'No. You'd make no terms, ever.'
'I've never been tempted. One may have to make terms, sometimes.'
'I think not,' said Gideon. 'I think one never is obliged to make terms.'
'If the enemy is too strong?'
'Then one goes under. Gets out of it. That's not making terms…. Good-night; I'm going home. I hate parties, you know. So do you. Why do either of us go to them?'
'They take one's thoughts off,' said Katherine in her own mind. Her blue eyes contracted as she looked after him.
'He's failing; he's being hurt. He'll go under. He should have been a scientist or a scholar or a chemist, like me; something in which knowledge matters and people don't. People will break his heart.'
3
Gideon walked all the way back from Hampstead to his own rooms. It was a soft, damp night, full of little winds that blew into the city from February fields and muddy roads far off. There would be lambs in the fields…. Gideon suddenly wanted to get out of the town into that damp, dark country that circled it. There would be fewer people there; fewer minds crowded together, making a dense atmosphere that was impervious to the piercing, however sharp, of truth. All this dense mass of stupid, muddled, huddled minds…. What was to be done with it? Greedy minds, ignorant minds, sentimental, truthless minds….
He saw, as he passed a newspaper stand, placards in big black letters—'Bride's Suicide.' 'Divorce of Baronet.' Then, small and inconspicuous, hardly hoping for attention, 'Italy and the Adriatic.' For one person who would care about Italy and the Adriatic, there would, presumably, be a hundred who would care about the bride and the baronet. Presumably; else why the placards? Gideon honestly tried to bend his impersonal and political mind to understand it. He knew no such people, yet one had to believe they existed; people who really cared that a bride with whom they had no acquaintance (why a bride? Did that make her more interesting?) had taken her life; and that a baronet (also a perfect stranger) had had his marriage dissolved in a court of law. What quality did it indicate, this curious and inexplicable interest in these topics so tedious to himself and to most of his personal acquaintances? Was it a love of romance? But what romance was to be found in suicide or divorce? Romance Gideon knew; knew how it girdled the world, heard the beat of its steps in far forests, the whisper of its wings on dark seas…. It is there, not in divorces and suicides. Were people perhaps moved by desire to hear about the misfortunes of others? No, because they also welcomed with eagerness the more cheerful domestic episodes reported. Was it, then, some fundamental, elemental interest in fundamental things, such as love, hate, birth, death? That was possibly it. The relation of states one with another are the product of civilisation, and need an at least rudimentarily political brain to grasp them. The relations of human beings are natural, and only need the human heart for their understanding. That part of man's mind which has been, for some obscure reason, inaccurately called the heart, was enormously and disproportionately stronger than the rest of the mind, the thinking part.
'Light Caught Bending,' another placard remarked. That was more cheerful, though it was an idiotic way of putting a theory as to the curvature of space, but it was refreshing that, apparently, people were expected to be excited by that too. And, Gideon knew it, they were. Einstein's theory as to space and light would be discussed, with varying degrees of intelligence, most of them low, in many a cottage, many a club, many a train. There would be columns about it in the Sunday papers, with little Sunday remarks to the effect that the finiteness of space did not limit the infinity of God. Scientists have naïf minds where God is concerned; they see him, if at all, in terms of space.
Anyhow, there it was. People were interested not only in divorce, suicide, and murder, but in light and space, undulations and gravitation. That was rather jolly, for that was true romance. It gave one more hope. Even though people might like their science in cheap and absurd tabloid form, they did like it. The Potter press exulted in scientific discoveries made easy, but it was better than not exulting in them at all. For these were things as they were, and therefore the things that mattered. This was the satisfying world of hard, difficult facts, without slush and without sentiment. This was the world where truth was sought for its own sake.
'When I see truth, do I seek truthOnly that I may things denote,And, rich by striving, deck my youthAs with a vain, unusual coat?'
Nearly every one in the ordinary world did that, if indeed they ever concerned themselves with truth at all. And some scientists too, perhaps, but not most. Scientists and scholars and explorers—they were the people. They were the world's students, the learners, the discoverers. They didn't talk till they knew….
Rain had begun to drizzle. At the corner of Marylebone Road and Baker Street there was a lit coffee-stall. A group clustered about it; a policeman drinking oxo, his waterproof cape shining with wet; two taxi-cab drivers having coffee and buns; a girl in an evening cloak, with a despatch case, eating biscuits.
Gideon passed by without stopping. A hand touched him on the arm, and a painted face looked up into his, murmuring something. Gideon, who had a particular dislike for paint on the human face, and, in general, for persons who looked and behaved like this person, looked away from her and scowled.
'I only wanted,' she explained, 'a cup of coffee …' and he gave her sixpence, though he didn't believe her.
