"Silius Italicus and drivel about Etna and its siphons."
Rendell had to admit that, taken as a whole, Latin literature made a
poor show.
"There's Lucretius and Catullus," he said.
"They're all right," said Lawrence. "But who else is there? Virgil,
the Victorian before his time. The cave scene, so refined and all
that. Better than old Arthur from the barge. Virgil the most blatant
pirate and lifter of literary goods that ever made a name. Virgil who
couldn't even translate the originals right and showed himself to be a
fool as well as a knave. If we're going to have thieves, let's have
them competent. Virgil! Ugh!"
Lawrence always spoke like this about Virgil: the subject gave him
eloquence, and the others had long ago ceased to argue with him on this
theme. To withstand his river of rhetoric was like trying to make a
match-box float up-stream.
"No, my lad," he continued, "you are making a distinct fool of yourself
by believing Mr Petworth's flattery. Not only is Latin literature rot,
but that rot will be more efficiently done by those intolerable
creatures from Balliol, who think of nothing else but these pots.
You're wasting valuable time, failing to improve your execrable tennis,
and demeaning yourself into the bargain. I wouldn't compete with those
swine."
Of course Rendell took no notice and continued to read the more obscure
Romans. But Lawrence was right; he did himself no good.
In June Martin went down to Devonshire. Only his uncle and aunt were
at home: Margaret was abroad and Robert was working in chambers in
town. Martin had much time for recalling the past and considering the
future. He saw now that a day of reckoning was at hand. For two
years, with the exception of a few weeks, he had taken life very, very
easily, and it was inevitable that he should begin to take it with
corresponding seriousness. He would have to settle down: his second in
Mods had been a fluky affair, based rather on previous knowledge than
on any real work done at Oxford. "Greats" would depend on genuine
reading, and after Greats the Civil--and his livelihood. Probably he
would have to go to India: how unthinkable it all was! Martin thought
of India as a very hot place, where you either died before you got your
pension or sat in clubs drinking whisky and soda with bullet-headed
soldiers who didn't know the difference between Chopin and Cezanne,
didn't know probably that such people had been. The future became
hatefully plain. Either he would fail for the Civil and go to slave
dismally at Wren's or else he would pass and go out to Colonels or to
death. He wanted none of these things: he wanted books and friends and
work in London, just enough work to neglect. It was scarcely possible
for him to get a job at home and he hadn't money enough for the Bar.
In fact he hadn't a penny, and he knew that his uncle couldn't help
him: as it was, Mr Berrisford had been more than generous.
It was a bad prospect. To make matters worse, he set out to read
Herodotus. He had been told that Herodotus was the jolliest man on
earth (of course by Petworth) and he expected a treat. He found two
immense volumes about nothing in particular, which contained a
description of the world, occasionally amusing but more often fruitful
only of hard words. What it all had to do with the Greek states and
why the father of history had chosen to write almost anything but
history, and that in the most muddled way possible, he found it hard to
discover. And then he tried the ethics of Aristotle: he penetrated as
far as Book V. and then gave way. For two whole days he yawned and
swore alternately. There was not even anyone to talk to.
One night he decided to put the case to his uncle. He approached it in
a rather tentative way after dinner as they sat smoking.
"Don't you ever get tired of being the country gentleman?" he asked.
"Frequently," said John Berrisford.
"Does it pass off, or what do you do about it?"
"Sometimes I go up to town to a company meeting and sometimes I bravely
defy boredom by catching, or failing to catch, trout."
"And it works?"
"Tolerably. But why this anxiety about country life?"
"It just occurred to me."
After a silence, John Berrisford said to Martin:
"You've got a lit of depression and you want to meet men and talk about
Art or the good life or women. It's quite right and natural that you
should. Where have all your set vanished to?"
"Two or three have gone to Paris."
"Well, go thou and do likewise."
Martin paused. "I'm afraid I can't afford it. I've only got twelve
pounds to keep me going till October. And I've got some bills as it
is."
"I'll give you twenty-five. Go and talk your head off. Do some work
too."
