§ 5
Bobby was recalled to the matter of the talk by a movement in the chair behind him.
Lambone’s smooth voice was explaining: “So that it does not matter so much what we achieve as what we contribute. That cherished personal life which men and women struggle to round off and make noble and perfect, disappears from the scheme of things. What matters more and more is the work one does. What matters less and less is our personal romance and our personal honour. Or rather our honour will go out of us into our work. Our love affairs, our devotions and private passions, for example, will fall more and more definitely into a subordination to our science or whatever our function is. Our romances and our fame and honour will join our vices among the things we suppress. There was a time when men lived for a noble tomb and in order to leave sweet and great memories behind them; soon it will matter nothing to a man and his work to know that he will probably die in a ditch—misunderstood. So long as he gets the work done.”
“With no last Judgment ever to vindicate him,” said Devizes.
“That will not matter in the least to him.”
“I agree. Some of us begin to feel like that even now.”
“Even if one has done nothing worth doing,” said Paul Lambone, and in his voice was that faint quality of the sigh of one who has crowned a rather difficult and uncertain card castle, “even if Sargon had died unrescued in his Asylum and all the world had thought him mad, all the same he would have escaped, his imagination would have touched the imagination of the greater life.”
Came a pause of edification and then a sigh of satisfaction from Miss Lambone. She never understood in the least what her brother was talking about, but she adored him when he talked. Nobody she thought had ever talked like him, or could possibly talk like him. His voice was so clear and bright, like the best sort of print. Only sometimes you wished you had spectacles.
But now Miss Lambone was to receive a shock. Christina Alberta suddenly came out of the silence in which she had been sitting.
“I don’t believe in this,” said Christina Alberta out of the depths of her chair.
Bobby was beginning to know the voice of Christina Alberta very well; and he knew now that she was terrified at having to talk, and at the same time desperately resolved to get something said. He knew too that she was gripping hard at the arms of her chair. He glanced at Devizes and in that instant the lighthouse beam touched his face and Bobby saw it very intent, watching Christina Alberta steadily and as if forgetful of all other things. It was intent and tender and tenderly apprehensive, grave and very pale in that white illumination. When the light had passed away Bobby still seemed to see that face, but now conversely it was a face of ebony.
“I do not believe in any of this,” said Christina Alberta.
She paused with the effect of marshalling her argument. “It is theology, I suppose,” she said. “Or mysticism. It is all an intellectual game that men have played to comfort themselves. Men rather than women. It makes no real difference. Tragedy is tragedy, failure is failure, death is death.”
“But is there ever complete failure?” asked Lambone.
“Suppose,” said Christina Alberta, “suppose a man is thrown into prison and misrepresented to all the world, suppose he is taken away presently and made to dig his own grave, and shot at the edge of it and buried and then lied about for a time and forgotten. It isn’t part of the race that is murdered, it isn’t a wonderful thing that passes on; it is a man who has been killed and made away with. Your mysticism is just an attempt to dodge the desolation of that. It doesn’t. Such things have happened. They happen to-day. In Russia. In America. Everywhere. Men are just wiped out, body and soul, hope and will. That man and his black personal universe are done with and over, and there is an end to his business; he is beaten and wiped out, and all the clever talk upon easy sofas in the warm twilight will not alter that one jot. It is frustration. If I am frustrated I am frustrated, if I have desires and dreams and they are defeated and die, I die. It is playing with words to say I do not die or that they are changed and sublimated and carried on into something better.”
“My dear,” said Miss Lambone to Miss Means. “You are sure you are not feeling cold?” Her voice conveyed a faint intimation that she would cease to be acutely interested in the talk if this chit of a girl intervened any further in the discussion, and that she would begin to do things with wraps and shawls and break up the meeting.
“I’m perfectly happy, dear,” Miss Means answered. “All this—! I wish it could go on for ever.”
But Christina Alberta disregarded Miss Lambone’s warning. She had something to say and there was some one she wanted to say it to, not too pointedly, not too plainly.
“All this theology, this religion, the new religions that are only the old ones painted over——”
“Reborn,” said Paul.
