Forenoon in the office and the telephone asking for him. It was Philip. “Are you engaged for to-morrow night?”
“Well, yes, I am. I have a meeting on. Why?”
“Listen. We’re having a show—usual reunion family affair and all that. Quite a crowd. Dancing and what-not. There will be a particular old friend of yours there. You can put off your meeting, surely?”
“I don’t know,” said Will. “I really feel——”
“What about a spot of lunch to-day?”
“Well—yes.”
“I’ll be a bit rushed, for I’m in the throes—but the same place same time. Right?”
“Right.”
His meeting was the usual committee one and Will wanted to see Joe. He did not want to go to the family reunion affair—which was a collection of the Mansons’ friends, a cross section of the influential business and professional life of the city. He remembered it from of old. Tails and all the rest and pleasant enough, but he would rather be with Joe many times over. Moreover, it was obvious that this invitation was very much an afterthought. Some late-comer—obviously a woman—had blown up unexpectedly.…
And this proved to be the case. Philip was quite frank about it. “I know you don’t care for those things. But when this girl blew in, full of Paris and Communism, and asked for you, I thought you might enjoy the joke. You can guess?”
“No.”
“Felicity.”
Will laughed. “Félice,” he murmured, and his cheeks grew warm.
“Sounds French!”
“No, just Swinburne.”
“Like that, was it?”
“No, just poetry. Remarkable thing, poetry, Philip. It’s a pity you didn’t go in for poetry. Or no—it’s just as well. It would have made your technique too overpowering. And it’s pretty successful as it is.”
Philip gave his easy laugh. “Getting at anything?”
“No. Just remembering from of old. Though I did see you yesterday afternoon again, now that I think of it! It really was amusing, too. I had been walking behind the lady and thought to myself—Jove, there’s a beauty. I was wondering whether her face was equal to the rest of her, when you both met.”
“And your conclusion?”
“Oh, more so. Trust Philip for that! I thought.”
He smiled. “She is pretty good, isn’t she.” It was not a question, for on such a matter he never required an opinion. He looked pleased, all the same; a trifle too pleased, Will thought; for there is a male smile of certainty that in its suggestion of modesty almost achieves the unctuous.
“Official?” Will asked, deciding to add a flick of butter to his roll.
“No,” said Philip.
“Not that I’m curious or would wish to intrude. I suppose I’m really trying to find out if she’ll be there to-morrow night.” He smiled as if unaware he had been too direct.
“Actually, she won’t,” said Philip coolly.
“Pity,” said Will. “Not, of course,” he added, “that I could have hoped to—ah—have interfered with your eye.”
Then Philip smiled. “Would you have had a try?”
“I might, you know.”
Philip was lingeringly amused. “All the same, it’s a subject we need not mention—there. By the way, of course we’ll put you up. You’ll have to bring your things from your country residence. You have the necessary gear?”
“If the moths haven’t been at ’em.”
“Good.” And he settled time and place.
As Will walked back to the office, he knew that Philip had rather enjoyed the lunch. Dark blue suit to-day, perfectly cut, and pale blue shirt and tie, giving the cool air of the morning bath to his graceful form. Real man’s man—men liked him—and yet with those little intimacies of manner that were so friendly. Almost feminine apprehension he had of the personal relationship; could take you into his confidence and flatter you with a glance, a careless remark. And almost at the same time was reserved and cool. His very best feature was his reserve over a girl like Jenny. It was his private affair—and no one else’s. Will liked that in him. It was just one of those little interludes in his life: it would come and it would go. He would manage it perfectly—and would no more unnecessarily expose it than he would his own body.
Part of the enjoyment he got from lunch was talking to Will with a perfect equality, an extra careless friendliness, seeing him not so well dressed, not so well off, doing his unimportant job. That Will had fallen from the realm of social importance merely made it all the more interesting in a way.…
Therefore with Jenny, where the cleavage was so vast, with what perfection of “equality” the cavalier in him would act! How considerate he would be of her virgin innocence while he—well.…
One naturally helped the thought out with a shrug. And a small laugh for luck.
He managed to get Joe on the telephone.
