by Rebecca West
“Yes, yes.” The male world was deep, deep in the dust of tedium. “But people have that idea everywhere. If they didn’t there wouldn’t be schools all over the world.”
“That is a very English way of looking at the problem. We Russians look at it differently. With a Russian seriousness. And my friend was enormously impressed by Nikolai Nikolaievitch because, serious himself, he recognized a certain sort of seriousness in your grandfather. He was astonished because he himself was a liberal. One of the few liberals I have ever known. So he detested the Tsardom and thought that all men who worked for the Tsar were evil and stupid. But Nikolai Nikolaievitch was not evil or stupid, he saw the Russian problem clearly, as clearly as my friend, your grandfather. But believed that the conversion of the majority from passive barbarism to activist intelligence could be brought about through the wise exercise of power by the privileged classes taking office under the Tsar and performing their duties ably and conscientiously. Many of his kind held the same faith, but there was, you know, Miss Laura, something wonderful about the way he held it. He was violent and his capacity for pleasure must have been immense, oh, what he must have been when he was a young man, but he had laid that faith in his duty to serve Russia as a yoke on his great shoulders. A little child looking up at a mammoth, that’s how my friend felt when he met Nikolai Nikolaievitch, and so he became his disciple. He imitated him first by his devotion to his profession—”
“And what was that?” She wanted to sleep, to sleep.
“He was an engineer.” The pause had lasted only a hundredth of a second. “A railway engineer. Most conscientious in the discharge of his duties. But your grandfather affected him not only as a servant of the State, but as a philosopher. My friend is of a very philosophical turn of mind. There your grandfather could not help him. He was a religious man, and the Orthodox Church has never been a friend to philosophy. Therefore my friend had to work out for himself certain aspects of the Russian problem and he was embarrassed by the obligation which all of us who love Russia recognize, the obligation to impose morality on the State. For what’s morality?”
Now she was awake. The answer rushed out of her. “Why morality’s not lying! Not cheating! Not murdering!”
Her wave of passion was so strong that he had to take notice of it, but it broke and scattered against his glazed calm and left it as it was. “What’s so wonderful about you, Miss Laura, is that you’re at once so gentle and so fierce. So untamed. Are you a great rider, like your grandmother? I should like to see you on horseback. Riding to hounds? Clearing a fence? Fox-hunting?” he said in his horrid English. “Yes, indeed. And what you say about morality charms, because it’s so high-spirited. I can imagine your hair blowing backward as you go into a gallop. But it’s not true, save on the superficial plane. These things you abhor are sacrifices which have to be offered up on the altar of necessity. Think of your own Army. Your Navy. Your Red Coats. Your Tommy Atkinses. Your Jack Tars. You wouldn’t repudiate them, any more than I would repudiate our Cossacks of the Setch. But they spy. They kill.”
“That’s why we English try to keep the peace. In peace one doesn’t spy or kill.”
“You’re right,” he exclaimed, his voice soaring and happy as if he were quite young and it were early in the night. “But you don’t know how right you are! Peace is what the heart desires. After the long pitting of force against force, after all the arguing, the scheming, the destruction, which even though it is necessary is still horrible—” he covered his eyes and shuddered—“oh, it could be utterly, utterly horrible—after all that there comes the establishment of a perfect balance, of equilibrium, of the synthesis, of peace. And the joy of it’s past believing. That’s what my friend had found … oh, he’s so happy. Mind you, he didn’t know for a long time what he was seeking, and he never imagined how glorious it would be to reach the goal. He began simply by following a clue in Hegel.”
“Ah, yes, Hegel,” she said. Chubinov and Nikolai had talked of Hegel in the train. Both had found in his works the messages they wanted, though they must have been very different: and now Kamensky turned out to have found what he wanted in the same place, though he had nothing in common with the other two. She was reminded of her father’s fast sister, Aunt Georgie, who had once been engaged to three men at the same time.
