OSWALD’S VALEDICTION

Joan and Peter by H. G. Wells, is part of the HackerNoon Books Series. You can jump to any chapter in this book here. OSWALD’S VALEDICTION

OSWALD’S VALEDICTION

§ 1

It was the third of April in 1918, the Wednesday after Easter, and the war had now lasted three years and eight months. It had become the aching habit of the whole world. Throughout the winter it had been for the most part a great and terrible boredom, but now a phase of acute anxiety was beginning. The “Kaiser’s Battle” was raging in France; news came through sparingly; but it was known that General Gough had lost tens of thousands of prisoners, hundreds of guns, and vast stores of ammunition and railway material. It was rumoured that he had committed suicide. But the standards of Tory England differ from those of Japan. Through ten sanguinary days, in a vaster Inkerman, the common men of Britain, reinforced by the French, had fought and died to restore the imperilled line. It was by no means certain yet that they had succeeded. It seemed possible that the French and British armies would be broken apart, and Amiens and Paris lost. Oswald’s mind was still dark with apprehension.

The particular anxieties of this crisis accentuated the general worry and inconveniences of the time, and deepened Oswald’s conviction of an incredible incompetence in both the political and military leadership of his country. In spite of every reason he had to the contrary, he had continued hitherto to hope for some bright dramatic change in the course of events; he had experienced a continually recurring disappointment with each morning’s paper. His intelligence told him that all the inefficiency, the confusion, the cheap and bad government by press and intrigue, were the necessary and inevitable consequences of a neglect of higher education for the past fifty years; these defects were now in 545the nature of things, almost as much as the bleakness of an English February or the fogs of a London November, but his English temperament had refused hitherto to accept the decision of his intelligence. Now for the first time he could see the possibility of an ultimate failure in the war. To this low level of achievement, he perceived, a steadfast contempt for thought and science and organization had brought Britain; at this low level Britain had now to struggle through the war, blundering, talking, and thinking confusedly, suffering enormously—albeit so sound at heart. It was a humiliating realization. At any rate she could still hope to struggle through; the hard-won elementary education of the common people, the stout heart and sense of the common people, saved her gentlefolk from the fate of their brother inefficients in Russia. But every day he fretted afresh at the costly and toilsome continuance of an effort that a little more courage and wisdom in high places on the allied side, a little more knowledge and clear thinking, might have brought to an entirely satisfactory close in 1917.

For a man of his age, wounded, disappointed, and a chronic invalid, there was considerable affliction in the steadily increasing hardships of the Fourth Year. A number of petty deprivations at which a healthy man might have scoffed, intensified his physical discomfort. There had been a complete restriction of his supply of petrol, the automobile now hung in its shed with its tyres removed, and the railway service to London had been greatly reduced. He could not get up to London now to consult books or vary his moods without a slow and crowded and fatiguing journey; he was more and more confined to Pelham Ford. He had been used to read and work late into the night, but now his home was darkened in the evening and very cheerless; there was no carbide for the acetylene installation, and a need for economy in paraffin. For a time he had been out of coal, and unable to get much wood because of local difficulties about cartage, and for some weeks he had had to sit in his overcoat and read and write by candlelight. Now, however, that distress had been relieved by the belated delivery of a truckload of coal. And another matter that may seem trivial in history, was by no means trivial in relation to his moods. In the 546spring of 1918 the food supply of Great Britain was at its lowest point. Lord Rhondda was saving the situation at the eleventh hour. The rationing of meat had affected Oswald’s health disagreeably. He had long ago acquired the habit of living upon chops and cutlets and suchlike concentrated nourishment, and he found it difficult to adapt himself now to the bulky insipidity of a diet that was, for a time, almost entirely vegetarian. For even fish travels by long routes to Hertfordshire villages. The frequent air raids of that winter were also an added nervous irritation. In the preceding years of the war there had been occasional Zeppelin raids, the Zeppelins had been audible at Pelham Ford on several occasions and once Hertford had suffered from their bombs; but those expeditions had ended at last in a series of disasters to the invaders, and they had never involved the uproar and tension of the Gotha raids that began in the latter half of 1917. These latter raids had to be met by an immense barrage of anti-aircraft guns round London, a barrage which rattled every window at Pelham Ford, lit the sky with star shells, and continued intermittently sometimes for four or five hours. Oswald would lie awake throughout that thudding conflict, watching the distant star shells and searchlights through the black tree boughs outside his open window, and meditating drearily upon the manifest insanity of mankind….

He was now walking up and down his lawn, waiting until it should be time to start for the station with Joan to meet Peter.

For Peter, convalescent again and no longer fit for any form of active service—he was lamed now as well as winged—was to take up a minor administrative post next week at Adastral House, and he was coming down for a few days at Pelham Ford before carrying his wife off for good to a little service flat they had found in an adapted house in the Avenue Road. They had decided not to live at The Ingle-Nook, although Arthur had built it to become Peter’s home, but to continue the tenancy of Aunts Phyllis and Phœbe. They did not want to disturb those two ladies, whose nervous systems, by no means stable at the best of times, were now in a very shaken condition. Aunt Phyllis was kept busy restraining 547Aunt Phœbe from inflicting lengthy but obscure prophetic messages upon most of the prominent people of the time. To these daily activities Aunt Phœbe added an increasing habit of sleep-walking that broke the nightly peace of Aunt Phyllis. She would wander through the moonlit living rooms gesticulating strangely, and uttering such phrases as “Blood! Blood! Seas of blood! The multitudinous seas incarnadine”; or “Murder most foul!”

She had a fixed idea that it was her business to seek out the Kaiser and either scold him or kill him—or perhaps do both. She held that it was the duty of women to assassinate. Men might fight battles, it was their stupid way; but surely women were capable of directer things. If some woman were to kill any man who declared war directly he declared war, there would be a speedy end to war. She could not, she said, understand the inactivity of German wives and mothers. She would spend hours over her old school German grammar, with a view to writing an “Open Letter to German Womankind.” But her naturally rich and very allusive prose was ill adapted to that sort of translation.

Many over-sensitive people were suffering more or less as Aunt Phœbe was suffering—from a sense of cruelty, wickedness, and disaster that staggered their minds. They had lived securely in a secure world; they could not readjust. Even for so sane a mind as Oswald’s, hampered as it was by the new poison his recent wound had brought into his blood, readjustment was difficult. He suffered greatly from insomnia, and from a haunting apprehension of misfortunes. His damaged knee would give him bouts of acute distress. Sometimes it would seem to be well and he would forget it. Then it would become painfully lame by day and a neuralgic pain at night. His moods seemed always exaggerated now; either he was too angry or too sorrowful or too hopeful. Sometimes he experienced phases of blank stupidity, when his mind became unaccountably sluggish and clumsy….

Joan was indoors now packing up a boxful of books that were to go with her to the new home.

He was feeling acutely—more acutely than he wanted to feel—that his guardianship was at an end. Joan, who had been the mistress of his house, and the voice that sang in it, 548the pretty plant that grew in it, was going now—to return, perhaps, sometimes as a visitor—but never more to be a part of it; never more to be its habitual presence. Peter, too, was severing the rope, a long rope it had seemed at times during the last three years, that had tethered him to Pelham Ford….

Oswald did not want to think now of his coming loneliness. What he wanted to think about was the necessity of rounding off their relationship properly, of ending his educational task with some sort of account rendered. He felt he owed it to these young people and to himself to tell them of his aims and of what he considered the whole of this business of education amounted to. He had to explain what had helped and what had prevented him. “A Valediction,” he said. “A Valediction.” But he could not plan out what he had to say that morning. He could not arrange his heads, and all the while that he tried to fix his thoughts upon these topics, he was filled with uncontrollable self-pity for the solitude ahead of him.

He was ashamed at these personal distresses that he could not control. He disliked himself for their quality. He did not like to think he was thinking the thoughts in his mind. He walked up and down the lawn for a time like a man who is being pestered by uncongenial solicitations.

In spite of his intense affection for both of them, he was feeling a real jealousy of the happiness of these two young lovers. He hated the thought of losing Joan much more than he hated the loss of Peter. Once upon a time he had loved Peter far more than Joan, but by imperceptible degrees his affection had turned over to her. In these war years he and she had been very much together. For a time he had been—it was grotesque, but true—actually in love with her. He had let himself dream—. It was preposterous to think of it. A moonlight night had made his brain swim…. At any rate, thank Heaven! she had never had a suspicion….

She’d come now as a visitor—perhaps quite often. He wasn’t going to lose his Joan altogether. But each time she would come changed, rather less his Joan and rather more a new Joan—Peter’s Joan….

549Some day they’d have children, these two. Joan would sit over her child and smile down at it. He knew exactly how she would smile. And at the thought of that smile Joan gave place to Dolly. Out of the past there jumped upon him the memory of Peter bubbling in a cradle on the sunny verandah of The Ingle-Nook, and how he had remarked that the very sunshine seemed made for this fortunate young man.

“It was made for him,” Dolly had said, with that faintly mischievous smile of hers.

How far off that seemed now, and how vivid still! He could remember Dolly’s shadow on the rough-cast wall, and the very things he had said in reply. He had talked like a fool about the wonderful future of Peter—and of the world. How long was that ago? Five-and-twenty years? (Yes, Peter would be five-and-twenty in June.) How safe and secure the European world had seemed then! It seemed to be loitering, lazily and basely indeed, but certainly, towards a sort of materialist’s millennium. And what a vast sham its security had been! He had called Peter the “Heir of the Ages.” And the Heritage of the Ages had been preparing even then to take Peter away from the work he had chosen and from all the sunshine and leisure of his life and to splinter his shoulder-blade, smash his wrist, snap his leg-bones with machine-gun bullets, and fling him aside, a hobbling, stiff, broken young man to limp through the rest of life….

§ 2

That was what his mind had to lay hold of, that was what he had to talk about, this process that had held out such fair hopes for Peter and had in the end crippled him and come near to killing him and wasting him altogether. He had to talk of that, of an enormous collapse and breach of faith with the young. The world which had seemed to be the glowing promise of an unprecedented education and upbringing for Peter and his generation, the world that had been, so to speak, joint guardian with himself, had defaulted. This war was an outrage by the senior things in the world 550upon all the hope of the future; it was the parent sending his sons through the fires to Moloch, it was the guardian gone mad, it was the lapse of all educational responsibility.

He had to keep his grasp upon that idea. By holding to that he could get away from his morbidly intense wish to be personal and intimate with these two. He loved them and they loved him, but what he wanted to say was something quite beyond that.

