Ring in the New

by Phyllis Bentley

  ‘I’m sure it can be arranged,’ said Jonathan soothingly.

  But he sighed to find. family enmities rising around the children almost before they could talk.

  8

  ‘The Wool is Rising’

  ‘How do they contrive to arrange their hair in these apparently careless waves which yet make an agreeable pattern?’ wondered Jonathan, observing the well-shaped dark head in front of him, bent downward as the young man, freshman student this term, nervously ruffled the pages of his essay to find a criticised passage. ‘I suppose they contrive it as Lord Byron contrived it,’ he reflected with some amusement. ‘Rebels always contrive this carefully dishevelled hair. It’s symptomatic. I suppose it expresses their revolt against convention—yes, of course it does. The waves are arranged, all the same—it’s another convention. I presume you are studying for the degree of Bachelor of Arts in General Studies, Mr Mellor?’ he said aloud, and seeing by the lad’s face that it was so, continued: ‘What subjects are you taking?’

  ‘Economics, history and English.’

  ‘It is economics which chiefly interest you.’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Yes I have observed that you can’t write an essay on any literary subject without providing some economic interpretation.’

  ‘The economic interpretation exists in the text!’ flashed the student, his rather small black eyes brightening to an eager glow.

  ‘Even if the writer didn’t intend it?’

  ‘All the more then.’

  ‘You have a point there,’ conceded Jonathan. ‘But my dear fellow, your desire for an economic interpretation must not be allowed to lead you into inaccuracies. For instance, in this essay you have implied that Emily Brontë had, even if unconsciously, communist leanings, because it is springtime at the end of Wuthering Heights, springtime when the new is growing and the old is dead.’

  It’s a legitimate symbolism, surely.’

  ‘But it is not springtime at the end of Wuthering Heights. The season is autumn.’

  ‘No! Stocks and flowers are in bloom. Mr Lockwood catches their scent on his last visit to the Heights.’

  ‘Stocks and wallflowers begin to bloom in the spring, but continue throughout the summer. Heather, however, does not bloom till late August or early September, and heather is blooming on the three graves of Cathy, Edgar and Heathcliff, when Mr Lockwood visits them that night.’

  The student looked considerably abashed, but suddenly recovered.

  ‘I don’t believe the heather is blooming, sir; heath is mentioned, but not that it is in flower.’

  ‘Let us examine the passage.’

  They opened the copies of the novel they respectively held. Jonathan’s his own, the student’s from a municipal library.

  ‘I believe you are right, Mr Mellor,’ said Jonathan gravely. ’Heath is mentioned without reference to flowers, and harebells seem to clinch the matter—though I don’t know for certain when harebells bloom. Do you?’

  ‘I live in the city of Lorimer, sir,’ said the boy with bitterness.

  ‘We must look up harebells. I don’t believe Emily had views in your sense, however. Her spirit could not have been chained to any narrow political creed.’

  ‘She could have been an anarchist’ said the boy, his eyes glowing.

  ‘That is possible. Give some thought to that then with special reference to her poetry, The Philosopher you know, and Ay, there it is and of course, No Coward Soul:

  The young man groaned.

  ‘Did you track down that ungrammatical sentence I spoke of? It came towards the end,’ said Jonathan, holding out his hand for the essay, as he guessed that the student did not recognise the error to which he referred. ‘Here it is—you’ve allowed an unattached, or perhaps I should say, wrongly attached participle to stray into your prose. Having thus set Hareton and Catherine on the road to love, Heathcliff has come to his time to die. Do you really mean that Heathcliff set the cousins on the road to love?’

  ‘No, of course not.’

  Then don’t say so. Present and past participles must be attached to a noun. If you analyse the sentence—but I forgot; analysis is not taught in schools nowadays.’

  ‘No,’ said Mellor defiantly.

  ‘By the way,’ said Jonathan, as the student inserted the essay pages into his loose-leaf folder, ‘I am interested in your name.’

  To his surprise a dark burning blush suffused the sallow cheeks of the young man.

  ‘How did you know I had no right to it?’

