IXTALKFor thus hath the Lord said unto me, Go, set a watchman, let him declare what he seeth.ITtakes an unconscionable long time to extort money from the Post Office Savings Bank, and René borrowed from his employer to pay Joe’s passage and the guarantee demanded by the Canadian immigration authorities. Joe could not thank him, but only, with tears in his eyes, shake him by the hand.“You know,” he said, “I could never have gone if I’d once been in prison. That’s where they has you. If wishing could do it, you’ll have good luck. And if praying’s any good I don’t mind trying that, though I’m not much of a hand at it and out of practice.”He gave René a crumpled dirty letter to Rita, and bade him tell her that his last thought was for her, and that when she came out he would be on the quay to meet her.“I’ve told ’er in my letter it was you put a heart into me, guvnor. I’d been feeding on it that long it was nearly all eat away.”At last the train moved—(René had taken him to the station with his few possessions, smuggled outunder the very eyes of the policeman)—Joe leaped into his carriage and sang out:“So long!”“Good luck!” cried René, as he moved away through the crowd of tearful women and young men on the platform.As he was leaving the station he met Kurt, just returned from a flying visit to Thrigsby. He explained that he had been called away on business or would have been round before to pay his promised visit.“I told them at home I’d seen you. My mother turned on a face like a window-shutter—you know, the iron kind they have in Paris, and clank down in the small hours of the morning just to make sure no one shall sleep the night through. Funny old thing! I suppose she regards you as one dead. Silly thing to do, when I’d just told her you were very much alive. Linda was quite excited and started pumping up all sorts of emotions until I asked her how long it was since she had even thought of you. Then she stopped that game. She knows it isn’t any use with me. I once said to her, ‘My dear girl, if you really felt all the emotions you pretend to feel, you’d be dead in a week.’ I never could stand that sort of thing myself. She gets them out of books, you know, and really sometimes it is quite impressive, or would be, if it weren’t so disgustingly false. It is wonderful to feel things, but you can’t feel things all the time and be sane. No one can. One’s too busy. It’s beastly to make that sort of thing cheap as they do on the stageand in Linda’s mucky novels—Oh, she’s written another play, all about my mother this time. Well, after a bit she cooled down and I told her you were quite pleased with yourself, earning an humble but honest living. She wanted to know if you were alone. I said I didn’t know, but anyhow it wasn’t her affair. She agreed, and said that anything she might do wasn’t your affair either. Then she talked a great deal of nonsense about your being the New Man, with too much vitality and intellectual energy for the outworn institutions of a demoded society, and a lot more rot of that kind. The fact is, of course, that she prefers living without you and doesn’t want any fuss. The scandal had made her interesting to Thrigsby, and she can find all sorts of silly people there who want to be instructed in the art of being advanced, to think shocking things and to live without shocks of any kind. Linda’s shock is keeping quite a lot of people going. I told her I should see you again and she asked me to give you her love, and to say that she is quite happy and hopes you will go and see her play when it is acted in London by the Thrigsby Players. I say, you must have thought me a swine that day at Hendon. That was a Lord and a Lady. These people haven’t any manners, and one gets like them. I’m their particular pet just now. You should see me hobnobbing with Cabinet Ministers and theater managers. It is terrible how alike they are.”“You’ll see a bit of difference if you come to Mitcham Mews,” said René.“I’ll come to-night.”“Good.”Rita had come successfully through her ordeal, and she was in the dreaming bliss of having her baby by her side, with no other thought in her mind than the satisfaction of its contact, the blessed charge of its helpless little life, not yet, nor for a long time to come, separate from her own. Ann took René up to see her, and he gave her Joe’s letter and told her how pleased he had been to go, and how he was looking forward to her joining him. To account for his sudden disappearance they invented a tale of an offer of immediate work, conditional upon his sailing at once. The whole thing had been so sudden (they said) that there was no time for her to be told or for him to wait to see her. Did she believe them? She looked incredulously from one to the other, but, holding the letter tightly crumpled up in her hand, she decided at length that it was a good thing to believe, and sighed out her thankfulness. She had relations who would help her until Joe sent, and when she was well she would be able to work.Ann had engaged old Bessie to come in during the day, and asked René if he would mind her spending all her evenings with Rita, and sometimes sleeping with her for the first few days. He was only too glad that she had found a task which could absorb her energies. He told her Kurt was coming, and asked if he might bring him over to see her. She had seen Kurt’s photograph in the paper and was quite fluttered.