What he had to talk about was Education, and Education alone. He had to point out to them that their own education had been truncated, was rough ended and partial. He had to explain why that was so. And he had to show that all this vast disaster to the world was no more and no less than an educational failure. The churches and teachers and political forms had been insufficient and wrong; they had failed to establish ideas strong and complete enough and right enough to hold the wills of men. Necessarily he had to make a dissertation upon the war. To talk of life now was to talk of the war. The war now was human life. It had eaten up all free and independent living.

The war was an educational breakdown, that was his point; and in education lay whatever hope there was for mankind. He had to say that to them, and he had to point out how that idea must determine the form of their lives. He had to show the political and social and moral conclusions involved in it. And he had to say what he wanted to say in a large manner. He had to keep his temper while he said it.

Oswald, limping slowly up and down his lawn in the April sunshine, with a gnawing pain at his knee, had to underline, as it were, that last proviso in his thoughts. That was the extreme difficulty of these urgent and tragic times. The world was in a phase of intense, but swift, tumultuous, and distracting tragedy. The millions were not suffering and dying in stateliness and splendour but in a vast uproar, amidst mud, confusion, bickering, and incoherence indescribable. While it was manifest that only great thinking, only very clear and deliberate thinking, could give even the forms of action that would arrest the conflagration, it was nevertheless almost impossible for any one anywhere to think clearly and 551deliberately, so universal and various were the compulsions, confusions, and distresses of the time. And even the effect to see and state the issue largely, fevered Oswald’s brain. He grew angry with the multitudinous things that robbed him of his serenity.

“Education,” he said, as if he called for help; “education.”

And then, collapsing into wrath: “A land of uneducated blockheads!”

No! It was not one of his good mornings. In a little while his steps had quickened and his face had flushed. His hands clenched in his pockets. “A universal dulness of mind,” he whispered. “Obstinacy…. Inadaptability…. Unintelligent opposition.”

Broad generalizations slipped out of his mind. He began to turn over one disastrous instance after another of the shortness of mental range, the unimaginative stupidity, the baseness and tortuousness of method, the dull suspicions, class jealousies, and foolish conceits that had crippled Britain through three and a half bitter years. With a vast fleet, with enormous armies, with limitless wealth, with the loyal enthusiasm behind them of a united people and with great allies, British admirals and generals had never once achieved any great or brilliant success, British statesmen had never once grasped and held the fluctuating situation. One huge disappointment had followed another; now at Gallipoli, now at Kut, now in the air and now beneath the seas, the British had seen their strength ill applied and their fair hopes of victory waste away. No Nelson had arisen to save the country, no Wellington; no Nelson nor Wellington could have arisen; the country had not even found an alternative to Mr. Lloyd George. In military and naval as in social and political affairs the Anglican ideal had been—to blockade. On sea and land, as in Ireland, as in India, Anglicanism was not leading but obstruction. Throughout 1917 the Allied armies upon the Western front had predominated over the German as greatly as the British fleet had predominated at sea, and the result on either element had been stagnation. The cavalry coterie who ruled upon land had demonstrated triumphantly their incapacity 552to seize even so great an opportunity as the surprise of the tanks afforded them; the Admiralty had left the Baltic to the Germans until, after the loss of Riga, poor Kerensky’s staggering government had collapsed. British diplomacy had completed what British naval quiescence began; in Russia as in Greece it had existed only to blunder; never had a just cause been so mishandled; and before the end of 1917 the Russian debacle had been achieved and the German armies, reinforced by the troops the Russian failure had released, began to concentrate for this last great effort that was now in progress in the west. Like many another anxious and distressed Englishman during those darker days of the German spring offensive in 1918, Oswald went about clinging to one comfort: “Our men are tough stuff. Our men at any rate will stick it.”

In Oswald’s mind there rankled a number of special cases which he called his “sores.” To think of them made him angry and desperate, and yet he could scarcely ever think of education without reviving the irritation of these particular instances. They were his foreground; they blocked his vistas, and got between him and the general prospect of the world. For instance, there had been a failure to supply mosquito curtains in the East African hospitals, and a number of slightly wounded men had contracted fever and died. This fact had linked on to the rejection of the services he had offered at the outset of the war, and became a festering centre in his memory. Those mosquito curtains blew into every discussion. Moreover there had been, he believed, much delay and inefficiency in the use of African native labour in France, and a lack of proper organization for the special needs of the sick and injured among these tropic-bred men. And a shipload had been sunk in a collision off the Isle of Wight. He had got an irrational persuasion into his head that this collision could have been prevented. After his wound had driven him back to Pelham Ford he would limp about the garden thinking of his “boys” shivering in the wet of a French winter and dying on straw in cold cattle trucks, or struggling and drowning in the grey channel water, and he would fret and swear. “Hugger mugger,” he would say, “hugger mugger! No care. No foresight. 553No proper grasp of the problem. And so death and torment for the men.”

While still so painful and feverish he had developed a new distress for himself by taking up the advocacy of certain novelties and devices that he became more and more convinced were of vital importance upon the Western front. He entangled himself in correspondence, interviews, committees, and complicated quarrels in connection with these ideas…. He would prowl about his garden, a baffled man, trying to invent some way of breaking through the system of entanglements that held back British inventiveness from the service of Great Britain. More and more clearly did his reason assure him that no sudden blow can set aside the deep-rooted traditions, the careless, aimless education of a negligent century, but none the less he raged at individuals, at ministries, at coteries and classes.

His peculiar objection to the heads of the regular army, for example, was unjust, for much the same unimaginative resistance was evident in every branch of the public activities of Great Britain. Already in 1915 the very halfpenny journalists were pointing out the necessity of a great air offensive for the allies, were showing that in the matter of the possible supply of good air fighters the Germans were altogether inferior to their antagonists and that consequently they would be more and more at a disadvantage in the air as the air warfare was pressed. But the British mind was trained, so far that is as one can speak of it as being trained at all, to dread “over-pressure.” The western allies having won a certain ascendancy in the air in 1916 became so self-satisfied that the Germans, in spite of their disadvantages, were able to recover a kind of equality in 1917, and in the spring of 1918 the British, with their leeway recovered, were going easily in matters aerial, and the opinion that a great air offensive might yet end the war was regarded as the sign of a froward and revolutionary spirit.

The sea war had a parallel history. Long before 1914 Dr. Conan Doyle had written a story to illustrate the dangers of an unrestricted submarine attack, but no precaution whatever against such a possibility seemed to have been undertaken by the British Admiralty before the war at all; Great 554Britain was practically destitute of sea mines in the October of 1914, and even in the spring of 1918, after more than a year and a half of hostile submarine activity, after the British had lost millions of tons of shipping, after the people were on short commons and becoming very anxious about rations, the really very narrow channel of the North Sea—rarely is it more than three hundred miles wide—which was the only way out the Germans possessed, was still unfenced against the coming and going of these most vulnerable pests.

It is hard not to blame individual men and groups when the affairs of a nation go badly. It is so much easier to change men than systems. The former satisfies every instinct in the fierce, suspicious hearts of men, the latter demands the bleakest of intellectual efforts. The former justifies the healthy, wholesome relief of rioting; the latter necessitates self-control. The country was at sixes and sevens because its education by school and college, by book and speech and newspaper, was confused and superficial and incomplete, and its education was confused and superficial and incomplete because its institutions were a patched-up system of traditions, compromises, and interests, devoid of any clear and single guiding idea of a national purpose. The only wrongs that really matter to mankind are the undramatic general wrongs; but the only wrongs that appeal to the uneducated imagination are individual wrongs. It is so much more congenial to the ape in us to say that if Mr. Asquith hadn’t been lazy or Mr. Lloyd George disingenuous——! Then out with the halter—and don’t bother about yourself. As though the worst of individuals can be anything more than the indicating pustule of a systemic malaise. For his own part Oswald was always reviling schoolmasters, as though they, alone among men, had the power to rise triumphant over all their circumstances—and wouldn’t. He had long since forgotten Mr. Mackinder’s apology.

He limped and fretted to and fro across the lawn in his struggle to get out of his jungle of wrathful thoughts, about drowned negroes and rejected inventions, and about the Baltic failure and about Gough of the Curragh and St. Quentin, to general and permanent things.

“Education,” he said aloud, struggling against his obsessions. 555“Education! I have to tell them what it ought to be, how it is more or less the task of every man, how it can unify the world, how it can save mankind….”

And then after a little pause, with an apparent complete irrelevance, “Damn Aunt Charlotte!”

§ 4

Nowadays quite little things would suddenly assume a tremendous and devastating importance to Oswald. In his pocket, not folded but crumpled up, was an insulting letter from Lady Charlotte Sydenham, and the thought of it was rankling bitterly in his mind.

The days were long past when he could think of the old lady as of something antediluvian in quality, a queer ungainly megatherium floundering about in a new age from which her kind would presently vanish altogether. He was beginning to doubt more and more about her imminent disappearance. She had greater powers of survival than he had supposed; he was beginning to think that she might outlive him; there was much more of her in England than he had ever suspected. All through the war she, or a voice indistinguishable from hers, had bawled unchastened in the Morning Post; on many occasions he had seemed to see her hard blue eye and bristling whisker glaring at him through a kind of translucency in the sheets of The Times; once or twice in France he had recognized her, or something very like her, in red tabs and gilt lace, at G.H.Q. These were sick fancies no doubt; mere fantastic intimations of the stout resistances the Anglican culture could still offer before it loosened its cramping grip upon the future of England and the world, evidence rather of his own hypersensitized condition than of any perennial quality in her.

The old lady had played a valiant part in the early stages of the war. She had interested herself in the persecution of all Germans not related to royalty, who chanced to be in the country; and had even employed private detectives in one or two cases that had come under her notice. She had been forced most unjustly to defend a libel case 556brought by a butcher named Sterne, whom she had denounced as of German origin and a probable poisoner of the community, in the very laudable belief that his name was spelt Stern. She felt that his indubitable British ancestry and honesty only enhanced the deception and made the whole thing more alarming, but the jury, being no doubt tainted with pacifism, thought, or pretended to think, otherwise. She had had a reconciliation with her old antagonists the Pankhurst section of the suffragettes, and she had paid twenty annual subscriptions to their loyal and outspoken publication Britannia, directing twelve copies to be sent to suitable recipients—Oswald was one of the favoured ones—and herself receiving and blue-pencilling the remaining eight before despatching them to such public characters as she believed would be most beneficially cowed or instructed by the articles she had marked. She also subscribed liberally to the British Empire Union, an organization so patriotic that it extended its hostility to Russians, Americans, Irishmen, neutrals, President Wilson, the League of Nations, and similar infringements of the importance and dignity of Lady Charlotte and her kind. She remained at Chastlands, where she had laid in an ample store of provisions quite early in the war—two sacks of mouldy flour and a side of bacon in an advanced state of decomposition had been buried at night by Cashel—all through the Zeppelin raids; and she played a prominent rather than a pacifying part in the Red Cross politics of that part of Surrey. She induced several rich Jewesses of Swiss, Dutch, German or Austrian origin to relieve the movement of their names and, what was still better, of the frequently quite offensively large subscriptions with which they overshadowed those who had the right to lead in such matters. She lectured also in the National Economy campaign on several occasions—for like most thoughtful women of her class and type, she was deeply shocked by the stories she had heard of extravagance among our over-paid munition workers. After a time the extraordinary meanness of the authorities in restricting her petrol obliged her in self-respect to throw up this branch of her public work. She was in London during one of the early Gotha raids, but she conceived such a disgust at the cowardice of the lower 557classes on this occasion that she left town the next day and would not return thither.

