Alison’s second indulgence in port and water had roused him to a certain Liberalism that usually hibernated.
“I wish sometimes we could get more into touch with the undergraduates,” he said. “We know about their games to some extent, and we know what their classical reading consists of, and we look over their compositions. But there our knowledge of them and their education abruptly ceases, unless they get into trouble through not keeping chapels, or making a row, or smoking in the quadrangle. You, for instance, just now, Butler, wanted to know no more aboutCamouflageor its authors.”
Butler poured himself out a glass of whisky and soda. This, too, was in celebration of Saturday night.
“My dear fellow,” he said, “your admirable description of the Ode was quite enough for me as regardsCamouflage. I should like it immediately suppressed. As for the authors, you yourself said they were a poisonous lot.”
“I know I did. But I wonder if one could not learn more about the poison, and perhaps supply an antidote. Indeed, what if it isn’t poison?”
“I am content to take your word that it is,” said Butler, yawning. Conversation about undergraduates always bored him, for it was not they, to his mind, whom Cambridge connoted. Cambridge meant to him the life lived by himself and his colleagues, the mild scholarly discussion, the gentle, ignorant patronization or criticism of the outer world, the leisure, the port, the dignity of the community of teachers. Naturally his life was concerned also with undergraduates, but only to the extent that he taught and lectured them at fixed hours, and when necessary rebuked.
But more advanced ideas still floated vaguely in Alison’s mind, as he rose to go.
“Sometimes I have certain doubts about our educational system,” he observed.
“Get rid of them,” said Butler, booming from his impregnable fortress.
While this decorous pleasure-party of the Olympians was in progress, another by no means less pleasurable, though far less Olympian, had been going on partly in Birds’s room, partly in Jim’s, just across the passage. Two or three people had strolled in to see Birds after Hall, two or three more to see Jim, with the effect that there had been an amalgamation and a game of poker.Those who did not care to play poker, refreshed themselves with cigarettes and conversation and whisky and soda, and a rather neat booby-trap had been set over the door into Birds’s bedroom. Jelf of the poisonous set, and editor ofCamouflage, had devised this, and subsequently forgetting about it, and going into Birds’s bedroom to fetch another glass, had got caught by it himself, and was now brushing carbolic tooth powder out of his hair. Then Birds, who at the moment was playing poker in Jim’s room, had come in, and by way of reprisal had thrown the rest of the tooth-powder in Jelf’s face, who had sneezed without intermission for ten minutes.
But the ragging had not gone further than that, and now the party had broken up, leaving only Jelf and Badsley with the owners of the rooms. Jelf was a tall, merry-faced, ugly boy, whose hair when not pink with tooth-powder was black. He wore it long and lanky, with the design, which perfectly succeeded, of annoying those who conformed to the custom of short hair. He wore extraordinarily shabby clothes and professed views of the wildest immorality for analogous reasons.
“And if I find long black hairs in my brush to-morrow,” said Birds, alluding to these incidents, “I shall make you eat them. Why don’t you get your hair cut like ordinary people?”
“Because then I should no longer annoy ordinary people. I say,Camouflageis going to be lovely next week. I’ve written a defence of Polygamy. There’s a polygamous tribe in West Africa whose average length of life is seventy-eight. I attribute that to polygamy.”
“Don’t believe it,” said Birds.
“You haven’t read my article yet, so you don’t know. It’s style that makes you believe things, and I’ve put it very convincingly with quotations from Taylor’s ‘Anthropology’ and the ‘Golden Bough,’ and Legros’ Travels. No one will turn the passages up, and if they did they wouldn’t find them, because they don’t exist. But it’s all damned scientifically put.”
“Do you mean you made the whole thing up?” asked Jim.
“Yes, my child. As I say, it’s all a question of style. You’ll believe it all right. And then there’s another rather neat rag, if you’ll promise not to tell anybody.”
“Right.”
“I’ve printed a French poem by Victor Hugo, and signed it with my initials.”
“What’s the point?”
“Why, I shall take a copy very diffidently to Butler, and ask him what he thinks of my French. And I bet you five to one that he says that I had better learn prosody before I attempt to write French verse, or words to that effect. Anyone take it?”
It seemed so perfectly certain that Butler would say words to that effect that not the wildest gambler would entertain such a hazard.
“And then you’ll tell him?” asked Jim.
“Of course not, but it’ll leak out somehow. I shall tell Mackenzie and he’ll do the rest. I wonder why the dons object to me so much? At least, I know why. They think I’m pulling their sacred legs. The Ode to the Trousers annoyed them awfully. They thought it was going to be obscene, and suffered a bitter disappointment.”
Robin sat down on the floor.
“Don’t see what you’re playing at,” he said. “It’s perfectly easy to be unpopular, and you take such a lot of trouble about it.”
“There you’re wrong,” said Jelf. “You couldn’t be unpopular if you tried, Birds. Your hair is nice and short and you’ve a clean face and shave every morning, and play cricket and are exactly like everybody else.”
“Sooner be like that than like you,” said Robin politely.
“You couldn’t be like me, if you tried, simply because you can’t think for yourself. You accept all that you’ve been brought up in, like a dear little good boy, eating the dinner that’s given him, and saying his grace afterwards. Being born an Englishman together with Eton and Cambridge has made you precisely what you are, which is exactly the same as Badders and Jim. You do what you’re told without ever asking why. Britannia rules the waves, and church is at eleven on Sunday morning, but you may play lawn-tennis in the afternoon.”
Jelf got up and waved his arms wildly.
“You’re all cast in one mould,” he said, “and Lord, how I should like to break it. Here you sit, you and Badders and Jim, and Badders is going to be a schoolmaster, because his father was, and Jim is going to be a clergyman for the same reason, and you’re going to be a bloody lord. Gosh! That’s why you get on so well, simply because you never think. And you never think because you can’t. Happy England! Our national stupidity is the basis of our national prosperity.”
“That comes out of ‘Intentions,’”remarked Badsley.
“I daresay it does, but anyhow, they’re not good intentions, which are invariably fatal. But none of you have got any intentions at all, except to be smugand comfortable and stereotyped. There’s Badders with his girls, and Birds with his cricket, and Jim—well, I don’t know what Jim’s with. He’s usually with Birds.”
“After all, we seem to annoy you without taking any trouble about it,” remarked Badsley, “and you have to take a great deal of trouble to annoy anybody. You’ve got to grow your hair long, and copy out Victor Hugo, and run a paper that nobody reads.”
“But I can’t help it: I must make a protest against respectability. Respectability carried to such a pitch as St. Stephen’s carries it to is simply indecent. Nobody ever gets drunk except me, and I not frequently because I hate feeling unwell afterwards. It’s so degrading to be sick even in a good cause. Why don’t we keep mistresses? Why does nobody do anything that he shouldn’t according to collegiate standards? Atheism too: Why no atheists? And all the time I’ve got a horrible feeling that I’m really just the same as any of you.”
