Noble in Reason

by Phyllis Bentley

  “Well, then,” said John. He sighed. “You may as well give up, then, I suppose. Have you told father?”

  At this moment my father re-entered the office, letters and snippets of cloth in his hand.

  “What’s the matter? Is anything wrong? Your mother?” he began sharply.

  “Chris is upset because he’s failed in his textile exam,” said John.

  “I don’t know what we’re going to do with you, Chris,” said my father, vehemently distressed. “I don’t indeed.”

  They both stood gazing at me, pitying, disappointed, vexed, till I wished the cracked linoleum beneath my feet would open and swallow me up.

  “It seems so cruel that Henry should have been taken,” began my father at length.

  The monstrous cruelty of this killed my shame for my failure on the instant. I coloured and stood erect, and hoped that my eyes looked as if they were flashing fire.

  “Henry! Henry! Always Henry!” exclaimed John in anger. “I don’t know what you’d all do if Henry were managing this place, I’m sure.”

  “Well, never mind. Do you know where this piece is?” said my father, holding out a letter with a snippet of cloth attached, to John.

  “Yes—it’s in the top room. I’ll go up and see to it. As for you, Chris,” said John, “pull yourself together—you can take these letters to the post.”

  I went out with fury in my heart. I was all right in London in the bookshop—Mr. M thought well of me—it’s only here that I fail—they can keep their damned textiles, they can keep them! My indignation was so strong that my hands trembled as I put the letters through the slit at the general post office and one fell to the ground. I picked it up and threw it into the slit as hard as I could. Ardent and courageous spirits, I said to myself, when thwarted in one direction turn eagerly, undaunted, in another; and I made up my mind on the instant to become a poet. I stalked into a nearby stationer’s and bought an exercise book in which to write. I shall have time to do what I like now, I shall have my evenings free, I reflected, thinking with hot resentment of the hours and hours I had wasted in conscientious study, of the strain I had put upon myself to compel my attention to matters for which I cared not at all. On a counter by the door lay a mixed heap of diaries for sale at a reduced price, the year being well advanced. I bought one, for I had a strong need to record in words the incidents of the morning. When I returned to the mill, both my father and John seemed a trifle apologetic, but I received their advances with reserve. I had given up the West Riding and its textiles once and for all, I assured myself; I would no longer hope to find happiness there.

  This brave attitude sustained me for some months and even gave me a certain snap in replying to my father and John, but all the same I missed the regular routine and youthful companionship of the textile classes. They had at least given me somewhere to go, a definite programme for my evenings; now the whole term of Netta’s absence would pass without my having a single evening engagement of any kind. I struggled hard to fill this gap. I visited the Municipal Library frequently and read enormously, having long since read every book in our house. I filled up my diary conscientiously every night— as a result the period is very thoroughly documented. I strove from time to time to express my feelings in poems, even though I had the judgment to realize that these were not at all good. But loneliness and isolation wrapped me round like an icy fog; the sense of my obscure and joyless destiny—the words come from my diary at the time—haunted me, weighed upon me. I longed to escape, to escape into warmth and life and freedom, and everything I read provided me with phrases which fed this desire. And o’er the hills, and jar away, Beyond their utmost purple rim, Beyond the night, across the day, Thro’ all the world she follow’d him—how I yearned for someone to summon me to such a joyous loyalty! How gladly I would give up the bourgeois comforts of my home, accept poverty and danger, if only I could be free! Sometimes as I stood on a Hudley pavement watching the cloth-laden lorries bumping up the hill—there is always a hill in Hudley—I felt almost sick with longing for a London bus, for all the teeming life and heady bustle of the capital There was a song, a few years old at that time, whose chorus began: Is London like it used to be, Is the Strand still there? I could hardly bear to hear this song, yet tormented myself with it at night in bed or as I ambled along through the dark dreary streets to the library.

