CHAPTER THE FOURTHMay at Udimore
BOBBYforgotthat glimpse of the elemental powers that the furnace doors had given him altogether, for such things do not remain naturally in the mind. They inconvenience life. But the voice of the clergyman hustling the arguments of St. Paul along, and the scene in the Crematorium Chapel with the little coffin waiting to be launched into eternity and the few still black mourners dotted among the yellow benches came back to him very vividly when Paul Lambone began to quote and twist those familiar sentences about the contrast between the corruptible and the incorruptible and expand a fantastic philosophy of his own. Bobby had always intended to read that funeral service over again slowly and judicially, but he had never done so and he regretted it now very much. It left him—and Paul of Tarsus—at the mercy of Paul Lambone, and he knew that Paul Lambone loved ingenious slight misquotations.
It was a very warm, serenely still May evening, and Lambone’s party sat after dinner in the twilight, some just inside the house and some on deck-chairs upon the terrace. They looked out over the marsh and over the still sea. The sky was like the inside of a deep blue globe on which an ever increasing multitude of starry midges was alighting, and Rye and Winchelsea crouched low beneath it, black low lumps with a street light and a window or so showing minutely. Receding out to sea was a liner quite brightly lit. With a swift steadiness the beam of the nearer lighthouse swept the distant flats, came near, litthe faces of the talkers, lit the room, called a church tower and a group of trees into existence and dropped them back into the darkness and forgot about them and passed on. And then presently it was coming again, a thin white streak of light hurrying far away across the levels.
When one’s attention wandered from the talk one became aware of an abundance of nightingales. They were nightingales newly come from the south. One or it might be two were in the trees close at hand; others remoter wove a gauze curtain of faint sweet sounds over the visible universe.
Bobby sat on the step between the room and the terrace with his back against a pillar and with his empty coffee-cup beside him. He had put himself there by the feet of Christina Alberta, who was deep in a big arm-chair and very still. Her face was dim except when her cigarette glowed and showed a red-lit unfamiliar face. And yet that afternoon she had been the most familiar thing in the world to him; she had kissed him and pulled his ears and he had kissed her bare shoulders and clasped her in his arms. Devizes too was silent and preoccupied. He sat over against Christina Alberta on the other side of the opening of the room; and he was so much in the twilight that except when the lighthouse beam lit his face, only his shining shoes and socks were clearly visible to Bobby. There had been times when Bobby had thought that Devizes was in love with Christina Alberta, and he had a vague inexplicable feeling that to some extent she was or had been in love with Devizes. He had a sense of unfathomed deeps in their relationship, but he did not know where these deeps lay. If Christina Alberta loved Devizes she would have said so. Bobby knew of no reason why she should not. But to-day she had hugged and kissed Bobby so that it was impossible to believe she loved anyone else.
Yet in the last three or four months she had gone aboutwith Devizes a lot; Bobby had seen her mind responding and changing with her talks with this man. She used to quote him, and she would say things exactly like the things he said. It had been a great inconvenience and trial to Bobby, this preoccupation. And then suddenly he found Devizes wasn’t the lover at all, never could have been a lover. That day she had proved that up to the hilt. And now in a state between pride and servitude Bobby sat at her feet. He sat at her feet and close to her; Devizes in the darkness was remote, a full three yards away.
Except for Lambone’s unquenchable flow it had not been a very talkative party. To-night it was less talkative than ever. “This is too perfect,” Margaret Means had sighed. “I can’t talk. I just thank God I am alive,” and she had nestled into her big deck-chair upon the terrace. This was the girl—it had suddenly become apparent to Bobby a fortnight ago in London—whom Devizes intended to marry. Abruptly she had come upon the scene to destroy the triangle that had obsessed Bobby’s imagination. A sweetly pretty fragile thing she was; in the twilight she seemed as faint and fragrant as nightstock, and she was a wonderful pianist. Last night she had played for two hours. Paul’s sister, Miss Lambone, had been evoked from somewhere in the west of England to come and be hostess to the engaged couple. Bobby had tried to talk to Christina Alberta about Margaret, but Christina Alberta hadn’t wanted to talk about her. “You see,” said Christina Alberta compactly, “she has opened the whole world of music to him. That’s what brought them together. She’s clever; she’s very clear and clever.
“I’d never heard of her—until you mentioned their engagement.
“They’ve gone to concerts together and that sort of thing. He’s known her much longer than he has known me.”
“When did you first meet Devizes?”
“About the time my Daddy came to Midgard Street. Asrecently as that. It’s hardly six months. Paul Lambone took me to him to get advice about Daddy. Buttheyhave been going about—for more than a year. I thought it was just music that interested them. They’d seemed to be friends. And I thought he didn’t mean to marry again. He just suddenly decided.”
Christina Alberta reflected. “That’s the way with life, Bobby. Things accumulate, and then you suddenly decide.”
“Had she been undecided? Had she made him wait?”
“Not her,” said Christina Alberta with a remarkable hardness in her voice.
“No,” she said. “Hedecided.”
She seemed to feel there was still something to express. “He just took hold of the situation.”
This was Bobby’s second visit to Udimore. Paul Lambone had suddenly seen fit to gather this party; apparently on the spur of Devizes’ engagement. In the interval Bobby had seen Christina Alberta a number of times and developed an immense sense of relationship to her. It filled his life. He had always been dreaming things about her from the time when he anticipated her with blue eyes and a fragile person, and always she was and did things that tore his dreams to shreds. This made her profoundly interesting. More and more he had become dependent upon her for interest. He wanted to marry her if only to make sure he wouldn’t lose the interest of her. She had refused—twice. Without any of the graces proper to the occasion. “No fear, Bobby,” she said. “It wouldn’t do. I’m not the woman you take me for.”
“You never are,” he said. “I don’t mind that.”
“You’re the dearest companion,” she said. “I like the way your hair grows.”
“Then why not make it yours, and be companions for ever?”
“Nothing more frightful,” she said, and so dismissed the proposal.
