THE COMMON HERD
1
It was after such a meeting, at Chesterfield, at the end of July, that
Kitty and the Minister next met. Kitty was at that time writing up the
Derbyshire towns for the Bulletin. She attended the Chesterfield meeting
officially. It was a good one; Chester spoke well, and the audience
(mainly colliers) listened well.
It was a very hot evening. The Town Hall was breathless, and full of
damp, coal-grimed, imperfectly-cleaned faces. Kitty too was damp, though
she was wearing even less than usual. Chester was damp and white, and
looked, for all his flame and ardour, which carried the meeting along
with him, fatigued and on edge. Kitty, herself fatigued and on edge,
watched him, seeing the way his hands moved nervously on the table as he
spoke.
It was while he was talking about the demand for increased wages among
colliers to facilitate the payment of the taxes on uncertificated
babies, that he saw Kitty. His eyes stayed on hers for a moment, and he
paused in the middle of a sentence ... "defeat the whole purpose of the
Act," he finished it, and looked elsewhere. Kitty was startled by his
pause; it was not like him. Normally he, so used to public speaking, so
steeled against emergencies, so accustomed to strange irruptions into
the flow of his speech, would surely have carried on without a break or
a sign. That he had not done so showed him to be in a highly nervous
state, thought Kitty, something like her own in this hot weather,
through her continual travellings by train and staying in lodgings and
writing absurd reports.
Across the length of the hall she saw nothing now but that thin,
slouching figure, the gestures of those nervous, flexible hands, that
white, damp face, with its crooked eyebrows and smile.
It was so long since she had seen him and spoken to him; something in
her surged up at the sight of him and turned her giddy and faint. It was
perilously hot; the heat soaked all one's will away and left one
limp.... Did he too feel like that?
2
He looked at her once more, just before the end, and his eyes said,
"Wait for me."
She waited, in the front of a little group by the door through which he
was to come out. He came out with his secretary, and the mayor, and
others; he was talking to them. When he saw her he stopped openly, and
said, so that all could hear, "How do you do, Miss Grammont. I haven't
seen you for some time. You're doing this reporting work for the
Bulletin now, aren't you? I want to talk to you about that. If you'll
give me the address I'll come round in about half an hour and see you
about it."
She gave him the address of her rooms in Little Darkgate Street, and he
nodded and walked on. He had done it well; no one thought it strange, or
anything but all in the way of business. Ministers have to be good at
camouflage, at throwing veils over situations; it is part of their job.
Kitty went back to her lodgings, and washed again, for the seventeenth
time that day, and tried if she would feel less hot and less pale and
more the captain of her soul in another and even filmier blouse. But she
grew hotter, and paler, and less the captain of anything at all.
At 9.30 Chester came. He too was hot and pale and captain of nothing. He
had not even the comfort of a filmy blouse.
He said, "My dear--my dear," and no more for a little time. Then he
said, "My dearest, this has got to stop. I can't stand it. We've got to
marry."
Kitty said, "Oh well. I suppose we have." She was too hot, too limp, too
tired, to suppose anything else.
"At once," said Chester. "I'll get a licence.... We must get it done at
some small place in the country where they don't know who we are. I must
take another name for it.... There's a place I sometimes stay at, in the
Chilterns. They are rather stupid there--even now," he added, with the
twist of a rueful smile. "I think it should be pretty safe. Anyhow I
don't think I much care; we're going to do it."
They spoke low in the dim, breathless room, with its windows opened wide
on to the breathless street.
"I have wanted you," said Chester. "I have wanted you extremely badly
these last three months. I have never wanted anything so much. It has
been a--a hideous time, taking it all round."
"You certainly," said Kitty, "look as if it had. So do I--don't I? It's
partly heat and dirt, with both of us--the black of this town _soaks_
in--and partly tiredness, and partly, for you, the strain of your
ministerial responsibilities, no doubt; but I think a little of it is
our broken hearts.... Nicky, I'm too limp to argue or fight. I know it's
all wrong, what we're going to do; but I'm like you--I don't think I
much care. We'll get married in your stupid village, under a false name.
That counts, does it? Oh, all right. I shouldn't particularly mind if it
didn't, you know. I'll do without the registry business altogether if
you think it's safer. After all, what's the odds? It comes to the same
thing in the end, only with less fuss. And it's no one's business but
ours."
