Part 21

Christina Alberta was greatly elated at her successful repulse of his projected cross-examination. Instead of making a display herself she could watch him. She watched him over the flowers on the table and had to be nudged by the waiter when he brought the pheasant to her elbow. “How _should_ one begin?” he plunged. She had heard of Pragmatism? Yes. She was probably better read in that sort of thing than he was. He was, he considered, a sort of Pragmatist. Most modern-minded, intelligent people he held were Pragmatists as he understood it. Pragmatist? As he understood it? He met her eye and explained. In this sense he meant it; we, none of us, had a clear vision of reality; nobody perhaps would ever do more than approach reality. What we perceived was just that much of reality that got through to us, through our very defective powers of interpretation. “They’ve done this pheasant _en casserole_ very well,” he broke off. “Three minutes’ truce we ought to give it. Do you find I’m talking comprehensibly? I doubt it.”

“I’m hanging on,” said Christina Alberta....

“Perhaps I’m beginning rather too far off.”

Pheasant....

“To come back to my confession of faith,” he said presently.... “Mind you, Christina Alberta, you’ve got to say your bit afterwards.”

“It won’t be as definite as yours,” she said. “Some of yours I shall steal. But go on--telling me.”

“Well, keep hold, Christina Alberta. I feel I’m going to be at once hesitating and condensed. And I’m not sure of what you know or don’t know. If I say I’m an Agnostic about the nature of the universe, and how it began and where it ends, does that convey anything to you?”

“Just what I think,” said Christina Alberta.

“Well.” He started afresh and got into parenthetical difficulties. The Pêche Melba came to interrupt and permit a fresh start. He unfolded a psychologist’s vision of the world for her inspection, a curious and yet attractive vision to her. He expressed himself in terms of mind and understanding. She was used to hearing everything expressed in terms of labour and material necessity. Life, he said, was one continuous thing, all life was connected. He tried to illustrate that. The conscious life of most lower animals was intensely individual, a lizard, for example, was just itself, just its instincts and appetites; it received no teaching and no tradition, it handed on nothing to its kind. But the higher animals were taught when they were young, learnt and taught others and communicated with each other. Men far more than any animal. He had developed picture-writing, speech, oral tradition, scientific record. There was now a common mind of the race, a great growing body of knowledge and interpretations.

“People like ourselves are just cross-sections of that flow. Individually we receive it, react to it, change it a little, and pass away. We are just passing phases of that increasing mind--which may be for all we can certainly say, an immortal mind. Does this sound like Greek--or nonsense to you?”

“No,” she said, “I think I get the drift of it.” She looked at his intent face. He wasn’t in the least talking down to her; he was simply trying to express himself as well as he possibly could to her. He was treating her like an equal. Like an equal!

That was his general philosophy. He was coming to the question of himself now, he said. He became very earnest over the coffee cups and ash tray on the swept tablecloth. He spread elucidatory hands before her. He was conscientiously explicit. He saw in himself two phases, or rather two levels of existence. Roughly speaking, two. They had links and intermediate stages of course, but they could be ignored when one just wanted to express the idea. First of all, he was the old instinctive individual, fearful, greedy, lustful, jealous, self-assertive. That was the primary self. He had to attend to that primary self because it carried all the rest of him, as a rider must see that his horse gets oats. Deeper lay social instincts and dispositions arising out of family life. That was the second self, the social self. Man, he threw out, is a creature that has become more and more consciously social in the last two or three hundred thousand years. He has been lengthening his life, keeping his children with him longer and longer, enlarging his community from family herds into clans and tribes and nations. The deep-lying continuity of life was becoming more apparent and finding more and more definite expression with this socialization of man. To educate anyone in the proper sense of the word was to make him more and more aware of this continuity. The importance of the passionate feverish self was then reduced. True education was self-subordination to a greater life, to the social self. The natural instincts and limitations of the primary self were in conflict with this wider underflow; education, _good_ education, tended to correct them.

“Here am I,” said Devizes, “as we all are, a creature in a state of internal conflict, quicker, fiercer mortal instincts at issue with a deeper, calmer, less brightly lit, but finally stronger drive towards immortal purposes. And I am--how shall I put it?--I personally am, to the best of my ability, on the side of the deeper things. My aptitudes and temperament and opportunities have brought me to psychology--as a profession. I work to add to the accumulation of human knowledge and understanding about the mind. I work for illumination. My particular work is to study and cure troubled and tangled minds. I try to straighten them out and simplify them and illuminate them. And above all I try to learn from them. I seek the mental or physical cause of their distresses. I try to set down as clearly and accessibly as possible, all I observe and learn. That’s my job. That’s my aim. It gives me a general direction for my life. All the stuff of my mere individual existence I try to subordinate to that end. Not always. My monkey individual gets loose at times and gibbers on the roof. And at other times it’s rather good company as a relief from overwork. Vanity and self-indulgence have their uses. But never mind the monkey now. I do not want to be a brilliant person; I want to be a vital part. That’s my essential creed. I want to be the sort of wheel in the machinery they call a mental expert. As good a wheel as I can be. That’s what I’m up to in general terms, Christina Alberta. That’s what I think I am.”

“Yes,” said Christina Alberta, reflecting profoundly. “Of course I can’t produce a statement like that. You’ve got your system--complete.”

“And finished,” said Devizes. “You’ve got to tell your story in your own way. At your age--you ought to be with loose ends to all your convictions.”

“I wonder if I can tell you any story.”

“You’ve got to try your best now. It’s only fair play.”

“Yes.”

There was a little silence.

“It’s wonderful to talk to you like this,” said Christina Alberta. “It’s wonderful to talk to anyone like this.”

“I feel that you and I--have to understand each other.”

She met his grave eyes for a moment. There was a wave of emotion within her. She could not speak. She reached out her hand to touch his, and for a moment their hands were together.

§ 13

Christina Alberta only got to her confession of faith in the studio after they had returned thither and relieved the Universal Aunt. Even then they didn’t settle down to the business all at once. Devizes walked about and looked for drawings by Harold; he deduced Harold from his drawings to a quite remarkable extent, Christina Alberta thought. He was curious about Fay. “What’s Mrs. Crumb like?” he asked. “Show me something of hers, something that seems to give her.”

It pleased Christina Alberta very much to think that he was shy with her. She felt that this was a recognition of her equality. He was respecting her and she was very eager that she should be respected by him.

He got to an anchorage at last in the gaily painted seat by the gas-fire; and Christina Alberta, after flitting about the room for a time, came and stood before it, shapely legs wide apart and hands behind her back in an attitude that would have shocked all her feminine ancestors for many generations. But it did not shock Devizes; he found her more and more interesting to watch, and he sat at his ease and regarded her with a lively admiration. Most of us get used to our daughters so gradually; they grow up and we carry the wonder of them as Milo carried his ox; it isn’t common for a man to get an unexpected daughter abruptly at the age of twenty-one.

She said she hadn’t much in the way of metaphysics; she was a Materialist.

“No prayers at mother’s knee? Religion of Mother and Daddy? School prayers and teaching? Church or chapel?”

“It all washed out and faded out, I think, as they laid it on.”

“No fear of hell? Most of my generation went through the fear of hell.”

“Not a trace of it,” said the New Age.

“But--a desire for God in the night?”

Christina Alberta paused for a little while. “I have that,” she said. “It comes--sometimes. I don’t know whether it’s very important or not important at all.”

“It’s part,” said Devizes slowly, “of something that has to do with wanting to be more than a miserable worm--and disliking meanness--and so forth.”

“Yes. Do you know more about it?”

Rather oddly he didn’t answer that. “And how do you see yourself in relation to mankind--and the animals--and the stars? What sense of obligation have you? What do you think the road is along which you have to go?”

