SIGNING his name on the last of the cheques and letters which Miss Butters had laid before him, Gilbert said:
“Tell one of the boys to go out and get me a Sun, will you?”
She blotted his signature and gathered the papers together.
“Mr. Nick just went for one, Mr. Massey.”
“Oh, all right. That’s the lot, I think, Miss Butters; don’t forget to register this.”
He yawned, took off his glasses, and looked at his watch. It was ten to five; he was finished for the day, and he could not remember a day when it had been harder to concentrate. They had all spent the week-end up the mountains, making arrangements for painting and minor alterations to the cottage, but the news which had come over the radio at midday yesterday had driven every other thought from Gilbert’s mind. He had left Phyllis gaping confusedly, at a loss for the correct reaction, and gone out into the cloudy midwinter day alone. He had walked for miles. He had a dim recollection now of the stony path he had followed over a high, windy tableland, of the huge valleys far below him, blue-grey, deepening to a cold purple towards late afternoon; of an eagle swooping, soaring, floating above him; of a creek where he had stopped for an icy, moss-tasting drink; but all the time he had been struggling with a new hope and a new horror. So much effort now to be deflected from construction and turned to the insane destructiveness of war—so much achievement now to be endangered—so many people who had tasted stability and discovered a motive power for existence, and who must now go back into that lunacy of danger and suffering out of which they had struggled in twenty-five momentous years . . .
Miss Butters, he realised, was lingering; he glanced up to find her looking at him with a curious expression of anxious eagerness. She said hurriedly:
“I just wanted to ask—I mean—do you think Russia has any chance against Hitler, Mr. Massey?”
“Good Lord!” he thought. “Already!”
He had always got on well with his employees. He had brought with him to his managerial desk a certain understanding tolerance which made him personally popular. But he would have needed to be more lacking in sensitiveness than he was not to have noticed, during the last couple of years, the faint reserve, the awkwardness, the uncertain stiffness which had invaded a once cordial relationship.
He admitted that they had all been tactful—even forbearing! They had loyally tried not to see the dubious pamphlets, newspapers, magazines and books which lay about among the papers on his desk. They were conventional people, conditioned to obey the law, and conditioned also never to question it, but it was their sense of propriety, more than anything else, which was outraged by the idea of having an employer who was, if not actually Red at least definitely Pink. They accepted what they were told, and what they had been told for many years now was that there was a bogey called Communism, which dwelt in a terrible country under the sway of a ruthless dictator, its people starving, bare-footed, ignorant, denied their religion, hounded and oppressed by a sinister secret police. The bogey, they had been endlessly assured, was on the march; even here, in their own country—the pattern of democratic freedom—it was being slyly introduced by means of subversive books. Gilbert had borne them no grudge for their uneasy sidelong glances, at the time; what were they to think, after all, when they saw these very books lying on their employer’s desk?
He looked hard at Miss Butters, and she returned his look with a shade of embarrassment, blushing slightly. The young, he thought, are full of curiosities, thank God. All this time when they disapproved consciously, perhaps, unconsciously, they wondered? Throughout this long day, ploughing through his work, he had felt one question nagging at his mind: “What is going to be the effect of this?” It amused him that here, within a few hours, was one effect, trivial in itself, but perhaps full of portent as a symptom? He had noticed that his staff avoided discussing the war with him, and Nick had reported the same experience. Now he was being asked, point-blank, as one having knowledge of forbidden mysteries, for his opinion!
But he was suddenly annoyed. It had been a difficult time for people who had committed the unforgivable sin of trying to investigate. He could support that kind of unpleasantness himself with equanimity, for he had always been, by nature, solitary, but he was angry now on behalf of other people, less detached, who had suffered in being treated like lepers, ostracised, suspected, even cut dead in the street. He reached across the desk for that morning’s Herald, folded it open at the leader, and tapped it sharply with his pen. He said shortly to Miss Butters:
“Read that. Just there.”
