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Making of a Bigot

<h2>CHAPTER XI. THE COUNTRY.</h2> THE Dean was paralysed up the right side, his wife agitated and anxious, his daughter cross. “It’s absurd,” said Daphne to Eddy, the morning after his arrival. “Father’s no more sense than a baby. He insists on bothering about some article he hasn’t finished for the Church Quarterly on the Synoptic Problem. As if one more like that mattered! The magazines are too full of them already.” But the Dean made it obvious to Eddy that it did matter, and induced him to find and decipher his rough notes for the end of the article, and write them out in proper form. He was so much better after an afternoon of that that the doctor said to Eddy, “How long can you stop at home?” “As long as I can be any use. I have just given up one job and haven’t begun another yet, so at present I am free.” “The longer you stay the better, both for your father and your mother,” the doctor said. “You can take a lot of strain off Mrs. Oliver. Miss Daphne’s very young—too young for much sick-nursing, I fancy; and the nurse can only do what nurses can do. He wants companionship, and someone who can do for him the sort of job you’ve been doing to-day.” So Eddy wrote to Arnold that he didn’t know when he would be coming back to London. Arnold replied that whenever he did he could come into his uncle’s publishing house. He added in a postscript that he had met Eileen and Datcherd at the Moulin d’Or, and Eileen had said, “Give Eddy my love, and say I’m sorry. Don’t forget.” Sorry about his father, Arnold understood, of course; but Eddy believed that more was meant by it than that, and that Eileen was throwing him across space her characteristically sweet and casual amends for her bitter words. He went on with the Synoptic Problem. The Dean’s notes were lucid and coherent, like all his work. It seemed to Eddy an interesting article, and the Dean smiled faintly when he said so. Eddy was appreciative and intelligent, if not learned or profound. The Dean had been afraid for a time that he was going to turn into a cleric of that active sort which is so absorbed in practical energies that it does not give due value to thoughtful theology. The Dean had reason to fear that too many High Church clergy were like this. But he had hopes now that Eddy, if in the end he did take Orders, might be of those who think out the faith that is in them, and tackle the problem of the Fourth Gospel. Perhaps he had had to, while managing Datcherd’s free-thinking club. “Are you still helping Datcherd?” the Dean asked, in the slow, hindered speech that was all he could use now. “No. Datcherd has done with me. I managed things badly there, from his point of view. I wasn’t exclusive enough for him,” and Eddy, to amuse his father, told the story of that fiasco. Daphne said, “Serve you right for getting an anti-suffragist to speak. How could you? They’re always so deadly silly, and so dull. Worse, almost, than the other side, though that’s saying a lot. I do think, Tedders, you deserved to be chucked out.” Daphne had blossomed into a militant. Mrs. Oliver had been telling Eddy about that the day before. Mrs. Oliver herself belonged to the respectable National Union for Women’s Suffrage, the pure and reformed branch of it in Welchester established, non-militant, non-party, non-exciting. Daphne, and a few other bright and ardent young spirits, had joined the W.S.P.U., and had been endeavouring to militate in Welchester. Daphne had dropped some Jeye’s disinfectant fluid, which is sticky and brown, into the pillar-box at the corner of the Close, and made disagreeable thereby a letter to herself from a neighbour asking her to tennis, and a letter to the Dean from a canon fixing the date (which was indecipherable) of a committee meeting. Daphne looked critically at breakfast next day at these two results of her tactics, and called them “Jolly fine.” “Disgusting,” said the Dean. “I didn’t know we had these wild women in Welchester. Who on earth can it have been?” “Me,” said Daphne. “Alone I did it.” Scene: the Dean horrified, stern, and ashamed; Mrs. Oliver shocked and repressive; Daphne sulky and defiant, and refusing to promise not to do it again. “We’ve joined the militants, several of us,” she said. “Who?” inquired her mother. “I’m sure Molly hasn’t.” “No, Molly hasn’t,” said Daphne, with disgust. “All the Bellairs’ are too frightfully well-bred to fight for what they ought to have. They’re antis, all of them. Nevill approves of forcible feeding.” “So does anyone, of course,” said the Dean. “Prisoners can’t be allowed to die on our hands just because they are criminally insane. Once for all, Daphne, I will not have a repetition of this disgusting episode. Other people’s daughters can make fools of themselves if they like, but mine isn’t going to. Is that quite clear?” Daphne muttered something and looked rebellious; but the Dean did not think she would flatly disobey him. She did not, in fact, repeat the disgusting episode of the Jeye, but she was found a few evenings later trying to set fire to a workmen’s shelter after dark, and arrested. She was naturally anxious to go to prison, to complete her experiences, but she was given the option of a fine (which the Dean insisted, in spite of her protests, on paying), and bound over not to do it again. The Dean said after that that he was ashamed to look his neighbours in the