They went about together; they spent much of their spare time together except for those distressing occasions when she would suddenly throw him over to go to a theatre or walk with Devizes. Or to go to Devizes to talk. She never hesitated to throw him over for Devizes. Yet Bobby got a lot of her. She didn’t know much about theatres or music-halls or restaurants or dancing-places or that sort of thing, and Bobby was discreetly competent in that province. The Malmesburys felt themselves deserted, and Susan was vindictive in her resentment at his frequent absence from her bed-time rituals. Tessy, Bobby declared, remained his dearest friend; but when he tried to tell her all about himself in the old, old fashion—which he did when Christina Alberta was away with Devizes—he naturally had to tell her all about Christina Alberta. But Tessy declined in the most emphatic way to be told about Christina Alberta. It was extremely surprising and disappointing to Bobby to find out how incapable Tessy was of appreciating the endless interestingness and charm of Christina Alberta. It was a blind spot in her mind. She seemed to assume that Christina Alberta was no better than she should be, whereas she was much better. It estranged Bobby and Tessy very much, and it was a great sorrow to Bobby.
Because Christina Albertawasgood—and interesting—beyond dispute. She was growing with tremendous rapidity mentally and in her knowledge of the world. Every time he met her she seemed more of a person, with richer, fuller, more commanding ideas. She seemed to be living every moment of her time. She was working now at the Royal College of Science under Macbride. She was taking hold of her new studies there with tremendous enthusiasm.She was in love with comparative anatomy. Bobby had always thought that comparative anatomy was dry, pedantic stuff about bones, but she declared it lit up the whole story of life for her. It changed her ideas about the world and about herself profoundly. “It is the most romantic stuff I have ever read or thought about,” she said. “It makes human history seem silly.”
She took him three times to the Natural History Museum at South Kensington to show him something of the fine realizations that stirred her mind. She made it clear to him how the bones of a wing or the scratches of a flint could restore the storms and sunlight and passions of ten million years ago.
And then suddenly a week ago Christina Alberta had consented to marry Bobby. She had taken back her two refusals. But the way she did it made it like everything else she did, astonishing and disconcerting. She had a confession to make, and for a time until he could think it over thoroughly that confession seemed to Bobby to explain her refusals completely and to clear up everything about her.
She got him to take her to Hampton Court. But they did not go into the gardens because they saw through the park gates that the chestnuts of Bushey Avenue were in full blossom; they went instead by the pond and up under the riotously flowering branches. A belated spring was coming now in a hurry, warm and brilliant. The trees were glorious. It was as if a bright green sea was splashing up warm creamy foam under a shower of cannon shots. The blue sky hummed with light.
“The spring has come fast now that it has begun to come,” she said.
He felt she had something to say and waited.
“I never know, Bobby—this year less than ever—whether spring is the happiest time in the year or the most miserably restless. Everybody and everything is falling in love.”
“I didn’t wait for spring,” said Bobby.
“But what of the frogs that can’t find water?” said Christina Alberta.
“There’s water where there are frogs,” said Bobby.
“Everybody is marrying and giving in marriage,” she said. “I thought—I thought—Dr. Devizes at least was an inconsolable widower. But the spring tides have caught even him. They catch everybody.”
“They’ve caught you?”
“I don’t know. I’m miserable, Bobby, and restless and all astir.”
“Then let yourself go.”
“One aches—alone.”
“But are you alone?”
“Fairly.”
“There’s me.”
“Bobby dear, what do you want in me?”
“You.To be with you. To be always about with you. And to be loved by you.”
“It’s kind of you.”
“Oh, nonsense!Kindness!”
“Listen, Bobby,” she said, and made a long pause.
Her voice when she spoke had adopted the ease of casual conversation. “Do you believe in chastity, Bobby? Could you love a girl who wasn’t—chaste?”
Bobby winced as if she had struck his face with a whip. He went white. “What do you mean?” he asked.
“Plainly,” she said.
For a time neither of them said a word.
“You have hadyourexperiences,” she thrust. “In France. They all did.”
Bobby made no answer to that.
“Now you know,” she flung at him.
For a little while the light had gone out of Bobby’s world.
“Did you love the man?” he asked.
“If I did I don’t remember it. It was just—curiosity. And the stir of growing up. And the intolerable sense of being forbidden. No—I think I was almost—cold-blooded. I liked the look of him. And then I disliked him.... But there it is, Bobby. That’s how things are.”
Bobby weighed his words. “I’d care if it were any girl but you. You—you’re different. I love you. What has or hasn’t happened to you doesn’t matter. At least—it doesn’t matter so much.”
“You’re sure it doesn’t matter so much?”
“Quite.”
“Sure for good?”
“Yes.”
“From this moment you forget, you begin to forget what I have told you? As I want to forget it?”
“It will go soon enough if you want to forget it. It doesn’t matter at all. I see now, it doesn’t matter at all.”
“But why on earth do you want to marry me, Bobby? What is there in me? I’m ugly, rude, greedy, inconsiderate. I’ve no purity, no devotion.”
“You’re incessantly interesting. You’re straight, swift, and endlessly beautiful.”
“Bobby, truly! Does it look like that to you?”
“Yes. Doesn’t my manner—? Don’t youknow?”
“Yes,” she said gravely; “I suppose I know.”
She came to a stop in front of him with her arms akimbo. They stood looking at one another, and Bobby winced as if he was going to cry. Her face was grave and troubled, and then at the sight of his expression her smile broke through. Her gravity vanished. She was a different Christina Alberta. She was suddenly the gayest conceivable thing to him, confident and impudent.
“If you were to kiss me, Bobby, right here and now in Bushey Park, would they lock us up?...”
Most wonderful it was to Bobby to take her in his arms.A new Christina Alberta was revealed to Bobby; Christina Alberta seen from a distance of six inches or so, an amazingly beautiful Christina Alberta. One might have thought she had never lived for anything but being loved by Bobby.
“You’re learning,” said Christina Alberta after a little while. “Now do it all over again, Bobby. Nobody seems to be looking....”
