Potterism Part 33

3

Juke's book on modern thought in the Church was a success. It was brilliantly written, and reviewed in lay as well as in church papers.

Juke, to his own detriment, became popular. Canon Streeter and others asked him to collaborate in joint books on the Church. Modernist liberal-catholic vicars asked him to preach. When he preached, people came in hundreds to hear him, because he was an attractive, stimulating, and entertaining preacher. (I have never had this experience, but I a.s.sume that it is morally unwholesome.) He had to take missions, and retreats, and quiet days, and give lectures on the Church to cultivated audiences. Then he was offered the living of St. Anne's, Piccadilly, which is one of those inc.u.mbencies with what is known as scope, which meant that there were no poor in the parish, and the inc.u.mbent's gifts as preacher, lecturer, writer, and social success could be used to the best advantage. He was given three weeks to decide.

4

Gideon wrote long letters to Jane from the Russian towns and villages in which he sojourned. But none of them were suitable for propaganda purposes; they were critical but dispa.s.sionate. He had found some cousins of his father's, fur merchants living in a small town on the edge of a forest. 'Clever, cringing, nerve-ridden people,' he said. The older generation remembered his grandparents, and his father as a bright-eyed infant. They remembered that pogrom fifty years ago, and described it.

'They'll describe anything,' wrote Gideon. 'The more horrible it is, the more they'll talk. That's Russian, not Jewish specially. Or is it just human?'... Gideon didn't repeat to Jane the details he heard of his grandparents' murder by Russian police--details which his father, in whose memory they burned like a disease, had never told him.

'Things as bad as that ma.s.sacre are happening all the time in this pleasant country,' he wrote. 'It doesn't matter what the political convictions, if any, of a Russian are--he's a barbarian whether he's on a soviet or in the anti-Bolshevik armies. Not always, of course; there are a few who have escaped the prevalent l.u.s.t of cruelty--but only a few. Love of pain (as experienced by others) for its own sake--as one loves good food, or beautiful women--it's a queer disease. It goes along, often, with other strong sensual desires. The Russians, for instance, are the worst gluttons and profligates of Europe. With it all, they have, often, an extraordinary generous good-heartedness; with one hand they will give away what they can't spare to some one in need, while with the other they torture an animal or a human being to death.

The women seldomer do either; like women everywhere, they are less given both to sensual desire and to generous open-handedness.... That's a curious thing, how seldom you find physical cruelty in a woman of any nationality. Even the most spiteful and morally unkindest little girl will shudder away while her brother tears the wings off a fly or the legs off a frog, or impales a worm on a hook. Weak nerves, partly, and partly the sort of high-strung fastidiousness women have. When you come across cruelty in a woman--physical cruelty, of course--you think of her as a monster; just as when you come on a stingy man, you think of him (but probably inaccurately) as a Jew. Russians are very male, except in their inchoate, confused thinking. Their special brand of humour and of sentimentality are male; their exuberant strength and aliveness, their sensuality, and their savage cruelty.... If ever women come to count in Russia as a force, not merely as mates for the men, queer things will happen.... Here in this town things are, for the moment, tidy and ordered, as if seven Germans with seven mops had swept it for half a year. The local soviet is a gang of ruffians, but they do keep things more or less ship-shape. And they make people work. And they torture dogs....'

Later he wrote, 'You were right as to one thing; every one I meet, including my relations, is persuaded that I am either a newspaper correspondent or writing a book, or, more probably, both. These taints cling so. I feel like a reformed drunkard, who has taken the pledge but still carries about with him a red nose and shaky hands, so that he gets no credit for his new sobriety. What's the good of my telling people here that I don't write, when I suppose I've the mark of the beast stamped all over me? And they play up; they talk for me to record it....

'I find all kinds of odd things here. Among others, an English doctor, in the local lunatic asylum. Mad as a hatter, poor devil--now--whatever he was when they shut him up. I dare say he'd been through enough even then to turn his brain. I can't find out who his friends in England are....'

5

Gideon stopped writing, and took Jane's last letter out of his pocket. It occurred to him that he was in no sense answering it. Not that Jane would mind; that wasn't the sort of thing she did mind. But it struck him suddenly how difficult it had grown to him to answer Jane's letters--or, indeed, any one else's. He could not flatter himself that he was already contracting the inarticulate habit, because he could pour forth fluently enough about his own experiences; but to Jane's news of London he had nothing to say. A new paper had been started; another paper had died; some one they knew had deserted from one literary coterie to another; some one else had turned from a dowdy into a nut; Jane had been seeing a lot of bad plays; her novel--'my confused ma.s.s of self-expression,' she called it to him--was coming out next week. All the familiar personal, literary, political, and social gossip, which he too had dealt in once; Jane was in the thick of it still, and he was turning stupid, like a man living in the country; he could not answer her. Or, perhaps, would not; because the thing that absorbed him at present was how people lived and thought, and what could be made of them--not the conscious, intellectual, writing, discussing, semi-civilised people (semi-civilised--what an absurd word! What is complete civilisation, that we should bisect it and say we have half, or any other exact fraction? Partly civilised, Gideon amended it to), but the great unconscious ma.s.ses, hardly civilised at all, who shape things, for good or evil, in the long run.

