1

That May was very hot. One sweltered in offices, streets, and underground trains. You don't expect this kind of weather in early May, which is usually a time of bitter frosts and biting winds, punctuated by thunderstorms. It told on one's nerves. One got sick of work and people. I quarrelled all round; with Peacock about the paper, with my typist about her punctuation, with my family about my sister's engagement. Rosalind (that was the good old English name they had given her) had been brought up, like myself, in the odour of public school and Oxford Anglicanism (she had been at Lady Margaret Hall). My father had grown up from his early youth most resolutely English, and had married the daughter of a rich Manchester cotton manufacturer. Their two children, Sidneys from birth, were to ignore the unhappy Yiddish strain that was branded like a deep disgrace into their father's earliest experience. It was unlucky for my parents that both Rosalind and I reverted to type. Rosalind was very lovely, very clever, and unmistakably a Jewess. At Roedean she pretended she wasn't; who wouldn't? She was still there when I came of age and became Gideon, so she didn't join me in that. But when she left school and went up to Oxford, she began to develop and expand mentally, and took her own line, and by the time she was twenty she was, as I never was, a red-hot nationalist. We were neither of us ever inclined to Judaism in religion; we shook off the misfit of Anglicanism at an early age (we both refused at fifteen to be confirmed), but didn't take to our national faith, which we both disliked extremely. Nor did we like most of our fellow Jews; I think as a race we are narrow, cowardly, avaricious, and mean-spirited, and Rosalind thinks we are oily. (She and I aren't oily, by the way; we are both the lean kind, perhaps because, after all, we are half English). I only reverted to our original name because I was sickened of the Sidney humbug. But we learnt Yiddish, and read Hebrew literature, and discussed repatriation, and maintained that the Jews were the brains of the world. It was a cross to our parents. But far more bitter to them than even my change of name was Rosalind's engagement, this spring of 1919, to Boris Stefan. Boris had been living and painting in London for some years; his home had been in Moscow; he had barely escaped with his life from a pogrom in 1912, and had since then lived in England. He had served in the war, belonged to several secret societies of a harmless sort, painted pictures that had attracted a good deal of critical notice, and professed Bolshevik sympathies, of a purely academic nature (as so many of these sympathies are) on the grounds that Bolshevism was a Jewish movement. He and I differed on the subject of Bolshevism. I have never seen any signs either of constructive ability or sound principles in any Bolshevik leader; nothing but enterprise, driving-power, vindictiveness, Hebrew cunning, and a criminal ruthlessness. They're not statesmen. And Bolshevism, as so far manifested, isn't a statesmanlike system; it holds the reins too tight. I don't condemn it for the cruelties committed in its name, because whenever Russians get excited there'll be fiendish cruelties; Russians are like that—the most cruel devils in earth or hell. Bolshevist Russians are no worse in that way than Czarist Russians. Except when I am listening to their music I loathe the whole race; great stupid, brutal, immoral, sentimental savages…. When I think of them I feel a kind of nausea, oddly touched with fear, that must be hereditary, I suppose. After all, my father, as a child of five, saw his mother outraged and murdered by Russian police. Anyhow, Bolshevism, in Russian hands, has become a kind of stupid, crazy, devil's game, as everything always has.

But I don't want to discuss Bolshevism here. Boris Stefan hadn't really anything to do with it. He wasn't a politician. He was a dreamy, simple, untidy, rather childlike person, with a wonderful gift for painting. Rosalind and I had got to know him at the Club. They were both beautiful, and it hadn't taken them long to fall in love. One Russian-Jewish exile marrying another—that was the bitterness of it to our very Gentile mother and our Sidneyfied father, who had spent fifty years living down his origin.

So I was called in to assist in averting the catastrophe. I wouldn't say anything except that it seemed very suitable, and that annoyed my mother. I remember that she and I and Rosalind argued round and round it for an hour one hot evening in the drawing-room at Queen's Gate. Finally my mother said, 'Oh, very well. If Rosalind wants a lot of fat Yid babies with hooked noses and oily hair, all lending money on usury instead of getting into debt like Christians, let her have them. I wash my hands of the lot of you. I don't know what I've done to deserve two Sheenies for children.'

