As he opened the front door with his latchkey, he was met by a stench of burning sugar. Phyllis called from the kitchen:
“Is that you, Gilbert?”
“Yes.” He went along the passage and stood in the doorway, looking through a pungent-smelling smoke at his wife, distractedly skimming a scummy froth from the top of a huge preserving-pan of jam. She wore an apron over a frock whose colour rather distressingly matched the mauvish-pink flush of her hot cheeks, and bedroom slippers on her feet. The sink was littered with sticky saucepans, spoons and saucers; a row of glass jars containing an opaque yellow-brown substance stood on the window-sill, and another row, empty, on sheets of newspaper on the table. Phyllis greeted him over her shoulder, pushing back wisps of hair with her forearm, her eyes harassed behind steam-dimmed spectacles.
“It won’t set properly,” she complained. “I’ve been at it all the afternoon, and again ever since dinner. The recipe must be all wrong—I put exactly the amount of water it said. That’s the first batch over there, and I don’t believe this is going to be any better.”
He looked at the mess with an irritation amounting to rage. He had been telling her for the past ten years that she need not make jam. She need not make cakes. She need not make clothes. All these things, he urged, they could afford to buy. He had so far refrained from telling her that indeed the ready-made product would be far cheaper than her continual and costly failures, but he felt the words hovering on his tongue to-night. He shut his lips over them and asked:
“Where’s Dulcie? Why don’t you get her to help you?”
“Friday,” she said tartly, “is her day out; you ought to know that by now.”
Well, perhaps he ought. He forced himself to realise that all this jam-making was part of her idea of model wifehood. He could admit quite sincerely that whatever her efforts towards making a success of their marriage had lacked in imagination they had been heroic in their stubborn persistence. She asked coldly:
“I suppose you had dinner in town?”
“Yes—with Nick. I told you I was going to a Writers-Guild meeting. Where are the children?”
“Pete’s in bed, of course. Long ago. The girls went to the pictures.” There was a silence while she skimmed, and then she said in a different voice—the voice of one trying to be amiable: “Did you have a good meeting?”
He made an effort to respond.
“Oh, not bad. Not very many there. I met Elsa Kay—you remember?”
She looked up from the stove with quick interest.
“Kay? You mean the daughter of that woman who used to live down at the bottom of the road when we were children? The one who ran away with the artist?”
“Yes—Jerrold Kay. We had Elsa Kay’s book in the house—you read it, didn’t you?”
“Yes.” She sounded defensive again now, as she had learned to do when she spoke to her husband of books. “I didn’t like it. I thought it was hard and sarcastic.”
“Oh, well . . .” Gilbert did not want to argue about that. “She seems a nice enough sort of girl. She had a cup of coffee with me afterwards:
Phyllis skimmed for a few moments, and then asked:
“What’s she like?”
Her husband’s brows contracted. He had spent an hour trying to find out, and now while he searched for an answer his mind was blank. He said vaguely:
“She seemed—intelligent.”
“I mean to look at.”
“Oh!” He felt inclined to quote Marty, but he knew that “predatory waif” would convey nothing to Phyllis. “I hardly know. Dark, and thin . . .” Suddenly he remembered her clearly—black eyes and hair, white face, scarlet lips and fingernails—scarf flaunting the gay colours of a mountain parrot. The word “vivid” shot into his mind, but he decided not to say it. He thought of her diamond ring, and mentioned that instead. “She was wearing an engagement ring.”
“Who’s she engaged to?” Phyllis asked.
“I don’t know—I didn’t ask her. Are you ready to wash those things yet?”
“No.” Suddenly she was snappish again. As if he could look inside her head and see her brain working, he knew that she was resenting his offer of eleventh-hour assistance. She had been working while everyone else amused themselves, and she was not going to be deprived of the dregs of her martyrdom. He turned abruptly, went up the hall to the drawing-room and switched on the light, furious with her because she had provided him with an excuse for evading so detestable a task, and furious with himself for grabbing it so promptly.
He sat down in the armchair by the fireplace and put a few sticks on the dying fire. He got out his glasses, lit his pipe, and picked up the morning paper at which he had, so far, only glanced. He had seen a Sun, so the news would be stale by now, but he wanted something to read—anything—an anchor for his drifting thoughts.
