THE HAPPY HIGHWAYS
 
 THE 
 HAPPY HIGHWAYS 
 
 BY 
 
 STORM JAMESON 
 
 Into my heart an air that kills 
 From yon far country blows: 
 
 What are those blue remembered hills, 
 What spires, what farms are those? 
 
 That is the land of lost content, 
 
 I see it shining plain, 
 The happy highways where 1 went 
 And cannot come again. 
 
 From "A Shropshire Lad" 
 By A. E. Housman. 
 
 NEW YORK 
 
 THE CENTURY CO. 
 
 1920
 
 Copyright, 1920, by 
 THE CENTOBY Co.
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 BOOK I IRRESPONSIBILITY 
 
 BOOK II THE EIKONOKLASTS: A SCHEME . . . 
 BOOK III CHAOS 

 
 BOOK I 
 IRRESPONSIBILITY
 
 THE HAPPY HIGHWAYS 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 I HAVE made three beginnings to my book. Each morning of 
 the past week I have taken myself and my papers to the side 
 of the beck and tried to make order from the headlong memories. 
 I meant this to be a book of youth, and I tried first to put into 
 words the quality of days when thoughts stir and whisper along 
 the mind from old unfathomable memories, and the leashed blood 
 strains and leaps in an ecstasy older and more cunning than the 
 eldest speech. The wind blew my papers over the green shoots 
 of the daffodils, and as I lay face downwards on the cool earth 
 there came only the brave unforgotten colors of the past. . . . 
 
 The moor road twists and climbs between stark trees, and at 
 the foot of the last slope the boy broke into a run. He reached 
 the top and stood mute. Below him the red roofs and narrow 
 streets of the town went down to the edge of the bay. The risen 
 sun had passed behind low-hung clouds: its rays poured down 
 and rimmed the waiting sea with silver. And as he watched, 
 there came across the waters a glory that he could hardly bear . . . 
 
 Now I remember the nightly journeys from school in the train 
 that rushed and rocked along the cliffs. There came a point 
 in the journey when the lights of the valley leaped out of the 
 darkness and stirred in me such a passion of formless desires 
 and wild, inarticulate ambition that I held my breath in some- 
 thing liker pain than pleasure. The train sweeps round the 
 corner, and the little town, sunk in the enchanted night, has 
 fled back into the darkness. . . . 
 
 I set myself to write of the last days in those trenches I shall 
 not see again. I failed once more a curious failure. For 
 three days after they told me I had lost my sight, I was afraid 
 to think. I lay in bed, trying to get out of my head that image 
 of a dark curtain, dropped between me and the life I hungered 
 
 3
 
 4 THE HAPPY HIGHWAYS 
 
 for. I was desperately afraid that I should begin to tear at it 
 with my hands, struggle, rave ... I am twenty-seven, and I 
 loved the things of the earth. 
 
 And on the fourth morning I woke to find myself at the other 
 side of the curtain. That is the only way I can get into words 
 the sense of lightness and freedom that came to me. I had no 
 illusions. I knew that my sight was gone for good, and yet I 
 was suddenly and strangely freed of an intolerable burden. The 
 blood, the squalor, the things I had suffered, all the sights and 
 sounds of the war were gone from my mind. I was free of them. 
 I laughed aloud. The gods that had taken my eyes had given 
 me back the heart of a child. . . . 
 
 There was something almost tangible in my happiness. I 
 thought about it, fingered it, feared to lose it. My waking 
 thoughts were always of it. I had a forlorn dread of the curtain 
 that had dropped behind me, a dread that did not leave me for 
 many weeks. It faded in its turn. I stood on hills I had known 
 and half forgotten, and drew again from the fresh, inexhaustible 
 sources of my life. In my black hours, in my moments of sav- 
 age revulsion and regret, I am held above the wrecking madness 
 of despair. I know that there are men for whom the curtain has 
 not lifted. There was young Gladding: he got shrapnel in his 
 face: I helped to carry him to the dressing station. I found out 
 the other day that he had shot himself. He was a pretty little 
 fool, and he had been proud of his good looks. God rest his soul : 
 the war is unkind to pretty fools who have not the merit of high 
 birth. 
 
 Thus it comes about that I can no more write of the war than 
 of a life I have never known. During the last week I have had 
 here two men: one who will not go back to France for many 
 months, and an airman who is on his way now. The first man is 
 suffering from shell-shock. He sat in my quiet room and talked 
 almost without ceasing. At times the hurried, eager voice rose 
 until it filled the room. "You remember the trenches in that 
 first winter," he said "no, of course you don't; you men that 
 went out in 'fifteen don't know anything about war. Mud! 
 There has never been mud like that in 'fourteen. You could n't 
 walk along the communication trenches. When you were re-
 
 IRRESPONSIBILITY 5 
 
 lieved you crawled along the top of the trench. The men fell 
 into shell holes in the dark. You had to leave them there. 
 If a man went back to help he fell in and the mud got him too. 
 I still hear them screaming for help. It's a funny thing, you 
 know, but they always called for their mothers when they were 
 nearly gone. You 'd think that was all cant, would n't you? 
 But it isn't, you know. I heard 'em. Screaming in the dark. 
 * Mother oh, God mother, mother ! ' He shouted with 
 laughter at the memory, catching his breath and trying to talk 
 as he shook and rocked in his chair. 
 