Gideon folded up Jane's letter and put it away, and to his own added nothing but his love.

6

Jane got that letter in Easter week. It was a fine warm day, and she, walking across Green Park, met Juke, who had been lunching with a bishop to meet an elderly princess who had read his book.

'She said, "I'm afraid you're sadly satirical, Mr. Juke,'" he told Jane.

'She did really. And I'm to preach at Sandringham one Sunday. Yes, to the Family. Tell Gideon that, will you. He'll be so disgusted. But what a chance! Life at St. Anne's is going to be full of chances of slanging the rich, that's one thing about it.'

'Oh, you're going to take it, then?'

'Probably. I've not written to accept yet, so don't pa.s.s it on.'

'I'm glad. It's much more amusing to accept things, even livings. It'll be lovely: you'll be all among the clubs and theatres and the idle rich; much gayer than Covent Garden.'

'Oh, gayer,' said Juke.

They came out into Birdcage Walk, and there was a man selling the _Evening Hustle_, Lord Pinkerton's evening paper.

'b.l.o.o.d.y ma.s.sacres,' he was observing with a kind of absent-minded happiness. 'b.l.o.o.d.y ma.s.sacres in Russia, Ireland, Armenia, and the Punjab.... British journalist a.s.sa.s.sinated near Odessa.'

And there it was, too, in big black letters on the _Evening Hustle_ placard:--

'DIVORCE OF A PEERESS.

'MURDER OF BRITISH JOURNALIST IN RUSSIA-LATE WIRE FROM GATWICK.'

They bought the paper, to see who the British journalist was. His murder was in a little paragraph on the front page.

'Mr. Arthur Gideon, a well-known British journalist' ... first beaten nearly to death by White soldiery, because he was, entirely in vain, defending some poor Jewish family from their wrath ... then found by Bolshevists and disposed of ... somehow ... because he was an Englishman....

7

A placard for the press. A placard for the Potter press. Had he thought of that at the last, and died in the bitterness of that paradox? Murdered by both sides, being of neither, but merely a seeker after fact. Killed in the quest for truth and the war against verbiage and cant, and, in the end, a placard for the press which hated the one and lived by the other.

_Had_ he thought of that as he broke under the last strain of pain? Or, merely, 'These d.a.m.ned brutes. White or Red, there's nothing to choose ...

nothing to choose ...'

Anyhow, it was over, that quest of his, and nothing remained but the placard which coupled his defeat with the peeress's divorce.

Arthur Gideon had gone under, but the Potter press, the flaunting banner of the great sentimental public, remained. It would always remain, so long as the great sentimental public were what they were.

8

Little remains to add. Little of Gideon, for they never learnt much more of his death than was telegraphed in that first message. His father, going out to the scene of his death, may have heard more; if he did, he never revealed it to any one. Not only Arthur had perished, but the Jewish family he was trying to defend; he had failed as well as died.

Failed utterly, every way; gone under and finished, he and his pedantry and his exact.i.tude, his preaching, his hard clarity, and his bewildered bitterness against a world vulgar and soft-headed beyond his understanding.

Juke refused St. Anne's, with its chances, its congregations, and its scope. Neither did he preach at Sandringham. Gideon's fate pilloried on that placard had stabbed through him and cut him, sick and angry, from his moorings. He spoke no more and wrote no more to admiring audiences who hung on his words and took his quick points as he made them. To be one with other men, he learnt a manual trade, and made shoes in Bermondsey, and preached in the streets to men who did not, as a rule, listen.

Jane would, no doubt, fulfil herself in the course of time, make an adequate figure in the world she loved, and suck therefrom no small advantage. She had loved Arthur Gideon; but what Lady Pinkerton and Clare would call her 'heart' was not of the kind which would, as these two would doubtless put it in their strange phraseology, 'break.'

Somehow, after all, Jane would have her good time; if not in one way, then in another.

Lord and Lady Pinkerton flourish exceedingly, and will be long in the land. Leila Yorke sells better than ever. Of the Pinkerton press I need not speak, since it is so well qualified to speak for itself. Enough to say that no fears are at present entertained for its demise. And little Charles Hobart grows in stature, under his grandfather's watching and approving eye. When the time comes, he will carry on worthily.