She bent over it. “It would be foolish to entertain great hope that the Red Army will he able for long to resist the Germans.” She looked up at him unhappily. Still irritated with her, he said:
“Well, there’s one opinion; now I’ll give you mine. Russia’s very strong. If Britain and America pull with her Hitler hasn’t got an earthly chance. Take your pick.” He rose and went across to where his overcoat hung behind the door, got a packet of cigarettes out of its pocket, and added more brusquely than he had ever spoken to her before:
“See that all those letters go off to-night, Miss Butters.”
“My dear,” giggled Aunt Bee, bustling into Marty’s dining-room, “if you hear a loud pop at dinner time it will be my waistband. I can’t think why I’m getting so fat.” She bent to the sideboard mirror and arranged her curls. “It’s charming of you and Richard to have me, darling, and I love my room with its glimpse of the water. Is it just a family dinner to-night?”
“Not quite.” Marty gave the table a last look and took her aunt’s arm. “Stop admiring yourself, and we’ll go and sit down till the others arrive. I think I’m tired. There’ll be our three selves, and Gilbert and Phyllis, and a young man called Gerald Avery, and a girl called Elsa Kay. I asked Nick to come, but he couldn’t.”
“What does he do, this Mr. Avery?”
“He’s a journalist for his bread and butter, and he writes short stories and radio plays, and acts in them sometimes.”
“And the girl?”
“I really don’t know much about her. I knew her step-sister when we were children—before she was born. She published a novel a year or two ago, and she earns her living at some sort of secretarial job now. Aunt Bee, your hair looks perfect; if you fiddle with it any more you’ll spoil it.”
She dragged her aunt away from the mirror, across the hall to the drawing-room, where Richard was standing on the hearthrug with his back to the fire, reading the evening paper. Aunt Bee sank on to one end of the sofa, and sat up again abruptly, crying; “Marty, I must remember to sit straight, or goodness knows what will happen.” She accepted a glass of sherry from Richard, a cigarette from Marty, and said comfortably: “Now tell me all the news!”
Marty, sitting on the arm of a chair, racked her brain for family gossip, and offered: “Gil has let Glenwood—you know that, I suppose?”
“Oh, yes, Prue told me in a letter. And they’re going to live up the mountains. It seems very—very odd, Marty, and unnecessary—poor Gilbert driving all that distance every day.” She sipped and smiled flatteringly at Richard. “What good sherry! Not that I can tell, really. The children all say I only know the difference between champagne and lemonade by the colour. Of course, that’s an exaggeration. But I know this must be good if Richard chose it. Anyhow, Marty, whose idea was it?”
“Idea . . . ?”
“About letting Glenwood?“
Marty shrugged.
“I don’t know. Gil seems quite satisfied. And if he needs to be in town he can always stay here or at Nick’s flat.”
“Ah,” said Aunt Bee. She considered; she brightened. “That’s perfectly true, Marty, and I hope he often will, because sometimes I think Phyllis , . . Well . . . Darling, that wine-colour suits you perfectly, but you should have a lipstick to match; that one’s much too vermilion-y.”
Marty said impenitently: “It’s the only one I have. There’s the bell. Will you go, Richard—I expect it’s Gilbert.” She looked at her aunt with speculative amusement. “You’ll get on well with Gerald; soul-mates, you’ll be. I don’t know about Elsa; somehow I think she mightn’t measure up to your standard in lipsticks either. More enthusiasm than discretion.”
Aunt Bee said indignantly:
“I don’t judge people by their lipsticks! Though I do find people who don’t wear any a little—unsympathetic. Ah, Gilbert, my dear boy! No, you’ll have to bend right down, because . . . well, just because.” She peered round him at the door. “Where’s Phyllis?”
Gilbert sat beside her on the sofa and took a glass of sherry from Richard.
“She sent her apologies, Marty. She’s been helping at the canteen all day, and she had a headache. When did you arrive, Aunt Bee?”
“This afternoon. And I had a most comfortable journey down in the train, and there was such a nice woman sharing the sleeper with me, and we talked about our children and grandchildren, and really the time passed so quickly that I could hardly believe we’d arrived.” She patted her nephew’s knee. “Arc you feeling happier about the war now, Gilbert?”
“Well—in a way, I suppose.”
