Potterism Part 28

'Not you, daddy. The papers, he does. He rather likes you, though he doesn't approve of you.... He doesn't like mother, and she doesn't like him. But people often don't get on with their mothers-in-law.'

'It's an awkward alliance, my dear, a very awkward alliance. What will people say? Besides, he's a Jew.'

Jewish babies; he was thinking of them too.

Jane thought, bother the babies. Perhaps there wouldn't be any, and if there were, they'd only be a quarter Jew. Anyhow, it wasn't them she wanted; it was Arthur.

Arthur opened doors and windows. You got to the edge of your own thought, and then stepped out beyond into his thought. And his thought drove sharp and hard into s.p.a.ce.

But more than this, Jane loved the way his hair grew, and the black line his eyebrows made across his forehead, and the way he stood, tall and lean and slouching, and his keen thin face and his long thin hands, and the way his mouth twisted up when he smiled, and his voice, and the whole of him. She wondered if he loved her like that--if he turned hot and cold when he saw her in the distance. She believed that he did love her like that. He had loved her, as she had loved him, all that time he had thought she was lying to every one about Oliver's death.

'It isn't what people do,' said Jane, 'that makes one love them or stop loving them.'

'Is this,' she thought, 'what Clare felt for Oliver? I didn't know it was like this, or I wouldn't have taken him from her. Poor old Clare.' Could one love Oliver like that? Any one, Jane supposed, could be loved like that, by the right person. And people like Clare loved more intensely than people like her; they felt more, and had fewer other occupations.

Jane hadn't known that she could feel so much about anything as she was feeling now about Gideon. It was interesting. She wondered how long it would last, at this pitch.

CHAPTER III

THE PRECISIAN AT WAR WITH THE WORLD

1

Jane's baby was born in January. As far as babies can be like grown human beings, it was like its grandfather--a little Potter.

Lord Pinkerton was pleased.

'He shall carry on the papers,' he said, dandling it on his arm.

'Tootooloo, grandson!' He dug it softly in the ribs. He understood this baby. However many little Yids Jane might achieve in the future, there would be this little Potter to carry on his own dreams.

Clare came to see it. She was glad it wasn't like Oliver; Jane saw her being glad of that. She was beginning to fall in love with a young naval officer, but still she couldn't have seen Oliver in Jane's child without wincing.

Gideon came to see it. He laughed.

'Potter for ever,' he said.

He added. 'It's symbolic. Potters will be for ever, you know. They're so strong....'

The light from the foggy winter afternoon fell on his face as he sat by the window. He looked tired and perplexed. Strength, perpetuity, seemed things remote from him, belonging only to Potters. Anti-Potterism and the _Weekly Fact_ were frail things of a day, rooted in a dream. So Gideon felt, on these days when the fog closed about him....

Jane looked at her son, the strange little animal, and thought not 'Potter for ever,' but 'me for ever,' as was natural, and as parents will think of their young, who will carry them down the ages in an ever more distant but never lost immortality, an atom of dust borne on the hurrying stream. Jane, who believed in no other personal immortality, found it in this little Potter in her arms. Holding him close, she loved him, in a curious, new, physical way. So this was motherhood, this queer, sensuous, cherishing love. It would have been a pity not to have known it; it was, after all, an emotion, more profound than most.

2

When Jane was well enough, she gave a party for Charles, as if he had been a new picture she had painted and wanted to show off. Her friends came and looked at him, and thought how clever of her to have had him, all complete and alive and jolly like that, a real baby. He was better than the books and things they wrote, because he was more alive, and would also last longer, with luck. Their books wouldn't have a run of four score years and ten or whatever it was; they'd be lucky if any one thought of them again in five years.

But partly Jane gave the party to show people that Charles didn't monopolise her, that she was well and active again, and ready for work and life. If she wasn't careful, she might come to be regarded as the mere mother, and dropped out.

Johnny said, grinning amiably at her and Charles, 'Ah, you're thinking that your masterpiece quite puts mine in the shade, aren't you, old thing.'

He had a novel just out. It was as good as most young men's first novels.

'I'm not sure,' said Jane, 'that Charles is my masterpiece. Wait till the other works appear, and I'll tell you.'

Johnny grinned more, supposing that she meant the little Yids.

'My books, I mean,' Jane added quickly.

'Oh, your books.'

'They're going to be better than yours, my dear,' said Jane. 'Wait and see.... But I dare say they won't be as good as this.' She appraised Charles with her eyes.

'But, oh, so much less trouble,' she added, swinging him up and down.

'I could have one as good as that,' said Johnny thoughtfully, 'with no trouble at all.'

'You'd have to work for it and keep it. And its mother. You wouldn't like that, you know.... Of course you ought to. It's your duty. Every young man who survives.... Daddy says so. You'd better do it, John. You're getting on, you know.'

Young men hate getting on. They hate it, really, more than young women do. Youth is of such immense value, in almost any career, but particularly to the young writer.

But Johnny only said, with apparent nonchalance, 'Twenty-seven is not very old.' He added, however, 'Anyhow, you're five minutes older, and I've published a book, if you have produced that thing.'

Johnny was frankly greedy about his book. He hung on reviews; he asked for it in bookshops, and expressed astonishment and contempt when they had not got it. And it was, after all, nothing to make a song about, Jane thought. It wasn't positively discreditable to its writer, like most novels, but it was a very normal book, by a very normal cleverish young man. Johnny wasn't sure that his publishers advertised it as much as was desirable.

Gideon came up to Jane and Charles. He had just arrived. He had three evening papers in his hand. His fellow pa.s.sengers had left them in the train, and he had collected them. Jews often get their news that way.

Johnny saw his friend Miss Nancy Sharpe disengaged and looking lovely, and went to speak to her. He was really in love with her a little, though he didn't go as far as wanting to work for her and keep her. He was quite right; that is to go too far, when so much happiness is attainable short of it. Johnny wisely shunned desperate measures. So, to do her justice, did Miss Sharpe.

'Johnny's very elated,' said Jane to Gideon, looking after him. 'What do _you_ think of his book, Arthur?'

Gideon said, 'I don't think of it. I've had no reason to, particularly.

I've not had to review it.... I'm afraid I'm hopeless about novels just now, that's the fact. I'm sick of the form--slices of life served up cold in three hundred pages. Oh, it's very nice; it makes nice reading for people. But what's the use? Except, of course, to kill time for those who prefer it dead. But as things in themselves, as art, they've been ruined by excess. My critical sense is blunted just now. I can hardly feel the difference, though I see it, between a good novel and a bad one. I couldn't write one, good or bad, to save my life, I know that. And I've got to the stage when I wish other people wouldn't. I wish every one would shut up, so that we could hear ourselves think--like in the Armistice Day pause, when all the noise stopped.'

Jane shook her head.

'You may be sure we shan't do that. Not likely. We all want to hear ourselves talk. And quite right too. We've got things to say.'

'Nothing of importance. Few things that wouldn't be better unsaid. Life isn't talking.'

'A journalist's is,' Jane pointed out, and he nodded.

'Quite true. Horribly true. It's chiefly myself I'm hitting at. But at least we journalists don't take ourselves solemnly; we know our stuff is babble to fill a moment. Novelists and poets don't always know that; they're apt to think it matters. And, of course, so far as any of them can make and hold beauty, even a fragment of it here and there, it does matter. The trouble is that they mostly can't do anything of the sort.

They don't mostly even know how to try. All but a few verse-makers are shallow, muddled, or sentimental, and most novelists are commercial as well. They haven't the means; they aren't adequately equipped; they've nothing in them worth the saying. Why say it, then? A little cleverness isn't worth while.'