Eddy granted that. “They’ve smashed the suffrage, for the present, yes. Poor things.” He reflected for a moment on these unfortunate persons, and added, “But I do see what they mean, all the same. They smash and spoil and hurt things and people and causes, because they are stupid with anger; but they’ve got things to be angry about, after all. Oh, I admit they’re very, very stupid and inartistic, and hopelessly unaesthetic and British and unimaginative and cruel and without any humour at all—but I do see what they mean, in a way.”
“Well, don’t explain it to me, then, because I’ve heard it at first-hand far too often lately.”
Eddy went round to the rooms in Old Compton Street which he shared with Arnold Denison. Arnold had chosen Soho for residence partly because he liked it, partly to improve his knowledge of languages, and partly to study the taste of the neighbourhood in literature, as it was there that he intended, when he had more leisure, to start a bookshop. Eddy, too, liked it. (This is a superfluous observation, because anybody would.) In fact, he liked his life in general just now. He liked reviewing for the Daily Post and writing for himself (himself via the editors of various magazines who met with his productions on their circular route and pushed them on again). He liked getting review copies of books to keep; his taste was catholic and omnivorous, and boggled at nothing. With joy he perused everything, even novels which had won prizes in novel competitions, popular discursive works called “About the Place,” and books of verse (to do them justice, not even popular) called “Pipings,” and such. He wrote appreciative reviews of all of them, because he appreciated them all. It may fairly be said that he saw each as its producer saw it, which may or may not be what a reviewer should try to do, but is anyhow grateful and comforting to the reviewed. Arnold, who did not do this, in vain protested that he would lose his job soon. “No literary editor will stand such indiscriminate fulsomeness for long.... It’s a dispensation of providence that you didn’t come and read for us, as I once mistakenly wished. You would, so far as your advice carried any weight, have dragged us down into the gutter. Have you no sense of values or of decency? Can you really like these florid effusions of base minds?” He was reading through Eddy’s last review, which was of a book of verse by a lady gifted with emotional tendencies and an admiration for landscape. Arnold shook his head and laughed as he put the review down.
“The queer thing about it is that it’s not a bad review, in spite of everything you say in appreciation of the lunatic who wrote the book. That’s what I can’t understand; how you can be so intelligent and yet so idiotic. You’ve given the book exactly, in a few phrases—no one could possibly mistake its nature—and then you make several quite true, not to say brilliant remarks about it—and then you go on and say how good it is.... Well, I shall be interested to see how long they keep you on.”
“They like me,” Eddy assured him, complacently. “They think I write well. The authors like me, too. Many a heartfelt letter of thanks do I get from those whom there are few to praise and fewer still to love. As you may have noticed, they strew the breakfast table. Is it comme il faut for me to answer? I do—I mean, I did, both times—because it seemed politer, but it was perhaps a mistake, because the correspondence between me and one of them has not ceased yet, and possibly never will, since neither of us likes to end it. How involving life is!”
Meanwhile he went to the Club House by the Lea most evenings. That, too, he liked. He had a gift which Datcherd had detected in him, the gift of getting on well with all sorts of people, irrespective of their incomes, breeding, social status, intelligence, or respectability. He did not, like Arnold, rule out the unintelligent, the respectable, the commonplace; nor, like Datcherd, the orthodoxly religious; nor, as Jane did, without knowing it, the vulgar; nor, like many delightful and companionable and well-bred people, the uneducated, those whom we, comprehensively and rightly, call the poor—rightly, because, though poverty may seem the merest superficial and insignificant attribute of the completed product, it is also the original, fundamental cause of all the severing differences. Molly Bellairs thought Eddy would have made a splendid clergyman, a better one than his father, who was unlimitedly kind, but ill at ease, and talked above poor people’s heads. Eddy, with less grip of theological problems, had a surer hold of points of view, and apprehended the least witty of jokes, the least pathetic of quarrels, the least picturesque of emotions. Hence he was popular.
He found that the sort of lectures Datcherd’s clubs were used to expect were largely on subjects like the Minimum Wage, Capitalism versus Industrialism, Organised Labour, the Eight Hours Day, Poor Law Reform, the Endowment of Mothers, Co-partnership, and such; all very interesting and profitable if well treated. So Eddy wrote to Bob Traherne, the second curate at St. Gregory’s, to ask him to give one. Traherne replied that he would, if Eddy liked, give a course of six. He proceeded to do so, and as he was a good, concise, and pungent speaker, drew large audiences and was immensely popular. At the end of his lecture he sold penny tracts by Church Socialists; really sold them, in large numbers. After his third lecture, which was on the Minimum Wage, he said he would be glad to receive the names of any persons who would like to join the Church Socialist League, the most effective society he knew of for furthering these objects. He received seven forthwith, and six more after the next.
Protests reached Eddy from a disturbed secretary, a pale, red-haired young man, loyal to Datcherd’s spirit.
“It’s not what Mr. Datcherd would like, Mr. Oliver.”
Eddy said, “Why on earth shouldn’t he? He likes the men to be Socialists, doesn’t he?”
“Not that sort, he doesn’t. At least, he wouldn’t. He likes them to think for themselves, not to be tied up with the Church.”
“Well, they are thinking for themselves. He wouldn’t like them to be tied up to his beliefs either, surely. I feel sure it’s all right, Pollard. Anyhow, I can’t stop them joining the League if they want to, can I?”
“We ought to stop the Reverend Traherne that’s where it is. He’d talk the head off an elephant. He gets a hold of them, and abuses it. It isn’t right, and it isn’t fair, nor what Mr. Datcherd would like in the Club.”
“Nonsense,” said Eddy. “Mr. Datcherd would be delighted. Mr. Traherne’s a first-rate lecturer, you know; they learn more from him than they do from all the Socialist literature they get out of the library.”
Worse than this, several young men who despised church-going, quite suddenly took to it, bicycling over to the Borough to hear the Reverend Traherne preach. Datcherd had no objection to anyone going to church if from conviction, but this sort of unbalanced, unreasoning yielding to a personal influence he would certainly consider degrading and unworthy of a thinking citizen. Be a man’s convictions what they might, Datcherd held, let them be convictions, based on reason and principle, not incoherent impulses and chance emotions. It was almost certain that he would not have approved of Traherne’s influence over his clubs.
Still less, Pollard thought, would he have approved of Captain Greville’s. Captain Greville was a retired captain, who needs no description here. His mission in life was to talk about the National Service League. Eddy, who, it may be remembered, belonged among other leagues to this, met him somewhere, and requested him to come and address the club on the subject one evening. He did so. He made a very good speech, for thirty-five minutes, which is exactly the right length for this topic. (Some people err, and speak too long, on this as on many other subjects, and miss their goal in consequence.) Captain Greville said, How delightful to strengthen the national fibre and the sense of civic duty by bringing all men into relation with national ideas through personal training during youth; to strengthen the national health by sound physical development and discipline, etcetera; to bring to bear upon the most important business with which a nation can have to deal, namely, National Defence, the knowledge, the interest, and the criticism of the national mind; to safeguard the nation against war by showing that we are prepared for it, and ensure that, should war break out, peace may be speedily re-established; in short, to Organize our Man Power; further, not to be shot in time of invasion for carrying a gun unlawfully, which is a frequent incident (sensation). He said a good deal more, which need not be specified, as it is doubtless familiar to many, and would be unwelcome to others. At the end he said, “Are you Democrats? Then join the League, which advocates the only democratic system of defence. Are you Socialists?” (this was generous, because he disliked Socialists very much) “Then join the League, which aims at a reform strictly in accordance with the principles of co-operative socialism; in fact, many people base their opposition to it on the grounds that it is too socialistic. Finally (he observed), what we want is not a standing army, and not a war—God forbid—but men capable of fighting like men in defence of their wives, their children, and their homes.”