The increasing scarcity of petrol and the onset of food rationing, which threatened to spread all over England, drove her to Ulster—in spite of the submarine danger that might have deterred a less stout-hearted woman. She took a small furnished house in a congenial district, and found herself one of a little circle of ultra-patriotic refugees, driven like herself from England by un-English restrictions upon the nourishment of the upper classes and the spread of the pacifist tendencies of Lord Lansdowne. “If the cowards must make peace,” said Lady Charlotte, “at least give me leave to be out of it.”

Considering everything, Ulster was at that time as comfortably and honourably out of the war as any part of the world, and all that seemed needed to keep it safely out to the end was a little tactful firmness in the Dublin Convention. There was plenty of everything in the loyal province at that time—men, meat, butter, Dublin stout, and self-righteousness; and Lady Charlotte expanded again like a flower in the sun. She reverted to driving in a carriage; it was nice to sit once more behind a stout able-bodied coachman with a cockade, with a perfect excuse for neutrality, and she still did her best for old England from eleven to one and often from five to six by writing letters and dabbling in organization. Oswald she kept in mind continually. Almost daily he would get newspaper cuttings from her detailing Sinn Fein outrages, or blue-marked leading articles agitating for a larger share of the munition industries for Belfast, or good hot stuff, deeply underlined, from the speeches of Sir Edward Carson. One dastardly Sinn Feiner, Oswald learnt, had even starved himself to death in gaol, a most unnatural offence to Lady Charlotte. She warmed up tremendously over the insidious attempts of the Prime Minister and a section of the press to get all the armies in France and Italy under one supreme generalissimo and end the dislocated muddling that had so long prolonged the war. It was a change that might have involved the replacement of regular generals by competent ones, and it imperilled everything that was most dear to the old lady’s heart. 558It was “an insult to the King’s uniform,” she wrote. “A revolution. I knew that this sort of thing would begin if we let those Americans come in. We ought not to have let them come in. What good are they to us? What can they know of war? A crowd of ignorant republican renegades! British generals to be criticized and their prospects injured by French Roman Catholics and Atheists and chewing, expectorating Yankees and every sort of low foreigner. What is the world coming to? Sir Douglas Haig has been exactly where he is for two years. Surely he knows the ground better than any one else can possibly do.”

Once the theme of Lady Charlotte got loose in Oswald’s poor old brain, it began a special worry of its own. He found his mind struggling with assertions and arguments. As this involved trying to remember exactly what she had said in this letter of hers, and as it was in his pocket, he presently chose the lesser of two evils and took it out to read over:—

“I suppose you have read in the papers what is happening in Clare. The people are ploughing up grass-land. It is as bad as that man Prothero. They raid gentlemen’s houses to seize arms; they resist the police. That man Devil-era—so I must call him—speaks openly of a republic. Devil-era and Devil-in; is it a coincidence merely? All this comes of our ill-timed leniency after the Dublin rebellion. When will England learn the lesson Cromwell taught her? He was a wicked man, he made one great mistake for which he is no doubt answering to his Maker throughout all eternity, but he certainly did know how to manage these Irish. If he could come back now he would be on our side. He would have had his lesson. Your Bolshevik friends go on murdering and cutting throats, I see, like true Republicans. Happily the White Guards seem getting the upper hand in Finland. In the end I suppose we shall be driven to a peace with the Huns as the worst of two evils. If we do, it will only be your Bolsheviks and pacifists and strikers and Bolos who will be to blame.

“The whining and cowardice of the East Enders disgusts me more and more. You read, I suppose, the account of the disgraceful panic during the air raid the other day in the 559East End, due entirely to foreigners of military age, mostly, no doubt, your Russian Bolsheviks. I am well away from such a rabble. I suffer from rheumatism here. I know it is rheumatism; what you say about gout is nonsense. In spite of its loyalty Ulster is damp. I pine more and more for the sun and warmth of Italy. Unwin must needs make herself very tiresome and peevish nowadays. These are not cheerful times for me. But one must do one’s bit for one’s country, I suppose, unworthy though it be.

“So Mr. Peter is back in England again wounded after his flying about in the air. I suppose he is tasting the delights of matrimony, such as they are! What an affair! Something told me long ago that it would happen. I tried to separate them. My instincts warned me, and my instincts were right. Breed is breed, and the servant strain came out in her. You can’t say I didn’t warn you. Why you let them marry I cannot imagine!!! I am sure the young lady could have dispensed with that ceremony!!!! I still think at times of that queer scene I passed on the road when I came to Pelham Ford that Christmas. A second string,—no doubt of it. But Peter was her great chance, of course, thanks to your folly. Well, let us hope that in the modern way they won’t have any children, for nothing is more certain than that these inter-breeding marriages are most harmful, and whether we like it or not you have to remember they are first cousins, if not in the sight of the law at any rate in the sight of God, which is what matters in this respect. Mr. Grimes, who has studied these things in his leisure time, tells me that there is a very great probability indeed that any child will be blind or malformed or consumptive, let us hope the latter, if not actually still-born, which, of course, would be the best thing that could possibly happen….”

§ 5

At this point Oswald became aware of Joan coming out of the house towards him.

He looked at his watch. “Much too early yet, Joan,” he said.

“Yes, but I want to be meeting him,” said Mrs. Joan….

560So they walked down to the station and waited for a long time on the platform. And Joan said very little to Oswald because she was musing pleasantly.

When the train came in neither Joan nor Peter took much notice of Oswald after the first greeting. I do not see what else he could have expected; they were deeply in love and they had been apart for a couple of weeks, they were excited by each other and engrossed in each other. Oswald walked beside them up the road—apart. “I’ve got some work,” he said abruptly in the hall. “See you at lunch,” and went into his study and shut the door upon them, absurdly disappointed.

§ 6

Peter came on Wednesday. It was not until Friday that Oswald found an opportunity to deliver his valediction. But he had rehearsed it, or rather he had been rehearsing experimental fragments of it for most of the night before. On Thursday night the cloudy malaise of his mind broke and cleared. Things fell into their proper places in his thoughts, and he could feel that his ideas were no longer distorted and confused. The valediction appeared, an ordered discourse. If only he could hold out through a long talk he felt he would be able to make himself plain to them….

He lay in the darkness putting together phrase after phrase, sentence after sentence, developing a long and elaborate argument, dipping down into parentheses, throwing off footnotes, resuming his text. For the most part Joan and Peter remained silent hearers of this discourse; now his ratiocination glowed so brightly that they were almost forgotten, now they came into the discussion, they assisted, they said helpful and understanding things, they raised simple and obvious objections that were beautifully overcome.

“What is education up to?” he would begin. “What is education?”

Then came a sentence that he repeated in the stillness of his mind quite a number of times. “Consider this beast 561we are, this thing man!” He did not reckon with Peter’s tendency to prompt replies.

He would begin in the broadest, most elementary way. “Consider this beast we are, this thing man!” so he framed his opening: “a creature restlessly experimental, mischievous and destructive, as sexual as a monkey, and with no really strong social instincts, no such tolerance of his fellows as a deer has, no such instinctive self-devotion as you find in a bee or an ant. A solitary animal, a selfish animal. And yet this creature has now made for itself such conditions that it must be social. Must be. Or destroy itself. Continually it invents fresh means by which man may get at man to injure him or help him. That is one view of the creature, Peter, from your biological end.” Here Peter was to nod, and remain attentively awaiting the next development. “And at the same time, there grows upon us all a sense of a common being and a common interest. Biologically separate, we unify spiritually. More and more do men feel, ’I am not for myself! There is something in me—that belongs to a greater being than myself—of which I am a part.’… I won’t philosophize. I won’t say which may be in the nature of cause and which of effect here. You can put what I have said in a dozen different ways. We may say, ’The individual must live in the species and find his happiness there’—that is—Biologese. Our language, Peter. Or we can quote, ’I am the True Vine and ye are the Branches.’” Oswald’s mind rested on that for a time. “That is not our language, Peter, but it is the same idea. Essentially it is the same idea. Or we can talk of the ’One and the Many.’ We can say we all live in the mercy of Allah, or if you are a liberal Jew that we are all a part of Israel. It seems to me that all these formulæ are so much spluttering and variation over one idea. Doesn’t it to you? Men can quarrel mortally even upon the question of how they shall say ’Brotherhood.’…” Here for a time Oswald’s mind paused.

He embarked upon a great and wonderful parenthesis upon religious intolerance in which at last he lost himself completely.

“I don’t see that men need fall out about religion,” was his main proposition.

562“There was a time when I was against all religions. I denounced priestcraft and superstition and so on…. That is past. That is past. I want peace in the world…. Men’s minds differ more about initial things than they do about final things. Some men think in images, others in words and abstract ideas—but yet the two sorts can think out the same practical conclusions. A lot of these chapels and churches only mean a difference in language…. Difference in dialect…. Often they don’t mean the same things, those religious people, by the same words, but often contrariwise they mean the same things by quite different words. The deaf man says the dawn is bright and red, and the blind man says it is a sound of birds. It is the same dawn. The same dawn…. One man says ’God’ and thinks of a person who is as much of a person as Joan is, and another says ’God’ and thinks of an idea more abstract than the square root of minus one. That’s a tangle in the primaries of thought and not a difference in practical intention. One can argue about such things for ever…. One can make a puzzle with a bit of wire that will bother and exasperate people for hours. Is it any wonder, then, if stating what is at the root of life bothers and exasperates people?…

“Personally, I should say now that all religions are right, and none of them very happy in the words and symbols they choose. And none of them are calm enough—not calm enough. Not peaceful enough. They are all floundering about with symbols and metaphors, and it is a pity they will not admit it…. Why will people never admit their intellectual limitations in these matters?… All the great religions have this in common, this idea in common; they profess to teach the universal brotherhood of man and the universal reign of justice. Why argue about phrases? Why not put it in this fashion?”…

For a long time Oswald argued about phrases before he could get back to the main thread of his argument….