TURKS SIGN PACT WITH NAZIS. FATE OF ALLIANCE WITH BRITAIN. GERMAN PRESSURE ON RUSSIA. . . .
The sudden shrilling of the telephone bell made him realise after a few moments that he had been reading with only half his attention. This curious splitting of thought was another recent symptom which disturbed him. He found that while one part of his mind noted the significance of what he read, weighed the possibility of a German drive on the Middle East, contemplated between hope and acute dread, a Nasi clash with Russia, another part was steadily and disconcertingly looking inward at himself, Gilbert Massey, a writer not writing.
He heard Phyllis go to the ‘phone, and noticed that her voice, even when it was being agreeable as now, had acquired a high pitch, a permanent note of querulousness.
“Yes,” she was saying, “I’ll be there. No, I haven’t finished that pair yet. Oh, I’ve been making jam all the afternoon and I’m so tired I can hardly stand. No, not yet. Well, I got the fruit so cheaply, you see—a case. . . . What time does the meeting start? Oh, that’s dreadfully early! No, I can’t possibly get there before half-past. All right, I won’t forget. Good-bye.”
She padded away again down the hall. Gilbert sat still, the paper across his knees, and his absent stare became suddenly fixed.
Good God, those pictures! Now that Father’s dead we must get rid of them. He had, for a moment, a sense of hopeless, exhausted bewilderment because everything seemed suddenly inextricably en-tangled and related, and it was too much for his mind to cope with. A writer not writing. That joined up with Elsa Kay and their conversation that evening; and Elsa Kay joined up with that bright tableau in the Laughlin’s house so many years ago; and that tableau, because it had been the beginning not only of Elsa, but of himself as a writer, had an accusation in it for the writer who was not now writing, but sitting looking at the pictures he had thought about that night, and read about in a letter only a week or two ago. In this inter-relation of things, events, personalities, in this action and reaction upon himself of past and present, he found confirmation of Marty’s theory that so far as the story of any one human life was concerned you might as well make your first plunge anywhere. The past will coil up behind you like a spring, it will reach over your head to link up with the future where you will find it awaiting you. The writer’s trick of presenting a life as the steady onward march of a personality, leaving the past behind, advancing on the future, must be, then, nothing but a lazy device to make his own task easier—a recoil of his mind from the technical intricacy of recording a man’s existence as an endless present moment, moving snailwise through time, carrying the past and the future on its back.
He had lived, He thought angrily, with these damned pictures all his life! He stared up at the one over the mantelpiece which, although not the largest, held pride of place because, portraying the incident of the loaves and fishes, it included a figure of the Saviour. He looked from it with a kind of disbelief to the one on the opposite wall; a young woman in flowing white was having her hand kissed—had been having her hand kissed for at least forty-five years—by a side - whiskered gentleman in a garden where doves clustered at the foot of a sundial, and a peacock walked on a distant lawn in the shadow of crenellated walls. He had not looked at it for years, he had not thought of it since that night when, at fifteen, he had studied very different pictures on the Laughlin’s walls. This monstrosity, he thought, must have been, along with the new furniture, one of the “handsome” purchases which his father had made as a fond gesture to his missionary bride. He did not turn his head to look at the one behind him, but he could see it all the same. It had no title; it was merely a basketful of puppies. The largest, on the wall opposite the fireplace, depicting village lads and lasses dancing round a maypole, was called “The Gaiety of Youth.”
Remembering how far from gay his own youth had been, he felt suddenly bitter towards a parent who could enshrine this synthetic frolicking on walls within which his own children’s exuberance was so unmercifully subdued. He studied the last picture with cold detachment. It was a large framed photograph of s.s. Larapaita which had carried his mother on her missionary voyagings. “I suppose,” he thought, “I was a fool to go on living here. ‘Soft’ as Marty says. She was quicker to grasp the—the inevitability of Father than I was. She saw that he was at once the product and the perpetuator of an attitude.” He remembered that in one of her books she had brought that point out by holding up to simultaneous ridicule a character of whom their father was undoubtedly the prototype, and the newspaper which he read. He got up and went across to the bookshelf; wasn’t it in that caustically amusing thing she had called I’ll Tell You What? He carried the book back to his chair, hunted up the passage, and read:
“The old man Walked slowly down the path to where the ‘Daily Messengerlay, an enticing while cylinder on the gravel path. Stooping is an action which only the young can accomplish with real grace, yet Mr. Blenkinson, though he bent ponderously, managed to retain even from the back view, which his daughter commanded, a certain stateliness.
