time for one another.

Jane wondered if the equivalent man would pass the time for her. She

didn't think so. She thought she would get bored with never talking about

anything interesting. And it must, she thought, be pretty beastly having

to kiss people who used cheap scent and painted their lips. One would be

afraid the red stuff would come off. In fact, it surely would. Didn't men

mind--clean men, like Johnny? Men are so different, thought Jane. Johnny

was the same at Oxford. He would flirt with girls in tea-shops. Jane had

never wanted to flirt with the waiters in restaurants. Men were perhaps

less critical; or perhaps they wanted different qualities in those with

whom they flirted; or perhaps it was that their amatory instinct, when

pronounced at all, was much stronger than women's, and flowed out on to

any object at hand when they were in the mood. Also, they certainly grew

up earlier. At Oxford and Cambridge girls weren't, for the most part,

grown-up enough to be thinking about that kind of thing at all. It came

on later, with most of them. But men of that age were, quite a lot of

them, mature enough to flirt with the girls in Buol's.

Jane discussed it with Gideon one evening. Gideon said, 'Men usually

have, as a rule, more sex feeling than women, that's all. Naturally. They

need more, to carry them through all the business of making marriage

proposals and keeping up homes, and so on. Women often have very little.

That's why they're often better at friendship than men are. A woman can

be a man's friend all their lives, but a man, in nine cases out of ten,

will either get tired of it or want more. Women have a tremendous gift

for friendship. Their friendships with other women are usually much more

devoted and more faithful than a man's with other men. Most men, though

of course not all, want sex in their lives at some time or other.

Hundreds of women are quite happy without it. They're quite often nearly

sexless. Very few men are that.'

Jane said, 'There are plenty of women like Clare, whom one can't think of

apart from sex. No friendship would ever satisfy her. If she isn't a wife

and mother she'll be starved. She'll marry, of course.'

'Yes,' Gideon agreed. 'There are plenty of women like that. And when a

woman is like that, she's much more dependent on love and marriage than

any man is, because she usually has fewer other things in her life. But

there are women also like Katherine.'

'Oh, Katherine. K isn't even dependent on friendship. She only wants her

work. K isn't typical.'

'No; she isn't typical. She isn't a channel for the life force, like most

of us. She's too independent; she won't let herself be used in that way.'

'Am I a channel for the life force?' thought Jane. 'I suppose so. Hence

Oliver and baby. Is Arthur? I suppose so. Hence his wanting to marry me.'

2

Jane told her family that she was going to marry Gideon. Lady Pinkerton

said, 'It's extraordinary to me that you can think of it, Jane, after all

that has happened. Surely, my child, the fact that it was the last thing

Oliver would wish should have some weight with you. Whatever plane he may

be on now, he must be disturbed by such news as this. Besides, dear

child, it is far too soon. You should wait at least a year before taking

such a step. And Arthur Gideon! Not only a Jew, Jane, and not only a man

of such very unfortunate political principles, but one who has never

attempted to conceal his spiteful hostility both to father's papers and

my books. But perhaps, as I believe you agree with him in despising both

of these, that may be an extra bond between you. Only you must _see_ that

it will make family life extremely awkward.'

Of course it would. But family lives nearly always are awkward, Jane

thought; it is one of the things about them.

Lady Pinkerton added, having suddenly remembered it, 'Besides, my dear,

he _drinks_; you told me so yourself.'

Jane said, if she had, she had lied, doubtless for some good reason now

forgotten by her. He didn't drink, not in the excessive sense of that

word obviously intended by Lady Pinkerton. Lady Pinkerton was

unconvinced; she still was sure he drank in that sense.

She resumed, 'And Jewish babies! I wonder you can think of it, Jane. They

may be a throw-back to a most degraded Russian-Jewish type. What brothers

and sisters for the dear mite who is coming first! My dear, I do beg you

to think this over long and seriously before committing yourself. You may

live to repent it bitterly.'

Clare said, '_Jane_! How _can_ you--after ...'

After Oliver, she meant. She would never say his name; perhaps one

doesn't like to when one has killed a man.

Jane thought, 'Why didn't I leave Oliver to Clare? She'd have suited him

much better. I was stupid; I thought I wanted him. I did want him. But

not in the way I want Arthur now. One wants so many things.'

Lord Pinkerton said, 'You're making a big mistake, Babs. That fellow

won't last. He's building on sand, as the Bible puts it--building on

sand. I hear on good authority that the _Fact_ can't go on many months

longer, unless it changes its tone and methods considerably; it's got no

chance of fighting its way as it is now. People don't want that kind of

thing. They don't want anything the Gideon lot will give them. Gideon and

his sort haven't got the goods. They're building on the sand of their own

fancy, not on the rock of general human demand. I hear that that daily

they talked of starting can't come off yet, either.... The chap's a bad

investment, Babs.... And he despises me and my goods, you know. That'll

be awkward.'

'Not you, daddy. The papers, he does. He rather likes you, though he

doesn't approve of you.... He doesn't like mother, and she doesn't like

him. But people often don't get on with their mothers-in-law.'

'It's an awkward alliance, my dear, a very awkward alliance. What will

people say? Besides, he's a Jew.'

Jewish babies; he was thinking of them too.

Jane thought, bother the babies. Perhaps there wouldn't be any, and if

there were, they'd only be a quarter Jew. Anyhow, it wasn't them she

wanted; it was Arthur.

Arthur opened doors and windows. You got to the edge of your own thought,

and then stepped out beyond into his thought. And his thought drove sharp

and hard into space.

But more than this, Jane loved the way his hair grew, and the black line

his eyebrows made across his forehead, and the way he stood, tall and

lean and slouching, and his keen thin face and his long thin hands, and

the way his mouth twisted up when he smiled, and his voice, and the whole

of him. She wondered if he loved her like that--if he turned hot and cold

when he saw her in the distance. She believed that he did love her like

that. He had loved her, as she had loved him, all that time he had

thought she was lying to every one about Oliver's death.

'It isn't what people do,' said Jane, 'that makes one love them or stop

loving them.'

'Is this,' she thought, 'what Clare felt for Oliver? I didn't know it was

like this, or I wouldn't have taken him from her. Poor old Clare.' Could

one love Oliver like that? Any one, Jane supposed, could be loved like

that, by the right person. And people like Clare loved more intensely

than people like her; they felt more, and had fewer other occupations.

Jane hadn't known that she could feel so much about anything as she was

feeling now about Gideon. It was interesting. She wondered how long it

would last, at this pitch.

CHAPTER III

THE PRECISIAN AT WAR WITH THE WORLD

1

Jane's baby was born in January. As far as babies can be like grown human

beings, it was like its grandfather--a little Potter.

Lord Pinkerton was pleased.

'He shall carry on the papers,' he said, dandling it on his arm.

'Tootooloo, grandson!' He dug it softly in the ribs. He understood this

baby. However many little Yids Jane might achieve in the future, there

would be this little Potter to carry on his own dreams.

