Part 23

It needed melodrama to move Mrs. Folyat; tragedy or tragi-comedy left her blank. She was in no mood for general consideration, for she was thinking with cold practicability of the need of the moment. When she thought of the house without Mary it was as a place of absolute silence. There were many evenings when Francis said never a word; many again when he sat alone in his study or working in his greenhouse, and only came up just before it was time to go to bed. Mrs. Folyat had a horror of silence. . . . Mary must not go, she thought, Mary must not go. She came swiftly to the point and asked:

"Have you accepted him?"

Unreasonably, in the face of experience, Mary had been expecting sympathy; she so craved it. For a flickering moment she desired almost viciously to lie, but she was hurt into truth.

"No," she said.

Mrs. Folyat sighed with relief and triumph.

"Of course you couldn't," she said. "He is such a common man. . . . Let us play Bézique."

Mary fetched the cards and they played until Francis came up at ten o'clock. She let him take her hand and went downstairs to the kitchen to brew her mother's chocolate. She had lost all interest in Mr. Hargreave, and she felt nothing at all.

In her bedroom that night she found it quite easy to write to him. She said that she trusted him to understand that she could not marry him, and that it would be best in the circumstances if he found another teacher for Violet. He had (she continued) always been very kind to her. She was very grateful to him, and would think well of him, but her duty lay towards her father and mother.

So, without any ill-feeling she slipped into the part designed for her by her mother.

As she was writing to Mr. Hargreave, her mother said to Francis:

"My dear, what do you think? That horrid old Hargreave has actually proposed to Mary. Of course she refused him."

"Poor Mary," said Francis.

XXIX

DISCUSSION

_Will kein Gott auf Erde sein? Sind wir selber Götter._ W. MÜLLER.

THROUGH the years Father Soledano had remained a fairly frequent visitor at the house of the Folyats. His was the only really constant intimacy that Francis enjoyed, and it was based on the kinship of their humour and their common taste for mental caricature. Both strangers to our town and dwelling outside its activity, they loved to foregather and burlesque its politics, its manners, and its worship of money. Father Soledano went further than Francis and poked his fun at English institutions, though then he became malicious and Francis could not see eye to eye with him. Francis had no politics save a dislike for Mr. Gladstone and a distrust of Benjamin Disraeli and Lord Salisbury, and he knew too little of modern English literature to be able to appreciate the priest's sarcasms at the expense of Carlyle, Ruskin, George Eliot, or Robert Browning. He had never heard of George Meredith, but he became almost angry when Soledano scoffed at Dickens and Thackeray. . . .

Their discussions used to take place on Sunday evenings in the study, and it often happened that Serge was present. One Sunday night when, as often happened, Soledano, harked back to the Manchester murders, he launched out upon a violent assault upon England, and quoted once more words that were often upon his lips, words of the mother of Charles Stewart Parnell:

"'The English are hated everywhere for their arrogance, greed, cant, and hypocrisy. They want us all to think they are so goody-goody. They are simply thieves.'"

"Oh! come, come," said Francis, "not so bad as that. After all we have given the world a good deal and showed the way to other nations in many things."

"You have shown the other nations how to steal."

"I don't think any nation, or any collective body of men who have pooled their sense of right and wrong need much instruction in that," said Serge. "It is simply a question of stealing from a body of men weaker than themselves. Men in the mass are abominable. There isn't anything to choose between England and France, or Italy, or the new German Empire or America. England has been more successful than the rest and has therefore had more opportunity of doing harm. . . ."

"Good as well," put in Francis. "Good as well."

"Only incidentally and by accident," retorted Soledano. "What I contend is that you cannot have collective villainy and individual virtue, collective bad action and individual good action."

"You can't indict a nation," said Serge.

"I can and I do."

"Then you are not so clever as I thought. There is no such thing as collective action, there is only the action of individuals. You herd men together so that they may carry out the will of individuals, and, as in the present condition of society, the most cunning and cold-blooded and unscrupulous men survive to exercise their wills over the herd. What is produced by the herd is almost always bad, because their efforts are directed only towards base ideals. . . . In the long run it may be a good thing to gather men together into huge masses for the easier and more expeditious creation of wealth and the means of subsistence. I don't know. I can't see into the future. But you and my father know--who better?--how the poor are being ground down in this town, and it must be the same in every other. What appals me is that there is no sort of corrective to the base ideal of success and accumulated wealth and what is called power except the blind revolt of nature in man and woman--especially woman. There is absolutely nothing. There are a certain number of artists in this town, men of my own trade, but they all seem to be doing their work from the dealer's point of view, to produce a saleable article, and not for the sheer delight of exercising a talent, without which the result cannot give delight. The theatres are even worse: they are fed from London with stupid replicas of pieces designed to give the illusion of pleasure rather than pleasure itself. The newspapers will soon be nothing but advertising sheets. It will soon be impossible for any man to do his work with any joy in it. It is bad enough when a man wastes himself in feeding his own vanity, but when he is used only to feed the vanity of another man then there is absolutely no hope for him. There might be something said for an arrangement by which a man gave a certain number of hours of his day to joyless work, so that during the rest he can take joy in other things. But all these men who are doing work in which there is no reward at all are paid so little that they are shattered by financial anxiety. They marry wives whom they cannot afford to keep and produce children whom it is impossible for them to feed and educate. . . . England is in a bad way, Father. It seems to me rather unfair to attack her when she is down."

