Usually when Hobart was in Paris he would dine with them.
5
Lady Pinkerton and Clare came over for a week. They stayed in rooms, in the Avenue de l'Opera. They visited shops, theatres, and friends, and Lady Pinkerton began a novel about Paris life. Clare had been run down and low-spirited, and the doctor had suggested a change of scene. Hobart was in Paris for the week-end; he dined with the Pinkertons and went to the theatre with them. But on Monday he had to go back to London.
On Monday morning Clare came to her father's office, and found Jane taking down letters from Lord Pinkerton's private secretary, a young man who had been exempted from military service through the war on the grounds that he was Lord Pinkerton's right hand.
Clare sat and waited, and looked round the room for violets, while this young gentleman dictated. His letters were better worded than Lord Pinkerton's, because he was better at the English language. Lord Pinkerton would fall into commercialisms; he would say 're' and 'same' and 'to hand,' and even sometimes 'your favour of the 16th.' His secretary knew that that was not the way in which a great newspaper chief should write. Himself he dictated quite a good letter, but annoyed Jane by putting in the punctuation, as if she was an imbecile. Thus he was saying now, pacing up and down the room, plunged in thought:—
'Lord Pinkerton is not comma however comma averse to' (Jane wrote 'from') 'entertaining your suggestions comma and will be glad if you can make it convenient to call to-morrow bracket Tuesday close the bracket afternoon comma between three and five stop.'
He could not help it; one must make allowances for those who dictate. But Clare saw Jane's teeth release her clenched tongue to permit it to form silently the word 'Ninny.'
The private secretary retired into his chief's inner sanctum.
'Morning, old thing,' said Jane to Clare, uncovering her typewriter without haste and yawning, because she had been up late last night.
'Morning,' Clare yawned too. She was warm and pretty, in a spring costume, with a big bunch of sweet violets at her waist. She touched these.
'Aren't they top-hole. Mr. Hobart left them this morning before he went. Jolly decent of him to think of it, getting off in a hurry like he was…. He's not a bad young thing, do you think.'
'Not so bad.' Jane extracted carbons from a drawer and fitted them to her paper. Then she stretched, like a cat.
'Oh, I'm sleepy…. Don't feel like work to-day. For two pins I'd cut it and go out with you and mother. The sun's shining, isn't it?'
Clare stood by the window, and swung the blind-tassel. They had five days of Paris before them, and Paris suddenly seemed empty….
'We're going to have a topping week,' she said.
Then Lord Pinkerton came in.
'Hobart gone?' he asked Jane.
'Yes.'
'Majendie in my room?'
'Yes.'
Lord Pinkerton patted Clare's shoulder as he passed her.
'Send Miss Hope in to me when she comes, Babs,' he said, and disappeared through the farther door.
Jane began to type. It bored her, but she was fairly proficient at it.Her childhood's training stood her in good stead.
'Mr. Hobart must have run his train pretty fine, if he came in here on the way,' said Clare, twirling the blind-tassel.
'He wasn't going till twelve,' said Jane, typing.
'Oh, I see. I thought it was ten…. I suppose he found he couldn't get that one, and had to see dad first. What a bore for him…. Well, I'm off to meet mother. See you this evening, I suppose.'
Clare went out into Paris and the March sunshine, whistling softly.
That night she lay awake in her big bed, as she had lain last night. She lay tense and still, and stared at the great gas globe that looked in through the open window from the street. Her brain formed phrases and pictures.
'That day on the river…. Those Sundays…. That lunch at the Florence…. "What attractive shoes those are."… My gray suedes, I had…. "I love these Sunday afternoons."… "You're one of the few girls who are jolly to watch when they run."… "Just you and me; wouldn't it be rather nice? I should like it, anyhow."… He kept looking…. Whenever I looked up he was looking…. his eyes awfully blue, with black edges to them…. Peggy said he blacked them…. Peggy was jealous because he never looked at her…. I'm jealous now because … No, I'm not, why should I be? He doesn't like fat girls, he said…. He watches her…. He looks at her when there's a joke…. He bought me violets, but he went to see her…. He keeps coming over to Paris…. I never see him…. I don't get a chance…. He cared, he did care…. He's forgetting because I don't get a chance…. She's stealing him…. She was always a selfish little cad, grabbing, and not really caring. She can't care as I do, she's not made that way…. She cares for nothing but herself…. She gets everything, just by sitting still and not bothering…. College makes girls awful…. Peggy says men don't like them, but they do. They seem not to care about men, but they care just the same. They don't bother, but they get what they want…. Pig…. Oh, I can't bear it. Why should I?… I love him, I love him, I love him…. Oh, I must go to sleep. I shall go mad if I have another night like last night.'
Clare got out of bed, stumbled to the washstand, splashed her burning head and face with cold water, then lay shivering.
It may or may not be true that the power to love is to be found in the human being in inverse ratio to the power to think. Probably it is not; these generalisations seldom are. Anyhow, Clare, like many others, could not understand, but loved.
6
Lady Pinkerton said to her lord next day, 'How much longer will the peace take being made, Percy?'
'My dear, I can't tell you. Even I don't know everything. There are many little difficulties, which have to be smoothed down. Allies stand in a curious and not altogether easy relation to one another.'
'Italy, of course….'
'And not only Italy, dearest.'
'Of course, China is being very tiresome.'
'Ah, if it were only China!'
Lady Pinkerton sighed.
'Well, it is all very sad. I do hope, Percy, that after this war weEnglish will never again forget that we hateallforeigners.'
'I hope not, my dear. I am afraid before the war I was largely responsible for encouraging these fraternisations and discriminations. A mistake, no doubt. But one which did credit to our hearts. One must always remember about a great people like ourselves that the heart leads.'
'Thank God for that,' said Leila Yorke, illogically. Then Lady Pinkerton added, 'But this peace takes too long…. I suppose a lasting and righteous peace must … Shall you have to be running to and fro like this till it's signed, dear?'
'To and fro, yes. I must keep an office going here.'
'Jane is enjoying it,' said Lady Pinkerton. 'She sees a lot of OliverHobart, I suppose, doesn't she?'
'He's in and out, of course. He and the child get on better than they used to.'
'There is no doubt about that,' said Lady Pinkerton. 'If you don't know it, Percy, I had better tell you. Men never see these things. He is falling in love with her.'
Lord Pinkerton fidgeted about the room.
'Rilly. Rilly. Very amusing. You used to think it was Clare, dearest.'
He cocked his head at her accusingly, convicting her of being a woman of fancies.
'Oh, you dear novelists!' he said, and shook a finger at her.
'Nonsense, Percy. It is perfectly obvious. He used to be attracted by Clare, and now he is attracted by Jane. Very strange: such different types. But lifeisstrange, and particularly love. Oh, I don't say it's love yet, but it's a strong attraction, and may easily lead to it. The question is, are we to let it go on, or shall we head him back to Clare, who has begun to care, I am afraid, poor child?'
'Certainly head him back if you like and can, darling. I don't supposeBabs wants him, anyhow.'