 The airman talked as much, but in a different way. He was 
 naively sure of my interest in the details of his adventures, and 
 he had a trick of vivid narrative. " Everything below was a 
 great black slate " r he was observing a battery at night " with 
 tongues of flame licking at the darkness." I imagined him sweep- 
 ing his hand at the rushing shadows. 
 
 I heard both these men with the same sense that I was listening 
 to tales of an alien world. I had no part or lot with them.
 
 CHAPTER II 
 
 f I ^HERE is no war in my world. It is the world in which I 
 _|_ lived in 1910, only a little wiser, a little less assured, more 
 insistent in its needs, more articulate in its desires. 
 
 We were students then at the college in the Strand four 
 men and a girl, sharing rooms in Herne Hall, walking every 
 morning over Denmark Hill to catch the Chalk Farm 'bus to 
 town, quarreling, arguing, working, and intent on seeing life 
 with an earnestness that defeated its own ends. Michael, Oliver 
 and I are brothers : Margaret was our friend at school. Anthony 
 Calvert we had met first at college and gathered into the clan. 
 
 We wanted our ideas on life to be ordered and spacious and 
 truthful after the best models. We were very severe on what 
 Mick called the healthy-minded, who are so wrapped round in 
 irrational satisfaction with things as they seem, that they never 
 by any chance see through their impenetrable ignorance to the 
 struggling, incalculable thing that is life. How much superior 
 our own disinterested understanding! 
 
 We waxed mightily hot in that room hung above the gray 
 quadrangle of King's. These were the days when the Scheme 
 was hovering just outside the circle of our consciousness, waiting 
 for the words that should discover and draw it in. We sat in 
 the dark round a vast fire, and the warm glow flung sharp lights 
 and shadows on the faces of the men. My thoughts of the social 
 struggle are inextricably mixed up with that warm shadowed 
 room and the plunge into the chequered radiance of the Strand. 
 After one of these gatherings we were filled with exhilaration as 
 we pushed our way along the crowded pavement. 
 
 We looked eagerly into the faces of the men and women whose 
 souls we meant snatching, willy-nilly, from a strangling civiliza- 
 tion. The exhilaration lasted while we stood on Waterloo Bridge 
 and looked from the dappled water to the brooding spaces of 
 
 6
 
 IRRESPONSIBILITY 7 
 
 the sky: but always as we went on it slipped from us, and in the 
 exhausted squalor of Walworth Road left us naked and ashamed. 
 
 With these memories come others of the darkened byways, 
 the little cafes and eating-houses that took hold on our affections. 
 We were always very poor: the Trocadero stood for us on un- 
 attainable and shining heights. I remember now the shock of 
 disappointment with which I looked round when I went there 
 for the first time, a subaltern on leave, my pockets full of good 
 money. In those other days we sought out small cafes in side 
 streets. There was the little eating-house in Greek Street with 
 the Italian name and the Russian proprietor. Deluded into be- 
 lieving.xhat we were Nihilists, he let us have his inner room for 
 hours every evening, until one day we found the place stripped 
 bare and deserted, vanished in the night. There was Biucchi's 
 in Brixton, where Margaret and I once sat at midnight and ate 
 roast chicken that we could not afford. And in Richmond was 
 a cafe where they took a shilling and set no limit to appetite. 
 It was frequented by lovers who hungered for the food of the 
 gods and ate nought else, but the system broke down when we 
 came. 
 
 Once we gave ourselves a dinner in the private room of another 
 Soho cafe. We chose it for its name, and I have forgotten it. 
 Margaret sat at the head of the table in a thin black dinner 
 gown. Her gaiety topped ours: there was about her a lift and 
 surge of excitement that flooded up in her voice and gestures 
 from a hidden source. We had with us two guests we had not 
 seen before that night and never saw again. One was a poet. 
 Oliver had found him wandering round Drury Lane, singing for 
 his supper. Mick brought the other. His guest was an old 
 shrunken man. He had stopped Mick in the Strand when Mick 
 was hurrying to the dinner. 
 
 ** Honest to goodness," Mick told him, " I have n't a penny in 
 the world." He turned out his pockets for all the world to 
 see. " You 'd better come and have some dinner." 
 
 The old wretch came. He ate and drank, and a change took 
 place in him. His cheeks filled out and his eyes gleamed in 
 their narrowed sockets. He began to talk in a voice like the 
 roar of a 'cello.
 