“Watching him, she was leased by the thought that a natural affinity existed between him and the paper which he was already unfolding as he walked back to the verandah. That he sealed himself with deliberation, opened his spectacle-case without hurry, shook out a clean handkerchief, polished his glasses, and gave some care to the precision with which he re-folded the pages before he began to read, seemed but an inevitable tribute from one established dignity to another.
“For this was not the kind of paper that he who runs stops dead to read. No sensational headlines lured one into a greedy gobbling of news instead of a sober, leisurely (and indeed sometimes somnolent) perusal. Between it and the Mr. Blenkinsons of the community there existed, therefore, a long, acknowledged, and well-tried regard. It was a paper which could be trusted never to shock their moral, nor disturb their political prejudices; and in return they could be relied upon to read its leading articles faithfully. ‘The Daily Messenger,’ they said devoutly, ‘is my Bible.’
“And indeed its leaders were worth reading. They brought to a high degree of perfection the art of saying nothing with great dignity and conviction. The vulgarity of vehemence found no place in them; they relied instead upon a subtle flattery of their readers by inviting them to austere reflection. ‘Mature consideration’ Was a favourite phrase, varied by ‘a careful weighing of the pros and cons’ That useful cliche about confusing liberty with license had not yet become a joke; it had many years of life still before it, in which to abash the simple-minded by suggesting that their timid groping after a broader culture and a truer democracy was merely an undisciplined grabbing for indulgences.
“Any unwise outburst from some irresponsible person against established custom was gravely rebuked. Any suggestion that all was not for the best in the best of all possible worlds was swiftly damned with the word ‘agitation.’ Any anxious advocacy of reform was treated with benign indulgence, which never failed to include a nostalgic sigh for unattainable Utopias. Anything, in short which threatened to disturb the public complacency was promptly, decently and efficiently buried beneath mountains of well-chosen words, interspersed with Latin lags to titillate the erudite and awe the unlettered . . .”
Gilbert shut the book with a sigh. He could see his father, dignified and patriarchal, spectacles on nose, reinforcing and being reinforced by the no less dignified press advocacy of the status quo. Thus community thought could be made to flow in a vicious circle, from the Blenkinsonian mind to the columns of the Blenkinsonian newspaper and back again. The strength of that barren interchange was the strength of death. It had made a sepulchre of this house. His own marriage had never generated the spiritual vitality to combat it, and yet he had lived on here, taking, in this one matter, the line of least resistance. It had seemed a small enough concession to make to his wife and his father in return for ruthlessness in other directions. But now he regretted it, thinking of his children, and feeling a hunger in himself for some sort of completeness, some fitting congruiy between the life of his mind and the environment of his body. “You drift into things,” he thought wearily. “You don’t rouse yourself to break away completely. You try to compromise, to split the good life into sections, to win in one section by submitting in another. . . .”
He reflected that writers should, perhaps, make it their especial business to stir people’s resentment over the mutilation of their little share of time. Look here, you silly saps, life is endless, but your share of it is only threescore years and ten. If you stand in a queue for two hours and then get a bad seat for the show you’re fighting-mad. But you wait a million years to get born, you let all the fun be grabbed out of your little span—and do you raise hell about that? Not you! A little comfort, a little febrile gaiety, a little dope—and your turn is over, my lads! You vanish in a nailed box through the door marked “exit,” and the million years to come write you off as a dead loss. . . .
Some sort of awareness like that was behind my rebellion and Marty’s. It was our turn, and we wanted to function. We couldn’t because our minds had been tied up. Life had been reduced by the merciless repetition of dogmatic statements to a rigid pattern which we felt must be false because we couldn’t move, stretch, breathe in it. Yet we were too ignorant to know where it was false; it looked all right, but we couldn’t find any meaning in it. . . .
And when the first World War burst on us it had the same maddening air of lunatic simplicity. Someone had murdered an Archduke. Why? Well, it was in the Balkans, where one expects such things to happen. Germany was invading Belgium. What had that got to do with the Archduke? That doesn’t matter: the point is that a great big bully of a nation is invading a gallant little neighbour, and no man of British blood can stand by and see that happen. Now can he?
