The Passionate Friends
personal secularization, and still less the glimpses she got of the
ampler intentions of his book. She missed the proximity to the church
and her parochial authority. But she was always a silent woman, and made
her comments with her profile and not with her tongue....
"I'm glad you've come back, Stephen," said my father as we sat together
after dinner and her departure, with port and tall silver candlesticks
and shining mahogany between us. "I've missed you. I've done my best to
follow things out there. I've got, I suppose, every press mention
there's been of you during the war and since. I've subscribed to two
press-cutting agencies, so that if one missed you the other fellow got
you. Perhaps you'll like to read them over one of these days.... You
see, there's not been a soldier in the family since the Peninsular War,
and so I've been particularly interested.... You must tell me all the
things you're thinking of, and what you mean to do. This last
stuff--this Chinese business--it puzzles me. I want to know what you
think of it--and everything."
I did my best to give him my ideas such as they were. And as they were
still very vague ideas I have no doubt he found me rhetorical. I can
imagine myself talking of the White Man's Burthen, and how in Africa it
had seemed at first to sit rather staggeringly upon our under-trained
shoulders. I spoke of slackness and planlessness.
"I've come back in search of efficiency." I have no doubt I said that
at any rate.
"We're trying to run this big empire," I may have explained, "with
under-trained, under-educated, poor-spirited stuff, and we shall come a
cropper unless we raise our quality. I'm still Imperialist, more than
ever I was. But I'm an Imperialist on a different footing. I've no great
illusions left about the Superiority of the Anglo-Saxons. All that has
gone. But I do think it will be a monstrous waste, a disaster to human
possibilities if this great liberal-spirited empire sprawls itself
asunder for the want of a little gravity and purpose. And it's here the
work has to be done, the work of training and bracing up and stimulating
the public imagination...."
Yes, that would be the sort of thing I should have said in those days.
There's an old _National Review_ on my desk as I write, containing an
article by me with some of those very phrases in it. I have been looking
at it in order to remind myself of my own forgotten eloquence.
"Yes," I remember my father saying. "Yes." And then after reflection,
"But those coolies, those Chinese coolies. You can't build up an
imperial population by importing coolies."
"I don't like that side of the business myself," I said. "It's detail."
"Perhaps. But the Liberals will turn you out on it next year. And then
start badgering public houses and looting the church.... And then this
Tariff talk! Everybody on our side seems to be mixing up the unity of
the empire with tariffs. It's a pity. Salisbury wouldn't have stood it.
Unity! Unity depends on a common literature and a common language and
common ideas and sympathies. It doesn't unite people for them to be
forced to trade with each other. Trading isn't friendship. I don't trade
with my friends and I don't make friends with my tradesmen. Natural
enemies--polite of course but antagonists. Are you keen over this Tariff
stuff, Steve?"
"Not a bit," I said. "That too seems a detail."
"It doesn't seem to be keeping its place as a detail," said my father.
"Very few men can touch tariffs and not get a little soiled. I hate all
this international sharping, all these attempts to get artificial
advantages, all this making poor people buy inferior goods dear, in the
name of the flag. If it comes to that, damn the flag! Custom-houses are
ugly things, Stephen; the dirty side of nationality. Dirty things,
ignoble, cross, cunning things.... They wake you up in the small hours
and rout over your bags.... An imperial people ought to be an urbane
people, a civilizing people--above such petty irritating things. I'd as
soon put barbed wire along the footpath across that field where the
village children go to school. Or claim that our mushrooms are
cultivated. Or prosecute a Sunday-Society Cockney for picking my
primroses. Custom-houses indeed! It's Chinese. There are things a Great
Country mustn't do, Stephen. A country like ours ought to get along
without the manners of a hard-breathing competitive cad.... If it can't
I'd rather it didn't get along.... What's the good of a huckster
country?--it's like having a wife on the streets. It's no excuse that
she brings you money. But since the peace, and that man Chamberlain's
visit to Africa, you Imperialists seem to have got this nasty spirit all
over you.... The Germans do it, you say!"
My father shut one eye and regarded the color of his port against the
waning light. "Let _'em_," he said.... "Fancy!--quoting the _Germans_!
When I was a boy, there weren't any Germans. They came up after '70.
Statecraft from Germany! And statesmen from Birmingham! German silver
and Electroplated Empires.... No."
"It's just a part of our narrow outlook," I answered from the hearthrug,
after a pause. "It's because we're so--limited that everyone is
translating the greatness of empire into preferential trading and
jealousy of Germany. It's for something bigger than that that I've
returned."
"Those big things come slowly," said my father. And then with a sigh:
"Age after age. They seem at times--to be standing still. Good things go
with the bad; bad things come with the good...."
I remember him saying that as though I could still hear him.