Clare came to see it. She was glad it wasn't like Oliver; Jane saw her

being glad of that. She was beginning to fall in love with a young

naval officer, but still she couldn't have seen Oliver in Jane's child

without wincing.

Gideon came to see it. He laughed.

'Potter for ever,' he said.

He added. 'It's symbolic. Potters will be for ever, you know. They're so

strong....'

The light from the foggy winter afternoon fell on his face as he sat by

the window. He looked tired and perplexed. Strength, perpetuity, seemed

things remote from him, belonging only to Potters. Anti-Potterism and the

_Weekly Fact_ were frail things of a day, rooted in a dream. So Gideon

felt, on these days when the fog closed about him....

Jane looked at her son, the strange little animal, and thought not

'Potter for ever,' but 'me for ever,' as was natural, and as parents will

think of their young, who will carry them down the ages in an ever more

distant but never lost immortality, an atom of dust borne on the hurrying

stream. Jane, who believed in no other personal immortality, found it in

this little Potter in her arms. Holding him close, she loved him, in a

curious, new, physical way. So this was motherhood, this queer, sensuous,

cherishing love. It would have been a pity not to have known it; it was,

after all, an emotion, more profound than most.

2

When Jane was well enough, she gave a party for Charles, as if he had

been a new picture she had painted and wanted to show off. Her friends

came and looked at him, and thought how clever of her to have had him,

all complete and alive and jolly like that, a real baby. He was better

than the books and things they wrote, because he was more alive, and

would also last longer, with luck. Their books wouldn't have a run of

four score years and ten or whatever it was; they'd be lucky if any one

thought of them again in five years.

But partly Jane gave the party to show people that Charles didn't

monopolise her, that she was well and active again, and ready for work

and life. If she wasn't careful, she might come to be regarded as the

mere mother, and dropped out.

Johnny said, grinning amiably at her and Charles, 'Ah, you're

thinking that your masterpiece quite puts mine in the shade, aren't

you, old thing.'

He had a novel just out. It was as good as most young men's first novels.

'I'm not sure,' said Jane, 'that Charles is my masterpiece. Wait till the

other works appear, and I'll tell you.'

Johnny grinned more, supposing that she meant the little Yids.

'My books, I mean,' Jane added quickly.

'Oh, your books.'

'They're going to be better than yours, my dear,' said Jane. 'Wait and

see.... But I dare say they won't be as good as this.' She appraised

Charles with her eyes.

'But, oh, so much less trouble,' she added, swinging him up and down.

'I could have one as good as that,' said Johnny thoughtfully, 'with no

trouble at all.'

'You'd have to work for it and keep it. And its mother. You wouldn't like

that, you know.... Of course you ought to. It's your duty. Every young

man who survives.... Daddy says so. You'd better do it, John. You're

getting on, you know.'

Young men hate getting on. They hate it, really, more than young women

do. Youth is of such immense value, in almost any career, but

particularly to the young writer.

But Johnny only said, with apparent nonchalance, 'Twenty-seven is not

very old.' He added, however, 'Anyhow, you're five minutes older, and

I've published a book, if you have produced that thing.'

Johnny was frankly greedy about his book. He hung on reviews; he asked

for it in bookshops, and expressed astonishment and contempt when they

had not got it. And it was, after all, nothing to make a song about, Jane

thought. It wasn't positively discreditable to its writer, like most

novels, but it was a very normal book, by a very normal cleverish young

man. Johnny wasn't sure that his publishers advertised it as much as was

desirable.

Gideon came up to Jane and Charles. He had just arrived. He had three

evening papers in his hand. His fellow passengers had left them in the

train, and he had collected them. Jews often get their news that way.

Johnny saw his friend Miss Nancy Sharpe disengaged and looking lovely,

and went to speak to her. He was really in love with her a little, though

he didn't go as far as wanting to work for her and keep her. He was quite

right; that is to go too far, when so much happiness is attainable short

of it. Johnny wisely shunned desperate measures. So, to do her justice,

did Miss Sharpe.

'Johnny's very elated,' said Jane to Gideon, looking after him. 'What do

_you_ think of his book, Arthur?'

Gideon said, 'I don't think of it. I've had no reason to, particularly.

I've not had to review it.... I'm afraid I'm hopeless about novels just

now, that's the fact. I'm sick of the form--slices of life served up cold

in three hundred pages. Oh, it's very nice; it makes nice reading for

people. But what's the use? Except, of course, to kill time for those who

prefer it dead. But as things in themselves, as art, they've been ruined

by excess. My critical sense is blunted just now. I can hardly feel the

difference, though I see it, between a good novel and a bad one. I

couldn't write one, good or bad, to save my life, I know that. And I've

got to the stage when I wish other people wouldn't. I wish every one

would shut up, so that we could hear ourselves think--like in the

Armistice Day pause, when all the noise stopped.'

Jane shook her head.

'You may be sure we shan't do that. Not likely. We all want to hear

ourselves talk. And quite right too. We've got things to say.'

'Nothing of importance. Few things that wouldn't be better unsaid. Life

isn't talking.'

'A journalist's is,' Jane pointed out, and he nodded.

'Quite true. Horribly true. It's chiefly myself I'm hitting at. But at

least we journalists don't take ourselves solemnly; we know our stuff is

babble to fill a moment. Novelists and poets don't always know that;

they're apt to think it matters. And, of course, so far as any of them

can make and hold beauty, even a fragment of it here and there, it does

matter. The trouble is that they mostly can't do anything of the sort.

They don't mostly even know how to try. All but a few verse-makers are

shallow, muddled, or sentimental, and most novelists are commercial as

well. They haven't the means; they aren't adequately equipped; they've

nothing in them worth the saying. Why say it, then? A little cleverness

isn't worth while.'

'You're morbid, Arthur.'

'Morbid? Diseased? I dare say. We most of us are. What's health, after

all? No one knows.'

'I've done eighty thousand words of my novel, anyhow.'

'I'm sorry. Nearly all novels are too long. All you've got to say would

go into forty thousand.'

'I don't write because I've got things to say. I haven't a message, like

mother. I write because it amuses me. And because I like to be a

novelist. It's done. And I like to be well spoken of--reasonably well,

that is. It's all fun. Why not?'

'Oh, don't ask _me_ why not. I can't preach sermons all the evening.'

He smiled down on her out of his long sad black eyes, glad of her because

she saw straight and never canted, impatient of her because her ideals

were commercial, loving her because she was gray-eyed and white-skinned

and desirable, seeing her much as Nancy Sharpe, who lived for music, saw

Johnny Potter, only with ardour instead of nonchalance; such ardour,

indeed, that his thoughts of her only intermittently achieved exactitude.

Two girls came up to admire Charles. Jane said it was time she took him

to bed, and they went up with her.