“Oh, him!” she said. “Fancy you knowing him!”He did not tell her how Kurt was related to him.However, Kurt blurted it out before he had been with Ann five minutes. René looked sheepish.“Come, now, Miss Ann,” laughed Kurt, “you didn’t expect him to have no one belonging to him or to keep him hidden away from us forever and ever. Because you are fond of him you don’t expect him to be utterly lost to all his friends, do you?”“I didn’t know he had a friend like you, Mr. Brock, or I shouldn’t have dared to be fond of him—perhaps.”“Is that a tribute to my personality or to my reputation.”“Well,” said Ann, “you do brighten things up.”“One for old Solemn!” said Kurt. “I hoped you’d have cured him.”“Oh! I don’t want him to be cured. I don’t want him to be different.”René’s vanity was bristling, but in the face of their good humor he could not let it appear. He envied Kurt his ease and the skill with which he gauged Ann’s humor to strike laughter out of her, so much so that he could not mind being the subject of it. Her laughter was affectionate.They were in Rita’s room, and she lay gazing fascinated at Kurt’s brown face, with its merry eyes flashing blue light as he laughed and talked. The children had been told that the great flying man wascoming. They had been staring at him with round eyes. At last one of them said:“Did you fly here?”“Not this time, my lad.”“Oncet,” said the piping voice, “oncet we ’ad a bird-cage.”“With a bird in it?”“No. We kep’ a ball in it and marbles.”“What happened to it?”“Farver popped it. I seen an airyoplane oncet.”“Did you? Where?”“In ve Park. A little boy ’ad it.”“Right ho! We’ll send you an airyoplane like that.”The children looked at each other, scared at this promised good fortune. Then they embraced and rocked each other to and fro.René and Kurt took their leave and passed out into the mews.“Well?” said René. “A bit of difference?”“I don’t know about that. But I’m always finding that where other folk see only riches or poverty or manners or personal tricks and habits, I see only people, and they are much the same everywhere. I nearly always like them. I’m not like you. I don’t expect anything much.”“Do I?”“Always. That’s what one loves about you. You were the only person who ever expected anything of me, and you gave me confidence to expect something of myself.”“Then it’s not a bad thing?”“It’s a splendid thing in a way, only you need to be able to love a lot of people to bear up against your disappointments. I can’t do that. I find them too amusing. I’m too easily pleased with everything they do, and, of course, I never stop to think.”“But some things make you think.”“What things?”“Having no money is one of them.”“I don’t know that the poor worry much about thinking, and lack of money is chronic with them.”“Joe tried to think. The trouble was that he didn’t know how. It took him as far as the Trade Union, and left him there expecting it to do the rest. That’s the trouble all round. There has been thinking enough to make the union, but not enough to use it. The mere fact of union seems to swamp thought, even in the leaders. When they speak they are always trying to say not what they themselves think, but what they fancy the collective body of men wants them to think. The result is that events always move just a little too fast for them, and they are tied hand and foot and left to the mercy of the capitalists who can afford to wait longer to see how the cat is going to jump.”“And the capitalists?”“My friend Martin is the only one I know. But I imagine they are just the same. They expect their money to do their thinking for them. Money and crowds have just the same hypnotic effect. Do you remember on one of our tours when we were driving atnight with the big headlight showing up the road fifty yards in front of us? It was a summer night, and as we flashed past trees the birds for a moment took us for the sun and began to wake up. It was amusing, the swish of the wind we made in the trees, the sudden singing of the birds, who sank to sleep again in the darkness we left behind us. And then as we drove along a woodland road a rabbit darted out into our light, and could not get out of it. If we drove slowly he ran slowly. If we put on pace to scare him away he kept ahead of us. If we stopped he couched down with his ears back and his eyes starting out of his head, absolutely confined by the walls of darkness round our light, and, I suppose, hypnotized by his own terror. It seems to me that human thought is a light like ours, and that individual men rush into it like the rabbit and cannot get out of it. It needs only a little plunge into the darkness to be back safe and happy in your own life, but they can’t take the plunge. We were able to turn the light off the rabbit at a cross-road to let him go, but nothing can take the light of human thought off men. The analogy is rather interesting, because the light of human thought is not borne by a horrible engine, but only seems so to those who are hypnotized by their own terror, and it seems normal to be scurrying away from it and to die—morally—of exhaustion. A few men, when they come into the light, are brave enough to step out of it to discover whence it comes. They find it kindled in themselves and, tracing it to its source, they find it in the will to live, and they reach the determinationto carry it farther over the world they live in, in order to break down the walls of darkness.”