Читать книгу The Middle of the Road - Philip Gibbs - Страница 15

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Luke Christy was still in town. It was when the sense of loneliness was in Bertram that he found himself drifting towards the Adelphi to Christy’s rooms. The time of day or night didn’t matter. Christy was always glad of a “yarn,” and an excuse to drop his work awhile, when Bertram called, if he happened to be in. And he was mostly in, not going out much to meet his friends but expecting his friends to come to him.

“That’s the test I put ’em to,” he said. “If they come, I know they love me. And I’ve never learnt how to behave outside my own rooms. I break their china, or eat with the wrong fork, or scandalise the servants. I’m a plebeian, a coarse-mannered loon, hopelessly ill-educated.”

Christy’s friends accepted the condition he imposed. There were often several in his room when Bertram called, smoking innumerable cigarettes, talking, talking. Remarkable men and women, most of them, new in type to Bertram, and wonderfully interesting. They were literary people, journalists, social workers of one kind and another, professional idealists. There was also Janet Welford, at times, more interesting than any of them, and more alarming. Now and then came a foreigner—a Russian, an Indian student, a Belgian poet, a young Czecho-Slovak, an Austrian musician, an American professor, even a full-blooded Red Indian, once an officer in the Canadian flying corps, and a brilliant young man, speaking perfectly good English, and liberal in ideas.

They were all liberal in ideas. Rather too liberal, some of them, according to Bertram’s way of thinking. He was startled by the boldness with which they accepted the necessity of change in the whole structure of social life and international relations. While he was worrying out of old inherited instincts and traditions, with some travail of doubt, they had jumped clean beyond to more advanced ideals than he could accept. They put no limit to their conceptions of liberty. If Ireland wanted a Republic, then it was her right to have it. They only questioned the wisdom of wanting a Republic, and the political possibility of obtaining it, with England hostile to that idea. They believed that national independence was less desirable, less “advanced” than federations of free peoples, linking up into ever widening groups, until the United States of Europe and the United States of America, and other associations of peoples would become the United States of the World. A distant vision!

Bertram’s mind refused to follow them as far as that. He balked at the first obstacle, and insisted that Ireland had no right to greater freedom than that of Dominion Home Rule. He believed in the link between the two countries. England had rights as well as Ireland, her own need of security and freedom. He did not see how England could be safe or free, with an Irish Republic on her flank, able to cut her communications at sea. An Irish Republic would be a mortal blow to the old historical pride and sentiment of England.

Christy laughed at that argument of his.

“England’s old historical pride and sentiment are going to be rudely shocked before long, my child! She can’t afford those antique treasures. She’s got to keep pace with the new needs of a world ruined by those dangerous possessions of old castes. It was historical pride and sentiment which caused the German ultimatum in 1914, and led to the massacre of the world’s best youth. All that’s in the Old Curiosity Shop now. Such stuff and nonsense must be replaced, lest we perish, by a spirit of comradeship and commonsense between peoples. Not “My country, right or wrong,” nor “Kaiser and Fatherland,” but “Service to the Human Family.”

“I believe in patriotism,” Bertram had said, stubbornly, and that confession of faith, which he would never have stated in Joyce’s “set,” because it was taken for granted as the very air they breathed, seemed to astonish and amuse some of Christy’s friends, as though he had uttered some ancient heresy in an outworn creed.

“Patriotism has been the curse of the human race,” said Henry Carvell, the war correspondent, who had seen more of wars, big and little, than any man in England, and had been a knight-errant of the pen in most countries of the world. A heavily-built, square-shouldered man, with white hair and a ruddy face, he spoke with a kind of smiling contempt for Bertram’s simplicity of ignorance.

“It’s a survival of the old tribal rivalry which replaced the cave-man law when every old ourang-outang defended his lair and his females from all others of his species. ‘This is my patch of earth. I’ve drawn a line with my club. It marks my territory. Cross it if you dare. I’m stronger than you. Yah!’ That’s patriotism. I’ve seen it working out in bloodshed and brutality from the Zambesi to the Rhine.”