Of course not—but . . . ?
Why is Germany invading Belgium?
Because Germany is a great big bully.
The dangerous, fearless logic of the young mind getting to work must be countered. Germany is a country—how can a country be a bully? Are the German people bullies? All of them? Beethoven, Goethe, Heine, the old Fraülein at Marty’s school, the kindly young man who held Nick on his shoulder once to see a procession . . . ? Is it the rulers? Is it the Kaiser? Is it . . . ?
But questions must be stopped, thought must be drowned, emotion must be degraded into emotionalism, men must be pushed back towards their primitive origin—or how can they ever fight a war? Phrases must be marshalled quickly to arouse anger and hatred. Blood and Iron! Deutschland uber alles! But we say: ‘Rule Brit . . . !’ Be quiet! A scrap of paper! Might is right! Gott strafe England!
There’s no chance for the adolescent mind. Its emotions are wide open like a flower inviting fertilization—how can it fail to reach out ardently towards a new, exciting atmosphere, born overnight? There comes a quickening in the leisurely tempo of life, a faint, new throb like drums, swelling to an intoxicating crescendo. Suddenly we knew the Belgian national anthem, and the Belgian flag. Suddenly, indeed, we knew all sorts of flags—Serbian, Russian, Japanese, Italian—the sky was bright with their fluttering, and every colour in their flaunting kaleidoscope thrust down into our silly, undefended hearts with a stab of exultation. They dazzled our physical eyes, and phrases were the flags we flew in our minds to their bemusement and confusion. The Lion’s whelps. The lads in khaki, the boys in blue. The last man and the last shilling. A World fit for heroes to live in. The War to end War . . .
Well, they overreached themselves there, the purveyors of slogans! A catastrophic phrase! A phrase which now, remembered with bitterness, drove millions into cynicism. A phrase which, once used and betrayed, could never be used again except with the irony of disillusionment; whose promise, though it were one for which the whole world cried out, could never again be believed with the same wholehearted faith . . .
And there, he thought, was the weak spot. A democracy without faith is just a machine without power. Nothing can make it function except faith in itself, in the ordinary man and woman. For once you say in your heart that they are no good—incorrigibly apathetic, sentimental, superstitious, ignorant and undisciplined—what is left to you but force? Force—and a Führer! Hadn’t he heard in a thousand scrappy conversations that ominous note of despair and capitulation? Hadn’t he seen the vast majority of his country’s seven million inhabitants moving through life in the bewitchment of a familiar routine, stepping from to-day’s problems to to-morrow’s, declining to meet those of next week half-way? They knew there was fighting going on in China—but, cripes, when wasn’t there fighting going on in China? They knew that Mussolini was dropping bombs on Abyssinian natives—but when haven’t natives got it in the neck? They disapproved in theory; this Musso, they thought vaguely, was beginning to throw his weight around too much. Look how it put ideas into other people’s heads—Hitler, for instance; but if they were on the dole they were too busy trying to keep alive to bother, and if they were in a wage job they were too busy trying to keep it, and if they were in executive positions they were too busy trying to show a profit, and if they had independent means they were too busy gardening and playing golf. So, really, no one had time to think about it except a few cranky, tiresome people who seemed to have nothing to do but stand on soap-boxes in the Domain and lay down the law about things they couldn’t possibly understand.
There was still an army of unemployed, though. Many of them were on the road, but you didn’t notice them much because the police kept them moving. Draw your dole in this town this week, but by next week you must be many miles away—or no dole. Unemployed people get talking when they settle down together, and that’s bad; they get thinking, even, and that’s worse. So they knock at your back door and ask for an hour’s work, or a bite of food, or a couple of bob, and then they drift away. . . . Well, times are hard . . .
In the papers you might see that there’s to be a call-up; if you happened to go down to the wharves to meet an incoming ship you might see a drab-looking, patient crowd of men waiting around the gates. In Hyde Park or in the Gardens or down the sunny slopes of the Domain there they were again, sitting on the grass with their hands locked around their knees, or lying asleep with a newspaper over their faces . . .
Something wrong somewhere. But a man has his own life to look after, and it’s no picnic. All the same when there’s something wrong somebody has to be blamed, so you say angrily to your mate on the job, or your friend at the Club, or your visitor in the drawing-room:
“Politicians! We ought to string them up to lamp-posts all down the street!”
