“But Plato, Clara, is a philosopher—one of your own little proteges.”
Clara shook her head disapprovingly. “A philosopher,” she said, “who always seemed to me, when I tried to read him, fatally tainted with poetry.” She turned to Adrian. “Have you given any thought, Adrian, to what you are going to be?”
Adrian looked sheepish, but before he could reply his grandfather had butted in.
“Going to be!” he echoed scornfully. “People are always worrying young folk about what they are going to be. In the state in which most of us live nowadays it is unfortunately necessary for them to do so. But we, by no particular merit of our own perhaps, are fortunate. We have enough money to be free of the necessity of working for our living. It is because of this increasing necessity to work for a living that culture is slowly dying out. There are very few really cultured young people in England today. It may be lack of inclination as well as of opportunity: I don’t know. But Adrian has the inclination, so for God’s sake let us give him the opportunity. You had it, Clara, and you made the most of it, and from the way you have been lecturing us about pans and dish-clouts I judge that it hasn’t done you any serious harm. You remain a practical person, though a little weak in that most practical of all matters, poetry.”
“My dear Father,” said Clara, “if we are to call poetry practical, what on earth is left for us to call unpractical?”
Oliver laughed. “I don’t ever expect to convince you, Clara, that poetry is anything more than a polite drunkenness. But to the writer of poetry, poetry is immensely, superlatively practical, for it deals or attempts to deal with reality. And it deals with it directly, for it avoids the clumsy method of thought and takes the short-cut of emotion. If you say’ I feel this’ or’ I feel that,’ you are stating an incontrovertible truth; no one can justifiably get up and tell you that you don’t, nor would it in the least impair the validity of your feelings if he did so. But if you say ‘I think this,’ every Tom, Dick, and Harry may jump up and prove convincingly, if he happens to be a better logician than you are, that you are wrong. Besides, emotions are vital things, the most vital things we have, and you can hardly deny that the most vital are the most practical.”
“And so Adrian with his music has a perfect right to declare himself a practical business man?”
“I believe he would have been considered so in Elizabethan times, which, in such matters, were more enlightened than ours. Shakespearean doctors, you remember, are very fond of prescribing music for their patients. So if you consider Messrs. Burroughs and Welcome practical men of business, I don’t see how you can deny Adrian the title. If you provoke us too persistently, Clara, we shall retort, in reply to all these salvoes from your batterie de cuisine, that your own preoccupation with pots and kettles and sinks is comfortably and aesthetically removed from stern reality. I don’t believe you have ever washed up in your life, and I should sit down to a supper which you had not only ordered but actually cooked, with the gravest misgivings.”
Bob gave a loud laugh. “Got you there, Clara! Don’t you remember the plaice that wouldn’t fry and the kidneys that turned into very fair imitations of india rubber boot-heels?”
Clara’s composure collapsed and she gave one of her sudden, loud, hearty laughs, opening her mouth and showing her fine teeth. “Don’t speak of them, Bob,” she said, shuddering. Then she turned, her eyes still shining with mirth, to her father. “But my private incapacities, and the fact that, when I provide supper, it is a supper not (except on that one unhappy occasion) cooked by myself, doesn’t really affect the question. You will soon be telling me, I expect, that plumbers are vague dreamers, engine-drivers unworldly mystics, and that Santa Fina of San Gimignano, who spent all her brief life, I believe, at full length on the kitchen floor having visions, was a very energetic and businesslike young woman. It seems to me, I must confess, a mere confusion of terms.’ The practical is quite unpractical, the only really practical things are the unpractical,’ and so on. Why have words at all if we are to twist them into meaning their opposites?”