“You need not, I assure you,” said Birds in the Butler voice, “be under any mistaken misapprehensions about that.”
“But I am. I argue and protest, but at bottom——”
“Oh, kick it, somebody,” said Badsley.
Jim went and stood in front of the fireplace with his head on one side.
“The question is how we shall make Jelf more like us,” he said. “Shall we begin by cutting his hair or shaving him, or——”
There was a wild rush across the room and Jelf jumped out of the window on to the grass outside.
“Cowards!” he said, and ran to his room and locked himself in.
Birds, who had just failed to catch Jelf before hejumped out of the window, came back into the room.
“And the rum thing is that though he talks such awful piffle, he’s about right,” he said. “We don’t think. I say, his Victor Hugo rag is rather a good one.”
“Top-hole. But what is there to think about except the things that everybody thinks about?”
“Dunno. But somehow he finds them. Do you remember when there was flue here before Easter, and he went round with a handcart and a bell, calling out, ‘Bring out your dead’? That did me a lot of good.”
Badsley yawned.
“I’m going to be a schoolmaster because the governor is,” he remarked, “and Jim’s going to be a clergyman, and Birds is going to be a lord. Jelf’s about right. And to-morrow will be Sunday, so I’m going to bed to-day!”
Birds and Jim were left alone, and Birds began undressing.
“I think I shall begin by being an atheist,” he said. “How am I to start? But it is true that we all do what everybody else does. Are you going to breakfast with me to-morrow, or I with you? I forget whose turn it is.”
“Yours. And we can’t think, at least I can’t. If I sat down to think I shouldn’t know what to think about. All the same——”
Jim took a turn up and down the room, trying to frame words to the idea in his mind.
“He’s rather Puck-like, is Jelf,” he said. “I don’t think he’s really human. He thinks that people who aren’t epigrammatic, don’t feel. I doubt if he likes anybody—really likes, I mean. You aren’t good for much if you don’t.”
“That’s what makes him want to pull things down,” said Birds, following vaguely the train of thought. “He can destroy all right; he makes you think nothing’s up to much. But he doesn’t give you anything instead. Lord! I wish I’d been a bit quicker and caught him before he went through the window.”
He strolled whistling away into his own room.
THE big loggia at Grote was set into the house; the dining-room lay along one side of it, the Italian drawing-room along the other, and a door in the inner wall of it communicated with the entrance hall. The open front was supported by six Corinthian columns, two set against the side walls, while the other four divided into equal spaces its frieze of metopes and triglyphs. It was raised a couple of steps above the broad gravel walk which ran along the southern façade of the house, and bordered the lawn. On the other side of that was the stone-balustraded terrace which fringed the edge of the beech-clad hill that plunged steeply down into the Thames valley. A broad opening had been cut through these woods opposite the centre of the terrace, and from the iron gates there you could look down on the mirror of the stream below which reflected the roofs and orchards of the village opposite. They were still milky-green with the verdure of the spring, and ran on past the house and formed the broad, mile-long avenue that led to the high-road beyond the park-gates.
The loggia gave the impression of great space and coolness on this broiling June afternoon. It was floored with squares of black and white marble, overwhich were laid some half dozen big Persian rugs, but the walls were bare save for panels framed in stone wreaths of fruit and flowers. In the centre of it stood a long dining-table, from a corner of which lunch had only recently been cleared away, and Lady Grote and a couple of friends who had arrived with her that morning, were lounging in a group of easy chairs that stood just inside the strip of sunlight lying along the edge of the steps.
Lady Grote had just rejoined the other two after seeing off Mr. Stoughton, the inexorable Socialist who had also lunched with her, and had now returned to London.
“He practically told me that Grote and I were thieves,” she remarked rather plaintively. “He said that all this”—and she indicated the surroundings—“really belonged to the human race in general and not to us. We had stolen it.”
“If you are thieves,” said Lord Thorley in his calm, philosophical voice, “then he is the receiver of stolen goods. He ate and drank in your pilferings with immense appetite.”
“I know. I thought it was not quite consistent of him. And he has gone to the station in the Rolls-Royce of which I have robbed him and others. But after all, why be consistent? Gracie is consistent, but I can’t think of anybody else who is.”
Lady Massingberd stirred gently in her chair.
“Is that a testimonial or an accusation?” she asked.
“I think it’s an accusation. It’s inconsistent to be consistent, if you see what I mean.”
“I think I should perhaps see better if you explained.”
Helen Grote considered a moment, half closing her eyes as if to focus her ideas.
“What I mean is this,” she said. “That we areeach of us such a bundle of opposite and contradictory tendencies and desires, the results of heredity, if you will, or of environment, that unless we continually did a large quantity of contradictory things, we shouldn’t be consistent with ourselves, or express ourselves. Mr. Stoughton, for instance, expresses himself beautifully: he is a Socialist and says that we have no right to possess anything nice, or to money which we didn’t earn: we are thieves and receivers of stolen goods. I am sure he is sincere in his outrageous belief. But on the other hand, he is clearly very fond of large quantities of food and wine, and likes going to the station in an expensive and stolen motor-car. That again is quite sincere, and he is right to eat and drink the stuff I have stolen. He wouldn’t be consistent with himself if he was not inconsistent. I really believe that means something.”
“Let us go on talking about me,” said Lady Massingberd. “We seem to have strayed from the subject.”
“Not far. I was coming back to you. You are consistent. You are completely convinced that nothing in the world matters two straws, and that the sole object of life is to extract from it all the enjoyment you can.”
“And there you are!” remarked Lord Thorley, shielding his eyes against the glare.
“I don’t think I’m there at all. You make me out not only completely selfish, but also utterly shallow.”
“No, not shallow,” said Lady Grote. “No one with convictions is shallow. You don’t drift in the least, you go steaming away in a well-defined line, with a wake of foam and waves behind you. And occasional corpses which you have thrown overboard,” she added, to complete the picture.
“Thank you, darling. And do explain also why I’m not selfish. It would make me feel more comfortable.”
“Certainly I can explain that: it is quite easy. You do quantities of kind and unselfish things. It gives you enjoyment to do them.”
“It would be very kind of you, for instance, to pass me those matches,” remarked Henry Thorley. “I’m sure you would enjoy it. Thanks.”
Lady Massingberd sat stiffly up in her chair. She looked rather like a smart young guardsman who had chosen to dress in a tailor-made gown.
“That is just like you, Helen,” she said. “You always impute low motives to people. You are good enough—I don’t know about your sincerity—to say I do kind things, but only because it amuses me.”
“No, I never said that. I said you enjoyed it,” said Helen. “I don’t think that anything amuses you.”
“Worse and worse. I have no sense of humour, then.”
“In that sense you haven’t. Things don’t tickle you, as Americans say, as they tickle me. You didn’t see the humour of Mr. Stoughton, for instance. You took him quite seriously: I had to point out to you the humour of his inconsistencies. I don’t say for a moment that you can’t see a funny joke, but you don’t see a serious joke like Mr. Stoughton.”