“That is rather beyond me,” said Kurt. “I’m no good at ideas. If you let me keep to people I’m all right. Some people do me good; other people make me feel cramped and choked. I’m not clever enough to know why. And there are lots of nice people with whom it is quite enough if one can make them laugh. They don’t seem to matter either way.”“You see,” said René, “human thought doesn’t shine until it is energized with feeling and brought into contact with the divine power that keeps things going. That is what the scared people take for a remorseless, swift, destroying engine.”“I remember now,” said Kurt, “that Linda said you were a mystic. That was when you were an economist, and I told her it was nonsense, because no mystic could read a page of Marshall—wasn’t that your fat book?”“I don’t know whether it’s mysticism or not, but I can’t accept experience without sifting it. I suppose if I could do that I should still be in Thrigsby keeping up appearances.”“And Linda would never have written her plays. That would have been a pity.”“How absurd you are, Kurt. But you seem able to sift experience before it comes to you. You seem to be able to do the right thing at the right time.”“I never worry about it. Life seems so simple to me. Directly it looks like being complicated, I switch off and try again. The only thing that worries me isthat it looks horribly as though I should never marry. I fall in love all right and somehow that always complicates things, so then I fall out of love. I can’t love a complicated woman, and I haven’t met an uncomplicated one. They all want to feel more than they do. Play-acting, I call it.”Kilner came in then. He greeted Kurt morosely, for his clothes showed that he came from the brilliant world, the object of the painter’s particular detestation, and Kurt’s manner might easily be taken for that affability which puts you at your ease and so disconcertingly leaves you there.René produced beer and tobacco, made room for Kilner by the fireplace, and carried on the discussion:“Kurt says women want to feel more than they do.”“I don’t know about that,” replied Kilner, “but my experience is that they generally feel more than the occasion demands. They won’t leave anything to the future. I don’t think it means anything except that they are not particular. They get so precious little out of men that they grab what they can and let consequences take their chance. I don’t blame them either. They begin by taking love seriously, so seriously that they frighten men and make them run away. I keep clear of that, not because I’m frightened, but because I can’t find a woman who hasn’t been unbalanced by having had some idiot run away from her.”“That’s like Kurt,” René threw in. “I expect it is because you both have a passion for what you are doing. It gives you a standard. Now I don’t pretendto have a passion for taxi-driving, and I suppose that is why I take seriously things that you two are able to ignore.”“H’m,” growled Kilner, stretching his long legs. “Not much in that. We’re both keen on something which demands health and nerve and self-confidence, a steady hand and a clear head. We can’t afford to throw our minds and passions into the common stock. I starve. Your friend has the world at his feet. But we’re both outside the world, and have as little truck with it as possible.”“Both,” said René, “outside the hypnotic circle.” He had to explain that to Kilner, who was excited by the idea.“I never thought of that,” he said. “Yes, by Jove, it’s true. They are hypnotized, every man Jack of them, rich and poor alike. Nothing can shake it off except the individual will. Every artist has to go through that. And your light, my friend, is nothing but the vision of the artist. Only hypnotism, the absolute surrender of the will, could account for the horrible distortions that appear in what they call art, what they call morality, the organization of what they call society. I know what Fourmy means. The infernal thing is always cropping up in my work. When an artist has seen what he wants to paint, there is always the danger of his being hypnotized by it, and if he doesn’t shake free of that, he is almost bound to paint it badly, however skillful he may be. He may paint a picture that people will like, but he won’t create a work of art.”“Isn’t it possible for a man to be hypnotized by art?” asked René.“If he is, he won’t be an artist. I’ve seen students surrender their will one after the other to Raphael, Rembrandt, Manet, Cezanne, not to their love of truth and beauty, but to the masterful skill which their love gave them. If they had surrendered to their love their own wills would have been strengthened, not destroyed. That is always happening: a manner is imitated, mimicked over and over again until at last it is so vilely done, so remote from the original as to have no charm to lead even the stupidest little draughtsman to make a copy. Is it so in life? I don’t know. Much the same, perhaps. Weren’t there imitations of Byron for generations after him? Something vile the brutes could imitate. No one imitated Shelley.”