Neither Lambone nor Devizes had seemed in the least surprised at their engagement. Indeed their attitude of gratified expectation was almost embarrassing. The young couple had come down to Udimore with Devizes and Miss Means under the ample protection of Miss Lambone almost as though they had been appointed for each other from the beginning of things.
But at Udimore there were further surprises and perplexities for Bobby. All day Saturday Christina Alberta seemed to be not so much in love as in a thoroughly bad temper. She seemed far more concerned by the fact that Devizes was going to marry Miss Means than by the generous devotion that Bobby was prepared to lavish upon her. She was inattentive to his various little manœuvres to get isolated with her. The two couples played tennis after tea until it was time to dress for dinner; she was badly out of practice and fundamentally unorthodox, and Margaret played with a smoothness and sweetness that roused her to a pitch of viciousness only too evident to Bobby’s fine perceptions. It seemed to Bobby that Devizes also noted her annoyance, but Miss Means was blissfully unobservant of anything in the world but Devizes.
On Sunday morning Christina Alberta carried off Bobby through the distant cheerfulness of church bells for a walk to Brede Castle. And she announced to Bobby that she did not intend to marry him.
Bobby protested. “You don’t love me?”
“Haven’t I kissed you? Didn’t I hug you? Haven’t I ruffled your hair?”
“Then why don’t you want to marry me?”
“I do not want to marry anyone. I don’t love anybody. Except of course you. But even you, I can’t marry. I want to be loved, Bobby, yes. But not to be married.”
“But why? Not the—the old reason?”
“No. I took your word about that. But all the same I don’t want to marry you, Bobby.... I think it’s because I don’t want to be bound up with anyone’s life. I don’t want to be a wife. I want to be my free and independent self. I’ve got to grow. That’s it, Bobby. I want to be free to grow.”
Bobby made protesting noises.
“I don’t want some one seeing me grow all the time. You’d always be looking at me, Bobby; I know you would.”
It was useless of Bobby to say he wouldn’t. He would.
“I didn’t know that things were going to take me like this until I fixed to marry you. I wanted to marry you when I consented—honestly I did. I wanted dreadfully then to get close to some one, as close as possible, and to be kissed and told ‘There! There!’ and to keep there. It was a comfort for me, Bobby. You are a comfort for me. I’d ache to madness without you. But how close we come when we love, Bobby, and how far away we are all the time! How can we know each other when we hardly know ourselves? When we don’tdareknow ourselves?
“You are such a dear, Bobby. You are so warm and kind that it seems ungrateful not to give myself to you with both hands. But I just can’t. I’m not a normal woman perhaps. Or something has happened to me unawares. Perhaps life has cheated me out of something.... Oh, I don’t know, Bobby. I want some one dreadfully; I want you dreadfully and I don’t want you at all. I’d ratherbe dead than a female thing like Margaret Means. Ifthat’smarrying——!”
“But I thought,” said Bobby, “after all that’s happened——”
“No.”
“I’ll wait ten years for you,” said Bobby, “on the chance of your altering your mind.”
“You are the dearest comforter,” said Christina Alberta, and stopped short....
And suddenly she had put her hands upon his shoulders and clung to him and broken into a wild passion of weeping.
“Wetting you instead of wedding you,” she sobbed and laughed. “Oh, my poor Bobby! you dear lover!”
She clung to him for a time. Then she detached herself and stood wiping her eyes, the Christina Alberta he generally knew, except for the traces of her tears. “If women can’t control their emotions better,” she said, “they’ll have to go back to Harems. We can’t have it both ways. But Iwon’tmarry you. There’s no man in the world I can marry. I’m going to be a free and independent woman, Bobby. From now on.”
“But I don’t understand!” said Bobby.
“It’s not because I don’t want you to love me.”
He was baffled. “Bobby!” she whispered, and seemed to glow.
Bobby took her back into his arms and held her, and pressed his cheek and ears against hers, and kissed her and kissed her again, and it seemed to him to mark his own unworthiness that he should think at such a time that there were no such wonderful kisses in the world as kisses flavoured with salt tears.
And yet she wasn’t going to marry him! She had snatched herself back from him and nevertheless she was in his arms.
He was enormously perplexed at what was happening, but it was quite clear that the end of his engagement wasnot to be the end of his love-making. Anyhow here was love. It was so manifestly the time for love. High May ruled the world. About them there were hawthorn trees white with blossom and great bushes of elder just breaking into flower.
Bobby sat in the gloaming with his friends and thought of the things that had happened to him that day, thought of Christina Alberta’s salt tears and the incessant intriguing strangeness of her ways. He was still immensely puzzled, but now in a large, restful, contented fashion. Christina Alberta and he were not to marry it seemed; nevertheless he had kissed her and embraced her, and he was free to sit at her feet. For a time he was not even to humiliate himself by telling these others he was not to marry her. He said nothing. His thoughts and feelings were beyond words. Christina Alberta too was darkly silent. Everyone indeed seemed preoccupied. Talk about the view and the stars and the coming of the nightingales, and about migratory birds and lighthouses rambled on for a time and died away.
They were all too full for talking. The silence lengthened. He wondered what would happen if nobody spoke any more. He thought of Christina Alberta close behind him and he began to quiver in all his being. The silence was becoming oppressive. He felt as though he could no longer change his attitude. Nobody stirred. But Lambone saved the situation.
“It is exactly six months ago to-night that Sargon died upstairs,” said Lambone. He paused and seemed to answer an unspoken question. “We don’t know when he died exactly. He just faded out in the night.”
“I wish I could have known him,” said Margaret Means after quite a long interval.
Bobby’s thoughts came round to Sargon. That stillyoung woman sitting in the darkness behind him ceased to dominate his thoughts. He was moved to speak, and had to cough to clear his throat.
“I hate to think of his being burnt and scattered,” he said.
“It’s not so disagreeable,” said Miss Lambone, “as to think of the body all shut up in the coffin and decaying.”