“I’m sorry I can’t come to the meeting, and I wondered if there was anything special on.”
“No, nothing special,” Joe replied. “So it doesn’t matter.”
“All right,” said Will. Then after waiting in silence for a moment: “Doing anything in particular to-night?”
“Nothing much. There’s an outdoor meeting on. I may look round.”
“Could you meet me in town?”
“Well—I’m afraid I’ll have to go home for tea.”
“Oh, well, never mind.”
“If there is anything special——”
“No, nothing. So long!” He took the silent receiver slowly from his ear—and hung it up.
Joe must make up his mind a bit quicker than that! Something cool in Joe’s tone had hurt him. If he continued to take things like that, well—let him!
It would be pleasant, anyhow, to have the evening all to himself in the country. He really had far too few evenings there. And the quiet of the country was a thing you had to get used to in order to enjoy it properly. Breaking it up too often left you restless, not at peace. For it happened to be a true saying that “peace comes dropping slow”.
He shut off the personal mind, his work getting his whole attention. This gave news an individual value, brought it to life more in the round—as the stereoscope did. Murder those days did not have the old selling value, because of the possibility of international mass murder, but women were born individualists and details of personal passion and violence held for them still a morbid fascination.… That slick word, morbid! Were the women instinctively right—as you would expect them to be? For women were grounded in the emotions, the individual, the personal—except the few who had intellectualized themselves into a half-neuter state, who had approached apprehension of the strange mad idealisms—now called ideologies—of men. For men were the mass murderers, the gargantuan theorists, the beehive builders, the robots: to make a perfect thing, an ideal state, they were prepared to kill and be killed, they were ready to put a match to the time fuse (what else were armaments?) that would blow up the world.
This undercurrent of comment, flowing like a deep stream under his sub-editor’s craft, affected the use of his pencil. It trimmed the murder story to its essential course; it selected his headings and general display. Slowly the story itself took on a living reality. The character-types (through long use, all these murder stories consisted, for the office journalist, in varying mixtures of types) became human and the scene a real scene. It was set in the slums. As he worked, it came into focus, and the whole crime passionnel (he would risk the bourgeois dignity of the epithet) was enacted before him quite vividly. Out of the court evidence, the figures emerged and were cast back—as in the familiar trick of the movies—not to re-enact the scene but to perform the original scene itself. This scene had a familiarity that presently began vaguely to disturb him. Had he read about it before—or seen…? It was actually like something that he remembered…and then he understood. There was the prostitute, the unemployed man, the youth with the razor…he had seen them all against the given background, and the youth with the razor (though new) was the most vivid of the lot. To the journalist, and perhaps therefore to the sociologist, to the normal reader, that youth was the “vicious type”. As almost certainly he was. But the others.… The girl’s name was not Ivy.…
He made a very attractive story of it. At moments, he was actually excited, inwardly. The murderer (the “vicious type”) was quite unrepentant. “As he stood in the dock,” the reporter wrote, “his face was grey, showing no emotion.” It was the only spot where Will stuck for a little, under the urge to shove in a sentence suggesting why he had shown none.
At the thought of committing so heinous a journalistic offence (for his paper had the sound “old tradition” in such matters), he smiled. And as he paused, staring before him for a moment, the whole scene took on a subtly different aspect. It was the same scene, enacted, however, not in the past but, somehow, in the future. Involuntary understanding of “the vicious type” had brought this about doubtless; the momentary substitution (of himself for the murderer) which must be at the basis of understanding, not to mention sympathy. Yet even the grey light of the scene was a future light, and it was not exactly the same scene.… He shut off the disturbing evocation abruptly, and an eyelid flickered down in a rather ironic humour. Those theories about the fourth dimension and being able to see a thing before it happened were getting rather popular. He drew a deep breath—and accepted the personal call to the telephone.
It was Joe.
“You must have cut me off. I was going to say that after having tea at home, I could be in town before seven.”
“Oh. Righto, Joe. Sorry if I cut you off—but I did not feel I had. You merely sounded as if the matter did not interest you! Actually, though, I don’t know that there’s anything much to discuss, as you said; and I thought of pushing off home to the farm.”
“Very well,” said Joe. “That’s all right.”