“You’ve heard of him? I’m glad. Some day in the future, somewhere very far from here, we may read Hegel together. He is not only a writer, he is the writer. If all the rest of literature should be destroyed, and his works alone remained, humanity could still follow its path towards new being. He that seeks, in Hegel shall he find. My friend is a seeker. He is the human embodiment of the search. Well, Hegel held out his hand to him from immortality and brought him to his haven. Through the theory of the dialectic.”
“The dialectic,” echoed Laura. It was one of those words to which she never troubled to attach a precise meaning. Teleology, oolitic, proportional representation, symbiotic; what they stood for was part of the world, and might once have been bright like the world, but the dust which falls wherever there are males had buried them in its dingy drifts. But he had spoken of the theory of the dialectic before, on the first evening of her stay in Paris, with a special relish, dreamy enjoyment. She must listen: the hunted should learn all they can about the hunter.
“I shouldn’t plague you with these serious matters. The opera, nightingales, rose-gardens, balconies overlooking Swiss lakes, marble landing-stages from which gondolas take off, the gondoliers singing. Your world should be made of such things only. But I talk like a schoolmaster because my friend is both a learner and a teacher, and as he was so very close to Nikolai Nikolaievitch, it relieves my sorrow to tell you about him.”
“Do anything you can which makes you better able to bear my grandfather’s death.”
“You’re so kind. Well, Hegel points out that every concept your mind can grasp leads it on to another. Why should it do that? Because all concepts are imperfect. Do you know why?”
“Because we are imperfect.” Imperfect, she added to herself, “and can’t do without our sleep.”
“That is not a satisfactory answer from the philosophic point of view. Rather would he say that it is because we can think about the universe only as we know it, and we can know only the small part of it which is within our experience, and that is always changing. Hence every concept we form is incomplete, or involves a contradiction or contradictions. We realize this, and so move on from the first concept to another, in the hope that it will complete the first or annul its contradictions.” He drank from his glass with an inappropriately pedagogic air, as if that were another way of wagging his forefinger. “The most profitable type of second concept which we can choose is the exact opposite of the first, for it covers the same field. Thus we can very fruitfully compare them, and discard what is false in both the first concept and the second, and retain what is true in both, and lo that gives us a third concept, which brings us a step nearer reality. Have you understood me so far?”
“Yes.” Her need for sleep was hunger, thirst, sickness.
“Excellent. Thus we saw that there are three stages in the dialectic process. We think of a concept, we summon up its opposite, we establish the truth which is common to both, and form it into a new concept. These three stages called the thesis, the antithesis, and the synthesis. You should repeat these terms. They are very important.”
“Thesis, antithesis, synthesis. But what has that to do with my grandfather and your friend?”
“Everything. It explains the whole of life. In evolving this theory Hegel did something more wonderful than Columbus when he discovered America, and the theory has been further developed by a German named Marx, with whom I do not agree, for he is inferior to our own Russian thinkers, Lavrov and Mikhailovsky and Machajski, but whose genius I must admit. Because of Hegel and Marx we now all realize that ideas are not static but dynamic. Ideas live like us. And this, dear Miss Laura, raises the possibility, as my friend
has seen, that perhaps we can live like ideas.” He looked at her with bright shy eyes, as simple people do when they are going to say, “I’ve brought you a present.”
The dance-music thumped on the walls during his long silence, and in the street below a cat-fight spurted out jets of sound. It would be wonderful if Madame Verrier would wake and send Kamensky away, but even at the last tearing screech her tired eyes did not open, she merely frowned, shook her head, and pressed the cotton wool deeper into one ear.
