My return home to Lady Grove was a very different thing from what I had
anticipated when I had got out to sea with my load of quap and fancied
the Perfect-Filament was safe within my grasp. As I walked through the
evening light along the downs, the summer stillness seemed like the
stillness of something newly dead. There were no lurking workmen any
more, no cyclists on the high road.
Cessation was manifest everywhere. There had been, I learnt from my
aunt, a touching and quite voluntary demonstration when the Crest Hill
work had come to an end and the men had drawn their last pay; they had
cheered my uncle and hooted the contractors and Lord Boom.
I cannot now recall the manner in which my aunt and I greeted one
another. I must have been very tired there, but whatever impression was
made has gone out of my memory. But I recall very clearly how we sat at
the little round table near the big window that gave on the terrace,
and dined and talked. I remember her talking of my uncle.
She asked after him, and whether he seemed well. “I wish I could help,”
she said. “But I’ve never helped him much, never. His way of doing
things was never mine. And since—since—. Since he began to get so rich,
he’s kept things from me. In the old days—it was different....
“There he is—I don’t know what he’s doing. He won’t have me near
him....
“More’s kept from me than anyone. The very servants won’t let me know.
They try and stop the worst of the papers—Boom’s things—from coming
upstairs.... I suppose they’ve got him in a corner, George. Poor old
Teddy! Poor old Adam and Eve we are! Ficial Receivers with flaming
swords to drive us out of our garden! I’d hoped we’d never have another
Trek. Well—anyway, it won’t be Crest Hill.... But it’s hard on Teddy.
He must be in such a mess up there. Poor old chap. I suppose we can’t
help him. I suppose we’d only worry him. Have some more soup
George—while there is some?...”
The next day was one of those days of strong perception that stand out
clear in one’s memory when the common course of days is blurred. I can
recall now the awakening in the large familiar room that was always
kept for me, and how I lay staring at its chintz-covered chairs, its
spaced fine furniture, its glimpse of the cedars without, and thought
that all this had to end.
I have never been greedy for money, I have never wanted to be rich, but
I felt now an immense sense of impending deprivation. I read the
newspapers after breakfast—I and my aunt together—and then I walked up
to see what Cothope had done in the matter of Lord Roberts β. Never
before had I appreciated so acutely the ample brightness of the Lady
Grove gardens, the dignity and wide peace of all about me. It was one
of those warm mornings in late May that have won all the glory of
summer without losing the gay delicacy of spring. The shrubbery was
bright with laburnum and lilac, the beds swarmed with daffodils and
narcissi and with lilies of the valley in the shade.
I went along the well-kept paths among the rhododendra and through the
private gate into the woods where the bluebells and common orchid were
in profusion. Never before had I tasted so completely the fine sense of
privilege and ownership. And all this has to end, I told myself, all
this has to end.
Neither my uncle nor I had made any provision for disaster; all we had
was in the game, and I had little doubt now of the completeness of our
ruin. For the first time in my life since he had sent me that wonderful
telegram of his I had to consider that common anxiety of
mankind,—Employment. I had to come off my magic carpet and walk once
more in the world.
And suddenly I found myself at the cross drives where I had seen
Beatrice for the first time after so many years. It is strange, but so
far as I can recollect I had not thought of her once since I had landed
at Plymouth. No doubt she had filled the background of my mind, but I
do not remember one definite, clear thought. I had been intent on my
uncle and the financial collapse.
It came like a blow in the face now; all that, too, had to end!
Suddenly I was filled with the thought of her and a great longing for
her. What would she do when she realised our immense disaster? What
would she do? How would she take it? It filled me with astonishment to
realise how little I could tell....
Should I perhaps presently happen upon her?
I went on through the plantations and out upon the downs, and thence I
saw Cothope with a new glider of his own design soaring down wind to my
old familiar “grounding” place. To judge by its long rhythm it was a
very good glider. “Like Cothope’s cheek,” thought I, “to go on with the
research. I wonder if he’s keeping notes.... But all this will have to
stop.”
He was sincerely glad to see me. “It’s been a rum go,” he said.
He had been there without wages for a month, a man forgotten in the
rush of events.
“I just stuck on and did what I could with the stuff. I got a bit of
money of my own—and I said to myself, ‘Well, here you are with the gear
and no one to look after you. You won’t get such a chance again, my
boy, not in all your born days. Why not make what you can with it? ‘”
“How’s Lord Roberts β?”