The Club apparently realised suddenly that this was what they did want, and crowded up to sign cards and receive buttons inscribed with the inspiring motto: “The Path of Duty is the Path of Safety.” In short, quite a third of the young men became adherents of the League, encouraged thereto by Eddy, and congratulated by the enthusiastic captain. They were invited to ask questions, so they did. They asked, What about employers chucking a man for good because he had to be away for his four months camp? Answer: This would not happen; force would be exerted over the employer. (Some scepticism, but a general sentiment of approval for this, as for something which would indeed be grand if it could be worked, and which might in itself be worth joining the League for, merely to score off the employer.) Further answer: The late Sir Joseph Whitworth said, “The labour of a man who has gone through a course of military drill is worth eighteen-pence a week more than that of one untrained, as through the training received in military drill men learn ready obedience, attention, and combination, all of which are so necessary in work.” Question: Would they get it? Answer: Get what? Question: The eighteen-pence. Answer: In justice they certainly should. Question: Would employers be forced to give it them? Answer: All these details are left to be worked out later in the Bill. Conclusion: The Bill would not be popular among employers. Further conclusion: Let us join it. Which they did.
Before he departed, Captain Greville said that he was very pleased with the encouraging results of the evening, and he hoped that as many as would be interested would come and see a cinematograph display he was giving in Hackney next week, called “In Time of Invasion.” From that he would venture to say they would learn something of the horrors of unprepared attack. The Club went to that. It was a splendid show, well worth threepence. It abounded in men being found unlawfully with guns and being shot like rabbits; in untrained and incompetent soldiers fleeing from the foe; abandoned mothers defending their cottage homes to the last against a brutal soldiery; corpses of children tossed on pikes to make a Prussian holiday; Boy Scouts and Girl Guides, the one saving element in the terrible display of national incompetence, performing marvellous feats of skill and heroism, and dying like flies in discharge of their duties. Afterwards there was a very different series to illustrate the Invasion as it would be had the National Service Act been passed. “The Invaders realise their Mistake,” was inscribed on the preliminary curtain. Well-trained, efficient, and courageous young men then sallied into the field, proud in the possession of fire-arms they had a right to, calm in their perfect training, temerity, and discipline, presenting an unflinching and impregnable front to the cowering foe, who retreated in broken disorder, realising their mistake (cheers). Then on the Finis curtain blazed out the grand moral of it all: “The Path of Duty is the Path of Safety. Keep your homes inviolate by learning to Defend them.” (Renewed cheers, and “God Save the King”).
A very fine show, to which, it may be added, Mr. Sidney Pollard, the Club Secretary, did not go.
It was soon after this that Captain Greville, having been much pleased—very pleased, as he said—by the Lea-side Club, presented its library with a complete set of Kipling. Kipling, since the Kipling period was some years past, was not well known by the Club; appearing among them suddenly, on the top of the Cinema, he made something of a furore. If Mr. Datcherd would get him to write poetry for Further, now, instead of Mr. Henderson and Mr. Raymond, and all the people he did get, that would be something like. Finding Kipling so popular, and yielding to a request, Eddy, who read rather well, gave some Kipling readings, which were much enjoyed by a crowded audience.
“Might as well take them to a music hall at once,” complained Mr. Pollard.
“Would they like it? I will,” returned Eddy, and did so, paying for a dozen boys at the Empire.
It must not be supposed that Eddy neglected, in the cult of a manly patriotism, the other aspects of life. On the contrary, he induced Billy Raymond, a good-natured person, to give a lecture on the Drama, and after it, took a party to the Savoy Theatre, to see Granville Barker’s Shakespeare, which bored them a good deal. Then he got Jane to give an address on drawings, and, to illustrate it, took some rather apathetic youths to see Jane’s own exhibition. Also he conducted a party to where Mr. Roger Fry was speaking on Post-Impressionism, and then, when they had thoroughly grasped it, to the gallery where it was just then being exemplified. First he told them that they could laugh at the pictures if they choose, of course, but that was an exceedingly stupid way of looking at them; so they actually did not, such was his influence over them at this time. Instead, when he pointed out to them the beauties of Matisse, they pretended to agree with him, and listened tolerant, if bored, while he had an intelligent discussion with an artist friend whom he met.
All this is to say that Eddy had his young men well in hand—better in hand than Datcherd, who was less cordial and hail-fellow-well-met with them, had ever had them. It was great fun. Influencing people in a mass always is; it feels rather like driving a large and powerful car, which is sent swerving to right or left by a small turn of the wrist. Probably actors feel like this when acting, only more so; perhaps speakers feel like this when speaking. Doing what you like with people, the most interesting and absorbing of the plastic materials ready to the hand—that is better than working with clay, paints, or words. Not that Eddy was consciously aware of what he was doing in that way; only about each fresh thing as it turned up he was desirous to make these lads that he liked feel keen and appreciative, as he felt himself; and he was delighted that they did so, showing themselves thereby so sane, sensible, and intelligent. He had found them keen enough on some important things—industrial questions, certain aspects of Socialism, the Radical Party in politics; it was for him to make them equally keen on other things, hitherto apparently rather overlooked by them. One of these things was the Church; here his success was only partial, but distinctly encouraging. Another was the good in Toryism, which they were a little blind to. To open their eyes, he had a really intelligent Conservative friend of his to address them on four successive Tuesdays on politics. He did not want in the least to change their politics—what can be better than to be a Radical?—(this was as well, because it would have been a task outside even his sphere of influence)—but certainly they should see both sides. So both sides were set before them; and the result was certainly that they looked much less intolerantly than before upon the wrong side, because Mr. Oliver, who was a first-rater, gave it his countenance, as he had to Matisse and that tedious thing at the Savoy. Matisse, Shakespeare, Tariff Reform, they all seemed silly, but there, they pleased a good chap and a pleasant friend, who could also appreciate Harry Lauder, old Victor Grayson, Kipling, and the Minimum Wage.
Such were the interests of a varied and crowded life on club nights by the Lea. Distraught by them, Mr. Sidney Pollard wrote to his master in Greece—(address, Poste-Restante, Athens, where eventually his wanderings would lead him and he would call for letters)—to say that all was going to sixes and sevens, and here was a Tariff Reformer let loose on the Club on Tuesday evenings, and a parson to rot about his fancy Socialism on Wednesdays, and another parson holding a mission service in the street last Sunday afternoon, not even about Socialism—(this was Father Dempsey)—and half the club hanging about him and asking him posers, which is always the beginning of the end, because any parson, having been bred to it, can answer posers so much more posingly than anyone can ask them; and some captain or other talking that blanked nonsense about National Service, and giving round his silly buttons as if they were chocolate drops at a school-feast, and leading them on to go to an idiot Moving Picture Show, calculated to turn them all into Jingoes of the deepest dye; and some Blue Water maniac gassing about Dreadnoughts, so that “We want eight and we won’t wait” was sung by the school-children in the streets instead of “Every nice girl loves a sailor,” which may mean, emotionally, much the same, but is politically offensive. Further, Mr. Oliver had been giving Kipling readings, and half the lads were Kipling-mad, and fought to get Barrack-room Ballads out of the library. Finally, “Mr. Oliver may mean no harm, but he is doing a lot,” said Mr. Pollard. “If he goes on here, the tone of the Club will be spoilt, he is personally popular, owing to being a friend to all in his manner and having pleasant ways, and that is the worst sort. If you are not coming home yourself soon, perhaps you will make some change by writing, and tell Mr. Oliver if you approve of above things or not. I have thought it right to let you know all, and you will act according as you think. I very much trust your health is on the mend, you are badly missed here.”