“Men have to be unified. They are driven to seek Unity. And they are still with the individualized instincts of a savage…. See then what education always has to be! The process of taking this imperfectly social, jealous, deeply 563savage creature and socializing him. The development of education and the development of human societies are one and the same thing. Education makes the social man. So far as schooling goes, it is quite plainly that. You teach your solitary beast to read and write, you teach him to express himself by drawing, you teach him other languages perhaps, and something of history and the distribution of mankind. What is it all but making this creature who would naturally possess only the fierce, narrow sociability of a savage family in a cave, into a citizen in a greater community? That is how I see it. That primarily is what has been done to you. An uneducated man is a man who can talk to a few score familiar people with a few hundred words. You two can talk to a quarter of mankind. With the help of a little translation you can get to understandings with most of mankind…. As a child learns the accepted language and the accepted writing and the laws and rules of life it learns the community. Watching the education of you two has made me believe more and more in the idea that, over and above the enlargement of expression and understanding, education is the state explaining itself to and incorporating the will of the individual….

“Yes—but what state? What state? Now we come to it….”

Oswald began to sketch out a universal history. There is no limit to these intellectual enterprises of the small hours.

“All history is the record of an effort in man to form communities, an effort against resistance—against instinctive resistance. There seems no natural and proper limit to a human community. (That’s my great point, that. That is what I have to tell them.) That is the final teaching of History, Joan and Peter; the very quintessence of History; that limitlessness of the community. As soon as men get a community of any size organized, it begins forthwith to develop roads, wheels, writing, ship-building, and all manner of things which presently set a fresh growth growing again. Let that, too, go on. Presently comes steam, mechanical traction, telegraphy, the telephone, wireless, aeroplanes; and each means an extension of range, and each therefore demands a larger community…. There seems no limit to the 564growth of states. I remember, Peter, a talk we had; we agreed that this hackneyed analogy people draw between the life and death of animals and the life and death of states was bad and silly. It isn’t the same thing, Joan, at all. An animal, you see, has a limit of size; it develops no new organs for further growth when it has reached that limit, it breeds its successors, it ages naturally; when it dies, it dies for good and all and is cleared away. Exactly the reverse is true of a human community. Exactly? Yes, exactly. If it can develop its educational system steadily—note that—if it can keep up communications, a State can go on indefinitely, conquering, ousting, assimilating. Even an amoeba breaks up after growth, but a human community need not do so. And so far from breeding successors it kills them if it can—like Frazer’s priest—where was it?—Aricia? The priest of Diana. The priest of The Golden Bough….”

Oswald picked up his thread again after a long, half dreaming excursion in Frazer-land.

“It is just this limitlessness, this potential immortality of States that makes all the confusion and bloodshed of history. What is happening in the world today? What is the essence of it all? The communities of today are developing range, faster than ever they did: aeroplanes, guns, swifter ships, everywhere an increasing range of action. That is the most important fact to grasp about the modern world. It is the key fact in politics. From the first dawn of the human story you see man in a kind of a puzzled way—how shall I put it?—pursuing the boundary of his possible community. Which always recedes. Which recedes now faster than ever. Until it brings him to a fatal war and disaster. Over and over again it is the same story. If you had a coloured historical atlas of the world, the maps would be just a series of great dabs of empire, spreading, spreading—coming against resistances—collapsing. Each dab tries to devour the world and fails. There is no natural limit to a human community, no limit in time or space—except one.

“Genus Homo, species Sapiens, Mankind, that is the only limit.” (Peter, perhaps, might be led up to saying that.)…

“What has the history of education always been? A 565series of little teaching chaps trying to follow up and fix the fluctuating boundaries of communities”—an image came into Oswald’s head that pleased him and led him on—“like an insufficient supply of upholsterers trying to overtake and tack down a carpet that was blowing away in front of a gale. An insufficient supply of upholsterers…. And the carpet always growing as it blows. That’s good…. They were trying to fix something they hadn’t clearly defined. And you have a lot of them still hammering away at their tacks when the edge of the carpet has gone on far ahead…. That was really the state of education in England when I took you two young people in hand; the carpet was in the air and most of the schoolmasters, schoolmistresses, writers, teachers, journalists, and all who build up and confirm ideas were hammering in tacks where the carpet had been resting the day before yesterday…. But a lot were not even hammering. No. They just went easy. Yes, that is what I mean when I say that education was altogether at loose ends…. But Germany was different; Germany was teaching and teaching in schools, colleges, press, everywhere, this new Imperialism of hers, a sort of patriotic melodrama, with Britain as Carthage and Berlin instead of Rome. They pointed the whole population to that end. They taught this war. All over the world a thousand other educational systems pointed in a thousand directions….

“So Germany set fire to the Phœnix….

“Only one other great country had any sort of state education. Real state education that is. The United States was also teaching citizenship, on a broader if shallower basis; a wider citizenship—goodwill to all mankind. Shallower. Shallower certainly. But it was there. A republican culture. Candour … generosity…. The world has still to realize its debt to the common schools of America….

“This League of Free Nations, of which all men are dreaming and talking, this World Republic, is the rediscovered outline, the proper teaching of all real education, the necessary outline now of human life…. There is nothing else to do, nothing else that people of our sort can do at all, nothing but baseness, grossness, vileness, and slavery unless we live now as a part of that process of a world peace. Our lives have 566got to be political lives. All lives have to be made political lives. We can’t run about loose any more. This idea of a world-wide commonwealth, this ideal of an everlasting world-peace in which we are to live and move and have our being, has to be built up in every school, in every mind, in every lesson. ‘You belong. You belong. And the world belongs to you.’…”

What ought one to teach when one teaches geography, for instance, but the common estate of mankind? Here, the teacher should say, are mountains and beautiful cities you may live to see. Here are plains where we might grow half the food of mankind! Here are the highways of our common life, and here are pleasant bye-ways where you may go! All this is your inheritance. Your estate. To rejoice in—and serve. But is that how geography is taught?…

“We used to learn lists of the British possessions, with their total exports and imports in money. I remember it as if it were yesterday…. Old Smugs—a hot New Imperialist—new then….

“Then what is history but a long struggle of men to find peace and safety, and how they have been prevented by baseness and greed and folly? Is that right? No, folly and baseness—and hate…. Hate certainly…. All history is one dramatic story, of man blundering his way from the lonely ape to the world commonwealth. All history is each man’s adventure. But what teacher makes history much more than a dwarfish twaddle about boundaries and kings and wars? Dwarfish twaddle. History! It went nowhere. It did nothing. Was there ever anything more like a crowd of people getting into an omnibus without wheels than the History Schools at Oxford? Or your History Tripos?”… Oswald repeated his image and saw that it was good….

“What is the teaching of a language again but teaching the knowledge of another people—an exposition of the soul of another people—a work of union?… But you see what I mean by all this; this idea of a great world of co-operating peoples; it is not just a diplomatic scheme, not something far off that Foreign Offices are doing; it is an idea that must revolutionize the lessons of a child in the nursery and alter the maps upon every schoolroom wall. And frame our lives 567altogether. Or be nothing. The World Peace. To that we all belong. I have a fancy— As though this idea had been hovering over the world, unsubstantial, unable to exist—until all this blood-letting, this torment and disaster gave it a body….

“What I am saying to you the University ought to have said to you.

“Instead of Universities”—he sought for a phrase and produced one that against the nocturnal dark seemed brilliant and luminous. “Instead of the University passant regardant, we want the University militant. We want Universities all round and about the world, associated, working to a common end, drawing together all the best minds and the finest wills, a myriad of multi-coloured threads, into one common web of a world civilization.”

§ 7

Also that night Oswald made a discourse upon the English.

“Yours is a great inheritance, Joan and Peter,” he said to the darkness. “You are young; that is a great thing in itself. The world cries out now for the young to enter into possession. And also—do you ever think of it?—you are English, Joan and Peter….

“Let me say something to you before we have done, something out of my heart. Have I ever canted patriotism to you? No! Am I an aggressive Imperialist? Am I not a Home Ruler? For Ireland. For India. The best years of my life have been spent in saving black men from white—and mostly those white men were of our persuasion, men of the buccaneer strain, on the loot. But now that we three are here together with no one else to hear us, I will confess. I tell you there is no race and no tradition in the whole world that I would change for my English race and tradition. I do not mean the brief tradition of this little Buckingham Palace and Westminster system here that began yesterday and will end tomorrow, I mean the great tradition of the English that is spread all over the earth, the tradition of Shakespeare and Milton, of Newton and Bacon, of Runnymede and Agincourt, the tradition of the men who speak 568fairly and act fairly, without harshness and without fear, who face whatever odds there are against them and take no account of Kings. It is in Washington and New York and Christchurch and Sydney, just as much as it is in Pelham Ford…. Well, upon us more than upon any other single people rests now for a time the burthen of human destiny. Upon us and France. France is the spear head but we are the shaft. If we fail, mankind may fail. We English have made the greatest empire that the world has ever seen; across the Atlantic we have also made the greatest republic. And these are but phases in our task. The better part of our work still lies before us. The weight is on us now. It was Milton who wrote long ago that when God wanted some task of peculiar difficulty to be done he turned to his Englishmen. And he turns to us today. Old Milton saw English shine clear and great for a time and then pass into the darkness…. He didn’t lose his faith…. Church and crown are no part of the real England which we inherit….

“We have no reason to be ashamed of our race and country, Joan and Peter, for all the confusion and blundering of these last years. Our generals and politicians have missed opportunity after opportunity. I cannot talk yet of such things…. The blunderings…. The slackness…. Hanoverian England with its indolence, its dulness, its economic uncleanness, its canting individualism, its contempt for science and system, has been an England darkened, an England astray——. Young England has had to pay at last for all those wasted years—and has paid…. My God! the men we have expended already in fighting these Germans, the brave, beautiful men, the jesting common men, the fresh boys, so cheerful and kind and gallant!… And the happiness that has died! And the shame of following after clumsy, mean leadership in the sight of all the world!… But there rests no stain on our blood. For our people here and for the Americans this has been a war of honour. We did not come into this war for sordid or narrow ends. Our politicians when they made base treaties had to hide them from our people…. Even in the face of the vilest outrages, even now the English keep a balanced justice and will not hate 569the German common men for things they have been forced to do. Yesterday I saw the German prisoners who work at Stanton getting into the train and joking with their guard. They looked well fed and healthy and uncowed. One carried a bunch of primroses. No one has an ill word for these men on all the countryside…. Does any other people in the world treat prisoners as we treat them?…

“Well, the time has come for our people now to go on from Empire and from Monroe doctrine, great as these ideas have been, to something still greater; the time has come for us to hold out our hands to every man in the world who is ready for a disciplined freedom. The German has dreamt of setting up a Cæsar over the whole world. Against that we now set up a disciplined world freedom. For ourselves and all mankind….