“H’m,” said Christina Alberta. She considered she was a Communist, she said, though she didn’t belong to the Party. But she knew some other young people who did. She produced some of the phrases of the movement, “the materialist conception of history” and so forth. He said he failed to understand and asked rather irritating questions; she thought controversially. She didn’t realize at first how widely apart was their phraseology. As they talked this became apparent. He seemed to have nothing too good to say for the Communist idea, for wasn’t it just his own idea of being a part of a greater being of life? but he seemed to have nothing too bad for practical Communism. Marxist Communism he said wasn’t a constructive movement at all; it was merely a solvent. It had no idea, no plan. Christina Alberta was put on the defensive. “Enthusiasm for an ideal Communist state isn’t nearly so important as the question of immediate Communist tactics in a decaying society,” she recited, in an almost official tone. That was how her young friends in the Party talked. But when she talked like this to him it didn’t seem so effective. He wouldn’t leave her phrases alone. He wanted to know what she meant by decay in a society, whether there had ever been a society not actively in decay and not also actively in growth, what good tactics were except in relation to general strategy and whether there could be any strategy without a clear war-end. She countered more vigorously than effectively and their manner became controversial.

He pressed the difference in their opinions. Communism for him meant a new spirit, a spirit of science reorganizing the world upon scientific collective lines, but the whole temper of party communism was contemporary. It was saturated with the feelings and ideas of existing social classes, with the natural resentment of the dispossessed. It had the angry dogmatism of desperate people not sure of their grip. It needed more of the passion of creative self-forgetfulness. Many Communists, he said, were simply reversed capitalists, egotists without capital; they wanted revenge and expropriation, and when they were through with that they would be left with nothing but social ruins and everything to begin all over again. And they were suspicious and intolerant because of their want of internal assurance. They distrusted their best friends, their proper leaders, scientific men like Keynes and Soddy.

“Keynes a Communist!” cried Christina Alberta in derision. “He doesn’t accept the first scientific fact of the class war.”

“It isn’t much of a fact--certainly not a First Scientific Fact,” he replied. “Keynes builds up slowly a conception of a scientifically organized exchange system. Most of your friends in Russia don’t seem capable even of realizing that such a thing is necessary.”

“But they do!”

“Have they shown it?”

“What do _you_ know of the Russian Bolsheviks?”

“What do _you_? You just look at the labels on people. Nothing genuine without the red label--and everything genuine with.”

She said he saw things from his “bourgeois” standpoint, and he laughed cheerfully at her social classifications; there was no bourgeoisie in England, he said; she attempted some of the stock cynicisms and sarcasms of the movement but with an unusual lack of conviction. It was easy for him to criticize, she said, living as he did on invested capital.

“It would make it easier,” he smiled. “But really I live on my fees.”

“You have invested capital.”

“Some. I don’t live on it.”

They had exhausted the dispute for a time. After all she reflected she hadn’t put up such a bad fight, considering her age and standing. The momentary glow of controversial exasperation faded again. They drifted to the more immediate question in which they were interested, the question of what she was to do with her life.

§ 14

“We progress, Christina Alberta,” said Devizes, “but it’s still generally the rule that a woman’s life is determined very largely by the character and occupations of--the leading man in the play. Have you by any chance been in love yet?”

She wanted to tell him all the truth about herself, but some things are untellable. She hesitated and blushed hotly. “Nowadays,” she said, and stopped. “I’ve some imagination. I’ve run about London. I’ve perhaps imagined things----”

His eyes were very searching for a moment but none the less kindly.

“I’ve been in love--in a kind of way,” she admitted.

He nodded with a dreadful effect of complete comprehension.

“I don’t want to run my life in relation to any man,” she extended.

“Clever girls never do. Any more than clever young men want to spend their lives adoring a goddess.”

“In any case I don’t see myself becoming a child-producing housekeeper,” she said.