And your friends say, shrugging:
“Well, we elected them!”
What’s that but a slap in the eye for Democracy? So you did elect them. You put a mark on a ballot paper because you knew you’d be fined two quid if you didn’t. And your cross helped to elect John Snooks—but what the hell did you know about John Snooks? Something wrong somewhere!
Nothing but a malaise as yet—like the first faint pangs of in-digestion that you ignore, hoping it will pass away. But a new pang is delivered to your door every morning with the paper. This Hitler—what’s he up to? We settled Germany once—have we got to do it all over again? What about the Peace Treaty? Was it too hard, as some say, or too damned gentlemanly, as others say? Can you flatten out a whole nation and keep it flat-tened—and even if you can, should you?
All the same, you can’t have nations just walking in and grabbing other nations. Look at Austria. Look at Abyssinia. Maybe they were just a bunch of savages, but all the same . . .
What was the League of Nations for? I read that Covenant of theirs once—it sounded all right. If one member nation was attacked, all the others had to go to its help. Abyssinia was a member, and so were we. The works slipped somewhere. Why?
Mind you, Germany and Italy are pretty strong, and we aren’t armed properly; we have to go carefully. But, Hell, they grow stronger with every country they grab—we have to draw the line somewhere or we’ll be next ourselves . . .
What’s this in Spain, now? This bloke Franco—what does he think he’s doing? Crushing Bolshevism? Well, the Spanish Government was elected, wasn’t it? Cripes, no, I’m not a Red—but if the Spanish people want a Red Government what do I care? Well, if it’s a civil war I suppose this non-intervention is all right. But they say Germany and Italy are all out helping Franco—where does that put us? Do we want Spain to go Fascist, too? No concern of ours? Jesus Christ, when all Europe’s Fascist we’ll have to start and be concerned all right!
Well, now, my dear chap, let’s take a look at this Fascism. Calmly and without prejudice. A man I know was in Germany last year, and he said it was impressive what Hitler had done. Perfect roads, all the country looking like a garden, marvellous service in the hotels. Concentration camps? For God’s sake, old man, you don’t want to believe all this sensational stuff they dish out. Floggings and torturings—those things went out with the Middle Ages! Do you know what it is? Those people have a leader. They know what they have to do, and they do it. We could do with some discipline and organisation like that ourselves. Look at these confounded Trade Unions running the country—look at the strikes we have—look at these ranting Reds without an “h” to bless themselves with, standing up in the Domain day after day preaching Communism! I tell you we could use a Hitler here!
What was all that, Gilbert thought, but the decay of faith, the power of democracy running down? This was the thing he hated and feared—this drifting of the human mind, anchorless, swinging helplessly to and fro to the pull of unscrupulous propaganda. This, finally, was the issue which split the world in two, split nations, split parties, split friendships and families—do you believe in human beings, or don’t you?
It was, Gilbert acknowledged, coming back reluctantly to his personal life, the issue which had finally finished his own marriage. Suddenly he was sorry for Phyllis—and for himself. Not for the querulous, muddling woman in the kitchen, not for the middle aged harassed man in the armchair, but for two young people whom he could see across a gulf of years, becoming aware of each other, stealing glances, feeling an exciting difference pervade their familiar brother-and-sister relationship. He was sorry for a slight, reserved boy who had just passed his Senior exam. with a distinction which astonished himself, and set his father boasting complacently; a boy intellectually and emotionally hungry, and snatching food where he could find it—for his brain in books, and for his emotions in the artificially overcharged atmosphere of the times. The War had meant only that for him—a subject for romantic reverie, a peg upon which to hang shy, private dreams of valor and sacrifice, life and death. And he was sorry for the anxious, inept girl, blossoming into her brief, pink-and-white, milkmaid prettiness, suffering her own confusions, hiding even from herself her own bewildering desires, abandoning herself to the spurious emotionalism of the period, doing war-work in a state of romantic exaltation, dreaming, no doubt, of a young soldier-lover for whom she would wait in patient constancy.
