“Howlong,” she raged, “have you been sitting there cursing me?”
“Not been cursing, Miriam. You’ve been interesting, no end. But there’s a thing, Miriam, an awful thing called tomorrow morning.”
“Is it late?” The appalling, the utter and everywhere appalling scrappiness of social life....
“Not for you, Miriam. We’re poor things. We envy. We can’t compete with your appetite, your disgraceful young appetite for late hours.”
“Things always end just as they’re beginning.”
“Things end, Miriam, so that other things may begin.”
She roused herself to give battle. But Alma drifted between, crying gaily that there was tomorrow. A good strong tomorrow. Warranted to stand hard wear.
“And turn; and take a dye when you’re tired of the colour.”
He laughed, really amused? Or crediting her with an attempt to talk in a code?
“A tomorrow that will wear forever and make a petticoat afterwards.”
He laughed again. Quite simply. He had not heard that old jest. Seemed never to have heard the old family jests. Seemed to have grown up without jests.... Tomorrow, unless no one came, would not be like today.
The morning offered a blissful eternity before lunch. She had wakened drowsy with strength and the apprehension of good, and gone through breakfast like a sleepwalker, playing her part without cost, independent of sight and hearing and thought. Successful. Dreamily watching a play, taking a part inaudibly dictated, without effort, seeing it turn into the chief part, more and more turned over to her as she lay still in the hands of the invisible prompter; withdrawn in an exploration of the features of this state of being that nothing could reach or disturb. If, this time, she could discover its secret, she would be launched in it forever.
Back in her room she prepared swiftly to go out and meet the day in the open; all the world, waiting in the happy garden.... Through the house-stillness sounded three single downward-stepping notes ... the first phrase of the seventh symphony.... Perfect. Eternity stating itself in the stillness. He knew it, choosing just this thing to play to himself, alone; living in space alone, at one with everybody, as everyone was, the moment life allowed. Beethoven’s perfect expression of the perfection oflife, first thing in the morning. Morning stillness; single dreaming notes that blossomed in it and left it undisturbed; moved on into a pattern and then stood linked together in a single perfect chord. Another pattern in the same simple notes and another chord. Dainty little chords bowing to each other; gentle gestures that gradually became an angelic little dance through which presently a song leapt forth, the single opening notes brought back, caught up and swept into song pealing rapturously out.
He was revealing himself as he was when alone, admitting Beethoven’s vision of life as well as seeing the marvellous things Beethoven did with his themes? But he liked best the slamming, hee-hawing rollick of the last movement.... Because it did so much with a theme that was almost nothing....Bang, toodle-oodle-oodle,Bang, toodle-oodle-oodle,Bangtoodle-oodle-oodle-oo. A lumpish phrase; a Clementi finger exercise played suddenly in startling fortissimo by an impatient schoolboy; smashed out with the full force of the orchestra, taken up, slammed here and there, up and down, by a leaping, plunging, heavy hoofed pantaloon, approving each variation with loud guffaws.... The sly swift dig-in-the-ribs of the sudden pianissimos....
To watch a shape adds interest to listening. But something disappears in listening with the form put first. Hearing only form is a kind of perfect happiness. But in coming back there is a reproach; as if it had been a kind of truancy....People who care only for form think themselves superior. Then there is something wrong with them.
On the landing table a letter lay waiting for the post. She passed by, gladly not caring to glance. But a tingling in her shoulders drew her back. She had reached the garden door. The music now pouring busily through from the next room urged her forward. But once outside she would have become a party to bright reasonableness, a foolish frontage, caricatured from behind. She fled back along her path to music that was once more the promise of joy ... to read the address of one of Alma’s tradespeople, a distasteful reminder of the wheels of dull work perpetually running under the surface of beauty. But this morning it would not attain her.... It was not Alma’s hand, but the small running shape like a scroll, each part a tiny perfection. She bent over it.Miss Edna Prout....This, then, was what she had come back to find; poison for the day. The house was silent as a desert; empty, swept clear of life. The roomful of music was in another world. Alone in it, he had written to her and then sat down, thinking of her, to his music.