Gideon turned away. He hated parties, and seldom went even to Jane's. He

stood drinking coffee and watching people. You met most of them at the

club and elsewhere continually; why meet them all again in a

drawing-room? There was his sister Rosalind and her husband Boris Stefan

with their handsome faces and masses of black hair. Rosalind had a baby

too (at home); a delicate, pretty, fair-haired thing, like Rosalind's

Manchester mother. And Charles was like Jane's Birmingham father. It was

Manchester and Birmingham that persisted, not Palestine or Russia.

And there was Juke, with his white, amused face and heavy-lidded eyes

that seemed always to see a long way, and Katherine Varick talking to a

naval officer about periscopes (Jane kept in with some of the Admiralty),

and Peacock, with whom Gideon had quarrelled two hours ago at the _Fact_

office, and who was now in the middle of a group of writing young men, as

usual. Gideon looked at him cynically. Peacock was letting himself be got

at by a clique. Gideon would rather have seen him talking to the

practical looking sailor about periscopes. Peacock would have to be

watched. He had shown signs lately of colouring the _Fact_ with

prejudices. He was getting in with a push; he was dangerously in the

movement. He was also leaning romancewards, and departing from the realm

of pure truth. He had given credence to some strange travellers' tales of

Foreign Office iniquities. As if that unfortunate and misguided body had

not enough sins to its account without having melodramatic and

uncharacteristic kidnappings and deeds of violence attributed to it. But

Peacock had got in with those unhappy journalists and others who had been

viewing Russia, and, barely escaping with their lives, had come back with

nothing else, and least of all with that accurate habit of mind which

would have qualified them as contributors to the _Weekly Fact_. It was

not their fault (except for going to Russia), but Peacock should have had

nothing to do with them.

Katherine Varick crossed the room to Gideon, with a faint smile.

'Hallo. Enjoying life?'

'Precisely that.'

'I say, what are you doing with the _Fact_?'

Gideon looked at her sourly.

'Oh, you've noticed it too. It's becoming quite pretty reading, isn't it.

Less like a Blue Book.'

'Much less. I should say it was beginning to appeal to a wider circle.

Is that the idea?'

'Don't ask me. Ask Peacock. Whatever the idea is, it's his, not mine....

But it's not a considered idea at all. It's merely a yielding to the

(apparently) irresistible pressure of atmosphere.'

'I see. A truce with the Potter armies.'

'No. There's no such thing as a truce with them. It's the first steps of

a retreat.'

He said it sharply and suddenly, in the way of a man who is, at the

moment, making a discovery. He turned and looked across the room at

Peacock, who was talking and talking, in his clever, keen, pleasant way,

not in the least like a Blue Book.

'We're _not_ like Blue Books,' Gideon muttered sadly. 'Hardly any one is.

Unfortunate. Very unfortunate. What's one to do about it?'

'Lord Pinkerton would say, learn human nature as it is and build on it.

Exploit its weaknesses, instead of tilting against them. Accept

sentimentality and prejudice, and use them.'

'I am aware that he would.... What do _you_ say, Katherine?'

'Nothing. What's the use? I'm one of the Blue Books--not a fair judge,

therefore.'

'No. You'd make no terms, ever.'

'I've never been tempted. One may have to make terms, sometimes.'

'I think not,' said Gideon. 'I think one never is obliged to make terms.'

'If the enemy is too strong?'

'Then one goes under. Gets out of it. That's not making terms....

Good-night; I'm going home. I hate parties, you know. So do you. Why do

either of us go to them?'

'They take one's thoughts off,' said Katherine in her own mind. Her blue

eyes contracted as she looked after him.

'He's failing; he's being hurt. He'll go under. He should have been a

scientist or a scholar or a chemist, like me; something in which

knowledge matters and people don't. People will break his heart.'

3

Gideon walked all the way back from Hampstead to his own rooms. It was a

soft, damp night, full of little winds that blew into the city from

February fields and muddy roads far off. There would be lambs in the

fields.... Gideon suddenly wanted to get out of the town into that damp,

dark country that circled it. There would be fewer people there; fewer

minds crowded together, making a dense atmosphere that was impervious to

the piercing, however sharp, of truth. All this dense mass of stupid,

muddled, huddled minds.... What was to be done with it? Greedy minds,

ignorant minds, sentimental, truthless minds....

He saw, as he passed a newspaper stand, placards in big black

letters--'Bride's Suicide.' 'Divorce of Baronet.' Then, small and

inconspicuous, hardly hoping for attention, 'Italy and the Adriatic.' For

one person who would care about Italy and the Adriatic, there would,

presumably, be a hundred who would care about the bride and the baronet.

Presumably; else why the placards? Gideon honestly tried to bend his

impersonal and political mind to understand it. He knew no such people,

yet one had to believe they existed; people who really cared that a bride

with whom they had no acquaintance (why a bride? Did that make her more

interesting?) had taken her life; and that a baronet (also a perfect

stranger) had had his marriage dissolved in a court of law. What quality

did it indicate, this curious and inexplicable interest in these topics

so tedious to himself and to most of his personal acquaintances? Was it a

love of romance? But what romance was to be found in suicide or divorce?

Romance Gideon knew; knew how it girdled the world, heard the beat of its

steps in far forests, the whisper of its wings on dark seas.... It is

there, not in divorces and suicides. Were people perhaps moved by desire

to hear about the misfortunes of others? No, because they also welcomed

with eagerness the more cheerful domestic episodes reported. Was it,

then, some fundamental, elemental interest in fundamental things, such as

love, hate, birth, death? That was possibly it. The relation of states

one with another are the product of civilisation, and need an at least

rudimentarily political brain to grasp them. The relations of human

beings are natural, and only need the human heart for their

understanding. That part of man's mind which has been, for some obscure

reason, inaccurately called the heart, was enormously and

disproportionately stronger than the rest of the mind, the thinking part.

'Light Caught Bending,' another placard remarked. That was more cheerful,

though it was an idiotic way of putting a theory as to the curvature of

space, but it was refreshing that, apparently, people were expected to be

excited by that too. And, Gideon knew it, they were. Einstein's theory

as to space and light would be discussed, with varying degrees of

intelligence, most of them low, in many a cottage, many a club, many a

train. There would be columns about it in the Sunday papers, with little

Sunday remarks to the effect that the finiteness of space did not limit

the infinity of God. Scientists have naïf minds where God is concerned;

they see him, if at all, in terms of space.

Anyhow, there it was. People were interested not only in divorce,

suicide, and murder, but in light and space, undulations and gravitation.

That was rather jolly, for that was true romance. It gave one more hope.

Even though people might like their science in cheap and absurd tabloid

form, they did like it. The Potter press exulted in scientific

discoveries made easy, but it was better than not exulting in them at

all. For these were things as they were, and therefore the things that

mattered. This was the satisfying world of hard, difficult facts, without

slush and without sentiment. This was the world where truth was sought

for its own sake.

'When I see truth, do I seek truth

Only that I may things denote,

And, rich by striving, deck my youth

As with a vain, unusual coat?'

Nearly every one in the ordinary world did that, if indeed they ever

concerned themselves with truth at all. And some scientists too, perhaps,

but not most. Scientists and scholars and explorers--they were the

people. They were the world's students, the learners, the discoverers.

