Potterism Part 30

The rain beat down. At its soft, chill touch Gideon's brain cooled and cooled, till he seemed to see everything in a cold, hard, crystal clarity. Life and death--how little they mattered. Life was paltry, and death its end. Yet when the world, the Potterish world, dealt with death it became something other than a mere end; it became a sensation, a problem, an episode in a melodrama. The question, when a man died, was always how and why. So, when Hobart had died, they were all dragged into a net of suspicion and melodrama--they all became for a time absurd actors in an absurd serial in the Potter press. You could not escape from sensationalism in a sensational world. There was no room for the pedant, with his greed for unadorned and unemotional precision.

Gideon sighed sharply as he turned into Oxford Street, Oxford Street was and is horrible. Everything a street should not be, even when it was down, and now it was up, which was far worse. If Gideon had not been unnerved by the painted person at the corner of Baker Street he would never have gone home this way, he would have gone along Marylebone and Euston Road. As it was, he got into a bus and rode unhappily to Gray's Inn Road, where he lived.

He sat up till three in the morning working out statistics for an article. Statistics, figures, were delightful. They were a rest.

They mattered.

4

Two days later, at the _Fact_ office, Peac.o.c.k, turning over galley slips, said, 'This thing of yours on Esthonian food conditions looks like a government schedule. Couldn't you make it more attractive?'

'To whom?' asked Gideon.

'Well--the ordinary reader.'

'Oh, the ordinary reader. I meant it to be attractive to people who want information.'

'Well, but a little jam with the powder.... For instance, you draw no inference from your facts. It's dull. Why not round the thing off into a good article?'

'I can't round things. I don't like them round, either. I've given the facts, unearthed with considerable trouble and pains. No one else has.

Isn't it enough?'

'Oh, it'll do.' Peac.o.c.k's eyes glanced over the other proofs on his desk.

'We've got some good stuff this number.'

'Nice round articles--yes.' Gideon turned the slips over with his lean brown fingers carelessly. He picked one up.

'Hallo. I didn't know that chap was reviewing _Coal and Wages_.'

'Yes. He asked if he could.'

'Do you think he knows enough?'

'It's quite a good review. Read it.'

Gideon read it carefully, then laid it down and said, 'I don't agree with you that it's a good review. He's made at least two mistakes. And the whole thing's biased by his personal political theories.'

'Only enough to give it colour.'

'You don't want colour in a review of a book of that sort. You only want intelligence and exact knowledge.'

'Oh, c.l.i.therton's all right. His head's screwed on the right way. He knows his subject.'

'Not well enough. He's a political theorist, not a good economist. That's hopeless. Why didn't you get Hinkson to do it?'

'Hinkson can't write for nuts.'

'Doesn't matter. Hinkson wouldn't have slipped up over his figures or dates.'

'My dear old chap, writing does matter. You're going crazy on that subject. Of course it matters that a thing should be decently put together.'

'It matters much more that it should be well informed. It is, of course, quite possible to be both.'

'Oh, quite. That's the idea of the _Fact_, after all.'

'Peac.o.c.k, I hate all these slipshod fellows you get now. I wish you'd chuck the lot. They're well enough for most journalism, but they don't know enough for us.'

Peac.o.c.k said, 'Oh, we'll thrash it out another time, if you don't mind.

I've got to get through some letters now,' and rang for his secretary.

Gideon went to his own room and searched old files for the verification and correction of c.l.i.therton's mistakes. He found them, and made a note of them. Unfortunately they weakened c.l.i.therton's argument a little.

c.l.i.therton would have to modify it. c.l.i.therton, a sweeping and wholesale person, would not like that.

Gideon was feeling annoyed with c.l.i.therton, and annoyed with several others among that week's contributors, and especially annoyed with Peac.o.c.k, who permitted and encouraged them. If they went on like this, the _Fact_ would soon be popular; it would find its way into the great soft silly heart of the public and there be d.a.m.ned.

He was a pathetic figure, Arthur Gideon, the intolerant precisian, fighting savagely against the tide of loose thinking that he saw surging in upon him, swamping the world and drowning facts. He did not see himself as a pathetic figure, or as anything else. He did not see himself at all, but worked away at his desk in the foggy room, checking the unconsidered or inaccurate or oversimplified statements of others, writing his own section of the Notes of the Week, with his careful, patient, fined brilliance, stopping to gnaw his pen or his thumb-nail or to draw diagrams, triangle within triangle, or circle intersecting circle, on his blotting paper.

CHAPTER IV

RUNNING AWAY

1

A week later Gideon resigned his a.s.sistant editorship of the _Fact_.

Peac.o.c.k was, on the whole, relieved. Gideon had been getting too difficult of late. After some casting about among eager, outwardly indifferent possible successors, Peac.o.c.k offered the job to Johnny Potter, who was swimming on the tide of his first novel, which had been what is called 'well spoken of' by the press, but who, at the same time, had the popular touch, was quite a competent journalist, was looking out for a job, and was young enough to do what he was told; that is to say, he was four or five years younger than Peac.o.c.k. He had also a fervent enthusiasm for democratic principles and for Peac.o.c.k's prose style (Gideon had been temperate in his admiration of both), and Peac.o.c.k thought they would get on very well.

Jane was sulky, jealous, and contemptuous.

'Johnny. Why Johnny? He's not so good as lots of other people who would have liked the job. He's sw.a.n.king so already that it makes me tired to be in the room with him, and now he'll be worse than ever. Oh, Arthur, it is rot, your chucking it. I've a jolly good mind not to marry you. I thought I was marrying the a.s.sistant editor of an important paper, not just a lazy old Jew without a job.'

She ruffled up his black, untidy hair with her hand as she sat on the arm of his chair; but she was really annoyed with him, as she had explained a week ago when he had told her.

2

He had walked in one evening and found her in Charles's bedroom, bathing him. Clare was there too, helping.

'Why do girls like washing babies?' Gideon speculated aloud. 'They nearly all do, don't they?'

'Well, I should just _hope_ so,' Clare said. She was kneeling by the tin bath with her sleeves rolled up, holding a warmed towel. Her face was flushed from the fire, and her hair was loosened where Charles had caught his toe in it. She looked pretty and maternal, and looked up at Gideon with the kind of conventional, good-humoured scorn that girls and women put on when men talk of babies. They do it (one believes) partly because they feel it is a subject they know about, and partly to pander to men's desire that they should do it. It is part of the pretty play between the s.e.xes. Jane never did it; she wasn't feminine enough. And Gideon did not want her to do it; he thought it silly.

'Why do you hope so?' asked Gideon. 'And why do girls like it?'

The first question was to Clare, the second to Jane, because he knew that Clare would not be able to answer it.