Horrible, these women were; ugly; dirty; loathsome; so that one wondered why on earth any one liked them (some people obviously did like them, or they wouldn't be there), and yet, detestable as they were, they were the outcome of facts. Possibly in them, and in the world's other ugly facts, Potterism and all truth-shirking found whatever justification it had. Sentimentalism spread a rosy veil over the ugliness, draping it decently. Making it, thought Gideon, how much worse; but making it such as Potterites could face unwincing.
The rain beat down. At its soft, chill touch Gideon's brain cooled and cooled, till he seemed to see everything in a cold, hard, crystal clarity. Life and death—how little they mattered. Life was paltry, and death its end. Yet when the world, the Potterish world, dealt with death it became something other than a mere end; it became a sensation, a problem, an episode in a melodrama. The question, when a man died, was always how and why. So, when Hobart had died, they were all dragged into a net of suspicion and melodrama—they all became for a time absurd actors in an absurd serial in the Potter press. You could not escape from sensationalism in a sensational world. There was no room for the pedant, with his greed for unadorned and unemotional precision.
Gideon sighed sharply as he turned into Oxford Street, Oxford Street was and is horrible. Everything a street should not be, even when it was down, and now it was up, which was far worse. If Gideon had not been unnerved by the painted person at the corner of Baker Street he would never have gone home this way, he would have gone along Marylebone and Euston Road. As it was, he got into a bus and rode unhappily to Gray's Inn Road, where he lived.
He sat up till three in the morning working out statistics for an article. Statistics, figures, were delightful. They were a rest. They mattered.
4
Two days later, at theFactoffice, Peacock, turning over galley slips, said, 'This thing of yours on Esthonian food conditions looks like a government schedule. Couldn't you make it more attractive?'
'To whom?' asked Gideon.
'Well—the ordinary reader.'
'Oh, the ordinary reader. I meant it to be attractive to people who want information.'
'Well, but a little jam with the powder…. For instance, you draw no inference from your facts. It's dull. Why not round the thing off into a good article?'
'I can't round things. I don't like them round, either. I've given the facts, unearthed with considerable trouble and pains. No one else has. Isn't it enough?'
'Oh, it'll do.' Peacock's eyes glanced over the other proofs on his desk.'We've got some good stuff this number.'
'Nice round articles—yes.' Gideon turned the slips over with his lean brown fingers carelessly. He picked one up.
'Hallo. I didn't know that chap was reviewingCoal and Wages.'
'Yes. He asked if he could.'
'Do you think he knows enough?'
'It's quite a good review. Read it.'
Gideon read it carefully, then laid it down and said, 'I don't agree with you that it's a good review. He's made at least two mistakes. And the whole thing's biased by his personal political theories.'
'Only enough to give it colour.'
'You don't want colour in a review of a book of that sort. You only want intelligence and exact knowledge.'
'Oh, Clitherton's all right. His head's screwed on the right way. He knows his subject.'
'Not well enough. He's a political theorist, not a good economist. That's hopeless. Why didn't you get Hinkson to do it?'
'Hinkson can't write for nuts.'
'Doesn't matter. Hinkson wouldn't have slipped up over his figures or dates.'
'My dear old chap, writing does matter. You're going crazy on that subject. Of course it matters that a thing should be decently put together.'
'It matters much more that it should be well informed. It is, of course, quite possible to be both.'
'Oh, quite. That's the idea of theFact, after all.'
'Peacock, I hate all these slipshod fellows you get now. I wish you'd chuck the lot. They're well enough for most journalism, but they don't know enough for us.'
Peacock said, 'Oh, we'll thrash it out another time, if you don't mind.I've got to get through some letters now,' and rang for his secretary.
Gideon went to his own room and searched old files for the verification and correction of Clitherton's mistakes. He found them, and made a note of them. Unfortunately they weakened Clitherton's argument a little. Clitherton would have to modify it. Clitherton, a sweeping and wholesale person, would not like that.
Gideon was feeling annoyed with Clitherton, and annoyed with several others among that week's contributors, and especially annoyed with Peacock, who permitted and encouraged them. If they went on like this, theFactwould soon be popular; it would find its way into the great soft silly heart of the public and there be damned.
He was a pathetic figure, Arthur Gideon, the intolerant precisian, fighting savagely against the tide of loose thinking that he saw surging in upon him, swamping the world and drowning facts. He did not see himself as a pathetic figure, or as anything else. He did not see himself at all, but worked away at his desk in the foggy room, checking the unconsidered or inaccurate or oversimplified statements of others, writing his own section of the Notes of the Week, with his careful, patient, fined brilliance, stopping to gnaw his pen or his thumb-nail or to draw diagrams, triangle within triangle, or circle intersecting circle, on his blotting paper.
