Читать книгу Unchanging Quest - Philip Gibbs - Страница 9

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WENT abroad a good deal—France, Germany, Italy—and lost what Paul had called my “lily-white soul,” or at least the simplicity of youth, by seeing too closely behind the scenes of passing history, and observing the falsity, corruption, and stupidity of people in high—and low—places. But I developed a sense of humour, made many good friends, wrote some extraordinarily bad short stories, learnt to know the cheapest restaurants in Paris, had several mild love-affairs which came to nothing, and returned to London from time to time with a sense of strangeness which wore off rapidly after one night in my old home or a walk down Piccadilly.

I was aware at these homecomings of slight, almost imperceptible changes among my family and friends. My mother’s hair was getting grey. My father had lost a little of his old flamboyance, and was occasionally rather querulous. His distrust of old Gladstone, and his contempt for Campbell Bannerman, had changed to a hatred of Lloyd George. He smelled the smouldering of revolution in England. Beatrice was getting fat, and had three plump babies, and adored her husband in Coutts’s Bank—Hubert Glyn—who was also a major in the Honourable Artillery Company and an imperialist of the Kipling school of thought—which was going out of fashion. Evelyn, married to the Reverend James Abercrombie Smythe, curate of St. Peter’s Hanover Square, was writing sensational stories for the Woman’s World, and moving in the very highest circles of Belgravia and Mayfair, where her husband was regarded as a “dear man” with High Church views and an inside knowledge of sporting tips.

It was to Katherine’s house that I always turned after my trips abroad, not to renew that boyish love-affair of mine which had belonged to the time of my growing-pains, but sure of finding the same understanding friendship, sympathy of ideas, and warmth of heart which seemed to me the ideal of womanhood. It is impossible to convey this character of Katherine to those who did not know her. She was not clever or brilliant, only wise and kind. She was not beautiful, though I have called her so, but she had the effect of beauty because of some spiritual touch. She did not talk much, or vivaciously, or possess any unusual talents, except, perhaps, her musical gift, but she was wonderfully good company, even when she was almost silent through a long evening, letting other people do the talking—me, especially, I’m afraid!—while she did her needlework, listening with a smile about her lips, or putting down her work for a moment with a quick sigh at some tale of tragedy, or shaking her head with a look of incredulity or disagreement or amusement at some wild flight of fancy by one of the hot-heads in the room, of whom there was generally one, and sometimes half a dozen.

It was curious how most people there—they used to drop in after coffee in the evenings—always turned to her for a kind of judicial verdict after their argument.

“Don’t you agree with me, Mrs. Detloff?”

They were disappointed when she laughed a little and said, “Not altogether,” or “Haven’t you gone rather too far?” Seldom more than that, and never any of that eloquence which used to play round that shabby old room in the Cromwell Road, when literary men and women, scientists, Socialists, and young students—Detloff’s young men from King’s College—used to gather and give tongue about the ethics of life, political ideals, social progress. They were all of the Liberal school of thought—my father would have been horrified to hear their democratic hopes—and they all looked forward to some new Utopia—they never agreed on the particular brand—when wars would be eliminated by international law, when crime would be treated as disease and disease as a crime, and when the common people of the world would work less for more wages, in a beautiful sanitary state.

Those people I met at Katherine’s house were typical, I think, of the wave of sentimental Liberalism which followed the Boer War, with its blunders and disasters. Most of them were ashamed of the loud-mouthed vulgarities which had called to their patriotism. They had been shocked by the inefficiency which had postponed victory so long. There was a strong tide of international idealism flowing against the military Imperialism of “Joe” Chamberlain and his school. King Edward had come to the throne, and with the passing of Queen Victoria, and all that she stood for, in social life—a rather dreadful smugness—we had a sense of liberation. People talked more frankly, thought more fearlessly. Women began to assert their intellectual equality with men. There was among most of these people a touching faith in the coming triumphs of knowledge and science which would give humanity a “leg up” on the plane of civilisation. Things were moving faster, they thought. Taxis had taken the place of hansom cabs, the old horse-bus was being displaced by the motor-omnibus, there was some talk of flying. And men’s minds seemed to be moving quicker, more audaciously.

H. G. Wells represented as well as led the common mind, analysing, looking forward, scrapping old ideas, leaping ahead to new discoveries which would make life easier and cleaner, and more beautiful for the common folk. The Boer War was becoming a stale old memory. The common sense of civilisation was going to make another war impossible. We were going to get on with the victories of peace.