Bertram made a violent protest against that line of reasoning.

“I utterly disagree. If you deny patriotism, you rule out human nature and one of its strongest instincts.”

“I don’t deny it,” said Henry Carvell, with a touch of impatience. “I denounce it. What virtue do you see in it?”

“Love of familiar things in life. Loyalty to the ideas of one’s own people, their code of honour and all that. Men will die in defence of those things, in the last ditch.”

“Why die?” asked Christy, grinning at Bertram in a friendly way. “Why get into ditches? Why not talk it out with the other fellow whose ideas, most likely, are exactly the same?”

Hubert Melvin, the novelist, took up the argument. He was a chubby little man with a bald head, a great expanse of brow, and a plump, good-natured face, like Shakespeare without his beard and dignity.

“Our friend, Pollard, is enlarging the definition of patriotism. He seems to be talking about sacrifice for the ideals of life. They reach beyond frontiers. They’re not limited to a particular patch of earth hedged round by jealousy and governed by a small group of rascals calling themselves patriots! Of course men will die for what they believe to be the true faith.”

“Quite so,” agreed Henry Carvell. “Unfortunately, all national education—in a South African tribe or a European state—is intensive suggestion to primitive minds that their community, alone in the world, is in possession of the true faith. Their tribal custom becomes the only code of honour. They are encouraged to impose it, with missionary and murderous zeal, upon the rest of humanity. German ‘Kultur,’ for example, British ‘Justice,’ French ‘Liberty,’ and so on.”

“British Justice is a pretty good thing,” said Bertram. “We believe in fair play.”

“In Ireland?” asked Christy, and Bertram was silent. No, somehow, for five hundred years, British Justice had rather fallen down in Ireland. It had been dragged into the mud since the War.

These conversations in Christy’s room were altering his whole outlook on life, drawing him further and further away from the ideas of Joyce and her people. He resisted some of the extreme doctrines put forth calmly, as though they were accepted platitudes, by Christy’s friends, but he found himself agreeing more and more with their fundamental principles, and leaning heavily to their side of life’s argument.

These men, Henry Carvell, the war correspondent, Hubert Melvin, the novelist, Arthur Birchington, the critic, Nat Verney, the Labour member, W. E. Lawless, the political economist, and Bernard Hall, the editor of The New World—to name but a few of those who came to Christy’s rooms—differed from each other in a thousand ways of thought, never agreed in detail, engaged each other in endless controversy, over words, quotations, facts, ideas, philosophy, but Bertram, as an outsider and a younger man, seemed to discover in them some common denominator of character and quality.

What was it that bound them by invisible threads? Not any party creed, for some called themselves Liberals, and others Socialists, and others Individualists, and others declined all labels. Not any code of caste, for they belonged to different strata of English life, by birth and education.

Henry Carvell had been a Balliol man and a rowing Blue, before he disappeared into the wilds of Central Africa on his first expedition.

Hubert Melvin, who wrote satirical novels, had never been educated at all, according to his own account, and belonged to that vague, ill-defined middle-class which stretches around London from the mean streets of Brixton to the garden suburbs of Wimbledon, and treks northward from the artistic seclusion of St. John’s Wood to the outer wilds of Golders Green and Finchley.

Nat Verney, the Labour member, had wielded a pick in the mines of Lancashire before taking a course, out of Trade Union Funds, at the London School of Economics.

W. E. Lawless, the economist, had been President of the Union at Oxford, his father was the well-known Judge, and his mother the beautiful Gwendoline Ashley, daughter of the actor.

Bernard Hall, whose editorship of The New World had founded something like a new school of English journalism—critical, scholarly, pledged to international peace, scornful of popular clamour and political insincerity, had been educated in France and Switzerland, and his swarthy face, his dark, brooding eyes, and the passionate temperament which he tried to hide under a mask of irony, came from a French mother and a Colonel of Seaforth Highlanders, his father.

