Jane was taking the chair at a meeting of a section of the Society for Equal Citizenship. The speakers were all girls under thirty who wanted votes. They spoke rather well. They weren't old enough to have become sentimental, and they were mostly past the conventional cliches of the earlier twenties. In extreme youth one has to be second-hand; one doesn't know enough, one hasn't lived or learnt enough, to be first-hand; and one lacks self-confidence. But by five or six-and-twenty one should have left that behind. One should know what one thinks and what one means, and be able to state it in clear terms. That is what these girls—mostly University girls—did.
Jane left the chair and spoke too.
I hadn't known Jane spoke so well. She has a clever, coherent way of making her points, and is concise in reply if questioned, quick at repartee if heckled.
Lady Pinkerton was sitting in the row in front of Juke and me. Mother and daughter. It was very queer to me. That wordy, willowy fool, and the sturdy, hard-headed girl in the chair, with her crisp, gripping mind. Yet there was something…. They both loved success. Perhaps that was it. The vulgarian touch. I felt it the more clearly in them because of Juke at my side. And yet Jukie too … Only he would always be awake to it—on his guard, not capitulating.
2
Jane came round with me after the meeting to the Fact office, to go through some stuff she was writing for us about the meeting. She had to come then, though it was late, because next day was press day. We hadn't been there ten minutes when Hobart's name was sent in, with the message that he was just going home, and was Mrs. Hobart ready to come?
'Well, I'm not,' said Jane to me. 'I shall be quite ten minutes more. I'll go and tell him.'
She went outside and called down, 'Go on, Oliver. I shall be some time yet.'
'I'll wait,' he called up, and Jane came back into the room.
We went on for quite ten minutes.
When we went down, Hobart was standing by the front door, waiting.
'How did you track me?' Jane asked.
'Your mother told me where you'd gone. She called at the Haste on her way home. Good-night, Gideon.'
They went out together, and I returned to the office, irritated a little by being hurried. It was just like Lady Pinkerton, I thought, to have gone round to Hobart inciting him to drag Jane from my office. There had been coldness, if not annoyance, in Hobart's manner to me.
Well, confound him, it wasn't to be expected that he should much care for his wife to write for the Fact. But he might mind his own business and leave Jane to mind hers, I thought.
Peacock came in at this point, and we worked till midnight.
Peacock opened a parcel of review books from Hubert Wilkins—all tripe, of course. He turned them over, impatiently.
'What fools the fellows are to go on sending us their rubbish. They might have learnt by now that we never take any notice of them,' he grumbled. He picked out one with a brilliant wrapper—'A Cabinet Minister's Wife, by Leila Yorke…. That woman needs a lesson, Gideon. She's a public nuisance. I've a good mind—a jolly good mind—to review her, for once. What? Or do you think it would be infra dig? Well, what about an article, then—we'd get Neilson to do one—on the whole tribe of fiction-writing fools, taking Lady Pinkerton for a peg to hang it on? … After all, we are the organ of the Anti-Potter League. We ought to hammer at Potterite fiction as well as at Potterite journalism and politics. For two pins I'd get Johnny Potter to do it. He would, I believe.'
'I'm sure he would. But it would be a little too indecent. Neilson shall do it. Besides, he'd do it better. Or do it yourself.'
'Will you?'
'I will not. My acquaintance with the subject is inadequate, and I've no intention of improving it.'
In the end Peacock did it himself. It was pretty good, and pretty murderous. It came out in next week's number. I met Clare Potter in the street the day after it came out, and she cut me dead. I expect she thought I had written it. I am sure she never read the Fact, but no doubt the family 'attention had been drawn to' the article, as people always express it when writing to a paper to remonstrate about something in it they haven't liked. I suppose they think it would be a score for the paper if they admitted that they had come across it in the natural course of things—anyhow, they want to imply that it is, of course, a paper decent people don't see—like John Bull, or the People.
When I met Johnny Potter, he grinned, and said, 'Good for you, old bean. Or was it Peacock? My mother's persuaded it was you, and she'll never forgive you. Poor old mater, she thought her new book rather on the intellectual side. Full of psycho-analysis, and all that…. I say, I wish Peacock would send me Guthrie's new book to do.'
That was Johnny all over. He was always asking for what he wanted, instead of waiting for what we thought fit to send him. I was sure that when he published a book, he'd write round to the editors telling them who was to review it.
I said, 'I think Neilson's going to do it,' and determined that it should be so. Johnny's brand of grabbing bored me. Jane did the same. A greedy pair, never seeing why they shouldn't have all they wanted.