“Who was he?” asked Kurt.Kilner stared at him aghast.“A poet.Thepoet.”“I suppose I ought to have known,” replied Kurt, chuckling at Kilner’s annoyance, “but you see I was brought up in a German household. There was a fellow called Schiller they used to talk about, and they named a club after him where they used to eat and drink.”“And what,” asked Kilner, “made you take to flying?”“Oh, I don’t know. I always loved engines and speed. And after all, you know, it is the only thing to do.”“Kilner thinks painting is the only thing to do,” interjected René.“I meant for me,” answered Kurt. “That may be all right for him. I hate using my brains. Things get muddled at once if I do. I love using my body so that every muscle is called into play, and I loathe illness. It’s torture to me to be just a little unwell. I get moments out of my work that make everything else seem nothing at all, just something to laugh at and be merry over.”“Something like that is my life,” said Kilner. “A few moments, only they are not enough in themselves. I have to follow them up in spirit and express them.”“And I,” said René, “am always hunting about for those moments in life and not finding them.”“Ever known one?”“No, but I’m absolutely certain they are there. I never knew what I was after until I met Kilner. I’m not certain that I know now. But I’ve escaped social hypnotism so far, and from what you tell me I seem to be less in danger of hypnotism by my own will than either of you.”“I deny that,” cried Kilner angrily. “You are denying the supremacy of the artist. Just because you have dodged a few of the conventional social obligations, you think——”“I’m not denying anything of the kind. I grant you the artist is supreme and his vision the most potent force in human thought, but the artist also must be a man and must live, or there’s an end of his vision. He must be prepared if necessary to live in thehypnotic circle, and he must be strong enough to assert his will in it.”“That’s stupid,” said Kilner. “As if any of us could escape, as if that weren’t precisely what the artist does. Your friend here is the lucky one. He is doing a new thing, exercising a new faculty which is imperfectly developed, so that it is not yet prostituted and abused, as art, science, and love have been. He is still a wonder, even to fools. I who aspire to art, you who aspire to love, are to the world nothing but idiots who have not thenousto help themselves to the plunder and comfort ready to their hands. But you and I are braver than he, for we seek greater things. He is content with physical health and adventure. That is something. It is a higher aim than money and money’s worth. But you and I are definitely pledged to accept only the happiness we know to be true, and the sorrow to which our wills can consent.”“I dunno,” said Kurt, rising, “but I daresay there’s a good deal to be said on the other side. I’m not so sure, though. I know lots of the other people, and they’ve never given me such an amusing evening. I haven’t had such a good time since I came to London, where everybody thinks of nothing but having a good time. I’ll come again. Anyhow, you’re not worrying about what other folk are thinking of you, and that’s the only thing I can’t stand. Good night.”Kilner was too excited to go to bed, and he kept René up till three o’clock in the morning talking about a picture he was painting of God creating Eve out of Adam, who was to be shown in an attitude ofsurrender, though his body gave signs of a fearful agony. Yet was it Adam’s will to submit to any torture to attain the knowledge of the almighty joy of creation.René was curious about the woman’s share in the operation, and was vaguely distressed to find that in Kilner’s intention Eve was to be no more than beautiful.“But is she to have no share in creation and the joy of it?”Kilner was pacing round the room. He waved his fists in the air.“Don’t you see? Don’t you see?” he shouted. “Don’t you see that we have created her? Even if you drop the myth and take to evolution, don’t you see that woman has been nothing but the creature, the instrument of reproduction? Don’t you see that man fell in love with her, and with his love slowly humanized her, gave her intelligence, humor, charm?”“Might it not be,” said René, “that woman was first, and evolved man to do the work so that she might reserve more energy for conception? And again, there seems no reason for imagining that either came first. The difference in sex is a great deal more superficial than is generally supposed. It must be. It is aggravated by environment and habit, training and physical processes, but it is not a fundamental difference.”Kilner said:“You may be right. You sometimes are. But for the purpose of my picture Eve must be stupidly beautiful, just beauty and nothing else. If you like I’llpaint another Adam and Eve when he has begun to love her, and through love has come to the desire of knowledge. But I’m afraid her eyes will still be stupid, and she will still think him rather a fool for desiring anything but her.”
For thus hath the Lord said unto me, Go, set a watchman, let him declare what he seeth.