A strangely assorted crowd, not more like each other in experience and heritage than others who drifted into Christy’s rooms. What, then, brought them together, and inspired them with some common quality and purpose?

Bertram thought he had found the key to the puzzle in the word “Tolerance.” These men were wonderfully tolerant of things that divide other men—religion, race, social environment. Henry Carvell had been brought up as a Catholic, Christy was an advanced sceptic on all religion, Lawless, a Christian Scientist. They had no race hatreds. At a time when the English people, and especially English women, continued to keep the hate fires burning against “the Hun” who had caused such agony in the world, these friends of Christy’s denounced the Peace Treaty as an outrage, because of its harsh terms to the beaten enemy, raged against the continuance of the blockade which had forced the Germans to accept its “humiliations” and “injustice”—

“It’s new in our code,” said Carvell, “to make war on women and children,”—and they believed that by generosity the German people could be induced to abandon their militarism and link up with a peaceful democracy in Europe.

There were times when Bertram, listening to this talk, felt uneasy, guilty of something like treachery. These men were too tolerant. They seemed more sensitive, sometimes, to the sufferings of the German people than to the sacrifice of their own. He quarrelled with them for that, and was beaten every time in argument because he found himself yielding to their sense of chivalry, to their belief in the “common man,” to their faith in the ultimate commonsense of an educated democracy, to their hatred of cruelty.

No, it was not tolerance that he found the binding link between them, for they were violently intolerant of those whom they called “reactionaries”—all men not in agreement with themselves—arrogantly intolerant of ignorance and stupidity in high places. What seemed to bind them in intellectual sympathy was hatred of cruelty, to humble men, to women and children, to primitive races, even to animals and birds. They were instinctive and educated Pacifists, believing in the power of the spirit, rather than in physical force, in civilisation rather than in conflict, in liberty and not in oppression, in free-will, and not in discipline.

“Discipline is death,” said Christy, and when Bertram cried out against that as blasphemy, he consented to modify his statement by admitting the necessity of “self-discipline,” based on understanding and consent, but not imposed by external authority.

“We must kill the instinct of cruelty in the human brain,” said Bernard Hall, of The New World, and the flame in him leapt through his cold mask. “We must give up teaching our children the old cave-man stuff, about soldier heroes and hunters of beasts. We must make it a public shame for women to be seen wearing the plumage of lovely birds.”

This hatred of cruelty was at the bottom of their arguments about the Peace Treaty. It coloured their views on India, Ireland, Egypt, the exploitation of Africa, the Negro problem in the United States, the unemployed problem in England, the relations between Capital and Labour, even the question of Divorce.

It was all very difficult. … It would be more difficult with Joyce, if he allied himself definitely with this group of men and their philosophy. He felt they were trying to “convert” him, to win him over wholly to their side.

“You ought to join us,” said Nat Verney, the Labour member. “Labour has need of lads like you. The younger Intellectuals.”

He spoke with a North country burr in his speech, in spite of the London School of Economics. He was a sturdy, youngish man—thirty-five or so—with a shock of brown hair and a Lancashire face, hard as teak, square-jawed, with deep-set eyes in which there was a glint of humour, in spite of the light of fanaticism now and then, when he was bitter against “the classes” and his great enemy “Capital.”

“Why don’t you write occasionally for The New World—?” asked Bernard Hall. “You have the gift of words, if I may say so.”

Bertram’s heart gave a thump at that compliment from Hall, distinguished editor, fastidious critic. Was he serious or only sarcastic?

“A realistic novel on the War,” said Hubert Melvin, raising his Shakespeare brow, and a little plump hand. “Nobody in England has come up to Barbusse. You could do it, Pollard! It’s burnt into you. Give it ’em hot and strong—‘The Old Gang!’ Put the heart of England into it.”

