Mr. Standfast
place was sown with villages, each with its green and pond and ancient
church. Most, too, had inns, and there I had many a draught of cool
nutty ale, for the inn at Biggleswick was a reformed place which sold
nothing but washy cider. Often, tramping home in the dusk, I was so
much in love with the land that I could have sung with the pure joy of
it. And in the evening, after a bath, there would be supper, when a
rather fagged Jimson struggled between sleep and hunger, and the lady,
with an artistic mutch on her untidy head, talked ruthlessly of
culture.
Bit by bit I edged my way into local society. The Jimsons were a great
help, for they were popular and had a nodding acquaintance with most of
the inhabitants. They regarded me as a meritorious aspirant towards a
higher life, and I was paraded before their friends with the suggestion
of a vivid, if Philistine, past. If I had any gift for writing, I would
make a book about the inhabitants of Biggleswick. About half were
respectable citizens who came there for country air and low rates, but
even these had a touch of queerness and had picked up the jargon of the
place. The younger men were mostly Government clerks or writers or
artists. There were a few widows with flocks of daughters, and on the
outskirts were several bigger houses—mostly houses which had been there
before the garden city was planted. One of them was brand-new, a
staring villa with sham-antique timbering, stuck on the top of a hill
among raw gardens. It belonged to a man called Moxon Ivery, who was a
kind of academic pacificist and a great god in the place. Another, a
quiet Georgian manor house, was owned by a London publisher, an ardent
Liberal whose particular branch of business compelled him to keep in
touch with the new movements. I used to see him hurrying to the station
swinging a little black bag and returning at night with the fish for
dinner.
I soon got to know a surprising lot of people, and they were the
rummiest birds you can imagine. For example, there were the Weekeses,
three girls who lived with their mother in a house so artistic that you
broke your head whichever way you turned in it. The son of the family
was a conscientious objector who had refused to do any sort of work
whatever, and had got quodded for his pains. They were immensely proud
of him and used to relate his sufferings in Dartmoor with a gusto which
I thought rather heartless. Art was their great subject, and I am
afraid they found me pretty heavy going. It was their fashion never to
admire anything that was obviously beautiful, like a sunset or a pretty
woman, but to find surprising loveliness in things which I thought
hideous. Also they talked a language that was beyond me. This kind of
conversation used to happen.—MISS WEEKES: “Don’t you admire Ursula
Jimson?” SELF: “Rather!” MISS W.: “She is so John-esque in her lines.”
SELF: “Exactly!” MISS W.: “And Tancred, too—he is so full of
_nuances_.” SELF: “Rather!” MISS W.: “He suggests one of Dégousse’s
countrymen.” SELF: “Exactly!”
They hadn’t much use for books, except some Russian ones, and I
acquired merit in their eyes for having read _Leprous Souls_. If you
talked to them about that divine countryside, you found they didn’t
give a rap for it and had never been a mile beyond the village. But
they admired greatly the sombre effect of a train going into Marylebone
station on a rainy day.
But it was the men who interested me most. Aronson, the novelist,
proved on acquaintance the worst kind of blighter. He considered
himself a genius whom it was the duty of the country to support, and he
sponged on his wretched relatives and anyone who would lend him money.
He was always babbling about his sins, and pretty squalid they were. I
should like to have flung him among a few good old-fashioned
full-blooded sinners of my acquaintance; they would have scared him
considerably. He told me that he sought “reality” and “life” and
“truth”, but it was hard to see how he could know much about them, for
he spent half the day in bed smoking cheap cigarettes, and the rest
sunning himself in the admiration of half-witted girls. The creature
was tuberculous in mind and body, and the only novel of his I read,
pretty well turned my stomach. Mr Aronson’s strong point was jokes
about the war. If he heard of any acquaintance who had joined up or was
even doing war work his merriment knew no bounds. My fingers used to
itch to box the little wretch’s ears.
Letchford was a different pair of shoes. He was some kind of a man, to
begin with, and had an excellent brain and the worst manners
conceivable. He contradicted everything you said, and looked out for an
argument as other people look for their dinner. He was a
double-engined, high-speed pacificist, because he was the kind of
cantankerous fellow who must always be in a minority. If Britain had
stood out of the war he would have been a raving militarist, but since
she was in it he had got to find reasons why she was wrong. And jolly
good reasons they were, too. I couldn’t have met his arguments if I had
wanted to, so I sat docilely at his feet. The world was all crooked for
Letchford, and God had created him with two left hands. But the fellow
had merits. He had a couple of jolly children whom he adored, and he
would walk miles with me on a Sunday, and spout poetry about the beauty
and greatness of England. He was forty-five; if he had been thirty and
in my battalion I could have made a soldier out of him.
