Venus Over Lannery (13 page)

Edna laid her hand on Mrs. Dryden's arm. “I don't believe it,” she said with a smile.

“O, but it's true, my dear. Ask the Buxteds. Ask Mr. Elsdon. And quite suddenly I had become human. It was what religious people would call conversion. Next morning I started for home: I was anxious to get back to Arthur. It was all I could do not to beg his forgiveness. But I didn't. I felt instinctively that if I were to bring it all to the surface we would both become horribly self-conscious. So I said nothing. And soon an extraordinary thing happened. All those little mannerisms and fads of Arthur's which had irritated me so much—they not only ceased to irritate me, they actually ceased to exist. They no longer had anything to feed on. I had driven him into them, and now, by mere nonresistance, I had driven him out of them. You remember Tolstoi's ‘ Resist not evil'? Well, in this case at any rate, it worked miraculously. For the rest of our life together we were the best of friends. Years afterwards I told him of the whole business. ‘I knew there was something wrong,' he said, ‘but I thought it better not to enquire.' How like him that was, and how it would have irritated me in earlier
days. But it didn't irritate me then: it seemed to me, by that time, that his method had been the right one.” She sighed. “He was an extraordinarily gentle creature.”

It was sunday evening and five of the visitors to Lannery had already left. Edna and Roger, and Joan with them, had taken the afternoon train, and Eric and Daphne, refusing an early tea, had set off in Eric's car. Cynthia and Todd were allowing themselves a few days more in the country in honour of their engagement, and Elsdon and the Buxteds were staying on for a week. The house seemed quiet and empty as they sat round the fire in the drawingroom. Emily, with an amused smile at Elsdon, had just asked him for his new opinion of the departed guests. “Last time, I remember,” she said, “you complained that they were restless.”

Elsdon nodded. “And I was surprised, this time, to find them still in the same state. One can understand it in Daphne: she hasn't even yet, I gather, permanently collared her young man, and in fact it rather seemed to me that, at the moment, she has ceased to try.” He paused for a moment, but as no one rose to this indiscreet observation, he did not pursue it further. “But the others,” he went on, “Edna and Roger and Joan, they seem to be as unfocused as ever. Marriage doesn't seem to have
done them any good. Edna, I admit, has matured surprisingly, but she and Roger are obviously at loggerheads, and that poor little girl Joan seems to be terribly unhappy. Emily, you ought to start a school for prospective husbands and wives. I know I've no right to boast, but it does seem to me that in our day we did, as a rule, make a better job of marriage. What's the matter with them all nowadays?”

“It's not them, primarily,” said Emily; “it's the conditions they're born into. The old principles and the old conventions have gone, or almost gone. They're much freer than we were, and their freedom leaves them shiftless and bewildered.”

“They're simply undisciplined, that's their trouble,” said the Colonel. “You can't run life, any more than you can run a battalion, on freedom. They fancy they can and we see the result.”

“Yes, there's some truth in that, Bob,” said Emily. “In our time, marriage was, if not for all of us a sacrament, at least a sacred convention which it didn't occur to us to question. We had a ready-made discipline imposed upon us and, on the whole, it made things easier. Nowadays marriage is simply a legal agreement which, with a certain amount of bother and expense, can be cancelled; and that, of course, cheapens it terribly.”

“And yet, in one way,” said Todd, “the freedom is all to the good, if only they could use it, because it means that morals have become personal instead of merely conventional. It's much more religious, in
the best sense of the word, to behave well or accept a duty because you want to, than to stick to a rule because you're afraid of public opinion.”

“So you think,” asked Elsdon, “that the people of our day—those, I mean, who respected marriage not from conviction but from convention—were no better than those young folk of today who regard marriage as no more than a legal matter?”

“Not a bit,” said Todd; “though I think they were luckier. The convention and their respect for it, however mercenary, did urge them to make the best of marriage: they were forced to adapt themselves and were probably the happier for it. But when you enter marriage, as some people do nowadays, with the idea that no adaptation and no compromise are necessary, because marriage is so easily annulled, you're running the risk of making any sort of domestic happiness impossible. That's the worst of freedom; to enjoy it, you've got to be free, free from inhibitions and complexes and all the rest of the old human failings to which we have given such impressive new names. If we were perfectly brought up we shouldn't need authority.”

“What? Free love, Padre?” asked the Colonel sharply.

“Certainly,” said Todd, “as all real love is, in any case.”

“Still, as a practical point,” said the Colonel, “you and Cynthia propose, I hope, to go through some sort of ceremony?”

Todd laughed. “You flatter us, Colonel. Your
question implies that we've both been perfectly brought up. But don't be afraid: you and Mrs. Buxted will get your invitation in due course.”

“But to go back,” said Elsdon to Todd, “to what you were saying just now. If we were all perfectly brought up, you said, we shouldn't need authority. But the trouble, it seems, with the young people of today is that they haven't been perfectly brought up and they don't accept authority. Well, what are you going to do about them? You can't impose authority on them as you can in the Colonel's battalion, because authority, in this case, has to be the authority of conviction.”

“You can't impose it even on a battalion, George,” said the Colonel, “unless the majority believe in it. If I tried to impose authority on a sceptical battalion, they would simply confine me to barracks, and a pretty fool I should look.”

Elsdon turned to Emily Dryden. “It seems to me, Emily, that this is your job. Bob, representing the Army, confesses that he can't dragoon their bodies, and Frank, representing the Church, apparently can't dragoon their souls. As you don't hold either with Church or Army, no doubt you have some other device up your sleeve.”

“O, come—that's not fair!” Todd broke in. “I don't even want to dragoon their souls. It's a monstrous notion.” He turned to Mrs. Dryden. “Forgive me for butting in.”

“You were quite right to butt in, my dear Frank,” said Emily. “George was behaving in the most
high-handed manner. If I dare to say, George, that I don't approve of cutting off their heads, you'll brush me aside at once, I suppose, without asking what I
do
approve of.”

Through the murmur of laughter, Elsdon was heard apologising. “Bob, I'm a martinet! Frank, I'm a bigot! Forgive me! And you, Emily, tell us your remedy.”

“Educate them,” she said.

“What? Arithmetic, French, geography?” barked the Colonel.

“Nonsense, Bob! I mean real education. Train their minds and emotions. Teach them about human nature and its reactions, behaviour and its consequences, the physical and spiritual facts of sex, and, in course of time, how to bring up the next generation.”

“In fact,” said Todd, “give them the first elements of religion.”

“Yes, Frank,” said Emily. “You and I always agree in everything but our terminology.”

“But isn't it rather late,” asked Elsdon, “to get hold, for instance, of our young friends who have just left us? They're out of your reach.”

“Yes, unhappily that's true,” said Emily, “except in so far as you can give them a word of advice now and then. But we can get hold of the younger ones.”

“Certainly we can; but do we?”

“Well, Frank and Cynthia do.”

“After all,” said Todd, “it's my job, isn't it? That's what parsons are for.”

“I'm delighted to hear you say so,” said the Colonel. “My religious education was a very different affair. My mother taught me to say a few prayers, which I did with great proficiency, but without knowing, at first, what they meant; I was taken to church on Sundays, which, to be honest, bored me intensely; and when I went to school I did Scripture—namely, the Old Testament with notes and Greek Testament—the dullest lessons of the week, neither of which had anything to do with religion. The first was ancient history, badly taught, and the second was a matter of grammar and translation. I learned much more religion on the football-field.”

“Yes,” said Elsdon, “my experience was much the same.”

“And mine,” said Todd, “though I came about thirty years later. They put the letter before the spirit, the cart before the horse.”

“My dear boy,” said the Colonel, “at my school they hadn't got a horse—nothing more than a broken-down gig with nothing to harness to it.”

“I think we're learning to begin with the horse nowadays,” said Todd.

“I'm all for the horse,” said Elsdon. “What bothers me is the cart—the letter, the dogma, the offices. I think you and I agree in that, Emily. Why mayn't we ride, Frank, and do without a cart?”