That made Rosalind giggle, and eased the acrimony of the discussion. My mother was a little fair woman, sharp-tongued and quick-tempered, but with a sense of fun.

My father had no sense of fun. I think it had been crushed out of him in his cradle. He was a silent man (though he could, like all Jews, be eloquent), with a thin face and melancholy dark eyes. I am supposed to look like him, I believe. He, too, spoke to me that evening about Rosalind's engagement. I remember how he walked up and down the dining-room, with his hands behind him and his head bent forward, and his quick, nervous, jerky movements.

'I don't like it, Arthur. I feel as if we had all climbed up out of a very horrible pit into a place of safety and prosperity and honour, and as if the child was preparing to leap down into the pit again. She doesn't know what it's like to be a Jew. I do, and I've saved you both from it, and you both seem bent on returning to the pit whence you were digged. We're an outcast people, my dear; an outcast people….'

His black eyes were haunted by memories of old fears; the fears his ancestors had had in them, listening behind frail locked doors for the howl 'Down with the Jews!' The fears that had been branded by savages into his own infant consciousness half a century ago; the fears seared later into the soul of a boy by boyish savages at an English school; the fears of the grown man, always hiding something, always pretending, always afraid….

I discovered then—and this is why I am recording this family incident here, why it connects with the rest of my life at this time—that Potterism has, for one of its surest bases, fear. The other bases are ignorance, vulgarity, mental laziness, sentimentality, and greed. The ignorance which does not know facts; the vulgarity which cannot appreciate values; the laziness which will not try to learn either of these things; the sentimentality which, knowing neither, is stirred by the valueless and the untrue; the greed which grabs and exploits. But fear is worst; the fear of public opinion, the fear of scandal, the fear of independent thought, of loss of position, of discomfort, of consequences, of truth.

My poor parents were afraid of social damage to their child; afraid lest she should be mixed up with something low, outcast, suspected. Not all my father's intellectual brilliance, nor all my mother's native wit, could save them from this pathetic, vulgar, ignorant piece of snobbery. Pathetic, vulgar, and ignorant, because, if they had only known it, Rosalind stood to lose nothing she cared for by allying herself with a Jewish painter of revolutionary theories. Not a single person whose friendship she cared for but would be as much her friend as before. She had nothing to do with the bourgeoisie, bristling with prejudices and social snobberies, who made, for instance, my mother's world. And that is what one generation should always try to understand about another—how little (probably) each cares for the other's world.

Of course, Rosalind married Boris Stefan. And, as I have said, the whole incident is only mentioned to illustrate how Potterism lurks in secret places, and flaunts in open places, pervading the whole fabric of human society.

2

Peace with Germany was signed, as every one knows, on June 28th. Nearly every one crabbed it, of course, the Fact with the rest. I have no doubt that it did, as Garvin put it, sow dragon's teeth over Europe. It certainly seemed a poor, unconstructive, expensive, brittle thing enough. But I am inclined to think that nearly all peace treaties are pretty bad. You have to have them, however, and you may as well make the best of them. Anyhow, bad peace as it looked, at least it was peace, and that was something new and unusual. And I confess frankly that it has, so far, held together longer than I, for one, ever expected it would. (I am writing this in January, 1920).

The Fact published a cheery series of articles, dealing with each clause in turn, and explaining why it was bound to lead, immediately or ultimately, to war with some one or other. I wrote some of them myself. But I was out on some points, though most haven't had time yet to prove themselves.

'Now,' said Jane, the day after the signature, 'I suppose we can get on with the things that matter.'

She meant housing, demobilisation, proportional representation, health questions, and all the good objects which the Society for Equal Citizenship had at heart. She had been writing some articles in the Daily Haste on these. They were well-informed and intelligent, but not expert enough for the Fact. And that, as I began to see, was partly where Hobart came in. Jane wrote cleverly, clearly, and concisely—better than Johnny did. But, in these days of overcrowded competent journalism —well, it is not unwise to marry an editor of standing. It gives you a better place in the queue.

I dined at the Hobarts' on June 29th, for the first time since their marriage. We were a party of six. Katherine Varick was there, and a distinguished member of the American Legation and his wife.