“You looked so worried before. When Russia came in I thought to myself: “What a comfort this will be to dear Gilbert!’ “
Flicking her ash delicately into a tray, she was happily oblivious of a flabbergasted, three-cornered glance. Gilbert blinked and replied meekly:
“That was very good of you.”
Marty said:
“I can hear Gerald and Eisa coming up the path. No, Richard, I’ll let them in; you give Aunt Bee some more sherry—I want her to sparkle to-night.”
“Aunt Bee,” Richard answered gallantly, “needs no sherry to make her sparkle.” The glance he exchanged with his wife as she went to the door made fun of his gift for blarney, his adroitness in playing up to whatever an audience or a situation demanded of him. Aunt Bee, Marty foresaw, would spend an entrancing week flirting with him, and join the legion of people who already spoke of him as “Marty’s charming husband.”
Elsa, she observed, ushering her two newly-arrived guests through the hall and into the drawing-room, was certainly not reticent with her lipstick. She looked more waif-like than ever in a long-skirted black front which emphasised her thinness almost to emaciation. Her scarlet lips and fingernails brought to the surface of Marty’s mind the words “red in tooth and claw,” and the thought, linking on to her half-formed impression of semi-starvation, made her feel a faint spasm of distaste.
Performing introductions, she reflected that it was perhaps just as well that Phyllis had a headache. She had one herself, and she knew that the conversation would demand less of her if it were not being stalled every now and then by her sister-in-law’s inept comments. Gilbert was asking Gerald Avery about his play.
“My dear chap,” Gerald said, “it’s ruined. My chief character has been sabotaged. My title’s a washout. How can I call it Subversive Mr. Avery now that I’m not subversive any longer? I’ve been double-crossed.”
“Don’t worry,” Gilbert remarked dryly, “you’re still subversive.”
“I give you my word,” Gilbert protested, “that I was bowed to this morning by the lady in the flat opposite. And my editor came to me, cap in hand, for an article on collective farming. I tell you it’s unnerving. An artist sweats blood to build up a conception of his character, and then the world takes his conception and wrings its neck.”
“I know,” Aunt Bee said sympathetically. “There was a paper the children used to bring home and leave lying about when people they didn’t like called—so that they would go away quickly, you know—and it worked so well. And the other day when they got it out for Mrs. Merivale-Hooper she borrowed it. Do we go in now, Marty dear?”
She had been right, Marty thought, when the soup was finished, in guessing that Gerald and Aunt Bee would hit it off well, and she relaxed, letting her thoughts wander to the fantastic time through which they had just passed. Citizen though she was of a sport-worshipping nation, she had always found the antics of the human mind more entertaining than the antics of the human body; but not all her forty years had afforded her such a spectacle as these six short weeks Had ever an ally been so grudgingly welcomed? Yet the ugliness of petty prejudice and mean-spirited distrust had been shot with its own sharp, sour humour. It had been almost awe-inspiring to watch how minds, floundering among false values, wriggling, dodging, evading, doubling back on their tracks, became enmeshed at last, inevitably, in obvious contradictions, and cornered by the logic of events. Can you refuse any longer to fly the flag of an ally? Oh, tormenting sight—that we should live to see the hammer and sickle flaunt against our pure blue sky! National anthem . . . ? God forbid—is our very air to be polluted? Anyhow, we have no records. But time and history press forward together so powerfully that there’s nothing to do but put a good face on it, retreating step by step—for lo! there is the flag, there is the anthem, there is the announcer saying: “M. Stalin, the Russian die—er—Premier . . .,” there is the Lord Mayor drinking vodka with a Russian captain, there are the people be-sieging the bookshops for information about The Bogey, there are subversive pictures breaking out of custody to show fine buildings, healthy children, buxom women and purposeful men. Oh, yes, it had been funny in its way . . .
She roused herself to say to Elsa:
“How has the comedy of the right-about-face to the Left struck you, Miss Kay?”
Elsa looked at the table, frowning slightly.
“I don’t think I have a very strong sense of humour,” she said dryly. “Everything that strikes me as funny seems tragic the next moment.” Marty noticed that Gilbert, sitting between Elsa and herself, gave the girl a quick look.