Datcherd got that letter at last, but not just yet, for he was then walking inland across the Plain of Thessaly between Volo and Tempe.
CHAPTER X.
DATCHERD’S RETURN.
ON the last day of April, Eddy procured an Irish Nationalist to address the Club on Home Rule. He was a hot-tempered person, and despised English people and said so; which was foolish in a speaker, and rather discounted his other remarks, because the Club young men preferred to be liked, even by those who made speeches to them. His cause, put no doubt over-vehemently, was on the whole approved of by the Club, Radically inclined as it in the main was; but it is a noticeable fact that this particular subject is apt to fall dead on English working-class audiences, who have, presumably, a deeply-rooted feeling that it does not seriously affect them either way. Anyhow, this Nationalist hardly evoked the sympathy he deserved in the Club. Also they were inclined to be amused at his accent, which was unmodified Wexford. Probably Eddy appreciated him and his arguments more than anyone else did.
So, when on the second day of May Eddy introduced an Orangeman to speak on the same subject from another point of view, the audience was inclined to receive him favourably. The Orangeman was young, much younger than the Nationalist, and equally Irish, though from another region, both geographically and socially. His accent, what he had of it, is best described as polite North of Ireland, and he had been at Cambridge with Eddy. Though capable of fierceness, and with an Ulster-will-fight look in the eye, the fierceness was directed rather against his disloyal compatriots than against his audience, which was more satisfactory to the audience. And whenever he liked he could make them laugh, which was more satisfactory still. From his face you might, before he spoke, guess him to be a Nationalist, so essentially and indubitably south-west Irish was the look of it. To avert so distressing an error he did speak, as a rule, quite a lot.
He spoke this evening with energy, lucidity, humour, and vehemence, and the Club listened appreciatively. Gradually he worked them up from personal approval of himself to partial approval of, or at least sympathy with, his cause. He went into the financial question with an imposing production of figures. He began several times, “The Nationalists will tell you,” and then proceeded to repeat precisely what the Nationalist the other night had told them, only to knock it down with an argument that was sometimes conclusive, often would just do, and occasionally just wouldn’t; and the Club cheered the first sort, accepted the second as ingenious, and said “Oh,” good-humouredly, to the third. Altogether it was an excellent speech, full of profound conviction, with some incontrovertible sense, and a smattering of intelligent nonsense. Not a word was dull, and not a word was unkind to the Pope of Rome or his adherents, as is usual, and perhaps essential, in such speeches when produced in Ireland, and necessitates their careful expurgating before they are delivered to English audiences, who have a tolerant, if supercilious, feeling towards that misguided Church. The young man spoke for half an hour, and held his audience. He held them even when he said, drawing to the end, “I wonder do any of you here know anything at all about Ireland and Irish politics, or do you get it all second-hand from the English Radical papers? Do you know at all what you’re talking about? Bad government, incompetent economy, partiality, prejudice, injustice, tyranny—that’s what the English Radicals want to hand us over to. And that is what they will not hand us over to, because we in Ulster, the most truly and nationally Irish part of Ireland, have signed this.” He produced from his breast-pocket the Covenant, and held it up before them, so that they all saw the Red Hand that blazed out on it. He read it through to them, and sat down. Cheers broke out, stamping of feet, clapping of hands; it was the most enthusiastic reception a speaker had ever had at the Club.
Someone began singing “Rule Britannia,” as the nearest expression that occurred to him of the patriotic and anti-disruptive sentiments that filled him, and it was taken up and shouted all over the room. It was as if the insidious influence of Kipling, the National Service League, the Invasion Pictures, the Primrose League, and the Blue Water School, which had been eating with gradual corruption into the sound heart of the Club, was breaking out at last, under the finishing poison of Orangeism, into an eruption which could only be eased by song and shout. So they sang and shouted, some from enthusiasm, some for fun, and Eddy said to his friend the speaker, “You’ve fairly fetched them this time,” and looked smiling over the jubilant crowd, from the front chairs to the back, and, at the back of all, met the eyes of Datcherd. He stood leaning against the door, unjubilant, songless, morose, his hands in his pockets, a cynical smile faintly touching his lips. At his side was Sidney Pollard, with very bright eyes in a white face, and a “There, you see for yourself” air about him.
Eddy hadn’t known Datcherd was coming down to the Club to-night, though he knew he had arrived in England, three weeks before he had planned. Seeing him, he rose to his feet and smiled, and the audience, following his eyes, turned round and saw their returned president and master. Upon that they cheered again, louder if possible than before. Datcherd’s acknowledgment was of the faintest. He stood there for a moment longer, then turned and left the room.
The meeting ended, after the usual courtesies and votes of thanks, and Eddy took his friend away.
“You must come and be introduced to Datcherd,” he said. “I wonder where he’s got to.”
His friend looked doubtful. “He could have come and spoken to me in the room if he’d wanted. Perhaps he didn’t. Perhaps he’d be tired after his journey. He didn’t look extraordinarily cheery, somehow. I think I’ll not bother him.”
“Oh, he’s all right. He only looked like a Home Ruler listening to Orange cheering. I expect they don’t, as a rule, look very radiant, do they?”
“They do not. But you don’t mean he’d mind my coming to speak, surely? Because, if he does, I ought never to have come. You told me they had lectures from all sorts of people on all sorts of things.”
“So they do. No, of course he wouldn’t mind. But that’s the way he’s bound to look in public, as a manifesto, don’t you see. Like a clergyman listening to a Nonconformist preacher. He has to assert his principles.”
“But a Church clergyman probably wouldn’t get a Nonconformist to preach in his church. They don’t, I believe, as a rule.”
Eddy was forced to admit that, unfortunately, they didn’t.
His friend, a person of good manners, was a little cross. “We’ve had him offended now, and I don’t blame him. You should have told me. I should never have come. It’s such rustic manners, to break into a person’s Club and preach things he hates. I could tell he hated it, by the look in his eye. He kept the other end of the room, the way he wouldn’t break out at me and say anything ferocious. No, I’m not coming to look for him; I wouldn’t dare look him in the face; you can go by yourself. You’ve fairly let me in, Oliver. I hate being rude to the wrong side, it gives them such an advantage. They’re rude enough to us, as a rule, to do for the two. I don’t want to have anything to do with his little Radical Club; if he wants to keep it to himself and his Radical friends, he’s welcome.”
“You’re talking nonsense,” Eddy said. “Did it behave like a Radical club to-night?”
“It did not. Which is exactly why Datcherd has every reason to be annoyed. Well, you can tell him from me that it was no one’s fault but your own. Good-night.”
He departed, more in anger than in sorrow—(it had really been rather fun to-night, though rude)—and Eddy went to find Datcherd.
But he didn’t find Datcherd. He was told that Datcherd had left the Club and gone home. His friend’s remark came back to him. “He kept the other end of the room, the way he wouldn’t break out at me and say anything ferocious.” Was that what Datcherd was doing to him, or was he tired after his journey? Eddy hoped for the best, but felt forebodings. Datcherd certainly had not looked cordial or cheerful. The way he had looked had disappointed and rather hurt the Club. They felt that another expression, after three months absence, would have been more suitable. After all, for pleasantness of demeanour, Mr. Datcherd, even at the best of times (which this, it seemed, hardly was) wasn’t a patch on Mr. Oliver.