  ‘I hadn’t the slightest idea!’ disclaimed Jonathan, blushing in his turn with shame for his gaffe. ‘I do apologise if I have trespassed on your private affairs. Mellor is a frequent name in the West Riding, of course—this may be just a coincidence—but my grandmother was a Mellor, and she had a father named Charles and a younger brother named David—who was killed early in the 1914 War. Your initials, CD.—Charles David?—I just wondered—pure coincidence, no doubt.’

  ‘My name is Charles David, but I’ve no right to the name of Mellor, in law,’ said Mellor angrily. ‘At least, I suppose not.’

  Jonathan looked attentive.

  ‘My father was illegitimate. Son of a soldier, killed in 1914, who hadn’t time to marry his girl before he was sent off to the front. She took his name, though, right or wrong, and registered the child under it, and we’ve stuck to it ever since.’

  ‘An uncomfortable story. But I don’t suppose your father is troubled by it nowadays,’ said Jonathan soothingly.

  ‘No, but I am!’ flashed Mellor, ‘Just another example of the glories of war.’

  ‘Indeed, yes. My grandmother’s elder brother has descendants. One of them is married to my half-cousin,’ said Jonathan, who felt that a spate of talk might gloss over and carry them through this awkward moment. (At the same time he thought of Ruth and his daughters, and suffered a pang.) ‘The other, G. B. Mellor, has recently won a seat for Labour—you may have heard of him.’

  ‘Those old fossils!’ exclaimed Mellor with contempt. ‘None of them are less than fifty.’

  ‘G. B. Mellor is barely forty, I believe,’ said Jonathan crisply.

  ‘It’s all the same. Their minds are like concrete—set in the mould of 1883.’

  ‘No doubt every generation feels the same about the previous generation,’ said Jonathan, appreciating, however, Mellor’s knowledge of the date when the Weavers’ Guild, the first textile trade union, was founded. ‘I know nothing of the history of my grandmother’s younger brother, David, I’m afraid, so I don’t know whether I’m entitled to claim relationship with you, presuming you’re his grandson, or not.’

  Mellor hesitated, and the look of anger on his face melted into one of mischief.

  ‘I’ve always hoped I was descended from the Luddite murderer of 1812,’ he said defiantly.

  ‘Indeed! I almost certainly am descended from him,’ said Jonathan.

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Yes, really.’

  ‘Why don’t you come to our Anarchist meetings, sir? We should be pleased to have you. If you’re a murderous Mellor, you should be on our side.’

  ‘I have other ancestors,’ said Jonathan stiffly.

  ‘So it seems from your name. How do you come to be an Oldroyd?’

  ‘It’s a long story,’ said Jonathan as before, resenting on his father’s behalf—for the first time in his life, perhaps—the contempt for all Oldroyds revealed in Mellor’s tone. ‘You say our side. What does that imply?’

  ‘Revolt!’

  ‘Against what?’

  ‘Everything! We want to shake the pillars which uphold the riddle of the world!’

  ‘Malraux,’ said Jonathan, recognising the quotation from Antimémoires.

  Mellor looked a trifle disconcerted, as if unpleasantly surprised to find somebody else—a lecturer at that—as well versed in ‘left’ readings as himself.

  ‘Malraux isn’t a revolutionary nowadays,’ he said, clearly intending to dep
rive Jonathan of credit for reading him. ‘He’s a minister under de Gaulle.’

  ‘True. He has a right to modify his views if he wishes.’

  Mellor made a sound of contempt. ‘And we have the right to disapprove.’

  ‘Of course; but freedom of thought and speech does not mean only freedom for one’s own side,’ said Jonathan.

  ‘The pillars want shaking all the same! And you are going to hear a great deal more of us doing it. The Wool is Rising,’ said Mellor ominously.

  ‘I see you’ve been reading Branwell Bronte,’ said Jonathan, unable not to feel pleased by this citing of the title of an obscure day-dream writing of the Bronte brother. ‘You are interested in Branwell, perhaps?’

  ‘He was in revolt,’ said Mellor with passion.

  ‘An ineffective life, however. The Billy Liar of his century.’

  ‘I do wish you would come to our meetings, Mr Oldroyd,’ said Mellor in a tone almost of pleading.

  Jonathan waited for him to say that the lecturer might have something to contribute to the meetings, but this did not come, so he said sardonically:

  ‘You think it would do me good? Set me on the right track?’

