The Passionate Friends
but never universal, as old at least as the mines of Syracuse and the
building of the pyramids, the side that came into view when I emerged
from the dusty station and sighted the squat shanties and slender
chimneys of Johannesburg, that uprooted side of social life, that
accumulation of toilers divorced from the soil, which is Industrialism
and Labor and which carries such people as ourselves, and whatever
significance and possibilities we have, as an elephant carries its
rider.
Now all Johannesburg and Pretoria were discussing Labor and nothing but
Labor. Bloemfontein was in conference thereon. Our work of repatriation
which had loomed so large on the southernward veld became here a
business at once incidental and remote. One felt that a little sooner or
a little later all that would resume and go on, as the rains would, and
the veld-grass. But this was something less kindred to the succession of
the seasons and the soil. This was a hitch in the upper fabric. Here in
the great ugly mine-scarred basin of the Rand, with its bare hillsides,
half the stamps were standing idle, machinery was eating its head off,
time and water were running to waste amidst an immense exasperated
disputation. Something had given way. The war had spoilt the Kaffir
"boy," he was demanding enormous wages, he was away from Johannesburg,
and above all, he would no longer "go underground."
Implicit in all the argument and suggestion about me was this profoundly
suggestive fact that some people, quite a lot of people, scores of
thousands, had to "go underground." Implicit too always in the discourse
was the assumption that the talker or writer in question wasn't for a
moment to be expected to go there. Those others, whoever they were, had
to do that for us. Before the war it had been the artless Portuguese
Kaffir, but he alas! was being diverted to open-air employment at
Delagoa Bay. Should we raise wages and go on with the fatal process of
"spoiling the workers," should we by imposing a tremendous hut-tax drive
the Kaffir into our toils, should we carry the labor hunt across the
Zambesi into Central Africa, should we follow the lead of Lord Kitchener
and Mr. Creswell and employ the rather dangerous unskilled white labor
(with "ideas" about strikes and socialism) that had drifted into
Johannesburg, should we do tremendous things with labor-saving
machinery, or were we indeed (desperate yet tempting resort!) to bring
in the cheap Indian or Chinese coolie?
Steadily things were drifting towards that last tremendous experiment.
There was a vigorous opposition in South Africa and in England (growing
there to an outcry), but behind that proposal was the one vitalizing
conviction in modern initiative:--indisputably it would pay, _it would
pay_!...
The human mind has a much more complex and fluctuating process than most
of those explanatory people who write about psychology would have us
believe. Instead of that simple, direct movement, like the movement of a
point, forward and from here to there, one's thoughts advance like an
army, sometimes extended over an enormous front, sometimes in échelon,
sometimes bunched in a column throwing out skirmishing clouds of
emotion, some flying and soaring, some crawling, some stopping and
dying.... In this matter of Labor, for example, I have thought so much,
thought over the ground again and again, come into it from this way and
from that way, that for the life of me I find it impossible to state at
all clearly how much I made of these questions during that Johannesburg
time. I cannot get back into those ancient ignorances, revive my old
astonishments and discoveries. Certainly I envisaged the whole process
much less clearly than I do now, ignored difficulties that have since
entangled me, regarded with a tremendous perplexity aspects that have
now become lucidly plain. I came back to England confused, and doing
what confused people are apt to do, clinging to an inadequate phrase
that seemed at any rate to define a course of action. The word
"efficiency" had got hold of me. All our troubles came, one assumed,
from being "inefficient." One turned towards politics with a bustling
air, and was all for fault-finding and renovation.
I sit here at my desk, pen in hand, and trace figures on the
blotting-paper, and wonder how much I understood at that time. I came
back to England to work on the side of "efficiency," that is quite
certain. A little later I was writing articles and letters about it, so
that much is documented. But I think I must have apprehended too by that
time some vague outline at least of those wider issues in the sæcular
conflict between the new forms of human association and the old, to
which contemporary politics and our national fate are no more than
transitory eddies and rufflings of the surface waters. It was all so
nakedly plain there. On the one hand was the primordial, on the other
the rankly new. The farm on the veld stood on the veld, a thing of the
veld, a thing rooted and established there and nowhere else. The dusty,
crude, brick-field desolation of the Rand on the other hand did not
really belong with any particularity to South Africa at all. It was one
with our camps and armies. It was part of something else, something
still bigger: a monstrous shadowy arm had thrust out from Europe and
torn open this country, erected these chimneys, piled these heaps--and
sent the ration-tins and cartridge-cases to follow them. It was gigantic
kindred with that ancient predecessor which had built the walls of
Zimbabwe. And this hungry, impatient demand for myriads of toilers, this
threatening inundation of black or brown or yellow bond-serfs was just
the natural voice of this colossal system to which I belonged, which had
brought me hither, and which I now perceived I did not even begin to
understand....