These events occurred on a Friday evening. It so happened that Eddy was going out of town next morning for a Cambridge week-end, so he would not see Datcherd till Monday evening. He and Arnold spent the week-end at Arnold’s home. Whenever Eddy visited the Denisons he was struck afresh by the extreme and rarefied refinement of their atmosphere; they (except Arnold, who had been coarsened, like himself, by contact with the world) were academic in the best sense; theoretical, philosophical, idealistic, serenely sure of truth, making up in breeding what, possibly, they a little lacked (at least Mrs. Denison and her daughter lacked) in humour; never swerving from the political, religious, and economic position they had taken up once and for all. A trifle impenetrable and closed to new issues, they were; the sort of Liberal one felt would never, however changed the circumstances, become Conservative. A valuable type, representing breeding and conscience in a rough-and-tumble world; if Christian and Anglican, it often belongs to the Christian Social Union; if not, like the Denisons, it will surely belong to some other well-intentioned and high-principled society for bettering the poor. They are, in brief, gentlemen and ladies. Life in the country is too sleepy for them and their progressive ideas; London is quite too wide awake; so they flourish like exquisite flowers in our older Universities and in Manchester, and visit Greece and Italy in the vacations.
Eddy found it peaceful to be with the Denisons. To come back to London on Monday morning was a little disturbing. He could not help a slight feeling of anxiety about his meeting with Datcherd. Perhaps it was just as well, he thought, to have given Datcherd two days to recover from the shock of the Unionist meeting. He hoped that Datcherd, when he met him, would look less like a Home Ruler listening to Orange cheering (a very unpleasant expression of countenance) than he had on Friday evening. Thinking that he might as well find out about this as soon as possible, he called at Datcherd’s house that afternoon.
Datcherd was in his library, as usual, writing. He got up and shook hands with Eddy, and said, “I was coming round to see you,” which relieved Eddy. But he spoke rather gravely, and added, “There are some things I want to talk to you about,” and sat down and nursed his gaunt knee in his thin hands and gnawed his lips.
Eddy asked him if he was much better, thinking he didn’t look it, and if he had had a good time. Datcherd scarcely answered; he was one of those people who only think of one thing at once, and he was thinking just now of something other than his health or his good time.
He said, after a moment’s silence, “It’s been extremely kind of you to manage the Club all this time.”
Eddy, with a wan smile, said apologetically, “You know, we really did have a Home Ruler to speak on Wednesday.”
Datcherd relaxed a little, and smiled in his turn.
“I know. In fact, I gather that there are very few representatives of any causes whatever whom you have not had to speak.”
“I see,” said Eddy, “that Pollard has told you all.”
“Pollard has told me some things. And you must remember that I spent both Saturday and Sunday evenings at the Club.”
“What,” inquired Eddy hopefully, “did you think of it?”
Datcherd was silent for a moment. Perhaps he was remembering again how kind it had been of Eddy to manage the Club all this time. When he spoke, it was with admirable moderation.
“It hardly,” he said, “seems quite on the lines I left it on. I was a little surprised, I must own. We had a very small Club on Sunday night, because a lot of them had gone off to some service in church. That surprised me rather. They never used to do that. Of course I don’t mind, but——”
“That’s Traherne,” said Eddy. “He got a tremendous hold on some of them when he came down to speak. He’s always popular, you know, with men and lads.”
“I daresay. What made you get him?”
“Oh, to speak about rents and wages and things. He’s very good. They liked him.”
“That is apparent. He’s dragged some of them into the Church Socialist League, and more to church after him. Well, it’s their own business, of course; if they like the sort of thing, I’ve no objection. They’ll get tired of it soon, I expect.... But, if you’ll excuse my asking, why on earth have you been corrupting their minds with lectures on Tariff Reform, National Service, Ulsterism and Dreadnoughts? Didn’t you realise that one can’t let in that sort of influence without endangering the sanity of a set of half-educated lads? I left them reading Mill; I find them reading Kipling. Upon my word, anyone would think you belonged to the Primrose League, from the way you’ve been going on.”
“I do,” said Eddy simply.
Datcherd stared at him, utterly taken aback.
“You what?”
“I belong to the Primrose League,” Eddy repeated. “Why shouldn’t I?”
Datcherd pulled his startled wits together, and laughed shortly.
“I beg your pardon. The mistake, I suppose, was mine. I had somehow got it into my head that you were a Fabian.”
“So I am,” said Eddy, patiently explaining. “All those old things, you know. And most of the new ones as well. I’m sorry if you didn’t know; I suppose I ought to have mentioned it, but I never thought about it. Does it matter?”
Datcherd was gazing at him with grave, startled eyes, as at a maniac.
“Matter? Well, I don’t know. Yes, I suppose it would have mattered, from my point of view, if I’d known. Because it just means that you’ve been playing when I thought you were in earnest; that, whereas I supposed you took your convictions and mine seriously and meant to act on them, really they’re just a game to you. You take no cause seriously, I suppose.”
“I take all causes seriously,” Eddy corrected him quickly. He got up, and walked about the room, his hands deep in his pockets, frowning a little because life was so serious.
“You see,” he explained, stopping in front of Datcherd and frowning down on him, “truth is so pervasive; it gets everywhere; leaks into everything. Like cod-liver oil spilt in a trunk of clothes; everything’s saturated with it. (Is that a nasty comparison? I thought of it because it happened to me the other day.) The clothes are all different from each other, but the cod-liver oil is in all of them for ever and ever. Truth is like that—pervasive. Isn’t it?”
“No,” said Datcherd, with vehemence. “No. Truth is not like that. If it were, it would mean that one thing was no better and no worse than another; that all progress, moral and otherwise, was illusive. We should all become fatalists, torpid, uncaring, dead, sitting with our hands before us and drifting with the tide. There’d be an end of all fight, all improvement, all life. But truth is not like that. One thing is better than another, and always will be. Democracy is a better aim than oligarchy; freedom is better than tyranny; work is better than idleness. And, because it fights, however slowly and hesitatingly, on the side of those better things, Liberalism is better than Toryism, the League of Young Liberals a better thing to encourage among the young men of the country than the Primrose League. You say truth is everywhere. Frankly, I look at the Primrose League, and all your Tory Associations, and I can’t find it. I see only a monumental tissue of lies. Lying to the people for their good—that’s what all honest Tories would admit they do. Lying to them for their harm—that’s what we say they do. Truth! It isn’t named among them. They’ve not got minds that can know truth when they see it. It’s not their fault. They’re mostly good men warped by a bad creed. And you say one creed is as good as another.”
“I say there’s truth in all of them,” said Eddy. “Can’t you see the truth in Toryism? I can, so clearly. It’s all so hackneyed, so often repeated, but it’s true in spite of that. Isn’t there truth in government by the best for the others? If that isn’t good what is? If it’s not true that one man’s more fitted by nature and training to manage difficult political affairs than another, nothing’s true. And it’s true that he can do it best without a mass of ignorant, uninstructed, sentimental people for ever jerking at the reins. Put the best on top—that’s the gist of Toryism.” Datcherd was looking at him cynically.
“And yet—you belong to the Young Liberals’ League.”
“Of course I do. Do you want me to enlarge on the gist and the beauties of Liberalism too? I could, only I won’t, because you’ve just done so yourself. All that you’ve said about its making for freedom and enlightenment is profoundly true, and is why I am a Liberal. I insist on my right to be both. I am both. I hope I shall always be both.”