“Of course,” Gerald said, “it’s a literary device as old as history to mix comedy and tragedy so as to heighten the effect of both. But you have to live through a time like this to see the principle in action.”
That’s true, Marty thought. Is it funny, or is it terrible to see minds halted in mid-stride, baulking, jittering, shuffling, looking round wildly for some convention to take the place of the one that has been so rudely snatched from them? Millions of human minds, huddling like sheep waiting to be told which way to go. Looking with an anxious, ovine gaze for the Parliamentary sheep-dogs to manoeuvre them into a suitable, safe pen. And finding their erstwhile shepherds no longer brisk, purposefully snapping at their heels—but avoiding their eyes, every bit as bewildered as their docile flock! “Lacking a definite official lead from Whitehall, the Federal Ministry is temporarily confused in defining its attitude to Russia’s entry into the war.” The truth is, my fleecy friends, they don’t know which pen you’re to go into now!
“It’s becoming quite confusing,” Gerald was complaining to Aunt Bee. “Before all this happened the people who took an intelligent interest in the U.S.S.R. were quite a select little fraternity, but nowadays all sorts of people go round talking about Russia at the top of their voices.” He sighed. “You know, Gilbert, I could find it in my heart to resent these upstarts who are beginning to gate-crash our subversive seclusion.”
Gilbert could smile at foolery, but he could answer it only with seriousness. “It wasn’t a particularly enjoyable seclusion,” he said thoughtfully. “We were avoided, and whispered about. Some of us lost our jobs, and some of us got run in, and lots of us had books confiscated by the police. Ill-informed dim-witted people who never put two ideas together for themselves in their lives had the colossal impudence to accuse us of being traitors. And,” he added, after a pause, “I wouldn’t be too sure that it’s going to be very different now. Less overt, perhaps.”
’ Well,” said Gerald, amiably charitable. “Heaven forgive them for their prejudice!”
“Not at all!” snapped Marty. “Heaven smite them for their ignorance! They know nothing now in the way of essentials that they couldn’t have known for the past six or seven years at least.”
“True, true.” Gerald nodded judicially. “They just hadn’t grasped the elementary fact that the first duty of a democrat is to read banned books.”
Elsa looked at him with a faintly malicious smile.
“You make me wonder, Gerald, if snobbery isn’t the one failing we’ll never cure ourselves of. Must you re-act like an aristocrat to the nouveau-riche?”
Gerald chuckled.
“Why not?” he enquired unrepentantly. “Don’t you think we’ve earned the little luxury of saying ‘I told you so’?”
She made an impatient movement with her shoulders. It suggested to Gilbert, watching her, that she was trying to wriggle away, as she had done on the first night he met her, from a subject which had become unwelcome to her, or in which she had lost interest. Or that she wanted to shake off the responsibility of defending a position she had taken up. Was it lack of conviction, lack of confidence, cynicism—or just inertia? She said indifferently: “Oh—perhaps.” But Marty objected.
“No, we haven’t, Gerald. No matter how small or how understandable a snobbery is, it still breeds antagonisms. It’s still the germ of a new set of ‘class distinctions.’ Nick—my younger brother, Miss Kay—is always so busy with the War of the Rich Class against the Poor Class, that he forgets there are a thousand other forms that class antagonism could take.”
“For instance . . . ?” Gerald asked.
“Oh, the manual class versus the intellectual class, or the technical class versus the artistic class, or the active class versus the contemplative class, or the gregarious class versus the solitary class . . .”
Richard interrupted:
“But why ‘versus’? There may be an intolerance, or as Miss Kay calls it, a snobbishness between those classes—but not the bitterness and hatred that spring up between the haves and the have-nots.”
Marty insisted:
“Why not—in time? Supposing we do adjust the economic structure so that there are no longer haves and have-nots. During the long period while we’re getting ourselves educated to tolerance and the idea of co-operation, what’s to prevent those minor snobberies from becoming hatreds? A crack can become a chasm. The superiority of one group over another only has to be accepted—to become a legend—and the group that’s regarded as inferior will begin to feel resentment.” Her head was aching badly now, and preoccupation with the world’s future was overwhelmed by preoccupation with a sharp pain behind her temples. She passed on the effort of conversation. “Or won’t it?”