One day when asking my way to some forgotten destination, I had pointed
out to me the Grey and Roberts Deep Mine. Some familiarity in the name
set me thinking until I recalled that this was the mine in which I had
once heard Lady Ladislaw confess large holdings, this mine in which
gangs of indentured Chinamen would presently be sweating to pay the
wages of the game-keepers and roadmenders in Burnmore Park....
Yes, this was what I was taking in at that time, but it found
me--inexpressive; what I was saying on my return to England gave me no
intimation of the broad conceptions growing in my mind. I came back to
be one of the many scores of energetic and ambitious young men who were
parroting "Efficiency," stirring up people and more particularly
stirring up themselves with the utmost vigor,--and all the time within
their secret hearts more than a little at a loss....
§ 6
While I had been in South Africa circumstances had conspired to alter my
prospects in life very greatly. Unanticipated freedoms and opportunities
had come to me, and it was no longer out of the question for me to think
of a parliamentary career. Our fortunes had altered. My father had
ceased to be rector of Burnmore, and had become a comparatively wealthy
man.
My second cousin, Reginald Stratton, had been drowned in Finland, and
his father had only survived the shock of his death a fortnight; his
sister, Arthur Mason's first wife, had died in giving birth to a
stillborn child the year before, and my father found himself suddenly
the owner of all that large stretch of developing downland and building
land which old Reginald had bought between Shaddock and Golding on the
south and West Esher station on the north, and in addition of
considerable investments in northern industrials. It was an odd
collusion of mortality; we had had only the coldest relations with our
cousins, and now abruptly through their commercial and speculative
activities, which we had always affected to despise and ignore, I was in
a position to attempt the realization of my old political ambitions.
My cousins' house had not been to my father's taste. He had let it, and
I came to a new home in a pleasant, plain red-brick house, a hundred and
fifty years old perhaps, on an open and sunny hillside, sheltered by
trees eastward and northward, a few miles to the south-west of
Guildford. It had all the gracious proportions, the dignified
simplicity, the roomy comfort of the good building of that time. It
looked sunward; we breakfasted in sunshine in the library, and outside
was an old wall with peach trees and a row of pillar roses heavily in
flower. I had a little feared this place; Burnmore Rectory had been so
absolutely home to me with its quiet serenities, its ample familiar
garden, its greenhouses and intimately known corners, but I perceived I
might have trusted my father's character to preserve his essential
atmosphere. He was so much himself as I remembered him that I did not
even observe for a day or so that he had not only aged considerably but
discarded the last vestiges of clerical costume in his attire. He met me
in front of the house and led me into a wide panelled hall and wrung my
hand again and again, deeply moved and very inexpressive. "Did you have
a good journey?" he asked again and again, with tears in his eyes. "Did
you have a comfortable journey?"
"I've not seen the house," said I. "It looks fine."
"_You're_ a man," he said, and patted my shoulder. "Of course! It was at
Burnmore."
"You're not changed," I said. "You're not an atom changed."
"How could I?" he replied. "Come--come and have something to eat. You
ought to have something to eat."
We talked of the house and what a good house it was, and he took me out
into the garden to see the peaches and grape vine and then brought me
back without showing them to me in order to greet my cousin. "It's very
like Burnmore," he said with his eyes devouring me, "very like. A
little more space and--no services. No services at all. That makes a gap
of course. There's a little chap about here, you'll find--his name is
Wednesday--who sorts my papers and calls himself my secretary.... Not
necessary perhaps but--_I missed the curate_."
He said he was reading more than he used to do now that the parish was
off his hands, and he was preparing material for a book. It was, he
explained later, to take the form of a huge essay ostensibly on Secular
Canons, but its purport was to be no less than the complete
secularization of the Church of England. At first he wanted merely to
throw open the cathedral chapters to distinguished laymen, irrespective
of their theological opinions, and to make each English cathedral a
centre of intellectual activity, a college as it were of philosophers
and writers. But afterwards his suggestions grew bolder, the Articles of
Religion were to be set aside, the creeds made optional even for the
clergy. His dream became more and more richly picturesque until at last
he saw Canterbury a realized Thelema, and St. Paul's a new Academic
Grove. He was to work at that remarkable proposal intermittently for
many years, and to leave it at last no more than a shapeless mass of
memoranda, fragmentary essays, and selected passages for quotation. Yet
mere patchwork and scrapbook as it would be, I still have some thought
of publishing it. There is a large human charity about it, a sun too
broad and warm, a reasonableness too wide and free perhaps for the timid
convulsive quality of our time, yet all good as good wine for the wise.
Is it incredible that a day should come when our great grey monuments to
the Norman spirit should cease to be occupied by narrow-witted parsons
and besieged by narrow-souled dissenters, the soul of our race in exile
from the home and place our fathers built for it?...
If he was not perceptibly changed, I thought my cousin Jane had become
more than a little sharper and stiffer. She did not like my uncle's own