Potterism Part 8

That was all we said about it. We talked for the rest of the evening about the _Fact_.

6

But when I went to Jane's wedding, I understood about the 'number of other people' that Hobart let Jane in to. They had been married that afternoon by the Registrar, Jane having withstood the pressure of her parents, who preferred weddings to be in churches. Hobart didn't much care; he was, he said, a Presbyterian by upbringing, but sat loosely to it, and didn't care for fussy weddings. Jane frankly disbelieved in what she called 'all that sort of thing.' So they went before the Registrar, and gave a party in the evening at the Carlton.

We all went, even Juke, who had failed to s.n.a.t.c.h Jane from the burning. I don't know that it was a much queerer party than other wedding parties, which are apt to be an ill-a.s.sorted mixture of the bridegroom's circle and the bride's. And, except for Jane's own personal friends, these two circles largely overlapped in this case. The room was full of journalists, important and unimportant, business people, literary people, and a few politicians of the same colour as the Pinkerton press. There were a lot of dreadful women, who, I supposed, were Lady Pinkerton's friends (probably literary women; one of them was introduced to Juke as 'the editress of _Forget-me-not_'), and a lot of vulgar men, many of whom looked like profiteers. But, besides all these, there were undoubtedly interesting people and people of importance. And I realised that the editor of the _Haste_, like the other editors of important papers, must, of necessity, as Katherine had said, have a lot to do with such people.

And there, in the middle of a group of journalists, was Jane; Jane, in a square-cut, high-waisted, dead white frock, with her firm, round, young shoulders and arms, and her firm, round, young face, and her dark hair cut across her broad white forehead, parted a little like a child's, at one side, and falling thick and straight round her neck like a mediaeval page's. She wore a long string of big amber beads--Hobart's present--and a golden girdle round her high, st.u.r.dy waist.

I saw Jane in a sense newly that evening, not having seen her for some time. And I saw her again as I had often seen her in the past--a greedy, lazy, spoilt child, determined to take and keep the best out of life, and, if possible, pay nothing for it. A profiteer, as much as the fat little match manufacturer, her uncle, who was talking to Hobart, and in whom I saw a resemblance to the twins. And I saw too Jane's queer, lazy, casual charm, that had caught and held Hobart and weaned him from the feminine graces and obviousnesses of Clare.

Hobart stood near Jane, quiet and agreeable and good-looking. A second-rate chap, running a third-rate paper. Jane had married him, for all her clear-headed intellectual scorn of the second-rate, because she was second-rate herself, and didn't really care.

And there was little Pinkerton chatting with Northcliffe, his rival and friend, and Lady Pinkerton boring a high Foreign Office official very nearly to yawns, and Clare Potter, flushed and gallantly gay, flitting about from person to person (Clare was always restless; she had none of Jane's phlegm and stolidity), and Johnny, putting in a fairly amusing time with his own friends and acquaintances, and Frank Potter talking to Juke about his new parish. Frank, discontented all the war because he couldn't get out to France without paying the price that Juke had paid, was satisfied with life for the moment, having just been given a fashionable and rich London living, where many hundreds weekly sat under him and heard him preach. Juke wasn't the member of that crowd I should personally have selected to discuss fashionable and overpaid livings with, had I just accepted one, but they were the only two parsons in the room, so I suppose Potter thought it appropriate, I overheard pleased fragments such as 'Twenty thousand communicants ...

only standing-room at Sunday evensong,' which indicated that the new parish was a great success.

'That poor chap,' Jukie said to me afterwards. 'He's in a wretched position. He has to profess Christianity, and he doesn't want even to try to live up to it. At least, whenever he has a flash of desire to, that atheist wife of his puts it out. She's the worst sort of atheist--the sort that says her prayers regularly. Why are parsons allowed to marry?

Or if they must, why can't their wives be chosen for them by a special board? And what, in Heaven's name, came over a Potter that he should take Orders? The fight between Potterism and Christianity--it's the funniest spectacle--and the saddest....'

But Juke on Christianity always leaves me cold. The nation to which I (on one side) belong can't be expected to look at Christianity impartially--we have suffered too much at the hands of Christians. Juke and the other hopeful and ardent members of his Church may be able to separate Christianity from Christians, and not judge the one by the other; but I can't. The fact that Christendom is what it is has always disposed of Christianity as a working force, to my mind. Judaism is detestable, but efficient; Christianity is well-meaning but a failure.

As, of course, parsons like Juke would be and are the first to admit.

They say it aims so high that it's bound to fail, which is probably true.

But that makes it pretty useless as a working human religion. Anyhow, I quite agree with Juke that it is comic to see poor little nonent.i.ties like Frank Potter caught in it, tangled up in it, and trying to get free and carry on as though it wasn't there.

Of course, nearly all the rest of that crowd at Jane's wedding was carrying on as if Christianity weren't there without the least trouble or struggle. They were quite right; it wasn't there. Nothing was there, for most of them, but self-interest and personal desire. We were, the lot of us, out to make--to grab and keep and enjoy. Nothing else counted. What could Christianity do, a frail, tilting, crusading St. George, up against the monster dragon Grab, who held us all in his coils? It's no use, Jukie; it never was and never will be any use.

I suddenly grew very tired of that party. It seemed a monster meeting of Potterites at play--mediocrity, second-rateness, humbug, muddle, cant, cheap stunts--the room was full of it all.

I went across to Jane to say good-bye. I had scarcely spoken to her yet.

I had never congratulated her on her engagement, but Jane wouldn't mind about that or expect me to.

All I could say now was, 'I'm afraid I've got to get back. I've some work waiting.'

She said, 'Is it any use my sending you anything for the _Fact_?

'From the enemy's camp?' I smiled at her. She smiled too.

'I've not ratted, you know. I'm still an A.P. I shall come on the next tour of investigation, whenever that is.'

'Shall you write for the _Haste_?' I asked her.

'Sometimes, I expect. Oliver says he can get me some of the reviewing.

And occasional non-controversial articles. But I don't want to be tied up with it; I want to write for other papers too.... You take Johnny's poetry, I observe.'

'Sometimes. That's Peac.o.c.k's fault, not mine. ... Send along anything you think may suit, by all means, and we'll consider it. You'll most likely get it back--if you remember to enclose a stamped envelope.

... Good-night, and thank you for asking me to your party.

Good-night, Hobart.'

I said good-bye to Lady Pinkerton, and went back to the _Fact_ office, for it was press night.

So Jane got married.

CHAPTER II

DINING WITH THE HOBARTS

1

That May was very hot. One sweltered in offices, streets, and underground trains. You don't expect this kind of weather in early May, which is usually a time of bitter frosts and biting winds, punctuated by thunderstorms. It told on one's nerves. One got sick of work and people.

I quarrelled all round; with Peac.o.c.k about the paper, with my typist about her punctuation, with my family about my sister's engagement.

Rosalind (that was the good old English name they had given her) had been brought up, like myself, in the odour of public school and Oxford Anglicanism (she had been at Lady Margaret Hall). My father had grown up from his early youth most resolutely English, and had married the daughter of a rich Manchester cotton manufacturer. Their two children, Sidneys from birth, were to ignore the unhappy Yiddish strain that was branded like a deep disgrace into their father's earliest experience. It was unlucky for my parents that both Rosalind and I reverted to type.

Rosalind was very lovely, very clever, and unmistakably a Jewess. At Roedean she pretended she wasn't; who wouldn't? She was still there when I came of age and became Gideon, so she didn't join me in that. But when she left school and went up to Oxford, she began to develop and expand mentally, and took her own line, and by the time she was twenty she was, as I never was, a red-hot nationalist. We were neither of us ever inclined to Judaism in religion; we shook off the misfit of Anglicanism at an early age (we both refused at fifteen to be confirmed), but didn't take to our national faith, which we both disliked extremely. Nor did we like most of our fellow Jews; I think as a race we are narrow, cowardly, avaricious, and mean-spirited, and Rosalind thinks we are oily. (She and I aren't oily, by the way; we are both the lean kind, perhaps because, after all, we are half English). I only reverted to our original name because I was sickened of the Sidney humbug. But we learnt Yiddish, and read Hebrew literature, and discussed repatriation, and maintained that the Jews were the brains of the world. It was a cross to our parents. But far more bitter to them than even my change of name was Rosalind's engagement, this spring of 1919, to Boris Stefan. Boris had been living and painting in London for some years; his home had been in Moscow; he had barely escaped with his life from a pogrom in 1912, and had since then lived in England. He had served in the war, belonged to several secret societies of a harmless sort, painted pictures that had attracted a good deal of critical notice, and professed Bolshevik sympathies, of a purely academic nature (as so many of these sympathies are) on the grounds that Bolshevism was a Jewish movement. He and I differed on the subject of Bolshevism. I have never seen any signs either of constructive ability or sound principles in any Bolshevik leader; nothing but enterprise, driving-power, vindictiveness, Hebrew cunning, and a criminal ruthlessness. They're not statesmen. And Bolshevism, as so far manifested, isn't a statesmanlike system; it holds the reins too tight. I don't condemn it for the cruelties committed in its name, because whenever Russians get excited there'll be fiendish cruelties; Russians are like that--the most cruel devils in earth or h.e.l.l. Bolshevist Russians are no worse in that way than Czarist Russians. Except when I am listening to their music I loathe the whole race; great stupid, brutal, immoral, sentimental savages.... When I think of them I feel a kind of nausea, oddly touched with fear, that must be hereditary, I suppose.