'That is just it. If Jane did, I shouldn't interfere. Her happiness is as dear to me as Clare's, naturally. But Jane is not susceptible; she has a colder temperament; and she is often quite rude to Oliver Hobart. Look how different their views about everything are. He and Clare agree much better.'
'Very well, mother. You're the doctor. I'll do my best not to throw them together when next Hobart comes over. But we must leave the children to settle their affairs for themselves. If he really wants fat little Babs we can't stop him trying for her.'
'Life is difficult,' Lady Pinkerton sighed. 'My poor little Clare is looking like a wilted flower.'
'Poor little girl. M'm yes. Poor little girl. Well, well, we'll see what can be done…. I'll see if I can take Janet home for a bit, perhaps—get her out of the way. She's very useful to me here, though. There are no flies on Jane. She's got the Potter wits all right.'
But Lady Pinkerton loved better Clare, who was like a flower, Clare, whom she had created, Clare, who might have come—if any girl could have come—out of a Leila Yorke novel.
'I shall say a word to Jane,' Lady Pinkerton decided. 'Just to sound her.'
But, after all, it was Jane who said the word. She said it that evening, in her cool, leisurely way.
'Oliver Hobart asked me to marry him yesterday morning. I wrote to-day to tell him I would.'
7
I append now the personal records of various people concerned in this story. It seems the best way.
1
Nothing that I or anybody else did in the spring and summer of 1919 was of the slightest importance. It ought to have been a time for great enterprises and beginnings; but it emphatically wasn't. It was a queer, inconclusive, lazy, muddled, reckless, unsatisfactory, rather ludicrous time. It seemed as if the world was suffering from vertigo. I have seen men who have been badly hit spinning round and round madly, like dancing dervishes. That was, I think, what we were all doing for some time after the war—spinning round and round, silly and dazed, without purpose or power. At least the only purpose in evidence was the fierce quest of enjoyment, and the only power that of successfully shirking facts. We were like bankrupts, who cannot summon energy to begin life and work again in earnest. And we were represented by the most comic parliament that ever sat in Westminster, upon which it would be too painful here to expatiate.
One didn't know what had happened, or what was happening, or what was going to happen. We had won the war. But what was that going to mean? What were we going to get out of it? What did we want the new world to be? What did we want this country to be? Every one shouted a different answer. The December elections seemed to give one answer. But I don't think it was a true one. The public didn't really want the England ofJohn Bulland Pemberton Billing; they showed that later.
A good many people, of course, wanted and want revolution and the International. I don't, and never did. I hate red-flaggery, and all other flaggery. The sentimentalism of Bob Smillie is as bad as the sentimentalism of the Pinkerton press; as untruthful, as greedy, as muddle-headed. Smillie's lot are out to get, and the Potterites out to keep. The under-dog is more excusable in its aims, but its methods aren't any more attractive. Juke can swallow it all. But Jukie has let his naturally clear head get muddled by a mediaeval form of religion. Religion is like love; it plays the devil with clear thinking. Juke pretended not to hate even Smillie's interview with the coal dukes. He applauded when Smillie quoted texts at them. Though I know, of course, that that sort of thing is mainly a pose on Juke's part, because it amuses him. Besides, one of the dukes was a cousin of his, who bored him, so of course he was pleased.
But those texts damned Smillie for ever in my eyes. He had those poor imbeciles at his mercy—and he gave his whole case away by quoting irrelevant remarks from ancient Hebrew writers. I wish I had had his chance for ten minutes; I would have taken it. But the Labour people are always giving themselves away with both hands to the enemy. I suppose facts have hit them too hard, and so they shrink away from them—pad them with sentiment, like uneducated women in villas. They all need—so do the women—a legal training, to make their minds hard and clear and sharp. So do journalists. Nearly the whole press is the same, dealing in emotions and stunts, unable to face facts squarely, in a calm spirit.
It seemed to some of us that spring that there was a chance for unsentimental journalism in a new paper, that should be unhampered by tradition. That was why theWeekly Fact(unofficially called the Anti-Potterite) was started. All the other papers had traditions; their past principles dictated their future policy. TheFact(except that it was up against Potterism) was untrammelled; it was to judge of each issue as it turned up, on its own merits, in the light of fact. That, of course, was in itself the very essence of anti-Potterism, which was incapable of judging or considering anything whatever, and whose only light was a feeble emotionalism The light of fact was to Potterites but a worse darkness.
TheFactwasn't to be labelled Liberal or Labour or Tory or Democratic or anti-Democratic or anything at all. All these things were to vary with the immediate occasions. I know it sounds like Lloyd George, but there were at least two very important differences between theFactand the Prime Minister. One was that theFactemployed experts who always made a very thorough and scientific investigation of every subject it dealt with before it took up a line; it cared for the truth and nothing but the truth. The other was that theFacttook in nearly every case the less popular side, not, of course, because it was less popular (for to do that would have been one of the general principles of which we tried to steer clear), but it so happened that we came to the conclusion nearly always that the majority were wrong. The fact is that majorities nearly always are. The heart of the people may be usually in the right place (though, personally, I doubt this, for the heart of man is corrupt) but their head can, in most cases, be relied on to be in the wrong one. This is an important thing for statesmen to remember; forgetfulness of it has often led to disaster; ignorance of it has created Potterism as an official faith.
Anyhow, theFact(again unlike the Prime Minister) could afford to ignore the charges of flightiness and irresponsibility which, of course, were flung at it. It could afford to ignore them because of the good and solid excellence of its contents, and the reputations of many of its contributors. And that, of course, was due to the fact that it had plenty of money behind it. A great many people know who backs theFact, but, all the same, I cannot, of course, give away this information to the public. I will only say that it started with such a good financial backing that it was able to afford the best work, able even to afford the truth. Most of the good weeklies, certainly, speak the truth as they see it; they are, in fact, a very creditable section of our press; but the idea of theFactwas to be absolutely unbiased on each issue that turned up by anything it had ever thought before. Of course, you may say that a man will be likely, when a case comes before his eyes, to come to the same conclusion about it that he came to about a similar case not long before. But, as a matter of fact, it is surprising how some slight difference in the circumstances of a case may, if a man keeps an open mind, alter his whole judgment of it. TheFactwas a scientific, not a sentimental paper. If our investigations led us into autocracy, we were to follow them there; if to a soviet state, still we were to follow them. And we might support autocracy in one state and soviets in another, if it seemed suitable. Again this sounds like some of our more notorious politicians—Carson, for instance; but the likeness is superficial.
2
We began in March. Peacock and I were the editors. We didn't, and don't, always agree. Peacock, for instance, believes in democracy. Peacock also accepts poetry; poetry about the war, by people like Johnny Potter. Every one knows that school of poetry by heart now; of course it was particularly fashionable immediately after the war. Johnny Potter did it much like other men. Any one can do it. One takes some dirty, horrible incident or sight of the battle-front and describes it in loathsome detail, and then, by way of contrast, describes some fat and incredibly bloodthirsty woman or middle-aged clubman at home, gloating over the glorious war. I always thought it a great bore, and sentimental at that. But it was the thing for a time, and people seemed to be impressed by it, and Peacock, who encouraged young men, often to their detriment, would take it for theFact, though that sort of cheap and popular appeal to sentiment was the last thing theFactwas out for.
Johnny Potter, like other people, was merely exploiting his experiences. Johnny would. He's a nice chap, and a cleverish chap, in the shrewd, unimaginative Potter way—Jane's way, too—only she's a shade cleverer—but chiefly he's determined to get there somehow. That's Potter, again. And that's where Jane and Johnny amuse me. They're up against what we agreed to call Potterism—the Potterism, that is, of second-rate sentimentalism and cheap short-cuts and mediocrity; they stand for brain and clear thinking against muddle and cant; but they're fighting it with Potterite weapons—self-interest, following things for what they bring them rather than for the things in themselves. John would never write the particular kind of stuff he does for the love of writing it; he'll only do it because it's the stunt of the moment. That's why he'll never be more than cleverish and mediocre, never the real thing. In his calm, unexcited way, he worships success, and he'll get it, like old Pinkerton. Though of course he's met plenty of the bloodthirsty non-combatants he writes about, he takes most of what he says about them second-hand from other people. It's not first-hand observation. If it was, he would have to include among his jingoes and Hun-haters some fighting men too. I know it's entirely against popular convention to say so, but some of the most bloodthirsty fire-eaters I met during the war were among the fighting men. Of course there were plenty of them at home too, and plenty of peaceable and civilised people at the front, but it's the most absurd perversion of facts to make out that all our combatants were full of sweet reasonableness (any one who knows anything about the psychological effects of fighting will know that this is improbable), and all our non-combatants bloody-minded savages. Though I don't say there's nothing in the theory one heard that the natural war rage of non-combatants, not having the physical outlet the fighters had for theirs, became in some few of them a suppressed Freudian complex and made them a little insane. I don't know. Anyhow to say this became the stunt among a certain section, so it was probably as inaccurate as popular sayings usually are; as inaccurate as the picture drawn by another section—the Potter press section—of an army going rejoicing into the fight for right.
What one specially resented was the way the men who had been killed, poor devils, were exploited by the makers of speeches and the writers of articles. First, they'd perhaps be called 'the fallen,' instead of 'the killed' (it's a queer thing how 'fallen,' in the masculine means killed in the war, and the feminine given over to a particular kind of vice), and then the audience, or the readers, would be told that they died for democracy, or a cleaner world, when very likely many of them hated the first and never gave an hour's thought to the second. I could imagine their indignant presences in the Albert Hall at Gray's big League of Nations meeting in May, listening to Clynes's reasons why they died. I can hear dear old Peter Clancy on why he died. 'Democracy? A cleaner world? No. Why? I suppose I died because I inadvertently got in the way of some flying missile; I know no other reason. And I suppose I was there to get in its way because it's part of belonging to a nation to fight its battles when required—like paying its taxes or keeping its laws. Why go groping for far-fetched reason? Who wants democracy, any old way? And the world was good enough for me as it was, thank you. No, of course it isn't clean, and never will be; but no war is going to make it cleaner. It's not a way wars have. These talkers make me sick.'
If Clancy—the thousands of Clancys—could have been there, I think that is the sort of thing they would have been saying. Anyhow, personally, I certainly didn't lose my foot for democracy or for a cleaner world. I lost it in helping to win the war—a quite necessary thing in the circumstances.
But every one seemed, during and after the war, to want to prove that the fighters thought in the particular way they thought themselves; they seemed to think it immeasurably strengthened their case. Heaven only knows why, when the fighting men were just the men who hadn't time or leisure to think at all. They were, as the Potterites put it so truly, doing the job. The thinking, such as it was, was done by the people at home—the politicians, the clergy, the writers, the women, the men with 'A' certificates in Government offices; and precious poor thinking it was, too.
3
We all settled down to life and work again, as best we could. Johnny Potter went into a publisher's office, and also got odd jobs of reviewing and journalism, besides writing war verse and poetry of passion (of which confusing if attractive subject, he really knew little). Juke was demobilised early too, commenced clergyman again, got a job as curate in a central London parish, and lived in rooms in a slummy street. He and I saw a good deal of each other.
One day in March, Juke and I were lunching together at the 1917 Club, when Johnny came in and joined us. He looked rather queer, and amused too. He didn't tell us anything till we were having coffee. Then Juke or I said, 'How's Jane getting on in Paris? Not bored yet?'
Johnny said, 'I should say not. She's been and gone and done it. She's got engaged to Hobart. I heard from the mater this morning.'
I don't think either of us spoke for a moment. Then Juke gave a long whistle, and said, 'Good Lord!'
'Exactly,' said Johnny, and grinned.
'It's no laughing matter,' said Juke blandly. 'Jane is imperilling her immortal soul. She is yoking together with an unbeliever; she is forming an unholy alliance with mammon. We must stop it.'
'Stop Jane,' said Johnny. 'You might as well try and stop a young tank.'
He meditated for a moment.
'The funny thing is,' he added, 'that we all thought it was Clare he was after.'
'Now that,' Juke said judicially, 'would have been all right. Your elder sister could have had Hobart and theDaily Hastewithout betraying her principles. ButJane—Jane, the anti-Potterite … I say, why is she doing it?'
Johnny drew a letter from his pocket and consulted it.
'The mater doesn't say. … I suppose the usual reasons. Why do people do it? I don't; nor do you; nor does Gideon. So we can't explain. … I didn't think Jane would do it either; it always seemed more in Clare's line, somehow. Jane and I always thought Clare would marry, she's the sort. Feminine and all that, you know. Upon my word, I thought Jane was too much of a sportsman to go tying herself up with husbands and babies and servants and things. What the devil will happen to all she meant todo—writing, public speaking, and all the rest of it? I suppose a girl can carry on to a certain extent, though, even if she is married, can't she?'
'Jane will,' I said. 'Jane won't give up anything she wants to do for a trifle like marriage.' I was sure of that.
'I believe you're right,' Johnny agreed. 'But it will be jolly awkward being married to Hobart and writing in the anti-Potter press.'
'She'll write for theDaily Haste,' Juke said. 'She'll make Hobart give her a job on it. Having begun to go down the steep descent, she won't stop till she gets to the bottom. Jane's thorough.'
But that was precisely what I didn't think Jane was. She is, on the other hand, given to making something good out of as many worlds as she can simultaneously. Martyrs and Irishmen, fanatics and Juke, are thorough; not Jane.
We couldn't stay gossiping over the engagement any longer, so we left it at that. The man lunching at the next table might have concluded that Johnny's sister had got engaged to a scoundrel, instead of to the talented, promising, and highly virtuous young editor of a popular daily paper. Being another member of the 1917, I dare say he understood.
But no one had tried to answer Juke's question, 'Why is she doing it?' Johnny had supposed 'for the usual reasons.' That opens a probably unanswerable question. What the devilarethe usual reasons?
4
I met Lady Pinkerton and her elder daughter in the muzzle department of the Army and Navy Stores the next week. That was one of the annoying aspects of the muzzling order; one met in muzzle shops people with whom neither temperament nor circumstances would otherwise have thrown one.
I have a particular dislike for Lady Pinkerton, and she for me. I hate those cold, shallow eyes, and clothes drenched in scent, and basilisk pink faces whitened with powder which such women have or develop. When I look at her I think of all her frightful books, and the frightful serial she has even now running in thePink Pictorial, and I shudder (unobtrusively, I hope), and look, away. When she looks at me, she thinks 'dirty Jew,' and she shudders (unobtrusively, too), and looks over my head. She did so now, no doubt, as she bowed.
'Dreadfully tahsome, this muzzling order,' she said, originally. 'We have two Pekingese, a King Charles, and a pug, and their poor little faces don't fit any muzzle that's made.'
I answered with some inanity about my mother's Poltalloch, and we talked for a moment. She said she hoped I was quite all right again, and I suppose I said I was, with my leg shooting like a gathered tooth (it was pretty bad all that spring).
Suddenly I felt her wanting badly to tell me the news about Jane. She wanted to tell me because she thought she would be scoring off me, knowing that what she would call my 'influence' over Jane had always been used against all that Hobart stands for. I felt her longing to throw me the triumphant morsel of news—'Jane has deserted you and all your tiresome, conceited, disturbing clique, and is going to marry the promising young editor of her father's chief paper.' But something restrained her. I caught the advance and retreat of her intention, and connected it with her daughter, who stood by her, silent, with an absurd Pekingese in her arms.
Anyhow, Lady Pinkerton held in her news, and I left them. I dislike Lady Pinkerton, as I have said; but on this occasion I disliked her a little less than usual, for that maternal instinct which had robbed her of her triumph.
5
I went to see Katherine Varick that evening. I often do when I have been meeting women like Lady Pinkerton, because there is a danger that that kind of woman, so common and in a sense so typical, may get to bulk too large in one's view of women, and lead one into the sin of generalisation. So many women are such very dreadful fools—men too, for that matter, but more women—that one needs to keep in pretty frequent touch with those who aren't, with the women whose brains, by nature and training, grip and hold. Of these, Katherine Varick has as fine and keen a mind and as good a head as any I know. She isn't touched anywhere with Potterism; she has the scientific temperament. Katherine and I are great friends. From the first she did a good deal of work for theFact—reviews of scientific books, mostly. I went to see her, to get the taste of Lady Pinkerton out of my mouth.
I found her doing something with test-tubes and bottles—some experiment with carbohydrates, I think it was. I watched her till she was through with it, then we talked. That is the way one puts it, but as a matter of fact Katherine seldom does much of the talking; one talks to her. She listens, and puts in from time to time some critical comment that often extraordinarily clears up any subject one is talking round. She contributes as much as any one I know to the conversation, but in such condensed tabloids that it doesn't take her long. Most things don't seem to her to be worth saying. She'll let, for instance, a chatterbox like Juke say a hundred words to her one, and still she'll get most said, though Jukie's not a vapid talker either.
'Jane,' she told me, 'is coming back next week. The marriage is to be at the end of April.'
'A rapidity worthy of the Hustling Press. Jukie will be sorry. He hopes yet to wrest her as a brand from the burning.'
Katherine smiled at Juke's characteristic sanguineness.
'Jukie won't do that. If Jane means to do a thing she does it. Jane knows what she wants.'
'And she wants Hobart?' I pondered it, turning it over, still puzzled.
'She wants Hobart,' Katherine agreed. 'And all that Hobart will let her in to.'
'TheDaily Haste? The society of the Pinkerton journalists?'
'And of a number of other people. Some of them fairly important people, you know. The editor of theDaily Hastehas to transact business with a good many notorious persons, no doubt. That would amuse Jane. She's all for life. I dare say the wife of the editor of theHastehas a pretty good front window for the show. Jane likes playing about with people, as you like playing with ideas, and I with chemicals…. Besides, beauty counts with Jane. It does with every one. She's probably fallen in love.'
That was all we said about it. We talked for the rest of the evening about theFact.
6
But when I went to Jane's wedding, I understood about the 'number of other people' that Hobart let Jane in to. They had been married that afternoon by the Registrar, Jane having withstood the pressure of her parents, who preferred weddings to be in churches. Hobart didn't much care; he was, he said, a Presbyterian by upbringing, but sat loosely to it, and didn't care for fussy weddings. Jane frankly disbelieved in what she called 'all that sort of thing.' So they went before the Registrar, and gave a party in the evening at the Carlton.
We all went, even Juke, who had failed to snatch Jane from the burning. I don't know that it was a much queerer party than other wedding parties, which are apt to be an ill-assorted mixture of the bridegroom's circle and the bride's. And, except for Jane's own personal friends, these two circles largely overlapped in this case. The room was full of journalists, important and unimportant, business people, literary people, and a few politicians of the same colour as the Pinkerton press. There were a lot of dreadful women, who, I supposed, were Lady Pinkerton's friends (probably literary women; one of them was introduced to Juke as 'the editress ofForget-me-not'), and a lot of vulgar men, many of whom looked like profiteers. But, besides all these, there were undoubtedly interesting people and people of importance. And I realised that the editor of theHaste, like the other editors of important papers, must, of necessity, as Katherine had said, have a lot to do with such people.
And there, in the middle of a group of journalists, was Jane; Jane, in a square-cut, high-waisted, dead white frock, with her firm, round, young shoulders and arms, and her firm, round, young face, and her dark hair cut across her broad white forehead, parted a little like a child's, at one side, and falling thick and straight round her neck like a mediaeval page's. She wore a long string of big amber beads—Hobart's present—and a golden girdle round her high, sturdy waist.
I saw Jane in a sense newly that evening, not having seen her for some time. And I saw her again as I had often seen her in the past—a greedy, lazy, spoilt child, determined to take and keep the best out of life, and, if possible, pay nothing for it. A profiteer, as much as the fat little match manufacturer, her uncle, who was talking to Hobart, and in whom I saw a resemblance to the twins. And I saw too Jane's queer, lazy, casual charm, that had caught and held Hobart and weaned him from the feminine graces and obviousnesses of Clare.
Hobart stood near Jane, quiet and agreeable and good-looking. A second-rate chap, running a third-rate paper. Jane had married him, for all her clear-headed intellectual scorn of the second-rate, because she was second-rate herself, and didn't really care.
And there was little Pinkerton chatting with Northcliffe, his rival and friend, and Lady Pinkerton boring a high Foreign Office official very nearly to yawns, and Clare Potter, flushed and gallantly gay, flitting about from person to person (Clare was always restless; she had none of Jane's phlegm and stolidity), and Johnny, putting in a fairly amusing time with his own friends and acquaintances, and Frank Potter talking to Juke about his new parish. Frank, discontented all the war because he couldn't get out to France without paying the price that Juke had paid, was satisfied with life for the moment, having just been given a fashionable and rich London living, where many hundreds weekly sat under him and heard him preach. Juke wasn't the member of that crowd I should personally have selected to discuss fashionable and overpaid livings with, had I just accepted one, but they were the only two parsons in the room, so I suppose Potter thought it appropriate, I overheard pleased fragments such as 'Twenty thousand communicants … only standing-room at Sunday evensong,' which indicated that the new parish was a great success.
'That poor chap,' Jukie said to me afterwards. 'He's in a wretched position. He has to profess Christianity, and he doesn't want even to try to live up to it. At least, whenever he has a flash of desire to, that atheist wife of his puts it out. She's the worst sort of atheist—the sort that says her prayers regularly. Why are parsons allowed to marry? Or if they must, why can't their wives be chosen for them by a special board? And what, in Heaven's name, came over a Potter that he should take Orders? The fight between Potterism and Christianity—it's the funniest spectacle—and the saddest….'
But Juke on Christianity always leaves me cold. The nation to which I (on one side) belong can't be expected to look at Christianity impartially—we have suffered too much at the hands of Christians. Juke and the other hopeful and ardent members of his Church may be able to separate Christianity from Christians, and not judge the one by the other; but I can't. The fact that Christendom is what it is has always disposed of Christianity as a working force, to my mind. Judaism is detestable, but efficient; Christianity is well-meaning but a failure. As, of course, parsons like Juke would be and are the first to admit. They say it aims so high that it's bound to fail, which is probably true. But that makes it pretty useless as a working human religion. Anyhow, I quite agree with Juke that it is comic to see poor little nonentities like Frank Potter caught in it, tangled up in it, and trying to get free and carry on as though it wasn't there.
Of course, nearly all the rest of that crowd at Jane's wedding was carrying on as if Christianity weren't there without the least trouble or struggle. They were quite right; it wasn't there. Nothing was there, for most of them, but self-interest and personal desire. We were, the lot of us, out to make—to grab and keep and enjoy. Nothing else counted. What could Christianity do, a frail, tilting, crusading St. George, up against the monster dragon Grab, who held us all in his coils? It's no use, Jukie; it never was and never will be any use.
I suddenly grew very tired of that party. It seemed a monster meeting of Potterites at play—mediocrity, second-rateness, humbug, muddle, cant, cheap stunts—the room was full of it all.
I went across to Jane to say good-bye. I had scarcely spoken to her yet. I had never congratulated her on her engagement, but Jane wouldn't mind about that or expect me to.
All I could say now was, 'I'm afraid I've got to get back. I've some work waiting.'
She said, 'Is it any use my sending you anything for theFact?
'From the enemy's camp?' I smiled at her. She smiled too.
'I've not ratted, you know. I'm still an A.P. I shall come on the next tour of investigation, whenever that is.'
'Shall you write for theHaste?' I asked her.
'Sometimes, I expect. Oliver says he can get me some of the reviewing. And occasional non-controversial articles. But I don't want to be tied up with it; I want to write for other papers too…. You take Johnny's poetry, I observe.'
'Sometimes. That's Peacock's fault, not mine. … Send along anything you think may suit, by all means, and we'll consider it. You'll most likely get it back—if you remember to enclose a stamped envelope. … Good-night, and thank you for asking me to your party. Good-night, Hobart.'
I said good-bye to Lady Pinkerton, and went back to theFactoffice, for it was press night.
So Jane got married.
1
That May was very hot. One sweltered in offices, streets, and underground trains. You don't expect this kind of weather in early May, which is usually a time of bitter frosts and biting winds, punctuated by thunderstorms. It told on one's nerves. One got sick of work and people. I quarrelled all round; with Peacock about the paper, with my typist about her punctuation, with my family about my sister's engagement. Rosalind (that was the good old English name they had given her) had been brought up, like myself, in the odour of public school and Oxford Anglicanism (she had been at Lady Margaret Hall). My father had grown up from his early youth most resolutely English, and had married the daughter of a rich Manchester cotton manufacturer. Their two children, Sidneys from birth, were to ignore the unhappy Yiddish strain that was branded like a deep disgrace into their father's earliest experience. It was unlucky for my parents that both Rosalind and I reverted to type. Rosalind was very lovely, very clever, and unmistakably a Jewess. At Roedean she pretended she wasn't; who wouldn't? She was still there when I came of age and became Gideon, so she didn't join me in that. But when she left school and went up to Oxford, she began to develop and expand mentally, and took her own line, and by the time she was twenty she was, as I never was, a red-hot nationalist. We were neither of us ever inclined to Judaism in religion; we shook off the misfit of Anglicanism at an early age (we both refused at fifteen to be confirmed), but didn't take to our national faith, which we both disliked extremely. Nor did we like most of our fellow Jews; I think as a race we are narrow, cowardly, avaricious, and mean-spirited, and Rosalind thinks we are oily. (She and I aren't oily, by the way; we are both the lean kind, perhaps because, after all, we are half English). I only reverted to our original name because I was sickened of the Sidney humbug. But we learnt Yiddish, and read Hebrew literature, and discussed repatriation, and maintained that the Jews were the brains of the world. It was a cross to our parents. But far more bitter to them than even my change of name was Rosalind's engagement, this spring of 1919, to Boris Stefan. Boris had been living and painting in London for some years; his home had been in Moscow; he had barely escaped with his life from a pogrom in 1912, and had since then lived in England. He had served in the war, belonged to several secret societies of a harmless sort, painted pictures that had attracted a good deal of critical notice, and professed Bolshevik sympathies, of a purely academic nature (as so many of these sympathies are) on the grounds that Bolshevism was a Jewish movement. He and I differed on the subject of Bolshevism. I have never seen any signs either of constructive ability or sound principles in any Bolshevik leader; nothing but enterprise, driving-power, vindictiveness, Hebrew cunning, and a criminal ruthlessness. They're not statesmen. And Bolshevism, as so far manifested, isn't a statesmanlike system; it holds the reins too tight. I don't condemn it for the cruelties committed in its name, because whenever Russians get excited there'll be fiendish cruelties; Russians are like that—the most cruel devils in earth or hell. Bolshevist Russians are no worse in that way than Czarist Russians. Except when I am listening to their music I loathe the whole race; great stupid, brutal, immoral, sentimental savages…. When I think of them I feel a kind of nausea, oddly touched with fear, that must be hereditary, I suppose. After all, my father, as a child of five, saw his mother outraged and murdered by Russian police. Anyhow, Bolshevism, in Russian hands, has become a kind of stupid, crazy, devil's game, as everything always has.
But I don't want to discuss Bolshevism here. Boris Stefan hadn't really anything to do with it. He wasn't a politician. He was a dreamy, simple, untidy, rather childlike person, with a wonderful gift for painting. Rosalind and I had got to know him at the Club. They were both beautiful, and it hadn't taken them long to fall in love. One Russian-Jewish exile marrying another—that was the bitterness of it to our very Gentile mother and our Sidneyfied father, who had spent fifty years living down his origin.
So I was called in to assist in averting the catastrophe. I wouldn't say anything except that it seemed very suitable, and that annoyed my mother. I remember that she and I and Rosalind argued round and round it for an hour one hot evening in the drawing-room at Queen's Gate. Finally my mother said, 'Oh, very well. If Rosalind wants a lot of fat Yid babies with hooked noses and oily hair, all lending money on usury instead of getting into debt like Christians, let her have them. I wash my hands of the lot of you. I don't know what I've done to deserve two Sheenies for children.'