face, and very shortly he had a stroke. Daphne decided reluctantly that militant methods must be in abeyance till he was recovered, and more fit to face shocks. To relieve herself, she engaged in a violent quarrel with Nevill Bellairs, who was home for Whitsuntide and ventured to remonstrate with her on her proceedings. They parted in sorrow and anger, and Daphne came home very cross, and abused Nevill to Eddy as a stick-in-the-mud. “But it is silly to burn and spoil things,” said Eddy. “Very few things are silly, I think, but that is, because it’s not the way to get anything. You’re merely putting things back; you’re reactionaries. All the sane suffragists hate you, you know.” Daphne was not roused to say anything about peaceful methods having failed, and the time having come for violence, or any of the other things that are natural and usual to say in the circumstances; she was sullenly silent, and Eddy, glancing at her in surprise, saw her sombre and angry. Wondering a little, he put it down to her disagreement with Nevill. Perhaps she really felt that badly. Certainly she and Nevill had been great friends during the last year. It was a pity they should quarrel over a difference of opinion; anything in the world, to Eddy, seemed a more reasonable cause of alienation. He looked at his young sister with a new respect, however; after all, it was rather respectable to care as much as that for a point of view. Molly Bellairs threw more light on the business next day when Eddy went to tennis there (Daphne had refused to go). “Poor Daffy,” Molly said to Eddy when they were sitting out. “She’s frightfully cross with Nevill for being anti-suffragist, and telling her she’s silly to militate. And he’s cross with her. She told him, I believe, that she wasn’t going to be friends with him any more till he changed. And he never does change about anything, and she doesn’t either, so there they are. It’s such a pity, because they’re really so awfully fond of each other. Nevill’s miserable. Look at him.” Eddy looked, and saw Nevill, morose and graceful in flannels, smashing double faults into the net. “He always does that when he’s out of temper,” Molly explained. “Why does he care so much?” Eddy asked, with brotherly curiosity. “Do you mean he’s really fond of Daffy? Fonder, I mean, than the rest of you are?” “Quite differently.” Molly became motherly and wise. “Haven’t you seen it? It’s been coming on for quite a year. I believe, Eddy, they’d be engaged by now if it wasn’t for this.” “Oh, would they?” Eddy was interested. “But would they be such donkeys as to let this get in the way, if they want to be engaged? I thought Daffy had more sense.” Molly shook her head. “They think each other so wrong, you see, and they’ve got cross about it.... Well, I don’t know. I suppose they’re right, if they really do feel it’s a question of right and wrong. You can’t go on being friends with a person, let alone get engaged to them, if you feel they’re behaving frightfully wrongly. You see, Daffy thinks it immoral of Nevill to be on the anti side in Parliament, and to approve of what she calls organised bullying, and he thinks it immoral of her to be a militant. I think Daffy’s wrong, of course, but I can quite see that she couldn’t get engaged to Nevill feeling as she does.” “Why,” Eddy pondered, “can’t they each see the other’s point of view,—the good in it, not the bad? It’s so absurd to quarrel about the respective merits of different principles, when all are so excellent.” “They’re not,” said Molly, rather sharply. “That’s so like you, Eddy, and it’s nonsense. What else should one quarrel about? What I think is absurd is to quarrel about personal things, like some people do.” “It’s absurd to quarrel at all,” said Eddy, and there they left it, and went to play tennis. Before he went home, Colonel Bellairs proposed a scheme to him. His youngest boy, Bob, having been ill, had been ordered to spend the summer at home, and was not to go back to Eton till September. Meanwhile he wanted to keep up with his work, and they had been looking out for a tutor for him, some intelligent young public-school man who would know what he ought to be learning. As Eddy intended to be at home for the present, would he take up this job? The Colonel proposed a generous payment, and Eddy thought it an excellent plan. He went home engaged for the job, and started it next morning. Bob, who was sixteen, was, like all the Bellairs’, neither clever nor stupid; his gifts were practical rather than literary, but he had a fairly serviceable head. Eddy found that he rather liked teaching. He had a certain power of transmitting his own interest in things to other people that was useful. As the Dean got better, Eddy sometimes stayed on at the Hall after work hours, and played tennis or bumble-puppy with Molly and Bob before lunch, or helped Molly to feed the rabbits, or wash one of the dogs. There was a pleasant coherence and unity about these occupations, and about Molly and Bob, which Eddy liked. Meanwhile he acted as amanuensis and secretary to his father, and was useful and agreeable in the home. Coherence and unity; these qualities seemed in the main sadly lacking in Welchester, as in other places. It was—country life is, life in Cathedral or any other cities is—a chaos of warring elements, disturbing to the onlooker. There are no communities now, village or other. In Welchester, and in the country round about it, there was the continuous strain of opposing interests. You saw it on the main road into Welchester, where villas and villa people ousted cottages and small farmers; ousted them, and made a different demand on life, set up a different, opposing standard. Then, in the heart of the town, was the Cathedral, standing on a hill and for a set of interests quite different again, and round about it were the canons’ houses of old brick, and the Deanery, and they were imposing on life standards of a certain dignity and beauty and tradition and order, not in the least accepted either by the slum-yards behind Church Street, or by Beulah, the smug tabernacle just outside the Close. And the Cathedral society, the canons and their families, the lawyers, doctors, and unemployed gentry, kept themselves apart with satisfied gentility from the townspeople, the keepers of shops, the dentists, the auctioneers. Sentiment and opinion in Welchester was, in short, disintegrated, rent, at odds within itself. It returned a Conservative member, but only by a small majority; the large minority held itself neglected, unrepresented. Out in the rolling green country beyond the town gates, the same unwholesome strife saddened field and lane and park. Land-owners, great and small, fought to the last ditch, the last ungenerous notice-board, with land-traversers; squires and keepers disagreed bitterly with poachers; tenant farmers saw life from an opposite angle to that of labourers; the parson differed from the minister, and often, alas, from his flock. It was as if all these warring elements, which might, from a common vantage-ground, have together conducted the exploration into the promised land, were staying at home disputing with one another as to the nature of that land. Some good, some better state of things, was in most of their minds to seek; but their paths of approach, all divergent, seemed to run weakly into waste places for want of a common energy. It was a saddening sight. The great heterogeneous unity conceived by civilised idealists seemed inaccessibly remote. Eddy this summer took to writing articles for the Vineyard about the breaches in country life and how to heal them. The breach, for instance, between tenant-farmer and labourer; that was much on his mind. But, when he had written and written, and suggested and suggested, like many before him and since, the breach was no nearer being healed. He formed in his mind at this time a scheme for a new paper which he would like to start some day if anyone would back it, and if Denison’s firm would publish it. And, after all, so many new papers are backed, but how inadequately, and started, and published, and flash like meteors across the sky, and plunge fizzling into the sea of oblivion to perish miserably—so why not this? He thought he would like it to be called Unity, and to have that for its glorious aim. All papers have aims beforehand (one may find them set forth in many a prospectus); how soon, alas, in many cases to be disregarded or abandoned in response to the exigencies of circumstance and demand. But the aim of Unity should persist, and, if heaven was kind, reach its mark. Pondering on this scheme, Eddy could watch chaos with more tolerant eyes, since nothing is so intolerable if one is thinking of doing something, even a very little, to try and alleviate it. He carried on a correspondence with Arnold about it. Arnold said he didn’t for a moment suppose his Uncle Wilfred would be so misguided as to have anything to do with such a scheme, but he might, of course. The great dodge with a new paper, was, Arnold said, the co-operative system; you collect a staff of eager contributors who will undertake to write for so many months without pay, and not want to get their own back again till after the thing is coining money, and then they share what profits there are, if any. If they could collect a few useful people for this purpose, such as Billy Raymond, and Datcherd, and Cecil Le Moine (only probably Cecil was too selfish), and John Henderson, and Margaret Clinton (a novelist friend of Arnold’s), and various other intelligent men and women, the thing might be worked. And Bob Traherne and Dean Oliver, to represent two different Church standpoints, Eddy added to the list, and a field labourer he knew who would talk about small holdings, and a Conservative or two (Conservatives were conspicuously lacking in Arnold’s list). Encouraged by Arnold’s reception of the idea, Eddy replied by sketching his scheme for Unity more elaborately. Arnold answered, “If we get all or any of the people we’ve thought of to write for it, Unity will go its own way, regardless of schemes beforehand.... Have your Tories and parsons in if you must, only don’t be surprised if they sink it.... The chief thing to mind about with a writer is, has he anything new to say? I hate all that sentimental taking up and patting on the back of ploughmen and navvies and tramps merely as such; it’s silly, inverted snobbery. It doesn’t follow that a man has anything to say that’s worth hearing merely because he says it ungrammatically. Get day labourers to write about land-tenure if they have anything to say about it that’s more enlightening than what you or I would say; but not unless; because they won’t put it so well, by a long way. If ever I have anything to do with a paper, I shall see that it avoids sentimentality so far as is consistent with just enough