Potterism Part 9

But I was out on some points, though most haven't had time yet to prove themselves.

'Now,' said Jane, the day after the signature, 'I suppose we can get on with the things that matter.'

She meant housing, demobilisation, proportional representation, health questions, and all the good objects which the Society for Equal Citizenship had at heart. She had been writing some articles in the _Daily Haste_ on these. They were well-informed and intelligent, but not expert enough for the _Fact_. And that, as I began to see, was partly where Hobart came in. Jane wrote cleverly, clearly, and concisely--better than Johnny did. But, in these days of overcrowded competent journalism --well, it is not unwise to marry an editor of standing. It gives you a better place in the queue.

I dined at the Hobarts' on June 29th, for the first time since their marriage. We were a party of six. Katherine Varick was there, and a distinguished member of the American Legation and his wife.

Jane handled her parties competently, as she did other things. A vivid, jolly child she looked, in love with life and the fun and importance of her new position. The bachelor girl or man just married is an amusing study to me. Especially the girl, with her new responsibilities, her new and more significant relation to life and society. Later she is sadly apt to become dull, to have her individuality merged in the eternal type of the matron and the mother; her intellect is apt to lose its edge, her mind its grip. It is the sacrifice paid by the individual to the race.

But at first she is often a delightful combination of keen-witted, jolly girl and responsible woman.

We talked, I remember, partly about the Government, and how soon Northcliffe would succeed in turning it out. The Pinkerton press was giving its support to the Government. The _Weekly Fact_ was not. But we didn't want them out at once; we wanted to keep them on until some one of constructive ability, in any party, was ready to take the reins. The trouble about the Labour people was that so far there was no one of constructive ability; they were manifestly unready. They had no one good enough. No party had. It was the old problem, never acuter, of 'Produce the Man.' If Labour was to produce him, I suspected that it would take it at least a generation of hard political training and education. If Labour had got in then, it would have been a mob of uneducated and uninformed sentimentalists, led and used by a few trained politicians who knew the tricks of the trade. It would be far better for them to wait till the present generation of honest mediocrities died out, and a new and differently educated generation were ready to take hold.

University-trained Labour--that bugbear of Barnes'--if there is any hope for the British Const.i.tution, which probably there is not, I believe it lies there. It is a very small one, at the best. Anyhow, it certainly did not, at this period, lie in the parliamentary Labour Party, that body of incompetents in an incompetent House.

It was in discussing this that I discovered that Hobart couldn't discuss.

He could talk; he could a.s.sert, produce opinions and information, but he couldn't meet or answer arguments. And he was cautious, afraid of committing himself, afraid, I fancied, of exposing gulfs in his equipment of information, for, like other journalists of his type, his habit was to write about things of which he knew little. Old Pinkerton remarked once, at a dinner to American newspaper men, that his own idea of a good journalist was a man who could sit down at any moment and write a column on any subject. The American newspaper men cheered this; it was their idea of a good journalist too. It is an amusing game, and one encouraged by the Anti-Potterite League, to waylay leader-writers and tackle them about their leaders, turn them inside out and show how empty they are.

I've written that sort of leader myself, of course, but not for the _Fact_; we don't allow it. There, the man who writes is the man who knows, and till some one knows no one writes. That is why some people call us dry, heavy, lacking in ideas, and say we are like a Blue Book, or a paper read to the British a.s.sociation. We are proud of that reputation. The Pinkerton papers and the others can supply the ideas; we are out for facts.

Anyhow, Hobart I knew for an ignorant person. All he had was a _flair_ for the popular point of view. That was why Pinkerton who knew men, got hold of him. He was a true Potterite. Possibly I always saw him at his least eloquent and his most cautious, because he didn't like me and knew I didn't like him. Even then there had already been one or two rather acrimonious disputes between my paper and his on points of fact. The _Daily Haste_ hated being pinned down to and quarrelled with about facts; facts didn't seem to the Pinkerton press things worth quarrelling over, like policy, principles, or prejudices. The story goes that when any one told old Pinkerton he was wrong about something, he would point to his vast circulation, using it as an argument that he couldn't be mistaken.

If you still pressed and proved your point, he would again refer to his circulation, but using it this time as an indication of how little it mattered whether his facts were right or wrong. Some one once said to him curiously, 'Don't you _care_ that you are misleading so many millions?'

To which he replied, in his dry little voice, 'I don't lead, or mislead, the millions. They lead me.' Little Pinkerton sometimes saw a long way farther into what he was doing than you'd guess from his shoddy press. He had queer flashes of genius.

But Hobart hadn't. Hobart didn't see anything, except what he was officially paid to see. A shallow, solemn a.s.s.

I looked suddenly at Jane, and caught her watching her husband silently, with her considering, dispa.s.sionate look. He was talking to the American Legation about the traffic strike (we were a round table, and the talk was general).

Then I knew that, whether Jane had ever been in love with Hobart or not, she was not so now. I knew further, or thought I knew, that she saw him precisely as I did.

Of course she didn't. His beauty came in--it always does, between men and women, confusing the issues--and her special relation to him, and a hundred other things. The relation between husband and wife is too close and too complex for clear thinking. It seems always to lead either to too much regard or to an excess of irritation, and often to both.