But now there was a reluctant note in his voice and Will hesitated. “Unless there’s anything you want to discuss yourself?”
“No—not particularly. Never mind. I’m sorry if I appeared——”
“Oh, come and have a lemon squash. Nothing like going the whole hog!”
There was a pause for a moment. “All right,” said Joe quietly.
And now we’re for it! thought Will. He had a deep reluctance to undergo any sort of questioning, to explain himself or his actions to any one, an intolerance that was instinctive and aristocratic and he did not mind who knew it!
So he met Joe in the most agreeable humour and soon put him at his ease—though not entirely, for Joe’s sheer bulk of body and mind and purpose could not be deflected lightly. It had a quietude, too, that was impressive.
The talk drifted through the reasons for his own social engagement. He smiled as he drew for Joe’s benefit the crowd who would be there, the makers and defenders of capitalism, the real bourgeoisie.
“You’ll enjoy it?” Joe asked, nodding his thanks to the barman.
“Most certainly I shall. That’s where I belonged, and to me it is just as human and a good deal more pleasant than many another group of human beings. Wouldn’t you enjoy it?” Will added water to his whisky.
“I doubt it,” said Joe. “However, that’s merely a personal reaction. I might find it difficult to divorce from my mind what they stood for. But I realize that’s beside the point of enjoying a social evening.”
“That’s where I think you’re wrong—deeply wrong.”
“Oh?” The broad face with its pale fair skin, clear forehead with light hair brushed neatly, and steady blue eyes, suggested force both in restraint and at peace.
“You make the mistake of mistrusting the personal.”
“In what respect?”
“Oh, it’s more than in the matter of a social evening. It’s a fundamental philosophic cleavage in you, since you have inevitably not only lost touch with the personal but—almost lost belief in it.”
“I am afraid that is beyond me,” Joe said, after the short thoughtful pause that was characteristic of him.
“You merely mean that I should be less general and more particular. But that implies the personal—and there it is.”
“That means nothing—unless it means you merely want to be personal,” said Joe. “If you do—go ahead. I think I’ll be able to stand it.”
“I know you will. The more difficult point for me is will you be able to understand it?”
“That remains to be discovered, as always, in praxis.”
“Good!” said Will, enjoying the dry Marxian thrust. “Stating the case broadly, then, to begin with, so that we may get our principles—for personal application in due course—I’d say that you are obsessed with the importance of social relations to such an extent that the individual tends to become an element in those relations—a mere element rather than a free individual. In this way——”
“I must interrupt because I do not know what you mean by a free individual. No individual is free. He is a product of and is conditioned by his social relations. That is a fact—or is it not?”
“It is a fact. I admit that. We may take it for granted that we both know the accepted philosophic basis of our creed. It’s the amount of acceptance, its application, and where it may land us, I’m concerned about. I am quite well aware that I am talking like this because I am a social product. Society has given me speech, learning, the arts, even whisky, bless it! Had I been cast at birth into the wilderness I should have been a jibbering savage. I grant all that. But at the end of the day, that’s just obvious. It’s like employer and employee, where the employer says, It is I who have given you work, and you should be grateful, for if I hadn’t, where would you and your wife and children have been? Now the fact, as you and I know, is that the employee gives as much to the employer as he gets—and a bit over or there would be no profit. So, we get our stuff from society all right, but we give back as much as we get—and a bit over, or there would be no evolution. But we do that in the last analysis by individual personal contribution; by the individual freely developing, by being allowed freely to develop within himself, something that will be a personal contribution. Without that personal contribution, society, however perfectly you arrange it, will become static, and as we cannot by our very natures remain static but must either go forward or back, then society will go back.
“Granted. But the whole aim of our socialist creed is so to run society, so to eliminate its shocking miseries and tyrannies and botched economics, that the individual in the socialist society will be in a far better position to contribute the maximum that’s in him and so help society forward to a degree that’s never been seen before.”
“Granted. So we establish the validity of the personal contribution. Now this is what I want to suggest: that it is possible, by our over-concentration on the importance of social relations, on the importance of a society functioning in a certain ‘perfect’ way, it is possible that meantime, in the process, we may so forget the need for the intimate personal life and development of the individual, so relegate it to the machinelike function of achieving the perfect state, that it will tend to atrophy in itself, tend to the perpetuation accordingly and in due course of the machine-like state.”