Complications are enlivening.... Within the sunlight, in the great spread of glistening sea, in the touch of the free air and the look of the things set down on the bench there was a lively intensity. A demand for search; for a thought that would obliterate the smear on the blue andgold of the day. The thought had been there even at the moment of shock. The following tumult was the effort to find it. To get round behind the shock and slay it before it could slay. To agree. That was the answer. Not to care. To show how much you care by deliberately not caring? People show disapproval of their own actions by defending them. By deliberately not hiding or defending them, they show off a version of their actions. That they don’t themselves accept.
Meantime everything passes. There are always the powerful intervals. Meetings, and then intervals in which other things come up and life speaks directly, to the individual.... Except for married people. Who are all a little absurd, to themselves and to all other married people. That is why they always talk so hard when two couples are together? To cover the din of their thoughts.... Their marriage was a success without being an exception to the rule that all marriages are failures, as he said. Why are they failures? Science, the way of thinking and writing that makes everybody seem small, in all these new books. Biology,Darwin. The way men, who have no inner convictions, no self, fasten upon an idea and let it describe life for them. Always a new idea. Always describing and destroying, filtering down, as time goes on to quite simple people, poisoning their lives, because men must have a formula. Men are gossips. Science is ... cosmic scandalmongering.
Science is Cosmic Scandalmongering. Perhaps that might do for the House of Lords. But those old fogies are not particularly scientific. They quote the Classics. The same thing. Club gossip. Centuries of unopposed masculine gossip about the universe.
Years ago he said there will be no more him and her, the novels of the future will be clear of all that.... Poetry nothing. Religion nothing. Women a biological contrivance. And now. Women still a sort of attachment to life, useful, or delightful ... the “civilised women of the future” to be either bright obedient assistants or providers of illusion for times of leisure. Two kinds, neatly arranged, each having only one type of experience, while men have both,andtheir work, into which women can only come as Hindus, obediently carrying out tasks set by men, dressed in uniform, deliberately sexless and deferential. How can anyone feel romantic about him? Alma. But that is the real old-fashioned romance of everyday, from her girlhood. Hidden through loyalty to his shifting man’s ideas? Half convinced by them? How can people be romantic impermanently, just now and again?
Romance is solitary and permanent. Always there. In everybody. That is why the things one hears about people are like stories, not referring to life. Why I always forget them when the people themselves are there. Or believe, when they talk of their experiences, that they misread them. I can’t believe even now in thereality of any of his experiences. But then I don’t believe in the experiences of anyone, except a few people who have left sayings I know are true.... Everything else, all the expressions, history and legend and novels and science and everybody’s talk, seems irrelevant. That’s why I don’t want experience, not to be caught into the ways of doing and being that drive away solitude, the marvellous quiet sense of life at first hand.... But he knows that too. “Life drags one along by the hair shrieking protests at every yard.”
“Hullo! What is she doing all alone?”
The surrounding scene that had gradually faded, leaving her eyes searching in the past for the prospect she could never quite recall, shone forth again.
“I’ve got to do a review.”
“What’s the book?”
“When you are in France, does a French river look different to you;French?”
“No, Miriam. It—doesn’t look different.”
He glanced for a moment shaggily from point to point of the sunlit scene and sat companionably down, turned towards her with a smile at her discomfiture. “What’s the book, Miriam? It’s jolly down here. We’ll have some chairs. Yes? You can’t write on a bench.”
He was gone. Meaning to come back. In the midst of the morning; in the midst of his preoccupations sociably at leisure. She felt herself sink into indifference. The unique opportunity was offering itself in vain. He came backjust as she had begun to imagine him caught, up at the house, by a change of impulse. Or perhaps an unexpected guest.
“What’s the review?”
“The House of Lords.”
“Read it?”
“I can’t. It’s all post hoc.”
“Then you’ve read it.”
“I haven’t read it. I’ve only sniffed the first page.”
“That’s enough. Glance at the conclusion. Get your statement, three points; that’ll run you through a thousand words. Look here—shall I write it for you?”
“I’ve gotfiftyideas,” she said beginning to write.