They didn't talk till they knew....

Rain had begun to drizzle. At the corner of Marylebone Road and Baker

Street there was a lit coffee-stall. A group clustered about it; a

policeman drinking oxo, his waterproof cape shining with wet; two

taxi-cab drivers having coffee and buns; a girl in an evening cloak, with

a despatch case, eating biscuits.

Gideon passed by without stopping. A hand touched him on the arm, and a

painted face looked up into his, murmuring something. Gideon, who had a

particular dislike for paint on the human face, and, in general, for

persons who looked and behaved like this person, looked away from her

and scowled.

'I only wanted,' she explained, 'a cup of coffee ...' and he gave her

sixpence, though he didn't believe her.

Horrible, these women were; ugly; dirty; loathsome; so that one wondered

why on earth any one liked them (some people obviously did like them, or

they wouldn't be there), and yet, detestable as they were, they were the

outcome of facts. Possibly in them, and in the world's other ugly facts,

Potterism and all truth-shirking found whatever justification it had.

Sentimentalism spread a rosy veil over the ugliness, draping it decently.

Making it, thought Gideon, how much worse; but making it such as

Potterites could face unwincing.

The rain beat down. At its soft, chill touch Gideon's brain cooled and

cooled, till he seemed to see everything in a cold, hard, crystal

clarity. Life and death--how little they mattered. Life was paltry, and

death its end. Yet when the world, the Potterish world, dealt with death

it became something other than a mere end; it became a sensation, a

problem, an episode in a melodrama. The question, when a man died, was

always how and why. So, when Hobart had died, they were all dragged into

a net of suspicion and melodrama--they all became for a time absurd

actors in an absurd serial in the Potter press. You could not escape from

sensationalism in a sensational world. There was no room for the pedant,

with his greed for unadorned and unemotional precision.

Gideon sighed sharply as he turned into Oxford Street, Oxford Street was

and is horrible. Everything a street should not be, even when it was

down, and now it was up, which was far worse. If Gideon had not been

unnerved by the painted person at the corner of Baker Street he would

never have gone home this way, he would have gone along Marylebone and

Euston Road. As it was, he got into a bus and rode unhappily to Gray's

Inn Road, where he lived.

He sat up till three in the morning working out statistics for an

article. Statistics, figures, were delightful. They were a rest.

They mattered.

4

Two days later, at the _Fact_ office, Peacock, turning over galley slips,

said, 'This thing of yours on Esthonian food conditions looks like a

government schedule. Couldn't you make it more attractive?'

'To whom?' asked Gideon.

'Well--the ordinary reader.'

'Oh, the ordinary reader. I meant it to be attractive to people who want

information.'

'Well, but a little jam with the powder.... For instance, you draw no

inference from your facts. It's dull. Why not round the thing off into a

good article?'

'I can't round things. I don't like them round, either. I've given the

facts, unearthed with considerable trouble and pains. No one else has.

Isn't it enough?'

'Oh, it'll do.' Peacock's eyes glanced over the other proofs on his desk.

'We've got some good stuff this number.'

'Nice round articles--yes.' Gideon turned the slips over with his lean

brown fingers carelessly. He picked one up.

'Hallo. I didn't know that chap was reviewing _Coal and Wages_.'

'Yes. He asked if he could.'

'Do you think he knows enough?'

'It's quite a good review. Read it.'

Gideon read it carefully, then laid it down and said, 'I don't agree with

you that it's a good review. He's made at least two mistakes. And the

whole thing's biased by his personal political theories.'

'Only enough to give it colour.'

'You don't want colour in a review of a book of that sort. You only want

intelligence and exact knowledge.'

'Oh, Clitherton's all right. His head's screwed on the right way. He

knows his subject.'

'Not well enough. He's a political theorist, not a good economist. That's

hopeless. Why didn't you get Hinkson to do it?'

'Hinkson can't write for nuts.'

'Doesn't matter. Hinkson wouldn't have slipped up over his figures

or dates.'

'My dear old chap, writing does matter. You're going crazy on that

subject. Of course it matters that a thing should be decently put

together.'

'It matters much more that it should be well informed. It is, of course,

quite possible to be both.'

'Oh, quite. That's the idea of the _Fact_, after all.'

'Peacock, I hate all these slipshod fellows you get now. I wish you'd

chuck the lot. They're well enough for most journalism, but they don't

know enough for us.'

Peacock said, 'Oh, we'll thrash it out another time, if you don't mind.

I've got to get through some letters now,' and rang for his secretary.

Gideon went to his own room and searched old files for the verification

and correction of Clitherton's mistakes. He found them, and made a note

of them. Unfortunately they weakened Clitherton's argument a little.

Clitherton would have to modify it. Clitherton, a sweeping and wholesale

person, would not like that.

Gideon was feeling annoyed with Clitherton, and annoyed with several

others among that week's contributors, and especially annoyed with

Peacock, who permitted and encouraged them. If they went on like this,

the _Fact_ would soon be popular; it would find its way into the great

soft silly heart of the public and there be damned.

He was a pathetic figure, Arthur Gideon, the intolerant precisian,

fighting savagely against the tide of loose thinking that he saw surging

in upon him, swamping the world and drowning facts. He did not see

himself as a pathetic figure, or as anything else. He did not see himself

at all, but worked away at his desk in the foggy room, checking the

unconsidered or inaccurate or oversimplified statements of others,

writing his own section of the Notes of the Week, with his careful,

patient, fined brilliance, stopping to gnaw his pen or his thumb-nail or

to draw diagrams, triangle within triangle, or circle intersecting

circle, on his blotting paper.

CHAPTER IV

RUNNING AWAY

1

A week later Gideon resigned his assistant editorship of the _Fact_.

Peacock was, on the whole, relieved. Gideon had been getting too

difficult of late. After some casting about among eager, outwardly

indifferent possible successors, Peacock offered the job to Johnny

Potter, who was swimming on the tide of his first novel, which had been

what is called 'well spoken of' by the press, but who, at the same time,

had the popular touch, was quite a competent journalist, was looking out

for a job, and was young enough to do what he was told; that is to say,

he was four or five years younger than Peacock. He had also a fervent

enthusiasm for democratic principles and for Peacock's prose style

(Gideon had been temperate in his admiration of both), and Peacock

thought they would get on very well.

Jane was sulky, jealous, and contemptuous.

'Johnny. Why Johnny? He's not so good as lots of other people who would

have liked the job. He's swanking so already that it makes me tired to be

in the room with him, and now he'll be worse than ever. Oh, Arthur, it is

rot, your chucking it. I've a jolly good mind not to marry you. I thought

I was marrying the assistant editor of an important paper, not just a

lazy old Jew without a job.'

She ruffled up his black, untidy hair with her hand as she sat on the

arm of his chair; but she was really annoyed with him, as she had

explained a week ago when he had told her.

2

He had walked in one evening and found her in Charles's bedroom, bathing

him. Clare was there too, helping.