“Painted over. I don’t want them. But that is not what I want to say. What I want to say is that you are wrong about my Daddy, you are quite wrong about him. That I do know. Mr. Lambone has dressed him up to suit his own philosophy. He had that philosophy long before he knew him. And you talked my Daddy over and put Mr. Lambone’s ideas into him when he was beaten and broken because they suited his case. They weren’t there before. I know him and exactly how he thought. I was brought up on him. He talked to me more than to anyone. And it is all nonsense to talk of him—his exaltation, as being like the great soul coming like the tidal sea into the pool of the little soul. It didn’t. When he said he was Lord of the World he wanted to be Lord of the World. He didn’t want to incorporate any other people at all—or be incorporated. He was just as exclusively himself when he was Sargon as when he was Albert Edward Preemby. More so.... And I believe that is how it is with all of us.”
She went on rather hurriedly, for she knew there were forces there very ready to silence her.
“I want to be myself and nothing else. I want the world—for myself. I want to be a goddess in the world. It does not matter that I am an ugly girl with natural bad manners. It does not matter that it is impossible. That is what I want. That is what I am made to want. One may get moments anyhow. A moment of glory is better than none.... I believe that sort of thing is what you all want really. You just persuade yourselves you don’t. And you call that religion. I don’t believe anyone has ever believed religion from the beginning. Buddhism, Christianity, this fantastic Sargonism, this burlesque religion you invent to make an evening’s talk, they are all consolations and patchings-up—bandages and wooden legs. People have tried to believe in such religions no doubt. Broken people. But because we cannot satisfy the desires of our hearts—why should we cry ‘Sour grapes’ at them?
“I don’t want to serve—anything or anybody. I may be heading for frustration, the universe may be a system of frustration, but that doesn’t alter the fact that this is how I feel about it. I may be defeated; it may be certain that I shall be defeated—but as for bringing a contrite heart out of the mess and starting again as a good little part of something—I don’t fink. Oh, I know I beat my hands against a wall. It’s not my fault. Why don’t we take? Oh, why don’t we dare?”
Miss Lambone stirred and rustled.
The darkness that was Devizes spoke to Christina Alberta, and Miss Lambone became still.
“We don’t take and we don’t dare,” he said, “we don’t defy laws and customs because there are other things in our lives, in us and not outside us, that are more important to us. That is why. It pleases Paul to dress up his view of these things in old mystical phrasing, but what he says is really an unscientific way of putting psychological fact. You think you are simple, but you are really complex. You are the individual but you are the race also. That is your nature and mine and everyone’s. The more our intelligence awakens the more we know that.”
“But it is the difference that is distinctively me, and not the general part. The race in me is no more to me than the ground I walk on. I am Christina Alberta; I am not Woman or Mankind. As Christina Alberta, I want and I want and I want. And when the door is slammed upon my imaginations I cry out against it. Why pretend I give up a thing because I can’t have it? Why make a glory of renunciation and letting-go? I hate the idea of self-sacrifice. What is the good of coming into the world as Christina Alberta just in order to sacrifice being Christina Alberta? What is the good of being different if one is not to live a different life?”
Unexpectedly Miss Lambone intervened, “The life of a woman is one long sacrifice,” she said.
There was a pause.
“But we have the vote now?” said Christina Alberta almost flippantly. “Why is a woman’s life sacrifice?”
“Think of the children we bear,” said Miss Lambone in a constrained voice.
“Well!” said Christina Alberta, and suppressed some scandalous remark.
“The most astonishing thing about us,” she broke out again, after a pause; “the most astonishing thing in the feminine make-up is that hardly any of us do seem to want children. A lot of us anyhow don’t. Now that I am beginning to learn something about biology, I realize how marvellous that is. As a race of creatures specialized for children, we ought to be eaten up by the desire for children. As a matter of fact most modern women will do anything to avoid having children. We dread them. To me they seem like a swarm of hidden dwarfs, prepared to come upon me and eat up my whole existence. It’s not simply I don’t want them; I live in fear of them. Love we may want. Many of us do. Intensely. We want to love and be loved—to get close and near to some one. It’s a delusion I suppose. One of Nature’s clumsy tricks. It is all a delusion. He vanishes—he was never there. Under the old conditions it availed; it got the children Nature wanted. But we don’t think of children. We don’t want to think about them. There it is! And anyway children do not take a woman out of her egotism; they only extend and intensify it. I have known intelligent girls marry and have children, and when the baby appeared their minds evaporated. They became creatures of instinct, messing about with napkins. I could scream at the thought of it. No, I am an egoist pure and simple. I am Christina Alberta, and her only. I am not Sargon. I refuse altogether to mix with that promiscuous anybody-nobody.”