“That’s too many, Miriam. That’s the trouble with you. You’ve got too many ideas. You’re messing up your mind, quite a good mind, with too swift a succession of ideas.” She wrote busily on, drinking in his elaboration of his view of the state of her mind. “H’m,” he concluded, stopping suddenly; but she read in the sound no intention of breaking away because she had nothing to say to him. He was watching, in some way interested. He sat back in his chair; sympathetically withheld. Actually deferring to her work....
She tore off the finished page and transfixed it on the grass with a hatpin. Her pencil flew. The statement was finished and leading to another. Perhaps he was right about three ideas. A good shape. The last must come from the book.She would have to consult it. No. It should be left till later. Her second page joined the first. It was incredible that he should be sitting there inactive, obliterated by her work.
She tore off the third sheet and dropped her pencil on the grass.
“Finished? Three sheets in less than twenty minutes. How do you do it, Miriam?”
“It’ll do. But I shall have to copy it. I’ve resisted the temptation to say whatIthink about the House of Curmudgeons. Trace it back to the First Curmudgeon. Yet it seems somehow wrong to write in the air, socurrently. The first time I did a review, of a bad little book on Whitman, I spent a fortnight of evenings reading.”
“You began at the Creation. Said everything you had to say about the history of mankind.”
“I went nearly mad with responsibility and the awfulness of discovering the way words express almost nothing at all.”
“It’s not quite so bad as that. You’ve come on no end though, you know. The last two or three have been astonishingly good. You’re not creative. You’ve got a good sound mind, a good style and a curious intense critical perception. You’ll be a critic. But writing, Miriam, should be done with a pen. Can’t call yourself a writer till you do itdirect.”
“How can I write with a pen, in bed, on my knee, at midnight or dawn?”
“A fountain pen?”
“No one can write with a fountain pen.”
“Quite a number of us do. Quite a number of not altogether unsuccessful little writers, Miriam.”
“Well, it’s wrong. How can thought or anything, well thought perhaps can, which doesn’t matter and nobody really cares about, wait a minute, nothingelsecan come through a hand whose fingers are held stiffly apart by a fat slippery barrel. A writing machine. A quill would be the thing, with a fine flourishing tail. But it is too important. It squeaks out an important sense ofwriting, makes people too objective, so that it’s as much a man’s pen, a mechanical, see life steadily and see it whole (when nobody knows what lifeis) man’s view sort of implement as a fountain pen. A pen should be thin, not disturbing the hand, and the nib flexible and silent, with up and down strokes. Fountain pen writing is like ... democracy.”
“Why not go back to clay tablets?”
“Machine-made things are dead things.”
“You came down here bytrain, Miriam.”
“I ought to have flown.”
“You’ll fly yet. No. Perhaps you won’t. When your dead people have solved the problem, you’ll be found weeping over the rusty skeleton of a locomotive.”
“I don’t mean Lilienfeld and Maxim. I can be fearfully interested in all that when I think of it. But to the people who do not see the beginning of flying it won’t seem wonderful. It won’t change anything.”
“It’ll change, Miriam, pretty well everything. And if you don’t mean Lilienfeld and Maxim whatdoyou mean?”
“Well, by inventing the telephone we’ve damaged the chances of telepathy.”
“Nonsense, Miriam. You’re suffering from too much Taylor.”
“The most striking thing about Taylor is that he does not want to develop his powers.”
“What powers?”
“The things in him that have made him discover things that you admit are true; that make you interested in his little paper.”
“They’re not right you know about their phosphoric bank; energy is not a simple calculable affair.”
“Now here’s a strange thing. That time you met them, the first thing you said when they’d gone, was what’swrongwith them? And the next time I met them they said there’s somethingwrongwith him. The truth is you are polar opposites and have everything to learn from each other.”
“Elizabeth Snowden Poole.”
“Yes. And without him no one would have heard of her. No one understood. And now psychology is going absolutely her way. In fifty years’ time her books will be as clear as daylight.”
“Damned obstructive classics. That’s what all our books will be. But I’ll give you Mrs. Poole. Mrs. Poole is a very wonderful lady. She’s the unprecedented.”
“There you are. Then you must admit the Taylors.”
“I’m not so sure about your little Taylors. There’s nothing to be said, you know, for just going about not doing things.”
“Theyarewonderful. Their atmosphere is the freest I know.”