3
It was at this time (July) that a long, drawn-out quarrel started between the Weekly Fact and the Daily Haste about the miners' strike. The Pinkerton press did its level best to muddle the issues of that strike, by distorting some facts, passing over others, and inventing more. By the time you'd read a leader in the Haste on the subject, you'd have got the impression that the strikers were Bolshevists helped by German money and aiming at a social revolution, instead of discontented, needy and greedy British workmen, grabbing at more money and less work, in the normal, greedy, human way we all have. Bonar Law, departing for once rather unhappily from his 'the Government have given me no information' attitude, announced that the miners were striking against conscription and the war with Russia. Some Labour papers said they were striking against the Government's shifty methods and broken pledges. I am sure both parties credited them with too much idealism and too little plain horse-sense. They were striking to get the pay and hours they wanted out of the Government, and, of course, for nationalisation. They were not idealists, and not Bolshevists, but frank grabbers, like most of us. But, as every one will remember, 'Bolshevist' had become at this period a vague term of abuse, like 'Hun' during the war. People who didn't like Carson called him a Bolshevist; people who didn't like manual labourers called them Bolshevists. What all these users of the mysterious and elastic epithet lacked was a clear understanding and definition of Bolshevism.
The Daily Haste, of course (and, to do it justice, many other papers), used the word freely as meaning the desire for better conditions and belief in the strike as a legitimate means of obtaining them. I suppose it took a shorter time to say or write than this does; anyhow, it bore a large, vague, Potterish meaning that was irresistible to people in general.
The Haste made such a fool of itself over the miners that we came to blows with them, and quarrelled all through July and August, mostly over trivial and petty points. I may add that the Fact was not supporting immediate nationalisation; we were against it, for reasons that it would be too tedious to explain here. (As a matter of fact, I know that all I record of this so recent history is too tedious; I do not seem to be able to avoid most of it; but even I draw the line somewhere). The controversy between the Fact and the Haste seemed after a time to resolve itself largely into a personal quarrel between Hobart and myself. He was annoyed that Jane occasionally wrote for us. I suppose it was natural that he should be annoyed. And he didn't like her to frequent the 1917 Club, to which a lot of us belonged. Jane often lunched there, so did I. She said that you got a better lunch there than at the Women's University Club. Not much better, but still, better. You also met more people you wanted to meet, as well as more people you didn't. We started a sort of informal lunch club, which met there and lunched together on Thursdays. It consisted of Jane, Katherine Varick, Juke, Peacock, Johnny Potter, and myself. Often other people joined us by invitation; my sister Rosalind and her husband, any girl Johnny Potter was for the moment in love with, and friends of Peacock's, Juke's, or mine. Juke would sometimes bring a parson in; this was rather widening for us, I think, and I dare say for the parson too. To Juke it was part of the enterprise of un-Potterising the Church, which was on his mind a good deal. He said it needed un-Potterising as much as the State, or literature, or journalism, or even the drama, and that Potterism in it was even more dangerous than in these. So, when he could, he induced parsons to join the Anti-Potter League.
We weren't all tied up, I may say, with the political party principles very commonly held by members of the 1917 Club. I certainly wasn't a Socialist, nor, wholly, I think, a Radical; neither at that time was Peacock, though he became more so as time went on; nor, certainly, was Katherine. Juke was, because he believed that in these principles was the only hope for the world. And the twins were, because the same principles were the only wear for the young intellectual, at that moment. Johnny, in all things the glass of fashion and the mould of form, wore them as he wore his monocle, quite unconscious of his own reasons for both. But it was the idea of the Anti-Potter League to keep clear of parties and labels. You can belong to a recognised political party and be an Anti-Potterite, for Potterism is a frame of mind, not a set of opinions (Juke was, after Katherine, the best Anti-Potterite I have known, though people did their best to spoil him), but it is easier, and more compatible with your objects, to be free to think what you like about everything. Once you are tied up with a party, you can only avoid second-handedness, taking over views ready-made, if you are very strong-minded indeed.
Thursday was a fairly free afternoon for me, and Jane and I somehow got into a habit of going off somewhere together after lunch, or staying on at the club and talking. Jane seemed to me to be increasingly interesting; she was acquiring new subtleties, complexities, and comprehensions, and shedding crudities. She wrote better, too. We took her stuff sometimes for the Fact. At the same time, she seemed to me to be morally deteriorating, as people who grab and take things they oughtn't to have always do deteriorate. And she was trying all the time to square Hobart with the rest of her life, fitting him in, as it were, and he didn't fit in. I was interested to see what she was making of it all.