“No, it is true I didn’t see the joke in Mr. Stoughton, if there was one. I thought him merely very rude and ill-mannered and altogether without breeding.”
“I don’t know where he would have got his breeding from,” said Lord Thorley. “That would have been stolen, if he had any.”
“He hadn’t: he had appropriated nothing in that line. I can’t understand you, Helen. You like seeingthe weirdest sorts of people. Do you remember when you found you had asked a black bishop, a lion-tamer and a suffragette to dine with you?”
Lady Grote leaned laughing back in her chair.
“Do I remember?” she said. “And do I not remember that Grote came up to town unexpectedly that night? He arrived in the middle of dinner, gave one glance at us and fled to his club. I didn’t see him again for six months. Poor Grote!”
“Poor Grote indeed! But we are going to see him to-day, aren’t we?”
“Yes: he comes this evening. You see, Robin is coming too, and he adores Robin.”
“But tell me why you like suffragettes and lion-tamers and black bishops?” asked Lady Massingberd. “You are—it’s a terrible word—but you’re aristocratic to your finger-tips, and yet I really think you like riff-raff of that sort more than anybody. Anyhow it amuses you most. But then, of course you’ve got a sense of humour,” she added bitingly.
“Darling, I never said you hadn’t: I explained that away beautifully. But the real difference between us is that I like people: I like the human race, and you don’t like the human race. You like what they call ‘a few friends,’ which is far more genteel.”
“Oh, I’m genteel, too, am I?” asked Lady Massingberd in a voice that would have frozen molten pitch.
“Yes, you are genteel: it is very, very nice to be genteel. You like a few friends, as I said, and they are all of the class which you allowed yourself to call aristocratic. My dear, I believe that you think that when Moses came down from Sinai he brought with him not the tables of the law but the original edition of Burke’s Peerage. The Dukes of Edom: that’s what you like.”
Lady Massingberd began counting on her brown, strong fingers.
“One selfish: two shallow: three without sense of humour: four genteel: five snob,” she said. “There’s a nice handful of qualities.”
Lady Grote laughed again: she had the laugh of a child, open mouthed and abandoned.
“You won’t listen to my explanation,” she said. “I’ve explained away everything but genteel, which I can’t do, and now I’ll explain away snob. You aren’t in the least a snob in the ordinary sense: you don’t like princes better than dukes and dukes than marquises, like Mr. Boyton who is coming down here this evening, but you like a certain quality which you call breeding. If a prince hasn’t got it you don’t like him. Lots of them haven’t. But you like a certain quality which usually goes with generations of living comfortably in castles. Now I don’t, at least I don’t like that to the exclusion of those who haven’t got it. I can make friends with those who haven’t got a trace of it. Indeed, I think I must have had some great-great-grandmother who came from the music-halls, if they had them in those days, and heredity makes me want to go back there.”
“I can’t think why people are down on snobs,” remarked Lord Thorley, in his slow, suave voice. “Snobs are so pleasant if one happens to be an earl or something. But the earl-variety of snob is unfortunately becoming rather scarce. They ought to create snobs instead of peers. With a pension.”
“Henry so often appears to be talking nonsense when he is really talking sense,” remarked Lady Grote. “He hasn’t had the opportunity to talk much at present owing to Gracie and me. Shall we let him talk for a little?”
“If he’s got anything to say,” remarked Lady Massingberd austerely.
“He has. I always know when Henry has something to say, because when he has something to say he is rather silent; when he has nothing to say, he talks.”
“You’re the biggest snob I know, Helen,” said Henry gently.
“That sounds like having something to say. Do say it.”
“Well, the good old crusted snob who likes earls as such is about extinct, except for your friend Mr. Boyton. But another sort of snob has sprung up, of which you are a perfect specimen. You are snobbish about success. You don’t like the rank and file of the Socialists, you like their leader, Mr. Stoughton. You don’t like singers, but you like the finest singer in the world. You like the finest artist, the richest man——”
“Oh, that’s not being a snob,” said Helen.
“Yes, it is: it is being the up-to-date snob. In old days there was the snobbism with regard to birth, because prince and duke and so on were representative of the most successful class. They had seats in the House of Lords, and controlled the seats in the House of Commons. They were richer than anybody else, they mattered most. Nowadays other people are much richer, Germans and Jews and such-like. Nowadays other people matter more, because the opera and the Russian ballet and such-like interest us more than marquises. We care less about territorial possessions and more about being amused. I don’t say you are the worse for being a snob: I only remark that you are one.”
“Go on: I love being talked about,” said Lady Grote.
“You have led a very happy life then, darling,” saidLady Massingberd, looking at her fingers, each of which connoted some odious quality.
“Oh, shut up, Gracie!” said Lady Grote. “Go on, Henry.”
“Well, you’re a snob, and what’s the harm of that? I think it’s very sensible of you. The efficient people of the world are naturally more interesting than others. They have won success, and to have won success implies gifts: it implies character. They have got their hall-mark: the world has recognized them: they have shown strength and determination. So far, so good.”
“Then tell me about the bad part. Whenever anyone says ‘So far, so good,’ it means there’s something awful coming.”
“You don’t think it awful, so you won’t mind. But it is a fact that a quantity of your successful people are bounders. That’s one of the penalties of success: it so often makes you a bounder. To be successful in the rough and tumble of a profession blunts your gentler qualities. Competition has been your business, and the habit of competition makes a very disagreeable by-product. It makes you inconsiderate of other people: it makes you square your shoulders and elbow people in the face.”
“That’s right,” said Lady Massingberd, almost smacking her lips. “Give it her hot: she told me I was genteel and selfish and—and what was my third finger?”
“Marriage-ring finger, dear,” said Helen wildly, completely forgetting for the moment that Gracie had divorced her husband only six months ago. Then suddenly she remembered, and gave a shriek of laughter.
“Oh, I wish I could say that sort of thing when I wanted to,” she exclaimed. “I only make awful gaffes by accident. It must be lovely to make themon purpose. But there’s more to follow, Henry. You got to where I liked people who elbowed others in the face.”
“Yes, I stick to that. You don’t like them because they elbow other people in the face, mind: you only like them though they do these elbowings. And there’s much more to follow.”
“Out with it,” said Lady Massingberd. “My third finger is for my marriage ring. Never shall I forget that.”
“Go on, Henry,” said Helen.
“I am going on. You make a profound mistake. You think you are being democratic: I have known you even think you were socialistic. But you are only being snobbish. The opera bores you very much——”
“She doesn’t know one note from another,” interjected Lady Massingberd.
“But you go in order to pay homage to that immense Kuhlmann, about whom everyone is talking.”
“He is coming down here this afternoon,” murmured Lady Grote.