“You can postulate any possibility. But what you say is, I think, a bit thin. Where we have to deal with such terrible realities as war and the possible destruction of humanity because of capitalist relations, your fear is, if not fantastic, at least academic. Take a great desire like peace, world peace. It is an emotion, intimate and personal to each one of us. Can you in the process of achieving the perfect state see that emotion, that emotion that is part of our socialist inspiration, possibly becoming atrophied?”
“That’s a shrewd one! But I daren’t dodge it, I suppose. So let us have a look at it. The first thing I notice is that you say peace, and then immediately, automatically, say world peace. That is, the peace—which is an absence of war. The very conception of peace in your mind has become negative. It is no longer an individual possession: it is something beyond you, it is something that belongs to that amorphous thing called society and it is placed in the future. It has ceased to be a reality, and has become, of all terrifying things, an ideal. It’s not the peace that passeth understanding. It’s not the peace that—that makes you feel—that lifts you on its wings, not that lovely exquisite moment of understanding when you know, beyond all telling, that life is good; deeper than that—that life is creation. It’s not that positive peace.”
“But in the permanent absence of war, surely that positive peace—as you call it—would have a better chance of thriving?”
“No doubt,” said Will.
“I would seem to have missed the point?”
“Which is perhaps the whole point.” Will smiled. “It would be the usual endless discussion anyhow. And probably, as you say, the point is merely a fine one.”
Joe’s face grew a trifle stern. “As you like—but you should play fair, even in discussion. Either you had a point to make or you hadn’t.”
“The point, I had hoped, was made. If that conception of positive peace is not in your mind, is not in the minds of all those striving for an absence of war in the ideal state, then I cannot see logically how it is to be in the ideal state. Individuals cannot contribute to any form of society what it is not in them to contribute. If you talk peace, but do not know positive peace in your own mind, you are talking a lie. It happens to be a historic fact that those who did know this peace and wanted to contribute it to society, were crucified by society, or made to drink poison out of a bowl, or similarly liquidated.”
“I see what you are getting at. But again I think you are being fantastic. You are shrouding the appalling facts of social life, and therefore of individual life, in a mere metaphysical argument. That takes us nowhere. It’s not talk now: it’s action we need. Looking at things sanely, with a sense of balance, surely that is clear?”
“Quite clear. Remember that I agree with all your fundamental propositions; that I have worked, after my fashion, and will go on working, for the cause. That is why it is all the more imperative that you and I see quite clearly what we are doing. Very well. All that I’m trying to say is that it is you—not me—who are shrouding the issue in metaphysics. That’s my point. I want peace, real, vivid, now, as a personal possession. You say we can’t have it now because we have to fight to have it in another form of society in the future. My realist mind sees that as a form of dangerous idealism, based on an illogicality. If I am not quick with life inside myself then the belief that I can bring life to others is a fake. It’s this life I have to find, and meantime I see us making for death. In our minds, peace talk is already thrilled through with the sensationalism of death. In our own leaders is this sensationalism of revolution and death, in our most austere and heroic men. The mood induced by the mass emotion, the mood of heroism and death. But death.”
“They die—so that we may have life more abundantly.”
“And after two thousand years—where are we? Being crucified, not individually, but in batches. Why? Because we have failed to understand that it is the individual who must have life more abundantly. You and me. Only then can he contribute of the abundance to a common stock. You cannot take whisky out of an empty bottle. All you can do is to go on imagining what the empty bottle will be like when it’s full.”
“You mean that—you mean that, to put it shortly, all our leaders have been crucified in vain? You mean that they will go on being crucified in vain? You mean that all the purpose, organization, results—all have been in vain? You mean that?”