“No, Clara,” said the old man, “the confusion is not in the terms, but in the ideas. To call art unpractical is only a sympton of the mercenary dullness of the modern outlook. It is time we dissociated, as Remy de Gourmont used to say, the ideas of the artistic and the unpractical. The New Psychologists, I believe, have already exploded some of the strongholds of the practical. Nothing, it used to be generally believed (though I myself never credited it for an instant), could be more utterly practical than a spring-cleaning. A woman in the act of spring-cleaning was the very symbol, the apotheosis of the practical. But all that has been exploded long since. It is known to-day that spring-cleaning is a sublimated sexual orgy, though why they should grace it with the qualification of sublimated is more than I can understand. Why not diverted?”
“Or perverted?” suggested Bob.
“Or perverted.” Oliver accepted the suggestion. “For a simple orgy affects no one but the participators, whereas a spring-cleaning raises a dust that is far better left lying, and causes horrible discomfort to numberless innocent males who ask nothing better than to be allowed to rest peacefully in a comfortable average of cleanliness and dirt.”
Clara laughed. “The New Psychology,” she said, “is obviously a science invented by men. If women were as poetical as men they could, I am sure, throw a very lurid light on pipe-smoking and company-promoting.”
They rose from the table, and that was all Clara got out of her laudable attempt to introduce the theme of Adrian’s future.
XIX
Whether or not there was such a thing as the future, Adrian had been thinking of it. After his long holiday he felt a desire for hard work, he wanted to get to grips with something, and his mind turned again to music. A crowd of ideas was stirring in him, but he knew nothing, beyond what in his youthful attempts he had discovered for himself, of the technical side of composition. He now determined that before going any further he must master this, and so equip himself thoroughly as a workman before he again tried to be an artist. He discussed the matter with his grandfather, and they decided that he should go to London and study at the Royal College of Music. Adrian wrote to Ronny, asking advice about rooms in London, and Ronny replied urging him to share his. They could easily share the sitting-room, he said, and by good luck the front bedroom above the sitting-room was vacant at the moment. “I’ve booked it for you from the twenty-third,” he wrote. “It will be like old times when you used to share my study.” He took it for granted that Adrian would be delighted to join him, and he was right.
“I feel guilty about you, Adrian,” said his grandfather on the evening before Adrian moved to London. “Here we are, apprenticing you to art without making any arrangements about the complementary apprenticeship to coal-heaving. The difficulty lies in the present organisation of society. If we coal-heave at all, society insists that we do so every day except Sunday, and not every alternate day. What are we to do for Adrian the animal? In the country it is fairly easy to keep the animal exercised, but in town it is a difficult job. That’s why I would never keep a dog when I lived in London.”
“He’ll have to take his chance,” said Adrian. “I shall be too busy to give him much attention.”
“But don’t ignore the poor devil, old man. Don’t turn into a hermit. What a pity you took to music instead of sculpture. The sculptor is the only man who escapes from the limits imposed by modern life. His work involves both the poetry and the coal-heaving. If I could begin again I would be a sculptor.”
“But think of the slowness of it. How exasperatingly the manual labour would lag behind the thought. You’re the best off in that respect, Grandfather. I’m sure music must be maddening at times. Think of the sheer mechanical labour of putting together an orchestral score. You work in single lines, but the wretched symphony-writer works by pages: every musical word has to be … to be built up vertically as well as horizontally.”
“Horri
ble!” said Oliver. “And none of it requiring any appreciable muscular effort, nothing but a skipping and scratching among the staves. No, your sculptor’s the only happy man. He has to sweat with hammer and chisel.”
“But why should that be better than to sit still and write a poem and then go for a walk? Or to coal-heave for a living and read Voltaire for pleasure in the evenings?”
“Why, indeed?” said the old man. “It’s mere prejudice on my part. I don’t mind reading for pleasure, because I’m a professional writer; but I resent the unproductiveness of my muscular life. I want a little serious coal-heaving to make a walk in the country a justifiable indulgence.”
“But a walk is justifiable, because you enjoy it and it does you good.”
“Exactly! You’re more truly classic than I am, Adrian. I suffer, it seems, from a tiresome romantic puritanism which I never seem to grow out of. So you won’t be worried by having no coal-heaving to do?”