“I felt sure of it. So probably is that man who wrote the play which the Lord Chamberlain refused to license. You don’t care for plays.”
“Mr. Hedgekick is perfectly charming,” said Helen, sticking up for her friends.
“Hedgekick?” asked Lady Massingberd in an awestruck voice.
“Yes, darling: Hedgekick. Why not? Talbot is just as funny, so is anything beginning with Fitz. I wish you wouldn’t interrupt when Henry is talking about me.”
“And the worst of all the miserable business,” said Lord Thorley, “is that you think you are being democratic and open-minded, and are among those who say, ‘One man is as good as another,’ and ‘God made us all.’ You don’t really think anything of the sort. A few men are much better than the others, and the others can go hang. You worship success. Could there be anything narrower or less democratic?”
“Anyhow, I had a suffragette to dinner,” remarked Lady Grote. “She was a criminal, too: she had scragged some picture in the Royal Academy and was sent to prison.”
“That was precisely why you asked her to dinner. She was in the world’s eye.”
“Like a cinder from the engine,” said Lady Massingberd.
“Exactly. And if a notorious murderer was allowed to go out to dinner, you would certainly ask him the night before he was hanged.”
Lady Grote did not attempt to defend herself.
“Yes, that’s all quite true as far as it goes,” she said. “But it doesn’t go far enough.”
“It goes a great deal too far,” said Lady Massingberd. “I never knew how dreadful you were.”
“May the prisoner at the bar speak?” said Helen. “She’s going to, anyhow. It’s just this. I’m human.”
She pointed her finger suddenly at Lady Massingberd. “Gracie, don’t say I’m much too human,” she said, “because that’s cheap. And you get into humanity most surely and quickly by going blind for the people who have succeeded in their own lines. I adore them. I don’t particularly care what they do, so long as they do it better than anybody else. If that is being a snob—well, I am one. I like people about whom the world is talking. They are concentrated people. They may be colossally rich, and that’s interesting, because they smoulder with power. They may sing, they maytell me, like Mr. Stoughton, that I’m a thief: they may dance. I like the grit that makes success. It’s what they are that interests me, not what they do.”
“In the case of the dancer, it’s what his legs do,” said Gracie succinctly.
“My dear, your great fault is that you can’t forgive,” said Helen. “You are pricking me with pins because I said you were genteel. That’s small of you. Now whatever I am, I’m not small. I’m not bound like you by any restriction of class: I’m much more a woman than a lady, if that makes it clearer to you. I don’t care whether the person who interests me comes from a slum, or South Kensington, or a palace: it doesn’t seem to me to matter. Therein I’m much bigger also than people like Mr. Stoughton, and those novelists, for whom, as someone said, the sun always rises in the East End. They think that if you dress for dinner you can’t be interesting. That’s a shallow view, if you like.”
Lord Thorley, with a wrinkling movement of his nose, displaced the pince-nez which he habitually wore. This gave him a lost sort of look.
“I don’t know where we’ve got to,” he remarked.
“We’ve got to the fact that I am more human than either of you, and therefore bigger. I know perfectly well how to begrande dameand how to begamin. I know it from the inside too: Iamboth. Grote used to say that he never knew which of me was coming down in the morning. But whichever it was, it always adored people.”
Lord Thorley gave a long, abstracted sigh.
“That is so amazing of you,” he said. “I can’t understand your being so completely taken up with people, as individuals, as you are. Collectively I agreewith you: when people form masses and parties, you can deal with the principles that are evolved.”
“In fact, you prefer the abstract to the concrete,” said Lady Massingberd.
He gave them a charming smile.
“Apart from the people I am privileged to call my friends, I certainly do,” said he. “It is delightful to sit here and discuss Helen’s snobbishness, because she’s a friend. But I have not the slightest desire to discuss Mr. Stoughton’s inconsistency. It doesn’t seem to me to matter whether he is inconsistent or not. All Socialists, I am aware, are very muddle-headed, and, indeed, have no constructive scheme to propose. Mr. Stoughton seems to me a very ordinary representative of the class without any clear ideas to lay before us, beyond the notion that we are thieves. I think that possibly we are, but he could tell us no more than that our goods ought to belong to the State. He hadn’t the slightest notion of how the State would dispose of them. He didn’t see that if A., for instance, is industrious and frugal, he will, though all property is equally distributed to-day, be richer at the end of the year than B., who is idle and spendthrift. Eventually he admitted that, but when I asked him if he proposed to have further distributions of property annually, he had nothing better to say than that this was a detail which could be worked out. It isn’t a detail: it lies at the root of the whole affair. The clever, the frugal and the industrious will always amass property, and periodical distributions of wealth would only put a premium on idleness and extravagance. How far the fact that our great-grandfathers were hard-working justifies our being rich to-day is, of course, a totally different question.”
He sat there gently tapping the knuckles of one handwith the pince-nez he held in the other, looking dreamily out over the sunny lawn. Then suddenly he seemed to recollect himself, and glanced from one to the other of his companions.
“Dear me, I have been bringing principles into this very charming discussion on personalities,” he said. “Naturally, I grant you that to arrive at principles, you must study persons. They must be analysed and dissected: all principles are the spirit distilled from persons. But I am more concerned really with the result of that distillation than with the individual grapes that have gone to it.”
“But, then, why did you adopt politics as your profession?” asked Lady Massingberd. “I always wanted to know that. Surely in a political career you are entirely concerned with persons as individuals.”
“Not in my view of it. Indeed, I should say precisely the opposite. Anyone who attempts to be a constructive politician deals entirely with forces and tendencies, with the evolution of the nation’s collective mind. Of course, there are tub-thumpers and rhetoricians of the new order who attack individuals, and tell us what they have seen in one particular Staffordshire potter’s house, and contrast it with the deer-park and the Vandycks of somebody else. Mr. Stoughton—was that his name?—was of that class. But the man whose ideas deal with big movements does not concern himself with isolated and probably misleading phenomena. He does not have to see a thing for himself and tell everybody what he has seen. You need not go to Australia, in fact, in order to learn to think imperially. Who coined that phrase, by the way?”
He turned to Lady Grote, as he spoke. She knew as much about politics as she knew about the lunartheory, and very wisely hazarded no conjectures on the subject.
“You are very suggestive,” she said. “But I think what you say is completely wrong from beginning to end. All the heads of different professions just now, like you Ministers of State, and the heads of the Church, like bishops, know nothing at all of what is really going on. Public opinion isn’t made in Whitehall, any more than Christianity is made in cathedrals. And anyone who professes to control the course of either must have first-hand knowledge of the subject. Why is the Church out of touch with the people? Simply because bishops live in palaces. And why is the State out of touch with the people? Simply because Ministers sit in their offices, in an academic manner, and are unacquainted with what public opinion is. You and they have not the smallest idea what individuals want: you have no first-hand information. Was there ever a more ridiculous assembly than the House of Commons, unless it is the House of Lords? A man is elected to the House of Commons, let us say, by the majority of one vote. He represents half of the constituents who elect him, plus one man. It is no answer to say that somebody else is elected with a majority of three thousand. He only represents the majority of the electorate. It doesn’t come out square; there is no use in saying it does. And, good Lord, the House of Lords!”