ITtakes an unconscionable long time to extort money from the Post Office Savings Bank, and René borrowed from his employer to pay Joe’s passage and the guarantee demanded by the Canadian immigration authorities. Joe could not thank him, but only, with tears in his eyes, shake him by the hand.
“You know,” he said, “I could never have gone if I’d once been in prison. That’s where they has you. If wishing could do it, you’ll have good luck. And if praying’s any good I don’t mind trying that, though I’m not much of a hand at it and out of practice.”
He gave René a crumpled dirty letter to Rita, and bade him tell her that his last thought was for her, and that when she came out he would be on the quay to meet her.
“I’ve told ’er in my letter it was you put a heart into me, guvnor. I’d been feeding on it that long it was nearly all eat away.”
At last the train moved—(René had taken him to the station with his few possessions, smuggled outunder the very eyes of the policeman)—Joe leaped into his carriage and sang out:
“So long!”
“Good luck!” cried René, as he moved away through the crowd of tearful women and young men on the platform.
As he was leaving the station he met Kurt, just returned from a flying visit to Thrigsby. He explained that he had been called away on business or would have been round before to pay his promised visit.
“I told them at home I’d seen you. My mother turned on a face like a window-shutter—you know, the iron kind they have in Paris, and clank down in the small hours of the morning just to make sure no one shall sleep the night through. Funny old thing! I suppose she regards you as one dead. Silly thing to do, when I’d just told her you were very much alive. Linda was quite excited and started pumping up all sorts of emotions until I asked her how long it was since she had even thought of you. Then she stopped that game. She knows it isn’t any use with me. I once said to her, ‘My dear girl, if you really felt all the emotions you pretend to feel, you’d be dead in a week.’ I never could stand that sort of thing myself. She gets them out of books, you know, and really sometimes it is quite impressive, or would be, if it weren’t so disgustingly false. It is wonderful to feel things, but you can’t feel things all the time and be sane. No one can. One’s too busy. It’s beastly to make that sort of thing cheap as they do on the stageand in Linda’s mucky novels—Oh, she’s written another play, all about my mother this time. Well, after a bit she cooled down and I told her you were quite pleased with yourself, earning an humble but honest living. She wanted to know if you were alone. I said I didn’t know, but anyhow it wasn’t her affair. She agreed, and said that anything she might do wasn’t your affair either. Then she talked a great deal of nonsense about your being the New Man, with too much vitality and intellectual energy for the outworn institutions of a demoded society, and a lot more rot of that kind. The fact is, of course, that she prefers living without you and doesn’t want any fuss. The scandal had made her interesting to Thrigsby, and she can find all sorts of silly people there who want to be instructed in the art of being advanced, to think shocking things and to live without shocks of any kind. Linda’s shock is keeping quite a lot of people going. I told her I should see you again and she asked me to give you her love, and to say that she is quite happy and hopes you will go and see her play when it is acted in London by the Thrigsby Players. I say, you must have thought me a swine that day at Hendon. That was a Lord and a Lady. These people haven’t any manners, and one gets like them. I’m their particular pet just now. You should see me hobnobbing with Cabinet Ministers and theater managers. It is terrible how alike they are.”
“You’ll see a bit of difference if you come to Mitcham Mews,” said René.
“I’ll come to-night.”
“Good.”
Rita had come successfully through her ordeal, and she was in the dreaming bliss of having her baby by her side, with no other thought in her mind than the satisfaction of its contact, the blessed charge of its helpless little life, not yet, nor for a long time to come, separate from her own. Ann took René up to see her, and he gave her Joe’s letter and told her how pleased he had been to go, and how he was looking forward to her joining him. To account for his sudden disappearance they invented a tale of an offer of immediate work, conditional upon his sailing at once. The whole thing had been so sudden (they said) that there was no time for her to be told or for him to wait to see her. Did she believe them? She looked incredulously from one to the other, but, holding the letter tightly crumpled up in her hand, she decided at length that it was a good thing to believe, and sighed out her thankfulness. She had relations who would help her until Joe sent, and when she was well she would be able to work.
Ann had engaged old Bessie to come in during the day, and asked René if he would mind her spending all her evenings with Rita, and sometimes sleeping with her for the first few days. He was only too glad that she had found a task which could absorb her energies. He told her Kurt was coming, and asked if he might bring him over to see her. She had seen Kurt’s photograph in the paper and was quite fluttered.