“Joan and Peter, that is what I have been coming to in all this wandering discourse. Yours is a great inheritance. You and your generation have to renew and justify England in a new world. You have to link us again in a common purpose with our kind everywhere. You have to rescue our destinies, the destinies of the world, from these stale quarrels; you have to take the world out of the hands of these weary and worn men, these old and oldish men, these men who can learn no more. You have to reach back and touch the England of Shakespeare, Milton, Raleigh, and Blake—and that means you have to go forward. You have to take up the English tradition as it was before church and court and a base imperialism perverted it. You have to become political. Now. You have to become responsible. Now. You have to create. Now. You, with your fresh vision, with the lessons you have learnt still burning bright in your minds, you have to remake the world. Listen when the old men tell you facts, for very often they know. Listen when they reason, they will teach you many twists and turns. But when they dogmatize, when they still want to rule unquestioned, and, above all, when they say ’impossible,’ even when they say ’wait—be dilatory and discreet,’ push them aside. Their minds squat crippled beside dead traditions…. That England of the Victorian old men, and its empire and its honours and its 570court and precedences, it is all a dead body now, it has died as the war has gone on, and it has to be buried out of our way lest it corrupt you and all the world again….”

§ 8

We underrate the disposition of youth to think for itself.

Oswald set himself to deliver this Valediction of his after dinner on Friday evening….

Joan was hesitating between a game of Demon Patience with Peter—in which she always played thirteen to his eleven and usually won in spite of the handicap—and an inclination for Bach’s Passacaglia upon the pianola in the study. Peter expressed himself ready for whatever she chose; he would play D.P. or read Moll Flanders—he had just discovered the delight of that greatest of all eighteenth century novels. He was sitting on the couch in the library and Joan was standing upon the hearthrug, regarding him thoughtfully, when Oswald came in. He stopped to hear what Peter was saying, with his one eye intent on Joan’s pretty gravity.

“No,” he interrupted. “This is my evening.

“You see,” he said, coming up to the fire; “I want to talk to you young people. I want to know some things—— I want to know what you make of life…. I want … an exchange of views.”

He stood with his back to the fire and smiled at Joan’s grave face close to his own. “I’ve got to talk to you,” he said, “very seriously. It’s necessary.”

Having paralysed them by this preface he sat down in his deep armchair, pulled it an inch or so towards the fire, and leaning forward, with his eye on the spitting coals, began.

“I wish I could talk better, Joan and Peter…. I know I’ve never been a good talker—it’s been rather a loss between us all. And now particularly…. I want to talk…. You must let me get it out in my own way….

“You see,” he went on after a moment or so to rally his forces, “I’ve been your guardian, I’ve had your education and your affairs in my hands, for fifteen years. So far as 571the affairs go, Sycamore, you know—— We won’t go into that. That’s all plain sailing. But it’s the education I want to talk about—and your future. You are now both of age. Well past. You’re on the verge of twenty-five, Peter—in a month or so. You’re both off now—housekeeping. You’re dropping the pilot. It’s high time, I suppose….”

Joan glanced at Peter, and then sank noiselessly into a crouching attitude close to Oswald’s knee. He paused to stroke her hair.

“I’ve been trying to get you all that I could get you…. Education…. I’ve had to blunder and experiment. I ought to tell you what I’ve aimed at and what I’ve done, take stock with you of the world I’ve educated you for and the part you’re going to play in it. Take stock…. It’s been a badly planned undertaking, I know. But then it’s such a surprising and unexpected world. All the time I’ve been learning, and most things I’ve learnt more or less too late to use the knowledge properly….”

He paused.

Peter looked at his guardian and said nothing. Oswald patted the head at his knee in return for a caress. It was an evasive, even apologetic pat, for he did not want to be distracted by affection just then.

“This war has altered the whole world,” he went on. “Life has become stark and intense, and when I took this on—when I took up the task of educating you—our world here seemed the most wrapped up and comfortable and secure world you can possibly imagine. Comfortable to the pitch of stuffiness. Most English people didn’t trouble a bit about the shape of human life; they thought it was—well, rather like a heap of down cushions. For them it was. For most of Europe and America…. They thought it was all right and perfectly safe—if only you didn’t bother. And education had lost its way. Yes. That puts the case. Education had lost its way.”

Oswald paused again. He fixed his one eye firmly on a glowing cavity in the fire, as though that contained the very gist of his thoughts.

“What is education up to?” he asked. “What is education?”…

572Thereupon of course he ought to have gone on to the passage beginning, “Consider this beast we are, this thing man!” as he had already rehearsed it overnight. But Peter had not learnt his part properly.

“I suppose it’s fitting the square natural man into the round hole of civilized life,” Peter threw out.

This reply greatly disconcerted Oswald. “Exactly,” he said, and was for some moments at a loss.

“Yes,” he said, rallying. “But what is civilized life?”

“Oh!… Creative activities in an atmosphere of helpful goodwill,” Peter tried in the brief pause that followed.

Oswald had a disagreeable feeling that he was getting to the end of his discourse before he delivered its beginning. “Yes,” he said again. “Yes. But for that you must have a political form.”

“The World State,” said Peter.

“The League of Free Nations,” said Oswald, “to enforce Peace throughout the earth.”

The next remark that came from Peter was still more unexpected and embarrassing.

“Peace is nothing,” said Peter.

Oswald turned his red eye upon his ward, in profound amazement.

Did they differ fundamentally in their idea of the human future?

“Peace, my dear Peter, is everything,” he protested.

“But, sir, it’s nothing more than the absence of war. It’s a negative. In itself it’s—vacuum. You can’t live in a vacuum.”

“But I mean an active peace.”

“That would be something more than peace. War is an activity. Peace is not. If you take war out of the world, you must have some other activity.”

“But doesn’t the organization of the World Peace in itself constitute an activity?”

“That would be a diminishing activity, sir. Like a man getting himself morphia and taking it and going to sleep. A World Peace would release energy, and as the energy was released, if the end were merely peace, there would be less need for it. Until things exploded.”

573Great portions of Oswald’s Valediction broke away and vanished for ever into the limbo of unspoken discourses.

“But would you have war go on, Peter?”

“Not in its present form. But struggle and unification, which is the end sought in all struggles, must go on in some form, sir,” said Peter, “while life goes on. We have to get the World State and put an end to war. I agree. But the real question is what are you going to do with our Peace? What struggle is to take the place of war? What is mankind going to do? Most wars have come about hitherto because somebody was bored. Do you remember how bored we all were in 1914? And the rotten way we were all going on then? A World State or a League of Nations with nothing to do but to keep the peace will bore men intolerably…. That’s what I like about the Germans.”

“What you like about the Germans!” Oswald cried in horror.

“They did get a move on, sir,” said Peter.

“We don’t want a preventive League of Nations,” Peter expanded. “It’s got to be creative or nothing. Or else we shall be in a sort of perpetual Coronation year—with nothing doing on account of the processions. Horrible!”

For a little while Oswald made no reply. He could not recall a single sentence of the lost Valediction that was at all appropriate here, and he was put out and distressed beyond measure that Peter could find anything to “like” about the Germans.

“A World Peace for its own sake is impossible,” Peter went on. “The Old Experimenter would certainly put a spoke into that wheel.”

“Who is the Old Experimenter?” asked Oswald.

“He’s a sort of God I have,” said Peter. “Something between theology and a fairy tale. I dreamt about him. When I was delirious. He doesn’t rule the world or anything of that sort, because he doesn’t want to, but he keeps on dropping new things into it. To see what happens. Like a man setting himself problems to work out in his head. He lives in a little out-of-the-way office. That’s the idea.”

“You haven’t told me about him,” said Joan.

574“I shall some day,” said Peter. “When I feel so disposed….”

“This is very disconcerting,” said Oswald, much perplexed. He scowled at the fire before him. “But you do realize the need there is for some form of world state and some ending of war? Unless mankind is to destroy itself altogether.”

“Certainly, sir,” said Peter. “But we aren’t going to do that on a peace proposition simply. It’s got to be a positive proposal. You know, sir——”

“I wish you’d call me Nobby,” said Oswald.

“It’s a vice contracted in the army, this Sir-ing,” said Peter. “It’s Nobby in my mind, anyhow. But you see, I’ve got a kind of habit, at night and odd times, of thinking over my little misadventure with that balloon and my scrap with von Papen. They are my stock dreams, with extra details worked in, nasty details some of them … and then I wake up and think about them. I think over the parachute affair more than the fight, because it lasted longer and I wasn’t so active. I felt it more. Especially being shot in the legs…. That sort of dream when you float helpless…. But the thing that impresses me most in reflecting on those little experiences is the limitless amount of intelligence that expended itself on such jobs as breaking my wrist, splintering my shoulder-blade and smashing up my leg. The amount of ingenuity and good workmanship in my instruments and the fittings of my basket, for example, was extraordinary, having regard to the fact that it was just one small item in an artillery system for blowing Germans to red rags. And the stuff and intelligence they were putting up against me, that too was wonderful; the way the whole problem had been thought out, the special clock fuse and so on. Well, my point is that the chap who made that equipment wasn’t particularly interested in killing me, and that the chaps who made my outfit weren’t particularly keen on the slaughter of Germans. But they had nothing else to do. They were brought up in a pointless world. They were caught by a vulgar quarrel. What did they care for the Kaiser? Old ass! What they were interested in was making the things….”

Peter became very earnest in his manner. “No peace, as 575we have known peace hitherto, offers such opportunities for good inventive work as war does. That’s my point, Nobby. There’s no comparison between the excitement and the endless problems of making a real, live, efficient submarine, for example, that has to meet and escape the intensest risks, and the occupation of designing a great, big, safe, upholstered liner in which fat swindlers can cross the Atlantic without being seasick. War tempts imaginative, restless people, and a stagnant peace bores them. And you’ve got to reckon with intelligence and imagination in this world, Nobby, more than anything. They aren’t strong enough to control perhaps, but they will certainly upset. Inventive, restless men are the particular instruments of my Old Experimenter. He prefers them now to plague, pestilence, famine, flood and earthquake. They are more delicate instruments. And more efficient. And they won’t stand a passive peace. Under no circumstances can you hope to induce the chap who contrived the clock fuse and the chap who worked out my gas bag or the chap with a new aeroplane gadget, and me—me, too—to stop cerebrating and making our damndest just in order to sit about safely in meadows joining up daisy chains—like a beastly lot of figures by Walter Crane. The Old Experimenter finds some mischief still for idle brains to do. He insists on it. That’s fundamental to the scheme of things.”