"No," Chester said. "I think that would be a mistake. Wrong. I don't
approve of this omitting of the legal bond; it argues a lack of the
sense of social ethics; it opens the door to a state of things which is
essentially uncivilised, lacking in self-control and intelligence. I
don't like it. It always strikes me as disagreeable and behind the
times; a step backwards. No, we won't do that. I'd rather take the
greater risk of publicity. I'm dropping one principle, but I don't want
to drop more than I need."
Kitty laughed silently, and slipped her hand into his. "All right, you
shan't. We'll get tied up properly at your country registry, and keep
some of our principles and hang the risk.... I oughtn't to let you, you
know. If it comes out it will wreck your career and perhaps wreck the
Ministry and endanger the intellect of the country. We may be sowing the
seeds of another World War; but--oh, I'm bored with being
high-principled about it."
"It's too late to be that," said Chester. "We've got to go ahead now."
He consulted his pocket-book and said that he was free on August 10th,
and that they would then get married and go to Italy for a fortnight's
holiday together. They made the other arrangements that have to be made
in these peculiar circumstances, and then Chester went back to his
hotel.
The awful, airless, panting night through which the Chesterfield
furnaces flamed, lay upon the queer, crooked black city like a menace.
Kitty, leaning out of her window and listening to Chester's retreating
steps echoing up the street, ran her fingers through her damp dark hair,
because her head ached, and murmured, "I don't care. I don't care.
What's the good of living if you can't have what you want?"
Which expressed an instinct common to the race, and one which would in
the end bring to nothing the most strenuous efforts of social and
ethical reformers.
3
They got married. Chester took, for the occasion, the name of Gilbert
Lewis; it was surprising how easy this was. The witness looked
attentively at him, but probably always looked like that at the people
getting married. Neither he nor the registrar looked intelligent, or as
if they were connecting Chester's face with anything they had seen
before.
After the performance they went to Italy for a fortnight. Italy in
August is fairly safe from English visitors. They stayed at Cogoleto, a
tiny fishing town fifteen miles up the coast from Genoa, shut in a
little bay between the olive hills and the sea. To this sheltered coast
through the summer months people come from the hot towns inland and fill
every lodging and inn and pitch tents on the shore, and pass serene,
lazy, amphibious days in and out of a sea which has the inestimable
advantage over English seas that it is always at hand.
The Chesters too passed amphibious days. They would rise early, while
the sea lay cool and smooth and pale and pearly in the morning light,
and before the sand burnt their feet as they walked on it, and slip in
off the gently shelving shore, and swim and swim and swim. They were
both good swimmers. Chester was the stronger and faster, but Kitty could
do more tricks. She could turn somersaults like an eel, and sit at the
bottom of the sea playing with pebbles, with open eyes gazing up through
clear green depths. When they bathed from a boat, she turned head over
heels backwards from the bows, and shot under the boat and came up
neatly behind the stern. Chester too could perform fairly well; their
energy and skill excited the amazed admiration of the _bagnanti_, who
seldom did more than splash on the sea's edge or bob up and down with
swimming belts a few yards out. Chester and Kitty would swim out for a
mile, then lie on their backs and float, gazing up into the sea-blue
sky, before the sun had climbed high enough to burn and blind. Then they
would swim back and return to the inn and put on a very few clothes and
have their morning coffee, and then walk up the coast, taking lunch, to
some little lonely cove in the shadow of rocks, where they would spend
the heat of the day in and out of the sea. When they came out of the
water they lay on the burning sands and dried themselves, and talked or
read. When the heat of the day had passed a little, and the sea lay very
smooth and still in the late afternoon, with no waves at all, only a
gentle, whispering swaying to and fro, they would go further afield;
climbing up the steep stone-paved mule-tracks that wound up the hills
behind, passing between grey olive groves and lemon and orange gardens
and vineyards of ripening vines and little rough white farmhouses, till
they reached the barer, wilder hill slopes of pines and rocks, where the
hot sweetness of myrtle and juniper stirred with each tiny moving of sea
air.
They would climb often to the top of one or other of this row of hills
that guarded the bay, and from its top, resting by some old pulley well
or little shrine, they would look down over hills and sea bathed in
evening light, and see to the east the white gleam of Genoa shimmering
like a pearl, like a ghost, between transparent sea and sky, to the west
the point of Savona jutting dark against a flood of fire.
