Testament of Youth: An Autobiographical Study of the Years 1900-1925 (87 page)

The various men, I thought bitterly, with whom I had come into contact since the War - men who were married already but enjoyed making use of my company for a little romantic diversion, men who imagined that I could be tempted by wealth and promises of financial support in politics, middle-aged men who were fussy and futile, elderly men whose avid eyes looked upon me with a narrow, appraising stare, young men who were ardent but ineffectual, men of all ages who wallowed in nauseating sentimentality and hadn’t the brains of an earwig - simply provided one proof after another that the best of their sex had disappeared from a whole generation.

Quite definitely, now, I felt sure that I did not want to marry. The men I had cared for were all dead; I loved my uninterrupted independence, and believed that I had outgrown all possibility of including children in my scheme of life. At long last I had achieved the way of living that I had always desired; I rejoiced in my work, and had no desire to adapt my habits to those of a stranger. Why, then, had I put up, even agreeably, with the insufferable secondrateness of these men whose intellectual values and conversational standards I should not have tolerated for a moment if they had been women? What was happening to me that my life, for all its exciting occupations and eventful days, sometimes seemed so stale and unprofitable? The trouble about men’s and women’s relationships, I concluded self-contemptuously, was never so much adultery as adulteration; love that had once been a torrent flood had meandered through mediocre plains until it had run dry, and lost itself in a limitless desert of sand.

Sadly I recalled two lines of doggerel that the Tommies, ruthless and realistic, used to sing at their concert-parties in France:

Hug me, kiss me, call me Gertie,
Marry me quick, I’m nearly thirty! . . .

In those days, with the predicament of ‘Gertie’ still years ahead, her importunity had seemed incredibly ludicrous; nevertheless the years, heavy with events, had moved relentlessly on, and the time had almost come. Was only that the matter - that I was nearly thirty? Was complete sublimation never possible when once the human organism had been wrought up to a high pitch of emotion?

In spite of this unflattering conclusion, I answered the letter from Oxford. But when the reply to my answer came, I found that it had been written from very far away; my correspondent was, in fact, passing the coast of Labrador in S.S.
Regina
at the time, accompanied by the strains of ‘We have no bananas to-day’, though his long communication was posted from a small town in the United States, where he had gone, he told me, to take up new work for a year at a great American university.

By all the rules of common sense, these overwhelming considerations of time and space ought to have put an end to the correspondence then and there. But somehow, they didn’t. The detailed and appreciative criticisms of
The Dark Tide
which came across the Atlantic were too stimulating to be lightly disregarded by so new an author as myself, and by the time that I was answering his third letter, we had already plunged into a prolonged argument upon the social conditions and consequences of marriage for the independent post-war woman.

It was a problem that I now very often discussed, and endeavoured - with a detachment which I believed complete - to solve in articles and on the public platforms of feminist organisations. Could marriage and motherhood be combined with real success in an art or profession? If it couldn’t, which was to suffer - the profession or the human race? Surely, since the finest flowers of English manhood had been plucked from a whole generation, women were needed as never before to maintain the national standard of literature, of art, of music, of politics, of teaching, of medicine? Yet surely, too, a nation from which the men who excelled in mind and body were mostly vanished into oblivion had never so much required its more vigorous and intelligent women to be the mothers of the generation to come?

All the restrictions which forbade professional work to women after marriage were so anti-biological, I felt, as almost to constitute a form of race suicide; for in spite of the sentimental aphorisms still uttered by most men about woman’s predominant desire for husband and home, I knew a growing number of women who would refuse marriage rather than give themselves up to years of exclusive domesticity and throw away their training and experience. The reorganisation of society in such a fashion that its best women could be both mothers and professional workers seemed to be one of the most acute problems which my generation - and to a lesser but still important extent all subsequent generations - had now to face. To find a man who appeared able to see this for himself was a novel experience in my post-war life.