“Well, for me,” said Todd, “the cart's there, so I can't ignore it. Religion, for me, is not a horse but a horse-and-cart. If the cart wasn't there already I should have to make one. How are you going to
purvey the goods if you've nothing to put them in? Religion is not only a private affair, it's also a universal affair, and so it must be contained in a permanent and communicable form, or, if you like to say so, in certain accepted symbols. The Word was, and had to be, made flesh.”

Elsdon smiled. “I must say, Frank, you're the only person I know who can say that sort of thing at a tea-party without making me feel uncomfortable.”

“Yes,” said Emily, “there's no denying that, for as long as I can remember, at least, it has been bad form to mention God at the tea-table.”

“Just so,” said Todd. “That was the state we had got into, and that's what this embarrassing outburst of freedom is saving us from. We had reduced, not only the idea of God, but also the manner of our social intercourse to a narrow convention. Each was shut away in a little department of its own with an impassable gulf between them. And it had become the same with the individual. Most people's inner lives were, and still are, sharply separated from their outer lives. We're a mass of pigeon-holes.”

“Quite true!” said the Colonel. “Most of us are little better than Orderly Rooms.”

“Well,” said Elsdon, “it seems to me it's better to be an Orderly Room than a Disorderly Room.”

“The disorder can't be helped,” said Todd, “and it's merely temporary. If we're going to knock more windows in the walls and get rid of the pigeon-holes and the stacks of old papers tied with red tape, there's bound to be some disorder.”

“And so,” said Elsdon, “until the job's done, I shall have to put up with these restless young people.”

“I'm afraid so, George,” said Emily.

“Besides,” said Todd, “they're not really in such a hopeless state as Mr. Elsdon seems to think. Most of them are excellent people when you know them.”

Elsdon shook his head sadly. “I shall never know them.”

“You don't even want to, George,” said Emily; “you're not interested in getting to know them.”

Elsdon considered for a moment. “I'll put it this way,” he said. “I'm interested in them, but not interested in getting to know them. There are sixteen waking hours in a day, and so one can't cope with more than a limited number of friends. I might squeeze in one or two more—indeed, I have already reserved a place for Frank if he will be good enough to take it—but I shouldn't dream of selecting friends from among these distressingly young and distressingly unbalanced creatures. In fact, it is the very quality that makes them so interesting as a spectacle and a psychological problem that makes them so particularly undesirable as friends. Besides, they're hardly any of them interesting in themselves, but only in their unhappy relations. Take, for instance”—he glanced round the small company—” take, if I may be quite frank for a moment, that silly, superficial and rather vulgar little Daphne. In herself she could hardly interest a field-mouse, but her relations with others are, I must confess, a curious and
fascinating problem. In fact, now that I come to think of it, it is only the tiresome, unbalanced people who do provide that kind of interest. Look at Cynthia and Frank”—Elsdon's dry face creased into a benevolent smile—“what could be less interesting than their condition. They are perfectly suited, perfectly happy in one another, offering not the ghost of a problem to entertain the mind, and, let me add, I hope they never will.”

“Hear, hear!” barked the Colonel. “The most interesting period of my life was the Great War and, I must say, I'm all for the humdrum. After all, the happy nation has no history.”

Emily snorted. “Neither has the donkey-cart that sticks in the mud. It's terrible to have one's friends grow audibly old all round one. What about you, Ida; are you for the humdrum too?”

Ida Buxted smiled apologetically. “I'm afraid, Emily, I've always had rather a liking for the humdrum. But I've certainly no objection to your proving that we're not old. I don't feel any older than I did twenty years ago.”

“But, my dear Emily,” said Elsdon, “we are old. Why shouldn't we face the fact and enjoy it into the bargain?”

“The fact? Facts, George, are generally what we choose to make them. The only inescapable fact, as far as you and I and Ida and Bob are concerned, is that we're sixty-five or thereabouts; but that doesn't warrant the assumption that we've done with life, that we must retire into our shells like tortoises and
shut our minds to what's going on outside. What I assume, quite reasonably, from the fact that I'm sixty-five is that I have twenty or thirty years in front of me and I should find it extremely tedious to hibernate for so long.”