After all, my father, as a child of five, saw his mother outraged and murdered by Russian police. Anyhow, Bolshevism, in Russian hands, has become a kind of stupid, crazy, devil's game, as everything always has.

But I don't want to discuss Bolshevism here. Boris Stefan hadn't really anything to do with it. He wasn't a politician. He was a dreamy, simple, untidy, rather childlike person, with a wonderful gift for painting.

Rosalind and I had got to know him at the Club. They were both beautiful, and it hadn't taken them long to fall in love. One Russian-Jewish exile marrying another--that was the bitterness of it to our very Gentile mother and our Sidneyfied father, who had spent fifty years living down his origin.

So I was called in to a.s.sist in averting the catastrophe. I wouldn't say anything except that it seemed very suitable, and that annoyed my mother.

I remember that she and I and Rosalind argued round and round it for an hour one hot evening in the drawing-room at Queen's Gate. Finally my mother said, 'Oh, very well. If Rosalind wants a lot of fat Yid babies with hooked noses and oily hair, all lending money on usury instead of getting into debt like Christians, let her have them. I wash my hands of the lot of you. I don't know what I've done to deserve two Sheenies for children.'

That made Rosalind giggle, and eased the acrimony of the discussion. My mother was a little fair woman, sharp-tongued and quick-tempered, but with a sense of fun.

My father had no sense of fun. I think it had been crushed out of him in his cradle. He was a silent man (though he could, like all Jews, be eloquent), with a thin face and melancholy dark eyes. I am supposed to look like him, I believe. He, too, spoke to me that evening about Rosalind's engagement. I remember how he walked up and down the dining-room, with his hands behind him and his head bent forward, and his quick, nervous, jerky movements.

'I don't like it, Arthur. I feel as if we had all climbed up out of a very horrible pit into a place of safety and prosperity and honour, and as if the child was preparing to leap down into the pit again. She doesn't know what it's like to be a Jew. I do, and I've saved you both from it, and you both seem bent on returning to the pit whence you were digged. We're an outcast people, my dear; an outcast people....'

His black eyes were haunted by memories of old fears; the fears his ancestors had had in them, listening behind frail locked doors for the howl 'Down with the Jews!' The fears that had been branded by savages into his own infant consciousness half a century ago; the fears seared later into the soul of a boy by boyish savages at an English school; the fears of the grown man, always hiding something, always pretending, always afraid....

I discovered then--and this is why I am recording this family incident here, why it connects with the rest of my life at this time--that Potterism has, for one of its surest bases, fear. The other bases are ignorance, vulgarity, mental laziness, sentimentality, and greed. The ignorance which does not know facts; the vulgarity which cannot appreciate values; the laziness which will not try to learn either of these things; the sentimentality which, knowing neither, is stirred by the valueless and the untrue; the greed which grabs and exploits. But fear is worst; the fear of public opinion, the fear of scandal, the fear of independent thought, of loss of position, of discomfort, of consequences, of truth.

My poor parents were afraid of social damage to their child; afraid lest she should be mixed up with something low, outcast, suspected. Not all my father's intellectual brilliance, nor all my mother's native wit, could save them from this pathetic, vulgar, ignorant piece of sn.o.bbery.

Pathetic, vulgar, and ignorant, because, if they had only known it, Rosalind stood to lose nothing she cared for by allying herself with a Jewish painter of revolutionary theories. Not a single person whose friendship she cared for but would be as much her friend as before. She had nothing to do with the _bourgeoisie_, bristling with prejudices and social sn.o.bberies, who made, for instance, my mother's world. And that is what one generation should always try to understand about another--how little (probably) each cares for the other's world.

Of course, Rosalind married Boris Stefan. And, as I have said, the whole incident is only mentioned to ill.u.s.trate how Potterism lurks in secret places, and flaunts in open places, pervading the whole fabric of human society.

2

Peace with Germany was signed, as every one knows, on June 28th. Nearly every one crabbed it, of course, the _Fact_ with the rest. I have no doubt that it did, as Garvin put it, sow dragon's teeth over Europe. It certainly seemed a poor, unconstructive, expensive, brittle thing enough.

But I am inclined to think that nearly all peace treaties are pretty bad.

You have to have them, however, and you may as well make the best of them. Anyhow, bad peace as it looked, at least it _was_ peace, and that was something new and unusual. And I confess frankly that it has, so far, held together longer than I, for one, ever expected it would. (I am writing this in January, 1920).

The _Fact_ published a cheery series of articles, dealing with each clause in turn, and explaining why it was bound to lead, immediately or ultimately, to war with some one or other. I wrote some of them myself.