Datcherd said, after a thoughtful moment, “I wish we had had this conversation three months ago. We didn’t; I was reckless and hasty, and so we’ve made this mess of things.”
“Is it a mess?” asked Eddy. “I’m sorry if so. It hasn’t struck me in that light all this time.”
“Don’t think me ungrateful, Oliver,” said Datcherd, quickly. “I’m not. Looking at things as you do, I suppose it was natural that you should have done as you have. Perhaps you might have let me a little more into your views beforehand than you did—but never mind that now. The fact that matters is that I find the Club in a state of mental confusion that I never expected, and it will take some time to settle it again, if we ever do. We want, as you know, to make the Club the nucleus of a sound Radical constituency. Well, upon my word, if there was an election now, I couldn’t say which way some of them would vote. You may answer that it doesn’t matter, as so few are voters yet; but it does. It’s what I call a mess; and a silly mess, too. They’ve been playing the fool with things they ought to be keen enough about to take in deadly earnest. That’s your doing. You seem to have become pretty popular, I must say; which is just the mischief of it. All I can do now is to try and straighten things out by degrees.”
“You’d rather I didn’t come and help any more, I suppose,” said Eddy.
“To be quite frank, I would. In fact, I wouldn’t have you at any price. You don’t mind my speaking plainly? The mistake’s been mine; but it has been a pretty idiotic mistake, and we mustn’t have any more of it.... I ought never to have gone away. I shan’t again, whatever any fools of doctors say.”
Eddy held out his hand. “Goodbye. I’m really very sorry, Datcherd. I suppose I ought to have guessed what you would feel about all this.”
“Honestly, I think you ought. But thank you very much, all the same, for all the trouble you’ve taken.... You’re doing some reviewing work now, aren’t you?” His tone implied that Eddy had better go on doing reviewing work, and desist from doing anything else.
Eddy left the house. He was sorry, and rather angry, and badly disappointed. He had been keen on the Club; he had hoped to go on helping with it. It seemed that he was not considered fit by anyone to have anything to do with clubs and such philanthropic enterprises. First the Vicar of St. Gregory’s had turned him out because he had too many interests besides (Datcherd being one), and now Datcherd turned him out because he had tried to give the Club too many interests (the cause the vicar stood for being one). Nowhere did he seem to be wanted. He was a failure and an outcast. Besides which, Datcherd thought he had behaved dishonourably. Perhaps he had. Here he saw Datcherd’s point of view. Even his friend the Ulsterman had obviously had the same thought about that. Eddy ruefully admitted that he had been an idiot not to know just how Datcherd would feel. But he was angry with Datcherd for feeling like that. Datcherd was narrow, opinionated, and unfair. So many people are, in an unfair world.
He went home and told Arnold, who said, “Of course. I can’t think why you didn’t know how it would be. I always told you you were being absurd, with your Blue Water lunatics, and your Food Tax ante-diluvians, and your conscription captains. (No, don’t tell me about it’s not being conscription; now is not the moment. You are down, and it is for me to talk.) You had better try your hand at no more good works, but stick to earning an honest livelihood, as long as they will give you any money for what you do. I daresay from a rumour I heard from Innes to-day, that it won’t be long. I believe the Daily Post are contemplating a reduction in their literary staff, and they will very probably begin with you, unless you learn to restrain your redundant appreciations a little. No paper could bear up under that weight of indiscriminate enthusiasm for long.”
“Hulbert told me I was to criticize more severely,” said Eddy. “So I try to now. It’s difficult, when I like a thing, to be severe about it. I wonder if one ought.”
But he was really wondering more what Eileen Le Moine thought and would say about his difference with Datcherd.
He didn’t discover this for a week. He called at 3, Campden Hill Road, and found both its occupants out. They did not write, as he had half expected, to ask him to come again, or to meet them anywhere. At last he met Eileen alone, coming out of an exhibition of Max Beerbohm cartoons. He had been going in, but he turned back on seeing her. She looked somehow altered, and grave, and she was more beautiful even than he had known, but tired, and with shadowed eyes of fire and softness; to him she seemed, vaguely, less of a child, and more of a woman. Perhaps it was Greece.... Somehow Greece, and all the worlds old and new, and all the seas, seemed between them as she looked at him with hardening eyes. An observer would have said from that look that she didn’t like him; yet she had always liked him a good deal. A capricious person she was; all her friends knew that.
He turned back from the entrance door to walk with her, though she said, “Aren’t you going in?”
“No,” he said. “I’ve seen them once already. I’d rather see you now, if you don’t mind. I suppose you’re going somewhere? You wouldn’t come and have tea with me first?”
She hesitated a moment, as if wondering whether she would, then said, “No; I’m going to tea with Billy’s grandmother; she wants to hear about Greece. Then Billy and I are taking Jane to the Academy, to broaden her mind. She’s never seen it yet, and it’s time her education was completed.”
She said it coldly, even the little familiar mockery of Jane and the Academy, and Eddy knew that she was angry with him. That he did not like, and he said quickly, “May I go with you as far as Gordon Place?” (which was where Billy’s grandmother lived), and she answered with childish sullenness, “If we’re going the one way at the one time I suppose we will be together,” and said no more till he broke the silence as they crossed Leicester Square in the sunshine with, “Please, is anything the matter, Eileen?”
She turned and looked at him, her face hard in the shadow of the sweeping hat-brim, and flung back ironically, “It is not. Of course not; how would it be?”
Eddy made a gesture of despair with his hands.
“You’re angry too. I knew it. You’re all angry, because I had Tariff Reformers and Orangemen to lecture to the Club.”
“D’you tell me so?” She still spoke in uncomfortable irony. “I expect you hoped we would be grateful and delighted at being dragged back from Greece just when Hugh was beginning to be better, and to enjoy things, by a letter from that miserable Pollard all about the way you had the Club spoilt. Why, we hadn’t been to Olympia yet. We were just going there when Hugh insisted on calling for letters at Athens and got this. Letters indeed! Bridget and I didn’t ask were there any for us; but Hugh always will. And of course, when he’d read it nothing would hold him; he must tear off home by the next train and arrive in London three weeks sooner than we’d planned. Now why, if you felt you had to go to spoil Hugh’s club, couldn’t you have had Pollard strangled first, the way he wouldn’t be writing letters?”
“I wish I had,” said Eddy, with bitter fervour. “I was a fool.”
“And worse than that, so you were,” said Eileen, unsparingly. “You were unprincipled, and then so wanting foresight that you wrecked your own schemes. Three weeks more, and you might have had twenty-one more captains and clergymen and young men from Ulster to complete the education of Hugh’s young Liberals. As it is, Hugh thinks you’ve not done them much harm, though you did your best, and he’s slaving away to put sense into them again. The good of Greece is all gone from him already; worry was just what he wasn’t to do, and you’ve made him do it. He’s living already again at top speed, and over-working, and being sad because it’s all in such a silly mess. Hugh cares for his work more than for anything in the world,” her voice softened to the protective cadence familiar to Eddy, “and you’ve hurt him in it. No one should hurt Hugh in his work, even a little. Didn’t you know that?”
She looked at him now with eyes less hostile but more sad, as if her thoughts had left him and wandered to some other application of this principle. Indeed, as she said it, it had the effect of a creed, a statement of a governing principle of life, that must somehow be preserved intact while all else broke.
“Could I have known it would have hurt him—a few lectures?” Eddy protested against the unfairness of it, losing his temper a little. “You all talk as if Datcherd was the mistress of a girls’ school, who is expected to protect her pupils from the contamination of degrading influences and finds they have been reading Nietsche or Tom Jones.”