'Why do girls like washing babies?' Gideon speculated aloud. 'They nearly

all do, don't they?'

'Well, I should just _hope_ so,' Clare said. She was kneeling by the tin

bath with her sleeves rolled up, holding a warmed towel. Her face was

flushed from the fire, and her hair was loosened where Charles had caught

his toe in it. She looked pretty and maternal, and looked up at Gideon

with the kind of conventional, good-humoured scorn that girls and women

put on when men talk of babies. They do it (one believes) partly because

they feel it is a subject they know about, and partly to pander to men's

desire that they should do it. It is part of the pretty play between the

sexes. Jane never did it; she wasn't feminine enough. And Gideon did not

want her to do it; he thought it silly.

'Why do you hope so?' asked Gideon. 'And why do girls like it?'

The first question was to Clare, the second to Jane, because he knew that

Clare would not be able to answer it.

'The mites!' said Clare. 'Who _wouldn't_ like it?'

Gideon sighed a little, Clare tried him. She had an amorphous mind. But

Jane threw up at him, as she enveloped Charles in the towel, 'I'll try

and think it out some time, Arthur. I haven't time now.... There's a

reason all right.... The powder, Clare.'

Gideon watched the absurd drying and powdering process with gravity and

interest, as if trying to discover its charm.

'Even Katherine enjoys it,' he said, still pondering. It was true.

Katherine, who liked experimenting with chemicals, liked also washing

babies. Possibly Katherine knew why, in both cases.

After Charles was in bed, his mother, his aunt, and his prospective

stepfather had dinner. Clare, who was uncomfortable with Gideon, not

liking him as a brother-in-law or indeed as anything else (besides not

being sure how much Jane had told him about 'that awful night'),

chattered to Jane about things of which she thought Gideon knew

nothing--dances, plays, friends, family and Potters Bar gossip. Gideon

became very silent. He and Clare touched nowhere. Clare flaunted the

family papers in his face and Jane's. Lord Pinkerton was starting a new

one, a weekly, and it promised to sell better than any other weekly on

the market, but far better.

'Dad says the orders have been simply stunning. It's going to be a big

thing. Simple, you know, and yet clever--like all dad's papers. David

says' (David was the naval officer to whom Clare was now betrothed)

'there's _no one_ with such a sense of what people want as dad has. Far

more of it than Northcliffe, David says he has. Because, you know,

Northcliffe sometimes annoys people--look at the line he took about us

helping the Russians to fight each other. And making out in leaders,

David says, that the Government is always wrong just because he doesn't

like it. And drawing attention to the mistakes it makes, which no one

would notice if they weren't rubbed in. David gets quite sick with him

sometimes. He says the Pinkerton press never does that sort of thing,

it's got too much tact, and lets well alone.'

'I'll, you mean, don't you, darling?' Jane interpolated.

Clare, who did, but did not know it, only said, 'David's got a tremendous

admiration for it. He says it will _last_.'

'Oh, bother the paternal press,' Jane said. 'Give it a rest, old thing.

It may be new to David, but it's stale to us. It's Arthur's turn to talk

about his father's bank or something.'

But Arthur didn't talk. He only made bread pills, and the girls got on to

the newest dance.

3

Clare went away after dinner. She never stayed long when Gideon was

there. David didn't like Gideon, rightly thinking him a Sheeney.

'Sheeneys are at the bottom of Bolshevism, you know,' he told Clare. 'At

the top too, for that matter. Dreadful fellows; quite dreadful. Why the

dickens do you let Jane marry him?'

Clare shrugged her shoulders.

'Jane does what she likes. Dad and mother have begged and prayed her not

to.... Besides, of course, even if he was all right, it's too _soon_....'

'Too soon? Ah, yes, of course. Poor Hobart, you mean. Quite. Much too

soon.... A dreadful business, that. I don't blame her for trying to put

it behind her, out of sight. But with a _Sheeney_. Well, _chacun a son

goût.'_ For David was tolerant, a live and let live man.

When Clare was gone, Jane said, 'Wake up, old man. You can talk now....

You and Clare are stupid about each other, by the way. You'll have to get

over it some time. You're ill-mannered and she's a silly fool; but

ill-mannered people and silly fools can rub along together, all right, if

they try.'

'I don't mind Clare,' said Gideon, rousing himself. 'I wasn't thinking

about her, to say the truth. I was thinking about something else.... I'm

chucking the _Fact_, Jane.'

'How d'you mean, chucking the _Fact_' Jane lit a cigarette.

'What I say. I've resigned my job on it. I'm sick of it.'

'Oh, sick.... Every one's sick of work, naturally. It's what work is

for.... Well, what are you doing next? Have you been offered a

better job?'

'I've not been offered a job of any sort. And I shouldn't take it if I

were--not at present. I'm sick of journalism.'

Jane took it calmly, lying back among the sofa cushions and smoking.

'I was afraid you were working up to this.... Of course, if you chuck the

_Fact_ you take away its last chance. It'll do a nose-dive now.'

'It's doing it anyhow. I can't stop it. But I'm jolly well not going to

nose-dive with it. I'm clearing out.'

'You're giving up the fight, then. Caving in. Putting your hands up to

Potterism.'

She was taunting him, in her cool, unmoved, leisurely tones.

'I'm clearing out,' he repeated, emphasising the phrase, and his black

eyes seemed to look into distances. 'Running away, if you like. This

thing's too strong for me to fight. I can't do it. Clare's quite right.

It's tremendous. It will last. And the Pinkerton press only represents

one tiny part of it. If the Pinkerton press were all, it would be

fightable. But look at the _Fact_--a sworn enemy of everything the

Pinkerton press stands for, politically, but fighting it with its own

weapons--muddled thinking, sentimentality, prejudice, loose cant phrases.

I tell you there'll hardly be a halfpenny to choose between the Pinkerton

press and the _Fact_, by the time Peacock's done with it.... It's not

Peacock's fault--except that he's weak. It's not the Syndicate's

fault--except that they don't want to go on losing money for ever. It's

the pressure of public demand and atmosphere. Atmosphere even more than

demand. Human minds are delicate machines. How can they go on working

truly and precisely and scientifically, with all this poisonous gas

floating round them? Oh, well, I suppose there are a few minds still

which do; even some journalists and politicians keep their heads; but

what's the use against the pressure? To go in for journalism or for

public life is to put oneself deliberately into the thick of the mess

without being able to clean it up.'

'After all,' said Jane, more moderately, 'it's all a joke. Everything is.

The world is.'

'A rotten bad joke.'

'You think things matter. You take anti-Potterism seriously, as some

people take Potterism.'

'Things are serious. Things do matter,' said the Russian Jew.

Jane looked at him kindly. She was a year younger than he was, but felt

five years older to-night.

'Well, what's the remedy then?'

He said, wearily, 'Oh, education, I suppose. Education. There's nothing

else. _Learning_.' He said the word with affection, lingering on it,

striking his hand on the sofa-back to emphasise it.