  Sometimes John seemed to become aware of my situation. He came to Ashroyd once a week to see my mother, and would sometimes exclaim: “You’re all dead-alive here. You want to get out somewhere, Chris, and see something.” (I fully agreed, but had no idea how to set about it. I visited the theatre alone, of course, and occasionally the cinema, which was in its early silent-Chaplin days, but the modest wage I earned at the mill did not allow such indulgences often.) John’s comment on the dullness of our Ashroyd life was usually followed by an invitation to his small but lively house in Lonsdale Road. In the intervals of producing children—with the help of a set of twins she soon had three daughters—Edie was much given to hospitality. I looked forward with mingled fear and excitement to these homely evening parties, where a good deal of fun seemed to be had by all, including at times even me. This time, I felt as I entered the house, things would go well; I never hoped to be the life and soul of the party, but surely this time I should achieve a decent participation; surely this time I should not appear different from everybody else. I tried immensely hard to be like John’s other guests, but never with any success; I did not know their songs, their catchwords, their points of view; if I ventured to say what I really thought, the company were astonished, outraged; if I tried to speak as they did, I said more than I meant and the words rang too false to be accepted.

  “You always talk either too little or too much, Chris,” said John to me once in an exasperated tone.

  Abashed, I left their house that night, as always, guessing that John and Edie discussed the failure of their efforts on my behalf despairingly, the moment the door was closed behind me. Bruised and sore, ruminating sadly on my social deficiencies, I walked in gloom for a couple of streets; then slipped with a sigh of happy relief into my never-failing consolation.

  For it was not surprising that during this period, little by little, my daydreams gained upon me. They offered me a world of delight, which was mine at any moment of the day I chose to summon it. Out of the drab constraint of my home, out of the boredom of the mill, out of isolation and social failure, out of the provincial homeliness of Edie’s parties, I could flash in a second into a brilliant, beautiful, exciting world where the young man who represented me had all the grace and charm, the polished wit, the powerful mind, the anguished struggle, the splendid triumph, which I longed for. The anguished struggle, yes; for while I sorrowed for the dream young man in his different (and so much more noble) troubles, I expressed my own sufferings, which thus burned themselves out, as it were, outside my own house. The splendid triumph, of course; but to do me justice I used it generously; the only punishment I imposed on my defeated enemies was an admission of my own superior power and merit. My theme was still always that of the ugly duckling, the unrecognized swan; in the end the young Etherington, his white plumage shining, his superb neck proudly erect, swam out of the ken of the well-meaning but inferior duckling brood which had hitherto sheltered and obscured him. Sometimes my dream-setting was mediaeval or oriental, or in faery lands forlorn; sometimes —most often still—it was dear old Northchester; it never came from the real world, or from historical periods of which I had substantial knowledge.

  I lingered late in bed to remain in these elflands of my mind; I dreamed along the streets; in the summer evenings, after struggling vainly perhaps with a poem, I took an old racquet and tennis ball and went out and played by myself against the stable wall. (I had outgrown my bicycle and my family derided the idea of renewing it.) My father sometimes stood at the back door for a few moments, watching my game, which from so much practice had become skilled and vigorous, with a perplexed and as
tonished air; he suggested to me once that it was perhaps rather a childish occupation for a lad of eighteen, but I looked so mutinous and sulky at this that he withdrew his criticism, saying hastily that the fresh air and exercise would no doubt do me good. Sometimes, too, a figure might vaguely be seen flitting behind the curtains at the Darrells’ upper windows; it was Beatrice, whose mother’s illness now kept her much indoors. To be watched in this way embarrassed me, since the presence of others always recalled me to the real world; still, when they withdrew the moment of return was so exquisite as to be almost worth the period of abstention which preceded it. The trumpets sounded, the rich romantic music played, the cloudy grey West Riding sky warmed to a deep dusky blue clad in the beauty of a thousand stars, young Etherington in doublet and hose—shabby but undaunted, or superbly brocaded in his moment of triumph—tossed back his lock of golden hair and poured out noble words into the ear of his king or his love. This last figure had now come into shadowy existence; rich, noble, beautiful and older than Etherington, she was a lonely princess who had never before found anyone she could trust.

  I poured all this out into a poem called Monday and Persepolis, a crude and childish piece which yet shows some strength of feeling, some beating of the wings; the shabby, insignificant, obscure young man of the poem, going to drab work on Monday morning, yet held all the kingdoms of the world in fee by the power of his imagination; he rode in triumph through Persepolis or turned the coloured jewels on his fingers in the firelight, while buying a bus ticket or adding columns of figures recording sordid transactions. It will be seen that I had discovered Christopher Marlowe; while fully aware that I did not share his turbulent genius, could never aspire to his mighty line, I felt an especial kinship with him and rejoiced that his name was the same as my own. Was not his Dr. Faustus, like myself, a man fretted by the limitations of real life, who sold his soul to the devil in order to enjoy all possible experience to the full stretch of his faculties?

  It did sometimes occur to me to wonder whether I too was selling my soul to the devil, but I did not take this seriously until one wintry afternoon in the February of 1913 when, my father and I returning cold and morose from the mill, we found my mother lying in a stupor—I hate to write a drunken stupor, but it is the truth—on the rug before the dining-room fire. She hardly seemed to breathe; her left hand lay gently on her breast; the hot red fire, still and sinking, cast a rich glow on her handsome face, picked out the wedding ring on her finger, brought gleams from the dark mass of her hair. She seemed to me infinitely pathetic as she lay there, and I knelt down beside her with true love for her in my heart. My father knelt too, and between us we raised her to the settee.

  “So you know, Chris? You mustn’t think too hardly of her, my boy,” said my father in a low tone.

  “I don’t, father.” (If only he knew, I thought angrily, how little I blamed her, how much I blamed him!)

  “The habit saps the will,” continued my father. “After a time, resistance to temptation becomes impossible; beyond one’s powers.”

  At the time I felt nothing but impatience for this hypocritical moralizing, as I felt it to be, but as I lay in bed that night, sleepless with sorrow for my mother—who would have to leave us again, my father said, for another cure—the picture of her lying in the fire’s red glow, at ease, relaxed, far from the troubles and disappointments of her real life, haunted me. She looked as I felt when I stepped into my private world. I was her son; perhaps I had inherited this capacity, this longing for withdrawal, from her. Perhaps drink was to her what daydream was to me.

  The moment I had made this connection—and at the same time the words “only connect!” flashed into my mind from Howards End which I had recently been reading—I sat up, appalled; for if it were true, if daydreams were like drink to me, then my father’s words of comment applied not only to my mother but to myself. I flashed my mind back over my recent doings and saw that this was true. I wasted hours of time in these puerile fancies, I neither wrote nor read as much as I had done a year ago; the habit of fantasy had struck its claws into me, I was becoming daily less able to resist its temptation; I should never make anything of my life, never escape from my obscure and joyless destiny, unless I gave up this private vice and devoted myself to active living in the real world. The fate of the Lady of Shalott, a day dreamer who perished at the direct sight of real life, flashed across my mind to confirm me in this view. Sternly I there and then made the resolution to cease my dreams.

  During the next few days, before my mother left us, I spent much time with her. If her temptation was like mine, I reasoned, the presence of a companion would keep it at bay. That I was right in this, I judged when I saw the faint frown of weariness which appeared on her forehead after a few minutes of my company; like me, she wished to be alone so as to sink into her consoling world.

  My father took her away, and I embarked on one of the sternest struggles of my life. My diary reveals it clearly enough. February 20: I therefore decided to cut out dreams for good. February 23: So far have kept off dreams. March 2: Being without dreams gives me a strained and homesick feeling. March 3: Awoke early and dreamed a little. April 10: In the night dreams to an increasing degree. It won’t do. I must pull up. Perhaps if I began to write something? May 3: Made an effort to check dreams again. May 10: Have now been without dreams for a week. I am pleased with my firmness but the loneliness and unhappiness which result are almost more than I can bear. May 12: Alas, I gave in and dreamed at the mill to-day.