“Oh, don’t!” cried Bobby. “It’s death—any death, that I hate to think of. Now when it is spring time, when the whole world is so full of life, I remember all he was, the hopes he had, and they are scattered and dispersed. Anyhow they are scattered and dispersed, they are not boxed up and locked up and buried.... When I was here last he was like a little boy who has just heard of the world. He was going to fly, going to India and China, going to learn all about everything and then do all sorts of splendid things. And there were the beastly bacteria at work in his lungs and beating his strength down and none of it was ever to happen.... When first I heard he was dead I could not believe it.”
“Ishe dead?” said Paul Lambone.
There was no reply to be made to that.
Paul adjusted his shoulder-blades a little more comfortably against the back of the small deep sofa on which he sat. “The more I think over Sargon the less dead he seems to me, and the more important he becomes. I don’t agree with you, Roothing. I don’t find anything futile in his life. I think he was—symbolically—perfect. I have thought about him endlessly.”
“And talked,” said Devizes, “endlessly.”
“And given you some very helpful ideas for your treatment. Don’t be ungrateful. You think that Sargon is over. He has only just begun. You are becoming too professional with success, Devizes. You begin to take up cases and work them off and drop them out of your mind. You don’t go on with them and learn. You don’t sit about and think about them as I do. I continue to think about Sargon.I go on with him because he is still a living being for me. I have got a new religion from him, the religion of Sargonism. I declare him prophet of a new dispensation. It is my latest new religion. There will always be new religions, and the new religions will always be the only ones that matter. Religion is a living thing, and what is alive must be continually dying and be continually born again—differently but the same.”
“You believe in immortality, Mr. Lambone,” said Miss Means. “I wish that I could. But when I try to imagine it my wits fail me. Sometimes one seems tofeelwhat it might be. On a night like this perhaps——”
Her pretty clear voice died away in the stillness as the trail of a falling star dies away.
Paul, a large dark lump on the dim pale sofa, went on speaking. “Immortality,” he said, “is a mystery. One can only speak of it in dark metaphors. How can we believe that each of our individual commonplace lives is to have an endless commonplace sequel? That is incredible nonsense. Yet we go on living after death nevertheless. When we die we are changed. All wise teachers have insisted upon that. As Roothing said, we are not boxed up and buried and forgotten. Our real death is an escape, and we escape and become—what did you say?—dispersed. Immortal life is endless consequence. Our lives are like lines in a great poem. It is an unfinished and yet it is a perfect poem. The line begins and ends but it has to be there, and once it is there, it is there eternally. Nothing could follow if it was not there. But every star has not the same glory. Some lives, some lines, stand out as more significant than the others. They open a new branch of the subject, they start a new point of view, they express something fresh. They are geniuses, they are prophets, they are major stars. Sargon was the last, the latest of these prophets, and I am his Paul. Not for nothing was I christened Paul.”
“Paul of Tarsus,” said Devizes, “was a man of energy.”
“There will always be minor differences in such parallels,” said Lambone.
“I will tell you my doctrine,” he said.
He began to talk in that clear miniature voice of his, which was so like a little mouse running out of the mountain of his person, of Sargon and his struggles with his individuality, and of the struggles in every man between his individual life and something greater that is also in him. There was a streak of fantasy in what he was saying, a touch of burlesque in his constant use of theological and religious phrasing, and withal a profound sincerity. In every human being, he declared, the little laundryman battled with the King of Kings. He expanded and amplified his theme. Ever and again Devizes would cut into the monologue and talk for a time, not so much to make objections as to restate and amend and amplify. The others said little. Margaret Means twice made soft sweet sounds suggestive of intellectual sensuousness, and once Christina Alberta said “But—!” very loudly and then “Never mind. Go on” and relapsed for a long time into a silence that could be felt. Bobby sat still, sometimes listening intently and sometimes with his mind spreading out like an uncared-for stream into a number of parallel channels. The argument itself was interesting to follow, but moving at the side of that was the question of the talker’s sincerity. How much of all this stuff did Lambone mean? How much of what he said was of a piece with the rest of his observant, self-indulgent life, his life as a humorous comment on a universe that was profoundly absurd?
How easily Lambone played with phrases and ideas for which men had lived and died! How widely he had read and thought to bring so many things together! He produced a great effect of erudition. The Golden Bough he had at his fingers’ ends. He talked of the sacramental mysteries of half a dozen cults, from Mithraism to ritualsacrifices, of varying ideas of personality that had held and swayed human life from Fiji to Yucatan. Now he was in pre-Christian Alexandria, and now among the Chinese philosophers. The “Superior Person” of Confucius he declared was merely an example of our way of translating all Chinese phrases as ridiculously as possible; it meant really the Higher and Greater Man, the Universal Man, in whom the inferior egotistical man merged himself. It was the salvation of the Revivalist everywhere; it was the Spiritual Man of Pauline Christianity. When the late Mr. Albert Edward Preemby poured out all his little being into the personality of Sargon, King of Kings, he was only doing over again what the saints and mystics, the religious teachers and fanatics, have done throughout the ages. He was just the Master under the Bo Tree translated into the cockney of Woodford Wells.
Presently Devizes was talking. Devizes was a great contrast to Lambone. He talked a different language. He did not seem nearly so clear and clever to Bobby as Lambone did, but he had an effect of sincerity and solidity of conviction that Lambone lacked altogether. His interventions made all that Lambone said seem like a wild and picturesque parody of something that was otherwise inexpressible. Both he and Lambone had an air of casting verbal nets for some truth that still eluded them. And yet this truth so remotely and imperfectly apprehended was for each of them the most important thing in life.
“Stripped of its theological trappings,” Devizes said to Lambone, “your new religion is simply a statement of this. That our race has reached, and is now receding, from a maximum ofindividuation. That it turns now towards synthesis and co-operation. It will move back towards what you call Sargon, the great ruler, and it will swallow up individual egotistical men in its common aims. As already scientific work swallows them up. Or good administrative work. Or art. That is what you are saying.”