2

So it was not, perhaps, so very remarkable that throughout the autumn and winter of 1923 this strange correspondence continued to gather momentum, with myself keeping up my own end of it in a rage of self-detesting, resentful regularity. After Somerville’s boycott of
The Dark Tide
, I found it difficult to believe that the author of prize essays and academic monographs had really been impressed by that melodramatic if lively performance, and for a long time I read his letters suspiciously lest a subtle and humiliating mockery should be concealed beneath their apparent admiration. But gradually I felt bound to conclude that his approbation was quite sincere; he even, to my surprise, appeared unmoved by the donnish disapproval which had caused me so much ingenuous anguish.

‘A novelist has considerable latitude . . . in the interests of her art - or shall we say that individuals are only justified so far as they subserve the universal? If Somerville complains, so did St Paul’s about Compton Mackenzie’s
Sinister Street
- and with far better reason,’ he wrote, with the assurance of one who had himself been at St Paul’s School when
Sinister Street
appeared.

By the Christmas of 1923 I was already writing to Winifred: ‘You know, I feel vaguely uneasy and rather miserable. I do hope that, after this lovely period of peace, some devastating male is not going to push into my life and upset it again. Just when things look so promising, too! . . . I haven’t really anything to feel uneasy about - what after all are a letter from America and a box of cigarettes? - and yet I do feel it. Please write and laugh me to scorn.’

From occasional brief sections of autobiography introduced casually and without emphasis into his letters - since to their writer ideas had always been of more importance than facts - I gathered that my correspondent’s Oxford career had followed a period of military service which had been postponed by ill health to the spring of 1918. Three years of war-work in the Civil Service had given him, he decided, no right to assume responsibility for other men’s lives in the Army, so he went into the ranks as a rifleman in the London Rifle Brigade, and was sent to France just in time for the Armistice. The somewhat unorthodox variety of Catholicism to which he confessed stirred in me the memory of Roland’s private conversion in France, while his political theories involved acceptance of the Socialism towards which I was already impelled by my experience of Bethnal Green. Later I learnt that the first vote he ever cast, as a twenty-two-year-old soldier in occupation of Mons during the ‘Khaki Election’, had been given to Labour, although this Party, with its tabooed group of conscientious objectors, was then at the nadir of its popularity. Even in those days, I discovered, he was a deeply absorbed student of the science of politics, and his migration to America had been due to a desire to continue his researches in a New World less harassed by political failure than the Old.

‘For the moment,’ he wrote, ‘my hand is set to the plough of the Theory of Politics . . . I do it chiefly because the War has left me with the feeling that nothing is more imperative than to clear up these conflicting political dogmata.’

Well, I thought, whatever he might be like otherwise, we were there emphatically at one; it was certainly, if disturbing, not a little intriguing. But when, one day, a letter came which mentioned, amongst other college contemporaries of his, ‘dear Henry M. Andrews of Uppingham and New College’, I realised, with an almost physical shock, that my correspondent and I might have even more in common than our political ideals. But for the War, I now knew, he and Edward must have been New College contemporaries; perhaps they had even sat for the same scholarship examination in the spring of 1914. I wrote and asked him whether by any chance the two of them had met, and received a reply which seemed, I thought, to have some strange kinship with the high austerity of the mountains above Vicenza.

‘I did not meet him; I should have come up next year . . . I should like to die that way. For us who live on there is the feeling of death, but for those
qui pro patria dimicantes pulchre occubuerunt
(do you know the New Coll. inscription?) the music of the pæan is at one with and without break passes straight over into the requiem . . . I don’t see that it matters whether it was Thermopylæ or the Asiago Plateau.’

