Potterism Part 7

So do journalists. Nearly the whole press is the same, dealing in emotions and stunts, unable to face facts squarely, in a calm spirit.

It seemed to some of us that spring that there was a chance for unsentimental journalism in a new paper, that should be unhampered by tradition. That was why the _Weekly Fact_ (unofficially called the Anti-Potterite) was started. All the other papers had traditions; their past principles dictated their future policy. The _Fact_ (except that it was up against Potterism) was untrammelled; it was to judge of each issue as it turned up, on its own merits, in the light of fact. That, of course, was in itself the very essence of anti-Potterism, which was incapable of judging or considering anything whatever, and whose only light was a feeble emotionalism The light of fact was to Potterites but a worse darkness.

The _Fact_ wasn't to be labelled Liberal or Labour or Tory or Democratic or anti-Democratic or anything at all. All these things were to vary with the immediate occasions. I know it sounds like Lloyd George, but there were at least two very important differences between the _Fact_ and the Prime Minister. One was that the _Fact_ employed experts who always made a very thorough and scientific investigation of every subject it dealt with before it took up a line; it cared for the truth and nothing but the truth. The other was that the _Fact_ took in nearly every case the less popular side, not, of course, because it was less popular (for to do that would have been one of the general principles of which we tried to steer clear), but it so happened that we came to the conclusion nearly always that the majority were wrong. The fact is that majorities nearly always are. The heart of the people may be usually in the right place (though, personally, I doubt this, for the heart of man is corrupt) but their head can, in most cases, be relied on to be in the wrong one. This is an important thing for statesmen to remember; forgetfulness of it has often led to disaster; ignorance of it has created Potterism as an official faith.

Anyhow, the _Fact_ (again unlike the Prime Minister) could afford to ignore the charges of flightiness and irresponsibility which, of course, were flung at it. It could afford to ignore them because of the good and solid excellence of its contents, and the reputations of many of its contributors. And that, of course, was due to the fact that it had plenty of money behind it. A great many people know who backs the _Fact_, but, all the same, I cannot, of course, give away this information to the public. I will only say that it started with such a good financial backing that it was able to afford the best work, able even to afford the truth. Most of the good weeklies, certainly, speak the truth as they see it; they are, in fact, a very creditable section of our press; but the idea of the _Fact_ was to be absolutely unbiased on each issue that turned up by anything it had ever thought before. Of course, you may say that a man will be likely, when a case comes before his eyes, to come to the same conclusion about it that he came to about a similar case not long before. But, as a matter of fact, it is surprising how some slight difference in the circ.u.mstances of a case may, if a man keeps an open mind, alter his whole judgment of it. The _Fact_ was a scientific, not a sentimental paper. If our investigations led us into autocracy, we were to follow them there; if to a soviet state, still we were to follow them. And we might support autocracy in one state and soviets in another, if it seemed suitable. Again this sounds like some of our more notorious politicians--Carson, for instance; but the likeness is superficial.

2

We began in March. Peac.o.c.k and I were the editors. We didn't, and don't, always agree. Peac.o.c.k, for instance, believes in democracy. Peac.o.c.k also accepts poetry; poetry about the war, by people like Johnny Potter. Every one knows that school of poetry by heart now; of course it was particularly fashionable immediately after the war. Johnny Potter did it much like other men. Any one can do it. One takes some dirty, horrible incident or sight of the battle-front and describes it in loathsome detail, and then, by way of contrast, describes some fat and incredibly bloodthirsty woman or middle-aged clubman at home, gloating over the glorious war. I always thought it a great bore, and sentimental at that.

But it was the thing for a time, and people seemed to be impressed by it, and Peac.o.c.k, who encouraged young men, often to their detriment, would take it for the _Fact_, though that sort of cheap and popular appeal to sentiment was the last thing the _Fact_ was out for.

Johnny Potter, like other people, was merely exploiting his experiences.

Johnny would. He's a nice chap, and a cleverish chap, in the shrewd, unimaginative Potter way--Jane's way, too--only she's a shade cleverer--but chiefly he's determined to get there somehow. That's Potter, again. And that's where Jane and Johnny amuse me. They're up against what we agreed to call Potterism--the Potterism, that is, of second-rate sentimentalism and cheap short-cuts and mediocrity; they stand for brain and clear thinking against muddle and cant; but they're fighting it with Potterite weapons--self-interest, following things for what they bring them rather than for the things in themselves. John would never write the particular kind of stuff he does for the love of writing it; he'll only do it because it's the stunt of the moment. That's why he'll never be more than cleverish and mediocre, never the real thing. In his calm, unexcited way, he worships success, and he'll get it, like old Pinkerton. Though of course he's met plenty of the bloodthirsty non-combatants he writes about, he takes most of what he says about them second-hand from other people. It's not first-hand observation. If it was, he would have to include among his jingoes and Hun-haters some fighting men too. I know it's entirely against popular convention to say so, but some of the most bloodthirsty fire-eaters I met during the war were among the fighting men. Of course there were plenty of them at home too, and plenty of peaceable and civilised people at the front, but it's the most absurd perversion of facts to make out that all our combatants were full of sweet reasonableness (any one who knows anything about the psychological effects of fighting will know that this is improbable), and all our non-combatants b.l.o.o.d.y-minded savages. Though I don't say there's nothing in the theory one heard that the natural war rage of non-combatants, not having the physical outlet the fighters had for theirs, became in some few of them a suppressed Freudian complex and made them a little insane. I don't know. Anyhow to say this became the stunt among a certain section, so it was probably as inaccurate as popular sayings usually are; as inaccurate as the picture drawn by another section--the Potter press section--of an army going rejoicing into the fight for right.

What one specially resented was the way the men who had been killed, poor devils, were exploited by the makers of speeches and the writers of articles. First, they'd perhaps be called 'the fallen,' instead of 'the killed' (it's a queer thing how 'fallen,' in the masculine means killed in the war, and the feminine given over to a particular kind of vice), and then the audience, or the readers, would be told that they died for democracy, or a cleaner world, when very likely many of them hated the first and never gave an hour's thought to the second. I could imagine their indignant presences in the Albert Hall at Gray's big League of Nations meeting in May, listening to Clynes's reasons why they died. I can hear dear old Peter Clancy on why he died. 'Democracy? A cleaner world? No. Why? I suppose I died because I inadvertently got in the way of some flying missile; I know no other reason. And I suppose I was there to get in its way because it's part of belonging to a nation to fight its battles when required--like paying its taxes or keeping its laws. Why go groping for far-fetched reason? Who wants democracy, any old way? And the world was good enough for me as it was, thank you. No, of course it isn't clean, and never will be; but no war is going to make it cleaner. It's not a way wars have. These talkers make me sick.'

If Clancy--the thousands of Clancys--could have been there, I think that is the sort of thing they would have been saying. Anyhow, personally, I certainly didn't lose my foot for democracy or for a cleaner world. I lost it in helping to win the war--a quite necessary thing in the circ.u.mstances.

But every one seemed, during and after the war, to want to prove that the fighters thought in the particular way they thought themselves; they seemed to think it immeasurably strengthened their case. Heaven only knows why, when the fighting men were just the men who hadn't time or leisure to think at all. They were, as the Potterites put it so truly, doing the job. The thinking, such as it was, was done by the people at home--the politicians, the clergy, the writers, the women, the men with 'A' certificates in Government offices; and precious poor thinking it was, too.

3

We all settled down to life and work again, as best we could. Johnny Potter went into a publisher's office, and also got odd jobs of reviewing and journalism, besides writing war verse and poetry of pa.s.sion (of which confusing if attractive subject, he really knew little). Juke was demobilised early too, commenced clergyman again, got a job as curate in a central London parish, and lived in rooms in a slummy street. He and I saw a good deal of each other.

One day in March, Juke and I were lunching together at the 1917 Club, when Johnny came in and joined us. He looked rather queer, and amused too. He didn't tell us anything till we were having coffee. Then Juke or I said, 'How's Jane getting on in Paris? Not bored yet?'

Johnny said, 'I should say not. She's been and gone and done it. She's got engaged to Hobart. I heard from the mater this morning.'

I don't think either of us spoke for a moment. Then Juke gave a long whistle, and said, 'Good Lord!'

'Exactly,' said Johnny, and grinned.

'It's no laughing matter,' said Juke blandly. 'Jane is imperilling her immortal soul. She is yoking together with an unbeliever; she is forming an unholy alliance with mammon. We must stop it.'

'Stop Jane,' said Johnny. 'You might as well try and stop a young tank.'

He meditated for a moment.

'The funny thing is,' he added, 'that we all thought it was Clare he was after.'

'Now that,' Juke said judicially, 'would have been all right. Your elder sister could have had Hobart and the _Daily Haste_ without betraying her principles. But _Jane_--Jane, the anti-Potterite ... I say, why is she doing it?'

Johnny drew a letter from his pocket and consulted it.

'The mater doesn't say. ... I suppose the usual reasons. Why do people do it? I don't; nor do you; nor does Gideon. So we can't explain. ... I didn't think Jane would do it either; it always seemed more in Clare's line, somehow. Jane and I always thought Clare would marry, she's the sort. Feminine and all that, you know. Upon my word, I thought Jane was too much of a sportsman to go tying herself up with husbands and babies and servants and things. What the devil will happen to all she meant to _do_--writing, public speaking, and all the rest of it? I suppose a girl can carry on to a certain extent, though, even if she is married, can't she?'

'Jane will,' I said. 'Jane won't give up anything she wants to do for a trifle like marriage.' I was sure of that.

'I believe you're right,' Johnny agreed. 'But it will be jolly awkward being married to Hobart and writing in the anti-Potter press.'

'She'll write for the _Daily Haste_,' Juke said. 'She'll make Hobart give her a job on it. Having begun to go down the steep descent, she won't stop till she gets to the bottom. Jane's thorough.'

But that was precisely what I didn't think Jane was. She is, on the other hand, given to making something good out of as many worlds as she can simultaneously. Martyrs and Irishmen, fanatics and Juke, are thorough; not Jane.

We couldn't stay gossiping over the engagement any longer, so we left it at that. The man lunching at the next table might have concluded that Johnny's sister had got engaged to a scoundrel, instead of to the talented, promising, and highly virtuous young editor of a popular daily paper. Being another member of the 1917, I dare say he understood.

But no one had tried to answer Juke's question, 'Why is she doing it?'

Johnny had supposed 'for the usual reasons.' That opens a probably unanswerable question. What the devil _are_ the usual reasons?

4

I met Lady Pinkerton and her elder daughter in the muzzle department of the Army and Navy Stores the next week. That was one of the annoying aspects of the muzzling order; one met in muzzle shops people with whom neither temperament nor circ.u.mstances would otherwise have thrown one.

I have a particular dislike for Lady Pinkerton, and she for me. I hate those cold, shallow eyes, and clothes drenched in scent, and basilisk pink faces whitened with powder which such women have or develop. When I look at her I think of all her frightful books, and the frightful serial she has even now running in the _Pink Pictorial_, and I shudder (un.o.btrusively, I hope), and look, away. When she looks at me, she thinks 'dirty Jew,' and she shudders (un.o.btrusively, too), and looks over my head. She did so now, no doubt, as she bowed.

'Dreadfully tahsome, this muzzling order,' she said, originally. 'We have two Pekingese, a King Charles, and a pug, and their poor little faces don't fit any muzzle that's made.'

I answered with some inanity about my mother's Poltalloch, and we talked for a moment. She said she hoped I was quite all right again, and I suppose I said I was, with my leg shooting like a gathered tooth (it was pretty bad all that spring).

Suddenly I felt her wanting badly to tell me the news about Jane. She wanted to tell me because she thought she would be scoring off me, knowing that what she would call my 'influence' over Jane had always been used against all that Hobart stands for. I felt her longing to throw me the triumphant morsel of news--'Jane has deserted you and all your tiresome, conceited, disturbing clique, and is going to marry the promising young editor of her father's chief paper.' But something restrained her. I caught the advance and retreat of her intention, and connected it with her daughter, who stood by her, silent, with an absurd Pekingese in her arms.

Anyhow, Lady Pinkerton held in her news, and I left them. I dislike Lady Pinkerton, as I have said; but on this occasion I disliked her a little less than usual, for that maternal instinct which had robbed her of her triumph.

5

I went to see Katherine Varick that evening. I often do when I have been meeting women like Lady Pinkerton, because there is a danger that that kind of woman, so common and in a sense so typical, may get to bulk too large in one's view of women, and lead one into the sin of generalisation. So many women are such very dreadful fools--men too, for that matter, but more women--that one needs to keep in pretty frequent touch with those who aren't, with the women whose brains, by nature and training, grip and hold. Of these, Katherine Varick has as fine and keen a mind and as good a head as any I know. She isn't touched anywhere with Potterism; she has the scientific temperament. Katherine and I are great friends. From the first she did a good deal of work for the _Fact_--reviews of scientific books, mostly. I went to see her, to get the taste of Lady Pinkerton out of my mouth.

I found her doing something with test-tubes and bottles--some experiment with carbohydrates, I think it was. I watched her till she was through with it, then we talked. That is the way one puts it, but as a matter of fact Katherine seldom does much of the talking; one talks to her. She listens, and puts in from time to time some critical comment that often extraordinarily clears up any subject one is talking round. She contributes as much as any one I know to the conversation, but in such condensed tabloids that it doesn't take her long. Most things don't seem to her to be worth saying. She'll let, for instance, a chatterbox like Juke say a hundred words to her one, and still she'll get most said, though Jukie's not a vapid talker either.

'Jane,' she told me, 'is coming back next week. The marriage is to be at the end of April.'

'A rapidity worthy of the Hustling Press. Jukie will be sorry. He hopes yet to wrest her as a brand from the burning.'

Katherine smiled at Juke's characteristic sanguineness.

'Jukie won't do that. If Jane means to do a thing she does it. Jane knows what she wants.'

'And she wants Hobart?' I pondered it, turning it over, still puzzled.

'She wants Hobart,' Katherine agreed. 'And all that Hobart will let her in to.'

'The _Daily Haste_? The society of the Pinkerton journalists?'

'And of a number of other people. Some of them fairly important people, you know. The editor of the _Daily Haste_ has to transact business with a good many notorious persons, no doubt. That would amuse Jane. She's all for life. I dare say the wife of the editor of the _Haste_ has a pretty good front window for the show. Jane likes playing about with people, as you like playing with ideas, and I with chemicals.... Besides, beauty counts with Jane. It does with every one. She's probably fallen in love.'