4
One Thursday in early September, when Juke and Jane and I had lunched alone together at the club, and Jane and I had gone off to some meeting afterwards, Juke dropped in on me in the evening after dinner. He sat down and lit a pipe, then got up and walked about the room, and I knew he had something on his mind, but wasn't going to help him out. I felt hard and rather sore that evening.
Soon he said, in his soft, indifferent voice, 'Of course you'll be angry at what I'm going to say.'
'I think it probable,' I replied, 'from the look of you. But go on.'
'Well,' he said quietly, 'I don't think these Thursday lunches will do any more.'
'For you?' I asked.
'For any of us. Not with Jane Hobart there.' He wouldn't look at me, but stood by the window looking out at Gray's Inn Road.
'And why not with Jane? Because she's married to the enemy?'
'It makes it awkward,' he murmured.
'Makes it awkward,' I repeated. 'How does it make it awkward? Whom does it make awkward? It doesn't make Jane awkward. Nor me, nor any one else, as far as I know. Does it make you awkward? I didn't know anything could do that. But something obviously has, this evening. It's not Jane, though; it's being afraid to say what you mean. You'd better spit it out, Jukie. You're not enough of a Jesuit to handle these jobs competently, you know. I know perfectly well what you've got on your mind. You think Jane and I are getting too intimate with each other. You think we're falling, or fallen, or about to fall, in love.'
'Well,' he wheeled round on me, relieved that I had said it, 'I do. And you can't deny it…. Any fool could see it by now. Why, the way you mooned about, depressed and sulky, this last month, when she's been out of town, and woke up the moment she came back, was enough to tell any one.'
'I dare say,' I said indifferently. 'People's minds are usually offensively open to that particular information. If you'll define being in love, I'll tell you whether I'm in love with Jane…. I'm interested in Jane; I find her attractive, if you like, extraordinarily attractive, though I don't admire her character, and she's not beautiful. I like to be with her and to talk to her. On the other hand, I've not the least intention of asking her to elope with me. Nor would she if I did. Well?'
'You're in love,' Juke repeated. 'You mayn't know it, but you are. And you'll get deeper in every day, if you don't pull up. And then before you know where you are, there'll be the most ghastly mess.'
'Don't trouble yourself, Jukie. There won't be a mess. Jane doesn't like messes. And I'm not quite a fool. Don't imagine melodrama…. I claim the right to be intimate with Jane—well, if you like, to be a little in love with Jane—and yet to keep my head and not play the fool. Why should men and women lose their attraction for each other just because they marry and promise loyalty to some one person? They can keep that compact and yet not shut themselves away from other men and other women. They must have friends. Life can't be an eternal duet…. And here you come, using that cant Potterish phrase, "in love," as if love was the sea, or something definite that you must be in or out of and always know which.'
'The sea—yes,' Juke took me up. 'It's like the sea; it advances and advances, and you can't stand there and stop it, say "Thus far and no farther" to it. All you can do is to turn your back upon it and walk away in time.'
'Well, I'm not going to walk away. There's nothing to walk away from. I've no intention of behaving in a dishonourable way, and I claim the right to be friends with Jane. So that's that.'
I was angry with Juke. He was taking the prudish, conventional point of view. I had never yet been the victim of passion; love between men and women had always rather bored me; it is such a hot, stupid, muddling thing, ail emotion and no thought. Dull, I had always thought it; one of those impulses arranged by nature for her own purposes, but not in the least interesting to the civilised thinking being. Juke had no right to speak as if I were an amorous fool, liable to be bowled over against my better judgment.
'I've told you what I think,' said Juke bluntly. 'I can't do any more. It's your own show.' He took out his watch. 'I've got a Men's Social,' he said, and went. That is so like parsons. Their conversations nearly always have these sudden ends. But I suppose that is not their fault.
5
And, after all, Juke was right. Juke was right. It was love, and I was in it, and so was Jane. Five minutes after Juke left me that night I knew that. I had been in love with Jane for years; perhaps since before the war, only I had never known it. On that Anti-Potter investigation tour I had observed and analysed her, and smiled cynically to myself at the commercial instinct of the Potter twins, the lack of the fineness that distinguished Katherine and Juke. I remembered that; but I remembered, too, how white and round Jane's chin had looked as it pressed against the thymy turf of the cliff where we lay above the sea. All through the war I had seen her at intervals, enjoying life, finding the war a sort of lark, and I had hated her because she didn't care for the death and torture of men, for the possible defeat of her country, or the already achieved economic, moral, and intellectual degradation of the whole of Europe. She had merely profiteered out of it all, and had a good time. I remembered now my anger and my scorn; but I remembered too the squareness and the whiteness of her forehead under her newly-cut hair, that leave when I had first seen it bobbed.