1
A week later Gideon resigned his assistant editorship of theFact. Peacock was, on the whole, relieved. Gideon had been getting too difficult of late. After some casting about among eager, outwardly indifferent possible successors, Peacock offered the job to Johnny Potter, who was swimming on the tide of his first novel, which had been what is called 'well spoken of' by the press, but who, at the same time, had the popular touch, was quite a competent journalist, was looking out for a job, and was young enough to do what he was told; that is to say, he was four or five years younger than Peacock. He had also a fervent enthusiasm for democratic principles and for Peacock's prose style (Gideon had been temperate in his admiration of both), and Peacock thought they would get on very well.
Jane was sulky, jealous, and contemptuous.
'Johnny. Why Johnny? He's not so good as lots of other people who would have liked the job. He's swanking so already that it makes me tired to be in the room with him, and now he'll be worse than ever. Oh, Arthur, it is rot, your chucking it. I've a jolly good mind not to marry you. I thought I was marrying the assistant editor of an important paper, not just a lazy old Jew without a job.'
She ruffled up his black, untidy hair with her hand as she sat on the arm of his chair; but she was really annoyed with him, as she had explained a week ago when he had told her.
2
He had walked in one evening and found her in Charles's bedroom, bathing him. Clare was there too, helping.
'Why do girls like washing babies?' Gideon speculated aloud. 'They nearly all do, don't they?'
'Well, I should justhopeso,' Clare said. She was kneeling by the tin bath with her sleeves rolled up, holding a warmed towel. Her face was flushed from the fire, and her hair was loosened where Charles had caught his toe in it. She looked pretty and maternal, and looked up at Gideon with the kind of conventional, good-humoured scorn that girls and women put on when men talk of babies. They do it (one believes) partly because they feel it is a subject they know about, and partly to pander to men's desire that they should do it. It is part of the pretty play between the sexes. Jane never did it; she wasn't feminine enough. And Gideon did not want her to do it; he thought it silly.
'Why do you hope so?' asked Gideon. 'And why do girls like it?'
The first question was to Clare, the second to Jane, because he knew thatClare would not be able to answer it.
'The mites!' said Clare. 'Whowouldn'tlike it?'
Gideon sighed a little, Clare tried him. She had an amorphous mind. But Jane threw up at him, as she enveloped Charles in the towel, 'I'll try and think it out some time, Arthur. I haven't time now…. There's a reason all right…. The powder, Clare.'
Gideon watched the absurd drying and powdering process with gravity and interest, as if trying to discover its charm.
'Even Katherine enjoys it,' he said, still pondering. It was true. Katherine, who liked experimenting with chemicals, liked also washing babies. Possibly Katherine knew why, in both cases.
After Charles was in bed, his mother, his aunt, and his prospective stepfather had dinner. Clare, who was uncomfortable with Gideon, not liking him as a brother-in-law or indeed as anything else (besides not being sure how much Jane had told him about 'that awful night'), chattered to Jane about things of which she thought Gideon knew nothing—dances, plays, friends, family and Potters Bar gossip. Gideon became very silent. He and Clare touched nowhere. Clare flaunted the family papers in his face and Jane's. Lord Pinkerton was starting a new one, a weekly, and it promised to sell better than any other weekly on the market, but far better.
'Dad says the orders have been simply stunning. It's going to be a big thing. Simple, you know, and yet clever—like all dad's papers. David says' (David was the naval officer to whom Clare was now betrothed) 'there'sno onewith such a sense of what people want as dad has. Far more of it than Northcliffe, David says he has. Because, you know, Northcliffe sometimes annoys people—look at the line he took about us helping the Russians to fight each other. And making out in leaders, David says, that the Government is always wrong just because he doesn't like it. And drawing attention to the mistakes it makes, which no one would notice if they weren't rubbed in. David gets quite sick with him sometimes. He says the Pinkerton press never does that sort of thing, it's got too much tact, and lets well alone.'
'I'll, you mean, don't you, darling?' Jane interpolated.
Clare, who did, but did not know it, only said, 'David's got a tremendous admiration for it. He says it willlast.'
'Oh, bother the paternal press,' Jane said. 'Give it a rest, old thing. It may be new to David, but it's stale to us. It's Arthur's turn to talk about his father's bank or something.'
But Arthur didn't talk. He only made bread pills, and the girls got on to the newest dance.
3
Clare went away after dinner. She never stayed long when Gideon was there. David didn't like Gideon, rightly thinking him a Sheeney.
'Sheeneys are at the bottom of Bolshevism, you know,' he told Clare. 'At the top too, for that matter. Dreadful fellows; quite dreadful. Why the dickens do you let Jane marry him?'