"It's frightfully good of you. They were going to work. They're
living very cheaply in rooms somewhere: later on, when it's too hot,
they're going into Brittany."
"Well, I don't know how long the money will last, but we'll expect you
when we see you."
"Thanks awfully!"
"Now let's walk in the garden."
It was a perfect midsummer evening. Away to the west the sky was still
red with the sunset and higher up above them the changing hues of opal
merged into a lustrous blue which again was turned to steel in the
summit of the vault. To the east shapely stems of firs rose to a black
bulk of branches, spread out against the sky like tails of giant
peacocks. And behind them was the splendid body of the moor with its
great bosom of heather towering into nipples of stone. The night,
which had stolen away colour and left only light and shade, had given
strength and meaning to every line and curve and silhouette. They
walked over soft, clinging grass to a paddock dotted with hen-coops,
where the tiny pheasants were wont to squeak and scuttle. The black
line of a distant bank twinkled with the tails of startled rabbits and
an owl clattered heavily through leafy boughs. Then followed a
silence, vivid and unforgettable, but soon to be broken by the shrill
note of a bat that came and went with magic swerve and speed.
"Well," said John Berrisford, after lighting a fresh cigar, "isn't this
rather convincing?"
"About the country, you mean?"
"Yes. On such a night do you thirst for Paris and cafe chatter with a
drink-sodden Futurist?"
"It's too clear," answered Martin, looking round. "Perhaps to-morrow
night it will be pouring, and then even you may have a hankering after
the roar of traffic and the fine smell of a city."
"My dear Martin, you're impossible. You can't have everything your own
way. If you intend to worship at one shrine you've got to keep it up
for a bit and give the deity a chance of getting hold of you."
"And what if you don't believe in worshipping deities?"
"Then you'll be very unhappy."
"But you don't worship and you profess to be happy?"
"Don't I worship?"
"It's the first I've heard of it."
"How do you suppose I would be here now if I didn't worship the place?
I'm a positive mystic."
"And the mystery?"
"The blessed mystery of Ham and Eggs."
"It sounds very fleshly. Tell me about it."
"Fleshly! It's the most spiritual thing on earth: in fact it's the
cardinal point in the country gentleman's faith. But I'd better
explain it all from the beginning. Just after I'd left Oxford your
grandfather died and left me this estate. I was young and rebellious,
as every young man should be, and I can tell you I didn't enjoy the
prospect of settling down as a squire. Like Herrick, I preferred
London to 'that dull Devonshire.' I wanted to hang about town, to join
the devotees of Morris, to be a genius, a writer of brilliant plays and
beautiful books, to be a lover of woman and to have breakfast after
lunch. So I let this place to a tenant and fooled round."
"But I don't want to fool round. I want reasonable work."
"That's what they all say. It's what I said. But I never did any
work."
"And you liked it?"
"On the whole, yes--until at last I went down to stay with a friend at
a gorgeous place in the Cotswolds. There was a great grey manor-house,
Jacobean and very good about the windows. My host gave me ham and eggs
for breakfast: I had been used to omelettes and white wine. After
breakfast--God, how I remember it--he took me across his wide, smooth
lawns to talk to the keeper. We shot all day--I hadn't forgotten how
to bowl over a pheasant--and then we dined and drank port and smoked
cigars. Suddenly it all flashed across me, the fitness of things, the
rich joy of escaping from chattering artists and cranks and reformers
and all the crowds who had Done Something: I understood about pomp and
circumstance. As I ate my ham and eggs next morning I became an
initiate into their perfect mystery. (The eggs, I may say, must be
fried, not poached.) The ham was a hill red with autumn and the eggs
houses of gold in pure gardens of white. Then I swore to go back home
and kick out the cotton king who used to come here for three weeks in
the year. I would set up a new temple to the goddess and, worship her
with all due rites. So I married my host's daughter, who was sound
about ham and eggs and never played with fruit at breakfast-time, and
here I am. I've stuck to it, for, as I said, you can't worship for a
week and then go away: that isn't fair on the mystery. You've got to
let things soak in. I've let the spirit of Ham and Eggs soak into me
and I'm not tempted now to get it out again."