Gilbert said in his deliberate way:
“I don’t see why it should. So long as he has a job, a home, enough to eat, and a reasonable freedom, I think the average human being is tolerant enough. He can keep his minor rivalries good-tempered. It’s when he’s cold and hungry and worried that he turns nasty—and how right he is!”
“There’s machine-snobbery,” Richard suggested. “Particularly air-machine-snobbery. I can foresee trouble there. Swooping about in the air is still new enough to cast a glamour. Can’t you imagine the emergence of a class of bird-men, quite superior to ordinary earth-bound mortals?”
Marty could not resist that; she nodded emphatically, and flinched.
“I can indeed. And there’s the physical symbolism, too. People are still so primitive about symbols. Here are these people above them; they look up . . .”
“Pilots’ uniforms,” proclaimed Aunt Bee, “are so exciting, aren’t they? A sort of adventurous polar-exploration look, they have. If I were young I’m sure I should fall madly in love with an airman.”
“You see?” Richard twinkled amusedly at his wife’s aunt. “Aunt Bee has succumbed already!”
Marty’s eyes were suddenly arrested by the sight of the water in Elsa’s glass. It was slopping about crazily as the girl drank; her hand was shaking so much that a drop ran down her chin. She replaced the glass on the table with a faint click, and lifted her napkin to her mouth. Marty, in that paralysed moment of surprise, saw that she was struggling against tears.
Gerald was saying:
“. . . as Soon as Japan starts throwing her weight about . . .”
No one else seemed to have noticed. Aunt Bee cried anxiously:
“Oh, dear, Mr. Avery, are we going to have trouble with Japan?”
“And how!” replied Gerald cheerfully.
Marty saw with relief that whatever emotion it was that had so abruptly shaken her, Elsa seemed to have subdued it, and she blessed Aunt Bee, whose voice, rather wistful now, was prattling on:
“You know, Gilbert, we went to Japan for a trip once, my husband and I. Such a lovely clean place, Richard, and the gardens so perfect, though somehow not very comfortable gardens, I thought, I mean to lounge about in and for children to romp in, but I may be wrong, of course, or perhaps it was just because my own children always had such miles and miles of country to ride about in, and it seemed a little bit—well, restricted; and very polite people they seemed, and I always did think The Mikado quite the most charming of the Gilbert and Sullivan operas, and then there’s Madame Butterfly, too, and their wonderful flower paintings, I mean you can hardly imagine that they would . . .”
For a moment, as her voice trailed off into silence, her gallant, synthetic, youthfulness became a very apparent mask, and Marty found herself looking at an old, tired and bewildered woman. This party, she thought, only just refraining from clutching her aching head, is getting difficult, and she said briskly:
“Talking of gardens, ours will simply cease to exist if we don’t get some rain soon.”
Oh, Lord, she though, crude, very crude! But Richard. . . . She caught his eye and relaxed thankfully, knowing that she could depend on him to pick up this inept changing of the subject, and invest it with conversational ease. Elsa was looking quite composed again; Richard was skilfully developing the weather-theme into a general discussion of droughts—a subject upon which Aunt Bee, as a country woman, could speak with authority, and so have her confidence happily restored. Marty sighed and left her dinner party to take care of itself for a few moments while plates were removed, and sweets arrived. She came on duty again to hear Gilbert saying to Elsa.
“I’m sorry my brother Nick couldn’t come to-night. He wanted to. meet you. He was very keen on your book.”
Elsa answered politely:
“I’d like to meet him very much.”
A stab of pain across her forehead made Marty ask herself with almost vicious uncharitableness: “Now, what does that prunes-and-prisms manner cover up?” She said:
“Be accurate, Gilbert. Nick was keen on the ‘ideology’—detestable word!—of Miss Kay’s book. He’d have been just as keen on a pamphlet expressing the same ideas.”
Elsa gave her a small, oblique smile.
“He’s that sort, is he? There are people who’ll read propaganda into anything.”