And there he was. Himself at nineteen, coming home for the first time, shy and gawky, in uniform; queerly disturbed by his own abrupt transformation from a schoolboy to a man upon whose shoulders rested at least some of the fate of civilisation. Seeing Phyllis-blue eyes stare, shine, and overflow; realising that being a man involved many things, including the awareness that she had just put her hair up, and that she was prettier than he had ever noticed before.
The family had rearranged itself. His father and Mrs. Miller were the old people, Marty and Nick were the children. Between stood himself and Phyllis, flung at each other by their new adult-hood, finding companionship and refuge from their uncertainties in each other’s eyes. During the uneasy year in camp he had come home on leave charged with all the impressions and emotions of a new, rough, male life, to find Phyllis always there, eagerly sym-pathetic, flatteringly attentive, pretty, slow-speaking, patient to-ward’s Marty’s unrelenting animosity, sewing on buttons for him, knitting him socks which could be treasured if not worn, and looking up at him with blue, adoring eyes. He was still shy and awkward, and she was the only girl he knew intimately; penned in her narrow circle, inhibited by her own and her mother’s pruderies, she knew no other boys. Spinning in an atmosphere of synthetic emotionalism like bits of thistledown in a gale, bemused by the patriotic legend, stupefied by martial music, intoxicated by the miracle of their own participation in stupendous events, they had mistaken the loneliness which drove them together for an abiding compatability, and the awakening clamour of their senses for love.
Out there under the blossoming apple-trees on his last leave, looking from the starlit sky to Phyllis, mysteriously ghost-like in her white frock, thinking of death, thinking of never coming home, there had been no chance for him—for either of them.
“Phyllis . . . !”
“Oh, Gilbert!”
It had been as easy as that. Once her head was against his shoulder and his arm round her, the thing was done. They were engaged; nothing else was conceivable. And a fortnight later he was on his way to France.
Yes, he was sorry for Phyllis now, in a remote, regretful way, as for something long finished and past rectifying. She had had a joyless sort of life. She had been taught to be afraid of joy, so she had sought, instead, the dreary satisfaction of conscious rectitude. She had always felt, and she still felt (out there in the kitchen among her sticky saucepans) that so long as she was, like Martha, burdened with many cares, she was being unassailably virtuous; and so she piled up her cares, believing that thereby she was piling up virtuousness. And yet, in a blundering, laborious way, she had tried to respond to the slow widening of her horizon. She had realised that many things which had been alien to their common upbringing were becoming not only permissible but desirable, and she had struggled to be what she pathetically called “broad-minded.” She had even made the supreme gesture of being “broad-minded” about religion—but it was only a gesture. It had done nothing but knock away a spiritual prop which she needed, and she had clutched instantly, in panic, for another to replace it; the procession of her various “faiths” over the last ten years had made even the children smile.
And now the world had begun to invade her home. Poor Phyllis! Her anger, her resentment, her fear! She didn’t want the world inside her home; its proper place was in the newspapers. Let it stay there; let Gilbert leave it alone, too, and attend to his business!
The clock on the mantelpiece struck eleven. Time for the news. But Gilbert did not move. Too much trouble to get up and walk across the room and switch on the wireless. He had no stomach, just now, for the rounded, platitudinous phrases, the stereotyped propaganda, the tedious quotation of unilluminating “statements.” “Mr. Churchill explained . . .” “Mr. Hughes went on to say . . .” “Mr. Menzies made it clear . . .” He had no reserves of patience at the moment to endure all that for the few meagre grains of news among the chaff of verbiage. What a world! No wonder poor Phyllis persisted in her obstinate, instinctive, foredoomed efforts to keep it at armslength!
Does she know, even now, that it has her beaten? Hasn’t she, even now, some last, desperate hope that she can still ignore it, and persuade me to ignore it, too? Doesn’t she understand yet, after all these years, that I have to follow such intelligence as I have where it leads me? Actually I believe she is less confused now that the war has begun. She has a set of reactions for war—a precedent for correct “war-behaviour.” But the few years before were outside her experience—they terrified her. Something that wasn’t war, and yet was something that even she couldn’t call peace. Yet so long as it lasted—that phoney peace, rotten and tottering as it was—how fiercely and irrationally she clung to the idea that to talk of war, even to think of it, somehow brought war closer. Primitive, that. The genie, the evil-spirit, the debbil-debbil who is invoked by the sound of his name. Just don’t think about it, don’t even glance at it over your shoulder, don’t move and hardly breathe, and it may go away—recede—vanish . . .