 8 THE HAPPY HIGHWAYS 
 
 "Once I was young," said he; "I had a little sweetheart. 
 She 'd bright blue eyes and golden hair." 
 
 " Her eyes were tawny and her face was pale," the poet inter- 
 rupted drowsily. 
 
 " Go to, thou old eater of life, I tell you her eyes were blue 
 blue as the sky above and her hair was the color of the corn 
 beneath. We lay on the grass and the warm earth lived through 
 us. Now she is ugly and withered and hateful in my sight. I 
 tread stones instead of grass, and the earth will be cold when I lie 
 on it next. I came to London in the spring. The rain had 
 washed the streets. The sun shone on the roofs of the houses, 
 on the bridles of the prancing horses, on the yellow flowers in 
 the windows. It glittered on the little pools and they vanished 
 like Semele. The motor-cars went by in a flash of light. The 
 people walked on light feet, exhilarated by the life whirling past 
 them in the sunshine." 
 
 The poet was writing quatrains on the gray wall-paper. He 
 wrote 
 
 Even as a dead leaf in the autumn eve, 
 The lifetime of a man soon drifts away. 
 
 Full soon the vesper bells call us to grieve, 
 And two and two the people go to pray. 
 
 The old man nodded his head. 
 
 " Quite right," he murmured. " She wears a little cotton 
 glove and you share her hymn-book. The sheep are nibbling at 
 the graves outside, and one goes pattering across the flagstones 
 like a mincing lady in high shoes. The scent of meadow-sweet 
 comes through the open window, and the choir sings The da-ay 
 thou ga-avest, Lo-ord " 
 
 Yet still alone, and wandering o 'er the earth, 
 Steeped in the wind, the sky, the sun and sea, 
 
 I sing in wayward, solitary mirth, 
 The songs of things as they seem good to me. 
 
 "You lie! " the other roared. "You were never steeped in 
 anything but drink. You never see the sky for the electric sky 
 signs. You never wandered in your life but between Battersea
 
 IRRESPONSIBILITY 9 
 
 and Bow. You never stood on a cliff and hugged the wind to 
 your body. You old stealer of youth! You trader of youth for 
 a rotten sonnet! " 
 
 Mick was staring at his guest in whimsical perplexity. 
 
 "What is youth?" he asked. "When one is old, what is 
 youth? " 
 
 The poet opened his mouth to answer, but the old man pushed 
 him back against the wall. 
 
 " Youth is wine to be poured away. Youth is the old heady 
 wine of the earth. Youth is the chalice whereinto the earth 
 empties herself. . . ." 
 
 Margaret laughed suddenly, and said in her high clear voice 
 that it' was really much simpler than that to be young. Her 
 laugh pricked the old maniac's excitement. He sat down and 
 picked with his fingers at the tablecloth. 
 
 I do not remember much about the dinner, except that we 
 talked, laughing and quoting poetry, until the short summer night 
 slipped under the wings of the dawn. It was an impatient dawn, 
 beating against the fiery ribs of the east. We set off towards 
 it down the road as lightly as if we had behind us a night of sleep 
 and not a night spent talking nonsense over candles guttering 
 out on a disordered dinner-table. There were houses on either 
 side of us, and frowsy Life rubbed her eyes in the alleys. But 
 the road might have run between eld fields and beech-trees. It 
 might have been the good road to the north, with the north wind 
 blowing back our hair. We should not have trod it more gaily.
 
 CHAPTER III 
 
 MY father was an amiable fool. 
 That is not quite true; he was a Hearne, and the black 
 Hearne temper drowsed in him. As he grew older, the thought 
 of his failure was a devil's goad. He fell into rages black as 
 the storms that tear suddenly from the still waters of the sky 
 and lash the crouching moors in fury. Then we fled before him. 
 There was one clear hot morning when Michael and I ran, stum- 
 bling, across the open moor. As we ran we left a trail of blood 
 on the moss and red ling. A horsewhip swished round our legs 
 and cut open our heads. Long after he had caught his foot in 
 a hole and lay cursing with a twisted ankle, we ran, hearing my 
 father's heavy steps in every bound of the black-faced sheep, 
 and in the rush of the water rat through the streams hearing the 
 whistle of his whip. We dragged Oliver between us, hot, and 
 sobbing at every step. He was five years old and very fat. His 
 plump little body shrank in terror from the whip. When at last 
 we rested he sat digging his round fists into the ground, and rub- 
 bing at his face until earth and tears and tangled red curls made 
 so grotesque an object of him that we laughed, forgetting wounds 
 and hunger. 
 
 Sometimes the black mood came on him at night, and then, 
 rolled together for warmth, we slept out in the old quarry. 
 Sometimes, coming home evil drunk, he sat in the kitchen, watch- 
 ing us with a brooding malice. We waited in stiff-limbed terror, 
 moving on legs that jerked and shook. Suddenly something ir- 
 ritated him, and with a roar, he leaped on the fore-doomed wretch 
 and thrashed him until exhaustion stopped his arm. 
 
 He never struck my mother but once. He had been particu- 
 larly cheerful and affectionate, playing and laughing with us in 
 the afternoon. Then at night, in the warm half-lighted kitchen, 
 the evil spirit took him. He sat looking at us with glazed eyes. 
 Mick was recovering weakly from a heavy chill, and his white 
 
 10
 
 IRRESPONSIBILITY 11 
 
 face was an offense. He cowered in his chair when the mad 
 thing turned on him. My mother sprang to her feet. 
 
 " You touch him," she said, " you touch him." 
 
 She spoke in an expressionless voice and her eyes were fixed 
 on my father with an intense burning passion. He stopped short 
 in his torrent of words and stepped back. A hesitant, furtive 
 look crossed his face. Then he smiled. He struck my mother 
 lightly on either ear. 
 
 "Will you be pleased to sit down?" he said, with a thin, 
 evil mockery in his voice. 
 
 He set a chair and bowed, and smiled into her face. She 
 shivered, and half slipped into the chair. He took a rope from 
 the table*" drawer and bound her quickly, talking all the while 
 in a gentle voice. He left a long end of rope, and after knotting 
 it in several places, advanced slowly towards Mick. 
 
 " Mother and child," he said. " So bound together." 
 
 The murderous knotted end hung in the air. In another 
 moment it would have cut down on the terrified boy. But in 
 that moment something happened to me. A vibrant noise that 
 had been running in my head, stopped. I saw everything with 
 great distinctness. Hatred of my father pulsed through my limbs. 
 I stepped across to him, and caught the uplifted arm. 
 
 The room swam before me. Mick's white face, my mother's 
 straining body, merged with the shadows of the chairs into a 
 malignant fantasy. I realized that I was rising of six feet tall 
 and strong beyond my fourteen years, while he was but a puny 
 thing with no strength in him but the strength of anger and 
 drink. I shook him until he was limp and detestable. 
 
 " Bea n't to strike 'un," I said monotonously, " bea n't to 
 strike 'un." 
 
 I heard my mother wailing, but it was far-off and thin, like 
 the wail of the lost soul that goes crying in a curlew's shape. 
 When I let him go, he turned and staggered out of the house. 
 His drunken steps carried him into the low brook, and he lay 
 there, half in and half out of the water, all night long. 
 
 The night started a mischief in his body that must have been 
 latent, and within four months he was dead of quick consumption. 
 He lay dying a week. We shrank from him. On the day he
 
 THE HAPPY HIGHWAYS 
 
 died he asked for us. We slunk into the room, uneasy and 
 ashamed. The pinched, colorless face between the pillows stared 
 furtively at death. He looked tired, as if life had already ebbed 
 far from him, and he lay stretched along the void, listening to 
 its slow-receding shallows. Under the piled-up bed clothes his 
 thin legs were the wrack flung by the surf, drying in the sunlight 
 of death. 
 
 His breath was loud, as if he sucked in water and tried to 
 breathe it out again. With an impatient movement of his hand, 
 he had us kneel on the floor at the head of his bed. In his sunken 
 eyes flickered the cracked, distorted love for the dramatic and 
 fantastic face of things that had pricked him oddly all his life. 
 He passed his hand over our heads in turn. 
 
 ' 'T is a good lad," he murmured to Oliver, and to Michael 
 " Unstable as water thou shalt not excel." 
 
 I shivered in the hot August sun as the cold fingers pressed 
 upon my head. 
 
 " Art hard, Joy," he said. " Art too hard. Shall suffer for V 
 
 An intolerable pity rose in my throat. " Father " I said, 
 and with a blind groping " Feyther." 
 
 His face twitched. "The larch trees, Joy? " he said. "Hast 
 forgotten, eh, lad? " 
 
 Queer he should remember that then. I was a sullen, slow 
 baby, and would not learn to talk, but one day as he lifted me 
 to touch the feathery green of the young larches I put my arms 
 round his neck, and said " Feyther." It pleased him, and he 
 boasted of it. I do not think that a man has much real love for 
 his sons, but maybe his first-born takes a hold on him the others 
 do not. 
 
 After they went he kept me in the room. I persuaded my 
 mother to go and rest a while. As the room darkened he seemed 
 to get restless. I think his ears strained after that distant, ebb- 
 ing murmur. His face glistened. " Have made a mess of 
 things," he panted. 
 
 "Don't talk," I said. 
 