It was a mistake to say that. He might have known it. Eileen flushed pink with a new rush of anger.
“Is that so? Is that the way we speak of Hugh? I’ll tell him you said so. No, I wouldn’t trouble his ears with anything so paltry. I wonder do you know the way he speaks of you? He thinks you must be weak in the head, and he makes excuses for you, so he does; he never says an unkind word against you, only how you ought to be locked up and not let loose like ordinary people, and how he ought to have known you were like that and explained to you in so many words beforehand the principles he wanted maintained. As if he hadn’t been too ill to explain anything, and as if any baby wouldn’t have known, and as if any honourable person wouldn’t have taken particular care, just when he was ill and away, to run things just the way he would like. And after that you call him a girls’ school mistress....”
“On the contrary,” said Eddy, crossly, “I said he wasn’t. You are horribly unfair. Is it any use continuing this conversation?”
“It is not. Nor any other.”
So, in her excitement, she got into a bus that was not going to Billy’s grandmother, and he swallowed his pride and told her so, but she would not swallow hers and listen to him, but climbed on to the top, and was carried down Piccadilly, and would have to change at Hyde Park Corner.
Eileen was singularly poor at buses, Eddy reflected bitterly. He walked down to the Embankment, too crushed and unhappy to go home and risk meeting Arnold. He had been rude and ill-tempered to Eileen, and sneered at Datcherd to her, and she had been rude and ill-tempered to him, and would never forgive him, because it had been about Datcherd, her friend, loyalty to whom was the mainspring of her life. All her other friends might go by the board, if Datcherd but prospered. How much she cared, Eddy reflected, his anger fast fading into a pity and regret that hurt. For all her bitter words to him had that basis—a poignant caring for Datcherd, with his wrecked health, and his wrecked home, and his hopeless, unsatisfied love for her—a love which would never be satisfied, because he had principles which forbade it, and she had a love for him which would always preserve his principles and his life’s work intact. And they were growing to care so much—Eddy had seen that in Eileen’s face when first he met her at the Leicester Galleries—with such intensity, such absorbing flame, that it hurt and burnt.... Eddy did not want to watch it.
But one thing it had done for him; it had killed in him the last vestiges of that absurd emotion he had had for her, an emotion which had always been so hopeless, and for that very reason had never become, and never would become, love.
But he wanted to be friends. However much she had been the aggressor in the quarrel, however unfair, and unjust, and unkind she had been, still he was minded to write and say he was sorry, and would she please come to lunch and go on being friends.
He turned into Soho Square, and went back to his rooms. There he found a letter from his editor telling him that his services on the Daily Post would not be required after the end of May. It was not unexpected. The Post was economising in its literary staff, and starting on him. It was very natural, even inevitable, that they should; for his reviewing lacked discrimination, and his interest in the Club had often made him careless about his own job. He threw the letter at Arnold, who had just come in.
Arnold said, “I feared as much.”
“What now, I wonder?” said Eddy, not caring particularly.
Arnold looked at him thoughtfully.
“Really, it’s very difficult. I don’t know.... You do so muddle things up, don’t you? I wish you’d learn to do only one job at once and stick to it.”
Eddy said bitterly, “It won’t stick to me, unfortunately.”
Arnold said, “If Uncle Wilfred would have you, would you come to us?”
Eddy supposed he would. Only probably Uncle Wilfred wouldn’t have him. Later in the evening he got a telegram to say that his father had had a stroke, and could he come home at once. He caught a train at half-past eight, and was at Welchester by ten.
CHAPTER XI.
THE COUNTRY.
THE Dean was paralysed up the right side, his wife agitated and anxious, his daughter cross.
“It’s absurd,” said Daphne to Eddy, the morning after his arrival. “Father’s no more sense than a baby. He insists on bothering about some article he hasn’t finished for the Church Quarterly on the Synoptic Problem. As if one more like that mattered! The magazines are too full of them already.”
But the Dean made it obvious to Eddy that it did matter, and induced him to find and decipher his rough notes for the end of the article, and write them out in proper form. He was so much better after an afternoon of that that the doctor said to Eddy, “How long can you stop at home?”
“As long as I can be any use. I have just given up one job and haven’t begun another yet, so at present I am free.”
“The longer you stay the better, both for your father and your mother,” the doctor said. “You can take a lot of strain off Mrs. Oliver. Miss Daphne’s very young—too young for much sick-nursing, I fancy; and the nurse can only do what nurses can do. He wants companionship, and someone who can do for him the sort of job you’ve been doing to-day.”
So Eddy wrote to Arnold that he didn’t know when he would be coming back to London. Arnold replied that whenever he did he could come into his uncle’s publishing house. He added in a postscript that he had met Eileen and Datcherd at the Moulin d’Or, and Eileen had said, “Give Eddy my love, and say I’m sorry. Don’t forget.” Sorry about his father, Arnold understood, of course; but Eddy believed that more was meant by it than that, and that Eileen was throwing him across space her characteristically sweet and casual amends for her bitter words.
He went on with the Synoptic Problem. The Dean’s notes were lucid and coherent, like all his work. It seemed to Eddy an interesting article, and the Dean smiled faintly when he said so. Eddy was appreciative and intelligent, if not learned or profound. The Dean had been afraid for a time that he was going to turn into a cleric of that active sort which is so absorbed in practical energies that it does not give due value to thoughtful theology. The Dean had reason to fear that too many High Church clergy were like this. But he had hopes now that Eddy, if in the end he did take Orders, might be of those who think out the faith that is in them, and tackle the problem of the Fourth Gospel. Perhaps he had had to, while managing Datcherd’s free-thinking club.
“Are you still helping Datcherd?” the Dean asked, in the slow, hindered speech that was all he could use now.
“No. Datcherd has done with me. I managed things badly there, from his point of view. I wasn’t exclusive enough for him,” and Eddy, to amuse his father, told the story of that fiasco.
Daphne said, “Serve you right for getting an anti-suffragist to speak. How could you? They’re always so deadly silly, and so dull. Worse, almost, than the other side, though that’s saying a lot. I do think, Tedders, you deserved to be chucked out.”
Daphne had blossomed into a militant. Mrs. Oliver had been telling Eddy about that the day before. Mrs. Oliver herself belonged to the respectable National Union for Women’s Suffrage, the pure and reformed branch of it in Welchester established, non-militant, non-party, non-exciting. Daphne, and a few other bright and ardent young spirits, had joined the W.S.P.U., and had been endeavouring to militate in Welchester. Daphne had dropped some Jeye’s disinfectant fluid, which is sticky and brown, into the pillar-box at the corner of the Close, and made disagreeable thereby a letter to herself from a neighbour asking her to tennis, and a letter to the Dean from a canon fixing the date (which was indecipherable) of a committee meeting.
Daphne looked critically at breakfast next day at these two results of her tactics, and called them “Jolly fine.”
“Disgusting,” said the Dean. “I didn’t know we had these wild women in Welchester. Who on earth can it have been?”
“Me,” said Daphne. “Alone I did it.”
Scene: the Dean horrified, stern, and ashamed; Mrs. Oliver shocked and repressive; Daphne sulky and defiant, and refusing to promise not to do it again.
“We’ve joined the militants, several of us,” she said.
“Who?” inquired her mother. “I’m sure Molly hasn’t.”