No use saying to her, back in 1934, that the war had already begun. “Oh—China!” That was not our business. Then, “Oh, Abyssinia . . . well . . . !” Then Spain. “But, Gilbert, that’s a civil war.” Oh, shades of half-digested history books, the red rose of Lancaster and the white rose of York, Prince Rupert of the Rhine, and take away that bauble! Then Czechoslovakia—and Munich. “But he’s trying to keep the peace, Gilbert! He’s trying! I think it’s magnificent of him!” And at last the snap-ping of patience, the torture of nervous stress, of anxiety, of ex-asperation and despair. “Oh, don’t talk rubbish, Phyl! Can’t you see? There is no peace to keep!”
She couldn’t see. “We weren’t at war,” she said angrily. “Not yet.” She looked at him with hatred—not, he knew, a personal hatred of himself, but woman’s hatred of man’s mysterious, mischievous, destructive activities. He opened Marty’s book again, remembering wryly that she, too, had had barbed words to say upon what she described as “the man-question.” She, too, had launched an indictment not easily to be refuted.
“Why all this pother, anyhow, about a ‘woman-question’ ? Women are simple creatures, with simple and rational desires. But what of the desperately urgent man-question ? What of this world almost entirely and almost uninterruptedly governed by man, and now in such a state of chaos that woman’s creative instinct—a steady light in all previous storms—is blown and shaken like a candle in the wind?
“Was there ever a man-creature who, from his first jam-stealing onward, did not rationalise his misdeeds? And now, perturbed by the dimming of the one fudamental source of light (whose failure would have passed unobserved by him had he not provided himself with complicated figures which he is pleased to call Statistics of the Birth Rate) he searches wildly for something to blame—anything to blame—so long as it is not his own criminal muddling. Women, he cries accusingly, are selfish and pleasure-loving. They prefer parties to parturition—fie upon them! And women, who have poured themselves out with misguided, sacrificial recklessness through the long centuries of his silly blundering, to keep that light alive—women who have stunted their brains, lost their alertness, narrowed their vision, and all but renounced their very humanity to make good his senseless orgies of self-destruction, are now dumb, lacking knowledge, lacking direction, knowing only (and without statistics) that the flame they have tended is going out, and the principle of life, whose devotees they are, has been too often, and loo brutally violated . . .”
He moved impatiently in his chair. Well, that was Marty, with all her slapdash vehemence. But it was also Phyllis. Not in headlong torrents of words, but only in that look of hatred. The same thought, the same deep bitterness, the same deadly accusation from two such different women. But Marty could at least see that in the fury which had possessed him over the last ten years to learn, to probe, pry, analyse and criticise, to come to grips with the man-made forces now almost uncontrollable by man, he was making an effort which was for her and all womankind. Phyllis couldn’t see that. It was “politics,” it was “economics,” it was banking and credit and industry and wages; it was trade unions and living conditions; it was imperialism and socialism and capitalism. It was just more of that dangerous, wilful man-stuff, wrapping up simple things in all the complications men delight in. There was no need for such complications. People only had to be sensible and good. “I don’t believe there’ll be another war!” she had cried. “Everyone remembers the last one too clearly. They just couldn’t be so silly!”
And that’s Phyllis. Instead of being educated like a human being she has been domesticated like a cat. Her whole life was planned to that end, and she’s no more to blame for the result than a goose destined to provide pate de foie gras is to blame for its enlarged liver. Should I blame her? Heaven forbid! Didn’t I take my hand in that training? Didn’t I, for years, accept it as natural that she would have no thoughts beyond caring for my physical comfort, and looking after the children? All the same I did try to wake her up when I began to wake myself. I did try to drag her along when I set out on this ghastly road of trying to cram a lifetime’s education into a few years. She didn’t want to come; perhaps she couldn’t come. . . . Anyhow, I left her behind . . .
He almost jumped, hearing her speak suddenly from behind him.
“Gilbert, I want to talk to you.”
She came into the room and sat down heavily on the opposite chair.
“I’ve been wondering if—now that Uncle Walter’s dead—we couldn’t live up the mountains. Permanently, I mean.”
He stared at her, and unconsciously echoed Virginia:
“Live there? How could we? I have to get into town every day, and so has Prue.”