Clare shrugged her shoulders.
'Jane does what she likes. Dad and mother have begged and prayed her not to…. Besides, of course, even if he was all right, it's toosoon….'
'Too soon? Ah, yes, of course. Poor Hobart, you mean. Quite. Much too soon…. A dreadful business, that. I don't blame her for trying to put it behind her, out of sight. But with aSheeney. Well,chacun a son goût.'For David was tolerant, a live and let live man.
When Clare was gone, Jane said, 'Wake up, old man. You can talk now…. You and Clare are stupid about each other, by the way. You'll have to get over it some time. You're ill-mannered and she's a silly fool; but ill-mannered people and silly fools can rub along together, all right, if they try.'
'I don't mind Clare,' said Gideon, rousing himself. 'I wasn't thinking about her, to say the truth. I was thinking about something else…. I'm chucking theFact, Jane.'
'How d'you mean, chucking theFact' Jane lit a cigarette.
'What I say. I've resigned my job on it. I'm sick of it.'
'Oh, sick…. Every one's sick of work, naturally. It's what work is for…. Well, what are you doing next? Have you been offered a better job?'
'I've not been offered a job of any sort. And I shouldn't take it if I were—not at present. I'm sick of journalism.'
Jane took it calmly, lying back among the sofa cushions and smoking.
'I was afraid you were working up to this…. Of course, if you chuck theFactyou take away its last chance. It'll do a nose-dive now.'
'It's doing it anyhow. I can't stop it. But I'm jolly well not going to nose-dive with it. I'm clearing out.'
'You're giving up the fight, then. Caving in. Putting your hands up toPotterism.'
She was taunting him, in her cool, unmoved, leisurely tones.
'I'm clearing out,' he repeated, emphasising the phrase, and his black eyes seemed to look into distances. 'Running away, if you like. This thing's too strong for me to fight. I can't do it. Clare's quite right. It's tremendous. It will last. And the Pinkerton press only represents one tiny part of it. If the Pinkerton press were all, it would be fightable. But look at theFact—a sworn enemy of everything the Pinkerton press stands for, politically, but fighting it with its own weapons—muddled thinking, sentimentality, prejudice, loose cant phrases. I tell you there'll hardly be a halfpenny to choose between the Pinkerton press and theFact, by the time Peacock's done with it…. It's not Peacock's fault—except that he's weak. It's not the Syndicate's fault—except that they don't want to go on losing money for ever. It's the pressure of public demand and atmosphere. Atmosphere even more than demand. Human minds are delicate machines. How can they go on working truly and precisely and scientifically, with all this poisonous gas floating round them? Oh, well, I suppose there are a few minds still which do; even some journalists and politicians keep their heads; but what's the use against the pressure? To go in for journalism or for public life is to put oneself deliberately into the thick of the mess without being able to clean it up.'
'After all,' said Jane, more moderately, 'it's all a joke. Everything is.The world is.'
'A rotten bad joke.'
'You think things matter. You take anti-Potterism seriously, as some people take Potterism.'
'Things are serious. Things do matter,' said the Russian Jew.
Jane looked at him kindly. She was a year younger than he was, but felt five years older to-night.
'Well, what's the remedy then?'
He said, wearily, 'Oh, education, I suppose. Education. There's nothing else.Learning.' He said the word with affection, lingering on it, striking his hand on the sofa-back to emphasise it.
'Learning, learning, learning. There's nothing else…. We should drop all this talking and writing. All this confused, uneducated mass of self-expression. Self-expression, with no self worth expressing. That's just what we shouldn't do with our selves—express them. We should train them, educate them, teach them to think, see that theyknowsomething—know it exactly, with no blurred edges, no fogs. Be sure of our facts, and keep theories out of the system like poison. And when we say anything we should say it concisely and baldly, without eloquence and frills. Lord, how I loathe eloquence!'
'But you can't get away from it, darling. All right, don't mind me, I like it…. Well now, what are you going todoabout it? Teach in a continuation school?'
'No,' he said, seriously. 'No. Though one might do worse. But I've got to get right away for a time—right out of it all. I've got to find things out before I do anything else.'
'Well, there are plenty of, things to find out here. No need to go away for that.'
He shook his head.
'Western Europe's so hopeless just now. So given over to muddle and lies.Besides, I can't trust myself, I shall talk if I stay. I'm not a strongsilent man. I should find myself writing articles, or standing forParliament, or something.'
'And very nice too. I've always said you ought to stand for Labour.'
'And I've sometimes agreed with you. But now I know I oughtn't. That's not the way. I'm not going to join in that mess. I'm not good enough to make it worth while. I should either get swamped by it, or I should get so angry that I should murder some one. No, I'm going right out of it all for a bit. I want to find out a little, if I can, about how things are in other countries. Central Europe. Russia. I shall go to Russia.'