Lord Thorley had adjusted his pince-nez again, and looked at her as through a microscope.
“And about the House of Lords?” he asked.
“My dear, you are not a professor, and I am not an undergraduate. You ask that as if you were trying to examine me, and determine my place by the intelligence of my answers. That is the fault of your party, whichis the same as mine. The Government are like school-masters: they don’t seem to recollect that they were elected by the school itself. You are—to adopt Gracie’s horrid phrase—aristocratic, and you can’t understand that nowadays there is no aristocracy. I suppose I belong to it, but I am quite certain that it doesn’t exist. We are like things in the Red King’s dream. When he wakes we shall all find that there aren’t any of us. Why should there be? As you said yourself, that which the House of Lords used to represent has gone elsewhere. Germans and Jews and Hittites—whatever they are—have got it. The House of Lords is an Aunt Sally, and everybody throws darts at its silly face. And they stick there every time.”
He wrinkled his pince-nez off his nose again.
“My dear Helen,” he said, “I had no idea you were such a Radical.”
She gave a little despairing sigh.
“I am nothing of the kind!” she said. “I am no more a Radical than I am a Tory. But I do know this, that in some weird way the whole world is going into a melting-pot. We’re all going to be chucked in. What sort of soup shall we make, I wonder?”
Lord Thorley, who had sunk back into his chair, sat a little more upright, and grasped the lapels of his coat in his hands.
“Without calling attention to the fact that soup is not usually made in a melting-pot,” he observed, “I don’t believe in the melting-pot. Ever since I can remember the country has supposedly been on the verge of some gigantic cataclysm. At one time it has been socialism, at another a European war, at another Home Rule. At no period that I can remember has there not been some terrible thunder-cloud in the sky, and now I have seen too many thunder-clouds to believein thunder. And if you look at a book of memoirs of whatever age, you will always find precisely the same thing. The writers invariably represent their country as on the edge of an abyss. The ground is always trembling with subterranean menaces. But when was the volcano actually in a state of eruption in England? It never has been. It has smoked and steamed sometimes; that has always been its safety-valve.”
He looked serenely, triumphantly, at his companions, as if, in the character of a teacher, he had algebraically “proved” some problem, or as if, in the character of a conjuror, he had brought off some clever piece of manipulation. But Lady Grote shook her head at him.
“You think you can prove things by a theory,” she said. “But unfortunately experience can disprove your theory.”
He laughed gaily and rose.
“That is just where we part company,” he said. “The theory itself is founded on collective experience.”
“But the conditions now are different.”
“That is what every age says of its own age,” he replied, “and in each case it is wrong. Behind the conditions and governing them is that great immutable force called human nature. And behind human nature is the infinitely greater force and the most immutable of all, which, by one name or another, we agree to be God!”
He stood twisting his pince-nez by the string for a moment’s silence.
“But here’s this lovely Saturday afternoon running to seed,” he said. “May I borrow a motor, my dear Helen, and go out for a run? And can’t I persuade you to come with me?”
“I wish I could, but my guests will be beginning to arrive before long.”
“Dear me, yes, I forgot. I was thinking that you and Gracie and I would be passing a quiet Sunday. Do you expect many people?”
“I think about thirty. I never really expect anybody till he arrives, for he may make some subsequent engagement.”
“And when he arrives you naturally cease to expect him, because he is already there. So you have no expectations with regard to people, and I wish you would apply the same principle with regard to cataclysms. But I think I shall go out, if I may, and return when your guests have mostly come. Then I can plunge head first into them. Seeing guests arrive one by one always rather reminds me of wading out on a flat shore to bathe.”
She laughed.
“My dear, order your car, will you? and take your header on your return. But don’t ask Gracie to go with you, because she would certainly say ‘Yes,’ and I want her here for moral support.”
“Very well. I feel no qualm about not offering you my moral support, because you would find me a broken reed.”
He looked round the great cool loggia a moment.
“Dear me, Grote’s ancestors were thieves with a great deal of taste,” he observed.
He drifted away in a rather rudderless manner, lost in subtle speculations on the subject that had been under discussion. Much the most interesting of these was Lady Grote herself, for whom he entertained the greatest admiration and the strongest affection of which he was capable. That, though it lacked any ardent quality, was undoubtedly deep; its very quietness almost guaranteed that. His pulses never beat quick for anybody, but for his friends they beat mostsatisfactorily full. Passions of any sort, whether of temper or of temperament, were quite unknown to him: his analytic mind lived in a cool, pleasant cave with its affections grouped tidily round it, and his admirable conscience keeping a sort of sentry-go at the mouth of it, to call him out, when required, for the fulfilment of his public duties. But the moment they were over, it saluted, and let him bestow himself at ease again.
He seldom was surprised at anything, for if anything at all startling came across him, he always felt that a better knowledge of the soil from which it sprang would have enabled him to conjecture its existence. He had been unaware, for instance, until to-day, that Lady Grote was one of the cataclysmic party, whose bogies, whenever they appeared in the public Press, he looked at with mild and easily-satisfied curiosity. The future of Ireland was of these, labour trouble was another; even suffragettes were periodically supposed to contribute a menace to the tranquillity of this decently-ordered realm, or the possibility of a European war. Lady Grote had not said which of these she thought threatening, but she had spoken of the melting-pot being on the fire....
He found himself standing in the drawing-room in front of the great Vandyck picture of the Lady Grote of the period, who had been an ancestress of his own. Not till then did he remember that he had come indoors to order a motor-car—had he driven down from London in his own car that morning? He could not recollect whether he had or not, and pressed a bell to order it if it was here, and, if not, one of his hostess’s. Waiting for it to be answered, he continued looking vaguely at the antique Lady Grote and thinking of the modern one.
How baffling to the analyst was the vivid and flame-like quality of her mind! No desire for the brooding activity of thought ever touched her; she was always eager for experience and psychical adventures in living; she loved coming in contact each day with new minds; she explored them like a traveller in unknown lands, but made no maps of them, no notes even of the fresh flora and fauna. She must be forty years old now, and yet in eagerness and elasticity of mind, just as in her fresh youth of body, she showed no signs of age and of the mellowness that age brought with it. She had still about her all the delicious effervescence and experimentalism of youth: her life was passed in the foam of rapids, and never by any chance did she float into a back-water. Time, with the buffetings and adventures that it brought, wrote no wrinkles on her, nor ever so slightly bruised her: the very quality of her vitality, like a wind, swept away catastrophes from her path in a mere cloud of dust.