“But that’s no reason,” interrupted Oswald, “why you and the inventors who were behind you, and the Germans who made and loaded and fired that shell, shouldn’t all get together to do something that will grow and endure. Instead of killing one another.”

“Ah, that’s it!” said Peter. “But the word for that isn’t Peace.”

“Then what is the word for it?”

“I don’t know,” said Peter. “The Great Game, perhaps.”

“And where does it take you?”

Peter threw out his hands. “It’s an exploration,” he said. “It will take man to the centre of the earth; it will take him to the ends of space, between the atoms and among the stars. How can we tell beforehand? You must have faith. But of one thing I am sure, that man cannot stagnate. 576It is forbidden. It is the uttermost sin. Why, the Old Man will come out of his office himself to prevent it! This war and all the blood and loss of it is because the new things are entangled among old and dead things, worn-out and silly things, and we’ve not had the vigour to get them free. Old idiot nationality, national conceit—expanding to imperialism, nationality in a state of megalomania, has been allowed to get hold of the knife that was meant for a sane generation to carve out a new world with. Heaven send he cuts his own throat this time! Or else there may be a next time…. I’m all for the one world state, and the end of flags and kings and custom houses. But I have my doubts of all this talk of making the world safe—safe for democracy. I want the world made one for the adventure of mankind, which is quite another story. I have been in the world now, Nobby, for five-and-twenty years, and I am only beginning to suspect the wonder and beauty of the things we men might know and do. If only we could get our eyes and hands free of the old inheritance. What has mankind done yet to boast about? I despise human history—because I believe in God. Not the God you don’t approve of, Nobby, but in my Old Experimenter, whom I confess I don’t begin to understand, and in the far-off, eternal scheme he hides from us and which he means us to develop age by age. Oh! I don’t understand him, I don’t begin to explain him; he’s just a figure for what I feel is the reality. But he is right, he is wonderful. And instead of just muddling about over the surface of his universe, we have to get into the understanding of it to the very limits of our ability, to live our utmost and do the intensest best we can.”

“Yes,” said Oswald; “yes.” This was after his own heart, and yet it did not run along the lines of the Valedictory that had flowered with such Corinthian richness overnight. He had been thinking then of world peace; what Peter was driving at now was a world purpose; but weren’t the two after all the same thing? He sat with his one eye reflecting the red light of the fire, and the phrases that had come in such generous abundance overnight now refused to come at all.

Peter, on the couch, continued to think aloud.

577“Making the world safe for democracy,” said Peter. “That isn’t quite it. If democracy means that any man may help who can, that school and university will give every man and woman the fairest chance, the most generous inducement to help, to do the thing he can best do under the best conditions, then, Yes; but if democracy means getting up a riot and boycott among the stupid and lazy and illiterate whenever anything is doing, then I say No! Every human being has got to work, has got to take part. If our laws and organization don’t insist upon that, the Old Experimenter will. So long as the world is ruled by stale ideas and lazy ideas, he is determined that it shall flounder from war to war. Now what does this democracy mean? Does it mean a crowd of primitive brutes howling down progress and organization? because if it does, I want to be in the machine-gun section. When you talk of education, Nobby, you think of highly educated people, of a nation instructed through and through. But what of democracy in Russia, where you have a naturally clever people in a state of peasant ignorance—who can’t even read? Until the schoolmaster has talked to every one for ten or twelve years, can you have what President Wilson thinks of as democracy at all?”

“Now there you meet me,” said Oswald. “That is the idea I have been trying to get at with you.” And for some minutes the palatial dimensions of the lost Valedictory loomed out. Where he had said “peace” overnight, however, he now said progress.

But the young man on the couch was much too keenly interested to make a good audience. When presently Oswald propounded his theory that all the great world religions were on the side of this World Republic that he and Peter desired, Peter demurred.

“But is that true of Catholicism for instance?” said Peter.

Oswald quoted, “I am the Vine and ye are the Branches.”

“Yes,” said Peter. “But look at the Church itself. Don’t look at the formula but at the practice and the daily teaching. Is it truly a growing Vine?” The reality of Catholicism, Peter argued, was a traditional, sacramental religion, a narrow fetish religion with a specialized priest, it was concerned primarily with another world, it set its face 578against any conception of a scheme of progress in this world apart from its legend of the sacrifice of the Mass.

“All good Catholics sneer at progress,” said Peter. “Take Belloc and Chesterton, for example; they hate the idea of men working steadily for any great scheme of effort here. They hold by stagnant standards, planted deep in the rich mud of life. What’s the Catholic conception of human life?—guzzle, booze, call the passion of the sexes unclean and behave accordingly, confess, get absolution, and at it again. Is there any recognition in Catholicism of the duty of keeping your body fit or your brain active? They’re worse than the man who buried his talent in a clean napkin; they bury it in wheezy fat. It’s a sloven’s life. What have we in common with that? Always they are harking back to the thirteenth century, to the peasant life amidst dung and chickens. It’s a different species of mind from ours, with the head and feet turned backward. What is the good of expecting the Pope, for instance, and his Church to help us in creating a League of Nations? His aim would be a world agreement to stop progress, and we want to release it. He wants peace in order to achieve nothing, and we want peace in order to do everything. What is the good of pretending that it is the same peace? A Catholic League of Nations would be a conspiracy of stagnation, another Holy Alliance. What real world unity can come through them? Every step on the way to the world state and the real unification of men will be fought by the stagnant men and the priests. Why blind ourselves to that? Progress is a religion in itself. Work and learning are our creed. We cannot make terms with any other creed. The priest has got his God and we seek our God for ever. The priest is finished and completed and self-satisfied, and we—we are beginning….”

§ 9

There were two days yet before Peter went back to his work in London. Saturday dawned blue and fine, and Joan and he determined to spend it in a long tramp over the Hertfordshire hills and fields. He meant to stand no nonsense from his foot. “If I can’t walk four miles an hour then I 579must do two,” he said. “And if the pace is too slow for you, Joan, you must run round and round me and bark.” They took a long route by field and lane through Albury and Furneaux Pelham to the little inn at Stocking Pelham, where they got some hard biscuits and cheese and shandygaff, and came home by way of Patmore Heath, and the golden oaks and the rivulet. And as they went Peter talked of Oswald.

“Naturally he wants to know what we are going to do,” said Peter, and then, rather inconsequently, “He’s ill.

“This war is like a wasting fever in the blood and in the mind,” said Peter. “All Europe is ill. But with him it mixes with the old fever. That splinter at Fricourt was no joke for him. He oughtn’t to have gone out. He’s getting horribly lean, and his eye is like a garnet.”

“I love him,” said Joan.

But she did not want to discuss Oswald just then.

“About this new theology of yours, Peter,” she said….

“Well?” said Peter.

“What do you mean by this Old Experimenter of yours? Is he—God?”

“I don’t know. I thought he was. He’s—— He’s a Symbol. He’s just a Caricature I make to express how all this”—Peter swept his arm across the sunlit world—“seems to stand to me. If one can’t draw the thing any better, one has to make a caricature.”

Joan considered that gravely.

“I thought of him first in my dream as the God of the Universe,” Peter explained.

“You couldn’t love a God like that,” Joan remarked.

“Heavens, no! He’s too vast, too incomprehensible. I love you—and Oswald—and the R.F.C., Joan, and biology. But he’s above and beyond that sort of thing.”

“Could you pray to him?” asked Joan.

“Not to him,” said Peter.

“I pray,” said Joan. “Don’t you?”

“And swear,” said Peter.

“One prays to something—it isn’t oneself.”

“The fashion nowadays is to speak of the God in the Heart and the God in the Universe.”

580“Is it the same God?”

“Leave it at that,” said Peter. “We don’t know. All the waste and muddle in religion is due to people arguing and asserting that they are the same, that they are different but related, or that they are different but opposed. And so on and so on. How can we know? What need is there to know? In view of the little jobs we are doing. Let us leave it at that.”

Joan was silent for a while. “I suppose we must,” she said.

“And what are we going to do with ourselves,” asked Joan, “when the war is over?”

“They can’t keep us in khaki for ever,” Peter considered. “There’s a Ministry of Reconstruction foozling away in London, but it’s never said a word to me of the some-day that is coming. I suppose it hasn’t learnt to talk yet.”

“What do you think of doing?” asked Joan.

“Well, first—a good medical degree. Then I can doctor if I have to. But, if I’m good enough, I shall do research. I’ve a sort of feeling that along the border line of biology and chemistry I might do something useful. I’ve some ideas…. I suppose I shall go back to Cambridge for a bit. We neither of us need earn money at once. It will be queer—after being a grown-up married man—to go back to proctors and bulldogs. What are you going to do, Joan, when you get out of uniform?”

“Look after you first, Petah. Oh! it’s worth doing. And it won’t take me all my time. And then I’ve got my own ideas….”

“Out with ’em, Joan.”

“Well——”

“Well?”

“Petah, I shall learn plumbing.”

“Jobbing?”

“No. And bricklaying and carpentry. All I can. And then I am going to start building houses.”

“Architect?”

“As little as possible,” said Joan. “No. No beastly Architecture for Art’s sake for me! Do you remember how people used to knock their heads about at The Ingle-Nook? 581I’ve got some money. Why shouldn’t I be able to build houses as well as the fat builder-men with big, flat thumbs who used to build houses before the war?”

“Jerry-building?”

“High-class jerry-building, if you like. Cottages with sensible insides, real insides, and not so much waste space and scamping to make up for it. They’re half a million houses short in this country already. There’s something in building appeals to my sort of imagination. And I’m going to make money, Petah.”

“I love the way you carry your tail,” said Peter. “Always.”

“Well, doing running repairs hardens a woman’s soul.”

“You’ll make more money than I shall, perhaps. But now I begin to understand all these extraordinary books you’ve been studying…. I might have guessed…. Why not?”

He limped along, considering it. “Why shouldn’t you?” he said. “A service flat will leave your hands free…. I’ve always wondered secretly why women didn’t plunge into that sort of business more.”

“It’s been just diffidence,” said Joan.

“Click!” said Peter. “That’s gone, anyhow. If a lot of women do as you do and become productive for good, this old muddle of a country will sit up in no time. It doubles the output…. I wonder if the men will like working under you?”