'Russia! You'll come back and write about it. People do.'
'I shall not. No, I think I can avoid that—it's too obvious a temptation to tumble into with one's eyes shut.'
'"He travelled in Russia and never wrote of it." It would be a good epitaph…. But Arthur darling, is it wise, is it necessary, is it safe? Won't the Reds get you, or the Whites? Which would be worse, I wonder?'
'What should they want with me?'
'They'll think you're going to write about them, of course. That's why the Reds kidnapped Keeling, and the Whites W.T. Goode. They were quite right, too—except that they didn't go far enough and make a job of them. Suppose they've learnt wisdom by now, and make a job of you?'
'Well then, I shall be made a job of. Also a placard for our sensational press, which would be worse. One must take a few risks…. It will be interesting, you know, to be there. I shall visit my father's old home near Odessa. Possibly some of his people may be left round there. I shall find things out—what the conditions are, why things are happening as they are, how the people live. I think I shall be better able after that to find out what the state of things is here. One's too provincial, too much taken up with one's own corner. Political science is too universal a thing to learn in that way.'
'And when you've found out? What next?'
'There's no next. It will take me all my life even to begin to find out.I don't know where I shall be—in London, no doubt, mostly.'
'Do you mean, Arthur, that you're going to chuck work for good? Writing,I mean, or public work?'
'I hope so. I mean to. Oh, if ever, later on, I feel I have anything I want to say, I'll say it. But that won't be for years. First I'm going to learn…. You see, Jane, we can live all right. Thank goodness, I don't depend on what I earn…. You and I together—we'll learn a lot.'
'Oh, I'm going in for confused self-expression. I'm not taking any vows of silence. I'm going to write.'
'As you like. Every one's got to decide for themselves. It amuses you,I suppose.'
'Of course, it does. Why not? I love it. Not only writing, but being in the swim, making a kind of a name, doing what other people do. I'm not mother, who does but write because she must, and pipes but as the linnets do.'
'No, thank goodness. You're as intellectually honest as any one I know, and as greedy for the wrong things.'
'I want a good time. Why not?'
'Why not? Only that, as long as we're all out for a good time, those of us who can afford to will get it, and nothing more, and those of us who can't will get nothing at all. You see, I think it's taking hold of things by the wrong end. As long as we go on not thinking, not finding out, but greedily wanting good things—well, we shall be as we are, that's all—Potterish.'
'You mean I'm Potterish,' observed Jane, without rancour.
'Oh Lord, we all are,' said Gideon in disgust. 'Every profiteer, every sentimentalist, ever muddler. Every artist directly he thinks of his art as something marketable, something to bring him fame; every scientist or scholar (if there are any) who fakes a fact in the interest of his theory; every fool who talks through his hat without knowing; every sentimentalist who plays up to the sentimentalism in himself and other people; every second-hand ignoramus who takes over a view or a prejudice wholesale, without investigating the facts it's based on for himself. You find it everywhere, the taint; you can't get away from it. Except by keeping quiet and learning, and wanting truth more than anything else.'
'It sounds a dull life, Arthur. Rather like K's, in her old laboratory.'
'Yes, rather like K's. Not dull; no. Finding things out can't be dull.'
'Well, old thing, go and find things out. But come back in time for the wedding, and then we'll see what next.'
Jane was not seriously alarmed. She believed that this of Arthur's, was a short attack; when they were married she would see that he got cured of it. She wasn't going to let him drop out of things and disappear, her brilliant Arthur, who had his world in his hand to play with. Journalism, politics, public life of some sort—it was these that he was so eminently fitted for and must go in for.
'You mustn't waste yourself, Arthur,' she said. 'It's all right to lie low for a bit, but when you come back you must do something worth while…. I'm sorry about theFact; I think you might have stayed on and saved it. But it's your show. Go and explore Central Europe, then, and learn all about it. Then come back and write a book on political science which will be repulsive to all but learned minds. But remember we're getting married in June; don't be late, will you. And write to me from Russia. Letters that will do for me to send to the newspapers, telling me not to spend my money on hats and theatres but on distributing anti-Bolshevist and anti-Czarist tracts. I'll have the letters published in leaflets at threepence a hundred, and drop them about in public places.'
'I'll write to you, no fear,' said Gideon. 'And I'll be in time for the wedding…. Jane, we'll have a great time, you and I, learning things together. We'll have adventures. We'll go exploring, shall we?'
'Rather. We'll lend Charles to mother and dad often, and go off…. I'd come with you now for two pins. Only I can't.'