Kamensky spoke again, as if he were now going to take off the silver paper and show the splendid present. “Suddenly my friend thought to himself. And this is what was so wonderful. My friend thought, Why should we not apply the dialectic process to actions as well as to ideas? Why not follow one deed by its opposite? Why not go gloriously further, and serve one way of life and then its enemy?’ Why not join one set of people who devoutly observe a system of morality, become truly one of them, not the loosest but the strictest adherent of their system, and pour one’s whole being into the furtherance of their ends, achieving utter and final loyalty to it? And why not at the same time join another set of people who live as devoutly by another system of morality, if possible one that’s totally opposed to the first, and pour one’s whole being into that too? Why not,” he asked, in that detestable English, “do first one thing and then the other?”
“You mean,” she said slowly, her need for sleep gone again, “fight for both sides at the same time without either knowing one’s working for the other? Be a Roundhead and a Cavalier at the same time? Fight for the French and the Germans in the Franco-Prussian War, for the Boers and the British in the South African War? Be a Liberal and a Conservative?”
“Just that,” he said and drank the last drops from his glass, and wiped his mouth.
“Why, everybody know’s that’s wrong,” she said. “If you asked a child, quite a little child, or a navvy working on the road who couldn’t read or write, they’d tell you that was wrong.”
“But we’re superior to little children, and still more are we superior to men who, debased by society, work on the road—”
“Oh, no we’re not,” she said, “not if we do that sort of thing.”
“But you’re so delightful,” he said, laughing and taking off his glasses to look at her tenderly with his head on one side, “you’re dismissing what my friend is doing in such an English way. You don’t like it because it is not fair play. Not playing the game. Not cricket. Ah, but you don’t understand that we’re passing beyond that to a freer, happier, wiser day. Remember what I told you about the dialectic theory, about the thesis, the antithesis, the synthesis. You’re standing at the point of the thesis. My friend’s moved on, by throwing all his strength and ability into both of two organizations he’s formed, quite opposite in their aims, he’s attained the antithesis. Now will come the synthesis, both the organizations will destroy each other, and a third will emerge which will be superior. Don’t you now understand what my friend’s doing, not just for those two organizations, but for the whole world, for morality itself? If people practice at one and the same time what’s considered bad conduct and what’s considered good conduct, then they’re bound to find themselves practising a new kind of conduct which shall be neither bad nor good but lootshee—meilleur—besser—better—more in accordance with reality, nearer the Absolute. Oh, Miss Laura, my friend is helping mankind on its journey as only the greatest teachers have done, as only the greatest teachers have done, he is with Christ, he is with Buddha—”
“What organizations are they that he joined and is destroying?” She was tired of all this deception. She did not care what happened if she forced him to show his hand, his murderous hand.
Smoothly he answered, “Not very important ones. It is the principle which counts. Societies busying themselves with religious and educational activities in the oil provinces round Baku.”
She groaned because he was so clever. This time he had hardly paused at all before he found an answer, and her need for sleep was again a hunger, a thirst, an aching in the bones.
“Miss Laura, you must try to understand the greatness of my friend’s achievements and their idealistic foundations. For he has grown this garden from seed given him by your grandfather. As I told you, my friend was a liberal, and when he met your grandfather and saw that his ideas also had some value and that the situation was a theatre of the soul, a stage where history engendered its drama, he became a character in the drama and converted it into a masterpiece. Oh, won’t you soften your heart towards my friend, who has given Nikolai Nikolaievitch true philosphic immortality?”
“My grandfather, my grandfather,” she groaned. She leant across and fingered Madame Verrier’s skirt, to touch the hem of a garment worn by someone sane was as good as if it had been worn by somebody divine. She remembered that evening in Paris when her grandfather had slept in his chair for such a long time, so long that the white rose in the crystal vase on the table lost petal after petal, while the lights came on in the tall grey houses across the streets. He who had been so often afraid to sleep slept soundly then, because he had said to his friend, Kamensky, “I am in torment because I think I am the victim of a conspiracy, and that may mean I am mad,” and Kamensky had spoken a sentence, sweet as a mouthful of whipped cream, “You are not mad, for you are right in believing that you are the victim of a conspiracy.” The memory sent a shudder of hatred through her body; she said, “The man who tormented my grandfather. He should be tormented in Hell. For ever and ever.”