There was one hill they often climbed, a steep little pine-grown
mountain crested by a little old chapel, with a well by its side. The
chapel was dedicated to the Madonna della Mare, and was hung about
inside with votive offerings of little ships, presented to the Madonna
by grateful sailors whom she had delivered from the perils of the sea.
Outside the chapel a shrine stood, painted pink, and from it the mother
and child smiled kindly down on the withered flowers that nearly always
lay on the ledge before them.
By the shrine and the well Chester and Kitty would sit, while the low
light died slowly from the hills, till its lower slopes lay in evening
shadow, and only they on the summit remained, as if en-chanted, in a
circle of fairy gold.
One evening while they sat there a half-witted contadino slouched out of
the chapel and begged from them. Chester refused sharply, and turned his
face away. The imbecile hung about, mouthed a confused prayer, bowing
and crossing, before the shrine, got no help from that quarter either,
and at last shambled disconsolately down the hillside, crooning an
unintelligible song to himself.
Kitty, looking at Chester, saw with surprise that his face was rigid
with disgust; he looked as if he were trying not to shudder.
"How you hate them, Nicky," she said curiously.
He said "I do," grimly, and spoke of something else.
But a little later he said abruptly, "I've never told you much about my
people, Kitty, have I, or what are called my early years?"
"You wouldn't, of course," she replied, "any more than I should. We're
neither of us much interested in the past; you live in the future, and I
live in the present moment.... But I should be interested to hear, all
the same."
"That imbecile reminded me," Chester said grimly. "I had a twin sister
like that, and a brother not very far removed from it. You know that, of
course; but you'll never know, no one _can_ ever know who's not
experienced it, what it was like.... At first, when I began to do more
than just accept it as part of things as they were, it only made me
angry that such things should be possible, and frightfully sorry for
Joan and Gerald, who had to go about like that, so little use to
themselves or anyone else, and so tiresome to me and Maggie (she's my
eldest sister; I'd like you to meet her one day). I remember even
consulting Maggie as to whether it wouldn't be a good thing to take them
out into a wood and lose them, like the babes in the wood. I honestly
thought it would be for their own good; I knew I should have preferred
it if I had been them. But Maggie didn't agree; she took a more patient
line about it than I did; she always does. Then, as I grew older, I
became angry with my parents, who had no right, of course, to have had
any children at all; they were first cousins, and deficiency was in the
family.... It was that that first set me thinking about the whole
subject. I remember I asked my father once, when I was about seventeen,
how he had reconciled it with his conscience (he was a dean at that
time) to do such a thing. I must have been an irritating young prig, of
course; in fact, I remember that I was. He very properly indicated to me
that I was stepping out of my sphere in questioning him on such a point,
and also that whatever is must be sent by Providence, and therefore
right. I didn't drop it at once; I remember I argued that it hadn't
"been" and therefore had not necessarily been right, until he and my
mother made it so; but he closed the conversation; quite time too, I
suppose. It was difficult to argue with my father in those days; it's
easier now, though not really easy. I think the reduction of the worldly
condition of bishops has been good for him; it has put him in what I
suppose is called a state of grace. I don't believe he'd do it now, if
he lived his life again. However, he did do it, and the result was two
deficient children and one who grew up loathing stupidity in the way
some few people (conceivably) loathe vice, when they've been brought
into close contact with its effects. It became an obsession with me; I
seemed to see it everywhere, spoiling everything, blocking every path,
tying everyone's hands. The Boer war happened while I was at school....
Good Lord.... Then I went to Cambridge, and it was there that I really
began to think the thing seriously out. What has always bothered me
about it is that human beings are so astoundingly _clever_; miraculously
clever, if you come to think of it, and compare us with the other
animals, so like us in lots of ways. The things we've done; the animal
state we've grown out of; the things we've discovered and created--it
makes one's head reel. And if we can be clever like that, why not be a
little cleverer still? Why be so abysmally stupid about many things? The
_waste_ of it.... The world might get anywhere if we really developed
our powers to their full extent. But we always slip up somewhere:
nothing quite comes off as it should. Think of all these thousands of
years of house-managing, and the really clever arrangements which have
been made in connection with it--and then visit a set of cottages and
see the mess; a woman trying to cook food and clean the house and look
after children and wash clothes, all by hand, and with the most
inadequate contrivances for any of it. Why haven't we thought of some
way out of that beastly, clumsy squalor and muddle yet? And why do
houses built and fitted like some of those still exist? If we're clever
enough to have invented and built houses at all, why not go one better
and do it properly? It's the same with everything. Medical science, for
instance. The advances it's made fill one with amaze and admiration; but
why is there still disease? And why isn't there a cure for every
disease? And why do doctors fail so hopelessly to diagnose anything a
little outside their ordinary beat? There it is; we've been clever about
it in a way, but nothing like clever enough, or as clever as we've got
to be before we've done. The same with statesmanship and government;
only there we've very seldom been clever at all; that's still to come.