“There’ll be a boss in the background,” said Joan. “Mr. John Debenham. Who’ll never turn up. Being, in fact, no more than camouflage for Joan of that ilk. I shall be just my own messenger and agent.

“One thing I know,” said Joan, “and that is, that I will make a cottage or a flat that won’t turn a young woman into an old one in ten years’ time. Living in that Jepson flat without a servant has brightened me up in a lot of ways…. And a child will grow up in my cottages without being crippled in its mind by awkwardness and ugliness…. This sort of thing always has been woman’s work really. Only we’ve been so busy chittering and powdering our silly noses—and laying snares for our Peters. Who didn’t know what was good for them.”

582Peter laughed and was amused. He felt a pleasant assurance that Joan really was going to build houses.

“Joan,” he said, “it’s a bleak world before us—and I hate to think of Nobby. He’s so ill. But the work—the good hard work—there’s times when I rather like to think of that…. They were beastly years just before the war.”

“I hated them,” said Joan.

“But what a lot of stuff there was about!” said Peter. “The petrol! Given away, practically, along the roadside everywhere. And the joints of meat. Do you remember the big hams we used to have on the sideboard? For breakfast. A lot of sausages going sizzle! Eggs galore! Bacon! Haddock. Perhaps cutlets. And the way one could run off abroad!”

“To Italy,” said Joan dangerously.

“God knows when those times will come back again! Not for years. Not for our lifetimes.”

“If they came back all at once we’d have indigestion,” said Joan.

“Orgy,” said Peter. “But they won’t.”…

Presently their note became graver.

“We’ve got to live like fanatics. If a lot of us don’t live like fanatics, this staggering old world of ours won’t recover. It will stagger and then go flop. And a race of Bolshevik peasants will breed pigs among the ruins. We owe it to ourselves, we owe it to the world to prevent that.”

“And we owe it to the ones who have died,” said Joan.

She hesitated, and then she began to tell him something of the part Wilmington had played in their lives.

They went through field after field, through gates and over stiles and by a coppice spangled with primroses, while she told him of the part that Wilmington had played in bringing them together; Wilmington who was now no more than grey soil where the battle still raged in France. Many were the young people who talked so of dead friends in those days. Their voices became grave and faintly deferential, as though they had invoked a third presence to mingle with their duologue. They were very careful to say nothing and to think as little as possible that might hurt Wilmington’s self-love.

Presently they found themselves speculating again about 583the kind of world that lay ahead of them—whether it would be a wholly poor world or a poverty-struck world infested and devastated by a few hundred millionaires and their followings. Poor we were certain to be. We should either be sternly poor or meanly poor. But Peter was disposed to doubt whether the war millionaires would “get away with the swag.”

“There’s too much thinking and reading nowadays for that,” said Peter. “They won’t get away with it. This is a new age, Joan. If they try that game they won’t have five years’ run.”

No, it would be a world generally poor, a tired but chastened world getting itself into order again…. Would there be much music in the years ahead? Much writing or art? Would there be a new theatre and the excitement of first nights again? Should we presently travel by aeroplane, and find all the world within a few days’ journey? They were both prepared to resign themselves to ten years’ of work and scarcity, but they both clung to the hope of returning prosperity and freedom after that.

“Well, well, Joan,” said Peter, “these times teach us to love. I’m crippled. We’ve got to work hard. But I’m not unhappy. I’m happier than I was when I had no idea of what I wanted in life, when I lusted for everything and was content with nothing, in the days before the war. I’m a wise old man now with my stiff wrist and my game leg. You change everything, Joan. You make everything worth while.”

“I’d like to think it was me,” said Joan idiomatically.

“It’s you….

“After all there must be some snatches of holiday. I shall walk with you through beautiful days—as we are doing today—days that would only be like empty silk purses if it wasn’t that they held you in them. Scenery and flowers and sunshine mean nothing to me—until you come in. I’m blind until you give me eyes. Joan, do you know how beautiful you are? When you smile? When you stop to think? Frowning a little. When you look—yes, just like that.”

“No!” said Joan, but very cheerfully.

“But you are—you are endlessly beautiful. Endlessly. 584Making love to Joan—it’s the intensest of joys. Every time—— As if one had just discovered her.”

“There’s a certain wild charm about Petah,” Joan admitted, “for a coarse taste.”

“After all, whether it’s set in poverty or plenty,” said Peter; “whether it’s rational or irrational, making love is still at the heart of us humans.”…

For a time they exulted shamelessly in themselves. They talked of the good times they had had together in the past. They revived memories of Bungo Peter and the Sagas that had slumbered in silence since the first dawn of adolescence. She recalled a score of wonderful stories and adventures that he had altogether forgotten. She had a far clearer and better memory for such things than he. “D’you remember lightning slick, Petah? And how the days went faster? D’you remember how he put lightning slick on his bicycle?”…

But Peter had forgotten that.

“And when we fought for that picshua you made of Adela,” Joan said. “When I bit you…. It was my first taste of you, Petah. You tasted dusty….”

“I suppose we’ve always had a blind love for each other,” said Peter, “always.”

“I hated you to care for any one but myself,” said Joan, “since ever I can remember. I hated even Billy.”

“It’s well we found out in time,” said Peter.

“I found out,” said Joan.

“Ever since we stopped being boy and girl together,” said Peter, “I’ve never been at peace in my nerves and temper till now…. Now I feel as though I swung free in life, safe, sure, content.”

“Content,” weighed Joan suspiciously. “But you’re still in love with me, Petah?”

“Not particularly in love,” said Peter. “No. But I’m loving you—as the June sun loves an open meadow, shining all over it. I shall always love you, Joan, because there is no one like you in all the world. No one at all. Making love happens, but love endures. How can there be companionship and equality except between the like?—who can keep step, who can climb together, joke broad and shameless, 585and never struggle for the upper hand? And where in all the world shall I find that, Joan, but in you? Listen to wisdom, Joan! There are two sorts of love between men and women, and only two—love like the love of big carnivores who know their mates and stick to them, or love like some man who follows a woman home because he’s never seen anything like her before. I’ve done with that sort of love for ever. There’s men who like to exaggerate every difference in women. They pretend women are mysterious and dangerous and wonderful. They like sex served up with lies and lingerie…. Where’s the love in that? Give me my old brown Joan.”

“Not so beastly brown,” said Joan.

“Joan nature.”

“Tut, tut!” said Joan.

“There’s people who scent themselves to make love,” said Peter.

“Experienced Petah,” said Joan.

“I’ve read of it,” said Peter, and a little pause fell between them….

“Every one ought to be like us,” said Joan sagely, with the spring sunshine on her dear face.

“It takes all sorts to make a world,” said Peter.

“Everybody ought to have a lover,” said Joan. “Everybody. There’s no clean life without it.”…

“We’ve been through some beastly times, Joan. We’ve run some beastly risks…. We’ve just scrambled through, Joan, to love—as I scrambled through to life. After being put down and shot at.”…

Presently Joan suspected a drag in Peter’s paces and decided at the sight of a fallen tree in a little grass lane to profess fatigue. They sat down upon the scaly trunk, just opposite to where a gate pierced a budding hedge and gave a view of a long, curved ridge of sunlit blue, shooting corn with red budding and green-powdered trees beyond, and far away a woldy upland rising out of an intervening hidden valley. And Peter admitted that he, too, felt a little tired. But each was making a pretence for the sake of the other.

“We’ve rediscovered a lot of the old things, Joan,” said 586Peter. “The war has knocked sense into us. There wasn’t anything to work for, there wasn’t much to be loyal to in the days of the Marconi scandals and the Coronation Durbar. Slack times, more despair in them by far than in these red days. Rotten, aimless times…. Oh! the world’s not done for….

“I don’t grudge my wrist or my leg,” said Peter. “I can hop. I’ve still got five and forty years, fifty years, perhaps, to spend. In this new world.”…

He said no more for a time. There were schemes in his head, so immature as yet that he could not even sketch them out to her.

He sat with his eyes dreaming, and Joan watched him. There was much of the noble beast in this Peter of hers. In the end now, she was convinced, he was going to be an altogether noble beast. Through her. He was hers to cherish, to help, to see grow…. He was her chosen man…. Depths that were only beginning to awaken in Joan were stirred. She would sustain Peter, and also presently she would renew Peter. A time would come when this dear spirit would be born again within her being, when the blood in her arteries and all the grace of her body would be given to a new life—to new lives, that would be beautiful variations of this dearest tune in the music of the world…. They would have courage; they would have minds like bright, sharp swords. They would lift their chins as Peter did…. It became inconceivable to Joan that women could give their bodies to bear the children of unloved men. “Dear Petah,” her lips said silently. Her heart swelled; her hands tightened. She wanted to kiss him….

Then in a whim of reaction she was moved to mockery.

“Do you feel so very stern and strong, dear Petah?” she whispered close to his shoulder.

He started, surprised, stared at her for a moment, and smiled into her eyes.

“Old Joan,” he said and kissed her….

587§ 10

When he returned to the house on Monday morning after he had seen the two young people off, a burthen of desolation came upon Oswald.

It was a loneliness as acute as a physical pain. It was misery. If they had been dead, he could not have been more unhappy. The work that had been the warm and living substance of fifteen years was now finished and done. The nest was empty. The road and the stream, the gates and the garden, the house and the hall, seemed to ache with emptiness and desertion. He went into their old study, from which they had already taken a number of their most intimate treasures, and which was now as disordered as a room after a sale. Most of their remaining personal possessions were stacked ready for removal; discarded magazines and books and torn paper made an untidy heap beside the fireplace. “I could not feel a greater pain if I had lost a son,” he thought, staring at these untidy vestiges.

He went to his own study and sat down at his desk, though he knew there was no power of attention in him sufficient to begin work.

Mrs. Moxton, for reasons best known to herself, was interested in his movements that morning. She saw him presently wander into the garden and then return to the hall. He took his cap and stick and touched the bell. “I’ll not be back to lunch, Mrs. Moxton,” he called.

“Very well, sir,” said Mrs. Moxton, unseen upon the landing above, nodding her head approvingly.

At first the world outside was as lonely as his study.

He went up the valley along the high road for half a mile, and then took a winding lane under almost overhanging boughs—the hawthorn leaves now were nearly out and the elder quite—up over the hill and thence across fields and through a wood until he came to where the steep lane runs down to Braughing. And by that time, although the spring-time world was still immensely lonely and comfortless, he no longer felt that despairful sense of fresh and irremediable loss with which he started. He was beginning to realize 588now that he had always been a solitary being; that all men, even in crowds, carry a certain solitude with them; and loneliness thus lifted to the level of a sustained and general experience ceased to feel like a dagger turning in his heart.