"And you didn't repent at the beginning?"
"Never permanently. I'm not idle. I'm a J.P., a soundly democratic
J.P., to the disgust of the Colonels. I work on a host of committees
and I direct two highly disreputable companies. Just because I like to
live here in the country and be an acolyte for the goddess, there's no
reason why I shouldn't do a lot besides. You can believe that I'm a
much better squire than the rest of them. Of course I'm well aware
that there oughtn't to be squires and that the whole thing is wrong.
But equally plainly there are squires, and squiredom has its point, of
which I may as well make the most. So I've played the part properly.
To begin with, I put my farms on a business basis, gave a reasonable
minimum, and became unpopular with my neighbours because I made them
pay. If the State demands my abolition, I'll go like a shot, but I
don't intend to let some magnate from Mincing Lane, who never eats ham,
come and buy the place, redecorate the house--as he'd call it--buy some
ancestors at Christie's and arrange an aerodrome. You young men think
that because you like one sort of pleasure you've got to drop the
others. It's all rubbish. I'll read any literature you want and talk
you silly, but only after ham and eggs for breakfast and port wine for
dinner. To hell with lunch!"
John Berrisford talked happily on and Martin was always pleased to
listen.
"You're not converted?" said the elder man at last.
"Only on fine nights."
"Well you aren't fit for the mystery. Go away to your Latin Quarter
and squalid digs and midnight settling of the universe."
So Martin went and found various members of his college living in
contented poverty. It seemed to him that, at the rate at which they
were existing, twenty-five pounds would keep him for a lifetime. Their
nights were late but frugal and an ability to sleep saved the expense
of _petit dejeuner_. They found where to obtain the noblest dinner for
one franc fifty and made the acquaintance of artists, male and female,
who would expound the whole theory of life and its artistic expression
if someone paid for their drinks: which Martin did, purposing to
improve his French. The weather was dry without being too hot, and one
Sunday they went to Versailles in search of amusement, which
materialised, for Martin and Lawrence, in the shape of two delightful
women who said they had lost their way in the woods and needed a guide.
Martin and Lawrence guided them with some skill to a house of
refreshment, where the strangers became pleasantly intoxicated and very
charming. They soon announced that they had lost their husbands as
well as their way and were going to look for them at the station.
Thither they went, with Martin and Lawrence following discreetly at a
distance. The husbands were found to be in other company and the wives
made a scene on the platform; it all ended by Martin and Lawrence,
themselves not frigidly sober, removing the other company to a cafe and
comforting their insulted dignity. They had a strange evening, and
Martin learned a lot more French.
Owing to one or two reckless evenings he found himself a pauper just
when the others were setting off to see Pierre Loti's fishermen,
Paimpol and Guingamp and the quaint religion of the West. Of necessity
he returned to Devonshire, fired with a determination to settle those
texts which he had carried in vain to Paris.
He crossed by night and came down during the day. When he arrived, it
was an evening of great beauty. Suddenly, as he was driven between
banked hedges and silent woods of purest green, he came to view the
mystery of Ham and Eggs as he had never viewed it before. He knew now
how sick he was of Paris with its noise and penetrating smell of
petrol, how tired of street cafes and superficial chattering about art.
It struck him that if a man isn't going to create something he may as
well shut his mouth and leave off jabbering for a bit. Here there was
at least silence. Paris had been kindly in its way, but its way was
sordid. He had been left with an impression that the city lacked baths
and the citizens a cleanly comprehension. To forego ham and eggs and
then to eat vastly in the middle of the day! What insipidity it
showed, despite their reputation for taste. And there through a gap in
the woods he saw The Steading, solid and calm as ever. Solidity and
calmness counted, he knew, and what had Paris to do with them?
That evening he walked again with his uncle in the paddock, drinking in
the sweet air, amazed at the restfulness.
"I enjoyed myself all the time," he said. "It was splendid!"
"That was good. And did you learn anything?"
"Nothing much from our talking. But I think I understand about the
mystery."
"I thought Paris might drive it home; it used to smell so in August.
Does it still?"
"In places." The scent of fir-trees came to him on the summer breeze.