And our educational system ... oh Lord.... The mischief is that people
in general don't _want_ other people to become too clever; it wouldn't
suit their turn. So the popular instinct for mucking along, for taking
things as you find them (and leaving them there), the popular taste for
superficial twaddle in literature and politics and science and art and
religion is pandered to on its own level....
"But I didn't mean to go off on to all this; I merely meant to tell you
what first started me thinking of these things."
"Go on," said Kitty. "I like it. It makes me feel at home, as if I was
sitting under you at a meeting.... What I infer is that if your parents
_hadn't_ been first cousins and had deficiency in their family, there
would have been no Ministry of Brains. I expect your father was right,
and whatever is is best.... Of course the interesting question is, what
would happen if ever we _were_ much cleverer than we are now? What would
happen, that is, besides houses being better managed and disease better
treated and locomotion improved and books better written or not written
at all, and all that? What would happen to nations and societies and
governments, if people in general became much more intelligent? I can't
imagine. But I think there'd be a jolly old row.... Perhaps we shall
know before long."
"No," said Chester. "We shan't know that. There may be a jolly old row;
I daresay there will; but it won't be because people have got too
clever; it will be because they haven't got clever enough. It'll be the
short-sighted stupidity of people revolting against their ultimate
good."
"As it might be you and me."
"Precisely. As it might be you and me.... What we're doing is horribly
typical, Kitty. Don't let's ever blind ourselves to its nature. We'll do
it, because we think it's worth it; but we'll do it with our eyes open.
Thank heaven we're both clear-headed and hard-headed enough to know what
we're doing and not to muddle ourselves with cant about it.... That's
one of the things that I suppose, I love you for, my dear--your
clear-headedness. You never muddle or cant or sentimentalise. You're
hard-headed and clear-eyed."
"In fact, cynical," said Kitty.
"Yes. Rather cynical. Unnecessarily cynical, I think. You could do with
some more faith."
"Perhaps I shall catch some from you. You've got lots, haven't you? As
the husband is the wife is; I am mated to, etc.... And you're a lot
cleverer than I am, so you're most likely right.... We're awfully
different, Nicky, my love, aren't we?"
"No doubt we are. Who isn't?"
For a while they lay silent in the warm sweetness of the hill-top, while
the golden light slipped from them, leaving behind it the pure green
stillness of the evening; and they looked at one another and speculated
on the strange differences of human beings each from each, and the
mystery of personality, that tiny point on to which all the age-long
accumulated forces of heredity press, so that you would suppose that the
world itself could not contain them, and yet they are contained in one
small, ordinary soul, which does not break under the weight.
So they looked at one another, speculating, until speculation faded into
seeing, and instead of personalities they became to one another persons,
and Chester saw Kitty red-lipped and golden-eyed and black-lashed and
tanned a smooth nut-brown by sun and sea, and Kitty saw Chester long and
lean and sallow, with black brows bent over deep, keen, dreaming eyes,
and lips carrying their queer suggestion of tragedy and comedy.
"Isn't it fun," said Kitty, "that you are you and I am I? I think it
must be (don't you?) the greatest fun that ever was since the world
began. That's what I think ... and everywhere millions of people are
thinking exactly the same. We're part of the common herd, Nicky--the
very, very commonest herd of all herds. I think I like it rather--being
so common, I mean. It's amusing. Don't you?"
"Yes," he said, and smiled at her. "I think I do."
Still they lay there, side by side, in the extraordinary hushed
sweetness of the evening. Kitty's cheek was pressed against short warm
grass. Close to her ear a cicale chirped, monotonously bright; far off,
from every hill, the frogs began their evening singing.