 " I must talk, now or not again. I want to talk. Have spoiled 
 things, failed in all my hand turned to. My fault: I broke my 
 bargains. Life is a question of bargains. You say to her ' I
 
 IRRESPONSIBILITY 13 
 
 will do so much work. Mind and body. And you will give me so 
 much ease.' I was to till the earth. I broke the bargain: with 
 my mind that was trained to it ; with Life that expected it. So she 
 was free of our contract. I broke it. She owed me nothing. 
 The same with marriage. You make a bargain : you ought to keep 
 it, no matter how hard. No question of immorality, but a bar- 
 gain 's a bargain. Free love, incompatibility all quibbles. 
 You made a bargain: you ought to keep it. Poor lassie, I have 
 been a disappointment and a torture to her. She worried me, she 
 and her moralities. Have turned from her, broken faith, lied. 
 So I broke another bargain." 
 
 He cOnghed, pressing his head against the wall, and opening his 
 mouth wide. 
 
 " Rest," I said, " rest now." 
 He did not notice me. 
 
 " I 've thought, if you were strong you could say to Life 
 * I break all bargains, yet you shall still pay me.' But for the 
 weak, the ordinary men, they must keep their promises or expect 
 nothing. It is just: I understand. When I did not understand, I 
 was strong and comfortable. Now I die, but it is better to un- 
 derstand. Man ought to understand, but not to whine when Life 
 punishes his failure. It may be that those others, the strong ones, 
 pay after all. They say ' I will make Life in my image.' And 
 Life, maybe, slips and changes in their hands." 
 "Tis a hard world," I said. 
 "A just world." 
 
 The room was almost dark now. The light coming through the 
 
 window seemed gathered in one luminous patch on the glistening 
 
 face. On his high forehead, the wisps of reddish hair lay damp 
 
 and flat. A thin dark trickle began from the corners of his mouth. 
 
 " Open the window," he said. 
 
 I set the rattling casement half ajar. The pines were roaring 
 above the hill. 
 
 " T is the sea," he murmured. " The wide sea, that troubles 
 for none of us. Shall wash away my sins." 
 
 A few moments later he asked for a drink. I brought water 
 from the kitchen, and went for my mother. As we came back we 
 heard him say in a high clear voice " The larch trees have tiny
 
 14 THE HAPPY HIGHWAYS 
 
 pink flowers in March." When we reached him, he was dead. 
 
 I think he made a good end. Death is a great sweetener of 
 bad breaths. 
 
 With these memories in our hearts, how should we be aught 
 but different and harder? 
 
 The winter after his death set sharp teeth in our passing 
 childhood. My mother owned a small cottage on the other 
 side of the moor, and we moved into it. Old debts had taken 
 most of the first quarter's rent from the farm. We were hard 
 put to it all that winter and spring. In December an extraor- 
 dinary fall of snow shut us off from the world for a fortnight. 
 No one could reach us from the village four miles away. We 
 stared all day across a world shrunken under a sullen dome of 
 sky. We stifled the fear that rose in us as we looked from the 
 dwindling wood pile to the emptying sack of flour. During that 
 fortnight Mary Elizabeth was born, and lived four days. 
 
 My mother called her Mary Elizabeth, but she died unbap- 
 tized. She was born starved to death. We helped at her 
 birth, and when she died I washed the white frail limbs carefully 
 in a bowl on the kitchen floor, and wrapped them in a clean 
 gown. For two days she lay on the hard sofa, and then we 
 buried her in the snowdrift at the bottom of the garden. That 
 drift must have been twelve feet deep. Oliver wrote an epitaph. 
 
 Here lies Mary Elizabeth Hearne. 
 She is too young and green to burn: 
 Her soul was like an anxious bird, 
 That flies before it shall be snared. 
 
 He meant it well: the hell-fury of the 'Rev. Strut had bitten 
 deep into our minds. 
 
 As we laid her in the drift, a flock of wild geese passed over 
 our heads, black against the gray sky. 
 
 " Quick," Mick cried, his eyes starting in terror from his 
 head " Oh, quick. Cover her up. She 's not baptized. 
 They '11 hunt her, they '11 hunt her." 
 
 We could make fun of the Rev. Strut and his Chief Police- 
 man, but it never entered our heads to doubt the elder, cruel 
 faith. The thought of that terrified child-soul, flying with the
 
 IRRESPONSIBILITY 15 
 
 scudding clouds before the long-necked hounds, brought the 
 sweat out on our bodies in the bitter air. We worked fever- 
 ishly to hide her from the wheeling, screeching torment. 
 
 I remember how she looked when they took her out of the 
 drift a week later. I thought that he had wished for a daugh- 
 ter. I thought that if, after all, there were anything in the 
 parson's faith, how strange that the first of all our family to 
 greet him should be the infant girl he had not lived to see. 
 
 With the memory of that small frozen body in our hearts, how 
 should we not be different and harder?
 