popularity to live by.” It was still all in the air, of course, but Eddy felt cheered by the definite treatment Arnold was giving to his idea. About the middle of June Arnold wrote that Datcherd had hopelessly broken down at last, and there seemed no chance for him, and he had given up everything and gone down to a cottage in Devonshire, probably to die there. “Eileen has gone with him,” Arnold added, in graver vein than usual. “I suppose she wants to look after him, and they both want not to waste the time that’s left.... Of course, many people will be horrified, and think the worst. Personally, I think it a pity she should do it, because it means, for her, giving up a great deal, now and afterwards, though for him nothing now but a principle. The breaking of the principle is surprising in him, and really, if one comes to think of it, pretty sad, and a sign of how he’s broken up altogether. Because he has always held these things uncivilised and wrong, and said so. I suppose he’s too weak in body to say so any more, or to stand against his need and hers any longer. I think it a bad mistake, and I wish they wouldn’t do it. Besides, she’s too fine, and has too much to give, to throw it all at one dying man, as she’s doing. What’s it been in Datcherd all along that’s so held her—he so sickly and wrecked and morose, she so brilliant and alive and young and full of genius and joy? Of course he’s brilliant too, in his own way, and lovable, and interesting; but a failure for all that, and an unhappy failure, and now at the last a failure even as to his own principles of life. I suppose it has been always just that that has held her; his failure and need. These things are dark; but anyhow there it is; one never saw two people care for each other more or need each other more.... She was afraid of hurting his work by coming to him before; but the time for thinking of that is past, and I suppose she will stay with him now till the end, and it will be their one happy time. You know I think these things mostly a mistake, and these absorbing emotions uncivilised, and nearly all alliances ill-assorted, and this one will be condemned. But much she’ll care for that when it is all over and he has gone. What will happen to her then I can’t guess; she won’t care much for anything any of us can do to help, for a long time. It is a pity. But such is life, a series of futile wreckages.” He went on to other topics. Eddy didn’t read the rest just then, but went out for a long and violent walk across country with his incredibly mongrel dog. Confusion, with its many faces, its shouting of innumerable voices, overlay the green June country. For him in that hour the voice of pity and love rose dominant, drowning the other voices, that questioned and wondered and denied, as the cuckoos from every tree questioned and commented on life in their strange, late note. Love and pity; pity and love; mightn’t these two resolve all discord at last? Arnold’s point of view, that of the civilised person of sense, he saw and shared; Eileen’s and Datcherd’s he saw and felt; his own mother’s, and the Bellairs’, and that of those like-minded with them, he saw and appreciated; all were surely right, yet they did not make for harmony. Meanwhile, a background to discord, the woods were green and the hedges starred pink with wild roses and the cow-parsley a white foam in the ditches, and the clouds shreds of white fleece in the blue above, and cows knee-deep in cool pools beneath spreading trees, and, behind the jubilance of larks and the other jocund little fowls, cried the perpetual questioning of the unanswered grey bird.... In the course of July, Eddy became engaged to Molly Bellairs, an event which, with all its preliminary and attendant circumstances, requires and will receive little treatment here. Proposals and their attendant emotions, though more interesting even than most things to those principally concerned, are doubtless so familiar to all as to be readily imagined, and can occupy no place in these pages. The fact emerges that Eddy and Molly, after the usual preliminaries, did become engaged. It must not be surmised that their emotions, because passed lightly over, were not of the customary and suitable fervour; in point of fact, both were very much in love. Both their families were pleased. The marriage, of course, was not to occur till Eddy was settled definitely into a promising profession, but that he hoped to be in the autumn, if he entered the Denisons’ publishing firm and at the same time practised journalism. “You should get settled with something permanent, my boy,” said the Dean, who was by now well enough to talk like that. “I don’t like this taking things up and dropping them.” “They drop me,” Eddy explained, much as he had to Arnold once, but the Dean did not like him to put it like that, as anyone would rather his son dropped than was dropped. “You know you can do well if you like,” he said, being fairly started in that vein. “You did well at school and Cambridge, and you can do well now. And now that you’re going to be married, you must give up feeling your way and occupying yourself with jobs that aren’t your regular career, and get your teeth into something definite. It wouldn’t be fair to Molly to play about with odd jobs, even useful and valuable ones, as you have been doing. You wouldn’t think of schoolmastering at all, I suppose? With your degree you could easily