"The greatest Empire the world has ever seen!" said Father Soledano mockingly.

Francis looked thoughtful. He lit his pipe and said:

"I wish I understood what you are talking about, Serge."

"I want a corrective," answered Serge. "All this material organisation may be a good thing in the long run, but spiritual health is every bit as important as physical health--more. They're organising education now, but towards no ideal save the base ideal of cunning unscrupulous men--self-help, and all that. A man's life consists of only two things, work and love. At present love is wiped out of consideration altogether, and work is regarded as a damned unpleasant thing that has to be stomached. At present a man must be either a slave or an employer of slaves, that is, a slave who is promoted. If you promote a slave to the condition of a free man he goes bad, because he has the soul of a slave and cannot live except under tyranny. If he escapes from the tyranny of a man he seeks that of his own vices. . . . If you educate men as slaves they will be slaves, just as your Loyola said, Father--every child who passed through the Jesuits' hands remained theirs for ever. . . . You get revolt every now and then as in the French Revolution and in 1848, but that is nothing but the desire of the slaves of poverty for the slavery of wealth."

"Christopher Sly," said Soledano, "will always be Christopher Sly. If you are stupid enough you can stand anything. Men are stupid. That is the whole story. When you have said that you have said everything."

Serge brought his fist down on the table.

"I don't believe it. If, inspired by a base ideal, they can do all that they have done, they can, when inspired by a noble ideal, the simplest and most beautiful of all, the ideal of a life of love and work, do better yet and gain material well-being in justice through spiritual health."

"Bah!" said Soledano. "That is your English idealism. Men can only understand a base ideal. They are impelled only by one instinct--hunger. They are terrified of hunger and fight only to protect themselves against it. All their other instincts, even the instinct of reproduction, have to take their chance--a very poor one. Also my friend, your idealism is just a joke to women. Life is too serious, too immediately appalling for them, for they are just as cruelly driven by their instinct of reproduction as they are by the instinct of hunger."

"Very well, then," said Serge, "drop the idealism and call it practical good sense. Concentrate on the instinct of hunger and the instinct of reproduction and organise for the satisfaction of both."

"It is impossible. You are asking men to be intelligent. The English will never be that."

Father Soledano said good-night to Francis and held out his hand to Serge.

"I'm coming with you," said Serge.

"Still unconvinced?"

"Absolutely convinced that I am right."

They drove back in a cab to the priest's house in the asphalted courtyard under the cathedral.

"Will you tell me," asked Serge, "how you reconcile what you have said this evening with what you say in your Church?"

"I don't."

"Can you go on?"

"Like the rest of the world, I do what I am told. If I examined and scrutinised everything that I was told to do I should do very little of it. . . . On the whole we do good. We save a certain number of men from sinking into brutality, and to a certain number of others we give an outlet for their emotions, which amounts to the same thing."

"How much do you believe of what you tell them?"

"I have never examined my belief. Like your father, I do what I am told to do. Suppose I renounced my faith and the priesthood. My place would be taken by another. There are too many men, my friend, too many women, and life moves both too slowly and too swiftly . . . What can you do? You say that the good life consists wholly of work and love. Then work, my friend, and love. There is nothing to prevent you. I also work, and I also love. Very lovingly I despise men, because I know them, as you, I think, do not."

"Quite candidly, it seems to me cowardly and rather despicable to teach men to believe in another life beyond the grave."

"Life, as it is, must be made supportable."

"From within, not from without."

"You seem to be levelling an accusation at my Church, but you must be just and observe that we do display, for the benefit of the men whose souls are our care, a certain faith in the next life by renouncing the pleasures of this."

"You stifle an instinct. That seems to me as great a sin as abusing it by excess of the pleasure derived from its satisfaction."

"I find your point of view interesting, but too naïve and simple. The idea of original sin may be fanciful, it may have its origin in Oriental myth, but there is contamination from some source or other."