 CHAPTER IV 
 
 WE left our moor village for a small house in the town, and 
 there at school met Margaret Douglass. She was six- 
 teen when she first came to the school and so shy that an unex- 
 pected greeting brought a hot flush to her cheeks, and she would 
 feign ignorance rather than answer a question in class. She cov- 
 ered her shyness with an air of self-possession that amused the 
 whole school. She came on a late train, and through the windows 
 of the sixth form class-room Mick and I watched her saunter down 
 the corridor, push open the door of the fifth form room and make 
 a grave survey of the class before settling herself at her desk. 
 She sat at the desk below Oliver's and she had not been in the 
 school a term before they were open rivals. In all science and 
 mathematical subjects she was hopeless, having had no sort of 
 training in them. But she had been well tutored in Latin and 
 Greek and knew, I suppose, as much of English literature then 
 as most students know at the end of a college course. She had 
 stores of information on odd subjects, and in her delight at the 
 chance of sharing her knowledge wrote essays of abnormal length, 
 full of quaint scraps of philosophy and obscure quotations. Oli- 
 ver's right to the essay and English honors had never been 
 challenged : he resented her bitterly. 
 
 She had been three terms at the school when Michael discov- 
 ered her, as he had it. Extracts from one of her essays were 
 printed in the school magazine, and impressed him as so uncom- 
 monly queer that at the next meeting of the Debating Society he 
 sought her out and walked with her to her rooms. She had by 
 this time given up the daily train journey, going home only at the 
 week-ends. He reported that she had not spoken a word during 
 the whole walk except to thank him gravely for the unnecessary 
 trouble he had taken. But I daresay Mick was entirely unembar- 
 rassed by that. Conversations begun by him soon became mono- 
 logues delivered to a helpless or fascinated audience, 
 
 10
 
 IRRESPONSIBILITY 17 
 
 After that I met them several times, walking on the South Cliff 
 or sitting on the rocks at Cayton Bay. Mick was talking, always 
 talking, with wide explanatory gestures. In the school cap and 
 her long straight coat, Margaret was very like a grave beautiful 
 boy. She listened to him with patient interest, her brows drawn 
 down : now and then she would thrust in an odd apt phrase, but at 
 any attempt to force an opinion from her retired into an un- 
 happy silence. 
 
 Michael talked as water falls. He had has still, I suppose 
 the most restless of minds. I forget how many thousand angels 
 can stand on the point of a pin in the inspired reckoning of the 
 old schoolman, but Mick's mind invented as many theories on 
 slenderer bases than a pin-point of fact. He was five years old 
 when he woke me one night to tell me that he was sure there was 
 no God. Some one had been reading us travelers' tales of the 
 rareness of the Thibetan air, and Mick had reached the conclu- 
 sion that no God could breathe on the celestial heights. " If he 's 
 alive he must breathe. If he 's not alive, he 's only a great lump. 
 Who 's afraid of a lump? Maybe he has gills like a fish." He 
 buried his face in the pillow to smother the crowing laugh that 
 always betrayed him to wakeful adults. I was a year older than 
 he, and I kicked him for blasphemy, but his vision of a finny 
 God stayed with me for weeks. I woke crying with terror from a 
 dream of a clammy cod-faced deity, intolerably slimy and beastly, 
 and in my incoherent relief almost betrayed Mick's depravity. 
 
 Later, in our school days, I reminded him of the episode. He 
 laughed and said, " Well, even the Greeks had the sense to put 
 their gods on a habitable Olympus, though if you were to believe 
 everything Greek scholars told you about them, they were the 
 most imbecile race that ever achieved an undeserved immor- 
 tality." This was just after old Silcox had been trying to per- 
 suade us that Greek actors wore masks because the audience would 
 not otherwise have distinguished hero and villain. 
 
 We had very few books, and Mick's ideas, common cant enough 
 among the rag-tag and bobtail of the advanced, were incredibly 
 audacious to our thinking. We were all natural skeptics, but 
 Mick got excited about his skepticism and insisted upon threshing 
 things put with us. We sat up in bed and discussed the existence
 
 18 THE HAPPY HIGHWAYS 
 
 of God until our eyes were heavy and we fell asleep upon our 
 heresies. I can see now Oliver and Michael, flushed and earnest, 
 scrawling diagrams on the kitchen table and shifting here and 
 there among them a piece of blotting paper soaked in ink. The 
 blotting paper stood for God: they were trying frantically to find 
 a place for him in the universe when vengeance fell upon them for 
 " doing geometry " on the white-scrubbed deal. 
 
 At school, all Mick's interest was absorbed by the science side. 
 Long before we had read Wells' romances his mind was a ferment 
 of such fantastic wayfarings. He began a tale round that idea of 
 a kink in space: he began another about a planet so placed that it 
 acted as a receiver for the thought waves given off by ours: there 
 were to be official receivers and one of them was to kill himself 
 for love of an inaccessible woman whose thoughts he had sensed 
 across the impassable gulfs of the ether. He began a play 
 wherein the characters talked and talked and were racked by wild, 
 inexplicable joys and distresses very like a Dostoievsky novel. 
 At one time he was burning with indignation about the unspeak- 
 able degradations of marriage. He became incoherent at the bare 
 thought of monopolizing the lifetime of a woman, or being monop- 
 olized. Love was a godhead, a crying flame, a passion too sacred 
 for the vile touch of dogma. Later still, he discovered eugenics, 
 and thrust the theory at us until we were heartily sick of it, and 
 Oliver said it was a pity the ideas had n't been enforced in time 
 to prevent Mick. 
 