“Exactly,” said Paul Lambone. “If wemusttalk your language, Devizes, and not mine. Art, science, public service, creative work of every sort, these are parts of what you, I suppose, would call the race mind, parts of the race life. Every man who matters is a fresh thought, a fresh idea. He is himself still, it is true, but his significance is that he comes out of his past and out of his conditions and he flows on to further men. This is the new realization that is changing all the values in human life. It is happening everywhere. Even in the books and reading of to-day you can see the thing happening. History now becomes more important than biography. What made up the whole of life in the romantic past; the love story, the treasure story, the career, getting on, making a fortune, the personal deed and victory, the sacrifices for an individual friend or love or leader; remains no longer the whole of life and sometimes not even the leading interest in life. We are passing into a new way of living, into a new sort of lives, into new relationships. The world which seemed for a time not to be changing any more is changing very swiftly ... in its mental substance.”
“New sorts of people,” said Bobby softly, and went off from listening to Lambone’s lucid little voice into a final recapitulation of the puzzling things Christina Alberta had said and done that day.
Bobby was recalled to the matter of the talk by a movement in the chair behind him.
Lambone’s smooth voice was explaining: “So that it does not matter so much what we achieve as what we contribute. That cherished personal life which men and women struggle to round off and make noble and perfect, disappears from the scheme of things. What matters more and more is the work one does. What matters less and less is ourpersonal romance and our personal honour. Or rather our honour will go out of us into our work. Our love affairs, our devotions and private passions, for example, will fall more and more definitely into a subordination to our science or whatever our function is. Our romances and our fame and honour will join our vices among the things we suppress. There was a time when men lived for a noble tomb and in order to leave sweet and great memories behind them; soon it will matter nothing to a man and his work to know that he will probably die in a ditch—misunderstood. So long as he gets the work done.”
“With no last Judgment ever to vindicate him,” said Devizes.
“That will not matter in the least to him.”
“I agree. Some of us begin to feel like that even now.”
“Even if one has done nothing worth doing,” said Paul Lambone, and in his voice was that faint quality of the sigh of one who has crowned a rather difficult and uncertain card castle, “even if Sargon had died unrescued in his Asylum and all the world had thought him mad, all the same he would have escaped, his imagination would have touched the imagination of the greater life.”
Came a pause of edification and then a sigh of satisfaction from Miss Lambone. She never understood in the least what her brother was talking about, but she adored him when he talked. Nobody she thought had ever talked like him, or could possibly talk like him. His voice was so clear and bright, like the best sort of print. Only sometimes you wished you had spectacles.
But now Miss Lambone was to receive a shock. Christina Alberta suddenly came out of the silence in which she had been sitting.
“I don’t believe in this,” said Christina Alberta out of the depths of her chair.
Bobby was beginning to know the voice of Christina Alberta very well; and he knew now that she was terrifiedat having to talk, and at the same time desperately resolved to get something said. He knew too that she was gripping hard at the arms of her chair. He glanced at Devizes and in that instant the lighthouse beam touched his face and Bobby saw it very intent, watching Christina Alberta steadily and as if forgetful of all other things. It was intent and tender and tenderly apprehensive, grave and very pale in that white illumination. When the light had passed away Bobby still seemed to see that face, but now conversely it was a face of ebony.
“I do not believe inanyof this,” said Christina Alberta.
She paused with the effect of marshalling her argument. “It is theology, I suppose,” she said. “Or mysticism. It is all an intellectual game that men have played to comfort themselves. Men rather than women. It makes no real difference. Tragedyistragedy, failureisfailure, death is death.”
“But is there ever complete failure?” asked Lambone.
“Suppose,” said Christina Alberta, “suppose a man is thrown into prison and misrepresented to all the world, suppose he is taken away presently and made to dig his own grave, and shot at the edge of it and buried and then lied about for a time and forgotten. It isn’t part of the race that is murdered, it isn’t a wonderful thing that passes on; it is a man who has been killed and made away with. Your mysticism is just an attempt to dodge the desolation of that. It doesn’t. Such things have happened. They happen to-day. In Russia. In America. Everywhere. Men are just wiped out, body and soul, hope and will. That man and his black personal universe are done with and over, and there is an end to his business; he is beaten and wiped out, and all the clever talk upon easy sofas in the warm twilight will not alter that one jot. It is frustration. If I am frustrated I am frustrated, if I have desires and dreams and they are defeated and die, I die. It is playing with words to say I do not die or that they arechanged and sublimated and carried on into something better.”
“My dear,” said Miss Lambone to Miss Means. “You are sure you are not feeling cold?” Her voice conveyed a faint intimation that she would cease to be acutely interested in the talk if this chit of a girl intervened any further in the discussion, and that she would begin to do things with wraps and shawls and break up the meeting.
“I’m perfectly happy, dear,” Miss Means answered. “All this—! I wish it could go on for ever.”
But Christina Alberta disregarded Miss Lambone’s warning. She had something to say and there was some one she wanted to say it to, not too pointedly, not too plainly.
“All this theology, this religion, the new religions that are only the old ones painted over——”
“Reborn,” said Paul.
“Painted over. I don’t want them. But that is not what I want to say. What I want to say is that you are wrong about my Daddy, you are quite wrong about him. That I do know. Mr. Lambone has dressed him up to suit his own philosophy. He had that philosophy long before he knew him. And you talked my Daddy over and put Mr. Lambone’s ideas into him when he was beaten and broken because they suited his case. They weren’t there before. I know him and exactly how he thought. I was brought up on him. He talked to me more than to anyone. And it is all nonsense to talk of him—his exaltation, as being like the great soul coming like the tidal sea into the pool of the little soul. It didn’t. When he said he was Lord of the World he wanted to be Lord of the World. He didn’t want to incorporate any other people at all—or be incorporated. He was just as exclusively himself when he was Sargon as when he was Albert Edward Preemby. More so.... And I believe that is how it is with all of us.”
She went on rather hurriedly, for she knew there were forces there very ready to silence her.