That made Rosalind giggle, and eased the acrimony of the discussion. My mother was a little fair woman, sharp-tongued and quick-tempered, but with a sense of fun.
My father had no sense of fun. I think it had been crushed out of him in his cradle. He was a silent man (though he could, like all Jews, be eloquent), with a thin face and melancholy dark eyes. I am supposed to look like him, I believe. He, too, spoke to me that evening about Rosalind's engagement. I remember how he walked up and down the dining-room, with his hands behind him and his head bent forward, and his quick, nervous, jerky movements.
'I don't like it, Arthur. I feel as if we had all climbed up out of a very horrible pit into a place of safety and prosperity and honour, and as if the child was preparing to leap down into the pit again. She doesn't know what it's like to be a Jew. I do, and I've saved you both from it, and you both seem bent on returning to the pit whence you were digged. We're an outcast people, my dear; an outcast people….'
His black eyes were haunted by memories of old fears; the fears his ancestors had had in them, listening behind frail locked doors for the howl 'Down with the Jews!' The fears that had been branded by savages into his own infant consciousness half a century ago; the fears seared later into the soul of a boy by boyish savages at an English school; the fears of the grown man, always hiding something, always pretending, always afraid….
I discovered then—and this is why I am recording this family incident here, why it connects with the rest of my life at this time—that Potterism has, for one of its surest bases, fear. The other bases are ignorance, vulgarity, mental laziness, sentimentality, and greed. The ignorance which does not know facts; the vulgarity which cannot appreciate values; the laziness which will not try to learn either of these things; the sentimentality which, knowing neither, is stirred by the valueless and the untrue; the greed which grabs and exploits. But fear is worst; the fear of public opinion, the fear of scandal, the fear of independent thought, of loss of position, of discomfort, of consequences, of truth.
My poor parents were afraid of social damage to their child; afraid lest she should be mixed up with something low, outcast, suspected. Not all my father's intellectual brilliance, nor all my mother's native wit, could save them from this pathetic, vulgar, ignorant piece of snobbery. Pathetic, vulgar, and ignorant, because, if they had only known it, Rosalind stood to lose nothing she cared for by allying herself with a Jewish painter of revolutionary theories. Not a single person whose friendship she cared for but would be as much her friend as before. She had nothing to do with thebourgeoisie, bristling with prejudices and social snobberies, who made, for instance, my mother's world. And that is what one generation should always try to understand about another—how little (probably) each cares for the other's world.
Of course, Rosalind married Boris Stefan. And, as I have said, the whole incident is only mentioned to illustrate how Potterism lurks in secret places, and flaunts in open places, pervading the whole fabric of human society.
2
Peace with Germany was signed, as every one knows, on June 28th. Nearly every one crabbed it, of course, theFactwith the rest. I have no doubt that it did, as Garvin put it, sow dragon's teeth over Europe. It certainly seemed a poor, unconstructive, expensive, brittle thing enough. But I am inclined to think that nearly all peace treaties are pretty bad. You have to have them, however, and you may as well make the best of them. Anyhow, bad peace as it looked, at least itwaspeace, and that was something new and unusual. And I confess frankly that it has, so far, held together longer than I, for one, ever expected it would. (I am writing this in January, 1920).
TheFactpublished a cheery series of articles, dealing with each clause in turn, and explaining why it was bound to lead, immediately or ultimately, to war with some one or other. I wrote some of them myself. But I was out on some points, though most haven't had time yet to prove themselves.
'Now,' said Jane, the day after the signature, 'I suppose we can get on with the things that matter.'
She meant housing, demobilisation, proportional representation, health questions, and all the good objects which the Society for Equal Citizenship had at heart. She had been writing some articles in theDaily Hasteon these. They were well-informed and intelligent, but not expert enough for theFact. And that, as I began to see, was partly where Hobart came in. Jane wrote cleverly, clearly, and concisely—better than Johnny did. But, in these days of overcrowded competent journalism —well, it is not unwise to marry an editor of standing. It gives you a better place in the queue.
I dined at the Hobarts' on June 29th, for the first time since their marriage. We were a party of six. Katherine Varick was there, and a distinguished member of the American Legation and his wife.
Jane handled her parties competently, as she did other things. A vivid, jolly child she looked, in love with life and the fun and importance of her new position. The bachelor girl or man just married is an amusing study to me. Especially the girl, with her new responsibilities, her new and more significant relation to life and society. Later she is sadly apt to become dull, to have her individuality merged in the eternal type of the matron and the mother; her intellect is apt to lose its edge, her mind its grip. It is the sacrifice paid by the individual to the race. But at first she is often a delightful combination of keen-witted, jolly girl and responsible woman.
We talked, I remember, partly about the Government, and how soon Northcliffe would succeed in turning it out. The Pinkerton press was giving its support to the Government. TheWeekly Factwas not. But we didn't want them out at once; we wanted to keep them on until some one of constructive ability, in any party, was ready to take the reins. The trouble about the Labour people was that so far there was no one of constructive ability; they were manifestly unready. They had no one good enough. No party had. It was the old problem, never acuter, of 'Produce the Man.' If Labour was to produce him, I suspected that it would take it at least a generation of hard political training and education. If Labour had got in then, it would have been a mob of uneducated and uninformed sentimentalists, led and used by a few trained politicians who knew the tricks of the trade. It would be far better for them to wait till the present generation of honest mediocrities died out, and a new and differently educated generation were ready to take hold. University-trained Labour—that bugbear of Barnes'—if there is any hope for the British Constitution, which probably there is not, I believe it lies there. It is a very small one, at the best. Anyhow, it certainly did not, at this period, lie in the parliamentary Labour Party, that body of incompetents in an incompetent House.
It was in discussing this that I discovered that Hobart couldn't discuss. He could talk; he could assert, produce opinions and information, but he couldn't meet or answer arguments. And he was cautious, afraid of committing himself, afraid, I fancied, of exposing gulfs in his equipment of information, for, like other journalists of his type, his habit was to write about things of which he knew little. Old Pinkerton remarked once, at a dinner to American newspaper men, that his own idea of a good journalist was a man who could sit down at any moment and write a column on any subject. The American newspaper men cheered this; it was their idea of a good journalist too. It is an amusing game, and one encouraged by the Anti-Potterite League, to waylay leader-writers and tackle them about their leaders, turn them inside out and show how empty they are. I've written that sort of leader myself, of course, but not for theFact; we don't allow it. There, the man who writes is the man who knows, and till some one knows no one writes. That is why some people call us dry, heavy, lacking in ideas, and say we are like a Blue Book, or a paper read to the British Association. We are proud of that reputation. The Pinkerton papers and the others can supply the ideas; we are out for facts.