get a good place.” The Dean hankered after a scholastic career for his son; besides, schoolmasters so often end in Orders. But Eddy said he thought he would prefer publishing or journalism, though it didn’t pay so well at first. He told the Dean about the proposed paper and the co-operative system, which was sure to work so well. The Dean said, “I haven’t any faith in all these new papers, whatever the system. Even the best die. Look at the Pilot. And the Tribune.” Eddy looked back across the ages at the Pilot and the Tribune, whose deaths he just remembered. “There’ve been plenty died since those,” he remarked. “Those whom the gods love, etcetera. But lots have lived, too. If you come to that, look at the Times, the Spectator, and the Daily Mirror. They were new once. So was the English Review; so was Poetry and Drama; so was the New Statesman; so was the Blue Review. They’re alive yet. Then why not Unity? Even if it has a short life, it may be a merry one.” “To heal divisions,” mused the Dean. “A good aim, of course. Though probably a hopeless one. One makes it one’s task, you know, to throw bridges, as far as one can, between the Church and the agnostics, and the Church and dissent. And look at the result. A friendly act of conciliation on the part of one of our bishops calls forth torrents of bitter abuse in the columns of our Church papers. The High Church party is so unmanageable: it’s stiff: it stands out for differences: it won’t be brought in. How can we ever progress towards unity if the extreme left remains in that state of wilful obscurantism and unchristian intolerance?... Of course, mind, there are limits; one would fight very strongly against disestablishment or disendowment; but the ritualists seem to be out for quarrels over trifles.” He added, because Eddy had worked in St. Gregory’s, “Of course, individually, there are numberless excellent High Churchmen; one doesn’t want to run down their work. But they’ll never stand for unity.” “Quite,” said Eddy, meditating on unity. “That’s exactly what Finch and the rest say about the Broad Church party, you know. And it’s what dissenters say about Church people, and Church people about dissenters. The fact is, so few parties do stand for unity. They nearly all stand for faction.” “I don’t think we Broad Churchmen stand for faction,” said the Dean, and Eddy replied that nor did the High Churchmen think they did, nor dissenters either. They all thought they were aiming at unity, but it was the sort of unity attained by the survivor of the Nancy brig, or the tiger of Riga, that was the ideal of most parties; it was doubtless also the ideal of a boa-constrictor. Mrs. Oliver, who had come into the room and wasn’t sure it was in good taste to introduce light verse and boa-constrictors into religious discussions, said, “You seem to be talking a great deal of nonsense, dear boy. Everard, have you had your drops yet?” In such fruitful family discourse they wiled away the Dean’s convalescence. Meanwhile Molly, jolly and young and alive, with her brown hair curling in the sun, and her happy infectious laugh and her bright, eager, amber eyes full of friendly mirth, was a sheer joy. If she too “stood for” anything beyond herself, it was for youth and mirth and jollity and country life in the open; all sweet things. Eddy and she liked each other rather more each day. They made a plan for Molly to spend a month or so in the autumn with her aunt that lived in Hyde Park Terrace, so that she and Eddy should be near each other. “They’re darlings,” said Molly, of her uncle and aunt and cousins. “So jolly and hospitable. You’ll love them.” “I’m sure I shall. And will they love me?” inquired Eddy, for this seemed even more important. Molly said of course they would. “Do they love most people?” Eddy pursued his investigations. Molly considered that. “Well ... most ... that’s a lot, isn’t it. No, Aunt Vyvian doesn’t do that, I should think. Uncle Jimmy more. He’s a sailor, you know; a captain, retired. He seems awfully young, always; much younger than me.... One thing about Aunt Vyvian is, I should think you’d know it pretty quick if she didn’t like you.” “She’d say so, would she?” “She’d snub you. She’s rather snippy sometimes, even to me and people she’s fond of. Only one gets used to it, and it doesn’t mean anything except that she likes to amuse herself. But she’s frightfully particular, and if she didn’t like you she wouldn’t have anything to do with you.” “I see. Then it’s most important that she should. What can I do about it?” “Oh, just be pleasant, and make yourself as entertaining as you can, and pretend to be fairly sensible and intelligent.... She wouldn’t like it if she thought you were, well, a socialist, or an anarchist, or a person who was trying to do something and couldn’t, like people who try and get plays taken; or if I was a suffragette. She thinks people oughtn’t to be like that, because they don’t get on. And, too, she likes very much to be amused. You’ll be all right, of course.” “Sure to be. I’m such a worldly success. Well, I shall haunt her doorstep whether she likes me or not.” “If she dared not to,” said Molly indignantly, “I should walk straight out of her house and never go into it again, and make Nevill take me into his rooms instead. I should jolly well think she would like you!” <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

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