Gilbert turned his head and looked hard at her.
“Do you believe in the theory that art should be divorced from propaganda?”
“Not entirely divorced, I suppose,” she answered. “But when the propaganda content is too high the art seems to suffer.”
“I don’t think so. It may be true that the better the art the less one is conscious of the propaganda—but it’s there in all the best art, and always has been.”
“The word itself,” Richard pointed out, “has the same derivation as the word ‘propagate,’ which means an act of generation. Doesn’t that suggest that it’s peculiarly a function of the creative mind?”
“Maybe so,” Elsa said shortly, “but at present, anyhow, it seems to be the happy hunting ground of the dogmatic mind.”
“All the more reason, surely,” Gerald argued, “why the artist should get busy and claim his own again. Instead of which he often comes over all fastidious, and says he wants no part of the nasty, vulgar thing. Why, Gilbert? Sour grapes? Or dropping his bundle because it has got too heavy?”
“Something like that, I suppose.”
“If I have to be preached at,” Aunt Bee said with a hint of defiance, “I like to be preached at in a nice, interesting story.”
Gerald-cried delightedly through their laughter:
“And you’re perfectly right! You know, Gilbert, the reactions of people like Mrs. Butler are greatly to be trusted. It’s a strong, sound instinct that prefers its propaganda humanised. People don’t want to see their social trials as abstract problems, and themselves as units in a row of statistics. They want to be made to feel what things mean in terms of individual human experience. Nick should sit at Mrs. Butler’s feet and learn the elements of psychology.”
“Oh, dear!” murmured Aunt Bee, awed and flattered, “should he?”
Richard protested:
“You’re all a bit hard on Nick. He’s a very useful sort of person.”
Marty said cantankerously:
“I don’t deny his usefulness; but I don’t like the way his mind functions. It’s like a gramophone record. A very good one. Everything he has to say is good, and the way he says it is good. But there’s just the one record; turn him on with a word, and he’ll play the whole thing through for you.”
“Well,” Gilbert said mildly, “don’t we all?”
“Friend Adolf, for instance, Gerald suggested. “Jews, communists, international finance, blood and soil, herrenvolk and lebensraum. Repeat as before.”
“Oh!” cried Aunt Bee, scandalised. “How can you compare dear Nick with Hitler? I won’t have it.”
“Quite right, Aunt Bee.” Richard spoke seriously. “There’s a similarity of technique, because they’re both fanatics. But they’re pulling in opposite directions. And we do all play our own tunes, Marty—even those of us who aren’t fanatics.”
“I know,” she admitted. “I suppose what I really object to is Nick’s pose of omniscience. He hasn’t earned it. He has a brain that’s absolutely unproductive. It’s just a cold-stirage room for other people’s ideas . . .”
“Marty,” Gerald explained to Elsa, “has a passion for metaphor. Don’t mind her jumping from gramophones to cold-storage rooms
“Be quiet, Gerald,” said Marty, unabashed. “What I mean is that when Nick talks I get no impression that his mind is working on what he says. He’s just reproducing. Whereas when Richard talks, for instance—though I frequently don’t agree with what he says—I do feel that his words are coming out of a living mind and not a machine. Nick keeps his borrowed ideas in refrigeration, all stacked and fresh, and hands them out to anyone who will accept them.”
“And very useful too,” Gilbert said stoutly.
Marty scowled at him.
“Useful, useful! I concede his usefulness. I applaud it. But when he calls himself a ‘Marxist thinker’ I begin to bristle. Look here, Miss Kay, wouldn’t you agree that one’s thinking should be—to some extent at least—original thinking?”
“Original?” Elsa looked sceptical. “That’s asking a lot. Haven’t most of the good things on fundamental subjects been thought long ago?”
“Of course they have, but there’s always a new set of circum-stances that they have to be related to. And I don’t mean original in an absolute sense, anyhow—only original for oneself. I mean that it’s necessary to break one’s own intellectual trails. Never mind if you have an idea and then discover that Solomon had it when he was a boy—it’s still your own. But Nick never had an original idea in his life. He’s a born follower—like King Wen-ceslaspage, trotting along in the footsteps of his master . .”
“Every prophet has his disciples,” Gilbert said.
Marty sighed.
“I suppose so.” She added truculently: “But all the same, I dislike a conversation that’s really a series of recitations from das Kapital and the Communist Manifesto.”
Richard looked amused.
“I grant you,” he said, “that your disciple is the world’s worst conversationalist. But, after all, his job is conversion, not conversation.”
“Suppose,” Marty insisted, “that he achieves his conversion, and gets his reform—what then? All he can do is to go on playing the same old record.
“God!” murmured Gerald, “she’s back on gramophones!”
“. . . and the world goes past him, and conditions change, and the needs and capacities of people are different, and hey presto,
“I pray,” Gerald said devoutly, “that I may live to see Nick a crusted old Tory telling his son that all these new-fangled ideas will never take the place of good, solid, well-tried, old-fashioned Marxism.”
“But,” Elsa objected, “the Marxist teaching does insist on change and flexibility, doesn’t it?”
“I wasn’t talking of the theory,” Marty said. “I was talking of human minds and how they work.”
“They’ll work differently when they’ve been differently educated,” said Gilbert. His sister looked at him
“Let’s hope so. But, presumably, the physiological changes in human brain-cells will continue. They’ll still deteriorate with age. Perhaps that could be coped with by compulsory retirement from administrative jobs at—say—fifty-five?”
Aunt Bee cried enthusiastically:
“Dear Marty, that’s a wonderful idea! I’ve always thought that young people should manage the world.”
“You know, Marty,” Richard said to his wife, “Aunt Bee refutes your theories. Here she is at—well, at a good deal more than anyone would think to look at her—all agog for innovations. What we really need is Nick’s encyclopaedia knowledge and his singleness of purpose grafted on to Aunt Bee’s charmingly large-hearted nature, and all our troubles would be solved.”
Marty laughed as they rose.
“Perhaps it sounds as if I don’t like my brother, Nick,” she said lightly. “I do, but I often wish I had smacked him more when I had the chance.”
Back in the drawing-room, Gerald, declining coffee, sat down at the piano and began to strum, keeping up a stream of badinage with Aunt Bee, who held herself very straight in her chair while she ogled him, for she had dined well, and her waistband felt tighter than ever. Elsa, wandering to the window, took her coffee cup from Gilbert, and said:
“The city looks lovely from here. All cities should be seen from a height and a distance—and at night.”
“You don’t like cities—otherwise?”
“Not to live in.”
He realised that he had never considered his own feeling for his native city, so he considered it now, stirring the sugar in his cup, characteristically oblivious of any need for continuing a conversation which seemed to have lapsed quite comfortably. He had lived, he decided, not so much in this city as with it; it had seemed less an environment than a loose outer skin. He liked its easy informality the more, perhaps, because he was himself by nature stiffinsh. Bullock-teams, not surveyors, had determined its first streets, and the bright, intrusive fingers of the harbour had always shaped its plan. It and its inhabitants had built their characters together in a happy-go-lucky harmony. Its vitality and theirs were of the same kind—a vitality not necessarily expressed in movement or in “progress”; a vitality of existence rather than of performance, falling, sometimes, under the hot sunlight, into an idle trance which had something of sluggishness, but nothing of debility. Yet the people, too, he reflected, were capable of that cold violence which possessed the city when a bleak wind roared through the funnels of its narrow streets, and the harbour whipped itself to a fury of white-crested waves.
He admitted with regret that it was a city rescued from man by the sea. Buildings crowded over its low hillsides to the water’s edge. The unscrupulous greed of “development” had indeed been curbed here and there by a sad flash of that intermittent homage which man pays to beauty; a few bays and promontories had been left to the bush. But it was through no plan or virtue of its inhabitants that the city remained an adjunct of the harbour, and not the harbour of the city. Only at night, from surrounding hillsides such as this, when it looked like a sky of stars below, could they claim to have added to beauty—and then by accident. Beyond the protection of its blue water, defenceless, the city became any city. Coming into it by train you left the bush behind, and then the paddocks, and then the stray vacant allotments; and with the multiplication of the railway tracks it closed about you in a whirl of black smuts and hot, tarry smells. The terrible backyards of the slums streaked past, and the human individual became lost in the city-concept of mass humanity which he had created, living and dying within crumbling walls, behind dingy curtains in labyrinthine lanes . . .