'Learning, learning, learning. There's nothing else.... We should drop

all this talking and writing. All this confused, uneducated mass of

self-expression. Self-expression, with no self worth expressing. That's

just what we shouldn't do with our selves--express them. We should train

them, educate them, teach them to think, see that they _know_

something--know it exactly, with no blurred edges, no fogs. Be sure of

our facts, and keep theories out of the system like poison. And when we

say anything we should say it concisely and baldly, without eloquence and

frills. Lord, how I loathe eloquence!'

'But you can't get away from it, darling. All right, don't mind me, I

like it.... Well now, what are you going to _do_ about it? Teach in a

continuation school?'

'No,' he said, seriously. 'No. Though one might do worse. But I've got to

get right away for a time--right out of it all. I've got to find things

out before I do anything else.'

'Well, there are plenty of, things to find out here. No need to go away

for that.'

He shook his head.

'Western Europe's so hopeless just now. So given over to muddle and lies.

Besides, I can't trust myself, I shall talk if I stay. I'm not a strong

silent man. I should find myself writing articles, or standing for

Parliament, or something.'

'And very nice too. I've always said you ought to stand for Labour.'

'And I've sometimes agreed with you. But now I know I oughtn't. That's

not the way. I'm not going to join in that mess. I'm not good enough to

make it worth while. I should either get swamped by it, or I should get

so angry that I should murder some one. No, I'm going right out of it all

for a bit. I want to find out a little, if I can, about how things are in

other countries. Central Europe. Russia. I shall go to Russia.'

'Russia! You'll come back and write about it. People do.'

'I shall not. No, I think I can avoid that--it's too obvious a temptation

to tumble into with one's eyes shut.'

'"He travelled in Russia and never wrote of it." It would be a good

epitaph.... But Arthur darling, is it wise, is it necessary, is it safe?

Won't the Reds get you, or the Whites? Which would be worse, I wonder?'

'What should they want with me?'

'They'll think you're going to write about them, of course. That's why

the Reds kidnapped Keeling, and the Whites W.T. Goode. They were quite

right, too--except that they didn't go far enough and make a job of them.

Suppose they've learnt wisdom by now, and make a job of you?'

'Well then, I shall be made a job of. Also a placard for our sensational

press, which would be worse. One must take a few risks.... It will be

interesting, you know, to be there. I shall visit my father's old home

near Odessa. Possibly some of his people may be left round there. I shall

find things out--what the conditions are, why things are happening as

they are, how the people live. I think I shall be better able after that

to find out what the state of things is here. One's too provincial, too

much taken up with one's own corner. Political science is too universal a

thing to learn in that way.'

'And when you've found out? What next?'

'There's no next. It will take me all my life even to begin to find out.

I don't know where I shall be--in London, no doubt, mostly.'

'Do you mean, Arthur, that you're going to chuck work for good? Writing,

I mean, or public work?'

'I hope so. I mean to. Oh, if ever, later on, I feel I have anything I

want to say, I'll say it. But that won't be for years. First I'm going to

learn.... You see, Jane, we can live all right. Thank goodness, I don't

depend on what I earn.... You and I together--we'll learn a lot.'

'Oh, I'm going in for confused self-expression. I'm not taking any vows

of silence. I'm going to write.'

'As you like. Every one's got to decide for themselves. It amuses you,

I suppose.'

'Of course, it does. Why not? I love it. Not only writing, but being in

the swim, making a kind of a name, doing what other people do. I'm not

mother, who does but write because she must, and pipes but as the

linnets do.'

'No, thank goodness. You're as intellectually honest as any one I know,

and as greedy for the wrong things.'

'I want a good time. Why not?'

'Why not? Only that, as long as we're all out for a good time, those of

us who can afford to will get it, and nothing more, and those of us who

can't will get nothing at all. You see, I think it's taking hold of

things by the wrong end. As long as we go on not thinking, not finding

out, but greedily wanting good things--well, we shall be as we are,

that's all--Potterish.'

'You mean I'm Potterish,' observed Jane, without rancour.

'Oh Lord, we all are,' said Gideon in disgust. 'Every profiteer, every

sentimentalist, ever muddler. Every artist directly he thinks of his art

as something marketable, something to bring him fame; every scientist or

scholar (if there are any) who fakes a fact in the interest of his

theory; every fool who talks through his hat without knowing; every

sentimentalist who plays up to the sentimentalism in himself and other

people; every second-hand ignoramus who takes over a view or a prejudice

wholesale, without investigating the facts it's based on for himself. You

find it everywhere, the taint; you can't get away from it. Except by

keeping quiet and learning, and wanting truth more than anything else.'

'It sounds a dull life, Arthur. Rather like K's, in her old laboratory.'

'Yes, rather like K's. Not dull; no. Finding things out can't be dull.'

'Well, old thing, go and find things out. But come back in time for the

wedding, and then we'll see what next.'

Jane was not seriously alarmed. She believed that this of Arthur's, was a

short attack; when they were married she would see that he got cured of

it. She wasn't going to let him drop out of things and disappear, her

brilliant Arthur, who had his world in his hand to play with. Journalism,

politics, public life of some sort--it was these that he was so eminently

fitted for and must go in for.

'You mustn't waste yourself, Arthur,' she said. 'It's all right to lie

low for a bit, but when you come back you must do something worth

while.... I'm sorry about the _Fact_; I think you might have stayed on

and saved it. But it's your show. Go and explore Central Europe, then,

and learn all about it. Then come back and write a book on political

science which will be repulsive to all but learned minds. But remember

we're getting married in June; don't be late, will you. And write to me

from Russia. Letters that will do for me to send to the newspapers,

telling me not to spend my money on hats and theatres but on

distributing anti-Bolshevist and anti-Czarist tracts. I'll have the

letters published in leaflets at threepence a hundred, and drop them

about in public places.'

'I'll write to you, no fear,' said Gideon. 'And I'll be in time for the

wedding.... Jane, we'll have a great time, you and I, learning things

together. We'll have adventures. We'll go exploring, shall we?'

'Rather. We'll lend Charles to mother and dad often, and go off.... I'd

come with you now for two pins. Only I can't.'

'No. Charles needs you at present.' 'There's my book, too. And all sorts

of things.' 'Oh, your book--that's nothing. Books aren't worth losing

anything for. Don't you ever get tied up with books and work, Jane. It's

not worth it. One's got to sit loose. Only one can't, to kids; they're

too important. We'll have our good times before we get our kids--and

after they've grown old enough to be left to themselves a bit.'

Jane smiled enigmatically, only obscurely realising that she meant, 'Our

ideas of a good time aren't the same, and never will be.'

Gideon too only obscurely knew it. Anyhow, for both, the contemplation of

that difference could be deferred. Each could hope to break the other in

when the time came. Gideon, as befitted his sex, realised the eternity of

the difference less sharply than Jane did. It was just, he thought, a

question of showing Jane, making her understand.... Jane did not think

that it was just a question of making Gideon understand. But he loved

her, and she was persuaded that he would yield to her in the end, and not

spoil her jolly, delightful life, which was to advance, hand in hand with

his, to notoriety or glory or both.