Cothope lifted his eyebrows. “I’ve had to refrain,” he said. “But he’s
looking very handsome.”
“Gods!” I said, “I’d like to get him up just once before we smash. You
read the papers? You know we’re going to smash?”
“Oh! I read the papers. It’s scandalous, sir, such work as ours should
depend on things like that. You and I ought to be under the State, sir,
if you’ll excuse me.”
“Nothing to excuse,” I said. “I’ve always been a Socialist—of a sort—in
theory. Let’s go and have a look at him. How is he? Deflated?”
“Just about quarter full. That last oil glaze of yours holds the gas
something beautiful. He’s not lost a cubic metre a week.”...
Cothope returned to Socialism as we went toward the sheds.
“Glad to think you’re a Socialist, sir,” he said, “it’s the only
civilised state. I been a Socialist some years—off the _Clarion_. It’s
a rotten scramble, this world. It takes the things we make and invent
and it plays the silly fool with ’em. We scientific people, we’ll have
to take things over and stop all this financing and advertisement and
that. It’s too silly. It’s a noosance. Look at us!”
Lord Roberts β, even in his partially deflated condition in his shed,
was a fine thing to stare up at. I stood side by side with Cothope
regarding him, and it was borne in upon me more acutely than ever that
all this had to end. I had a feeling just like the feeling of a boy who
wants to do wrong, that I would use up the stuff while I had it before
the creditors descended. I had a queer fancy, too, I remember, that if
I could get into the air it would advertise my return to Beatrice.
“We’ll fill her,” I said concisely.
“It’s all ready,” said Cothope, and added as an afterthought, “unless
they cut off the gas.”...
I worked and interested myself with Cothope all the morning and for a
time forgot my other troubles. But the thought of Beatrice flooded me
slowly and steadily. It became an unintelligent sick longing to see
her. I felt that I could not wait for the filling of Lord Roberts β,
that I must hunt her up and see her soon. I got everything forward and
lunched with Cothope, and then with the feeblest excuses left him in
order to prowl down through the woods towards Bedley Corner. I became a
prey to wretched hesitations and diffidence. Ought I to go near her
now? I asked myself, reviewing all the social abasements of my early
years. At last, about five, I called at the Dower House. I was greeted
by their Charlotte—with a forbidding eye and a cold astonishment.
Both Beatrice and Lady Osprey were out.
There came into my head some prowling dream of meeting her. I went
along the lane towards Woking, the lane down which we had walked five
months ago in the wind and rain.
I mooned for a time in our former footsteps, then swore and turned back
across the fields, and then conceived a distaste for Cothope and went
Downward. At last I found myself looking down on the huge abandoned
masses of the Crest Hill house.
That gave my mind a twist into a new channel. My uncle came uppermost
again. What a strange, melancholy emptiness of intention that stricken
enterprise seemed in the even evening sunlight, what vulgar
magnificence and crudity and utter absurdity! It was as idiotic as the
pyramids. I sat down on the stile, staring at it as though I had never
seen that forest of scaffold poles, that waste of walls and bricks and
plaster and shaped stones, that wilderness of broken soil and wheeling
tracks and dumps before. It struck me suddenly as the compactest image
and sample of all that passes for Progress, of all the
advertisement-inflated spending, the aimless building up and pulling
down, the enterprise and promise of my age. This was our fruit, this
was what he had done, I and my uncle, in the fashion of our time. We
were its leaders and exponents, we were the thing it most flourishingly
produced. For this futility in its end, for an epoch of such futility,
the solemn scroll of history had unfolded....
“Great God!” I cried, “but is this Life?”
For this the armies drilled, for this the Law was administered and the
prisons did their duty, for this the millions toiled and perished in
suffering, in order that a few of us should build palaces we never
finished, make billiard-rooms under ponds, run imbecile walls round
irrational estates, scorch about the world in motor-cars, devise
flying-machines, play golf and a dozen such foolish games of ball,
crowd into chattering dinner parties, gamble and make our lives one
vast, dismal spectacle of witless waste! So it struck me then, and for
a time I could think of no other interpretation. This was Life! It came
to me like a revelation, a revelation at once incredible and
indisputable of the abysmal folly of our being.