And in rat-infested Burt Street terraces . . .
He said abruptly:
“Come up to the top of the steps at the back of the house, Miss Kay. The view’s really good from there at night.”
She put her coffee cup down and went with him through the verandah door, across the gravel path, across Marty’s lawn, now languishing in the drought, and up the steps cut out of the rock wall to the back gate. From there, looking over the roof-top, they could see most of the city and a great deal of the harbour, but when Gilbert spoke it was not of the view.
“I’ve been thinking of that ‘creative paralysis’ you mentioned. Perhaps ‘productive paralysis’ would be a better term?”
“Doesn’t it come to the same thing?” she asked flatly.
“If it continued, of course, it would. But why should we assume it’s going to continue just because we’re going through a barren patch ourselves? What’s the matter?”
She had moved sharply, and drawn a quick breath. She thought that it was like this slow, serious, middle-aged man to utter so clumsily a phrase that flicked her like a whip. The incessant torment of her own ‘barren patch’ had almost betrayed her into making a fool of herself at dinner when they began talking about airmen; she had felt an almost murderous exasperation with them all—these well-provided-for people with their comfortable relation-ships, their strongly established private lives, their easy theorising. And yet she had wanted to meet this family—wanted it almost morbidly because they were part of a life which, though only a story on her mother’s lips, had been more real to her than her own. And having met them she did not want to let them go; it was as if by entwining them with her own life she could borrow some of their psychological stability. Now that Bill. . . .
She said hurriedly:
“My cigarette burnt my finger. What were you saying?”
“I wondered if this feeling of paralysis were a result of our having been—as writers, you know—kept at. arm’s length by the community. We haven’t ever been made to feel that there’s a population demanding our products, just as it demands food or clothing. So that when life falls into chaos as it is now, there is no established bond between the public and its writers . . .”
She knew that her face had fallen into sullen lines, and her eyes into the strained stare which she sometimes surprised in the mirror when she was alone; but in the darkness it didn’t matter. She said: “There should be, by now,” and then, realising that her tone had matched the invisible expression, she added quickly, forcing more interest into her voice: “It’s not as if our writers have lived
“No more. No writer can do more than write. But when what they write has to go out into the market place and compete on equal terms with a new pair of stockings, or an evening at the cinema—well, what can you expect of a public that left school at fourteen, and whose literary taste stops short at the comic strips?”
She said unsympathetically:
“You sound like your sister. But does that explain why we sit chewing our pencils by the hour like third form children with an essay to do?”
“I think it does. Writers live on their times; they have no material except the life around them. And they live with their times in a sort of holy wedlock, for better or worse, till death do them part. So when that life doesn’t accept them fully, or recognise them as contributors, it throws the whole burden on them instead of taking half itself. Writers are only human beings; they get tired like anyone else, they get depressed . . .”
“And then they start bellyaching about creative paralysis.”
“I suppose so. But there is a psychological strain in preserving one’s own faith in something against a mass opinion that says it isn’t important.”
She was not interested in the abstract problems of collective writers. Her own private misery was so demanding that she shied away impatiently from anything which endeavoured to distract her attention from it. She said coldly:
“My cigarette’s gone out. Have you a match?”
Holding one for her, he saw its light wink back at him from the diamond on her finger, and asked abruptly:
“You’re engaged to be married?”
She stared down at the city lights in a silence which lasted for so long that he began to think, feeling irritated, that she had resented his question. He was just about to propose to return to the house when she said slowly:
“No. No, not now. My fiance is—was—in the Air Force. He went to England quite early in me war. He was one of those who—didn’t come back from Dunkirk . . .”
He saw her drop her cigarette-butt and stamp out its glowing end. She said in a dull, expressionless voice:
“It’s rather cold, isn’t it? Shall we go inside again?”
He followed hoer silently down the steps.