“No, I’m afraid not,” said Adrian.
Oliver was silent. He was thinking, and smiled drily at his thoughts. “I’m afraid it’s undeniable,” he said at last, “that the peculiar nature of my coal-heaving is that it is limited exclusively to the mind. Despite my strong feelings on the subject and the flood of words I let loose about it, I have never stirred a finger to put it, or anything equivalent to it, into practice. And as for doing anything useful, even in the mental department, haven’t I spent half a lifetime in writing poetry which appeared to be of no use whatsoever? It’s only in the last twenty years, you know, that people have begun to take any notice of me. Before that, my books didn’t sell three hundred copies.”
“So your coal-heaving is a sort of prick of conscience?”
“Yes, a moment of revolt against writing poems for their own sakes only.”
“But nowadays all your work has become useful because people have learnt to appreciate it.”
“Yes, now that I have almost got accustomed to doing without appreciation.” He paused, and then said: “But no! That’s not true. I value appreciation of my work. What I have grown out of is the desire for personal applause. And that is just as well, for the sage has no need of applause. I am not a sage, but I have achieved at least that quality of one, There was once a king—or there will have been if I ever get the poem written—a king of … where shall we say? … of Khor. Because you will have noticed, Adrian, that if one wishes to make a very wise or a very beneficent character in the least credible one has to locate him outside the bounds of Europe. There was once, then, a king of Khor, whose subjects were an energetic, intelligent, but undisciplined and irresponsible people. For centuries they had been accustomed to government by tyranny, and it was as a beneficent tyrant that he ruled them when he succeeded his father on the throne. But he saw that if this state of things continued, their unemployed forces would explode and they would destroy themselves. So he began, slowly and unobtrusively, to organise them, to thrust upon them gradually the business of exploiting their energies in small details of self-government. His reforms caused grave discontent. His people complained that he was weak, idle, unable to control them; but by degrees they adapted themselves to the new conditions. When the time was ripe, he again exercised his tyranny in imposing upon them a still greater measure of freedom, and again there were outcries, again he became unpopular, and again the turbulent energies of the nation were safely conducted into wider and more useful channels. At last, by his patent and careful education, he had given them an admirably equipped constitutional government. He had tamed them and he had liberated them. His work, it seemed, was accomplished. And none too soon, for he was by this time a feeble old man. One day, seated in his study, he was overcome by dejection, for it seemed to him, despite all he had achieved, that he had failed in his life’s work. As if in answer to his thoughts, his Prime Minister entered unannounced and informed him that, in response to the unanimous wish of the people, the cabinet had that morning resolved to depose him and elect a president. They regretted that, as a matter of principle, they must also expel him from the country, for the very idea of a king had become hateful to a free people. All that was needed to put these schemes into practise was the royal assent. The old king, having received this information and given his assent, summoned his valet, ordered him to pack his things, and in an hour, unaccompanied except by the valet, left the palace. By slow stages he travelled to another country, the land of Gobi, whose king, a cousin of his, would, he knew, receive him hospitably. In order that his cousin of Gobi should not be totally unprepared for his arrival, he sent a letter ahead of him, telling of all that had happened in his own kingdom and announcing his arrival a few days later. When he reached his journey’s end he was almost dead from exhaustion. They laid him on a bed of yellow damask, and by degrees he rallied. When he was to some extent rested, his cousin came to his bedside.’ I have come, my dear cousin of Khor,’ he said,’ to offer my profound sympathy in the days of your failure and affliction.’’ My dear cousin and host,’ whispered the old king,’ I do not deserve nor need your pity, for these are the happiest days I have ever known. Throughout my life I have coerced my people towards liberty, but the final act of liberation could not be performed by coercion. It could be performed only by themselves. I could but drive them, like horses, to the pool and hope that they would smell the water and drink. For the last year I have feared failure: I have waited and waited for a sign, and no sign came. I almost came to believe that I should die on the throne and leave my unhappy country a monarchy. But ten days ago, when my Prime Minister came to me and announced my deposition and expulsion, I knew that I was not to be robbed of the fruit of my life’s labour. You see in me, dear cousin, one of the blessed few who have triumphed.’ Having spoken thus, the old king closed his eyes and, with a smile of perfect happiness on his lips, breathed his last breath.”