“After all that may only be a phase in your development,” said Devizes.
“It is the only one I know.”
“That is evident. But I assure you, Christina Alberta, that this revolt and distress of yours is a phase. You are talking rebellion and egoism and anarchism as a healthy baby screams to get breath into its lungs, and escape from the stuffiness of old air. The baby doesn’t know why it screams and no doubt finds some dim little grievance in its brain——”
“Go on,” said Christina Alberta. “Chastise me and chastise me.”
It seemed to Bobby that there were tears in her voice.
“No, but you are so young, my dear,” said Devizes.
My dear!
“Not so young. Not so actually young,” cried Christina Alberta.
“If I live to be eighty,” said Christina Alberta, “shall I ever be able to feel more than I am feeling now? Why will you always treat me like a child nowadays?”
“Feeling isn’t the only measure,” said Devizes. “Even now, to-night, you are talking below your beliefs. You are not an egoistic adventurer. You take sides on a score of matters. You insist you are a Communist for example.”
“Oh! just to smash up things,” said Christina Alberta. “Just to smash up everything.”
“No. You say that to-night, but you have told me differently before. You have a care for the world. You want to help forward the common interest. You develop a passion for scientific truth. Well—there’s no way of fencing in your individuality from other minds in science or in public affairs. You’re a part by necessity; you can’t be a complete whole. You find already you can’t keep away from these things. They will take you more and more, whether you like it or not, because it is the spirit of the time. That is what is happening to us all. You can’t escape. Our work, our part, is the first thing in our lives. To that, pride must bow now and passion and romance. We have to slam and lock and bar the door against all personal passion that might wreck our work. Bar it and put it out of your mind. As a secondary thing. Work. Give the greater things a chance to keep you.”
“That’s all very well.”
“It’s everything.”
“Why should they keep me?” came from Christina Alberta, sullenly and resolutely.
“I know that this is your faith,” she said. “You told me all about it. You’ve always told me about it.” Bobby’s quick ear detected a change in her voice “Do you remember our first talk together? Do you remember our talk in Lonsdale Mews? When we dined together at that Italian place? That night. Just after we had found each other.”
Found each other?
“But I did not know then that your faith meant all the suppressions and sacrifices and discretions it seems to do. I thought it was something robust and bold. I did not understand its—qualifications. But since then we have argued about these things and argued. That day at Kew Gardens. That day when you took me for that walk over the downs to Shere. We have threshed things out. Why should we argue again? I am giving in—what can I do but give in?—and soon I will be a Sargonite with you and Paul. But not this summer. Not now. This night—This wonderful first night of summer. To-night I rebel against any renunciation, any fobbing-off of individuals with second-best things. I am going to be impossible and absurd. For the last time. I want the world from the stars to the bottom of the sea for myself, for my own hungry self. And all between. The precious things between. The love.... There!”
Vague questions appeared and vanished again on the screen of Bobby’s mind. What had Christina Alberta renounced? What was she renouncing? What was anyone renouncing? And had his ears cheated him, or had Devizes called her, “my dear”? In front of Margaret Means and in face of all the circumstances of the case it seemed to Bobby that Devizes was the last person who ought to call Christina Alberta “my dear.” And what was this about “fobbing-off”? Was this really a shameless plainness of speech, an atrocious confession, or something that he misunderstood?
Miss Lambone stirred uneasily.
It was as if an evil spirit possessed Christina Alberta. “Oh, damn renunciation!” she said with bitter gusto.
They seemed to be sitting for some moments in a profound silence, and then the nightingale became very audible.