§ 12
It was manifest that he was almost as excited as she was at their mutual discovery. The possible proceedings of Sargon, fantastic as they might prove to be when they came to light, remained for him as for her a matter of urgent importance, but the thought of this strange relationship completely overshadowed it. Each had a reciprocal desire to get at the other, to discover what magic of sympathy and understanding might not be latent in their consanguinity.
The evening after the Universal Aunt was installed he took Christina Alberta out to dine with him at a pleasant little Italian restaurant in the corner of Sloane Square, and afterwards he came back to the studio with her and talked until nearly one in the morning. He showed himself shyly anxious to find out her aims and purposes in life, and what she was doing and what might be done to let out her possibilities. He was evidently disposed to shoulder just as much parental responsibility as he could, subject to the preservation of appearances and a proper care for the self-respect of the vanished Sargon. She attracted him and he liked her. Her feelings for him were more tumultuous and abundant and indefinite. She didn’t particularly want help or support from him. The idea of being dependent upon him for anything repelled rather than attracted her, but she wanted to get hold of him, to please and satisfy him, to be better than he had expected and interesting in fresh ways. She wanted him to like her—to care for her more than mere liking. She wanted that anxiously and tremendously.
She liked a sort of ease and confidence he had with waiters and cabmen and the common services of life. He seemed to know just what people would do and they seemed to know just what he would do; there was no tension in these matters, no nervous “h’rrmping.” These common attributes of habitual prosperity were so little in her experience that they seemed a distinction of his; and they threw a flavour of knowing what he was about, and being serenely in control over most of the conversation, when indeed he was as curious and experimental and emotionally stirred almost as she was. The eyes that met hers when she talked were steady, friendly, interested, intimate eyes, and her heart went out to them.
Over the dinner he talked at first about music. He had had no music in his education, and now he was discovering it. A friend of his had been taking him to concerts, and he had got a pianola, “so as to spell it out at home first.” But Christina Alberta’s education had missed out music too, and she hadn’t as yet discovered it. So that topic died out presently. He tried her about pictures, but there again she wasn’t particularly interested. They had a little silence.
He looked across at her and smiled.
“I’d like to ask you all sorts of questions, Christina Alberta, if I dared,” he said.
She blushed—absurdly. “Any questions you like,” she said.
“Immense questions,” he said. “For example—generally—what do you think you are up to?”
She understood what he meant at once. But she was so unprepared with an answer that she became evasive.
“Up to!” she said, playing for time. “I suppose I’m looking for my lost Daddy.”
“But what are you up to generally? What are you doing with your life? Where are you going?”
“I’m at sea,” she said at last. “Lots of my generation are, I think. The girls especially. You are older than I am; I’m only beginning. I don’t want to seem cheeky, but aren’t you better able to say what you are up to? Suppose—” Her slightly scared gravity broke into an impudent smile that Devizes found very congenial—“suppose you play first?”
He considered that. “Perfectly fair,” he said. “I will. Have another olive. I’m glad you like olives. I do too. Nobody’s called me to account for a long time. What is my game? It’s a fair question.”
But not an easy one evidently.
“I suppose one ought to begin right back at one’s philosophy,” he said. “A long story. But I started the idea.”
Christina Alberta was greatly elated at her successful repulse of his projected cross-examination. Instead of making a display herself she could watch him. She watched him over the flowers on the table and had to be nudged by the waiter when he brought the pheasant to her elbow. “How should one begin?” he plunged. She had heard of Pragmatism? Yes. She was probably better read in that sort of thing than he was. He was, he considered, a sort of Pragmatist. Most modern-minded, intelligent people he held were Pragmatists as he understood it. Pragmatist? As he understood it? He met her eye and explained. In this sense he meant it; we, none of us, had a clear vision of reality; nobody perhaps would ever do more than approach reality. What we perceived was just that much of reality that got through to us, through our very defective powers of interpretation. “They’ve done this pheasant en casserole very well,” he broke off. “Three minutes’ truce we ought to give it. Do you find I’m talking comprehensibly? I doubt it.”
“I’m hanging on,” said Christina Alberta....
“Perhaps I’m beginning rather too far off.”
Pheasant....
“To come back to my confession of faith,” he said presently.... “Mind you, Christina Alberta, you’ve got to say your bit afterwards.”
“It won’t be as definite as yours,” she said. “Some of yours I shall steal. But go on—telling me.”
“Well, keep hold, Christina Alberta. I feel I’m going to be at once hesitating and condensed. And I’m not sure of what you know or don’t know. If I say I’m an Agnostic about the nature of the universe, and how it began and where it ends, does that convey anything to you?”
“Just what I think,” said Christina Alberta.
“Well.” He started afresh and got into parenthetical difficulties. The Pêche Melba came to interrupt and permit a fresh start. He unfolded a psychologist’s vision of the world for her inspection, a curious and yet attractive vision to her. He expressed himself in terms of mind and understanding. She was used to hearing everything expressed in terms of labour and material necessity. Life, he said, was one continuous thing, all life was connected. He tried to illustrate that. The conscious life of most lower animals was intensely individual, a lizard, for example, was just itself, just its instincts and appetites; it received no teaching and no tradition, it handed on nothing to its kind. But the higher animals were taught when they were young, learnt and taught others and communicated with each other. Men far more than any animal. He had developed picture-writing, speech, oral tradition, scientific record. There was now a common mind of the race, a great growing body of knowledge and interpretations.
“People like ourselves are just cross-sections of that flow. Individually we receive it, react to it, change it a little, and pass away. We are just passing phases of that increasing mind—which may be for all we can certainly say, an immortal mind. Does this sound like Greek—or nonsense to you?”
“No,” she said, “I think I get the drift of it.” She looked at his intent face. He wasn’t in the least talking down to her; he was simply trying to express himself as well as he possibly could to her. He was treating her like an equal. Like an equal!
That was his general philosophy. He was coming to the question of himself now, he said. He became very earnest over the coffee cups and ash tray on the swept tablecloth. He spread elucidatory hands before her. He was conscientiously explicit. He saw in himself two phases, or rather two levels of existence. Roughly speaking, two. They had links and intermediate stages of course, but they could be ignored when one just wanted to express the idea. First of all, he was the old instinctive individual, fearful, greedy, lustful, jealous, self-assertive. That was the primary self. He had to attend to that primary self because it carried all the rest of him, as a rider must see that his horse gets oats. Deeper lay social instincts and dispositions arising out of family life. That was the second self, the social self. Man, he threw out, is a creature that has become more and more consciously social in the last two or three hundred thousand years. He has been lengthening his life, keeping his children with him longer and longer, enlarging his community from family herds into clans and tribes and nations. The deep-lying continuity of life was becoming more apparent and finding more and more definite expression with this socialization of man. To educate anyone in the proper sense of the word was to make him more and more aware of this continuity. The importance of the passionate feverish self was then reduced. True education was self-subordination to a greater life, to the social self. The natural instincts and limitations of the primary self were in conflict with this wider underflow; education, good education, tended to correct them.
“Here am I,” said Devizes, “as we all are, a creature in a state of internal conflict, quicker, fiercer mortal instincts at issue with a deeper, calmer, less brightly lit, but finally stronger drive towards immortal purposes. And I am—how shall I put it?—I personally am, to the best of my ability, on the side of the deeper things. My aptitudes and temperament and opportunities have brought me to psychology—as a profession. I work to add to the accumulation of human knowledge and understanding about the mind. I work for illumination. My particular work is to study and cure troubled and tangled minds. I try to straighten them out and simplify them and illuminate them. And above all I try to learn from them. I seek the mental or physical cause of their distresses. I try to set down as clearly and accessibly as possible, all I observe and learn. That’s my job. That’s my aim. It gives me a general direction for my life. All the stuff of my mere individual existence I try to subordinate to that end. Not always. My monkey individual gets loose at times and gibbers on the roof. And at other times it’s rather good company as a relief from overwork. Vanity and self-indulgence have their uses. But never mind the monkey now. I do not want to be a brilliant person; I want to be a vital part. That’s my essential creed. I want to be the sort of wheel in the machinery they call a mental expert. As good a wheel as I can be. That’s what I’m up to in general terms, Christina Alberta. That’s what I think I am.”
“Yes,” said Christina Alberta, reflecting profoundly. “Of course I can’t produce a statement like that. You’ve got your system—complete.”
“And finished,” said Devizes. “You’ve got to tell your story in your own way. At your age—you ought to be with loose ends to all your convictions.”
“I wonder if I can tell you any story.”
“You’ve got to try your best now. It’s only fair play.”
“Yes.”
There was a little silence.
“It’s wonderful to talk to you like this,” said Christina Alberta. “It’s wonderful to talk to anyone like this.”
“I feel that you and I—have to understand each other.”
She met his grave eyes for a moment. There was a wave of emotion within her. She could not speak. She reached out her hand to touch his, and for a moment their hands were together.