He did not seem to hear her. That was strange, he kept on not hearing what she said. There might have been a sheet of plate-glass between them. “Don’t you at all understand,” pleaded his innocent voice, “what my friend’s been trying to do?”
“How can I judge your friend’s doings when I haven’t heard how they worked out? When I don’t know what he’s doing now? When I can’t think how it’s all going to end?”
He hid in silence like a wild animal taking cover in a thicket, then murmured, as if the beast were venturing near the bushes on the fringe, “Well, it’s early yet to paint the whole picture. I told you, my friend’s just come to the end of the antithesis, in a few days the negation will be completed, the two organizations will begin to perish in their own self-doubt.” His voice died away. The gaslight flared up and showed joy on his face, and some surviving grains of gold on the wreaths stamped on the olive wall-paper. He continued, “And as to the synthesis, the third organization, which will be born of the other two, my friend won’t be there to see it. He’ll only have the satisfaction of knowing that he has controlled history.” He retreated again into the thicket of silence.
“Where is he now?”
He shifted in his chair, quite comfortably. It had not crossed his mind that she was mocking him. “He … it’s impossible to say what he’s doing at this actual moment. We must wait for news.” He laughed to himself. “There’s one thing interesting I can tell you about him. If we’re to believe his own account, he’s undergone a peculiar change. It’s as if the dialectic process doesn’t operate only in the world of ideas and of events, but on matter itself. For years my friend put his strength under a double strain by giving prodigally to two organizations, day in and day out, and he’d grown stale and slow, one might almost say old. But now that he’s come through the stages of thesis and antithesis he’s emerging into what I can only call his own personal synthesis. Oh, it’s extraordinary. Apparently—though, of course, I’ve nothing to go on but his letters—he’s become a young man again. He can’t believe it, he’s never tired, and when he looks in the glass he sees a man years younger than himself.”
She wondered if she had after all been mistaken. Perhaps he had not been talking of himself when he spoke of his friend, perhaps someone of the sort really existed. For he had not changed since she had first seen him, except to grow slightly older, and he did not look a bit like a young man.
“It’s also that he feels the blood r
acing through his veins, at a new speed, with a new drunkenness …” Hesitantly and softly, as softly as if he were talking of some delicate personal matter, he breathed some words, which she thought she had not heard correctly, and asked him to repeat. “I said, my friend’s account of his emotions reminds me of Hegel’s description of reality, when he likens it to a Bacchic dance in which there is not one of the elements which is not drunk.”
“I’d like the image better,” said Laura, “if I hadn’t so recently seen the landlord of this hotel.”
His voice went on, low and sibilant and dry, making the same sound as the autumn leaves one scuffs off garden paths in autumn. “What’s so remarkable is that all my friend’s life he’s dovetailed every moment of the day to make patterns that will fit into the complicated design of his great innovation. In a short time there’ll be hardly a fragment left of the solid structures he’s spent his life in building, structures which, there’s no denying it, gave him a certain position. They’ve collapsed, soon it’ll be as if they’d never been, but he doesn’t care, he’s full of joy.”
“Hush,” she said, “don’t speak so loud. You mustn’t wake poor Madame Verrier.” She did not want him to go home till he had told her more.
“Forgive me. The poor virtuous woman, toiling for the sick. Yes. Well, my friend’s joyously persuaded he need take no thought for the future. He’s got a trade and the world’s wide. There are whole continents in which a European can start afresh.” There was another of those silences like retreats into the undergrowth. He raised his trembling hand and loosened his collar. “I tell you, the dialectical process manifests itself not only in what is thought but in what is lived. In even the most personal experiences.” He passed his handkerchief across his forehead. His voice was not sweet any more, it was hoarse. “The negation of life, that’s death.”