  ‘Well, yes,’ said Mellor, laughing.

  ‘Perhaps you would care to compile a few notes on a comparison of the ethics of Branwell and Emily Bronte,’ said Jonathan drily.

  Mellor went out looking pleased with himself.

  Looking back at this interview, Jonathan was dissatisfied with his part in it. He had sounded, he thought, essentially as a member of a previous generation sounded to a present one—reactionary, unaware, with a closed mind, interested only in unimportant and outdated trivia. Mellor on the other hand, though vigorous and idealistic, was jejune and uninformed.

  Jonathan debated with himself whether to attend a meeting of Mellor’s cherished group. Heaven knew there was nothing on his cold and lonely hearth now to keep him at home in the evenings. His hesitation concluded a few days later when there appeared in huge white letters (very unshapely on the wall of a Lorimer University building, the slogan: THE SYSTEM IS ROTTEN DESTROY IT. He smiled to himself to observe that the youthful anarchists had not defaced a new building, but kindly—or perhaps symbolically—vented their wrath on an old one. But it was time, he thought, that somebody suggested to these young hotheads the advisability of planning another system to take its place, before proceeding to destroy the one, however imperfect, at present working—he had gathered from Mellor that the present mild form of Welfare State was as much despised as capitalism.

  He glanced at the Union notice board to mark the relevant day and time, and presently found himself sitting on the floor—the bed was full—against the wall in a student’s chilly, meagrely furnished private room, surrounded by some score of (he presumed) anarchical revolutionaries of both sexes. The walls, agreeably free from female pin-ups, featured instead newspaper portraits of Mao, Che Guevara and Daniel Cohn-Bendit in characteristically defiant attitudes. A youth who stammered seemed to be host; there were no other members of faculty present.

  ‘Is it true that you and Mellor are related?’ said a girl in long black network stockings, sitting beside him, abruptly.

  ‘We are not certain, but there are some grounds for supposing so.’

  Mellor, who seemed to be in the chair, now made an admirable speech, laying his finger firmly on all the miseries of the contemporary scene: the wars, the injustices, the starvation, the oppression, the maldistribution of wealth, the nuclear weapons, immigration. He was received with fervent applause and enthusiastic cries of approval. A girl next delivered a passionate indictment of American behaviour in Vietnam, and a third student delivered an amusingly satiric description of the doings of the present British Government. Ireland, the Pope, of course the Pill, voyages to the moon and University curricula were argued over, and finally the meeting condescended to discuss weekend leave. The ability displayed came down the scale as the meeting went on, but shot up when the Vietnam war came again on the agenda. The main speakers all spoke well, even with eloquence, and knew their facts it was by no means a display of ‘blind and naked ignorance’ delivering ‘brawling judgements’. The only point indeed on which Jonathan strongly disagreed was the vehement accusation of specific persons and organisations for deliberate wrongdoings, rather than a general deploring such as he would have favoured, of human ignorance, human inability (as yet) to think out solutions. ‘Perhaps Mr Oldroyd would like to say a word to us about peace,’ said Mellor suddenly.

  ‘Clever of him to choose the least controversial topic on which to call me in,’ thought Jonathan, rising; and caught thus unawares he threw out the sentence which expressed one of his most profound convictions: ‘If we would have peace without a worm in it, lay we foundations of justice and righteousness.’

  There was silence.

  ‘Who said that?’ demanded Mellor at length in a disagreeable tone.

  ‘Oliver Cromwell.’

  ‘Is C-C-Cromwell a f-f-favourite of yours?’ demanded the youth who stammered badly.

  ‘No. Fairfax is my man. How do you feel about Cromwell?’

  ‘Look how he p-p-put down the Levellers,’ continued the youth. ‘He chased them away from the Army and shot one dead. He was against p-p-power until he got it, and then he liked it and used it without mercy.’

  ‘It’s all too common a fault,’ said Jonathan drily, reflecting that a First Year History course must have reached the Civil War, for badly though the lad stammered, his facts emerged correctly. ‘Look at all revolutionaries of modern times.’

  ‘Let us take Power as our next week’s theme,’ suggested Mellor brightly.