Adrian left Abbot’s Randale in high feather. He was full of energy and keen to get to work. All the good he had got from his months in France seemed to have concentrated itself now into a tireless activity of mind. He was keen to get to grips with this business of music. And, added to the prospect of hard work at the Royal College, was his eagerness to be with Ronny again. How delightful that would be. He would have Ronny to himself at last, and in a much more satisfactory way than at Charminster for they would live intimately yet independently. They would breakfast together every morning, each would be busy with his own affairs during the day, and they would meet again after work and have their evenings together. How lucky he was. His mind suddenly turned to Ellenger, and he remembered that he must persuade Ronny to write to him fairly often.
The afternoon sun shone over the leafless woods and bare fields as the little train from Abbot’s Randale rattled along towards Wilmore Junction. At Wilmore he would have a cup of tea and a word with his old friend, and when the little train had deposited him there he left his luggage with the porter and went to the refreshment-room.
Her eyes lit up as she recognised him. “And how are you?” he said in his shy, polite way.
“Oh, I keep very well, thank you,” she replied. “I needn’t ask you how you are.”
Her pleasant, kindly eyes rested on his face and Adrian understood that she was referring to his colour. “That’s left over from the summer,” he said. “I was in France. I did a lot of walking.”
“It’s a long time now, isn’t it,” she said, “since you first began looking in here?”
“Yes, I suppose it’s at least seven years.”
“It must have been winter or early spring, because you had on a coat—a grey coat and a grey cap, I remember. You were only a little chap then.” And he’s only a boy now, she thought to herself. He’s got a boy’s face and he’s still shy, for all he’s grown so big.
“Seven years is a long time,” said Adrian seriously.
She smiled. “Well, I hope you’ll look in now and then during the next seven years.”
“Oh, I’m sure to,” said Adrian. “You see, my grandfa
ther lives at Abbot’s Randale. No doubt I’ll be wanting fifteen or twenty cups of tea between now and seven years hence.”
Well, anyhow, he looked happy enough this time, she thought to herself after he had gone.
Adrian, having settled himself in the London train, opened his despatch-case and took out a volume of Bach’s toccatas which he had not yet tried. His intention was to spend the journey in trying to learn one of these and then play it by heart at the next opportunity. Soon he was absorbed in his task, now staring earnestly at the page, now raising his head and fixing his eyes on the luggage-rack in an attempt to recall a few bars of the music.
When he had done this once or twice he became conscious of the person sitting opposite him. It was a young woman, and she was studying him with lively, amused black eyes. Why should she be amused? Adrian felt a little annoyed at her impertinence, and with a frown dropped his eyes again to the music. She thought it comical, he supposed, that anyone should read music instead of reading a cheap magazine. Probably rather a silly young woman. He became absorbed in the music again, but just as he was going to raise his eyes again from the page and run over the next passage in his mind, he remembered the young woman and, frowning rather more severely, he kept his eyes lowered. But, after all, she was probably thinking of something else by this time. It would really be too much if she was still staring. He raised his eyes suddenly, to see what she was doing, and there she was, if you please, still examining him with a look of quiet amusement. Adrian was really annoyed, and, to show her that he was, he returned her gaze firmly and stonily for two or three seconds before dropping his eyes again to the music.
But she was not at all abashed. On the contrary, she leaned forward and said: “Do you find you can manage it?”
“Manage what?” said Adrian coldly. She hadn’t the least idea, he supposed, of what he was doing.
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