In January he wrote to me that he had been offered an academic post at his American university, which would enable him to carry on the work of a famous English publicist who had lately returned thence to Oxford. While he was debating whether to accept this or to return to England, he sent me, somewhat tentatively, a copy of the notorious
Paradoxes
of the young reprobate John Donne. To show that I did not misunderstand this experiment in frankness, I responded with a presentation copy of my own newly published
Not Without Honour
, and received several pages of astringent criticism in reply. By the time that I returned from my Scottish Border tour in the April of 1924 we had exchanged photographs, and I sent Winifred, who was in Yorkshire for Easter, a description of his.

‘Nice-looking,’ I concluded, very reluctantly, for a new, unwanted agitation had crept into life as soon as I learnt that he was coming to England in June for the Long Vacation, which made it impossible to concentrate on writing articles, or even on reading Rose Macaulay’s absorbing
Told by an Idiot
, which had appeared the previous November.

‘As for writing anything but letters, why, how can I?’ I complained perturbedly to Winifred, ‘For all life seems suddenly to be tumbling about my ears . . . If only I had not this strange feeling that life is somehow or other going to blow up!’ And she replied with a wise, perceptive resignation: ‘My dear, it seems that one must choose between stagnation and agitation in this world - and that for some people the choice is taken out of their hands.’

After April, when I heard from him that he had accepted the post in America, a more purposeful note appeared in the letters of the young don whom I now thought of as ‘G.’ Might he call on me, he inquired, as soon as he arrived in England? And I, wishing that I really wanted to say ‘No’, tried desperately to find some flaw in either his photograph or his philosophy.

‘There is an abiding beauty,’ he had written to me, ‘which may be appreciated by those who will see things as they are, and who will ask for no reward except to see. There is a high æsthetic pleasure in seeing the truth clear-eyed, and in not being afraid of things . . . Two campaigns seem to me at the present momentous and worthwhile - that for the equalisation of the position of women, and that for economic security for the worker. Whoever puts his hand to the plough of the first will be told he is furthering immorality and the break-up of the family; whoever puts his hand to the second will be told he is a Bolshevik.’

Well, I decided apprehensively, I couldn’t find much wrong with that; and a critical inspection of the photograph repaid me no better. At last, a fortnight before his boat was due to sail, a letter came which left the meaning of his correspondence no longer in doubt. A certain Oxford undergraduate, it said, had had an admiration for somebody, distant because he was not interested in women in those days and had another plan, but none the less sincere. Long after they had both gone down, he thought one day in Oxford that he saw her again at the end of a period of doubt and isolation, and the idea of writing to her suddenly occurred - an idea reaffirmed and strengthened by the publication of a novel containing just those beliefs which he had hoped that the admired person would have, and written, apparently, by someone who had known sorrow and despair but had nevertheless decided that the contest was worth continuing . . . ‘On the day that I read
The Dark Tide
,’ he told me later, ‘I determined that I would win Virginia Dennison, and that if you were Virginia I would win you.’

Did he do wrong in writing this? his letter inquired in conclusion; it was a ‘simple and naïf tale’ enough. And at least it was now possible for me to tell him that I did not want to see him in June.

It certainly
was
possible, I thought, now thoroughly alarmed, and it seemed, moreover, not only possible but definitely advisable. I knew that I was ‘in for it’ again, and I felt reluctant and afraid; I did not wish to live, emotionally, any more, for I was still too tired; I wanted only to stand aside from life and write. I had more than enough, God knew, to remember and write about; why should I add, thus belatedly, marriage and all its consequences? But much as I longed to tell him just this, the time when I might have been capable of doing so had completely gone by. Behind all my work that year - the General Election, the conclusion of
Not Without Honour
, my lectures and articles and the Scottish Border tour - the music of his letters had sounded like the rolling of some distant organ, the tones of which became gradually deeper and the melody more sweet. Could I sharply terminate this profound and intimate correspondence, as death had once sharply terminated the dear and intimate correspondences of the War? I knew that I could not; and to my emotional inability was added the sharp salt of intense curiosity. So at last, feeling as though I were signing the warrant for my own execution, I took up my pen and wrote: