§ 13
Christina Alberta only got to her confession of faith in the studio after they had returned thither and relieved the Universal Aunt. Even then they didn’t settle down to the business all at once. Devizes walked about and looked for drawings by Harold; he deduced Harold from his drawings to a quite remarkable extent, Christina Alberta thought. He was curious about Fay. “What’s Mrs. Crumb like?” he asked. “Show me something of hers, something that seems to give her.”
It pleased Christina Alberta very much to think that he was shy with her. She felt that this was a recognition of her equality. He was respecting her and she was very eager that she should be respected by him.
He got to an anchorage at last in the gaily painted seat by the gas-fire; and Christina Alberta, after flitting about the room for a time, came and stood before it, shapely legs wide apart and hands behind her back in an attitude that would have shocked all her feminine ancestors for many generations. But it did not shock Devizes; he found her more and more interesting to watch, and he sat at his ease and regarded her with a lively admiration. Most of us get used to our daughters so gradually; they grow up and we carry the wonder of them as Milo carried his ox; it isn’t common for a man to get an unexpected daughter abruptly at the age of twenty-one.
She said she hadn’t much in the way of metaphysics; she was a Materialist.
“No prayers at mother’s knee? Religion of Mother and Daddy? School prayers and teaching? Church or chapel?”
“It all washed out and faded out, I think, as they laid it on.”
“No fear of hell? Most of my generation went through the fear of hell.”
“Not a trace of it,” said the New Age.
“But—a desire for God in the night?”
Christina Alberta paused for a little while. “I have that,” she said. “It comes—sometimes. I don’t know whether it’s very important or not important at all.”
“It’s part,” said Devizes slowly, “of something that has to do with wanting to be more than a miserable worm—and disliking meanness—and so forth.”
“Yes. Do you know more about it?”
Rather oddly he didn’t answer that. “And how do you see yourself in relation to mankind—and the animals—and the stars? What sense of obligation have you? What do you think the road is along which you have to go?”
“H’m,” said Christina Alberta. She considered she was a Communist, she said, though she didn’t belong to the Party. But she knew some other young people who did. She produced some of the phrases of the movement, “the materialist conception of history” and so forth. He said he failed to understand and asked rather irritating questions; she thought controversially. She didn’t realize at first how widely apart was their phraseology. As they talked this became apparent. He seemed to have nothing too good to say for the Communist idea, for wasn’t it just his own idea of being a part of a greater being of life? but he seemed to have nothing too bad for practical Communism. Marxist Communism he said wasn’t a constructive movement at all; it was merely a solvent. It had no idea, no plan. Christina Alberta was put on the defensive. “Enthusiasm for an ideal Communist state isn’t nearly so important as the question of immediate Communist tactics in a decaying society,” she recited, in an almost official tone. That was how her young friends in the Party talked. But when she talked like this to him it didn’t seem so effective. He wouldn’t leave her phrases alone. He wanted to know what she meant by decay in a society, whether there had ever been a society not actively in decay and not also actively in growth, what good tactics were except in relation to general strategy and whether there could be any strategy without a clear war-end. She countered more vigorously than effectively and their manner became controversial.
He pressed the difference in their opinions. Communism for him meant a new spirit, a spirit of science reorganizing the world upon scientific collective lines, but the whole temper of party communism was contemporary. It was saturated with the feelings and ideas of existing social classes, with the natural resentment of the dispossessed. It had the angry dogmatism of desperate people not sure of their grip. It needed more of the passion of creative self-forgetfulness. Many Communists, he said, were simply reversed capitalists, egotists without capital; they wanted revenge and expropriation, and when they were through with that they would be left with nothing but social ruins and everything to begin all over again. And they were suspicious and intolerant because of their want of internal assurance. They distrusted their best friends, their proper leaders, scientific men like Keynes and Soddy.
“Keynes a Communist!” cried Christina Alberta in derision. “He doesn’t accept the first scientific fact of the class war.”
“It isn’t much of a fact—certainly not a First Scientific Fact,” he replied. “Keynes builds up slowly a conception of a scientifically organized exchange system. Most of your friends in Russia don’t seem capable even of realizing that such a thing is necessary.”
“But they do!”
“Have they shown it?”
“What do you know of the Russian Bolsheviks?”
“What do you? You just look at the labels on people. Nothing genuine without the red label—and everything genuine with.”
She said he saw things from his “bourgeois” standpoint, and he laughed cheerfully at her social classifications; there was no bourgeoisie in England, he said; she attempted some of the stock cynicisms and sarcasms of the movement but with an unusual lack of conviction. It was easy for him to criticize, she said, living as he did on invested capital.
“It would make it easier,” he smiled. “But really I live on my fees.”
“You have invested capital.”
“Some. I don’t live on it.”
They had exhausted the dispute for a time. After all she reflected she hadn’t put up such a bad fight, considering her age and standing. The momentary glow of controversial exasperation faded again. They drifted to the more immediate question in which they were interested, the question of what she was to do with her life.