‘That’s splendid!’ said Constance. ‘Splendid! That’s beautiful!’
‘If your ladyship’d like anymore—’
‘No, no! That’s enough! It seems a pity to cut it.’
‘Or a bit of spruce fir, wi’ cones on?’
She turned and glanced at him. His red-brown eyes with the tiny black pupils, disarmed for the moment of their watchful hostility, seemed as near to being kindly as they ever could be. But also they showed a peculiar fear, fear of all that she stood for, and that Clifford stood for, and that all the house-servants stood for.
‘No!’ she said. ‘No! Let the trees keep their own branches. It is a pity to bring them indoors, to get dusty.’
He gave her a sharp glance of intelligence.
‘Then I’ll go, if there’s nothing else,’ he said.
‘Nothing else!’ she replied.
He gave a quick salute, and seemed to melt from the kitchen.
Constance put up the sprigs and tufts of red-berried holly where they pleased her: just a hint, here and there. She did it all against her instinct, really. Since the war, Christmas nauseated her.
There were only five guests: Clifford’s aunt, Lady Eva, his cousin Olive Strangeways, and her husband Jack, then Tommy Dukes and Harry Winterslow. Olive and Jack came for Clifford’s sake: Olive had always had a terndre for Clifford. Lady Eva, who belonged to one of the very titled families, but was slightly in disrepute because of her gambling and her brandy, came because other people were scared of her play. Once she started, she was a demon, and she infected others. Money gushed from pocket to pocket in a way that was the ruin of any house-party, the day after. So nobody wanted her for Christmas. There would be no cards at Wragby. Resigned and angelic, Lady Eva descended on her nephew Clifford. She was his mother’s sister, after all.
Tommy Dukes, the Brigadier General, was tall and thin and erect, with a reddish bony face and a reddish, plucked neck and ginger hair going grey, though he was not yet forty. He was fond of Clifford, and he was very good company, witty, amusing, dry, original, and an authority on Arabic and Arab literature. But he could talk to anybody on any subject, he got on famously with Lady Eva, one would have thought he had a tenderness for her.
Perhaps he had, of a sort. Lady Eva was sixty, tall and thin and with a small, shapely red nose (brandy) and vague, light-blue eyes that only really woke up at cards. She was as simple in her manner as a girl, and withal had the remains of a real grande dame about her, of the Queen Alexandra period. She was intelligent, too, but like a child, detached. Everything was vague and far-away, to her. Probably it was this childishness, combined with the remains of the grande dame, that appealed to the General.
Harry Winterslow was the General’s friend. He was a moody young man with a pale face and dark hair and a rather petulant manner, who wrote poetry that Constance could not understand, and who seemed to labour under some cloud of doom: though it was probably only a cloud of self-importance and self-consciousness. He very often did not answer when spoken to, was always retiring to his room, or disappearing somewhere, and altogether was one of the young men that Constance had learned to leave to themselves. Lady Eva and Olive Strangeways did the same. So that sometimes, the young gentleman, who was of good family and ‘knew everybody’, had to put himself out and start charming one of the ladies. And when he started, he was quite good at it. — But it happened to be Olive whom he spasmodically tackled. He seemed afraid of Constance.
This left Jack Strangeways more or less alone. So Jack made up to Connie. He had been for a long time what is called ‘a good-looking boy’. Lady Eva still said it of him: ‘Poor Jack is such a good-looking boy.’ But Jack was thirty-five, and it was time he left off being a boy. Moreover, he was getting really fat. And if anything exasperated his wife, it was to hear people calling him: ‘Poor Jack!’ They did it so unconsciously.
‘I don’t mind people getting fat,’ said Olive, ‘if they didn’t lay it on in the wrong place.’
Olive was always saying deadly things about her husband, ‘the good-looking boy’. And it was true, he did have too large a posterior, and there was something almost female in his big thighs. But men, as a rule, didn’t like him. He was too fond of the sound of his own voice, and he loved to get some sympathetic woman into a corner and tell her all about the war, and himself in the war. He terribly wanted to make women feel for him: but he rather overdid it. His big, rather childish blue eyes would get wider and wider, his low, secret voice hotter and hotter, as he talked on about himself, or expounded some idea of his own about Spanish architecture, which was his pet subject. And he seemed so convinced that the woman must, simply must feel tremendously him, his appeal, and what he was saying, that most women laughed at him a little spitefully.
So it was with Constance. She did not even think him a good-looking boy. He was flat-faced and a little insipid. And his posterior was too large. Nevertheless he followed her about as if she must, simply must want to be listening to him, must want to be taking him up: like a persistent little boy dogging his mother. He was not little at all. He was big, and good-looking in the romantic style, like a young Siegfried already a bit too fat and vapid. Yet he, too, had his own peculiar intelligence, a certain insight into things, though it was the insight of a rather timid child who wished things could be made ‘safe’. He was, like many young people after the war, a neo-conservative and a neo-aristocrat and everything that was anti-democratic.
This bored Constance, Even in Clifford, when he kept saying that democracy was a dead dog, most people should be put back into slavery, there should be a small and ruthless, armed aristocracy, and so on, she felt it was mere stupidity, really, ineffectuality. In Jack it was still worse. When he said to her so hotly: ‘My God, if ever we get a revolution here in England, how I should love to charge the rabble with machine-guns,’ she felt like kicking him. ‘What rabble?’ she asked. ‘These damned bolshevist-socialist lot.’ — ‘But how do you know they are rabble? How do you know they are any more rabble than you are? Perhaps it’s we who are rabble, really — people like you and me, who stand for nothing, really!’
‘Oh come! Look here! Look at Russia!’ and off he went again.
‘Very well’ she said. ‘But when the time comes, take care that it isn’t the rabble who are charging you with machine-guns, not you them. Don’t you think so easily of mowing them down. The mowing-machine may be in their hands.’
‘That’s just what we don’t intend it to be!’ he cried.
But she walked away, her face flushed and angry. There was nothing infuriated her more than his puppyish talk about ‘mowing down the rabble’. The rabble, coming down to brass tacks, were to her the Tevershall colliers. And though she didn’t love them, exactly: still, they were at least as manly as Jack Strangeways, and she hadn’t yet heard them talk of ‘mowing him down’.
Olive looked up from her deep conversation with Clifford.
‘Oh, don’t you get cross with him, Connie!’ she said. ‘Lascialo sfogarsi —let him blow off his steam!’
Which was just what Constance didn’t intend to let him do: not upon her, at least. He could go into the garden to blow it off.
The general conversation happened to turn on the future. Suppose this civilisation did blow up, what might we expect after. A woman had written a book about such a future: with ‘immunized’ women who had definite activities, and other women who were ‘breeders’; and a strictly-regulated society, like a superlative ant-heap that had at the same time marvellous flying-machines and all that: just an extension of the scientific-materialistic Wellsian ideas.
‘It’s so perfectly repulsive,’ said Lady Eva, resignedly sitting the whole evening with no brandy to sip, ‘that it probably will happen.’
‘Probably if the men had their way, it would happen,’ said Olive.
‘Not if I’m one of the men,’ said Tommy Dukes.
‘I think I might apply for a job as breeder,’ said Jack.
‘Where’s
your testimonials?’ cried Olive contemptuously: she had no children.
‘Testimonials!’ said Tommy Dukes.
‘It will never happen,’ said Winterslow. ‘Because by the time we have reduced ourselves to the ant-heap’s psychology, society will have gone quite mad, and we shall have murdered one another. I consider society the most dangerous madman alive. The mass is much more insane than the individual, though he’s bad enough. — But we go on as we are doing—’
‘Of course!’ said Constance. ‘The whole thing is based on hatred — a hatred of life. It becomes a system of hate.’
‘Now that had never occurred to me before! I believe you are right, child, it is just hatred!’ said Lady Eva. ‘One must love something.’
They looked at her, as she sat in her black dress, with her slender, still-girlish arms. Her face was reddened with brandy. She was a pathetic instance of not being able to love anything. She couldn’t do it: so she drank brandy and gambled.
‘I don’t know,’ said Clifford. ‘It seems to me that sufficient civilization eliminates the love-necessity. The need to love is only half civilized. And if the fully-civilized have no need to love, we may easily come to the bee-hive community.’
‘Even that requires a queen bee,’ said Dukes quietly.
‘Cherchez la femme!’ added Olive’s satirical voice.
‘And what woman could lay three thousand eggs?’ said Jack.
They all laughed.
‘Oh!’ said Tommy Dukes. ‘Let them talk! Let them talk about immunized women and sterilized men, and flying to Mars. It won’t alter things! Men only talk like that because they’re sterile already: and the women because they’re immune — even if they’ve not been immunized. They’re immune enough! — It’s not from that sort of talk and that sort of talker any change will come. So let them buzz. They’re the flying ants of the present ant-heap. Who cares!’
‘Well, I do!’ said Lady Eva. ‘I should hate to think that anything of that sort was going to happen. It’s bad enough, what has happened. Imagine if I had to be an immunized woman, or the other sort, in that kind of London University society! I should hate it!’
They all laughed, and it was only by a miracle that the impudent Jack saved himself from saying: ‘Well, what are you now? — if not immunized, you’re immune.’ He was always a bit second-hand.
‘No, don’t trouble!’ said Tommy Dukes softly. ‘If I know anything about human nature, the ant-heap is here and now, and soon a big ant-eater will come along and lick it up with a curly tongue!’
‘How nice!’ said Olive. ‘And what then?’
‘Ask the ant-eater,’ said Jack.
‘Something really nice might come after, don’t you think?’ said Constance. ‘Don’t you think it’s time things took a rather lovely turn, instead of always a more horrid one?’
‘Quite time, my child, quite!’ said Lady Eva, pursing her lips.
The men laughed.
‘I can imagine a world where nobody cared terribly about money, or owning things, or bossing other people. Personally, I wouldn’t care a bit if the land and the mines and all those things belonged to everybody. I only want to live. And I don’t seem to make a very startling success of it!’ Constance persisted.
‘But you want to own Wragby,’ said Jack. He certainly did.
‘Not necessarily. I can imagine lots of nicer things than Wragby,’ she said.
‘Scotch castles and Italian villas!’ he smirked.
‘No! Where one needn’t be desperate about owning anything. Where a bit of life flowed.’
‘You’re quite right, Connie!’ said Dukes, looking at her with his shrewd eyes. ‘A flow of life, and contact! We’ve never had proper human contact — we’ve never been civilized enough. We’re not civilized enough even now, to be able to touch one another. We start away, like suspicious hairy animals. The next civilization will be based on the inspiration of touch: believe me—But we shall never live to see it, so why talk about it?’ Everybody sat silent, not understanding him.
‘But you never want to touch anybody,’ said Constance.
He laughed short.
‘Don’t I?’ he said. ‘No, I don’t want to paw anybody — and I don’t want anybody pawing me. But touch?’ — he considered a moment — ‘well, perhaps it’s too late for me now. Too late for me, or I might even want — ah well!’ He looked at her oddly, and her heart gave a queer lurch. This man might have been in love with her — if he’d had enough hope, if the weight of disillusion hadn’t been too heavy. But the old thing, the dead civilization, was clamped down on him too hard. That was why he never married, never would marry — he had no bodily hope for himself. ‘Apart from me, personally, though,’ he added, ‘there will be a new civilization, the very antithesis of tabloids and aeroplanes: believe me! There will be a civilization based on the mystery of touch, and all that that means; a field of consciousness which hasn’t yet opened into existence. We’re too much afraid of it — oh, stiff as wood, with fear! We paw things — but probably we’ve never truly touched anybody in all our lives, nor any living thing. — Oh, there’ll be a democracy — the democracy of touch. For the few who survive the fear of it. We shall be swept away, and all the tabloiders and white ants and brown and black ants, and soldier ants and artisans. We’re only an experiment in mechanization, that will be properly used in the next phase.’
A sense of fear fell over the room. This soldier seemed to see all his own world so definitely swept away, to be replaced by something else.
‘I belong to the mechanistic experiment,’ he said. ‘But I wish I could have crossed over, to the democracy of touch.’
‘Well, I never heard of the democracy of touch before!’ said Lady Eva. ‘We used to think there was only one democracy, when my husband was radical member for Darlington. But I suppose we were wrong, as usual.’