  This last occasion I recall only too well. I had been sent on a message of rebuke down to our firer in the yard, and on my return heard, from outside the office, my father talking within in the kind of voice he kept for customers. Not wishing to disturb the interview, particularly as the firer’s message, about the quality of the coal supplied him, was not one to arouse confidence in a customer, I waited outside, leaning against the wall in an attitude of weariness and dejection. I was indeed desperately tired, for my mental fight was most exhausting— and most difficult to terminate; no sooner had I expelled temptation from one corner of my mind than it sneaked back in another. Each night I read far into the early hours until fatigue should overpower me and leave me no time to succumb to temptation; in the day, I rushed about hither and thither, learned and repeated poems, read the stiffest works of history and economics I could find, so as to obtain a sense of relaxation and enjoyment when I turned in the late evening to poetry and fiction. As I leaned there, then, tired, lonely and wretched, the insidious temptation yet again attacked me. “O God,” I cried silently, recognizing it, “let father finish with this man soon!” But this petition was not answered; the voices in the office continued to sound; suddenly, with a rush of exquisite delight, a delight that was almost bodily, I flung wide the gates of Northchester and stepped within.

  The battle continued for eighteen months, and I must admit that I lost it. For God, whom I often, humbly and seriously and intensely, invoked, was not, it seemed, on my side. He sent no help. He did not terminate my father’s conversation that afternoon a moment sooner, though it would have saved me from relapse. I prayed: Deliver me from temptation, but temptation continued thickly to strew my path. God often contrived that my father should stay late at the mill, talking to John, and when I hung around, waiting for him so as not to meet the temptation of walking home alone, urged my father to say testily: “Be off with you, Chris! Surely you can take yourself to Walker Lane without getting lost!” One should never, I knew, pray for release from ills but only for strength to conquer them. I kept all the rules, I only asked to be strengthened in my fight for my soul; but the heavens remained silent to my plea, grey and chilly like the West Riding sky, and no God-given strength was forthcoming.

  One evening in the early autumn of that year I put God to a final test. After a night and day of sickening struggle, I found myself alone in the house, my father having gone to fetch my mother home. Once my mother returned, I felt that my struggle would be eased;
she would be present in the house, I could seek her company when the battle pressed too hardly on me. I had only to hold out till the morrow, I told myself, and all would be well. Unluckily it was the closing half-day at the Municipal Library, and unluckily also I soon finished the book I was reading—a bibliography at the end had deceived me into thinking I had more pages to read than in fact remained. But why say “unluckily”? Could not God have arranged otherwise? Of course He could, and if He were both all-powerful and all-benevolent, He undoubtedly would have done so. This led me into the old argument about free will; still, if God were all-powerful, I thought stubbornly, He could easily have arranged a little matter like free will—even I, Chris Jarmayne, could think of a solution or two to the old problem. However, if God were not all-powerful, if, though all-benevolent, He was engaged in a life-and-death struggle against the powers of evil, my sympathies were certainly engaged on His side and I was ready to help Him in the fight. This thought being reinforced by the old saying that God helps those who help themselves, which came into my mind just then, I resolved to struggle on unremittingly, and cast round for some means of occupying my mind so that it should not lie empty for the seven devils of daydream to enter. One should not despise simple means, I reflected; so I took a couple of racquets and a tennis ball and going out into the yard knocked at the Darrells’ back door.

  After a pause, it was opened by Beatrice. She looked a little pale, a trifle thin and worn, I thought, and she was wearing a brown dress which did not suit her.

  “Come and play racquets with me, Beatrice,” said I.

  Beatrice smiled and shook her head.

  “Oh, come on! Do, Beatrice. It would give me very great pleasure if you would,” I said with much sincerity. “It’s only a child’s game, of course,” I continued, blushing and feeling very young and awkward: “But the air and exercise would do you good.”