He never made inquiries into the truth of scandals about his friends; such things did not interest him, but for as long as he had known her the world’s tongue had never ceased wagging about her affairs. Whatever they had been, they had in no way coarsened her or made her common: she remained the high-bred, exquisite woman, perched on a pinnacle of what he must suppose was called social standing. His passion for analysis did not trouble to exert itself over what that meant. In this prosperous, thoughtless, democratic day there was no end to the ingredients which composed it. She was a power, a centre, a comet....
Years ago there had been an awkward time, when Robin was quite a small boy. Grote had wanted to take very extreme steps, most ill-advised steps in Lord Thorley’s opinion, with regard to it. He had interestedhimself in that, and eventually he had persuaded Grote to be reconciled with her again. No good could come of it, only harm all round, especially for the boy.... Naturally he had never spoken to Helen of what he had done on that occasion; probably to this day she was ignorant that it was he who had saved the situation. Besides Grote himself ... and then with a slight sense of disgust, as if he had seen an objectionable paragraph in a book, Lord Thorley turned over that page in his mind. All the rest, as far as he personally knew, was mere scandal and gossip. He had no means of judging its truth or falsity; he only knew that the subject-matter of it was unattractive to him, even positively distasteful.
It seemed that the bells in this house were answered with truly artistic deliberation, and going again to the side of the chimney-piece to repeat the summons, he observed that he had merely turned on the lights of the glass chandelier that hung in the centre of the room. He had been vaguely conscious of a good deal of sunlight about, and had even wondered where it came from.
“Dear me, dear me!” he said to himself, as he pressed the correct button. “I must really try to be a little more observant in practical affairs. Helen would never have done that. It is distinctly a waste of nervous force to attend too closely to trivial matters, but I suppose there is a compromise to be arrived at.”
IT was not long after Lord Thorley had got clear of the house—it turned out on inquiry that he had driven down from London that morning, and thus he went forth in his own motor-car—that Lady Grote’s guests began to arrive, and for the next couple of hours she had to remain in the loggia, receiving them. There was a buffet set out against the wall, where they could get tea or hock-cup, and a variety of foods and fruits to refresh them after the strain of the half-hour’s journey from town, in the saloon carriage reserved for them on a couple of trains stopped for them at Grote, so that they should not have the inconvenience of travelling by the more leisurely services. There motor-cars had met them, with omnibuses for their servants and luggage, so that the journey even on this hot day could not be considered an intolerable ordeal, and they arrived very smart and talkative and hungry.
Week after week, on Saturday afternoon, from the beginning of May till the end of July, this crowd of those whose names were all for some reason or another much on the lips of the world in which she lived, descended on her like a flock of brilliantly plumaged birds, and made the social history of the current season. There was very little process of selection inher invitations, for with so numerous a party it really mattered little if it contained utterly incongruous elements, for all were fused by the agreeable fact that it was acachetand a distinction to be here at all.
She made no rule of asking husbands and wives together, for with her usual commonsense she argued that they generally saw enough, if not too much, of each other already, and these parties were rather of the nature of a slipping of the domestic chain. Besides, it was easily possible in those free-and-easy days, which were characteristic of the first decade and a half of the twentieth century, that a man admired somebody else beside his wife, and a woman looked not without favour on a man who had not the good fortune to be her husband. But never did she ask two men who admired the same woman to any very special degree, nor two women who happened to be setting their modish hats at the same man. She was much too good-natured to take pleasure in awkward situations, and it was the rarest thing in the world for her party not to split up into the most amicable groups and couples, which could be shaken together again into one shining piece of quicksilver by the arrival of mealtimes. No kind of precedence in the way of rank was observed, for she rightly considered that a stray duchess might easily bore or be bored by a stray duke, and boredom was not among the objects of her parties.
For herself she proposed to be taken in to dinner to-night by Kuhlmann, an immense tenor at the Covent Garden opera about whom all London raved. He had soft, purring manners, and at heart was about as civilized as the average wild-cat. There was no Frau Kuhlmann, as far as she was aware, but people said that there ought to have been a great many. Hehad sung the part of Walther last night at the opera, and Helen Grote, in spite of Lady Massingberd’s firm assertion that she did not know one note from another, had nearly fallen out of her box from sheer emotion in the Preislied.... And Grote should take in Gracie Massingberd, to show that his wife paid no attention to ridiculous things that people, she believed, were saying, and Mr. Boyton should take in the Duchess of Lindfield, because he adored duchesses, and she flattery, and Lord Thorley should take in Mrs. Trayle, who had written the mystical play that nobody understood, but everybody considered quite wonderful. Lord Thorley had been nine times to see it in the hope of understanding it; the seventh time he thought he had understood it, only to become aware at the eighth that he had done nothing of the sort. But perhaps the authoress could throw some light on it on behalf of so earnest an inquirer.
Then there was Mrs. Lockwater, who was asked here because she was simply the most beautiful creature ever seen, and so deserved her place. She seldom opened her mouth, but was an admirable listener, with a bad memory, so that it was perfectly safe to tell her anything. She would obviously fall to the arm of the great portrait-painter, Geoffrey Bellingham, who neither listened nor stopped talking in long, abstruse sentences, from which he could not always extricate himself. When this happened, he began again and put it all differently. These periods were packed full of wit and wisdom, if you only could extract it; but the style of his speech resembled that of refractory ore from which it was difficult to win the gold. All this was obvious, and for the rest she could easily see, between tea and dinner, who gravitated to whom.
It occasionally happened, though rarely, that someguest or other showed no signs of gravitating to anybody, in which case this most complete of hostesses singled him out, at whatever personal inconvenience, for her own especial attention. To-day there seemed to be no such present, and as the loggia filled up and emptied again, with fresh arrivals and previous arrivals who strolled out together after tea, some down to the river, some to the tennis-courts, there were no signs of detached units. Most of her guests, as was natural in the middle of the season among those who spend three months in an incessant interchange of meetings with others, were already acquainted, many were friends, and there were none who found themselves in any way on alien territory.
The French Ambassador, a tall, emaciated person, whom no one could ever have suspected of being the first of Europeangourmets, had shown an unmistakable preference for Lady Instow, whosechefhe had already tried to seduce into his service; and Mr. Boyton, as by some inevitable law that governs the movements of heavy bodies, had been already drawn into a reverential orbit round the Duchess of Lindfield, who, according to her custom, was swiftly denuding him of cigarettes. But to Mr. Boyton a cigarette of his own smoked by a duchess was worth a hundred cigarettes smoked by himself, and he came near to being vexed when Lady Grote, observing this marauding process, told a footman to put a case of cigarettes on a table close to her Grace. But he found some little consolation in shutting up his own case and supplying himself from this, for these were, at any rate, titled cigarettes. He also felt a quiet and secret pleasure in being the only snob of the old school present: thus he had a fair field to himself, and no one disputed his desire to talk to a dull duchess. For the rest, he was a stout, middle-aged gentleman, with hair of a suspiciously uniform honey-colour parted in the middle.