For a moment both heard, remotely, the faint clash of swords. Then they

shut a door upon the sound, and the man, shaken with sudden passion, drew

the woman into his arms.

'I've been talking, talking all the evening,' said Gideon presently. 'I

can't get away from it, can I. Preaching, theorising, holding forth. It's

more than time I went away somewhere where no one will listen to me.'

'There's plenty of talking in Russia. You'll come back worse than ever,

my dear.... I don't care. As long as you do come back. You must come back

to me, Arthur.'

She clung to him, in one of her rare moments of demonstrated passion. She

was usually cool, and left demonstration to him.

'I shall come back all right,' he told her. 'No fear. I want to get

married, you see. I want it, really, much more than I want to get

information or anything else. Wanting a person--that's what we all want

most, when we want it at all. Queer, isn't it? And hopelessly personal

and selfish. But there it is. Ideals simply don't count in comparison.

They'd go under every time, if there was a choice.'

Jane, with his arms round her and his face bent down to hers, knew it.

She was not afraid, either for his career or her own. They would have

their good time all right.

CHAPTER V

A PLACARD FOR THE PRESS

1

March wore through, and April came, and warm winds healed winter's scars,

and the 1920 budget shocked every one, and the industrial revolution

predicted as usual didn't come off, and Mr. Wells's _History of the

World_ completed its tenth part, and blossom by blossom the spring began.

It was the second Easter after the war, and people were getting more used

to peace. They murdered one another rather less frequently, were rather

less emotional and divorced, and understood with more precision which

profiteers it was worth while to prosecute and which not, and why the

second class was so much larger than the first; and, in general, had

learnt to manage rather better this unmanageable peace.

The outlook, domestic and international, was still what those who think

in terms of colour call black. The Irish question, the Russian question,

the Italian-Adriatic question, and all the Asiatic questions, remained

what those who think in terms of angles call acute. Economic ruin,

political bankruptcy, European chaos, international hostilities had

become accepted as the normal state of being by the inhabitants of this

restless and unfortunate planet.

2

Such was the state of things in the world at large. In literary London,

publishers produced their spring lists. They contained the usual hardy

annuals and bi-annuals among novelists, several new ventures, including

John Potter's _Giles in Bloomsbury_ (second impression); Jane Hobart's

_Children of Peace_ (A Satire by a New Writer); and Leila Yorke's _The

Price of Honour_. ('In her new novel, Leila Yorke reveals to the full the

Glittering psychology combined with profound depths which have made this

well-known writer famous. The tale will be read, from first page to

last, with breathless interest. The end is unexpected and out of the

common, and leaves one wondering.' So said the publisher; the reviewers,

more briefly, 'Another Leila Yorke.')

There were also many memoirs of great persons by themselves, many

histories of the recent war, several thousand books of verse, a monograph

by K.D. Varick on Catalysers and Catalysis and the Generation of

Hydrogen, and _New Wine_ by the Reverend Laurence Juke.

The journalistic world also flourished. The _Weekly Fact_ had become, as

people said, quite an interesting and readable paper, brighter than the

_Nation_, more emotional than the _New Statesman_, gentler than the _New

Witness_, spicier than the _Spectator_, more chatty than the _Athenaeum_,

so that one bought it on bookstalls and read it in trains.

There was also the new Pinkerton fourpenny, the _Wednesday Chat_,

brighter, more emotional, gentler, spicier, and chattier than them

all, and vulgar as well, nearly as vulgar as _John Bull_, and quite

as sentimental, but less vicious, so that it sold in its millions

from the outset, and soon had a poem up on the walls of the tube

stations, saying--

'No other weeklies sell

Anything like so well.'

which was as near the truth as these statements usually are. Lord

Pinkerton had, in fact, with his usual acumen, sensed the existence of a

great Fourpenny Weekly Public, and given it, as was his wont, more than

it desired or deserved. The sixpenny weekly public already had its needs

met; so had the penny, the twopenny, the threepenny, and the shilling

public. Now the fourpenny public, a shy and modest section of the

community, largely clerical (in the lay sense of the word) looked up and

was fed. Those brains which could only with effort rise to the solid

political and economic information and cultured literary judgments meted

out by the sixpennies, but which yet shrank from the crudities of our

cheapest journals, here found something they could read, mark, learn, and

inwardly digest.

The Potterite press (not only Lord Pinkerton's) advanced, like an army

terrible with banners, on all sections of the line.

3

Juke's book on modern thought in the Church was a success. It was

brilliantly written, and reviewed in lay as well as in church papers.

Juke, to his own detriment, became popular. Canon Streeter and others

asked him to collaborate in joint books on the Church. Modernist

liberal-catholic vicars asked him to preach. When he preached, people

came in hundreds to hear him, because he was an attractive, stimulating,

and entertaining preacher. (I have never had this experience, but I

assume that it is morally unwholesome.) He had to take missions, and

retreats, and quiet days, and give lectures on the Church to cultivated

audiences. Then he was offered the living of St. Anne's, Piccadilly,

which is one of those incumbencies with what is known as scope, which

meant that there were no poor in the parish, and the incumbent's gifts as

preacher, lecturer, writer, and social success could be used to the best

advantage. He was given three weeks to decide.

4

Gideon wrote long letters to Jane from the Russian towns and villages in

which he sojourned. But none of them were suitable for propaganda

purposes; they were critical but dispassionate. He had found some cousins

of his father's, fur merchants living in a small town on the edge of a

forest. 'Clever, cringing, nerve-ridden people,' he said. The older

generation remembered his grandparents, and his father as a bright-eyed

infant. They remembered that pogrom fifty years ago, and described it.

'They'll describe anything,' wrote Gideon. 'The more horrible it is, the

more they'll talk. That's Russian, not Jewish specially. Or is it just

human?'... Gideon didn't repeat to Jane the details he heard of his

grandparents' murder by Russian police--details which his father, in

whose memory they burned like a disease, had never told him.

'Things as bad as that massacre are happening all the time in this

pleasant country,' he wrote. 'It doesn't matter what the political

convictions, if any, of a Russian are--he's a barbarian whether he's on

a soviet or in the anti-Bolshevik armies. Not always, of course; there

are a few who have escaped the prevalent lust of cruelty--but only a

few. Love of pain (as experienced by others) for its own sake--as one

loves good food, or beautiful women--it's a queer disease. It goes

along, often, with other strong sensual desires. The Russians, for

instance, are the worst gluttons and profligates of Europe. With it

all, they have, often, an extraordinary generous good-heartedness; with

one hand they will give away what they can't spare to some one in need,

while with the other they torture an animal or a human being to death.