  ‘An excellent choice,’ approved Jonathan.

  Having said this, he felt a certain moral obligation to be present at the next week’s discussion. He promised himself to be silent unless directly called upon, but after a raging speech in favour of violent demonstrations from the black-stockinged girl—who it appeared was Mellor’s girl friend; they were possibly sleeping together, but of course, Jonathan did not enquire into this—he felt obliged to intervene. ‘I don’t support your equation of power with violence and physical force,’ he said.

  ‘You can’t do anything without power,’ said the girl.

  ‘There I agree. Knowledge, goodwill and power—in the sense of determination and freedom to reform—are the three prerequisites of any useful reforming action.’

  ‘All p-p-power is b-b-based on f-f-force,’ said the stammerer.

  ‘The base is a long way down,’ observed Jonathan, smiling.

  ‘You are obliged to use violence if you want anybody to take any notice of you,’ said the girl hotly.

  ‘If you support that view you are supporting American action in Vietnam and Russian action in Czechoslovakia,’ said Jonathan.

  This Russian reference was ill-received. So much so, in fact, that after the close of the meeting, Jonathan hung back for an opportunity to say to Mellor:

  ‘If my interventions are disagreeable to your members, I will gladly stay away from the meetings. But I can’t come to the meetings and remain silent. I must protest against what I believe to be wrong.’

  ‘Oh, they don’t object to you,’ replied Mellor cheerfully. ‘They think it sharpens their wits to have somebody to argue with.’

  After this Jonathan’s term seemed to consist, apart from his Saturday meetings with the twins at Emsley Hall, in discussions with Mellor, which too often sprang away from literature and ranged throughout the universe, including heaven and hell. The two subjects which seriously concerned all the students at the time were curricula and participation in University government. Mellor had much to say on both.

  ‘What objections have you to the present English course, Mr Mellor?’ enquired Jonathan on an essay-returning occasion.

  ‘The whole system’s wrong!’ began Mellor, at the top of his voice.

  ‘Don’t shout at me as if I were a public meeting. Let us discuss the matter quie
tly, as rational members of a -civilisation.’

  ‘But there’s no civilisation about it. University is supposed to give us the entry to civilisation, a participation in culture, a sharing in cultural excitement, a response to it. But we don’t get any such thing. These stupid examinations lead us up the garden! Not that it’s a garden; it’s the dreariest kind of desert.’.

  ‘But do you deserve a cultural garden?’

  ‘Why not? Everyone deserves it! If you mean because of class——’ began Mellor hotly.

  ‘No, no, no. But if you don’t understand, say Paradise Lost, or find Meredith meaningless, you think it’s the University’s fault.’

  ‘Well, whose fault is it if not the University’s?’

  ‘Largely yours.’

  ‘I don’t agree,’ said Mellor with passion. ‘We ask bread, and are given a stone, that’s what I say.’

  ‘You’re not willing to make an effort, to work to understand. Let me ask you a question: did you look up the blooming period of harebells?’

  ‘I can’t waste time on such trivial bourgeois detail,’ said Mellor sulkily.

  ‘But it was essential to the correct interpretation of Emily Brontë—or at any rate, to your interpretation of her thought.’

  Mellor was silent.

  ‘Did you look it up?’ he said at length roughly.

  ‘Yes. Let’s see, I wrote it down somewhere,’ said Jonathan, drawing out his engagement diary. ‘At the back here. Yes: It displays its blue bell-shaped flowers during July to September. A rather thicker kind, with different leaves throws up its racemes of blue bells during a late season (September and October). But as that kind grows in woods and copses, I don’t think it’s Emily’s. The first kind thrives on pastures and on dry heaths. Dry heaths are Emily’s, I think. But you can’t call July to September springtime, can you? Two other authorities say it flowers July to September, that is summer and early autumn. On the other hand wallflowers are said to bloom in May and June. My impression is, however, that they go on blooming through the whole summer season, as do stocks. But I intend to consult a knowledgeable gardener, when I can find one. Of course,’ he added as an afterthought, ‘Emily may have indulged in a careless inaccuracy. What we sometimes sentimentally, call poets’ licence. But that is not my idea of Emily Bronte. Is it yours?’