Bertram had glanced at Christy. He had pledged him to secrecy about his book, and Christy kept the pledge.

“Pollard may surprise us all!” So Christy said, and then spoilt his speech for Bertram by a grin and a jibe. “But we mustn’t forget his aristocratic connections! It’s hard to break with one’s caste.”

“That belongs to the wreckage of war,” said Henry Carvell. “I’m glad of the smash. Think of the entrenched snobbishness of England in 1913! Thank Heaven that heritage of stupidity has been blown to bits.”

Christy was not so sure that it had been blown to bits. In time of war there had been a little mixing up. Patrician girls had been dairy-maids, hospital nurses, canteen women. Public school men had gone into the ranks, now and then. Now they were all dividing again, getting back to different sides.

Bertram agreed with Christy, thinking of Kenneth Murless, General Bellasis, and others. He agreed more with Christy than any of the others. He was glad when they went away, leaving him to “jaw” with this old comrade of his. Christy was of simpler stuff, dead true in his estimate of facts. What was it in Christy that caught hold of him so? Perhaps his intense sincerity and his harsh realism. He did not deceive himself by illusion, however pleasant and idealistic. He told the truth as he saw it, unsparingly, to himself as well as to others. He had revealed Bertram to himself.

“You’re pulled two ways, old man,” he had said one night, as they had sat each side of his fireplace, here. “There’s a tug of war between two opposing ideals in your brain. You’re a traditional Conservative, trying to make a truce, or Coalition Government, with Liberal ideals. A foot in both camps.”

“A Jekyll and Hyde!”

Bertram laughed, but he had been touched by this sword point which had pierced his armour.

“A Hamlet in Holland Street,” said Christy. “You want to murder your old uncle, Tory Tradition, but you can’t bear to ‘kill him at his prayers.’ You’re still under the spell of Caste.”

“It’s my caste by proxy. It’s my wife’s.”

“True,” said Christy; “and out of chivalry to her, you will deny the light that sometimes gleams in you—the fierce, white flame of truth.”

He quoted Scripture. It was a habit of his, though no Churchman.

“ ‘He that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me; and he that loveth son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me. And he that taketh not his cross and followeth after me is not worthy of me.’ ”

“A harsh doctrine, if harshly interpreted,” said Bertram. “It sometimes leads to the cruelty which your friends hate so much.”

“One must be hard for honesty’s sake.”

Christy spoke of the secret in his own life which only once before he had revealed to Bertram—on a night before a morning of battle.

“When I found that my wife was dragging me down into the dirt of lies, into the squalour of self-pity and spiritual impotence, I left her—with my blessing. It was hard—because I had loved her.”

“Hard on her,” said Bertram.

“For a time,” Christy agreed. “Afterwards she was glad. We had nagged at each other for five years, before the war. That gave her relief. She was sorry I didn’t get killed. Of course I ought to have been, for her sake—perhaps for mine. After the Armistice life became intolerable. She had changed and I had changed—or rather, developed on separate lines. We were worlds apart. She hated my Socialistic tendencies. I hated her damned little suburban philosophy. You see, she’d married beneath her. A clergyman’s daughter. Think of that—with me!”

Bertram remained silent for a while. Was Christy’s story to be repeated in another sphere of life; in another quarter of London? Joyce had married “beneath her”—a peer’s daughter to a lawyer’s son.

“Christy, old man,” he said at last, “I believe in Loyalty. It’s my central faith. Loyalty to one’s country, one’s wife, one’s code of honour. Without that life, to me, is unlivable.”

Christy puffed at his old burnt pipe for several minutes before replying.

“Loyalty’s good,” he admitted presently; “but to the highest and not to the lowest. Loyalty to lies is disloyalty to truth. That’s one of life’s little ironies. A damned nuisance, sometimes!”

The conversation was broken by Janet Welford, who came in to see Christy, whom she loved.