"I do see really," he added, almost pleadingly.
"I'm glad for your own sake. It's as well to look at the future. You
may have to go to India. That may mean the end of books and talking
and ideas. But you'll get reasonable pay and occasional leave and then
you won't feel like anything but shooting and fishing. And perhaps
when you're fifty or so you'll struggle back to this kind of existence.
I assure you there's something in it all. And once you've dropped your
philosophy of this and art of that for thirty years they won't come
back. Ham and Eggs will be your only deity. But it isn't merely
carnal."
"I see that," Martin replied.
Somehow the future did not seem so ugly to Martin as he stood watching
the young moon hanging lightly over the dark shoulder of the moor. It
would be good to come back and worship the goddess in Devonshire.
"Thanks for the initiation," he said as they turned back to the house.
V
"The' being no fur' questions, much pleasure call on Mr Leigh for his
paper on Industrialism and the Home." (_Mild applause._)
The members of the King's Essay Society were scattered about Martin's
rooms, lounging in window-seats or strewn on the floor. The air was
thick with smoke, the carpet invisible by reason of the mingled feet,
tobacco, coffee-cups, books, and crystallised fruit. The Push were
present in force, and Lawrence, larger than ever, lounged on the sofa
and smoked a cigar with ungainly opulence.
Martin, from his seat by the reading-lamp, began to inform them about
the home. He started philosophically, taking as his text the assertion
that voluntary associations are always preferable to compulsory
grouping and that it should be our object to restrict such compulsion
as far as possible. The home is a compulsory association and its
sphere must be limited. He pointed out that since the whole trend of
industrialism had been to invade the home, to capture the women and to
drag them out to wage-slavery, it was irrational to stop in the present
position. The home must be either a real thing where women were free
from the direct clutches of capitalism and made up for indirect
economic dependence by freedom from drudgery in offices and factories,
or else we must be logical and complete the tendency by industrialising
the home. This process would of course destroy the home as at present
understood. But it would substitute for the present compulsory group a
voluntary association: and this he would welcome because the home of
to-day was not only a compulsory but a fundamentally rotten
institution. (_Loud applause from emancipated young men._)
He didn't care whether women had votes or not: that was inessential.
The great thing was to smash the home by making it a commercial unit.
This, he maintained, could be done by the State endowment of motherhood
and by marriage contracts in which payment for all domestic work should
be made by the husband. There must be honest, open payment; wheedling
and pin-money must go. Probably the best solution would be to insist
on a fixed percentage of the husband's income going to the wife as a
matter of course so long as she lived with him and kept his house.
Even more important was the case of the children. They too must be
economic members of a commercial unit. Of course in early childhood
that was impossible, but as soon as they reached a reasonable age--say
seventeen--they too should have a legal claim to a certain percentage
of the family income, to be continued until they were self-supporting.
In the interest of youth, no one should be compelled to support himself
until the age of twenty-four, for it was wicked to drive people into
offices at eighteen, before they had known freedom of any kind. During
these seven years the child might either take his salary and go or stay
at home as a paying guest. The amount paid for such board would depend
on the standard of life of the family. After all the parents had
brought the child into the world without asking if he wanted it, and
consequently, so far from having rights with regard to the fruit of
their pleasure, they had only duties. Aristotle was reduced to pulp
with regard to this point.
Such a policy would safeguard the liberties of the child, who, on
reaching a reasonable age, could always go away and need not accept his
father's politics and religion with his father's beef. The home would
thus be a compulsory association only during early childhood and would
be a voluntary association for the adolescent. Thus would we solve the
woman question and build an honest, self-reliant nation. Let Dr
Bosanquet maunder on about organisms and compare the family meal--that
ghastly rite--to the Holy Communion. To hell with such sentimentality!
(_Applause._)
Martin then reverted to political philosophy and maintained that no
group whose membership was not spontaneous could have a vital purpose
and a common will. In so far as the family remained compulsory it
could have no such will: because a man was born a Jones he need not
have the same interests as the rest of the Jones' group: indeed most
great men loathed their relations. For the small children a home of
some sort, whether private or municipal, was inevitable. The question
was whether they were going to save the young adult from sentimental
tyranny by insisting on incomes and latch-key rights for sons and
daughters and building up a multitude of voluntary co-operative groups
on a strictly business basis.