So we talked and talked, and Serge Detloff, with his fine humanity, his love of liberty, his intellectual enthusiasm, his insatiable passion for conversation, never wanted to go to bed.

Sometimes I used to watch Katherine while all this jawbation was in progress, and wondered whether she was happy in this queer marriage or hers.

Evesham had come back wounded from South Africa, and was now Lord Evesham, and something in the War Office—marked out for a brilliant career, according to accounts I heard. He had married a daughter of an Irish peer, and their wedding had made a great fuss in the papers. Katherine never met him, so Paul told me, and their lives lay apart, it seemed. Did she ever think about him, I wondered, or remember those words which she had once spoken to me in an unguarded moment: “I ought to have married Hugh. We were meant for each other”? No just as my boyish passion had died out, all its anguish no more than a sentimental memory at which I could smile, so I was sure Katherine could think of Hugh Evesham without a heartbeat or any sense of fear. It is the one consolation of passing time that passion passes also, and leaves one in peace. At least, with most of us.

Katherine had one source of happiness which made life good to her—that boy of hers, young Michael, who grew so fast between the times I saw him that I was always startled. A good-looking lad, with a shock of fair hair, a broad forehead like Detloff’s, and Katherine’s eyes, with their humour in him, except when he had queer fits of moodiness and temper which worried his mother a good deal, though they didn’t last long. It was a pretty picture to see him playing the violin to her accompaniment, though he was occasionally inclined to break his fiddle and tear up his music when he found a passage too difficult and came a cropper over it, much to the amusement of his uncle Paul, who saw the Slav in him.

“Scratch a Russian and find a Tartar. What did I tell you, Kitty?”

Paul had changed, too, a good deal since his medical student days—and time enough, too, as the father of a boy and girl almost as old as Michael. He was less rowdy—except when his old hilarity burst out at odd times—more thoughtful, sometimes rather melancholy and self-absorbed. His marriage with my sister Clare was not altogether a success, I fancied, and Katherine was sure of it, and sorry for both of them. But he liked dropping in at Detloff’s house for those conversational evenings after supper, and was always rather revolutionary and violent in his ideas, though I think he often exaggerated for the sake of an intellectual lark, and to set other people’s tongues wagging. I remember one evening when he had an argument with Detloff, though it was only typical of the usual kind of talk. I suppose it comes back to me because of things that happened later, showing that Katherine’s husband had an intuition of dangers which to the rest of us were unguessed and unimaginable.

Paul talked largely about the possibilities of science, and let his imagination rip. It would soon be possible, he said, for people to communicate with each other across space by means of electrical vibrations acting on the ether—no wires or anything of that sort, like the telephone and telegraph, but wireless waves caught up by sensitive receivers. Distance wouldn’t count. Berlin would talk to London, Moscow to Paris, ... perhaps England to Mars! Flying, of course, would soon be an accomplished fact. We could go to breakfast in Paris, lunch at Monte Carlo, and get back home in time for tea. Men would live to a hundred or more—old Mechnikov was on the right line. Civilisation would change more in the next fifty years than in three thousand years before. Nations would be brought closer together, frontiers would be abolished, and there would be a common language and universal law.

Detloff listened to all this with a glint of amusement in his deep-set eyes. He liked to hear Paul letting himself go on electrons, and atomic energy, and scientific prophecies. But that night he challenged these ideas.

“I’m not so sure about all this science of yours, Paul. Isn’t it leaving God and the devil out of account?”

“Why not?” asked Paul blandly. “I thought we were talking in terms of science.”

“I’m not doubting the scientific possibilities,” said Detloff. “It’s quite likely that men will soon be flying. But suppose they use that new power for destructive purposes? A war in the air, as Wells pictures? Not a pleasant thought, that! Is humanity sufficiently advanced to make use of all these inventions? Are our ethics, the religion that is in us, keeping pace with our control of these mechanical forces?”

“Certainly,” said Paul, with simple confidence. “The human mind adjusts itself to every scrap of new knowledge. The younger generation of to-day, morally and intellectually, are streets ahead of their fathers and grandfathers.”

“I quite agree,” said young Michael, who was sitting on a low stool with his knees up to his chin and his hands clasped round them.

He flushed and frowned at the laughter which greeted this comment.

“Be careful, Paul!” said Katherine, pulling her boy’s hair a little, so that he squealed. “Some pitchers have long ears, and it’s difficult already to maintain discipline.”