“I mean something much more profound than that. I mean this: that it is we—you and I—who have crucified our leaders, and who will go on crucifying them. Why? Because we have abdicated life. Because we are empty bottles. Just as there is no true peace in us, so there is no true life in us. When you shift the emphasis from the individual to society, to social relations, you shift it from the vivid springing core of life to a windy, if convenient, abstraction. But, and this is the snag: it is difficult to be a real individual living from your feet up. It needs grit, and pride, and courage, and power to endure through despair; you need to be quick with beauty, and light, and love, and sex; you must see men, not as social units, but as your individual brothers, full of this magic thing called life. And that is difficult. But—it is easy to be a socialist, it is easy to cry for ideal justice and go forward as one in the ranks, shedding this difficult thing that is real life upon the imaginary back of the army. You are then like one committed to a great fate. You have the surge of the crowd emotionalism within you. This surge will carry you over the barricades superbly. But when the surge is spent and you are sitting on your backside with a sore head—you are not then Joe Wilson, the individual, the indomitable, an entity in its own eternal right under heaven—you are merely a unit who has got lost, and you scurry around until you regain the obliterating safety of the army, and then the surge of crowd emotionalism again, and once more the barricades, and—so on, until, of course, you reach your own final fatal barricade. But that army has its leaders, must have its leaders, and its leaders must be individualists. Power is sweet. The temptation is strong. And you can always make it look like a beneficent bureaucracy—to an army of units. But you could never on God’s earth make it look like a beneficent anything to an army of individualists.”
“Isn’t a lot of that pure rhetoric?”
“Ah, but such rhetoric!”
“I could put up a case to prove that the life of the unit, as you call it, may be something a little different from your conception——”
“Listen, Joe. All I am trying to say is you can’t prove life: you can only live it. And living it, it should be a thrill, a joy. If it isn’t going to be that, it doesn’t seem to me it matters a damn what it is going to be.”
“But you know there’s another side to all that. You know, for example, that if there is one thing that keeps us back from attaining socialism, it is that very individualism that you boost. To have power against the forces of destruction you must have discipline; to conquer, you must submerge your own petty so-called independence in the greater social purpose that will win real freedom for all, including you. What’s wrong with the Scot is this self-same curse of individualism, the anarchy of the individualism that creates schism, for ever and all the time. And I now see it rising in you.”
“I know you have wondered why I have been so attracted by Scottish Nationalism, and so far I have given in to your fear that it would merely cause a diversion in our fight. I am beginning to doubt your wisdom very profoundly. Look at the history of this nation before it became a herd of lost units in a southern army. When these individualists decided to have their own church, they combined all right—and my God did they put up a fight? And won too, just as long, long before they defended their national independence—they themselves, the common people—against terrific odds. But then, you see, the poorest, most miserable crofter, surprised by the enemy—think of ‘the killing times’—was not a lost unit. He faced his enemy; he fought by himself, until he died. Why? Because that poor crofter was the Scottish church. He was not merely one of the many. He was one, one in himself. The church burned in him. And he respected and trusted his brother like himself. And they combined in that way, and won. And that is the way men should combine, and in that way they must surely win, for they not only bring strength unto death, but they bring in themselves that which they seek.”
“We’ve discussed all that before.”
“Doubtless. But you’ve never answered it.”
Joe was silent. Will, looking at him, smiled slowly. Arguments did tend to go on endlessly.
“We seem to have wandered a bit,” said Joe.
“From where?”
“You said you were going to apply your findings, if any; something about my having lost faith or belief in the individual.”
Will saw he could not avoid the real issue any longer. “It seems rather absurd, doesn’t it? Particularly when we think of that night at Jamie’s; what you did—for the individual—there. I know.” He grew silent. Then he said quietly: “Not to realize how individual and personal you were is to suggest that you were slumming.”
Joe looked at him. Will met his eyes, then stared down thoughtfully at his hand on the table.
“You think—that?” said Joe.
Will shook his head. “No.”
“Well?”
“But there may be the suggestion of something in it. Otherwise I am slightly at a loss.”
“Go on.”
“It’s very difficult, Joe,” said Will, reluctantly, “because you happen to be one of the great individualists, the born leader. That being so, however, you must, in the final count, be concerned more for your great aim than for any particular individual. Jamie and Ettie.…” Will paused, and looked away. “I merely perceive that I am going to make a mess of it. An unpardonable mess. I withdraw—unconditionally—and slightly ashamed.”