"Of course I admit it is more or less impossible," he said as he
finished. "But we may as well talk theory."
There was a short interval, and then Rendell, by grace of his three
"F's," was chosen to open the discussion.
He couldn't, he said, accept all that about voluntary associations. He
wasn't a Syndicalist, though, judging from the latest efforts of the
Tories, we were all not only Socialists, but Syndicalists nowadays. He
believed in the State.... The State ... yes, organisms and all that.
He didn't mind the commercialism, provided it was State commercialism.
Couldn't have these voluntary groups ... dangerous. Besides, he wanted
domestic work all done by clever machines, electric stoves and
automatic beds that "made" themselves and became sofas in the next room
by slipping through the wall. This would liberate woman. "Woman's
sphere is not the home, her home is the sphere."
With these feeble aphorisms he sat down. He had at least convinced the
company on one point--namely, that discussions are always a futile
anti-climax.
But Davenant was up, and he was amusing, though he always said the same
thing. "I protest," he said, "against industrialism being carried any
further. It has marred our men, let us keep it from our women. I want
to see a world full of guilds and craftsmen and artificers, not working
eight hours a day and then going to a municipal park to drink municipal
cocoa and hear the municipal band, but working because they love their
work, because it is their creation, their life. And I want to see
women working as they love to work, not sordidly and cheaply in a
market of labour. The women I want will not work against men, but with
them and for them, fashioning beautiful homes and beautiful things of
every kind. And you will find that it is no use to put woman on a
level with men because women are not crudely rational like men, who
analyse and destroy. With woman lies the future, because she alone can
create without destroying. Man is destructive and analytic. Woman is
ultimate, intuitive, basic, and synthetic."
The less experienced members of the Essay Society began to wonder
whether this could mean anything and roused themselves from sleep. But
those who knew Davenant understood. He had an affection for certain
words and loved to entwine them with any subject that came to hand.
Woman was not the only entity which Davenant had been known to call
"ultimate, intuitive, basic, and synthetic."
Then a remote, unknown young man in spectacles and spats said in a
plaintive way that the reader of the paper did not understand about
Laav: that Laav made all things different: that religion was morality
tinged with emotion: that the home was just what its inhabitants made
of it: that a change of heart was needed: that you couldn't make men
good by Act of Parliament; that, just as dancing was the poetry of
motion, so Laav was the poetry of life.
Then this master of the catch-word sat down amid a deathly silence. It
appeared afterwards that he had got in by mistake: he thought he was
attending a meeting of Oxford Churchmen on Home Missions. Lawrence
rose. He began, suitably, by treading on some coffee-cups and bananas,
stumbling backward and tripping over the cord which united the
reading-lamp and the wall. The lamp fell with a crash and confusion
and foul language ensued. At length order was restored and he could
let himself go.
"It may seem odd," he said, "but I agree with the last speaker more
than with anyone else: and he was about as wrong as can be. He was
right when he said love mattered but wrong in what he meant by it. The
love that counts isn't the squidgy, religious thing he wants and it
hasn't anything to do with the great passions of poets and intellectual
young men. It isn't even Browning's ethereal penguin, half angel and
half bird. The love that really matters for people who are interested
in the way the world is going is just extensive, sentimental wallowing.
Nothing more. Has it ever struck you remote philosophers that making
love is the only thing that most people really care about? The papers
may rave about a great political crisis or a strike movement. But if
you met the average man you wouldn't bet a button that he cared
twopence either way, but I'd bet my bottom dollar that he cared about
taking a girl out on Saturday night. That's the permanent and
irresistible fact. Every cinema film, every piece of cheap fiction,
every popular song has one message. There must be 'a strong love
interest.' The world has known friendship and sensuality and passion
since the beginning. This great flood of sentimentality is as new as
it is strong."
He paused a moment to look round. The sleepers had been roused:
Lawrence was good when he was under way.