“I envy you your enthusiasms, Miriam. Even your misplaced enthusiasms.”
“You go there, worn out, at the end of the day, and have to walk, after a long tram-ride through the wrong part of London, along raw new roads, dark little houses on either side, solid, without a single break, darkness, a street-lamp, more darkness, another lamp; and something in the air that lets you down and down. Partly the thought of these streets increasing, all the time, all over London. Yet when someone said walking home after a good evening at the Taylors’ that the thought of having to settle down in one of those houses made him feel suicidal, I felt he was wrong; and saw them, from inside, bright and big; people’s homes.”
“They’re not big, Miriam. You wanted to marry him.”
“Good Heavens. An Adam’s apple, sloping shoulders and a Cockney accent.”
“Ihave a Cockney accent, Miriam.”
“...”
“Don’t go about classifying with your ears. People, you know, are very much alike.”
“They’re utterly different.”
“Your vanity. Go on with your Taylors.”
“They are very much like other people.”
“WithmyTaylors. I’m interested; really.”
“Well, suddenly you are in their kitchen. White walls and aluminium and a smell of fruit. Do you know the smell of root vegetables cooking slowly in a casserole?”
“I’ll imagine it. Right. Where are the Taylors?”
“You are all standing about. Happy and undisturbed. None of that feeling of darkness and strangeness and the need for a fresh beginning. Tranquillity. As if someone had gone away.”
“The devil; exorcised, poor dear.”
“No but glorious. Making everyone move like a song. And talk. You are all, at once, bursting with talk. All over the flat, in and out of the rooms. George washing up all the time, wandering about with a dish and a cloth and Dora probably doing her hair in a dressing-gown, and cooking. It’s the only place where I can talk exhausted and starving.”
“What do you talk about?”
“Everything. We find ourselves sitting in the bathroom, engrossed—long speeches—they talk to each other, like strangers talking intimately on a ’bus. Then something boils over and we all drift back to the kitchen. Left to herself Dora would go on forever and sit down to a few walnuts at midnight.”
“Mary.”
“But she is an absolutely perfect cook. An artist. She invents and experiments. But he has a feminine consciousness, though he’s a most manly little man with a head like Beethoven. So he’s practical. Meaning he feels with his nerves and has a perfect sympathetic imagination. So presently we are all sitting down to a meal and the evening begins to look short. And yet endless. With them everything feels endless; the present I mean. They are so immediately alive. Everything and everybody is abolished. Wedoabolish them I assure you. And a new world is there. You feel language changing, every word moving, changed, into the new world.But, when their friends come in the evening, weird people, real cranks, it disappears. They all seem to be attacking things they don’t understand. I gradually become an old-fashioned Conservative. But the evening is wonderful. None of these people mind how far or how late they walk. And it goes on till the small hours.”
“You’re getting your college time with these little people.”
“No. I’m easily the most stupidly cultured person there.”
“Then you’re feeding your vanity.”
“I’m not. Even the charlatans make me feel ashamed of my sham advantage. No; the thing that is most wonderful about those Tuesdays is waking up utterly worn out, having a breakfast of cold fruit in the cold grey morning, a rush for the train, a last sight of the Taylorsas they go off into the London Bridge crowd and then suddenly feeling utterly refreshed. They do too. It’s an effect we have on each other.”
“How did you come across them?”