“I want to be myself and nothing else. I want the world—for myself. I want to be a goddess in the world. It does not matter that I am an ugly girl with natural bad manners. It does not matter that it is impossible. That is what I want. That is what I am made to want. One may get moments anyhow. A moment of glory is better than none.... I believe that sort of thing is what you all want really. You just persuade yourselves you don’t. And you call that religion. I don’t believe anyone has ever believed religion from the beginning. Buddhism, Christianity, this fantastic Sargonism, this burlesque religion you invent to make an evening’s talk, they are all consolations and patchings-up—bandages and wooden legs. People have tried to believe in such religions no doubt. Broken people. But because we cannot satisfy the desires of our hearts—why should we cry ‘Sour grapes’ at them?
“I don’t want to serve—anything or anybody. I may be heading for frustration, the universe may be a system of frustration, but that doesn’t alter the fact that this is how I feel about it. I may be defeated; it may be certain that I shall be defeated—but as for bringing a contrite heart out of the mess and starting again as a good little part of something—Idon’tfink. Oh, I know I beat my hands against a wall. It’s not my fault. Why don’t we take? Oh, why don’t we dare?”
Miss Lambone stirred and rustled.
The darkness that was Devizes spoke to Christina Alberta, and Miss Lambone became still.
“We don’t take and we don’t dare,” he said, “we don’t defy laws and customs because there are other things in our lives,inus and not outside us, that are more important to us. That is why. It pleases Paul to dress up his view of these things in old mystical phrasing, but what he says is really an unscientific way of putting psychological fact. You think you are simple, but you are really complex. You are the individual but you are the race also. That isyour nature and mine and everyone’s. The more our intelligence awakens the more we know that.”
“But it is the difference that is distinctively me, and not the general part. The race in me is no more to me than the ground I walk on. I am Christina Alberta; I am not Woman or Mankind. As Christina Alberta, I want and I want and I want. And when the door is slammed upon my imaginations I cry out against it. Why pretend I give up a thing because I can’t have it? Why make a glory of renunciation and letting-go? I hate the idea of self-sacrifice. What is the good of coming into the world as Christina Alberta just in order to sacrifice being Christina Alberta? What is the good of being different if one is not to live a different life?”
Unexpectedly Miss Lambone intervened, “The life of a woman is one long sacrifice,” she said.
There was a pause.
“But we have the vote now?” said Christina Alberta almost flippantly. “Why is a woman’s life sacrifice?”
“Think of the children we bear,” said Miss Lambone in a constrained voice.
“Well!” said Christina Alberta, and suppressed some scandalous remark.
“The most astonishing thing about us,” she broke out again, after a pause; “the most astonishing thing in the feminine make-up is that hardly any of usdoseem to want children. A lot of us anyhow don’t. Now that I am beginning to learn something about biology, I realize how marvellous that is. As a race of creatures specialized for children, we ought to be eaten up by the desire for children. As a matter of fact most modern women will do anything to avoid having children. We dread them. To me they seem like a swarm of hidden dwarfs, prepared to come upon me and eat up my whole existence. It’s not simply I don’t want them; I live in fear of them. Love wemaywant. Many of us do. Intensely. We want to love and beloved—to get close and near to some one. It’s a delusion I suppose. One of Nature’s clumsy tricks. It is all a delusion. He vanishes—he was never there. Under the old conditions it availed; it got the children Nature wanted. But we don’t think of children. We don’t want to think about them. There it is! And anyway children do not take a woman out of her egotism; they only extend and intensify it. I have known intelligent girls marry and have children, and when the baby appeared their minds evaporated. They became creatures of instinct, messing about with napkins. I could scream at the thought of it. No, I am an egoist pure and simple. I am Christina Alberta, and her only. I am not Sargon. I refuse altogether to mix with that promiscuous anybody-nobody.”
“After all that may only be a phase in your development,” said Devizes.
“It is the only one I know.”
“That is evident. But I assure you, Christina Alberta, that this revolt and distress of yours is a phase. You are talking rebellion and egoism and anarchism as a healthy baby screams to get breath into its lungs, and escape from the stuffiness of old air. The baby doesn’t know why it screams and no doubt finds some dim little grievance in its brain——”
“Go on,” said Christina Alberta. “Chastise me and chastise me.”
It seemed to Bobby that there were tears in her voice.
“No, but you are so young, my dear,” said Devizes.
My dear!
“Not so young. Not so actually young,” cried Christina Alberta.
“If I live to be eighty,” said Christina Alberta, “shall I ever be able to feel more than I am feeling now? Why will you always treat me like a child nowadays?”
“Feeling isn’t the only measure,” said Devizes. “Even now, to-night, you are talking below your beliefs. Youare not an egoistic adventurer. You take sides on a score of matters. You insist you are a Communist for example.”
“Oh! just to smash up things,” said Christina Alberta. “Just to smash up everything.”
“No. You say that to-night, but you have told me differently before. You have a care for the world. You want to help forward the common interest. You develop a passion for scientific truth. Well—there’s no way of fencing in your individuality from other minds in science or in public affairs. You’re a part by necessity; you can’t be a complete whole. You find already you can’t keep away from these things. They will take you more and more, whether you like it or not, because it is the spirit of the time. That is what is happening to us all. You can’t escape. Our work, our part, is the first thing in our lives. To that, pride must bow now and passion and romance. We have to slam and lock and bar the door against all personal passion that might wreck our work. Bar it and put it out of your mind. As a secondary thing. Work. Give the greater things a chance to keep you.”
“That’s all very well.”
“It’s everything.”
“Whyshouldthey keep me?” came from Christina Alberta, sullenly and resolutely.
“I know that this is your faith,” she said. “You told me all about it. You’ve always told me about it.” Bobby’s quick ear detected a change in her voice “Do you remember our first talk together? Do you remember our talk in Lonsdale Mews? When we dined together at that Italian place? That night. Just after we had found each other.”
Found each other?