“No, Molly hasn’t,” said Daphne, with disgust. “All the Bellairs’ are too frightfully well-bred to fight for what they ought to have. They’re antis, all of them. Nevill approves of forcible feeding.”
“So does anyone, of course,” said the Dean. “Prisoners can’t be allowed to die on our hands just because they are criminally insane. Once for all, Daphne, I will not have a repetition of this disgusting episode. Other people’s daughters can make fools of themselves if they like, but mine isn’t going to. Is that quite clear?”
Daphne muttered something and looked rebellious; but the Dean did not think she would flatly disobey him. She did not, in fact, repeat the disgusting episode of the Jeye, but she was found a few evenings later trying to set fire to a workmen’s shelter after dark, and arrested. She was naturally anxious to go to prison, to complete her experiences, but she was given the option of a fine (which the Dean insisted, in spite of her protests, on paying), and bound over not to do it again. The Dean said after that that he was ashamed to look his neighbours in the face, and very shortly he had a stroke. Daphne decided reluctantly that militant methods must be in abeyance till he was recovered, and more fit to face shocks. To relieve herself, she engaged in a violent quarrel with Nevill Bellairs, who was home for Whitsuntide and ventured to remonstrate with her on her proceedings. They parted in sorrow and anger, and Daphne came home very cross, and abused Nevill to Eddy as a stick-in-the-mud.
“But it is silly to burn and spoil things,” said Eddy. “Very few things are silly, I think, but that is, because it’s not the way to get anything. You’re merely putting things back; you’re reactionaries. All the sane suffragists hate you, you know.”
Daphne was not roused to say anything about peaceful methods having failed, and the time having come for violence, or any of the other things that are natural and usual to say in the circumstances; she was sullenly silent, and Eddy, glancing at her in surprise, saw her sombre and angry.
Wondering a little, he put it down to her disagreement with Nevill. Perhaps she really felt that badly. Certainly she and Nevill had been great friends during the last year. It was a pity they should quarrel over a difference of opinion; anything in the world, to Eddy, seemed a more reasonable cause of alienation. He looked at his young sister with a new respect, however; after all, it was rather respectable to care as much as that for a point of view.
Molly Bellairs threw more light on the business next day when Eddy went to tennis there (Daphne had refused to go).
“Poor Daffy,” Molly said to Eddy when they were sitting out. “She’s frightfully cross with Nevill for being anti-suffragist, and telling her she’s silly to militate. And he’s cross with her. She told him, I believe, that she wasn’t going to be friends with him any more till he changed. And he never does change about anything, and she doesn’t either, so there they are. It’s such a pity, because they’re really so awfully fond of each other. Nevill’s miserable. Look at him.”
Eddy looked, and saw Nevill, morose and graceful in flannels, smashing double faults into the net.
“He always does that when he’s out of temper,” Molly explained.
“Why does he care so much?” Eddy asked, with brotherly curiosity. “Do you mean he’s really fond of Daffy? Fonder, I mean, than the rest of you are?”
“Quite differently.” Molly became motherly and wise. “Haven’t you seen it? It’s been coming on for quite a year. I believe, Eddy, they’d be engaged by now if it wasn’t for this.”
“Oh, would they?” Eddy was interested. “But would they be such donkeys as to let this get in the way, if they want to be engaged? I thought Daffy had more sense.”
Molly shook her head. “They think each other so wrong, you see, and they’ve got cross about it.... Well, I don’t know. I suppose they’re right, if they really do feel it’s a question of right and wrong. You can’t go on being friends with a person, let alone get engaged to them, if you feel they’re behaving frightfully wrongly. You see, Daffy thinks it immoral of Nevill to be on the anti side in Parliament, and to approve of what she calls organised bullying, and he thinks it immoral of her to be a militant. I think Daffy’s wrong, of course, but I can quite see that she couldn’t get engaged to Nevill feeling as she does.”
“Why,” Eddy pondered, “can’t they each see the other’s point of view,—the good in it, not the bad? It’s so absurd to quarrel about the respective merits of different principles, when all are so excellent.”
“They’re not,” said Molly, rather sharply. “That’s so like you, Eddy, and it’s nonsense. What else should one quarrel about? What I think is absurd is to quarrel about personal things, like some people do.”
“It’s absurd to quarrel at all,” said Eddy, and there they left it, and went to play tennis.
Before he went home, Colonel Bellairs proposed a scheme to him. His youngest boy, Bob, having been ill, had been ordered to spend the summer at home, and was not to go back to Eton till September. Meanwhile he wanted to keep up with his work, and they had been looking out for a tutor for him, some intelligent young public-school man who would know what he ought to be learning. As Eddy intended to be at home for the present, would he take up this job? The Colonel proposed a generous payment, and Eddy thought it an excellent plan. He went home engaged for the job, and started it next morning. Bob, who was sixteen, was, like all the Bellairs’, neither clever nor stupid; his gifts were practical rather than literary, but he had a fairly serviceable head. Eddy found that he rather liked teaching. He had a certain power of transmitting his own interest in things to other people that was useful.
As the Dean got better, Eddy sometimes stayed on at the Hall after work hours, and played tennis or bumble-puppy with Molly and Bob before lunch, or helped Molly to feed the rabbits, or wash one of the dogs. There was a pleasant coherence and unity about these occupations, and about Molly and Bob, which Eddy liked. Meanwhile he acted as amanuensis and secretary to his father, and was useful and agreeable in the home.
Coherence and unity; these qualities seemed in the main sadly lacking in Welchester, as in other places. It was—country life is, life in Cathedral or any other cities is—a chaos of warring elements, disturbing to the onlooker. There are no communities now, village or other. In Welchester, and in the country round about it, there was the continuous strain of opposing interests. You saw it on the main road into Welchester, where villas and villa people ousted cottages and small farmers; ousted them, and made a different demand on life, set up a different, opposing standard. Then, in the heart of the town, was the Cathedral, standing on a hill and for a set of interests quite different again, and round about it were the canons’ houses of old brick, and the Deanery, and they were imposing on life standards of a certain dignity and beauty and tradition and order, not in the least accepted either by the slum-yards behind Church Street, or by Beulah, the smug tabernacle just outside the Close. And the Cathedral society, the canons and their families, the lawyers, doctors, and unemployed gentry, kept themselves apart with satisfied gentility from the townspeople, the keepers of shops, the dentists, the auctioneers. Sentiment and opinion in Welchester was, in short, disintegrated, rent, at odds within itself. It returned a Conservative member, but only by a small majority; the large minority held itself neglected, unrepresented.
Out in the rolling green country beyond the town gates, the same unwholesome strife saddened field and lane and park. Land-owners, great and small, fought to the last ditch, the last ungenerous notice-board, with land-traversers; squires and keepers disagreed bitterly with poachers; tenant farmers saw life from an opposite angle to that of labourers; the parson differed from the minister, and often, alas, from his flock. It was as if all these warring elements, which might, from a common vantage-ground, have together conducted the exploration into the promised land, were staying at home disputing with one another as to the nature of that land. Some good, some better state of things, was in most of their minds to seek; but their paths of approach, all divergent, seemed to run weakly into waste places for want of a common energy. It was a saddening sight. The great heterogeneous unity conceived by civilised idealists seemed inaccessibly remote.