The women seldomer do either; like women everywhere, they are less

given both to sensual desire and to generous open-handedness.... That's

a curious thing, how seldom you find physical cruelty in a woman of any

nationality. Even the most spiteful and morally unkindest little girl

will shudder away while her brother tears the wings off a fly or the

legs off a frog, or impales a worm on a hook. Weak nerves, partly, and

partly the sort of high-strung fastidiousness women have. When you come

across cruelty in a woman--physical cruelty, of course--you think of

her as a monster; just as when you come on a stingy man, you think of

him (but probably inaccurately) as a Jew. Russians are very male,

except in their inchoate, confused thinking. Their special brand of

humour and of sentimentality are male; their exuberant strength and

aliveness, their sensuality, and their savage cruelty.... If ever women

come to count in Russia as a force, not merely as mates for the men,

queer things will happen.... Here in this town things are, for the

moment, tidy and ordered, as if seven Germans with seven mops had swept

it for half a year. The local soviet is a gang of ruffians, but they do

keep things more or less ship-shape. And they make people work. And

they torture dogs....'

Later he wrote, 'You were right as to one thing; every one I meet,

including my relations, is persuaded that I am either a newspaper

correspondent or writing a book, or, more probably, both. These taints

cling so. I feel like a reformed drunkard, who has taken the pledge but

still carries about with him a red nose and shaky hands, so that he gets

no credit for his new sobriety. What's the good of my telling people here

that I don't write, when I suppose I've the mark of the beast stamped all

over me? And they play up; they talk for me to record it....

'I find all kinds of odd things here. Among others, an English doctor, in

the local lunatic asylum. Mad as a hatter, poor devil--now--whatever he

was when they shut him up. I dare say he'd been through enough even then

to turn his brain. I can't find out who his friends in England are....'

5

Gideon stopped writing, and took Jane's last letter out of his pocket. It

occurred to him that he was in no sense answering it. Not that Jane

would mind; that wasn't the sort of thing she did mind. But it struck him

suddenly how difficult it had grown to him to answer Jane's letters--or,

indeed, any one else's. He could not flatter himself that he was already

contracting the inarticulate habit, because he could pour forth fluently

enough about his own experiences; but to Jane's news of London he had

nothing to say. A new paper had been started; another paper had died;

some one they knew had deserted from one literary côterie to another;

some one else had turned from a dowdy into a nut; Jane had been seeing a

lot of bad plays; her novel--'my confused mass of self-expression,' she

called it to him--was coming out next week. All the familiar personal,

literary, political, and social gossip, which he too had dealt in once;

Jane was in the thick of it still, and he was turning stupid, like a man

living in the country; he could not answer her. Or, perhaps, would not;

because the thing that absorbed him at present was how people lived and

thought, and what could be made of them--not the conscious, intellectual,

writing, discussing, semi-civilised people (semi-civilised--what an

absurd word! What is complete civilisation, that we should bisect it and

say we have half, or any other exact fraction? Partly civilised, Gideon

amended it to), but the great unconscious masses, hardly civilised at

all, who shape things, for good or evil, in the long run.

Gideon folded up Jane's letter and put it away, and to his own added

nothing but his love.

6

Jane got that letter in Easter week. It was a fine warm day, and she,

walking across Green Park, met Juke, who had been lunching with a bishop

to meet an elderly princess who had read his book.

'She said, "I'm afraid you're sadly satirical, Mr. Juke,'" he told Jane.

'She did really. And I'm to preach at Sandringham one Sunday. Yes, to the

Family. Tell Gideon that, will you. He'll be so disgusted. But what a

chance! Life at St. Anne's is going to be full of chances of slanging the

rich, that's one thing about it.'

'Oh, you're going to take it, then?'

'Probably. I've not written to accept yet, so don't pass it on.'

'I'm glad. It's much more amusing to accept things, even livings. It'll

be lovely: you'll be all among the clubs and theatres and the idle rich;

much gayer than Covent Garden.'

'Oh, gayer,' said Juke.

They came out into Birdcage Walk, and there was a man selling the

_Evening Hustle_, Lord Pinkerton's evening paper.

'Bloody massacres,' he was observing with a kind of absent-minded

happiness. 'Bloody massacres in Russia, Ireland, Armenia, and the

Punjab.... British journalist assassinated near Odessa.'

And there it was, too, in big black letters on the _Evening Hustle_

placard:--

'DIVORCE OF A PEERESS.

'MURDER OF BRITISH JOURNALIST IN RUSSIA-LATE WIRE FROM GATWICK.'

They bought the paper, to see who the British journalist was. His murder

was in a little paragraph on the front page.

'Mr. Arthur Gideon, a well-known British journalist' ... first beaten

nearly to death by White soldiery, because he was, entirely in vain,

defending some poor Jewish family from their wrath ... then found by

Bolshevists and disposed of ... somehow ... because he was an

Englishman....

7

A placard for the press. A placard for the Potter press. Had he thought

of that at the last, and died in the bitterness of that paradox? Murdered

by both sides, being of neither, but merely a seeker after fact. Killed

in the quest for truth and the war against verbiage and cant, and, in the

end, a placard for the press which hated the one and lived by the other.

_Had_ he thought of that as he broke under the last strain of pain? Or,

merely, 'These damned brutes. White or Red, there's nothing to choose ...

nothing to choose ...'

Anyhow, it was over, that quest of his, and nothing remained but the

placard which coupled his defeat with the peeress's divorce.

Arthur Gideon had gone under, but the Potter press, the flaunting banner

of the great sentimental public, remained. It would always remain, so

long as the great sentimental public were what they were.

8

Little remains to add. Little of Gideon, for they never learnt much more

of his death than was telegraphed in that first message. His father,

going out to the scene of his death, may have heard more; if he did, he

never revealed it to any one. Not only Arthur had perished, but the

Jewish family he was trying to defend; he had failed as well as died.

Failed utterly, every way; gone under and finished, he and his pedantry

and his exactitude, his preaching, his hard clarity, and his bewildered

bitterness against a world vulgar and soft-headed beyond his

understanding.

Juke refused St. Anne's, with its chances, its congregations, and its

scope. Neither did he preach at Sandringham. Gideon's fate pilloried

on that placard had stabbed through him and cut him, sick and angry,

from his moorings. He spoke no more and wrote no more to admiring

audiences who hung on his words and took his quick points as he made

them. To be one with other men, he learnt a manual trade, and made

shoes in Bermondsey, and preached in the streets to men who did not,

as a rule, listen.

Jane would, no doubt, fulfil herself in the course of time, make an

adequate figure in the world she loved, and suck therefrom no small

advantage. She had loved Arthur Gideon; but what Lady Pinkerton and

Clare would call her 'heart' was not of the kind which would, as these

two would doubtless put it in their strange phraseology, 'break.'

Somehow, after all, Jane would have her good time; if not in one way,

then in another.

Lord and Lady Pinkerton flourish exceedingly, and will be long in the

land. Leila Yorke sells better than ever. Of the Pinkerton press I need

not speak, since it is so well qualified to speak for itself. Enough to

say that no fears are at present entertained for its demise. And little

Charles Hobart grows in stature, under his grandfather's watching and

approving eye. When the time comes, he will carry on worthily.