“Oh, him!” she said. “Fancy you knowing him!”
He did not tell her how Kurt was related to him.
However, Kurt blurted it out before he had been with Ann five minutes. René looked sheepish.
“Come, now, Miss Ann,” laughed Kurt, “you didn’t expect him to have no one belonging to him or to keep him hidden away from us forever and ever. Because you are fond of him you don’t expect him to be utterly lost to all his friends, do you?”
“I didn’t know he had a friend like you, Mr. Brock, or I shouldn’t have dared to be fond of him—perhaps.”
“Is that a tribute to my personality or to my reputation.”
“Well,” said Ann, “you do brighten things up.”
“One for old Solemn!” said Kurt. “I hoped you’d have cured him.”
“Oh! I don’t want him to be cured. I don’t want him to be different.”
René’s vanity was bristling, but in the face of their good humor he could not let it appear. He envied Kurt his ease and the skill with which he gauged Ann’s humor to strike laughter out of her, so much so that he could not mind being the subject of it. Her laughter was affectionate.
They were in Rita’s room, and she lay gazing fascinated at Kurt’s brown face, with its merry eyes flashing blue light as he laughed and talked. The children had been told that the great flying man wascoming. They had been staring at him with round eyes. At last one of them said:
“Did you fly here?”
“Not this time, my lad.”
“Oncet,” said the piping voice, “oncet we ’ad a bird-cage.”
“With a bird in it?”
“No. We kep’ a ball in it and marbles.”
“What happened to it?”
“Farver popped it. I seen an airyoplane oncet.”
“Did you? Where?”
“In ve Park. A little boy ’ad it.”
“Right ho! We’ll send you an airyoplane like that.”
The children looked at each other, scared at this promised good fortune. Then they embraced and rocked each other to and fro.
René and Kurt took their leave and passed out into the mews.
“Well?” said René. “A bit of difference?”
“I don’t know about that. But I’m always finding that where other folk see only riches or poverty or manners or personal tricks and habits, I see only people, and they are much the same everywhere. I nearly always like them. I’m not like you. I don’t expect anything much.”
“Do I?”
“Always. That’s what one loves about you. You were the only person who ever expected anything of me, and you gave me confidence to expect something of myself.”
“Then it’s not a bad thing?”
“It’s a splendid thing in a way, only you need to be able to love a lot of people to bear up against your disappointments. I can’t do that. I find them too amusing. I’m too easily pleased with everything they do, and, of course, I never stop to think.”
“But some things make you think.”
“What things?”
“Having no money is one of them.”
“I don’t know that the poor worry much about thinking, and lack of money is chronic with them.”
“Joe tried to think. The trouble was that he didn’t know how. It took him as far as the Trade Union, and left him there expecting it to do the rest. That’s the trouble all round. There has been thinking enough to make the union, but not enough to use it. The mere fact of union seems to swamp thought, even in the leaders. When they speak they are always trying to say not what they themselves think, but what they fancy the collective body of men wants them to think. The result is that events always move just a little too fast for them, and they are tied hand and foot and left to the mercy of the capitalists who can afford to wait longer to see how the cat is going to jump.”
“And the capitalists?”
“My friend Martin is the only one I know. But I imagine they are just the same. They expect their money to do their thinking for them. Money and crowds have just the same hypnotic effect. Do you remember on one of our tours when we were driving atnight with the big headlight showing up the road fifty yards in front of us? It was a summer night, and as we flashed past trees the birds for a moment took us for the sun and began to wake up. It was amusing, the swish of the wind we made in the trees, the sudden singing of the birds, who sank to sleep again in the darkness we left behind us. And then as we drove along a woodland road a rabbit darted out into our light, and could not get out of it. If we drove slowly he ran slowly. If we put on pace to scare him away he kept ahead of us. If we stopped he couched down with his ears back and his eyes starting out of his head, absolutely confined by the walls of darkness round our light, and, I suppose, hypnotized by his own terror. It seems to me that human thought is a light like ours, and that individual men rush into it like the rabbit and cannot get out of it. It needs only a little plunge into the darkness to be back safe and happy in your own life, but they can’t take the plunge. We were able to turn the light off the rabbit at a cross-road to let him go, but nothing can take the light of human thought off men. The analogy is rather interesting, because the light of human thought is not borne by a horrible engine, but only seems so to those who are hypnotized by their own terror, and it seems normal to be scurrying away from it and to die—morally—of exhaustion. A few men, when they come into the light, are brave enough to step out of it to discover whence it comes. They find it kindled in themselves and, tracing it to its source, they find it in the will to live, and they reach the determinationto carry it farther over the world they live in, in order to break down the walls of darkness.”