"Simply from a wrong interpretation of life. I say it is possible for men to understand life."

"It is quite impossible. They can only live it."

"Then there is absolutely no meaning in all their activity, all their inventions, all their discoveries . . ."

"I can see none. They are still the slaves of hunger. When you appease the hunger of the body there remains the hunger of the spirit."

"Exactly, and I contend that in the hands of intelligent men the machinery in their power could satisfy the bodily hunger of all men, and set them free to find satisfaction for the hunger of the spirit. . . . As I see it, it is towards that that the world is tending. There will be a great deal of cruelty and oppression by the way, but there will come a time when man's mastery of the world will be so great that anything save the most elastic organisation will make life intolerable for rich and poor alike. As you say, if you are stupid enough you can endure anything. Men are more intelligent now than they were fifty years ago. They will be ten times as intelligent fifty years hence. . . ."

"Look at home, my friend. Look at home."

"I do. And it is just that absurdly pathetic tragi-comedy that makes me scan the world to see what hope there is for future generations. . . . You make the mistake of taking men as you find them. I take myself and discover what I might be, to what I might grow if I could get my fill of friendship, and affection, and love."

"Love is of God."

"God is in Man. I take myself, as I say. There is much in myself that I despise, even as you despise men, but there is in myself an essence which I know to be unconquerable and free. That you translate into another world and call God and eternal life. You postpone freedom, because to you the crust of slavery seems impenetrable. I want freedom for that essence in myself here and now. It is the fiercest instinct in me, stronger than hunger, stronger than reproduction, which are only by the way. What I find in myself I believe to exist in all other men."

"But then," said Father Soledano, "you have never done as you were told."

Serge laughed and took his leave.

XXX

FREDERIC IN THE TOILS

_O, you shall have him give a number of those false faces ere he depart._ EVERY MAN OUT OF HIS HUMOUR.

SUPERSTITION will have it that marriage is a good thing, and, being one of the most powerful agents in human affairs, forbids discussion of its pseudo-axiom. Superstition uses marriage as a club with which to lay men and women low. Sincerity insists on examining marriage, and discovers that there is no such thing, as superstition interprets it. Society does not marry people, neither does the Church. Society and Church can only record what they are told. Men and women marry themselves by as much free will as they possess, and their marriage will be good or bad or both in the degree in which they are good or bad or both. If their marriage is good it will endure. If it is bad it will come to an end and it will none the less be at an end though superstition insist that the parties to it continue miserably to dwell under one roof and never seek outside it the love they have suffered to escape. Superstition refuses to countenance divorce--a dissolution of the bond as free as the making of it--and smiles blandly upon every hideous captivity so long as it comes not to public knowledge. . . Superstitious persons are perpetually setting their faces against Nature's subtle and ingenious provisions for every emergency, but, it is to be observed, that if you set your face against anything in Nature, it will simply go round the other way and hit you in the back of the neck, exactly at the moment when you are congratulating yourself on having made a comfortable provision for the mature years of your life and a ripe and venerable old age.

They were very superstitious persons who lived near Frederic and Jessie Folyat, and they smiled benignantly upon their young marriage. Every morning several old ladies and more than one old gentleman peeped out of their dining-room windows to see Jessie walk down the garden on Frederic's arm and kiss him at the little iron gate.

"Ah!" they said, "young love! Young love! There is nothing like it."

And this in the face of their own appalling experience and the fact that Frederic and Jessie were neither of them very young: but superstitious persons realise very little of all that happens to them and they see even less of what is presented to their eyes. It was enough for these people that Jessie and Frederic were newly married, and they kept them in their minds as newly married long after they had settled down and the exciting novelty had given way to day-to-day habit.

Frederic never saw the heads at the windows as he hurried away to his office, but Jessie saw them, and more for them than for any satisfaction of her own she maintained the practice of kissing her husband. In the evening she would go down to the little gate and kiss him again as he arrived.

"Ah! Lucky man!" the audience would sigh in their withered, sentimental old hearts.

When Frederic did not come Jessie would turn and visibly wilt under the gaze of the superstitious persons, who muttered to themselves:

"Poor little bride! Poor little bride!"

At length there came a time when on four evenings in succession Frederic did not come, and on the fourth evening Jessie could not bring herself to turn and walk up the path alone. She went out into the street, round the corner, and in at the kitchen door, and not again for a long time did she go down to the little iron gate in the evening.