'No. Charles needs you at present.' 'There's my book, too. And all sorts of things.' 'Oh, your book—that's nothing. Books aren't worth losing anything for. Don't you ever get tied up with books and work, Jane. It's not worth it. One's got to sit loose. Only one can't, to kids; they're too important. We'll have our good times before we get our kids—and after they've grown old enough to be left to themselves a bit.'
Jane smiled enigmatically, only obscurely realising that she meant, 'Our ideas of a good time aren't the same, and never will be.'
Gideon too only obscurely knew it. Anyhow, for both, the contemplation of that difference could be deferred. Each could hope to break the other in when the time came. Gideon, as befitted his sex, realised the eternity of the difference less sharply than Jane did. It was just, he thought, a question of showing Jane, making her understand…. Jane did not think that it was just a question of making Gideon understand. But he loved her, and she was persuaded that he would yield to her in the end, and not spoil her jolly, delightful life, which was to advance, hand in hand with his, to notoriety or glory or both.
For a moment both heard, remotely, the faint clash of swords. Then they shut a door upon the sound, and the man, shaken with sudden passion, drew the woman into his arms.
'I've been talking, talking all the evening,' said Gideon presently. 'I can't get away from it, can I. Preaching, theorising, holding forth. It's more than time I went away somewhere where no one will listen to me.'
'There's plenty of talking in Russia. You'll come back worse than ever, my dear…. I don't care. As long as you do come back. You must come back to me, Arthur.'
She clung to him, in one of her rare moments of demonstrated passion. She was usually cool, and left demonstration to him.
'I shall come back all right,' he told her. 'No fear. I want to get married, you see. I want it, really, much more than I want to get information or anything else. Wanting a person—that's what we all want most, when we want it at all. Queer, isn't it? And hopelessly personal and selfish. But there it is. Ideals simply don't count in comparison. They'd go under every time, if there was a choice.'
Jane, with his arms round her and his face bent down to hers, knew it. She was not afraid, either for his career or her own. They would have their good time all right.
1
March wore through, and April came, and warm winds healed winter's scars, and the 1920 budget shocked every one, and the industrial revolution predicted as usual didn't come off, and Mr. Wells'sHistory of the Worldcompleted its tenth part, and blossom by blossom the spring began.
It was the second Easter after the war, and people were getting more used to peace. They murdered one another rather less frequently, were rather less emotional and divorced, and understood with more precision which profiteers it was worth while to prosecute and which not, and why the second class was so much larger than the first; and, in general, had learnt to manage rather better this unmanageable peace.
The outlook, domestic and international, was still what those who think in terms of colour call black. The Irish question, the Russian question, the Italian-Adriatic question, and all the Asiatic questions, remained what those who think in terms of angles call acute. Economic ruin, political bankruptcy, European chaos, international hostilities had become accepted as the normal state of being by the inhabitants of this restless and unfortunate planet.
2
Such was the state of things in the world at large. In literary London, publishers produced their spring lists. They contained the usual hardy annuals and bi-annuals among novelists, several new ventures, including John Potter'sGiles in Bloomsbury(second impression); Jane Hobart'sChildren of Peace(A Satire by a New Writer); and Leila Yorke'sThe Price of Honour. ('In her new novel, Leila Yorke reveals to the full the Glittering psychology combined with profound depths which have made this well-known writer famous. The tale will be read, from first page to last, with breathless interest. The end is unexpected and out of the common, and leaves one wondering.' So said the publisher; the reviewers, more briefly, 'Another Leila Yorke.')
There were also many memoirs of great persons by themselves, many histories of the recent war, several thousand books of verse, a monograph by K.D. Varick on Catalysers and Catalysis and the Generation of Hydrogen, andNew Wineby the Reverend Laurence Juke.
The journalistic world also flourished. TheWeekly Facthad become, as people said, quite an interesting and readable paper, brighter than theNation, more emotional than theNew Statesman, gentler than theNew Witness, spicier than theSpectator, more chatty than theAthenaeum, so that one bought it on bookstalls and read it in trains.
There was also the new Pinkerton fourpenny, theWednesday Chat, brighter, more emotional, gentler, spicier, and chattier than them all, and vulgar as well, nearly as vulgar asJohn Bull, and quite as sentimental, but less vicious, so that it sold in its millions from the outset, and soon had a poem up on the walls of the tube stations, saying—
'No other weeklies sellAnything like so well.'
which was as near the truth as these statements usually are. Lord Pinkerton had, in fact, with his usual acumen, sensed the existence of a great Fourpenny Weekly Public, and given it, as was his wont, more than it desired or deserved. The sixpenny weekly public already had its needs met; so had the penny, the twopenny, the threepenny, and the shilling public. Now the fourpenny public, a shy and modest section of the community, largely clerical (in the lay sense of the word) looked up and was fed. Those brains which could only with effort rise to the solid political and economic information and cultured literary judgments meted out by the sixpennies, but which yet shrank from the crudities of our cheapest journals, here found something they could read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest.