It must have been after dinner, for he was sitting, duskily indistinct,
against the light, with a voice coming out to him. The candles had not
been brought in, and the view one saw through the big plate glass window
behind him was very clear and splendid. Those little Wealden hills in
Surrey and Sussex assume at times, for all that by Swiss standards they
are the merest ridges of earth, the dignity and mystery of great
mountains. Now, the crests of Hindhead and Blackdown, purple black
against the level gold of the evening sky, might have been some
high-flung boundary chain. Nearer there gathered banks and pools of
luminous lavender-tinted mist out of which hills of pinewood rose like
islands out of the sea. The intervening spaces were magnified to
continental dimensions. And the closer lowlier things over which we
looked, the cottages below us, were grey and black and dim, pierced by a
few luminous orange windows and with a solitary street lamp shining like
a star; the village might have been nestling a mountain's height below
instead of a couple of hundred feet.
I left my hearthrug, and walked to the window to survey this.
"Who's got all that land stretching away there; that little blunted
sierra of pines and escarpments I mean?"
My father halted for an instant in his answer, and glanced over his
shoulder.
"Wardingham and Baxter share all those coppices," he remarked. "They
come up to my corner on each side."
"But the dark heather and pine land beyond. With just the gables of a
house among the trees."
"Oh? _that_," he said with a careful note of indifference.
"That's--Justin. You know Justin. He used to come to Burnmore Park."
CHAPTER THE SIXTH
LADY MARY JUSTIN
§ 1
I did not see Lady Mary Justin for nearly seven months after my return
to England. Of course I had known that a meeting was inevitable, and I
had taken that very carefully into consideration before I decided to
leave South Africa. But many things had happened to me during those
crowded years, so that it seemed possible that that former magic would
no longer sway and distress me. Not only had new imaginative interests
taken hold of me but--I had parted from adolescence. I was a man. I had
been through a great war, seen death abundantly, seen hardship and
passion, and known hunger and shame and desire. A hundred disillusioning
revelations of the quality of life had come to me; once for example when
we were taking some people to the concentration camps it had been
necessary to assist at the premature birth of a child by the wayside, a
startlingly gory and agonizing business for a young man to deal with.
Heavens! how it shocked me! I could give a score of such grim
pictures--and queer pictures....
And it wasn't only the earthlier aspects of the life about me but also
of the life within me that I had been discovering. The first wonder and
innocence, the worshipping, dawn-clear passion of youth, had gone out of
me for ever....
§ 2
We met at a dinner. It was at a house the Tarvrilles had taken for the
season in Mayfair. The drawing-room was a big white square apartment
with several big pictures and a pane of plate glass above the fireplace
in the position in which one usually finds a mirror; this showed another
room beyond, containing an exceptionally large, gloriously colored
portrait in pastel--larger than I had ever thought pastels could be.
Except for the pictures both rooms were almost colorless. It was a
brilliant dinner, with a predominating note of ruby; three of the women
wore ruby velvet; and Ellersley was present just back from Arabia, and
Ethel Manton, Lady Hendon and the Duchess of Clynes. I was greeted by
Lady Tarvrille, spoke to Ellersley and Lady Hendon, and then discovered
a lady in a dress of blue and pearls standing quite still under a
picture in the opposite corner of the room and regarding me attentively.
It was Mary. Some man was beside her, a tall grey man with a broad
crimson ribbon, and I think he must have spoken of me to her. It was as
if she had just turned to look at me.
Constantly during those intervening months I had been thinking of
meeting her. None the less there was a shock, not so much of surprise as
of deferred anticipation. There she stood like something amazingly
forgotten that was now amazingly recalled. She struck me in that brief
crowded instant of recognition as being exactly the person she had been
when we had made love in Burnmore Park; there were her eyes, at once
frank and sidelong, the old familiar sweep of her hair, the old familiar
tilt of the chin, the faint humor of her lip, and at the same time she
seemed to be something altogether different from the memories I had
cherished, she was something graver, something inherently more splendid
than they had recorded. Her face lit now with recognition.
I went across to her at once, with some dull obviousness upon my lips.
"And so you are back from Africa at last," she said, still unsmiling. "I
saw about you in the papers.... You had a good time."
"I had great good luck," I replied.
"I never dreamt when we were boy and girl together that you would make a
soldier."
I think I said that luck made soldiers.
Then I think we found a difficulty in going on with our talk, and began
a dull little argument that would have been stupidly egotistical on my
part if it hadn't been so obviously merely clumsy, about luck making
soldiers or only finding them out. I saw that she had not intended to
convey any doubt of my military capacity but only of that natural
insensitiveness which is supposed to be needed in a soldier. But our
minds were remote from the words upon our lips. We were like aphasiacs
who say one thing while they intend something altogether different. The
impulse that had brought me across to her had brought me up to a wall of
impossible utterances. It was with a real quality of rescue that our
hostess came between us to tell us our partners at the dinner-table,
and to introduce me to mine. "You shall have him again on your other
side," she said to Lady Mary with a charming smile for me, treating me
as if I was a lion in request instead of the mere outsider I was.