“Quite right too,” said Paul carelessly. “Discipline is death. Think of the discipline of our young days. Family prayers—church three times on Sunday—and the frightful platitudes of poor old Dad, trying to improve our minds at the breakfast-table. It’s a wonder we didn’t go to the dogs, as a natural protest against so much moral exercise.”

“That’s unfair!” said Katherine rather hotly. “Father was always liberal-minded. He did his best to make us happy, as he did his best to help the world, by tolerance and example.”

It was a year since Canon Lambert had dropped asleep one day in his little room in Romilly Hall, and failed to wake up again when one of the old charladies came to light his fire. The whole of the East End had turned out to see his funeral pass.

“I’ve unhappy recollections of early youth,” said Paul, “before the poor old governor saw the light, and broadened out a little.”

Detloff came back to the argument.

“Aren’t we rather too sure of ourselves about all this scientific progress? Sometimes I have a terrible feeling that underneath this crust of civilization of Europe there’s a molten lava of human passion, on the move, pressing upwards, ready to break out. This European peace, our sense of security—isn’t it rather flimsy? Do the nations love each other any more? Aren’t they beginning to pile up armaments for some frightful challenge of strength in which the common folk, duped by their governments as usual, will be driven against each other again into the shambles? All these standing armies—this manufacture of great guns——”

“Elaborately old-fashioned!” said Paul. “Grotesquely out of date! The make-believe of little kings and emperors who don’t know that history is leaving them behind, and making their toy soldiers as ridiculous as knights in armour or men with bows and arrows.”

Detloff shook his head and gave a heavy sigh.

“The powers of evil are still strong. I’m beginning to think that human nature isn’t changing as fast as I once hoped. We little intellectuals here, we idealists and visionaries—we dreamers!—forget the terrible forces of ignorance and hatred and tyranny in the world outside these cosy rooms in London. Look at my own people—a nation of illiterate peasants ruled by a weak, well-meaning man under a system of mediæval tyranny—tyranny of the mind and soul—with the Secret Police and the Cossack knout. Look at a new nation, taking a foremost place in civilisation, the best educated, the most virile, the most highly organised, the most industrious—and the most dangerous. I mean Germany.”

“Why dangerous?” asked Paul. “As scientists they lead the world—at least, in applied science, and scholarship.”

“That’s my point,” said Detloff quietly. “In spite of all their science and social organisation—marvellous!—they are dominated by ideas which may end all our dreams. That Kaiser of theirs, with his shining armour and his mailed fist—I read his speeches with a sense of calamity.”

“A poseur,” said Paul. “A mountebank with some talent. Look at all the Socialists in Germany. Do you think they’re going to play up to all that rhetoric, his ‘me and God’ sort of talk?”

Detloff nursed his knees with his long, delicate hands.

“I’ve been in Germany lately,” he said. “I had a talk with Edward Bernstein, the great Socialist leader and my old friend. He rather disheartened me. He’s not quite sure that the forces of Liberal democracy are strong enough to resist other forces at work among his people—that superman philosophy of Nietzsche, the cult of brutality in the Universities, a sense among the whole German people that God has destined them to be the greatest power in the world, now that England, as they think, is growing old and weak and unable to hold what she has grabbed.”

Paul laughed light-heartedly.

“You’ve been eating lobster, Prince. You’re looking at things with bilious eyes. A touch of liver!”

“A sense of fear,” said Detloff, “growing stronger.”

“That’s it!” answered Paul, in his breezy, dogmatic way. “Humanity must throw off fear before it gets liberated from the old darkness of the mind. We’re hampered and imprisoned by old fears, due to heredity, superstition, and ignorance. Thank God we’re getting free from some of that. Look at the pluck of modern women. They decline to be the slaves of crinolines or the playthings of men. They’re coming out to take their place in the world. And so it is with the human mind everywhere. It’s facing up to realities. It’s going to put things straight fearlessly.”

“It’s nice to think so, in this cheerful room,” said Detloff. “Anyhow, I believe that things are going to happen before long in Russia. For good or evil. A new bid for Liberty.”

His heart was still in Russia, in spite of his long exile. His house was still the sanctuary of Russian exiles. One of them took refuge with him at this time, and it was a queer little episode in Katherine’s life which seemed to have no special significance at the time, though afterwards I saw that it was a kind of hint of future history in which she was caught like a bird in a net.