“But I did not know then that your faith meant all the suppressions and sacrifices and discretions it seems to do. I thought it was something robust and bold. I did not understand its—qualifications. But since then we haveargued about these things and argued. That day at Kew Gardens. That day when you took me for that walk over the downs to Shere. We have threshed things out. Why should we argue again? I am giving in—what can I do but give in?—and soon I will be a Sargonite with you and Paul. But not this summer. Not now. This night—This wonderful first night of summer. To-night I rebel against any renunciation, any fobbing-off of individuals with second-best things. I am going to be impossible and absurd. For the last time. I want the world from the stars to the bottom of the sea for myself, for my own hungry self. And all between. The precious things between. The love....There!”
Vague questions appeared and vanished again on the screen of Bobby’s mind. What had Christina Alberta renounced? What was she renouncing? What was anyone renouncing? And had his ears cheated him, or had Devizes called her, “my dear”? In front of Margaret Means and in face of all the circumstances of the case it seemed to Bobby that Devizes was the last person who ought to call Christina Alberta “my dear.” And what was this about “fobbing-off”? Was this really a shameless plainness of speech, an atrocious confession, or something that he misunderstood?
Miss Lambone stirred uneasily.
It was as if an evil spirit possessed Christina Alberta. “Oh,damnrenunciation!” she said with bitter gusto.
They seemed to be sitting for some moments in a profound silence, and then the nightingale became very audible.
“I think,” said Miss Lambone in the silence, “that it is getting just aleetlechilly.”
“It is so beautiful here,” said Miss Means, who was warm in Miss Lambone’s shawl. “Perfectly beautiful.
“How you can talk of frustration—!” she added, and left her sentence incomplete.
“I think,” said Miss Lambone, “that I shall go in and light the candles. It is too wonderful a night for the electric lights, far too wonderful. We will just light the candles and the fire. And perhaps you will play us something beautiful. These are such marvellous fire-places here that they blaze up at once. I don’t know if you have noticed them—a new sort. The fire is all on the hearth—no draught below, but the shape of the back draws it up.
“I love a wood fire,” said Miss Lambone, and sighed and rose slowly and voluminously.
Two days later Bobby came into one of the little studies on the garden side of Paul Lambone’s house. Paul had found out that Bobby wanted a few days of uninterrupted thought in which to begin his novel, and had asked him to stay on after the other guests had returned to London. It was a perfect room for a writer of Bobby’s temperament; it had a low writing-table close to the sill of the casemented window, and on the sill was a silver bowl of forget-me-nots and white tulips. A little glass-paned door released one into the garden without one’s having to go back through the house. The writing-table had everything a fastidious writer could desire, a pleasant paper-rack and wafers, and real quill pens, and plenty of elbow room. The chair he sat in was an arm-chair, immensely comfortable but not too luxurious; no hint of repose in it but only a completely loyal support for a working occupant. A garden path ran up hill from the window, a garden path skirted by wonderful clusters of pansies. On either side of the pansies were rose bushes, and though not a rosebud was showing, yet the fresh green leaves, tinged with ruddy brown, were very exquisite in the light.
He stood looking up the path for a time and then sat down and drew the writing-pad towards him. He took one of those delightful quills, tested the delicious flexibility of its points, dipped it in the ink and wrote in his very neat and beautiful handwriting:
UPS AND DOWNSA Pedestrian NovelBY ROBERT ROOTHINGCHAPTER THE FIRSTWHICH INTRODUCES OUR HERO
He wrote this very readily because it was very familiar to him. From first to last he had written it on fair fresh sheets of paper perhaps half a dozen times.
Then he stopped short and sat quite still with his head on one side. Then very neatly he corrected “which introduces” into “in which we introduce.”
It was nearly two years now since he had first begun his novel in this fashion, and he was still quite uncertain about the details of his hero’s introduction. His original intention about the story still floated pleasantly in the sky of his mind; a promise of a happy succession of fine, various and delightful adventures, told easily and good-humouredly; the fortunes of a kindly, unpretending, not too brave but brave enough young man, on his way through the world, to live happily afterwards with a delicious young woman. “Picaresque” was the magic word. None of these adventures had as yet assumed a concrete form in his mind. He felt they would come to him definitely enough one day. If one sat and mused one half saw them, and that was assurance enough for him. And so having rewritten his title page neatly and prettily, he fell into a day-dream and was presently thinking round and about his Christina Alberta as a good hero should.
Bobby was always being puzzled by Christina Alberta, always coming upon something that seemed to clear up everything, and then being puzzled again. But now it seemed to him that he really did know the last fact of importance that was to be known about her. Overnight Paul Lambone had described how he had taken her to Devizes to get advice, and how they had blundered upon the reality of her parentage. He told his story well as a story-writer should; he gave it dramatic point. Evidently he told the tale of set intention, because it was time Bobby knew. Lambone was aware of Christina Alberta’s engagement. He did not know and nobody but Bobby knew that she never intended to be married. But this, it seemed to Bobby, made the understanding of her situation possible; explained that watchful tenderness of Devizes’ face suddenly betrayed by the light of his inadvertent “my dear”; explained her position as though she belonged to him and Paul Lambone instead of being a rather unaccountable visitor; excused her vehement jealousy of Margaret Means, because evidently she had become violently possessive of her father, and had counted perhaps upon recognition and being very much with him. No doubt Margaret Means stood in the way of that. It was natural for Christina Alberta to want to be with Devizes and work with him, and natural for her to suspect and anticipate and resent an intervening personality. Apart from the magic of kinship it was natural that two such subtle and abundant personalities should attract each other greatly. That Devizes should have decided quite abruptly to marry Margaret Means did not present any difficulties to Bobby; he was not thinking very closely about Devizes. Margaret Means was pretty enough for anyone to want to marry her. There are times, as Bobby knew, when that sweet prettiness can stab one like an arrow. It had evidently stabbed and won Devizes. And almost the only thing that gave Bobby a second thought, but no more thana second thought, was Christina Alberta’s fluctuation of purpose, why she should have consented to marry him and then have changed her mind so quickly and definitely and yet have retained him as a lover.