Kitty, as she sometimes did, seemed to slip suddenly outside the circle
of the present, of her own life and the life around her; far off she saw
it, a queer little excited corner of the universe, where people played
together and were happy, where the funny world spun round and round and
laughed and cried and ran and slept and loved and hated, and everything
mattered intensely, and yet, as seen from outside the circle, did not
matter at all.... She felt like a soul unborn, or a soul long dead,
watching the world's antics with a dispassionate, compassionate
interest....
The touch of Chester's hand on her cheek brought her back abruptly into
the circle again.
"Belovedest," he said, "let's come down the hill. The light is going."
4
One day they had a shock; they met someone they knew. They met him in
the sea; at least he was in a boat and they were in the sea. They were
swimming a mile from shore, in a pearl-smooth, golden sea, in the eye of
the rising sun. Half a mile out from them a yacht lay, as idle as a
painted ship upon a painted ocean. From the yacht a boat shot out, rowed
by a man. It shot between the swimmers and the rising sun. Chester and
Kitty were lying on their backs, churning up the sun's path of gold with
their feet, and Kitty was singing a little song that Greek goat-herds
sing on the hills above Corinth in the mornings.
Leaning over the side and resting on his oars, the man in the boat
shouted, "_Hullo_, Chester!"
An electric shock stabbed Kitty through at the voice, which was Vernon
Prideaux's. Losing her nerve, her head, and her sense of the suitable,
she splashed round on to her chest, kicked herself forward, and dived
like a porpoise, travelling as swiftly as she could from Chester,
Prideaux, and the situation. When she came up it was with a splutter,
because she had laughed. Glancing backwards over her shoulder, she saw
Chester swimming towards the boat. What would he say? Would he speak of
her, or wrap her in discreet silence? And had Prideaux recognised her or
not?
"Lunatic," said Kitty. "Of course he did. I have taken the worst way, in
my excitement."
Promptly she retraced her path, this time on the water's surface, and
hailed Prideaux as she came.
"Hullo, Vernon. The top of the morning to you. I thought I'd show you I
could dive.... What brings you here? Oh the yacht, of course...." She
paused, wondering what was to be their line, then struck one out on her
own account. "Isn't it odd; Mr. Chester and I are both staying near
here."
Prideaux's keen, well-bred, perfectly courteous face looked for one
moment as if it certainly was a little odd; then he swallowed his
surprise.
"Are you? It's a splendid coast, isn't it? Cogoleto in there, I suppose?
We're not stopping at all, unfortunately; we're going straight on to
Genoa.... I'm coming in."
He dived neatly from the bows, with precision and power, as he wrote
minutes, managed deputations, ignored odd situations, and did everything
else. One was never afraid with Prideaux; one could rely on him not to
bungle.
They bathed together and conversed, till Kitty said she must go in, and
swam shoreward in the detached manner of one whose people are expecting
her to breakfast. Soon afterwards she saw that Prideaux was pulling back
to the yacht, and Chester swimming westward, as if he were staying at
Varazze.
"Tact," thought Kitty. "This, I suppose, is how people behave while
conducting a vulgar intrigue. Ours is a vulgar marriage; there doesn't
seem much difference.... I rather wish we could have told Vernon all
about it; he's safe enough, and I should like to have heard his comments
and seen his face. How awful he would think us.... I don't know anyone
who would disapprove more.... Well, I suppose it's more interesting than
a marriage which doesn't have to be kept dark, but it's much less
peaceful."
They met at the inn, at breakfast.
"Did you have to swim right across the bay, darling?" Kitty enquired.
"I'm so sorry. By the way, I noticed that Vernon never asked either of
us where we were staying, nor invited us to come and visit the yacht. Do
you suppose he believed a word we said?"
Chester lifted his eyebrows. "His mental category is A, I believe," he
replied.
"Well," said Kitty, "anyhow he can't know we're married, even if he does
think we've arranged to meet here. And Vernon's very discreet; he won't
babble."
Chester ate a roll and a half in silence. Then he remarked, without
emotion, "Kitty, this thing is going to come out. We may as well make up
our minds to it. We shall go on meeting people, and they won't all be
discreet. It will come out, as certainly as flowers in spring, or the
Clyde engineers next week."
They faced one another in silence for a moment across the coffee and
rolls. Then, because there seemed nothing else which could meet the
situation, they both began to laugh helplessly.
Three days later they returned to England, by different routes.