“You mean that Jamie and Ettie were units to me? Not altogether, of course, but still what I did for them I really did for the cause? In the long run I should be prepared to sacrifice Jamie and Ettie and you and even myself—for the greater glory? That being so I am losing my individual response, losing this vivid personal life you talk of? That’s really your point?”
“Well?” said Will, but without any challenge.
“Perhaps there’s something in it. There would have to be something in it.”
Will’s smile twisted slowly. “Rub it in.”
“No,” said Joe quietly, “for it’s a simple issue. Had it not been for the cause, I should not have done what I had done? Possibly. What is certain is that had it not been for the cause I should not have known them at all, and so have done nothing. Though no doubt I should have been trying to make my precious little personal life vivid in some other way.”
Will’s laugh came in soft gusts through his nostrils.
“The personal now with a vengeance!” he said. “That’s me being hoist with mine own criticism. And I have nothing to offer—except sincere acknowledgments.”
“And we can’t even leave it there—because of the personal. For all this talk has been really about something much more personal.”
“Sort of camouflage about my personal conduct that night with the prostitute. I have been trying to criticize you indirectly—for your personal reaction to my behaviour. I—who profess to believe in the personal! You always could make a fool-proof case, Joe.”
“I was wrong,” said Joe. “That’s what’s troubled me. And I’m glad we’ve had this talk. I have no right to be personal. The personal is always sticky and full of misunderstanding. It destroys—what the mind builds up. I had no right——”
“Oh God, you had a right! Otherwise how are we going to march together? You had—and you must. At this point niceties are drowned. There was just this odd inconsistency, it seemed to me. You could understand not only Jamie and Mary and the policeman and the rest, but you could also understand Ivy, the prostitute. You would work for them in understanding and forgiveness. They are products of their environment. But when it came to me—I was a product of my environment. There was no excuse for me. It was not a moral judgement with you—though it was perhaps to some degree, because you, too, are a product of our puritanical background. But actually it was a judgement delivered from the point of view of the betrayal of the cause. By my conduct, I was bringing our crusade into disrepute. And that—got you.”
“Roughly, that is so. And by that judgement I still stand. I see no inconsistency.”
“Perhaps there is none. And so I may make my small point. Primarily, then, to you, we are all products of our environment. That great social fact brings out the best that’s in you. On that basis you have understanding and pity and act with kindness and personal consideration. I wish I could emphasize the greatness of that—but I don’t want to embarrass you or myself. Still, at that moment of judgement, I was primarily a product—not Will Montgomery, your friend. That is the matter from this personal point of view.”
“I admit—that is what has troubled me. But I must be honest and say that, though I might have acted differently, my judgement would not have been affected. And that’s the cardinal matter. I do not want to be personal, heaven knows. But let me be done with it. I am sufficiently class conscious to feel that when you want to mess about with prostitutes, you should stick to your own part of the town. That you were in the habit of doing that sort of thing was new to me. Still——” He paused, for feeling had begun to creep into his voice.
“It was an odd night that night,” said Will, thinking back on it. “The experience of the night before had been strong enough to keep me from sleeping. Ettie would cry now and then: I am very tired! I tried to get hold of you. I felt rather disembodied. And the whisky kept up the illusion—that queer following night when I wandered about alone. Identity with the object they call it in philosophy. And all that’s wrong with that is—the absence of life. Particularly when the object is alive itself.” He smiled reflectively and went on in the same reminiscent tone: “You see, I have never been with a professional prostitute in my life. That was the first time I ever even stood one a drink. Poor Ivy—she didn’t know what to make of me. And she was prepared to comfort me, the dear girl, out of her warm instinctive woman’s heart. All wrong, I suppose. But I felt at that moment, in some way I can never make clear, that it was natural and right. And—odder still—that I shall continue to think it was natural and right until I die. The only thing, possibly, that was wrong—though this is supposition or theory—was that I did not go home with her.” He moved his eyes and met Joe’s. Joe held the look, then dropped his head.
Will saw the small knob of flesh gather above each eyebrow. A gentleness suffused his own mind. They understood each other now better than they had ever done.