Anyhow, Hobart I knew for an ignorant person. All he had was aflairfor the popular point of view. That was why Pinkerton who knew men, got hold of him. He was a true Potterite. Possibly I always saw him at his least eloquent and his most cautious, because he didn't like me and knew I didn't like him. Even then there had already been one or two rather acrimonious disputes between my paper and his on points of fact. TheDaily Hastehated being pinned down to and quarrelled with about facts; facts didn't seem to the Pinkerton press things worth quarrelling over, like policy, principles, or prejudices. The story goes that when any one told old Pinkerton he was wrong about something, he would point to his vast circulation, using it as an argument that he couldn't be mistaken. If you still pressed and proved your point, he would again refer to his circulation, but using it this time as an indication of how little it mattered whether his facts were right or wrong. Some one once said to him curiously, 'Don't youcarethat you are misleading so many millions?' To which he replied, in his dry little voice, 'I don't lead, or mislead, the millions. They lead me.' Little Pinkerton sometimes saw a long way farther into what he was doing than you'd guess from his shoddy press. He had queer flashes of genius.
But Hobart hadn't. Hobart didn't see anything, except what he was officially paid to see. A shallow, solemn ass.
I looked suddenly at Jane, and caught her watching her husband silently, with her considering, dispassionate look. He was talking to the American Legation about the traffic strike (we were a round table, and the talk was general).
Then I knew that, whether Jane had ever been in love with Hobart or not, she was not so now. I knew further, or thought I knew, that she saw him precisely as I did.
Of course she didn't. His beauty came in—it always does, between men and women, confusing the issues—and her special relation to him, and a hundred other things. The relation between husband and wife is too close and too complex for clear thinking. It seems always to lead either to too much regard or to an excess of irritation, and often to both.
Jane looked away from Hobart, and met my eyes watching her. Her expression didn't alter, nor, probably, did mine. But something passed between us; some unacknowledged mutual understanding held us together for an instant. It was unconscious on Jane's part and involuntary on mine. She hadn't meant to think over her husband with me; I hadn't meant to push in. Jane wasn't loyal, and I wasn't well-bred, but we neither of us meant that.
I hardly talked to Jane that evening. She was talking after dinner to Katherine and the American Legation. I had a three-cornered conversation with Hobart and the Legation's wife, who was of an inquiring turn of mind, like all of her race, and asked us exhausting questions. She got on to the Jewish question, and asked us for our views on the reasons for anti-Semitism in Europe.
'I've been reading theNew Witness,' she said.
I told her she couldn't do better, if she was investigating anti-Semitism.
'But are they fair?' she asked ingenuously.
I replied that there were moments in which I had a horrible suspicion that they were.
'Then the Jews are really a huge conspiracy plotting to get the finances of Europe into their hands?' Her eyes, round and shocked, turned from me to Hobart.
He lightly waved her to me.
'You must ask Mr. Gideon. The children of Israel are his speciality.'
His dislike of me gleamed in his blue eyes and in his supercilious, cold smile. The Legation's wife (no fool) must have seen it.
I went on talking rubbish to her about the Jews and the finances of Europe. I don't remember what particular rubbish it was, for I was hardly aware of it at the time. What I was vividly and intensely and quite suddenly aware of was that I was on fire with the same anger, dislike, and contempt that burned in Hobart towards me. I knew that evening that I hated him, even though I was sitting in his house and smoking his cigarettes. I wanted to be savagely rude to him. I think that once or twice I came very near to being so.
Katherine and I went home by the same bus. I grumbled to her about Hobart all the way. I couldn't help it; the fellow seemed suddenly to have become a nervous disease to me; I was mentally wriggling and quivering with him.
Katherine laughed presently, in that queer, silent way of hers.
'Why worry?' she said. 'You'venot married him.'
'Well, what's marriage?' I returned. 'He's a public danger—he and his kind.'
Katherine said truly, 'There are so many public dangers. There really isn't time to get agitated about them all.' Her mind seemed still to be running on marriage, for she added presently, 'I think he'll find that he's bitten off rather more than he can chew, in Jane.'
'Jane can go to the devil in her own way,' I said, for I was angry with Jane too. 'She's married a second-rate fellow for what she thinks he'll bring her. I dare say she has her reward…. Katherine, I believe that's the very essence of Potterism—going for things for what they'll bring you, what they lead to, instead of for the thing-in-itself. Artists care for the thing-in-itself; Potterites regard things as railway trains, always going somewhere, getting somewhere. Artists, students, and the religious—they have the single eye. It's the opposite to the commercial outlook. Artists will look at a little fishing town or country village, and find it a thing of beauty and a joy for ever, and leave it to itself—unless they yield to the devil and paint it or write about it. Potterites will exploit it, commercialise it, bring the railway to it—and the thing is spoilt. Oh, the Potterites get there all right, confound them. They're the progressives of the world. They—they have their reward.'
(It's a queer thing how Jews can't help quoting the New Testament—evenJews without religion.)
'We seem to have decided,' Katherine said, 'that Jane is a Potterite.'
'Morally she is. Not intellectually. You can be a Potterite in many ways. Jane accepts the second-rate, though she recognises it as such…. The plain fact is,' I was in a fit of savage truth-speaking, 'that Jane is second-rate.'
'Well …'
The gesture of Katherine's square shoulders may have meant several things—'Aren't we all?' or 'Surely that's very obvious,' or 'I can't be bothered to consider Jane any more,' or merely 'After all, we've just dined there.'
Anyhow, Katherine got off the bus at this point.
I was left repeating to myself, as if it had been a new discovery, which it wasn't, 'Jane is second-rate….'
1
Jane was taking the chair at a meeting of a section of the Society for Equal Citizenship. The speakers were all girls under thirty who wanted votes. They spoke rather well. They weren't old enough to have become sentimental, and they were mostly past the conventional cliches of the earlier twenties. In extreme youth one has to be second-hand; one doesn't know enough, one hasn't lived or learnt enough, to be first-hand; and one lacks self-confidence. But by five or six-and-twenty one should have left that behind. One should know what one thinks and what one means, and be able to state it in clear terms. That is what these girls—mostly University girls—did.
Jane left the chair and spoke too.
I hadn't known Jane spoke so well. She has a clever, coherent way of making her points, and is concise in reply if questioned, quick at repartee if heckled.
Lady Pinkerton was sitting in the row in front of Juke and me. Mother and daughter. It was very queer to me. That wordy, willowy fool, and the sturdy, hard-headed girl in the chair, with her crisp, gripping mind. Yet there was something…. They both loved success. Perhaps that was it. The vulgarian touch. I felt it the more clearly in them because of Juke at my side. And yet Jukie too … Only he would always be awake to it—on his guard, not capitulating.
2
Jane came round with me after the meeting to theFactoffice, to go through some stuff she was writing for us about the meeting. She had to come then, though it was late, because next day was press day. We hadn't been there ten minutes when Hobart's name was sent in, with the message that he was just going home, and was Mrs. Hobart ready to come?
'Well, I'm not,' said Jane to me. 'I shall be quite ten minutes more.I'll go and tell him.'
She went outside and called down, 'Go on, Oliver. I shall be some time yet.'
'I'll wait,' he called up, and Jane came back into the room.
We went on for quite ten minutes.
When we went down, Hobart was standing by the front door, waiting.
'How did you track me?' Jane asked.
'Your mother told me where you'd gone. She called at theHasteon her way home. Good-night, Gideon.'