He had a wife, a fact which nobody here present probably knew, who kept his house in Hampstead in a wholly admirable manner. She was the only person in the world who loved him, and would have perished with terror had there been any serious reason to suppose that she would be asked to the tables at which her Arthur was so deservedly popular, for he had an apt and amusing tongue ready to trim itself with sycophancy when exposed to the high lights of such a firmament. His eminence consisted in the fact that he was always there: he crawled, he climbed, he flew. But he invariably got there. A hostess asked Mr. Boyton as a matter of course: he was there to eat his dinner just as naturally as the footmen were there to give it him. He sang for it, too, making himself invariably agreeable to those who were worth the trouble. And as he saw no others, he never proved a disappointment.
All, then, was going well in the assembling of this particular party. Everything always did go well, but with a rather touching humility Lady Grote never ceased to fear as Saturday afternoon became more populous, that her guests were not going to enjoy themselves. That was her main anxiety: she had no solid self-assurance that would permit her to think that they must enjoy themselves, since they formed her party. A tremendous under-tow of modesty lay below the surface of her nature: she never rated herself at the figure at which the whole of her world rated her. She was never dazzled by the brilliance that she shed. She could not get over the notion that it was very nice of others to appear to enjoy her hospitality.
With her admirable memory, long trained in the requirements needed by a hostess, she knew that soonafter six all her guests had arrived with the exception of Robin and her husband. The boy had certainly said he would come to-day, but had not said how or when he would get there: that was rather like him. Perhaps he would swim down the river from Cambridge, and arrive at the steps by the bottom of the wood with no clothes of any description....
She mentioned this possibility to Geoffrey Bellingham, who was a late arrival, and was sitting by her with a cup of tea, a glass of hock-cup, a tea-cake and a peach on the table beside him. It did not seem that he wished to consume any of those items of provender: he had but absently taken them from trays that were handed him, and they now formed a sort of phalanx of food ready to hand. Soon he added to them a glass of brandy-and-soda, a cigar and a cigarette. The last of these, without lighting it, he brandished as an instrument of gesticulation.
“But there is, in fact, my dear lady,” he said, “no apprehension justly founded which could lead you seriously to contemplate so unusual an occurrence as our dear Robin’s appearance here in that state which you so delicately allude to as nudity. Even if it were so, what sight could be more delectable to our over-civilized eyes than a young, unconscious Greek god, an Aphrodite, in fact, though of the more muscular sex, appearing suddenly from the wave in all the unashamedness of youthful beauty among our sophisticated frocks and frills? You would, if your maternal instincts prompted you, lend him a skirt, and I would hesitatingly offer him a coat more than ample for his slimness. Then, clad with a shoe of Lady Massingberd’s and a boot of our amiable Boyton’s, is there any more alluring spectacle—in fact, we shall all be delighted to see Robin, irrespective of his position as the son of ourdear hostess, whenever and however he arrives. But if, unless I am mistaken, it is the Cam that glides by his studious walls, there is no real chance of the aqueous phenomenon you have suggested, as he comes, I understand, from the banks of a river which suffers a sea-change in the Wash. Had Oxford the honour of claiming him as analumnus, there would have been the chance of his debouching, so to speak, at Grote, which, I cannot believe I am mistaken in thinking, casts its spell over the Thames. In fact, Robin, if he comes by river in any form, will have to face a voyage down the North Sea, or German Ocean as the geography books, probably Teutonic in origin, so impudently call it, before he can win a footing on our beloved Thames. And even then he would have to swim up from Gravesend or some ill-defined settlement that enriches the estuary!”
His eyes suddenly fell on the peach, the tea-cake, the brandy-and-soda, the tea and the hock-cup.
“I had not been aware,” he said, “that so complete a paraphernalia of what would make the most sumptuous sort of dinner had been provided me. It is slightly embarrassing to be so beautifully equipped with what the Prayer-book calls the kindly fruits of the earth, without having had the slightest intention of claiming their benign aid to bridge over the chasm, as we may call it, which intervenes—in fact, the smallest possible selection from an apparently unlimited store would more than suffice for me. In short, a cup of tea and nothing more would be remarkably pleasant. I seem to have taken a cigar, too, a delicacy of desiccated foliage of which I am wholly unworthy. And so Robin is expected.”
That seemed to be the gist of it all, and Helen Grotetook firm hold of this life-preserver that floated on the flood of Geoffrey Bellingham’s discourse.
“He said he would come this afternoon,” she said, clinging to that which kept her head above water. “But one never knows about Robin.”
She was instantly swept off again into the sea.
“Therein you outline the most glorious of all relationships, I need not say—do not tell me that I need say—that I allude to that between mothers and sons. Had I been so fortunate as to have a son, granting the premiss that I had already gained the most essential of all conditions for that—namely, that of husbandhood—there is nothing that would delight me more than the existence of that supreme and entrancing uncertainty of how a son is going to behave. The younger generation, my dear lady, must inevitably be ahead of us in development, and, therefore, in incomprehensibility. If you could understand your dear Robin—may we say ‘our’ dear Robin?—it would imply that he was a generation behind his time. Nothing fills me with more delighted wonder and surfeits me with more entranced surmise than how the younger generation are going to govern the world. The reins are already slipping from our effete and rheumatic fingers—you will understand, of course, that no fingers of those which I see so gracefully round me are alluded to in any sort of implication, however remote—but, in point of fact, mothers and fathers, and the elderly bachelors and the even more elderly maids, are now, at this present moment, sitting round in a dusk andDämmerung, and bright eyes, dimly seen, but sparkling with purpose, gleam from the corners of our crumbling habitations, and watch for the opportunity which must surely come, and come soon, of, in fact, scragging us.”
Lady Grote gave a little shiver, quite involuntary, quite sincere.
“You are horrible,” she said. “Do you mean that Robin is going to cut my throat? But you are more than fascinating. You are a Pied Piper; is he not, Mr. Kuhlmann?”
Kuhlmann, who was sitting on the other side of her, made a little purring noise in his throat like a contented cat.
“Also,” said he, “I do not understand a word of what Mr. Bellingham says. But I like the noise he makes.Ach, one word I did understand, and he says you are in theDämmerung. There is a dusk closing in on England. So?”
Mr. Bellingham remembered, with a sense of relief, the fact that Kuhlmann had not arrived till after his remarks about the sea so impudently called the German Ocean.
“A dusk closing in on England?” he said. “I must surely have expressed myself with more than my accustomed infelicity, if I have left that impression. The dusk, Mr. Kuhlmann, is but the dusk of certain expiring ashes, such as my own, which will rekindle in a nobler fire to light the ways of our world’s obscure transit through infinite space, than has ever yet been seen. The words that should convey to you how eagerly I make fuel of myself for that incomparable Phœnix immeasurably fail me. But if, in the ways of a stuttering tongue and a speech to which the babbling of a brook—any brook you please—is of the nature of speech more coherent than is given to me, I am capable of conveying the impression that is so irradicably fixed on my mind that no other picture is aught but colourless beside it, I would endeavour to make this at least plain.” Bellingham was now in full splendid blast.He outlined and emphasized his point with strokes of his unlit cigar, using it like a brush against the canvas of the air, and his voice boomed out impressively.