Down the middle of Braughing village, among spaces of grass, runs the little Quin, now a race of crystalline water over pebbly shallows and now a brown purposefulness flecked with foam, in which reeds bend and recover as if they kept their footing by perpetual feats of dexterity. There are two fords, and midway between them a little bridge with a handrail on which Oswald stayed for a time, watching the lives and adventures of an endless stream of bubbles that were begotten thirty feet away where the eddy from the depths beneath a willow root dashed against a bough that bobbed and dipped in the water. He found a great distraction and relief in following their adventures. On they came, large and small, in strings, in spinning groups, busy bubbles, quiet bubbles, dignified solitary bubbles, and passed a dangerous headland of watercress and ran the gauntlet between two big stones and then, if they survived, came with a hopeful rush for the shadow under the bridge and vanished utterly….

For all the rest of the day those streaming bubbles glittered and raced and jostled before Oswald’s eyes, and made a veil across his personal desolation. His mind swung like a pendulum between two ideas; those bubbles were like human life; they were not like human life….

Philosophy is the greatest of anodynes.

“Why is a man’s life different from a bubble? Like a bubble he is born of the swirl of matter, like a bubble he reflects the universe, he is driven and whirled about by forces he does not comprehend, he shines here and is darkened there and is elated or depressed he knows not why, and at last passes suddenly out into the darkness….”

In the evening Oswald sat musing by his study fire, his lamp unlit. He sat in an attitude that had long become habitual to him, with the scarred side of his face resting upon and hidden by his hand. His walk had wearied him, but not unpleasantly, his knee was surprisingly free from pain, and he was no longer acutely unhappy. The idea, a very 589engaging idea, had come into his head that it was not really the education of Joan and Peter that had come to an end, but his own. They were still learners—how much they had still to learn! At Peter’s age he had not yet gone to Africa. They had finished with school and college perhaps, but they were but beginning in the university of life. Neither of them had yet experienced a great disillusionment, neither of them had been shamed or bitterly disappointed; they had each other. They had seen the great war indeed, and Peter knew now what wounds and death were like—but he himself had been through that at one-and-twenty. Neither had had any such dark tragedy as, for example, if one of them had been killed, or if one of them had betrayed and injured the other. Perhaps they would always have fortunate lives.

But he himself had had to learn the lesson to the end. His life had been a darkened one. He had loved intensely and lost. He had had to abandon his chosen life work when it was barely half done. He had a present sense of the great needs of the world, and he was bodily weak and mentally uncertain. He would spend days now of fretting futility, unable to achieve anything. He loved these dear youngsters, but the young cannot give love to the old because they do not yet understand. He was alone. And yet, it was strange, he kept on. With such strength as he had he pursued his ends. Those two would go on, full of hope, helping one another, thinking together, succeeding. The lesson he had learnt was that without much love, without much vitality, with little hope of seeing a single end achieved for which he worked, he could still go on.

He drifted through his memories, seeking for the motives that had driven him on from experience to experience. But while he could remember the experiences it was very hard now to recover any inkling of his motives. He remembered himself at school as a violent egotist, working hard, openly and fairly, for his ascendancy in the school games, working hard secretly for his school position. It seemed now as though all that time he had been no more than a greed and a vanity…. Was that fair to himself? Or had he forgotten the redeeming dreams of youth?…

The scene shifted to the wardroom of his first battleship, 590and then to his first battle. He saw again the long low line of the Egyptian coast, and the batteries of Alexandria and Ramleh spitting fire and the Condor standing in. He recalled the tense excitement of that morning, the boats rowing to land, but strangely enough the incident that had won him the Victoria Cross had been blotted completely from his mind by his injury. He could not recover even the facts, much less the feel of that act…. Why had he done what he had done? Did he himself really do it?… Then very vividly came the memory of his first sight of his smashed, disfigured face. That had been horrible at the time—in a way it was horrible still—but after that it seemed as though for the first time he had ceased then to be an egotism, a vanity. After that the memories of impersonal interests began. He thought of his attendance at Huxley’s lectures at South Kensington and the wonder of making his first dissections. About that time he met Dolly, but here again was a queer gap; he could not remember anything very distinctly about his early meetings with Dolly except that she wore white and that they happened in a garden.

Yet, in a little while, all his being had been hungry for Dolly!

With his first journey into Africa all his memories became brighter and clearer and as if a hotter sun shone upon them. Everything before that time was part of the story of a young man long vanished from the world, young Oswald, a personality at least as remote as Peter—very like Peter. But with the change of scene to Africa Oswald became himself. The man in the story was the man who sat musing in the study chair, moved by the same motives and altogether understandable. Already in Nyasaland he was working consciously for “civilization” even as he worked today. Everything in that period lived still, with all its accompanying feelings alive. He fought again in his first fight in Nyasaland, and recalled with complete vividness how he had loaded and fired and reloaded and fired time after time at the rushes of the Yao spearmen; he had fought leaning against the stockade because he was too weary to stand upright, and with his head and every limb aching. One man he had hit had wriggled for a long time in the grass, and that memory 591still distressed him. It trailed another memory of horror with it. In his campaign about Lake Kioga, years later, in a fight amidst some ant hills he had come upon a wounded Sudanese being eaten alive by swarms of ants. The poor devil had died with the ants still upon him…. Oswald could still recall the sick anguish with which he had tried in vain to save or relieve this man.

The affair was in the exact quality of his present feelings; the picture was painted from the same palette. He remembered that then, as now, he felt the same helpless perplexity at apparently needless and unprofitable human agony. And then, as now, he had not despaired. He had been able to see no reason in this suffering and no excuse for it; he could see none now, and yet he did not despair. Why did not that and a hundred other horrors overwhelm him with despair? Why had he been able to go on with life after that? And after another exquisite humiliation and disappointment? He had loved Dolly intensely, and here again came a third but less absolutely obliterated gap in his recollections. For years he had been resolutely keeping his mind off the sufferings of that time, and now they were indistinct. His memory was particularly blank now about Arthur; he was registered merely as a blonde sort of ass with a tenor voice who punched copper. That faint hostile caricature was all his mind had tolerated. But still sharp and clear, as though it had been photographed but yesterday upon his memory, was the afternoon when he had realized that Dolly was dead. That scene was life-size and intense; how in a shady place under great trees, he had leant forwards upon his little folding table and wept aloud.

What had carried him through all those things? Why had he desired so intensely? Why had he worked so industriously? Why did he possess this passion for order that had inspired his administrative work? Why had he given his best years to Uganda? Why had he been so concerned for the welfare and wisdom of Joan and Peter? Why did he work now to the very breaking-point, until sleeplessness and fever forced him to rest, for this dream of a great federation in the world—a world state he would certainly never live to see established? If he was indeed only a bubble, then 592surely he was the most obstinately opinionated of bubbles. But he was not merely a bubble. The essential self of him was not this thing that spun about in life, that felt and reflected the world, that missed so acutely the two dear other bubbles that had circled about him so long and that had now left him to eddy in his backwater while they hurried off into the midstream of life. His essential self, the self that mused now, that had struggled up through the egotisms of youth to this present predominance, was something deeper and tougher and more real than desire, than excitement, than pleasure or pain. That was the lesson he had been learning. There was something deeper in him to which he had been getting down more and more as life had gone on, something to which all the stuff of experience was incidental, something in which there was endless fortitude and an undying resolution to do. There was something in him profounder than the stream of accidents….

He sat now with his distresses allayed, his mind playing with fancies and metaphors and analogies. Was this profounder contentment beneath his pains and discontents the consciousness of the bubble giving way to the underlying consciousness of the stream? That was ingenious, but it was not true. Men are not bubbles carried blindly on a stream; they are rather like bubbles, but that is all. They are wills and parts of a will that is neither the slave of the stream of matter nor a thing indifferent to it, that is paradoxically free and bound. They are parts of a will, but what this great will was that had him in its grasp, that compelled him to work, that saved him from drowning in his individual sorrows and cares, he could not say. It was easy to draw the analogy that a man is an atom in the life of the species as a cell is an atom in the life of a man. But this again was not the complete truth. Where was this alleged will of the species? If there was indeed such a will in the species, why was there this war? And yet, whatever it might be, assuredly there was something greater than himself sustaining his life…. To him it felt like a universal thing, but was it indeed a universal thing? It was strangely bound up with preferences. Why did he love and choose certain things passionately? Why was he indifferent to others? 593Why were Dolly and Joan more beautiful to him than any other women; why did he so love the sound of their voices, their movements, and the subtle lines of their faces; why did he love Peter, standing upright and when enthusiasm lit him; and why did he love the lights on polished steel and the darknesses of deep waters, the movements of flames, and of supple, feline animals, so intensely? Why did he love these things more than the sheen on painted wood, or the graces of blonde women, or the movements of horses? And why did he love justice and the revelation of scientific laws, and the setting right of disordered things? Why did this idea of a League of Nations come to him with the effect of a personal and preferential call? All these lights and matters and aspects and personal traits were somehow connected in his mind, and had a compelling power over him. They could make him forget his safety or comfort or happiness. They had something in common among themselves, he felt, and he could not tell what it was they had in common. But whatever it was, it was the intimation of the power that sustained him. It was as if they were all reflections or resemblances of some overruling spirit, some Genius, some great ruler of the values that stood over his existence and his world. Yet that again was but a fancy—a plagiarism from Socrates….

There was a light upon his life, and the truth was that he could not discover the source of the light nor define its nature; there was a presence in the world about him that made all life worth while, and yet it was Nameless and Incomprehensible. It was the Essence beyond Reality; it was the Heart of All Things…. Metaphors! Words! Perhaps some men have meant this when they talked of Love, but he himself had loved because of this, and so he held it must be something greater than Love. Perhaps some men have intended it in their use of the word Beauty, but it seemed to him that rather it made and determined Beauty for him. And others again have known it as the living presence of God, but the name of God was to Oswald a name battered out of all value and meaning. And yet it was by this, by this Nameless, this Incomprehensible, that he lived and was upheld. It did so uphold him that he could go on, he knew, 594though happiness were denied him; though defeat and death stared him in the face….

§ 11

At last he sighed and rose. He lit his reading lamp by means of a newspaper rolled up into one long spill—for there was a famine in matches just then—and sat down to the work on his desk.

THE END

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This book is part of the public domain. H. G. Wells (2020). Joan and Peter. Urbana, Illinois: Project Gutenberg. Retrieved October 2022, from https://www.gutenberg.org/files/61426/61426-h/61426-h.htm

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OSWALD’S VALEDICTION
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