* * *

Frederic was a liar of the common type, which indulges in absurd and useless exaggerations. When he bought a neck-tie at a cheap hosier's for half-a-crown he would say he got it at a more fashionable shop for seven-and-six, though the name of the maker was sewn inside it. When he borrowed money he would ask for three times as much as he wanted. When he walked three miles he always stretched them out to ten. His lying was for his own benefit first of all, and it was to help in deceiving himself that he extended it to other people. His income was always estimated at at least three times too high a figure, and his expenditure, which also he blew out to convince himself of the truth of his estimate, always exceeded it. Jessie had two hundred a year: he persuaded himself that she had five hundred, and forced many quarrels upon her because she came to him with bills for household expenses. . . . Time and again did Jessie find him out in his lying, but, as he always carried it into their intimate relation and multiplied the nothing that he gave her to the _n_th power, she was appeased; but imperceptibly she was contaminated, and in spite of her many anxious moments as to their solvency, contracted the habit of lying to her family as to her affairs and the state of Frederic's business. This was, in fact, unhealthy. Outside the management of the Bradby-Folyat estate there was very little work that could bring in any solid profit, though in his office there was an air of bustling activity due to the fairly constant stream of small county-court and police-court cases, which came to him as a tribute to his prowess as a liar. Being what is called a gentleman, he could lie from a coign of vantage, and a number of small shopkeepers and shady customers came to Lawyer Folyat, though, when there was any danger of a skilful cross-examination, they soon learned to avoid him. Still, there was enough business in the office to go to Frederic's head: he was one of those men who are perpetually intoxicated, though they never touch alcohol and may be, frequently are, ardent temperance reformers. Every case that came into his office became four or five in his mind, and he never doubted but that he was building up a large, solid, and flourishing business. He had all the air of a successful man, hoodwinked many innocent persons and very soon had two young men as articled clerks, whose premiums went to swell his banking account. He was what is called generous, gave for the pleasure of being thanked, and lavished presents on his wife, his mother, his mother-in-law, his sisters, and Jessie's sisters. He thought for a long time of paying his father back some of the money that had been disbursed for him, thought it over so long that at last he believed he had repaid it and patted himself on the back as a dutiful son. . . . When he had moments of doubt--and they were very awful when they came--he would go to his mother and she would cluck over him like an old hen, and tell him he was the most grateful, the most affectionate, the most generous, and truly thoughtful of her children. He would gulp down her flattery and win back to self-deception, without which it had become impossible for him to face his wife, whom he was for ever pestering with absurd questions like "Do you love me?" "How much do you love me?" "Would anything ever make you cease to love me?" And when she replied as best she could with exaggerated demonstrations he hardly listened to her. . . . Truly in their relationship it was he who played the feminine part.

When Jessie was with child he lied to himself about his son, saw himself building up a great firm for his inheritance, and from the very first moment being a hero to the little fellow. He began to feel irresistible and so tormented his wife with his swaggering that she protested by mentioning one or two awkward little facts. She brought down on herself such a storm of anger that her nerves gave way and she had a fit of hysteria. . . In a week she was brought to bed of a miscarriage.

She was not very ill, but she suffered terribly, for Frederic hardly spoke a word to her for ten days, and then he arranged for her to go and stay at the sea alone, unless she chose to take one of her sisters with her. She would not do that and she went alone. He promised to spend Saturdays and Sundays with her, but at the end of each week he declared that it was impossible for him to get away. . . . He was hardly responsible for his actions. The most glorious fiction he had ever created had come toppling down and he was not altogether to blame for the breach which gaped so wide between himself and his wife that he could not avoid seeing it. She, too, had missed her opportunity, for she was so oppressed by the physical ugliness of the calamity that she was frozen by it and could not give him the warmth that might have saved him from still further floundering in the morass. . . . As it was, he was savagely resentful against her and missed not the pettiest occasion of hurting her. Under this treatment her love died almost without a struggle, so painlessly indeed that she attributed all her hurt and her agony to the discovery that came to her by the sea, that Frederic had never loved her. She saw that clearly and was instantly filled with dread lest she should betray herself and let him feel that she knew. . . . Every letter she wrote to him was carefully framed to convey a picture of herself as loyal, tender, devoted, proud, and--with the most cunning falsity of all--admiring. These letters soothed Frederic. He had found it difficult to admire his own brutality, though, as he moved further away from it, it was distorted by the prism of his vanity into something very like strength. That accomplished, it became an easy task to cover over the unpleasant fact of the disaster so that it became as a pearl upon his shell.

He was loftily forgiving when Jessie returned, and she was softly, cushionly submissive. For the first time--love being dead--she let loose upon him the full force of her sex. He was still sensitive enough to feel repelled, even as he yielded.

Their house was filled with stealthy shadows. It grew darker and darker. Each sought to illuminate it with lies, lies, and yet more lies.