She picked up her knitting; it was one of her favourite boasts that her fingers were never idle. She said persuasively:
“Quite a lot of people go up and clown every day. It isn’t really far, and you say you always enjoy driving. Pete was going to boarding-school anyhow at the end of this term, so it wouldn’t make any difference to him. And it really would be much cheaper living, you know.”
It was characteristic of her that she could weave her secret thoughts behind a screen of candid works without suspecting that he might do the same. Secure, because her eyes were on the stitches she was counting, he looked at her thoughtfully.
“Would you like it much better yourself?”
“Oh, yes!” Her tone was ardent. “You know how I’ve always loved the mountains. And the children, too. Of course, Pete would only be there for holidays, and an occasional week-end, but the girls would love it. Personally, I’d like Prue to give up her shop; I don’t think it’s good for her, and she’s been looking quite peaky lately—but you wouldn’t notice that. I believe it would do you good, too, Gilbert, because . . .”
She went on elaborating her case without touching on its real motive, but he was not listening any longer. He was thinking: “Good God, it’s a solution!” A little shocked at his own relief and his own dawning excitement, he forced himself to recognise the crude fact that he wanted to be rid of the tiresome company of this tiresome woman. His life with her had developed in him, by now, a fear of mental dishonesty which had become almost an obsession. Her own habitual self-deceptions so horrified him that he was kept painfully on the lookout for a similar failing in himself. Gradually, as his own habit of thought had clarified and matured, he had watched her mental and spiritual flounderings with increasing repugnance; it had seemed alarming and almost incredible that any creature endowed with the mechanism of thought should so misuse it, should be capable of so much mental dishonesty, should be so utterly astray in her own brain, so certain of her own strength and rectitude, and yet so pitiably eager to grasp any ready-made faith to supply her with the spiritual support she would not admit she needed.
Not that he could not understand her craving for support. Understand—yes. Even sympathise. But endorse—never! He had to hate this thing from which he had himself escaped by the skin of his teeth—this dependence on symbols and slogans and the faiths of other people. He had to hate it in her as he had hated and overcome it in himself. So he admitted bleakly that the less he saw of her the better he would be pleased; and if they lived in the mountains it would be easy to absent himself pretty frequently without being obviously neglectful or overtly brutal. There was Nick’s flat where he could stay overnight, and Marty would always put him up . . .
He said slowly:
“We’d have to let this place.”
Actually, he was thinking, it was a providential suggestion. It was true that living would be cheaper in the mountains; he knew, without regrets, that his business was likely to suffer—at least temporarily—from the drastic changes he contemplated, and that his plan of action for the Burt Street property would make it more a financial liability than an asset. Driving up and down from the city would hit up the garage-bill a bit, of course, but against that he could set the rent of Glenwood . . .
“I daresay,” he said, “we could try it for a year or so, if you like.”
She looked up, beaming through her spectacles. It had really been absurdly easy. She said happily;
“I’m sure it would be a good move, Gilbert. I’ve thought for a long time that you needed a change, and you’ll have such lovely air and surroundings to come home to every night. And I believe you’d write better there, too.” She became earnest. “I’ve been planning. We can fix up that glassed-in corner of the verandah as a lovely study for you. I was sitting there last time we were up and I thought that anyone would just have to be inspired by that view. I’m sure the city atmosphere must be rather stifling to the artist. Of course, you have to be there through the week, but I’m sure it will renew you to escape to the mountains every week-end. You’ll be able to look at the view while you’re writing . . .”
Suddenly he felt almost murderous. During these last unproductive years he had many times been flinchingly conscious that she looked on with disapproval at what she obviously considered his wilful and self-indulgent idleness. To her a stack of paper, a pencil and a writer equalled a book. When the book was not forthcoming, she added “inspiration” in the shape of a view, and thought: “Now there’s no excuse!” He could not bear to have her blundering in on that particular sore spot, and he found himself saying disagreeably:
“I usually look at my paper when I’m writing.”
It was, he thought furiously, the sort of cheap snub she invited. He felt ashamed of himself, and angrier than ever with her for provoking him into ill-natured sarcasm. She gave him a hurt, long-suffering glance, and bent her head again over her knitting. He picked up Marty’s book and opened it at random—a hint to her as clear as he could make it that the subject was closed, and the conversation over.