“That is rather beyond me,” said Kurt. “I’m no good at ideas. If you let me keep to people I’m all right. Some people do me good; other people make me feel cramped and choked. I’m not clever enough to know why. And there are lots of nice people with whom it is quite enough if one can make them laugh. They don’t seem to matter either way.”
“You see,” said René, “human thought doesn’t shine until it is energized with feeling and brought into contact with the divine power that keeps things going. That is what the scared people take for a remorseless, swift, destroying engine.”
“I remember now,” said Kurt, “that Linda said you were a mystic. That was when you were an economist, and I told her it was nonsense, because no mystic could read a page of Marshall—wasn’t that your fat book?”
“I don’t know whether it’s mysticism or not, but I can’t accept experience without sifting it. I suppose if I could do that I should still be in Thrigsby keeping up appearances.”
“And Linda would never have written her plays. That would have been a pity.”
“How absurd you are, Kurt. But you seem able to sift experience before it comes to you. You seem to be able to do the right thing at the right time.”
“I never worry about it. Life seems so simple to me. Directly it looks like being complicated, I switch off and try again. The only thing that worries me isthat it looks horribly as though I should never marry. I fall in love all right and somehow that always complicates things, so then I fall out of love. I can’t love a complicated woman, and I haven’t met an uncomplicated one. They all want to feel more than they do. Play-acting, I call it.”
Kilner came in then. He greeted Kurt morosely, for his clothes showed that he came from the brilliant world, the object of the painter’s particular detestation, and Kurt’s manner might easily be taken for that affability which puts you at your ease and so disconcertingly leaves you there.
René produced beer and tobacco, made room for Kilner by the fireplace, and carried on the discussion:
“Kurt says women want to feel more than they do.”
“I don’t know about that,” replied Kilner, “but my experience is that they generally feel more than the occasion demands. They won’t leave anything to the future. I don’t think it means anything except that they are not particular. They get so precious little out of men that they grab what they can and let consequences take their chance. I don’t blame them either. They begin by taking love seriously, so seriously that they frighten men and make them run away. I keep clear of that, not because I’m frightened, but because I can’t find a woman who hasn’t been unbalanced by having had some idiot run away from her.”
“That’s like Kurt,” René threw in. “I expect it is because you both have a passion for what you are doing. It gives you a standard. Now I don’t pretendto have a passion for taxi-driving, and I suppose that is why I take seriously things that you two are able to ignore.”
“H’m,” growled Kilner, stretching his long legs. “Not much in that. We’re both keen on something which demands health and nerve and self-confidence, a steady hand and a clear head. We can’t afford to throw our minds and passions into the common stock. I starve. Your friend has the world at his feet. But we’re both outside the world, and have as little truck with it as possible.”
“Both,” said René, “outside the hypnotic circle.” He had to explain that to Kilner, who was excited by the idea.
“I never thought of that,” he said. “Yes, by Jove, it’s true. They are hypnotized, every man Jack of them, rich and poor alike. Nothing can shake it off except the individual will. Every artist has to go through that. And your light, my friend, is nothing but the vision of the artist. Only hypnotism, the absolute surrender of the will, could account for the horrible distortions that appear in what they call art, what they call morality, the organization of what they call society. I know what Fourmy means. The infernal thing is always cropping up in my work. When an artist has seen what he wants to paint, there is always the danger of his being hypnotized by it, and if he doesn’t shake free of that, he is almost bound to paint it badly, however skillful he may be. He may paint a picture that people will like, but he won’t create a work of art.”
“Isn’t it possible for a man to be hypnotized by art?” asked René.
“If he is, he won’t be an artist. I’ve seen students surrender their will one after the other to Raphael, Rembrandt, Manet, Cezanne, not to their love of truth and beauty, but to the masterful skill which their love gave them. If they had surrendered to their love their own wills would have been strengthened, not destroyed. That is always happening: a manner is imitated, mimicked over and over again until at last it is so vilely done, so remote from the original as to have no charm to lead even the stupidest little draughtsman to make a copy. Is it so in life? I don’t know. Much the same, perhaps. Weren’t there imitations of Byron for generations after him? Something vile the brutes could imitate. No one imitated Shelley.”