 He was, of course, a socialist, and of the oldest and most vio- 
 lent order. His tenebrous enthusiasms drove the rest of us into 
 arid wastes of Fabianism. But long before this we were playing 
 on the way to school a game called Bloody Revolution, in which 
 we stormed barricades, dodged and ran through withering fire, 
 and finally, at the top of the school slope, hailed victory and the 
 triumph of the proletariat. We dreamed of cringing Privy Coun- 
 cillors and three heroic, boyish figures who stood on the steps of 
 the Town Hall and announced the new order to a delirious multi- 
 tude. 
 
 I can only make vague guesses at the chaos that Michael's gar- 
 rulous madness wrought in Margaret's brain. For a time there 
 was another girl, a thin, dusky little prude, whom he walked up
 
 IRRESPONSIBILITY 19 
 
 and down the sands and talked to with a certain amount of cau- 
 tion. I suppose his caution failed him, for one day she turned and 
 walked away alone and would never speak to him thereafter. 
 He swore that he did not know how he had offended, but I daresay 
 he knew quite well. After that, he sought Margaret more often 
 and poured out for her all the misty enthusiasms and fantastic 
 visions which his own mind bred. She had never heard of the 
 social problem but she accepted his socialism unquestioning, and 
 even, pale from sheer nervousness, defended him in debate. So- 
 cialism was vastly unpopular in the school and her courage sur- 
 prised us, though we refrained from praising her to her face. In- 
 deed, Mick gave us little chance to say anything to her face. 
 
 I caeie upon them once, standing at the top of the school slope, 
 and caught the words " free love " and " degradation " in Mick's 
 rapid eager voice. Afterwards I remonstrated with him. He was 
 talking about her. 
 
 " You know, Joy," he said, " she 's the queerest kid. She knows 
 a devil of a lot about all sorts of things, but about Life she does n't 
 know as much as a babe of five." 
 
 "Then you ought to be more careful what you talk to her 
 about," I told him. " I heard you talking about free love this 
 morning. What sort of an effect do you suppose that '11 have on 
 the virgin brain? " 
 
 " Well," he said, with a sudden shout of amusement, " do you 
 know what she said to me this morning after I had been holding 
 forth for half an hour? She said, ' If free love is the wonderful 
 deathless feeling you say it is, what is its difference from maf- 
 riage except a few words and a piece of official paper, which you 
 say doesn't count for anything anyway?' Oh, she's quick, I 
 tell you." 
 
 Oliver looked up from his books. 
 
 " She probably does n't take in half of what you say, but she 's 
 sharp enough to pretend she does to please you." 
 
 Mick thought. 
 
 " No," he said slowly, " she takes it in all right. She does n't 
 know anything but books. Maybe Joy 's right it ain't wise to 
 
 fill her up with all these " he hesitated " speculations," he 
 
 finished firmly.
 
 20 THE HAPPY HIGHWAYS 
 
 Some time later he got up to look for a book and said over his 
 shoulder, " I should n't be surprised at anything that girl became. 
 One of these days she 's going to be that self-assured and critical 
 you wouldn't know her. She has flashes of it now. She's just 
 listening. Taking things in. Sort of testing 'em in her mind. 
 She 's discovered that she don't know anything worth knowing. 
 And her mind doesn't seem to be full of conventional ruts like 
 most folks' minds." 
 
 Oliver was heavily sarcastic. 
 
 " Soul development, is it? I 'm sorry for the girl." 
 
 In the scuffle that followed a chair was broken. Souls and free 
 love and other trivial things were forgotten in a common distress. 
 
 After a year and a half at school Margaret went to one of the 
 northern Universities. Michael and I were to have gone to 
 London the same year, but there was no money forthcoming and 
 we stayed on at school. Thus it came about that Margaret had 
 taken her degree a brilliant first while we were only finish- 
 ing our second year. She wrote several letters to Mick, from 
 which he read extracts in support of his belief in her spiritual 
 progress. They were uncommon letters, more the sort of thing 
 one would have expected from a clever boy with flashes of wit, 
 and quick penetrative judgments on men and thoughts. Clearly, 
 Margaret was coming on.
 
 CHAPTER V 
 
 MICHAEL chafed miserably during our last year at school. 
 He looked forward to London with a longing that became 
 almost a fever in the week before we went. He spent his days and 
 the greater part of his nights on the cliffs, and drove my mother to 
 despair by refusing to make any preparation for going. 
 