“From a race of heroic fathers and mothers has come forth, with explosion as of gorse-seed, an infinitely more heroic offspring. The steadfast eyes of boys and girls to-day, I assure you, frighten me. They are steadfast on their pleasure, if you will, or on each other, or on those extraordinary games they play, in which you have to hit a small india-rubber ball, or so I take it to be, as few times as possible, putting it, at uncertain intervals, into a species of small jam-pot sunk in little lawns, in order to win this very serious game. Golf, I think, is the name of the sport which I am feeling for. Or, again, they fix those same steadfast eyes, unwittingly perhaps, but in obedience to the life force, as poor Shaw put it, on the mist that assuredly now more than ever veils the future from us. The destiny of the world! Where does that lie but in the solar plexus of boys and girls? How commonplace to the verge of conspicuousness that sounds! But in the history of the world did ever the future lie—like, like this plucked peach, all pink with the sun that has ripened it, more fatefully, more conclusively, in the hands of the young? There it lies, as it were, a bomb built of fire and explosiveness, tame for the moment as this plucked peach, which it really would be a crime not to eat, and, as I am without criminal instincts, I forthwith proceed to plunge the spoon in it, thus and thus—and, in fact, may the future be as soft and as sweet.
“The fuse is attached; I image it for you, in fact, with what seems to be, and in fact is, if for the moment you will allow me to translate such imagery into the actual terms of what we may call, in the analogy of cutlery implying steel, argentery, implying silver,with this spoon, and push it into the peach which so beautifully awaits me. But the peach, irrespective of this consuming and already delighted mouth, must stand for us as the bomb which the Robins and the swimmers of fresh rivers hold in their hands, and will deal with, as theDämmerungof the older generation closes round it, and the clouds brighten with the dawning of a day that is, to the licence allowed to the self-made seer, the herald of the more serene than ever was yet day.”
Lord Thorley had made an inconspicuous entry during this monologue, and, after a rather incomprehensible greeting on the part of Mr. Bellingham, who hailed him as “our dear lantern,” joined the circle. This salutation was soon explained, for with a wealth of delicate and elusive imagery, Mr. Bellingham made it moderately clear that Lord Thorley’s intellect was the light that would illuminate the future for them. “No will-of-the-wisp, my dear friend,” he handsomely concluded, “but the beam of the steadfast lighthouse on menacing and broken seas. Tell us, then, ever so lightly indicate to us, that which for the incomparable brightness of your revolving reflectors that cast pencils of imperishable light—in fact, my dear Thorley, what do you make of the future as in the hands of the rising generation?”
Lord Thorley weighed his pince-nez a moment in his open hand.
“Really, there seems an epidemic of inquiry about that matter,” said he. “Only just now Lady Grote and I were discussing it.”
“I curse myself, I pour dust on my head, for not, in fact, coming by an earlier train,” said Mr. Bellingham.
“We disagreed,” began Lord Thorley.
“And I missed the chance of observing the exquisitethrust and riposte of those incomparable gladiators. Another round, I beseech you for another round, or at least the report of the contest.”
“Well, Helen was all for our being in a melting-pot, and in her richly-mixed metaphor wondered what kind of soup would come out of it. I cannot see that we are in a melting-pot at all, or in the soup, either. Every generation, so I ventured to suggest, has always fancied it lived in critical times: memoirs prove that. But the crisis passes, and except for the memoirs subsequent generations would never imagine there had been one.”
“But, in fact,” said Bellingham, “sometimes surely, as at the end of the eighteenth century, it was not only in memoirs subsequently proved guilty of wild exaggeration that France—in short, I allude to the French Revolution.”
“I am disposed even to dispute that. The French Revolution was not really a great event: it was only the last chapter of a process that had been going on for fifty years. And, again, as we were talking of the young generation, it is important to remember that it was not the young who had their hands on the levers. I don’t think the young, with the exception perhaps of poets, ever do anything much. Ibsen, is it not, tells us in one of his practically unreadable plays that the young are knocking at the door? That is as far as they get. They knock at the door and run away like mischievous street boys. They do not, as a matter of fact, come in till they have ceased to be young.”
“Our dear lantern, in fact,” remarked Mr. Bellingham, “shows us a calm sea and children playing on the sand. But I doubt whether it is not the peacefulness of your own effulgence, my dear Thorley, that makesthe object on which it plays partake of the same serene quality.”
“You agree with Helen.”
“If I err, I err then in the most delightful company in the world. Indeed, one might prefer to stray from the high road and the direct path with so entrancing a guide, though, of course, I cannot consent to underrate the enthralling prospect of marching breast-forward, my dear Thorley, with you. You see me in a quandary. Whichever course I adopt, I must be widowed of the most amiable of companions. To your secret eyes, then, there is noDämmerungapproaching, no brightness of youth ready to pounce on us from the dimness.”
“I cannot see it,” said Lord Thorley; “the political horizon, I am bound to say, seems to me very serene. I see no fresh bogies there, they are all the well-worn properties. A European war, a revolution in Ireland—I need not enumerate the old familiar faces. And, as regards the young, I see nothing more than I have always seen. Some clever boy from Oxford writes a book that makes a nine days’ wonder. Some clever group of artists evolves a new scheme of pictorial representation, and loads the walls of our exhibitions with crude and violent diagrams of a wholly puerile nature. Some excitable young women break shop windows and commit similar outrages in order to show us how fit they are to receive the franchise. But I must confess that I am unable to see any significance in such pranks. There are always, I am glad to say, clever young men and obstreperous young women keeping the world young. In a sense, of course, the future belongs to the young, because they will be alive when we are all dead. But when that not very regrettable day occurs, they will be no longeryoung. Emphatically, in my opinion, it is the middle-aged who matter.”
“A comfortable, a well-wadded and delightful doctrine,” exclaimed Mr. Bellingham. “But yet it seems to me that as with plastic clay the young are shaping the features of the future, each in his smock with slender finger-tips bedaubed with what we may call the materials of days yet unborn. We are being picked up, we older men—this at least to me is the secret lesson of which I am but learning the alphabet, and which in a sort of impotent babble I haltingly strive to express. In fact, in my own case I feel that the young just scoop me up like the lump of clay, and set me with pressing thumb and forefinger into the great image that grows beneath their hands. A very curious observer might possibly detect in that image a tuft of my already depleted hair, and say, ‘Surely this is a remnant, a capillary adjunct sadly grey and thin, of what once was Bellingham. Now with other past modes he is but a morsel of a rib or some other less honourable and expressive a portion of the entire anatomy.’”