There were dozens more whose names I have forgotten, but they had one
common characteristic. They were puffed up with spiritual pride, and I
used to amuse myself with finding their originals in the _Pilgrim’s
Progress_. When I tried to judge them by the standard of old Peter,
they fell woefully short. They shut out the war from their lives, some
out of funk, some out of pure levity of mind, and some because they
were really convinced that the thing was all wrong. I think I grew
rather popular in my role of the seeker after truth, the honest
colonial who was against the war by instinct and was looking for
instruction in the matter. They regarded me as a convert from an alien
world of action which they secretly dreaded, though they affected to
despise it. Anyhow they talked to me very freely, and before long I had
all the pacifist arguments by heart. I made out that there were three
schools. One objected to war altogether, and this had few adherents
except Aronson and Weekes, C.O., now languishing in Dartmoor. The
second thought that the Allies’ cause was tainted, and that Britain had
contributed as much as Germany to the catastrophe. This included all
the adherents of the L.D.A.—or League of Democrats against Aggression—a
very proud body. The third and much the largest, which embraced
everybody else, held that we had fought long enough and that the
business could now be settled by negotiation, since Germany had learned
her lesson. I was myself a modest member of the last school, but I was
gradually working my way up to the second, and I hoped with luck to
qualify for the first. My acquaintances approved my progress. Letchford
said I had a core of fanaticism in my slow nature, and that I would end
by waving the red flag.
Spiritual pride and vanity, as I have said, were at the bottom of most
of them, and, try as I might, I could find nothing very dangerous in it
all. This vexed me, for I began to wonder if the mission which I had
embarked on so solemnly were not going to be a fiasco. Sometimes they
worried me beyond endurance. When the news of Messines came nobody took
the slightest interest, while I was aching to tooth every detail of the
great fight. And when they talked on military affairs, as Letchford and
others did sometimes, it was difficult to keep from sending them all to
the devil, for their amateur cocksureness would have riled Job. One had
got to batten down the recollection of our fellows out there who were
sweating blood to keep these fools snug. Yet I found it impossible to
be angry with them for long, they were so babyishly innocent. Indeed, I
couldn’t help liking them, and finding a sort of quality in them. I had
spent three years among soldiers, and the British regular, great fellow
that he is, has his faults. His discipline makes him in a funk of
red-tape and any kind of superior authority. Now these people were
quite honest and in a perverted way courageous. Letchford was, at any
rate. I could no more have done what he did and got hunted off
platforms by the crowd and hooted at by women in the streets than I
could have written his leading articles.
All the same I was rather low about my job. Barring the episode of the
ransacking of my effects the first night, I had not a suspicion of a
clue or a hint of any mystery. The place and the people were as open
and bright as a Y.M.C.A. hut. But one day I got a solid wad of comfort.
In a corner of Letchford’s paper, the _Critic_, I found a letter which
was one of the steepest pieces of invective I had ever met with. The
writer gave tongue like a beagle pup about the prostitution, as he
called it, of American republicanism to the vices of European
aristocracies. He declared that Senator La Follette was a
much-misunderstood patriot, seeing that he alone spoke for the toiling
millions who had no other friend. He was mad with President Wilson, and
he prophesied a great awakening when Uncle Sam got up against John Bull
in Europe and found out the kind of standpatter he was. The letter was
signed “John S. Blenkiron” and dated “London, July 3rd”.
The thought that Blenkiron was in England put a new complexion on my
business. I reckoned I would see him soon, for he wasn’t the man to
stand still in his tracks. He had taken up the rôle he had played
before he left in December 1915, and very right too, for not more than
half a dozen people knew of the Erzerum affair, and to the British
public he was only the man who had been fired out of the Savoy for
talking treason. I had felt a bit lonely before, but now somewhere
within the four corners of the island the best companion God ever made
was writing nonsense with his tongue in his old cheek.
There was an institution in Biggleswick which deserves mention. On the
south of the common, near the station, stood a red-brick building
called the Moot Hall, which was a kind of church for the very undevout
population. Undevout in the ordinary sense, I mean, for I had already
counted twenty-seven varieties of religious conviction, including three
Buddhists, a Celestial Hierarch, five Latter-day Saints, and about ten
varieties of Mystic whose names I could never remember. The hall had
been the gift of the publisher I have spoken of, and twice a week it
was used for lectures and debates. The place was managed by a committee
and was surprisingly popular, for it gave all the bubbling intellects a
chance of airing their views. When you asked where somebody was and
were told he was “at Moot,” the answer was spoken in the respectful
tone in which you would mention a sacrament.
I went there regularly and got my mind broadened to cracking point. We
had all the stars of the New Movements. We had Doctor Chirk, who
lectured on “God”, which, as far as I could make out, was a new name he
had invented for himself. There was a woman, a terrible woman, who had
come back from Russia with what she called a “message of healing”. And
to my joy, one night there was a great buck nigger who had a lot to say
about “Africa for the Africans”. I had a few words with him in Sesutu
afterwards, and rather spoiled his visit. Some of the people were
extraordinarily good, especially one jolly old fellow who talked about
English folk songs and dances, and wanted us to set up a Maypole. In
the debates which generally followed I began to join, very coyly at