Eddy this summer took to writing articles for the Vineyard about the breaches in country life and how to heal them. The breach, for instance, between tenant-farmer and labourer; that was much on his mind. But, when he had written and written, and suggested and suggested, like many before him and since, the breach was no nearer being healed. He formed in his mind at this time a scheme for a new paper which he would like to start some day if anyone would back it, and if Denison’s firm would publish it. And, after all, so many new papers are backed, but how inadequately, and started, and published, and flash like meteors across the sky, and plunge fizzling into the sea of oblivion to perish miserably—so why not this? He thought he would like it to be called Unity, and to have that for its glorious aim. All papers have aims beforehand (one may find them set forth in many a prospectus); how soon, alas, in many cases to be disregarded or abandoned in response to the exigencies of circumstance and demand. But the aim of Unity should persist, and, if heaven was kind, reach its mark.
Pondering on this scheme, Eddy could watch chaos with more tolerant eyes, since nothing is so intolerable if one is thinking of doing something, even a very little, to try and alleviate it. He carried on a correspondence with Arnold about it. Arnold said he didn’t for a moment suppose his Uncle Wilfred would be so misguided as to have anything to do with such a scheme, but he might, of course. The great dodge with a new paper, was, Arnold said, the co-operative system; you collect a staff of eager contributors who will undertake to write for so many months without pay, and not want to get their own back again till after the thing is coining money, and then they share what profits there are, if any. If they could collect a few useful people for this purpose, such as Billy Raymond, and Datcherd, and Cecil Le Moine (only probably Cecil was too selfish), and John Henderson, and Margaret Clinton (a novelist friend of Arnold’s), and various other intelligent men and women, the thing might be worked. And Bob Traherne and Dean Oliver, to represent two different Church standpoints, Eddy added to the list, and a field labourer he knew who would talk about small holdings, and a Conservative or two (Conservatives were conspicuously lacking in Arnold’s list). Encouraged by Arnold’s reception of the idea, Eddy replied by sketching his scheme for Unity more elaborately. Arnold answered, “If we get all or any of the people we’ve thought of to write for it, Unity will go its own way, regardless of schemes beforehand.... Have your Tories and parsons in if you must, only don’t be surprised if they sink it.... The chief thing to mind about with a writer is, has he anything new to say? I hate all that sentimental taking up and patting on the back of ploughmen and navvies and tramps merely as such; it’s silly, inverted snobbery. It doesn’t follow that a man has anything to say that’s worth hearing merely because he says it ungrammatically. Get day labourers to write about land-tenure if they have anything to say about it that’s more enlightening than what you or I would say; but not unless; because they won’t put it so well, by a long way. If ever I have anything to do with a paper, I shall see that it avoids sentimentality so far as is consistent with just enough popularity to live by.”
It was still all in the air, of course, but Eddy felt cheered by the definite treatment Arnold was giving to his idea.
About the middle of June Arnold wrote that Datcherd had hopelessly broken down at last, and there seemed no chance for him, and he had given up everything and gone down to a cottage in Devonshire, probably to die there.
“Eileen has gone with him,” Arnold added, in graver vein than usual. “I suppose she wants to look after him, and they both want not to waste the time that’s left.... Of course, many people will be horrified, and think the worst. Personally, I think it a pity she should do it, because it means, for her, giving up a great deal, now and afterwards, though for him nothing now but a principle. The breaking of the principle is surprising in him, and really, if one comes to think of it, pretty sad, and a sign of how he’s broken up altogether. Because he has always held these things uncivilised and wrong, and said so. I suppose he’s too weak in body to say so any more, or to stand against his need and hers any longer. I think it a bad mistake, and I wish they wouldn’t do it. Besides, she’s too fine, and has too much to give, to throw it all at one dying man, as she’s doing. What’s it been in Datcherd all along that’s so held her—he so sickly and wrecked and morose, she so brilliant and alive and young and full of genius and joy? Of course he’s brilliant too, in his own way, and lovable, and interesting; but a failure for all that, and an unhappy failure, and now at the last a failure even as to his own principles of life. I suppose it has been always just that that has held her; his failure and need. These things are dark; but anyhow there it is; one never saw two people care for each other more or need each other more.... She was afraid of hurting his work by coming to him before; but the time for thinking of that is past, and I suppose she will stay with him now till the end, and it will be their one happy time. You know I think these things mostly a mistake, and these absorbing emotions uncivilised, and nearly all alliances ill-assorted, and this one will be condemned. But much she’ll care for that when it is all over and he has gone. What will happen to her then I can’t guess; she won’t care much for anything any of us can do to help, for a long time. It is a pity. But such is life, a series of futile wreckages.” He went on to other topics. Eddy didn’t read the rest just then, but went out for a long and violent walk across country with his incredibly mongrel dog.
Confusion, with its many faces, its shouting of innumerable voices, overlay the green June country. For him in that hour the voice of pity and love rose dominant, drowning the other voices, that questioned and wondered and denied, as the cuckoos from every tree questioned and commented on life in their strange, late note. Love and pity; pity and love; mightn’t these two resolve all discord at last? Arnold’s point of view, that of the civilised person of sense, he saw and shared; Eileen’s and Datcherd’s he saw and felt; his own mother’s, and the Bellairs’, and that of those like-minded with them, he saw and appreciated; all were surely right, yet they did not make for harmony.
Meanwhile, a background to discord, the woods were green and the hedges starred pink with wild roses and the cow-parsley a white foam in the ditches, and the clouds shreds of white fleece in the blue above, and cows knee-deep in cool pools beneath spreading trees, and, behind the jubilance of larks and the other jocund little fowls, cried the perpetual questioning of the unanswered grey bird....
In the course of July, Eddy became engaged to Molly Bellairs, an event which, with all its preliminary and attendant circumstances, requires and will receive little treatment here. Proposals and their attendant emotions, though more interesting even than most things to those principally concerned, are doubtless so familiar to all as to be readily imagined, and can occupy no place in these pages. The fact emerges that Eddy and Molly, after the usual preliminaries, did become engaged. It must not be surmised that their emotions, because passed lightly over, were not of the customary and suitable fervour; in point of fact, both were very much in love. Both their families were pleased. The marriage, of course, was not to occur till Eddy was settled definitely into a promising profession, but that he hoped to be in the autumn, if he entered the Denisons’ publishing firm and at the same time practised journalism.
“You should get settled with something permanent, my boy,” said the Dean, who was by now well enough to talk like that. “I don’t like this taking things up and dropping them.”
“They drop me,” Eddy explained, much as he had to Arnold once, but the Dean did not like him to put it like that, as anyone would rather his son dropped than was dropped.
“You know you can do well if you like,” he said, being fairly started in that vein. “You did well at school and Cambridge, and you can do well now. And now that you’re going to be married, you must give up feeling your way and occupying yourself with jobs that aren’t your regular career, and get your teeth into something definite. It wouldn’t be fair to Molly to play about with odd jobs, even useful and valuable ones, as you have been doing. You wouldn’t think of schoolmastering at all, I suppose? With your degree you could easily get a good place.” The Dean hankered after a scholastic career for his son; besides, schoolmasters so often end in Orders. But Eddy said he thought he would prefer publishing or journalism, though it didn’t pay so well at first. He told the Dean about the proposed paper and the co-operative system, which was sure to work so well.
The Dean said, “I haven’t any faith in all these new papers, whatever the system. Even the best die. Look at the Pilot. And the Tribune.”
Eddy looked back across the ages at the Pilot and the Tribune, whose deaths he just remembered.
“There’ve been plenty died since those,” he remarked. “Those whom the gods love, etcetera. But lots have lived, too. If you come to that, look at the Times, the Spectator, and the Daily Mirror. They were new once. So was the English Review; so was Poetry and Drama; so was the New Statesman; so was the Blue Review. They’re alive yet. Then why not Unity? Even if it has a short life, it may be a merry one.”