“Michael. ReadsReynolds’s. A notice of a meeting of London Tolstoyans. We rushed out in the pouring rain to the Edgware Road and found nothing at the address but a barred up corner shop-front. Michael wanted to go home. I told him to go and stood staring at the shop waiting for it to turn into the Tolstoyans. I knew it would. It did. Just as Michael was almost screaming in the middle of the road, I turned down a side street and found a doorway, a bead of gas shining inside just showing a stone staircase. We crept up and found a bare room, almost in darkness, a small gas jet, and a few rows of kitchen chairs and a few people sitting scattered about. A young man at a piano picked out a few bars of Grieg and played them over and over again. Then the meeting began. Dora, reading a paper on Tolstoy’s ideas. Well, I felt I was hearing the whole truth spoken aloud for the first time.... But oh the discussion.... A gaunt man got up and began to rail at everything, going on till George gently asked him to keep to the subject. He raved then about some self-help book he had read. Quite incoherent; and convincing. Then the young man at the piano made a long speech about hitching your waggon to a star and at the endof it a tall woman, so old that she could hardly stand, stood up and chanted, in a deep laughing voice, Waggons and Stars. Waggons and stars. Today I am a waggon. Tomorrow a star. I’m reminded of the societies who look after young women. Meet them with a cup of tea, call a cab, put the young woman and the cup of tea into the cab. Am I to watch my brother’s blunderings? No. I am his lover. Then he becomes a star. And I am a star. Then an awful man, very broad-shouldered and narrow-hipped, with a low forehead and a sweeping moustache bounded up and shouted; I am a God! You, madam, are a goddess! Tolstoy is over-civilised! That’s why he loves the godlike peasant. All metaphysicians, artists and pious people are sensualists. All living in unnatural excesses. The Zulu is a god. How many women in filthy London can nurse their children? What is a woman?Children.What is the glory of man? Unimaginable to town slaves. They go through life ignorant of manhood, and the metaphysicians wallow in pleasures. Men and women are divine. There is no other divinity. Let them not sell their godhead for filthy food and rotting houses and moloch factories. What stands in the way? The pious people, the artists and the metaphysicians.... Then a gentleman, in spectacles at the back, quietly said that Tolstoy’s ideas were eclectic and could never apply generally.... Of course he was right, but it doesn’t make Tolstoy any the less true. Andyou know when I hear all these convincing socialists planning things that really would make the world more comfortable, they always in the end seem ignorant ofhumanity; always behind them I see little Taylor, unanswerable, standing for more difficult deep-rooted individual things. It’sindividualswho must change, one by one.”
“Socialism will give the individual his chance.”
“Yes, I know. I agree in a way. You’ve shown me all that. I know environment and ways of thinkingdopartly make people. But Taylor makes socialism, even when its arguments floor him, look such a feathery, passing thing.”
“You stand firm, Miriam. Socialism isn’t feathery.You’refeathery. One thinks you’re there and suddenly finds you playing on the other side of the field.”
“It’s the fact that socialism is asidethat makes it look so shaky. And then there’s Reich; an absolute blaze of light ... on the outside side of things.”
“Not a blaze of anything, my dear Miriam ... a poor, hard-working, popular lecturer.”
“Everybody in London is listening. Hearing the most illuminating things.”
“What do they illuminate?”
“Ourselves. The English. Continuing Buckle. He’s got a clear cool hard unprejudiced foreign mind.”
“Your foreigners, Miriam. They haven’t the monopoly of intelligence.”
“I know. You think the English arethepeople. But so does Reich. Really he would interest you. Youmustlet me tell you his idea. Just the shape of it. Badly. He puts it so well that you know he has something up his sleeve. He has. He’s a Hungarian patriot. That is his inspiration. That England shall save Europe, and therefore Hungary, from the Germans. You must let me just tell you without interrupting. Two minutes.”
“I’mintelligent, Miriam.You’reintelligent. You have distinction of mind. But a really surprising lack of expression you know. You misrepresent yourself most tremendously.”
“You mean I haven’t a voice, that way of talking about things that makes one know people don’t believe what they say and are thinking most about the way they are talking. Bah.”
“Clear thought makes clear speech.”
“Well. Reich says that history so far is always one thing. The Hellenisation of Europe.... The Greeks were the first to evolve universal ideals. Which were passed on. Through two channels. Law-giving Rome. And the Roman church; Paul, who had made Christianity a universal working scheme. So Europe has been Hellenised. And the Hellenisation of therestof the world will be through its Europeanisation. The enemy to this is the rude materialistic modern Germany. The only hope, England. Which he calls a nation of ignorant specialists, ignorant of history; believing onlyin race, which doesn’t exist—a blindfold humanitarian giant, utterly unaware that other people are growing up in Europe and have the use of their eyes. The French don’t want to do anything outside their large pleasant home. They are the sedentary Greeks; townspeople. The English are Romans, official, just, inartistic. Good colonists, not intrinsically, but because they send so much of their best away from their little home. A child can see that the English and Americans care less for money than any people in the western world, are adventurous and wandering and improvident; the only people with ideals and a sense of the future. Inartistic....”