That resolution not to marry seemed after all just a part of her immense modernity. Because of all this group of “new people” in which he found her, she seemed to Bobby to be in every way the newest. She was the boldest enterprise in living he had ever met. Her flare of hungry rebel individuality fascinated him. Where in this world was she going? Would she win out to this free personal life she desired or would she fail to find an objective of work and come upon disappointment and solitude like some creature that has strayed? The world had terrified Bobby in his own person greatly; it terrified him still more when he thought of this valiant little figure going out to challenge it.
Bobby was naturally, inherently, afraid; his instinct was for security, protection, kindliness and help. He clung to his “Aunt Suzannah” job for safety. He didn’t believe Christina Alberta knew one tenth of the dangers she ran of insult, defeat, humiliation, neglect, repulse, fatigue and lonely distress. His imagination presented a tormenting picture of her away there in dark, confused, immense and blundering London, as an excessively fragile figure, light on its feet, shock-head erect, arms akimbo, unaware of monstrous ambushed dangers. Now that he began to understand her, he began to understand a great number of bright-eyed, adventurous, difficult young women he had met in the last few years, and he had his first dim realization of the meaning of the deep wide stir among womankind that had won them votes and a score of unprecedented freedoms.
Many of these younger women were doing their work and holding their own exactly like men. They were painting and drawing like men, writing criticism like men, writing plays and novels like men, leading movements, doingscientific work, playing a part in politics. Like men? On reflection—not exactly. No. They still kept different. But they didn’t do their things in any fashion one could call womanly. Without adding strange new meanings to “womanly.” The novels they were writing interested him immensely. People like Stella Benson wrote books like—anybody; you could not tell from her work whether she was a man or a woman. All that again was new. George Eliot perhaps was a precursor. Perhaps. The former sort of women’s writings, when they were not “pretty me” books, were “kindly auntie” books; you heard the petticoats swish in every page.
Sexless, these new ones? Bobby weighed the word. The earlier generation of women who wanted to be emancipated suppressed sex, suppressed it so fiercely that its negative presence became the dominant factor in their lives. They ceased to be positive woman; they became fantastically negative woman. But this newer multitude was not so much repressing as forgetting their sex, making little of it. Christina Alberta had in a way made nothing of her sex, not by struggling against it, but by making it cheap for herself as a man makes it cheap for himself—so that it was a thing of mere intermittent moods and impulses for her—and she could go on to other things.
Going on to other things. His imagination recurred to that little figure resolved to conquer the world for itself in defiance of every tradition.
There was a strong urgency in him to start off to London in pursuit of her, to hover about her, intervene, protect her and carry her off to security. He knew she wouldn’t permit that sort of thing to happen anyhow. He’d have to be just a friend and companion to her, be at hand for her, and if she did encounter some disaster, stand by her.
It was a queer thing that he should want to stand by this unsexed young woman. It was just what one would not expect; it was part, perhaps, of the immense biologicalchanges of the time. In the past the species had needed half the race specialized for child-bearing and child-rearing; now plainly it didn’t. The tremendous and worshipful dignity of wife and mother was not for all women any longer. That would remain for a certain sort of them to take up if they would. But a vast multitude of women were born now to miss that. Some would become pretty nuisances who would presently cease to be pretty, parasites on love and the respect for motherhood; shams, simulacra. Others would break away to a real individual life—a third sex. Perhaps in the new world there would cease to be two sexes only; there would be recognized varieties and subdivisions. So Bobby speculated. For just as there were women who did not want to bear children, so there were men who did not want to lord it over wife and children.
They would want to love all the same. Every individual of a social species needed love; to fail in that need was to escape out of social life to lonely futility. “Mutual comfort,” Bobby quoted. In his past Bobby had dreamt of the love of children. Even now he remembered as a fact that he had dreamt particularly of a little girl of his own that he could protect and explore. But now the thought and interest of Christina Alberta had blotted that out. It was extraordinary to him to perceive how possessed he was by her. He could endure no prospect of life just now unless it was to include Christina Alberta as its principal fact. But he’d be no use to her unless she respected him. He couldn’t hope to stand subordinate to her, any more than he could hope to be her master. In the latter case she’d rebel; in the former, she’d despise. They would have to stand side by side. And since she was clever, able and resolved to work hard and distinguish herself, he must word hard and also distinguish himself too. He had to be her equal and remain and keep himself her equal....
That, in fact, was why he was going to write a great novel—not just a novel but a great one.
He looked again at the neatly written page. “Ups and Downs,” he read. “A Pedestrian Novel.”
It dawned upon him that there was something profoundly wrong about that.
It was to have been a story of wandering about in the world that is; the story of the happy adventures of a well tempered mind in a well understood scheme of things. But Bobby was beginning to realize that there is not, and there never has been, a world that is; there is only a world that has been and a world that is to be. “New people,” whispered Bobby, and dipped a quill in the ink and made a border of dots round his title. Then suddenly he crossed out those three words “Ups and Downs” and wrote instead, “New Country.”
“That might be the title of any novel that matters,” said Bobby.
He mused deeply. Then he altered the sub-title to “The History of an Explorer.”
He scratched out “Explorer.”
“Involuntary traveller,” said Bobby.
Finally he put back “A Pedestrian Novel” as his sub-title....
He became aware of an intermittent dull tapping, and following the sound discovered a thrush trying to break up a snail on the gravel path. But the gravel path was too fine and soft to give a firm anvil for the beating. “The silly bird ought to find a brick or a potsherd,” said Bobby and reflected. “I suppose all the flower-pots are shut up in the shed....
“I don’t like to see that bird wasting the morning and being disappointed....
“It wouldn’t take a minute....”
He got up, let himself out by the little glass door beside the window and went to find a brick. Presently he returned with it.
But he did not go back into the study because whilehe had been looking for the brick, he had seen a young blackbird which had got under the strawberry netting, and was evidently scared out of its silly wits. So he went back to see about the blackbird. The minutes passed and he did not reappear. Perhaps he had found some other fellow-creature in trouble.
Presently a little breeze blew into the study through the open glass door, and lifted the sheet of paper which was to introduce our hero, and wafted it softly and suggestively on to the unlit wood fire upon the hearth. There it lay for a long time.