“Even if you married. No. I doubt whether you are that type. But if you are going to reject that easy way--and it _is_ an easy way, in spite of what people say--if you are going to be a citizen on your own as a man is, then you’ve got to do a man’s work, Christina Alberta. There’s to be none of the Pretty Fanny business you know.”

“Well, _am_ I?” asked Christina Alberta.

“No, I don’t think you are. And in that case, I guess you want some more education. You’re clever, but you’re a bit patchy.”

“I’m good enough to get a job. And then learn.”

“Learn,” he said. “That’s enough to take you all your time. I’d rather we agreed it’s got to be a student for two or three years more. You need have no anxiety about ways and means. You and I are of the same Clan--a clan of two practically--and I am the head. I’ll see you through just as though you were a son. And now, what sort of work is it to be? Law? Medicine? a general education for journalism or affairs? Doors open to women now--fresh doors every day.”

To that Christina Alberta could speak a little more fully. She had been thinking out some of these things. She wanted to know about life and the world as a whole. Could she have a good year at physical science, biology and geology chiefly and anthropology? Would that be possible? And then if she was any good at medical work, another year at mental science or politics and public health? “It sounds ambitious I know,” she said.

“Ambitious! It’s an encyclopædia in a year.”

“But I want to know about all these things.”

“Naturally.”

“Could I have longer than that?”

“You’d have to have longer than that.”

“It seems to be asking for so much.”

“It wouldn’t be if you were in trousers. We’ve agreed to unsex you to that extent. Why shouldn’t you be ambitious?”

“You think I might do work--scientific work--at last--as you do?”

“Why not?”

“A girl?”

“You’re the sort of stuff I am, Christina Alberta.”

“Do you think--some day--I might even come to work--to work with you?”

“Kindred minds may follow kindred courses,” he said, with the completest recognition of their relationship “Why not?”

She stood and looked at him with a dark excitement in her eyes and he had a momentary intimation of all that he might be to her. Gallant she was and fine and ambitious; a wonderful life to come out of nothingness into his own. And she meant this relationship to grow, as well it might grow, into something very great and deep for both of them.

He went off at a tangent to talk of the contrast of men and women students and of men and women as workers. “You’ll never run parallel with men, you free women, so don’t expect it. You’ve got to work out a way that is similar perhaps but different. Different down to the roots.” He argued that probably the whole fabric of a man had its qualities that a woman’s did not possess and vice versa, down even to a muscular fibre or a nerve tendril. A time might come when we should be able to put a drop of blood or a scrap of skin under the microscope or apply some subtle reagent to it and tell its sex. “A man resists,” he said. “A man is intractable. He has greater inertia, physical and mental. That keeps him to his course. Men compared with women are steadier and stupider. Women compared with men are quicker and sillier. Bludgeons and bodkins.”

He talked of his student days when women medical students were still rather novel intrusions, and from that he passed to his father’s prejudices, to his father’s treatment of his mother and his boyish days. Presently they were exchanging experiences of childish delusions and fancies. She forgot how much older and more experienced he was in the ease of his talk. He told her about himself because he recognized her right to know about him; he listened with a friendly eagerness to all she chose to tell him of her Daddy and herself and about her impressions and her few adventures in encounter as a suburban student in London. They shared their delight in Paul Lambone’s kindly absurdity. Presently it occurred to her to offer him drink. The Crumbs had left a bottle of beer and a syphon. But Devizes asked her to make tea and helped her with the kettle. Meanwhile the mutual exploration went on. Their friendliness grew richer and deeper as they talked. She had never before met so intimate and delightful a curiosity as his. She had had friends before but no such friendliness; she had had a lover but never such intimacy.

It was one o’clock before he went away.

The talk had ebbed. He sat thoughtful for a moment.

“I must go,” he said, and stood up. They faced each other, a little at a loss for parting words.

“It’s been wonderful to talk to you,” she said.

“It’s a great thing to have discovered you.”