‘Quite wrong, Aunt Eva! There are as many democracies as there are people — every man his own demos,’ laughed Clifford.
‘It seems so.’
‘I don’t get your democracy of touch, you know,’ said Olive, in her casual, brutal way. ‘Touch what?’
‘Ah, there you ask me! We’ve had two thousand years of noli me tangere. Just imagine voli me tangere, for a change.’
‘Sounds to me like pawing.’
‘Ah, well it isn’t! any more than noli me tangere is not pawing. A great deal of pawing goes on with noli me tangere.’
‘I’m afraid you’re getting mystical.’
‘To you, I’m sure I am.’
‘Touch is the one thing that is entirely mystical, to a materialist,’ said Harry Winterslow, turning with a saturnine gleam on his pale countenance, to Olive. Especially the idealistic materialist.’
‘You mean the materialist has only got paws, anyhow,’ said Olive. She knew that Winterslow scorned to make love to her; and by instinct, she knew he didn’t find her quite, not quite touchable; he thought her hands insensitive paws, her body a clumsy animal arrangement that just pushed against things.
‘Clever of you!’ he retorted to her.
‘And of course, all women are materialists I’ she said sarcastically.
‘Clever again.’
‘I’m sure you’re wrong there!’ said Lady Eva. ‘I’ve known women who were anything but materialists.’
‘I agree with you, Lady Eva!’ said Dukes. ‘Yet perhaps women are more out of touch, than some men. Most men, of course, we don’t speak of at all. Delenda est Carthago! But a few men might know what touch meant — and I doubt if any living woman would.’
‘You’d be jolly well determined not to let her!’ said Olive. ‘Men like you! You talk about touch-me-not! It’s touch-her-not, with men like you.’
‘I tell you,’ laughed Dukes, ‘she’s not yet ascended into touchableness.’
‘Poor darling!’ said Olive. ‘Who’s going to give her a heave up, do you think?’ She looked at him with malicious sarcasm.
‘I tell you, I’m too old,�
�� he said.
‘And far, far too modest!’ she mocked.
‘Perhaps it is rather modesty than age that ails me,’ he laughed.
‘Of course, I think it’s hate,’ said Connie, in a faint voice.
‘You would, Connie darling!’ laughed Jack. ‘Everybody that sees you says how adorable you are, so it must be hate.’
‘Connie certainly is a wonderful girl,’ said Lady Eva.
‘We’re to be pawed — but never really touched. That’s how men treat us,’ she said. ‘We’re untouchables! But they’d like to paw us about.’
‘Not necessarily even that,’ said Dukes. ‘And men? are men touchable, to women? Is any man really touchable, to you?’
He looked at her shrewdly, sarcastically.
‘I think we’ve talked about touchables enough now,’ said Lady Eva. ‘It used to be one of the problems of India, as far as I remember. But we’ve got it on the domestic hearth now, apparently. I think you ought to stop, General. You’re much too clever for us, so why rub it in?’
‘I’m sorry, Lady Eva! I’m wrong.’
‘Yes, you are wrong.’
‘Set me right, then,’ he said good-humouredly.
‘Will you dance with me? I should just love a fox-trot.’
‘I should like it more than I can say,’ he replied.
‘There, then! Now you’re being human. You don’t really mind holding my hand in a dance, you see! I simply don’t follow you in all that untouchable talk.’
‘We’ll manage better with music, Lady Eva, if I’m not presumptuous,’ he said.
‘Much better! Much better with music!’
And Connie had to dance with the fat Jack.
She didn’t know what to make of the ‘untouchable’ talk either. She only felt that Dukes was trying, in his own way, to get somewhere eventually. There was something a bit heroic about him. And as a human being he was generous, even to a woman. But why did he have that funny thread of hate for women altogether? He liked them, as creatures. Yet, because they were women, they were, to him, untouchable, in some subtle way. And he had no control of this feeling in himself. It was something more than physical. He didn’t mind having Lady Eva’s hand in his, nor his arm lightly round her, as they danced. Because, of course, there was no real contact. It was hardly more physical than talking to her, and not really so near.
John Thomas and Lady Jane Page 7