I had been moved by desire then without knowing it; I had let Hobart take her, and still not known. The pang I had felt had been bitterness at having lost Jane, not bitterness against Jane for having made a second-rate marriage.
But I knew now. Juke's words, in retrospect, were like fire to petrol; I was suddenly all ablaze.
In that case Juke was right, and we mustn't go on meeting alone. There might be, as he said, the most ghastly mess. Because I knew now that Jane was in love with me too—a little.
We couldn't go on. It was too second-rate. It was anti-social, stupid, uncivilised, all I most hated, to let emotion play the devil with one's reasoned principles and theories. I wasn't going to. It would be sentimental, sloppy—'the world well lost for love,' as in a schoolgirl's favourite novel, a novel by Leila Yorke.
Now there are some loves that the world, important though it is, may be well lost for—the love of an idea, a principle, a cause, a discovery, a piece of knowledge or of beauty, perhaps a country; but very certainly the love of lovers is not among these; it is too common and personal a thing. I hate the whole tribe of sentimental men and women who, impelled by the unimaginative fool nature, exalt sexual love above its proper place in the scheme of things. I wasn't going to do it, or to let the thing upset my life or Jane's.
6
I kept away from Jane all that week. She rang me up at the office once; it may have been my fancy that her voice sounded strange, somehow less assured than usual. It set me wondering about that last lunch and afternoon together which had roused Juke. Had it roused Jane, too? What had happened, exactly? How had I spoken and looked? I couldn't remember; only that I had been glad—very glad—to have Jane back in town again.
I didn't go to the club next Thursday. As it happened, I was lunching with some one else. So, by Thursday evening, I hadn't seen Jane for a week.
Wanting company, I went to Katherine's flat after dinner. Katherine had just finished dinner, and with her was Jane.
When I saw her, lying there smoking in the most comfortable arm-chair as usual, serene and lazy and pale, Juke's words blazed up between us like a fire, and I couldn't look at her.
I don't know what we talked about; I expect I was odd and absent. I knew Katherine was looking at me, with those frosty, piercing, light blue eyes of hers that saw through, and through, and beyond….
All the time I was saying to myself, 'This won't do. I must chuck it. We mustn't meet.'
I think Jane talked about Abraham Lincoln, which she disliked, and Lady Pinkerton's experiments in spiritualism, which were rather funny. But I couldn't have been there for more than half an hour before Jane got up to go. She had to get home, she said.
I went with her. I didn't mean to, but I did. And here, if any one wants to know why I regard 'being in love' as a disastrous kink in the mental machinery, is the reason. It impels you to do things against all your reasoned will and intentions. My madness drove me out with Jane, drove me to see her home by the Hampstead tube, to walk across the Vale of Health with her in the moonlight, to go in with her, and upstairs to the drawing-room.
All this time we had talked little, and of common, superficial things. But now, as I stood in the long, dimly-lit room and watched Jane take off her hat, drop it on a table, and stand for a moment with her back to me, turning over the evening post, I knew that I must somehow have it out, have things clear and straight between us. It seemed to me to be the only way of striking any sort of a path through the intricate difficulties of our future relations.
'Jane,' I said, and she turned and looked at me with questioning gray eyes.
At that I had no words for explanation or anything else: I could only repeat, 'Jane. Jane. Jane,' like a fool.
She said, very low, 'Yes, Arthur,' as if she were assenting to some statement I had made, as perhaps she was.
I somehow found that I had caught her hands in mine, and so we stood together, but still I said nothing but 'Jane,' because that was all that, for the moment, I knew.
Hobart stood in the open doorway, looking at us, white and quiet.
'Good-evening,' he said.
We fell apart, loosing each other's hands.
'You're early back, Oliver,' said Jane, composedly.
'Earlier, obviously,' he returned, 'than I was expected.'
My anger, my hatred, my contempt for him and my own shame blazed in me together. I faced him, black and bitter, and he was not only to me Jane's husband, the suspicious, narrow-minded ass to whom she was tied, but, much more, the Potterite, the user of cant phrases, the ignorant player to the gallery of the Pinkerton press, the fool who had so little sense of his folly that he disputed on facts with the experts who wrote for the Weekly Fact. In him, at that moment, I saw all the Potterism of this dreadful world embodied, and should have liked to have struck it dead.
'What exactly,' I asked him, 'do you mean by that?'
He smiled.
Jane yawned. 'I'm going to take my things off,' she said, and went out of the room and up the next flight of stairs to her bedroom. It was her contemptuous way of indicating that the situation was, in fact, no situation at all, but merely a rather boring conversation.
As, though I appreciated her attitude, I couldn't agree with her, I repeated my question.