Jane handled her parties competently, as she did other things. A vivid, jolly child she looked, in love with life and the fun and importance of her new position. The bachelor girl or man just married is an amusing study to me. Especially the girl, with her new responsibilities, her new and more significant relation to life and society. Later she is sadly apt to become dull, to have her individuality merged in the eternal type of the matron and the mother; her intellect is apt to lose its edge, her mind its grip. It is the sacrifice paid by the individual to the race. But at first she is often a delightful combination of keen-witted, jolly girl and responsible woman.

We talked, I remember, partly about the Government, and how soon Northcliffe would succeed in turning it out. The Pinkerton press was giving its support to the Government. The Weekly Fact was not. But we didn't want them out at once; we wanted to keep them on until some one of constructive ability, in any party, was ready to take the reins. The trouble about the Labour people was that so far there was no one of constructive ability; they were manifestly unready. They had no one good enough. No party had. It was the old problem, never acuter, of 'Produce the Man.' If Labour was to produce him, I suspected that it would take it at least a generation of hard political training and education. If Labour had got in then, it would have been a mob of uneducated and uninformed sentimentalists, led and used by a few trained politicians who knew the tricks of the trade. It would be far better for them to wait till the present generation of honest mediocrities died out, and a new and differently educated generation were ready to take hold. University-trained Labour—that bugbear of Barnes'—if there is any hope for the British Constitution, which probably there is not, I believe it lies there. It is a very small one, at the best. Anyhow, it certainly did not, at this period, lie in the parliamentary Labour Party, that body of incompetents in an incompetent House.

It was in discussing this that I discovered that Hobart couldn't discuss. He could talk; he could assert, produce opinions and information, but he couldn't meet or answer arguments. And he was cautious, afraid of committing himself, afraid, I fancied, of exposing gulfs in his equipment of information, for, like other journalists of his type, his habit was to write about things of which he knew little. Old Pinkerton remarked once, at a dinner to American newspaper men, that his own idea of a good journalist was a man who could sit down at any moment and write a column on any subject. The American newspaper men cheered this; it was their idea of a good journalist too. It is an amusing game, and one encouraged by the Anti-Potterite League, to waylay leader-writers and tackle them about their leaders, turn them inside out and show how empty they are. I've written that sort of leader myself, of course, but not for the Fact; we don't allow it. There, the man who writes is the man who knows, and till some one knows no one writes. That is why some people call us dry, heavy, lacking in ideas, and say we are like a Blue Book, or a paper read to the British Association. We are proud of that reputation. The Pinkerton papers and the others can supply the ideas; we are out for facts.

Anyhow, Hobart I knew for an ignorant person. All he had was a flair for the popular point of view. That was why Pinkerton who knew men, got hold of him. He was a true Potterite. Possibly I always saw him at his least eloquent and his most cautious, because he didn't like me and knew I didn't like him. Even then there had already been one or two rather acrimonious disputes between my paper and his on points of fact. The Daily Haste hated being pinned down to and quarrelled with about facts; facts didn't seem to the Pinkerton press things worth quarrelling over, like policy, principles, or prejudices. The story goes that when any one told old Pinkerton he was wrong about something, he would point to his vast circulation, using it as an argument that he couldn't be mistaken. If you still pressed and proved your point, he would again refer to his circulation, but using it this time as an indication of how little it mattered whether his facts were right or wrong. Some one once said to him curiously, 'Don't you care that you are misleading so many millions?' To which he replied, in his dry little voice, 'I don't lead, or mislead, the millions. They lead me.' Little Pinkerton sometimes saw a long way farther into what he was doing than you'd guess from his shoddy press. He had queer flashes of genius.

But Hobart hadn't. Hobart didn't see anything, except what he was officially paid to see. A shallow, solemn ass.

I looked suddenly at Jane, and caught her watching her husband silently, with her considering, dispassionate look. He was talking to the American Legation about the traffic strike (we were a round table, and the talk was general).

Then I knew that, whether Jane had ever been in love with Hobart or not, she was not so now. I knew further, or thought I knew, that she saw him precisely as I did.