“Geography he calls the ground symphony of history, but nothing more, or Ireland would play first fiddle in Great Britain. The rest is having to fight for your life and being visited by your neighbours. England has attracted thousands of brilliant foreigners, who have made her, including the Scotch, who until theybecame foreigners in England were nothing. And the foreigner of foreigners is the permanently alien Jew. And the genius of all geniuses Loyola, because he made all his followers permanent aliens. Countries without foreigners are doomed. Like Hungary. Doomed to extinction if England does not beat Germany. That’s all.”
“There won’t, if we can help it, be any need for England to beat Germany. There are, you know, possibly unobserved by yourrather wildly rocketting Reich, a few eyes in England. That war can be written away; by journalists and others, written into absurdity.”
“Oh, I’m so glad. Listening to Reich makes one certain that the things that seem to be happening in the world are illusions and the real result of the unseen present movement of history is war with Germany. I don’t like Reich. His idea of making everything begin with Greece. His awful idea that art follows only on pressure and war. Yet it is true that the harassed little seaboard peoples who lived insecurelydidhave their art periods after they had fought for their lives. Then no more wars no more Art....Well; perhaps Art like war is just male ferocity!”
“Nonsense, Miriam.”
“Do you really think the war can be written away? There are so many opinions, and reading keeps one always balanced between different sets of ideas.”
“You’re too omnivorous, Miriam. You get the hang of too many things. You’re scattered.”
“The better you hear a thing put, the more certain you are there’s another view. And then there aremotives.”
“Ah, now you’re talking.... Motives; can be used. Almost any sort of motive can be roped in; and directed. You ought to write up that little meeting by the way. You’re lucky you know, Miriam, in your opportunities for odd experience. Write it up. Don’t forget.”
“You weren’t there. It wasn’t a joke. I don’t want to be facetious about it.”
“You’re too near. But you will. Save it up. You’ll see all these little excursions in perspective when you’re round the next corner.”
“Oh Ihateall these written up things; ‘Jones always wore a battered cricket cap, a little askew.’ They simply drive memad. You know the whole thing is going to be lies from beginning to end.”
“You’re a romantic, Miriam.”
“I’m not. It’s the ‘always wore.’ Trying to get at you, just as much as ‘Iseult the Fair.’ Just as unreal, just as much in an assumed voice. The amazing thing is the way men go prosing on for ever and ever, admiring each other, never suspecting.”
“You’ve got to create an illusion you know.”
“Why illusion? Life isn’t an illusion.”
“We don’t know what life is. You don’t know what life is. You think too much. Life’s got to be lived. The difference between you and me is that you think to live and I live to think. You’ve made a jolly good start. Done things. Come out and got your economic independence. But you’re stuck.”
“Nowthere’ssomebody who’s writing about life. Who’s shown what has been going on from the beginning. Mrs. Stetson. It was the happiest day of my life when I readWomen and Economics.”
“It’s no good, you know, that idea of hers.Women have got to specialise. They are specialists from the beginning. They can’t run families, and successful careers at the same time.”
“They could if life were differently arranged. They will. It’s not that so much. Though it’s a relief to know that homes won’t be always a tangle of nerve-racking heavy industries which ought to be done by men. But the blaze of light she brings is by showing that women were social from the first and thatallhistory has been the gradual socialisation of the male. It is partly complete. But the male world is still savage.”
“The squaw, Miriam, was—”
“Absolutely social and therefore civilised, compared to the hunting male. She went out of herself. Mother and son was society.Hehad no chance. Everyone, even his own son, was an enemy and a rival.”
“That’s old Ellis’s idea. There’sbeena matriarchate all right, Miriam, for your comfort.”
“I don’t want comfort, I want truth.”
“Oh youdon’t, Miriam. One gives you facts and you slide away from them.”
Household life breaks everything up. Comes crashing down on moments that cannot recur.... Thought runs on, below the surface to conclusions, arriving distractingly at the wrong moment.