“Who was he?” asked Kurt.
Kilner stared at him aghast.
“A poet.Thepoet.”
“I suppose I ought to have known,” replied Kurt, chuckling at Kilner’s annoyance, “but you see I was brought up in a German household. There was a fellow called Schiller they used to talk about, and they named a club after him where they used to eat and drink.”
“And what,” asked Kilner, “made you take to flying?”
“Oh, I don’t know. I always loved engines and speed. And after all, you know, it is the only thing to do.”
“Kilner thinks painting is the only thing to do,” interjected René.
“I meant for me,” answered Kurt. “That may be all right for him. I hate using my brains. Things get muddled at once if I do. I love using my body so that every muscle is called into play, and I loathe illness. It’s torture to me to be just a little unwell. I get moments out of my work that make everything else seem nothing at all, just something to laugh at and be merry over.”
“Something like that is my life,” said Kilner. “A few moments, only they are not enough in themselves. I have to follow them up in spirit and express them.”
“And I,” said René, “am always hunting about for those moments in life and not finding them.”
“Ever known one?”
“No, but I’m absolutely certain they are there. I never knew what I was after until I met Kilner. I’m not certain that I know now. But I’ve escaped social hypnotism so far, and from what you tell me I seem to be less in danger of hypnotism by my own will than either of you.”
“I deny that,” cried Kilner angrily. “You are denying the supremacy of the artist. Just because you have dodged a few of the conventional social obligations, you think——”
“I’m not denying anything of the kind. I grant you the artist is supreme and his vision the most potent force in human thought, but the artist also must be a man and must live, or there’s an end of his vision. He must be prepared if necessary to live in thehypnotic circle, and he must be strong enough to assert his will in it.”
“That’s stupid,” said Kilner. “As if any of us could escape, as if that weren’t precisely what the artist does. Your friend here is the lucky one. He is doing a new thing, exercising a new faculty which is imperfectly developed, so that it is not yet prostituted and abused, as art, science, and love have been. He is still a wonder, even to fools. I who aspire to art, you who aspire to love, are to the world nothing but idiots who have not thenousto help themselves to the plunder and comfort ready to their hands. But you and I are braver than he, for we seek greater things. He is content with physical health and adventure. That is something. It is a higher aim than money and money’s worth. But you and I are definitely pledged to accept only the happiness we know to be true, and the sorrow to which our wills can consent.”
“I dunno,” said Kurt, rising, “but I daresay there’s a good deal to be said on the other side. I’m not so sure, though. I know lots of the other people, and they’ve never given me such an amusing evening. I haven’t had such a good time since I came to London, where everybody thinks of nothing but having a good time. I’ll come again. Anyhow, you’re not worrying about what other folk are thinking of you, and that’s the only thing I can’t stand. Good night.”
Kilner was too excited to go to bed, and he kept René up till three o’clock in the morning talking about a picture he was painting of God creating Eve out of Adam, who was to be shown in an attitude ofsurrender, though his body gave signs of a fearful agony. Yet was it Adam’s will to submit to any torture to attain the knowledge of the almighty joy of creation.
René was curious about the woman’s share in the operation, and was vaguely distressed to find that in Kilner’s intention Eve was to be no more than beautiful.
“But is she to have no share in creation and the joy of it?”
Kilner was pacing round the room. He waved his fists in the air.
“Don’t you see? Don’t you see?” he shouted. “Don’t you see that we have created her? Even if you drop the myth and take to evolution, don’t you see that woman has been nothing but the creature, the instrument of reproduction? Don’t you see that man fell in love with her, and with his love slowly humanized her, gave her intelligence, humor, charm?”
“Might it not be,” said René, “that woman was first, and evolved man to do the work so that she might reserve more energy for conception? And again, there seems no reason for imagining that either came first. The difference in sex is a great deal more superficial than is generally supposed. It must be. It is aggravated by environment and habit, training and physical processes, but it is not a fundamental difference.”
Kilner said:
“You may be right. You sometimes are. But for the purpose of my picture Eve must be stupidly beautiful, just beauty and nothing else. If you like I’llpaint another Adam and Eve when he has begun to love her, and through love has come to the desire of knowledge. But I’m afraid her eyes will still be stupid, and she will still think him rather a fool for desiring anything but her.”