The Potterite press (not only Lord Pinkerton's) advanced, like an army terrible with banners, on all sections of the line.
3
Juke's book on modern thought in the Church was a success. It was brilliantly written, and reviewed in lay as well as in church papers. Juke, to his own detriment, became popular. Canon Streeter and others asked him to collaborate in joint books on the Church. Modernist liberal-catholic vicars asked him to preach. When he preached, people came in hundreds to hear him, because he was an attractive, stimulating, and entertaining preacher. (I have never had this experience, but I assume that it is morally unwholesome.) He had to take missions, and retreats, and quiet days, and give lectures on the Church to cultivated audiences. Then he was offered the living of St. Anne's, Piccadilly, which is one of those incumbencies with what is known as scope, which meant that there were no poor in the parish, and the incumbent's gifts as preacher, lecturer, writer, and social success could be used to the best advantage. He was given three weeks to decide.
4
Gideon wrote long letters to Jane from the Russian towns and villages in which he sojourned. But none of them were suitable for propaganda purposes; they were critical but dispassionate. He had found some cousins of his father's, fur merchants living in a small town on the edge of a forest. 'Clever, cringing, nerve-ridden people,' he said. The older generation remembered his grandparents, and his father as a bright-eyed infant. They remembered that pogrom fifty years ago, and described it. 'They'll describe anything,' wrote Gideon. 'The more horrible it is, the more they'll talk. That's Russian, not Jewish specially. Or is it just human?'… Gideon didn't repeat to Jane the details he heard of his grandparents' murder by Russian police—details which his father, in whose memory they burned like a disease, had never told him.
'Things as bad as that massacre are happening all the time in this pleasant country,' he wrote. 'It doesn't matter what the political convictions, if any, of a Russian are—he's a barbarian whether he's on a soviet or in the anti-Bolshevik armies. Not always, of course; there are a few who have escaped the prevalent lust of cruelty—but only a few. Love of pain (as experienced by others) for its own sake—as one loves good food, or beautiful women—it's a queer disease. It goes along, often, with other strong sensual desires. The Russians, for instance, are the worst gluttons and profligates of Europe. With it all, they have, often, an extraordinary generous good-heartedness; with one hand they will give away what they can't spare to some one in need, while with the other they torture an animal or a human being to death. The women seldomer do either; like women everywhere, they are less given both to sensual desire and to generous open-handedness…. That's a curious thing, how seldom you find physical cruelty in a woman of any nationality. Even the most spiteful and morally unkindest little girl will shudder away while her brother tears the wings off a fly or the legs off a frog, or impales a worm on a hook. Weak nerves, partly, and partly the sort of high-strung fastidiousness women have. When you come across cruelty in a woman—physical cruelty, of course—you think of her as a monster; just as when you come on a stingy man, you think of him (but probably inaccurately) as a Jew. Russians are very male, except in their inchoate, confused thinking. Their special brand of humour and of sentimentality are male; their exuberant strength and aliveness, their sensuality, and their savage cruelty…. If ever women come to count in Russia as a force, not merely as mates for the men, queer things will happen…. Here in this town things are, for the moment, tidy and ordered, as if seven Germans with seven mops had swept it for half a year. The local soviet is a gang of ruffians, but they do keep things more or less ship-shape. And they make people work. And they torture dogs….'
Later he wrote, 'You were right as to one thing; every one I meet, including my relations, is persuaded that I am either a newspaper correspondent or writing a book, or, more probably, both. These taints cling so. I feel like a reformed drunkard, who has taken the pledge but still carries about with him a red nose and shaky hands, so that he gets no credit for his new sobriety. What's the good of my telling people here that I don't write, when I suppose I've the mark of the beast stamped all over me? And they play up; they talk for me to record it….
'I find all kinds of odd things here. Among others, an English doctor, in the local lunatic asylum. Mad as a hatter, poor devil—now—whatever he was when they shut him up. I dare say he'd been through enough even then to turn his brain. I can't find out who his friends in England are….'