It always seems a deliberate conspiracy tosuppress conclusions. Lunch, grinning like a Jack-in-the-box, in a bleak emptiness. People ought not to meet at lunch time. If the bleakness is overcome it is only by borrowing from the later hours. And the loan is wasted by the absence of after-time, the business of filling up the afternoon with activities; leaving everything to be begun all over again later on.
How can guestsallowthemselves to arrive to lunch? The smooth young man had come primed for his visit. Carefully talking in the Wilson way; carefully finding everything in the world amusing. And he was not amused. He was a cold selfish baffled young man, lost in a set. Welcomed here as a favoured emissary from a distant potentate....
And now with just the same air of reflected brilliance he was blithely playing tennis. Later on he would have to begin again with his talk; able parroting, screening hard coldness, the hard coldness of the pale yellow-haired Englishman with good features.... A blindfold humanitarian giant? Where are Reich’s English giants? Blind. Amongst the old-fashioned, conservatives? Gentlepeople with fixed ideas who don’t want to change anything? The Lycurgans are not humanitarians. Because they are humanitarians deliberately. Liberals and socialists are humanitarian intellectually, through anger. Humanitarian idealists. The giants are humanitarian unconsciously, through breeding. Reich said the strongest motives, the motives that made history, wereunconscious.... Consciousnessis increasing. The battle of unconscious fixed ideas and conscious chosen fixed ideas. Then the conservatives must always win! They make socialists and then absorb them. The socialists give them ideas. Neither of them are quite true. Why doesn’t God state truth once and for all and have done with it?
And all the time, all over the western world, life growing more monstrous. The human head growing bigger and bigger. A single scientific fact, threatening humanity. Hypo’samusedanswer to the claims of the feminists. The idea of having infants scooped out early on, and artificially reared. Insane. Science rushing on, more and more clear and mechanical.... “Life becomes more and more a series of surgical operations.” Howcanmen contemplate the increasing awfulness of life for women and yet wish it to go on? The awfulness they have created by swaddling women up; regarding them as instruments of pleasure. Liking their cooking.Stereotypingin their fixed mechanical men’s way a standard of deadly cooking that is destroying everybody, teeth first. And they call themselves creators.... Knickers or gym skirts. A free stride from the hips, weight forward on toes pointing straight, like Orientals. Squatting, like a savage, keeping the pelvis ventilated and elastic instead of sitting, knees politely together, stuffy and compressed and unventilated. All the rules of ladylike deportment ruin the pelvis.... Ladiesare awful. Deportment and a rigid overheated pelvis. In the kitchen they have to skin rabbits and disembowel fowls. Otherwise no keep. Polite small mouthfuls of squashy food and pyorrhoea. Good middleaged church people always suggest stuffy bodies and pyorrhoea. Somewhere in the east people can be divorced for flatulence.
But the cranks are so uncultured; cut off from books and the past. Martyrs braving ridicule? The salt of the earth, making here and there a new world, unseen? Their children will not be cranks....
A rose fell at her feet flung in through the window.
“Come out and play!”
This is joy. To stand back from the court, fall slack, losing sight of the scatter of watching people round the lawn. Nothing but the clasp of the cool air and the firm little weight of the rough-coated ball in a slack hand. The loose-limbed plunge forward to toe the line. One measuring glance and the whole body a taut projectile driving the ball barely clear of the net, to swish furrowing along the ground.
“The lady serves from the cliff and Hartopp volleys from the sky. They’re invincible.” The yellow young man was charming the other side of the net. Not yellow. His hair a red gold blaze when the sun was setting, loose about his pale eager sculptured face; and now dull gold. He had welcomed her wranglingrush to the net after the first set, rushing forward at once, wrangling, without hearing, Hypo coming too, squealing incoherent contributions. And then the young man had done it again, for her, to make a little scene for the onlookers. But the third time it had been a failure and Hypo had filled the gap with witty shoutings. And all the time the tall man with dense features had said not a word, only swung sympathetically about. Yet he was a friend. From the moment he came up through the garden from France with his bag, uninvited, and sat down and murmured gently in response to vociferous greetings. Ill, after a bad crossing. So huge and so gentle that it had been easy to go up to his chair as everyone else had done, and say lame things, instead of their bright ones, and get away with a sense of having had an immense conversation. He played the game, thinking of nothing else. Understood the style and rhythm of all the incidental movements. The others were different. They had learned their tennis; could remember a time when they did not play. Playing did not take them back to the beginning of life. Was not pure joy to them.