Jane looked away from Hobart, and met my eyes watching her. Her expression didn't alter, nor, probably, did mine. But something pa.s.sed between us; some unacknowledged mutual understanding held us together for an instant. It was unconscious on Jane's part and involuntary on mine.

She hadn't meant to think over her husband with me; I hadn't meant to push in. Jane wasn't loyal, and I wasn't well-bred, but we neither of us meant that.

I hardly talked to Jane that evening. She was talking after dinner to Katherine and the American Legation. I had a three-cornered conversation with Hobart and the Legation's wife, who was of an inquiring turn of mind, like all of her race, and asked us exhausting questions. She got on to the Jewish question, and asked us for our views on the reasons for anti-Semitism in Europe.

'I've been reading the _New Witness_,' she said.

I told her she couldn't do better, if she was investigating anti-Semitism.

'But are they fair?' she asked ingenuously.

I replied that there were moments in which I had a horrible suspicion that they were.

'Then the Jews are really a huge conspiracy plotting to get the finances of Europe into their hands?' Her eyes, round and shocked, turned from me to Hobart.

He lightly waved her to me.

'You must ask Mr. Gideon. The children of Israel are his speciality.'

His dislike of me gleamed in his blue eyes and in his supercilious, cold smile. The Legation's wife (no fool) must have seen it.

I went on talking rubbish to her about the Jews and the finances of Europe. I don't remember what particular rubbish it was, for I was hardly aware of it at the time. What I was vividly and intensely and quite suddenly aware of was that I was on fire with the same anger, dislike, and contempt that burned in Hobart towards me. I knew that evening that I hated him, even though I was sitting in his house and smoking his cigarettes. I wanted to be savagely rude to him. I think that once or twice I came very near to being so.

Katherine and I went home by the same bus. I grumbled to her about Hobart all the way. I couldn't help it; the fellow seemed suddenly to have become a nervous disease to me; I was mentally wriggling and quivering with him.

Katherine laughed presently, in that queer, silent way of hers.

'Why worry?' she said. '_You've_ not married him.'

'Well, what's marriage?' I returned. 'He's a public danger--he and his kind.'

Katherine said truly, 'There are so many public dangers. There really isn't time to get agitated about them all.' Her mind seemed still to be running on marriage, for she added presently, 'I think he'll find that he's bitten off rather more than he can chew, in Jane.'

'Jane can go to the devil in her own way,' I said, for I was angry with Jane too. 'She's married a second-rate fellow for what she thinks he'll bring her. I dare say she has her reward.... Katherine, I believe that's the very essence of Potterism--going for things for what they'll bring you, what they lead to, instead of for the thing-in-itself. Artists care for the thing-in-itself; Potterites regard things as railway trains, always going somewhere, getting somewhere. Artists, students, and the religious--they have the single eye. It's the opposite to the commercial outlook. Artists will look at a little fishing town or country village, and find it a thing of beauty and a joy for ever, and leave it to itself--unless they yield to the devil and paint it or write about it.

Potterites will exploit it, commercialise it, bring the railway to it--and the thing is spoilt. Oh, the Potterites get there all right, confound them. They're the progressives of the world. They--they have their reward.'

(It's a queer thing how Jews can't help quoting the New Testament--even Jews without religion.)

'We seem to have decided,' Katherine said, 'that Jane is a Potterite.'

'Morally she is. Not intellectually. You can be a Potterite in many ways.

Jane accepts the second-rate, though she recognises it as such.... The plain fact is,' I was in a fit of savage truth-speaking, 'that Jane is second-rate.'

'Well ...'

The gesture of Katherine's square shoulders may have meant several things--'Aren't we all?' or 'Surely that's very obvious,' or 'I can't be bothered to consider Jane any more,' or merely 'After all, we've just dined there.'

Anyhow, Katherine got off the bus at this point.

I was left repeating to myself, as if it had been a new discovery, which it wasn't, 'Jane is second-rate....'

CHAPTER III

SEEING JANE

1

Jane was taking the chair at a meeting of a section of the Society for Equal Citizenship. The speakers were all girls under thirty who wanted votes. They spoke rather well. They weren't old enough to have become sentimental, and they were mostly past the conventional cliches of the earlier twenties. In extreme youth one has to be second-hand; one doesn't know enough, one hasn't lived or learnt enough, to be first-hand; and one lacks self-confidence. But by five or six-and-twenty one should have left that behind. One should know what one thinks and what one means, and be able to state it in clear terms. That is what these girls--mostly University girls--did.

Jane left the chair and spoke too.

I hadn't known Jane spoke so well. She has a clever, coherent way of making her points, and is concise in reply if questioned, quick at repartee if heckled.

Lady Pinkerton was sitting in the row in front of Juke and me. Mother and daughter. It was very queer to me. That wordy, willowy fool, and the st.u.r.dy, hard-headed girl in the chair, with her crisp, gripping mind. Yet there was something.... They both loved success. Perhaps that was it. The vulgarian touch. I felt it the more clearly in them because of Juke at my side. And yet Jukie too ... Only he would always be awake to it--on his guard, not capitulating.