5
Gideon stopped writing, and took Jane's last letter out of his pocket. It occurred to him that he was in no sense answering it. Not that Jane would mind; that wasn't the sort of thing she did mind. But it struck him suddenly how difficult it had grown to him to answer Jane's letters—or, indeed, any one else's. He could not flatter himself that he was already contracting the inarticulate habit, because he could pour forth fluently enough about his own experiences; but to Jane's news of London he had nothing to say. A new paper had been started; another paper had died; some one they knew had deserted from one literary côterie to another; some one else had turned from a dowdy into a nut; Jane had been seeing a lot of bad plays; her novel—'my confused mass of self-expression,' she called it to him—was coming out next week. All the familiar personal, literary, political, and social gossip, which he too had dealt in once; Jane was in the thick of it still, and he was turning stupid, like a man living in the country; he could not answer her. Or, perhaps, would not; because the thing that absorbed him at present was how people lived and thought, and what could be made of them—not the conscious, intellectual, writing, discussing, semi-civilised people (semi-civilised—what an absurd word! What is complete civilisation, that we should bisect it and say we have half, or any other exact fraction? Partly civilised, Gideon amended it to), but the great unconscious masses, hardly civilised at all, who shape things, for good or evil, in the long run.
Gideon folded up Jane's letter and put it away, and to his own added nothing but his love.
6
Jane got that letter in Easter week. It was a fine warm day, and she, walking across Green Park, met Juke, who had been lunching with a bishop to meet an elderly princess who had read his book.
'She said, "I'm afraid you're sadly satirical, Mr. Juke,'" he told Jane. 'She did really. And I'm to preach at Sandringham one Sunday. Yes, to the Family. Tell Gideon that, will you. He'll be so disgusted. But what a chance! Life at St. Anne's is going to be full of chances of slanging the rich, that's one thing about it.'
'Oh, you're going to take it, then?'
'Probably. I've not written to accept yet, so don't pass it on.'
'I'm glad. It's much more amusing to accept things, even livings. It'll be lovely: you'll be all among the clubs and theatres and the idle rich; much gayer than Covent Garden.'
'Oh, gayer,' said Juke.
They came out into Birdcage Walk, and there was a man selling theEvening Hustle, Lord Pinkerton's evening paper.
'Bloody massacres,' he was observing with a kind of absent-minded happiness. 'Bloody massacres in Russia, Ireland, Armenia, and the Punjab…. British journalist assassinated near Odessa.'
And there it was, too, in big black letters on theEvening Hustleplacard:—
They bought the paper, to see who the British journalist was. His murder was in a little paragraph on the front page.
'Mr. Arthur Gideon, a well-known British journalist' … first beaten nearly to death by White soldiery, because he was, entirely in vain, defending some poor Jewish family from their wrath … then found by Bolshevists and disposed of … somehow … because he was an Englishman….
7
A placard for the press. A placard for the Potter press. Had he thought of that at the last, and died in the bitterness of that paradox? Murdered by both sides, being of neither, but merely a seeker after fact. Killed in the quest for truth and the war against verbiage and cant, and, in the end, a placard for the press which hated the one and lived by the other.Hadhe thought of that as he broke under the last strain of pain? Or, merely, 'These damned brutes. White or Red, there's nothing to choose … nothing to choose …'
Anyhow, it was over, that quest of his, and nothing remained but the placard which coupled his defeat with the peeress's divorce.
Arthur Gideon had gone under, but the Potter press, the flaunting banner of the great sentimental public, remained. It would always remain, so long as the great sentimental public were what they were.
8
Little remains to add. Little of Gideon, for they never learnt much more of his death than was telegraphed in that first message. His father, going out to the scene of his death, may have heard more; if he did, he never revealed it to any one. Not only Arthur had perished, but the Jewish family he was trying to defend; he had failed as well as died. Failed utterly, every way; gone under and finished, he and his pedantry and his exactitude, his preaching, his hard clarity, and his bewildered bitterness against a world vulgar and soft-headed beyond his understanding.
Juke refused St. Anne's, with its chances, its congregations, and its scope. Neither did he preach at Sandringham. Gideon's fate pilloried on that placard had stabbed through him and cut him, sick and angry, from his moorings. He spoke no more and wrote no more to admiring audiences who hung on his words and took his quick points as he made them. To be one with other men, he learnt a manual trade, and made shoes in Bermondsey, and preached in the streets to men who did not, as a rule, listen.
Jane would, no doubt, fulfil herself in the course of time, make an adequate figure in the world she loved, and suck therefrom no small advantage. She had loved Arthur Gideon; but what Lady Pinkerton and Clare would call her 'heart' was not of the kind which would, as these two would doubtless put it in their strange phraseology, 'break.' Somehow, after all, Jane would have her good time; if not in one way, then in another.
Lord and Lady Pinkerton flourish exceedingly, and will be long in the land. Leila Yorke sells better than ever. Of the Pinkerton press I need not speak, since it is so well qualified to speak for itself. Enough to say that no fears are at present entertained for its demise. And little Charles Hobart grows in stature, under his grandfather's watching and approving eye. When the time comes, he will carry on worthily.