Another pause. “It’s a great thing for me,” she said lamely.

“We’ll talk--many times,” he said.

He wanted to call her “my dear,” and an absurd shyness prevented him. And she was aware of that suppression.

She stood up straight before him in the passage with a flush on her cheeks and her eyes alight, and he wondered he had not thought her beautiful from the beginning. “Good-bye for the time,” he said, and smiled at her gravely and took and held her hand for a moment.

“Good night,” she said, and hesitated and then opened the green door for him and stood and watched him go up the Mews.

At the top he turned and waved his hand to her before he disappeared. “Good night,” she whispered and started, and looked about her as if she feared that her unspoken thoughts had been audible.

Father. Her father!

So real fathers leave one aglow like this!

He had left her tense as a violin string on which the bow rests motionless. Now Daddy, who wasn’t her father, she would just have hugged and kissed.

CHAPTER THE SECOND

_How Bobby Stole a Lunatic_

§ 1

A man may be a mental expert and yet fail to take the most obvious hints in a detective investigation. The medical superintendent at Cummerdown Hill had doubted for a moment whether Widgery was the name of Sargon’s visitor. He had thought it was more like Goodchild. But since there was no known Goodchild in the world of Christina Alberta, neither she nor Devizes had troubled to scrutinize this momentary uncertainty. Nor had she and Devizes asked themselves why Widgery should have made a second visit to his cousin. Indeed, he had not done so. It was a much younger man who had visited Sargon that Tuesday; he had falsely represented himself as Sargon’s nephew and given the name of “Robin Goodchild.” His real name was Robert Roothing, and he had come for the sole purpose of getting Sargon out of the asylum as soon as possible, because he could not endure the thought of his staying there.

Circumstances had conspired with a natural predisposition to give Bobby a great horror of all restraint. His mother, a gentle dark creature, the wife of a large blond negligent landowner, had died when Bobby was twelve; and he had been entrusted to the care of a harsh, old-fashioned aunt--to whom the cupboard seemed a proper place for discipline. When she discovered that he was really distressed by it, she sought to break his “cowardice” by giving him quite liberal doses of it--even when he had committed no offence. He went to a school where discipline was maintained by “keeping-in.” The war eliminated his father, who died suddenly of over-excitement while in command of an anti-aircraft gun during an air-raid, and it led Bobby through some tiresome campaigning in Mesopotamia and the beleaguerment of Kut to an extremely unsympathetic Turkish prison. In any case he would probably have been a free-going easy creature, but now he had so passionate a hatred of cages that he wanted to release even canaries. He disliked the iron fences round the public parks and squares with a propagandist passion, he wrote articles about them in _Wilkins’ Weekly_ and elsewhere clamouring for their “liberation,” and he never went by train if he could help it because of the claustrophobia that assailed him in the compartment. He would ride a push-bike except for long distances, and then he would borrow Billy’s motor bicycle. He did his best to prevent his craving for the large and open from becoming too conspicuous or a nuisance to other people, but Tessy and Billy understood about it and did their best to make things easy for him.

It was not only claustrophobia that Bobby had to fight against. He carried on a secret internal conflict with a disinclination to act upon most occasions, that he believed had developed in him as a result of war experiences. Sometimes it seemed to him to be just indolence, sometimes fastidiousness, sometimes sheer funk and cowardice. He could not tell. He had a rankling memory of a case of cruelty he had witnessed in the prisoners’ camp when he had stood by and done nothing. He would wake up sometimes at three o’clock in the morning and say to himself aloud, “I stood by and I did nothing. Oh God! Oh _God_! Oh GOD!” And at times he would walk up and down his study repeating: “_Act!_ You vegetable! you hiding cur! Out and act!” Meanwhile he obeyed routines and did whatever came to his hand. As “Aunt Suzannah” he was excellent, indefatigably considerate, lucid, really helpful. _Wilkins’ Weekly_ was proud of him. He was the backbone of the paper.