He was wonderful. He altered the tone. The style and peace of his slow sentences. Half German. The best kind of German. Nowhecould prevent war with Germany, if he could be persuaded to waft to and fro, for Reich’s ten years, between the two countries, talking.
He talked through the evening; keeping his hold of the simplest thread of speech with his still voice and bearing. Leaving a large, peaceful space when he paused, into which it was easy to drop any sort of reflection that might have arisen in one’s mind. Hypo scarcely spoke except to question him and the smooth young man dramatically posed, smoked, in silence. The huge form was a central spectacle, until the light faded and the talk began to die down. Then Alma asked him to play. He rose gigantic in the half light and went to the piano murmuring that he would be pleased to improvise a little. Amazing. With all his foreign experience and his serene mind, his musical reflections would be wonderful. But they were not. His gentle playing was colourless. Vague and woolly. And it brought a silence in which his own silence stood out. He seemed to have retired, politely and gently, but definitely, into himself. The darkness surrounding the one small shaded light began to state the joy of the day. Everyone was beaming quietly with the sense of a glorious day. The tall man was at ease in stillness. In his large quiet atmosphere communication flowed, following serenely on the cessation of sound. Nun danket alle Gott.... How far was he a believer in the old things? His consciousness was the widest in the room; seemed to hold the balance between the old and the new, sympathetically, broad shouldered and rather weary with his burden. Speaking always ina frayed tired voice that would not give in to any single brisk idea. There was room and space and kind shelter in his mind for a woman to state herself, completely, unopposed. But he would not accept conclusions.... His mild smooth shape of words would survive anything; persisting. It was hisstyle. With it he carried himself through everything, making his way of talking a thing in itself.... No ideas, no convictions; but something in him that made a perfect manner. A blow between the eyes, flattening him out, would not break it. There was nothing there to break, nothing hard in him. A made mould, chosen, during his growing, filling itself up from life, but not living ... a gentleman, of course, that was it. Then there was an abyss beneath. Unstated things that lived in darkness.
But the silence lasted only an instant. Before its test could reveal anything further than the sudden sharp division of the sitters into men and women, Alma made movements to break up the party. Hypo’s voice came, enchanting, familiar and new, its qualities renewed by the fresh contacts. The thing to do he said rising, coming forward into the central light, not in farewell, into a self-made arena, with needless challenging sturdiness from one of the distances of his crowded mind. It would be one of his unanswerable fascinating misapprehensions. The thing todowas to go out into the world; leave everything behind, wife, and child and things; go all over the world and come back;experienced.
“And what about the wives?”
“The wives, Miriam, will go to heaven when they die.” He turned on his laugh to the men in the background; and gathered their amused agreement in a swift glance. They had both risen and were standing, exposed by the frankness of their spokesman, silent in polite embarrassment. Theyreallythought, these two nice men, that something had been said. The spell of the evening was broken up. The show had been given. Dream picture of moving life. Entertainment and warm forgetfulness. Everyone enchanted and alive. Now was the time for talk, exchange; beginning with the shattering of Hypo’s silly idea. How could men have experience? Nothing would make them discover themselves. Either of them. Perhaps the tall man....
“Men as they are,” she began, trusting to the travelling power of her mental picture of him as an exception, “might go——”
But her words were lost. Alma had come forward and was saying her good nights, hurriedly. They were to go, just as everything was beginning. All chance of truth was caught, in a social trap. The men were to be left, with their illusions, to talk their monstrous lies, unchecked. Imagining they were really talking, because there was no one to contradict. Unfair.
She rose perforce and got through her part. It was idiotic, a shameful farce. Evening dress and the set scene, so beautifully arranged, weresuddenly shameful and useless. Taken to bits; silly. She seemed to be taking leave of herself, three separate selves, united in the blessed relief of getting rid of the women. In the person of the tall man she strode gracefully across the room to open the door for Alma and herself, breaking out, with the two other men, at once, before the door was closed, with immeasurable relief, into the abrupt chummy phrases of old friends newly met.