Of course she didn't. His beauty came in—it always does, between men and women, confusing the issues—and her special relation to him, and a hundred other things. The relation between husband and wife is too close and too complex for clear thinking. It seems always to lead either to too much regard or to an excess of irritation, and often to both.

Jane looked away from Hobart, and met my eyes watching her. Her expression didn't alter, nor, probably, did mine. But something passed between us; some unacknowledged mutual understanding held us together for an instant. It was unconscious on Jane's part and involuntary on mine. She hadn't meant to think over her husband with me; I hadn't meant to push in. Jane wasn't loyal, and I wasn't well-bred, but we neither of us meant that.

I hardly talked to Jane that evening. She was talking after dinner to Katherine and the American Legation. I had a three-cornered conversation with Hobart and the Legation's wife, who was of an inquiring turn of mind, like all of her race, and asked us exhausting questions. She got on to the Jewish question, and asked us for our views on the reasons for anti-Semitism in Europe.

'I've been reading the New Witness,' she said.

I told her she couldn't do better, if she was investigating anti-Semitism.

'But are they fair?' she asked ingenuously.

I replied that there were moments in which I had a horrible suspicion that they were.

'Then the Jews are really a huge conspiracy plotting to get the finances of Europe into their hands?' Her eyes, round and shocked, turned from me to Hobart.

He lightly waved her to me.

'You must ask Mr. Gideon. The children of Israel are his speciality.'

His dislike of me gleamed in his blue eyes and in his supercilious, cold smile. The Legation's wife (no fool) must have seen it.

I went on talking rubbish to her about the Jews and the finances of Europe. I don't remember what particular rubbish it was, for I was hardly aware of it at the time. What I was vividly and intensely and quite suddenly aware of was that I was on fire with the same anger, dislike, and contempt that burned in Hobart towards me. I knew that evening that I hated him, even though I was sitting in his house and smoking his cigarettes. I wanted to be savagely rude to him. I think that once or twice I came very near to being so.

Katherine and I went home by the same bus. I grumbled to her about Hobart all the way. I couldn't help it; the fellow seemed suddenly to have become a nervous disease to me; I was mentally wriggling and quivering with him.

Katherine laughed presently, in that queer, silent way of hers.

'Why worry?' she said. 'You've not married him.'

'Well, what's marriage?' I returned. 'He's a public danger—he and his kind.'

Katherine said truly, 'There are so many public dangers. There really isn't time to get agitated about them all.' Her mind seemed still to be running on marriage, for she added presently, 'I think he'll find that he's bitten off rather more than he can chew, in Jane.'

'Jane can go to the devil in her own way,' I said, for I was angry with Jane too. 'She's married a second-rate fellow for what she thinks he'll bring her. I dare say she has her reward…. Katherine, I believe that's the very essence of Potterism—going for things for what they'll bring you, what they lead to, instead of for the thing-in-itself. Artists care for the thing-in-itself; Potterites regard things as railway trains, always going somewhere, getting somewhere. Artists, students, and the religious—they have the single eye. It's the opposite to the commercial outlook. Artists will look at a little fishing town or country village, and find it a thing of beauty and a joy for ever, and leave it to itself—unless they yield to the devil and paint it or write about it. Potterites will exploit it, commercialise it, bring the railway to it—and the thing is spoilt. Oh, the Potterites get there all right, confound them. They're the progressives of the world. They—they have their reward.'

(It's a queer thing how Jews can't help quoting the New Testament—even
Jews without religion.)

'We seem to have decided,' Katherine said, 'that Jane is a Potterite.'

'Morally she is. Not intellectually. You can be a Potterite in many ways. Jane accepts the second-rate, though she recognises it as such…. The plain fact is,' I was in a fit of savage truth-speaking, 'that Jane is second-rate.'

'Well …'

The gesture of Katherine's square shoulders may have meant several things—'Aren't we all?' or 'Surely that's very obvious,' or 'I can't be bothered to consider Jane any more,' or merely 'After all, we've just dined there.'

Anyhow, Katherine got off the bus at this point.

I was left repeating to myself, as if it had been a new discovery, which it wasn't, 'Jane is second-rate….'