CHAPTER VII

THE CULT OF USELESSNESS

Helena certainly had small ambition towards the life political, even as anything no more exalted than a latch-key voter. She had been compelled to read politics in Devonshire but like a schoolboy who is forced to chapel, found it very dull, and took another course at the first opportunity. She could not think, she said, to Hubert's joy, how grown men even took the trouble of electing members who had no influence over their own party and spent most of the time in childishly hindering the other.

She did, however, wish to gain her self-respect.

She met, now, people vastly cleverer than those who had made her feel ignorant at home, so that her growing knowledge in no way kept pace with her aspirations. Those old vague yearnings for something which she used to call Being Herself were stronger now and in a form more definite. She had learnt, in the first year of her married life, all that a woman could learn about keeping house, but she still felt a fool. She knew that this was not enough for her, whatever it might be for others. She still loved to hear Hubert talking when he embarked on Art or some really big subject; but she wished to do more than listen.

And she was learning, too.

Those who give their time to that most wonderful and noblest of all trades, the making of a man, have lately come by the belief that children have been taught quite wrongly. They have been stuffed with knowledge before their bodies were grown to receive it. A deluge of facts has been poured upon them, seated at their little desks, and most of it has gone out through the open window into God's fresh air, where they ought to have been themselves. They have almost burst with learning--and never learnt to learn. They have known all Euclid at thirteen: forgotten everything by thirty-one. They have been specialists at seventeen and city clerks at twenty-three.

Mrs. Hallam, that crusted theorist and advocate of the old way, unconsciously had done a curiously modern thing. She had kept her daughter back, given her a healthy body, a mind anxious to expand and able. Now, at twenty-two, Helena began to specialise--in learning and in life. She had been kept back: now she leapt forward the better.

Contemptible enough perhaps to a superior eye, the salad of quite disconnected lectures, random talks with a young artist-friend, and pencilled passages from Mudie books, that formed this home curriculum; but as in health, contentment, as with life itself, the will to be is almost everything, and Helena was quite resolved to learn.

Her sole worry, in all the excitement of this onward surge into a fuller life whose endless spaces thrilled and terrified, was that her husband would not bear her company. Oh, he was much too clever. She knew that. She never blamed him. He had no need for all her causeries and things. She would be dull to argue with; and yet----

Yet it is only human, only feminine, when one has got a clever husband and is adventuring on the long road of Art, to wish that he should take one's hand.

And she was proud of him.

Her simple mind had not yet probed the inwardness of Mrs. Herbertson's "mistake." It did not seem peculiar to her that Mr. Alison should be seen always, and he only, as her companion at the Institute. It merely was that she wished it might sometimes have been Hubert. She longed to hear his views on all of it, and it would be nice, too, to show him. It looked so odd that he would never come, when quite old-looking women brought husbands triumphantly along!

At length, when fifteen months of lectures gave her a new confidence, she tackled him point-blank one afternoon while they were walking on the Heath.

He looked at her reproachfully, as though he were a master who had just been asked for a half-holiday.

"My dear girl," he said, "is that quite logical?"

She knew at once that hope was dead. It always was when logic once appeared. She never had a chance.

"I don't know why not," she said gaily, for nowadays she did not go back to her kennel quite so easily. They had been married for two years.

Hubert was forced to put the thing in words.

"Well you see, my dear," he started, slowly, "I dare say other husbands have got their work finished by six o'clock. In fact"--and he brightened visibly--"that is really why they fixed that hour, I dare say. City men are back. But it's my best work-hour, you know."

"_Is_ it?" laughed Helena, and looked at him. Then, as he did not seem to see the joke, "The _morning_ is, you know, if I ask you to come out shopping. I'm afraid, Hugh, you're just a little naughty!" And she shook her finger.

"No," he said shortly, still not very much amused, for once, at her nice childish ways. "They _both_ are.... It's not much for a man to work, just two short goes at it, and I simply can't spare the time, however much I'd like to. I mustn't go out between tea and dinner when I'm on a book."

"You used to, though," persisted Helena, "in Devonshire."

It is a rash wife who recalls to her husband the days of single life.

"Very likely," he answered impatiently; "but we weren't married then. I can't afford it now."

The rash wife had it, full between the eyes; a brutal blow provoked by her incaution; and she reeled.

"Can't afford it, Hugh?" she repeated, with a vague sense of being accused. "Why, do I cost so much? Do I cost more than Ruth?"

He had not looked for anything quite as direct as that. He had blurted it out and now, as often, felt ashamed. He laughed and said in a much kinder tone:

"Don't you worry your dear head about things like that. We shall be all right. You won't find the man in possession by our fireside yet, when you come home from market!"

Now it was her turn not to be amused. "No, but tell me," she said. "I'd much rather know. Are we honestly hard up?"

"What a practical little thing it's getting," he said, patting her on the back as they strode onward, always heralded by the long white dog with its straight tail, as proud as a drum-major. "Well, if you really want to know," he went on, "we are and have been, but we shan't be. Listen!" He turned about and about, his finger to his mouth, upon the empty spaces, clearly once more in the best of spirits. "Never tell a soul--and least of all the High-Art Alison--but I am doing a pot-boiler!"

"What, something worse than you need?" she blurted out in her astonishment.

He laughed at that. "Yes, if you put it so! Anyhow, something to make money."

"But won't the critics hate that?" she asked seriously.

Hubert Brett, for a man who had been almost too kindly reviewed, was always very hard on critics.

"Now listen," he said, "and I'll tell you something. The public has a natural suspicion of literary criticism. It only reads the stuff to see what to avoid. If it sees some book is called sincere, painstaking, artistic, a masterpiece, or anything like that, it passes on until it comes to something labelled crude and elementary. Then it gets out its library list. Think of the two best-selling novelists to-day, and then think what the critics say of them! They are a journalistic joke. Yes, the more the dear critics hurl abuse, the more the darling public rushes out to Boot's. I'm sick of good reviews and rotten sales. I'm not doing it because I married you, not I; but I want columns of abuse and half a million copies!"

She loathed it, always, when he talked like this. She never knew quite what he meant. She hoped he was not really writing a pot-boiler.

"No, but honestly," she said, "why are things worse than in the old days? Your books sell just as well. Do tell me or I shall ask Ruth."

"Well," he said, but this time without rancour, merely telling her what she had asked, "you see a house, even a hen-run like ours, always costs ever so much more than rooms--rates and things like servants, don't you see--and then Ruth used to make a bit with curious bazaar stuff all gummed on to tins."

It was a mere backwash of his thought, as he drew the question out to a solution--nothing more. He never thought of a comparison. Why, if the thing had ever come to that, Helena had her allowance....

But it went home to her, whose early days had bred a diffidence to die only with the years. Ruth had helped him, then!

"I wish _I_ could do something," she said. "I feel so useless!" She had forgotten her bold attack with which this dialogue had started, and her whole mind was filled now with its self-reproach.

Hubert felt a sudden shame. The words threw back his memory to those first hours in London when the vast City crowd had made her say; "It makes me feel so useless!" Dear little girl, what happy, jolly days she had brought to his life since then! And yet she thought that she was useless....

She seemed so upset. His one idea was consolation. She must not think he longed for Ruth again, in even one respect!

Perhaps at a less flustered time he might have thought of all that she did in the house; those charming little meals, hot always at however variable times; the pretty bowls of flowers; everything so dainty--green and white--so different from the grimy lodgings.

But now he did not think of that. He took her arm instinctively in his and spoke what came into his mind.

"Dear little girlie," he said kindly, "I love you to be useless."

But she was not consoled.