They went out together, and I returned to the office, irritated a little by being hurried. It was just like Lady Pinkerton, I thought, to have gone round to Hobart inciting him to drag Jane from my office. There had been coldness, if not annoyance, in Hobart's manner to me.
Well, confound him, it wasn't to be expected that he should much care for his wife to write for theFact. But he might mind his own business and leave Jane to mind hers, I thought.
Peacock came in at this point, and we worked till midnight.
Peacock opened a parcel of review books from Hubert Wilkins—all tripe, of course. He turned them over, impatiently.
'What fools the fellows are to go on sending us their rubbish. They might have learnt by now that we never take any notice of them,' he grumbled. He picked out one with a brilliant wrapper—'A Cabinet Minister's Wife, by Leila Yorke…. That woman needs a lesson, Gideon. She's a public nuisance. I've a good mind—a jolly good mind—to review her, for once. What? Or do you think it would beinfra dig? Well, what about an article, then—we'd get Neilson to do one—on the whole tribe of fiction-writing fools, taking Lady Pinkerton for a peg to hang it on? … After all, wearethe organ of the Anti-Potter League. We ought to hammer at Potterite fiction as well as at Potterite journalism and politics. For two pins I'd get Johnny Potter to do it. He would, I believe.'
'I'm sure he would. But it would be a little too indecent. Neilson shall do it. Besides, he'd do it better. Or do it yourself.'
'Will you?'
'I will not. My acquaintance with the subject is inadequate, and I've no intention of improving it.'
In the end Peacock did it himself. It was pretty good, and pretty murderous. It came out in next week's number. I met Clare Potter in the street the day after it came out, and she cut me dead. I expect she thought I had written it. I am sure she never read theFact, but no doubt the family 'attention had been drawn to' the article, as people always express it when writing to a paper to remonstrate about something in it they haven't liked. I suppose they think it would be a score for the paper if they admitted that they had come across it in the natural course of things—anyhow, they want to imply that it is, of course, a paper decent people don't see—likeJohn Bull, or thePeople.
When I met Johnny Potter, he grinned, and said, 'Good for you, old bean. Or was it Peacock? My mother's persuaded it was you, and she'll never forgive you. Poor old mater, she thought her new book rather on the intellectual side. Full of psycho-analysis, and all that…. I say, I wish Peacock would send me Guthrie's new book to do.'
That was Johnny all over. He was always asking for what he wanted, instead of waiting for what we thought fit to send him. I was sure that when he published a book, he'd write round to the editors telling them who was to review it.
I said, 'I think Neilson's going to do it,' and determined that it should be so. Johnny's brand of grabbing bored me. Jane did the same. A greedy pair, never seeing why they shouldn't have all they wanted.
3
It was at this time (July) that a long, drawn-out quarrel started between theWeekly Factand theDaily Hasteabout the miners' strike. The Pinkerton press did its level best to muddle the issues of that strike, by distorting some facts, passing over others, and inventing more. By the time you'd read a leader in theHasteon the subject, you'd have got the impression that the strikers were Bolshevists helped by German money and aiming at a social revolution, instead of discontented, needy and greedy British workmen, grabbing at more money and less work, in the normal, greedy, human way we all have. Bonar Law, departing for once rather unhappily from his 'the Government have given me no information' attitude, announced that the miners were striking against conscription and the war with Russia. Some Labour papers said they were striking against the Government's shifty methods and broken pledges. I am sure both parties credited them with too much idealism and too little plain horse-sense. They were striking to get the pay and hours they wanted out of the Government, and, of course, for nationalisation. They were not idealists, and not Bolshevists, but frank grabbers, like most of us. But, as every one will remember, 'Bolshevist' had become at this period a vague term of abuse, like 'Hun' during the war. People who didn't like Carson called him a Bolshevist; people who didn't like manual labourers calledthemBolshevists. What all these users of the mysterious and elastic epithet lacked was a clear understanding and definition of Bolshevism.
TheDaily Haste, of course (and, to do it justice, many other papers), used the word freely as meaning the desire for better conditions and belief in the strike as a legitimate means of obtaining them. I suppose it took a shorter time to say or write than this does; anyhow, it bore a large, vague, Potterish meaning that was irresistible to people in general.
TheHastemade such a fool of itself over the miners that we came to blows with them, and quarrelled all through July and August, mostly over trivial and petty points. I may add that theFactwas not supporting immediate nationalisation; we were against it, for reasons that it would be too tedious to explain here. (As a matter of fact, I know that all I record of this so recent history is too tedious; I do not seem to be able to avoid most of it; but even I draw the line somewhere). The controversy between theFactand theHasteseemed after a time to resolve itself largely into a personal quarrel between Hobart and myself. He was annoyed that Jane occasionally wrote for us. I suppose it was natural that he should be annoyed. And he didn't like her to frequent the 1917 Club, to which a lot of us belonged. Jane often lunched there, so did I. She said that you got a better lunch there than at the Women's University Club. Not much better, but still, better. You also met more people you wanted to meet, as well as more people you didn't. We started a sort of informal lunch club, which met there and lunched together on Thursdays. It consisted of Jane, Katherine Varick, Juke, Peacock, Johnny Potter, and myself. Often other people joined us by invitation; my sister Rosalind and her husband, any girl Johnny Potter was for the moment in love with, and friends of Peacock's, Juke's, or mine. Juke would sometimes bring a parson in; this was rather widening for us, I think, and I dare say for the parson too. To Juke it was part of the enterprise of un-Potterising the Church, which was on his mind a good deal. He said it needed un-Potterising as much as the State, or literature, or journalism, or even the drama, and that Potterism in it was even more dangerous than in these. So, when he could, he induced parsons to join the Anti-Potter League.
We weren't all tied up, I may say, with the political party principles very commonly held by members of the 1917 Club. I certainly wasn't a Socialist, nor, wholly, I think, a Radical; neither at that time was Peacock, though he became more so as time went on; nor, certainly, was Katherine. Juke was, because he believed that in these principles was the only hope for the world. And the twins were, because the same principles were the only wear for the young intellectual, at that moment. Johnny, in all things the glass of fashion and the mould of form, wore them as he wore his monocle, quite unconscious of his own reasons for both. But it was the idea of the Anti-Potter League to keep clear of parties and labels. Youcanbelong to a recognised political party and be an Anti-Potterite, for Potterism is a frame of mind, not a set of opinions (Juke was, after Katherine, the best Anti-Potterite I have known, though people did their best to spoil him), but it is easier, and more compatible with your objects, to be free to think what you like about everything. Once you are tied up with a party, you can only avoid second-handedness, taking over views ready-made, if you are very strong-minded indeed.
Thursday was a fairly free afternoon for me, and Jane and I somehow got into a habit of going off somewhere together after lunch, or staying on at the club and talking. Jane seemed to me to be increasingly interesting; she was acquiring new subtleties, complexities, and comprehensions, and shedding crudities. She wrote better, too. We took her stuff sometimes for theFact. At the same time, she seemed to me to be morally deteriorating, as people who grab and take things they oughtn't to have always do deteriorate. And she was trying all the time to square Hobart with the rest of her life, fitting him in, as it were, and he didn't fit in. I was interested to see what she was making of it all.