 " Oh, put something in a box," he said. " I don't care. Joy, 
 you do h. I tell you I can't be bothered." 
 
 My mother's own patience was wearing thin under the strain 
 of getting together a decent sufficiency of clothes, and squeezing 
 pocket-money from empty purses. 
 
 " Be quiet with your something in a box," she said hotly. 
 " Another week of this, and I '11 be the something in a box, and 
 God knows I 'd be glad to rest in a quiet grave away from the lot 
 of ye." 
 
 We went out and walked along the sands past the chiaroscuro 
 of black cliffs, vivid, flitting girls, and red-striped mummers danc- 
 ing on white boards. We pushed past fat men quivering in their 
 bathing-dress and lean men sticking starkly out of theirs. Poor 
 Punch, disinherited and forlorn, strutted madly on his mock stage. 
 We reached the corner of the cliffs and walked into a world sud- 
 denly become round and silent, bounded by cliffs hunched drows- 
 ily below the hazy spaces of the sky. The sleek sea, withdrawn 
 beyond flat rocks, stirred through all the little pools across our 
 way. 
 
 Mick lay face downwards on the warm sand. He was silent for 
 so long that I thought he had gone to sleep, when he rolled over on 
 his back and sat up. 
 
 " I wonder what we '11 be thinking next summer," he said. 
 " Sometimes when I think about London I feel as if I were hang- 
 ing over a void. My mind won't fill it up for me. I feel empty 
 and used-up." 
 
 " Well, it 's your own fault," I answered. " You Ve gone on 
 
 21
 
 22 THE HAPPY HIGHWAYS 
 
 about it until you think London will fall down as you approach, 
 or else vanish." 
 
 "That's just what I do feel. That it will vanish. Turn out 
 as unreal as all this." 
 
 " I don't see anything unreal about this," I said carelessly. 
 
 " No, of course you don't. There 's nothing unreal for you in a 
 world you can paint or try to paint. But I feel sometimes 
 I 've felt for months, as if sea and cliffs and white houses were a 
 kind of illusion, a colored shadow thrown by something lurking 
 behind them. The shadow might vanish, and leave you looking 
 at well, what would you be looking at? It might be something 
 malignant or beastly, or there might be nothing there at all." 
 
 Mick's sense of humor sometimes reached very near the gro- 
 tesque, and sometimes fell abruptly into some hole in his con- 
 sciousness and vanished out of sight. During these lapses his 
 cosmic imagination galloped with him through a nightmare of 
 gloom and foreboding. He saw himself quite seriously as a de- 
 fiant atom in a universe that rolled menacingly over his head. 
 At these times he was a perfectly impossible companion. He 
 sat huddled in a chair, dropping from despair to despair, until 
 the room was a charnel-house of murdered hopes. Consolation 
 was useless and sarcasm unworthy. 
 
 We felt, of course, that he was deliberately posing and postur- 
 ing in his mind. I do not now believe that he was, not any more 
 than we all are, strutting about in our secret thoughts, comforting 
 ourselves for the dread loneliness of man in a world of men. 
 
 There may have been some congenital kink in his mind: my 
 grandfather was given to fits of depression, during one of which 
 he went out and killed all his cattle and every living thing on the 
 farm, while my grandmother and the hired man cowered in the 
 kitchen. Afterwards he locked himself in the dairy with a loaded 
 gun and held off all attempts at capture until the third day, when 
 he shot himself through the head. His son never rallied the fam- 
 ily fortunes after this disastrous blow. 
 
 There was yet another Michael Hearne, who took to his bed 
 in the thirty-second year of his life and stayed there forty years 
 until his death. During the whole of this tune he did not speak 
 a word after once explaining that he did it to escape from the
 
 IRRESPONSIBILITY 23 
 
 stupidity of a farmer's life and the perpetual sight and sound of 
 his wife, of whom he was now tired. In appearance Mick is very 
 like this amiable lunatic. They have the same broad foreheads, 
 bright hazel eyes, and general quaintness of feature. I wondered 
 what Mick would have done, had he been condemned to live his 
 life on a desolate moor farm, sleeping, eating, working, and get- 
 ting children till he died. 
 
 He sat now, with his hands clasped round his knees and his face 
 set in the mask of a dejected imp. I knew that he was on the bor- 
 derland of a lapse, and I tried to ward it off. 
 
 " I know you all think I 'm going to do well," he said. " The 
 mother expects it. Old Silcox expects it. He said, ' You are the 
 best scientist the school has turned out : we look to you to do great 
 things.' The fatuous old bladder! What right has he, anyway, 
 to expect me to do great things? People have no right to expect 
 things from others. Why can't they let each other alone run- 
 ning round crying, ' Let me love you. Let me admire you. Do 
 something fine so that we can all stand round and be uplifted and 
 stirred.'- 
 
 " Pity the poor Great Man," I said. 
 
 " He ought to be pitied. Swarmed on by all the flabby vam- 
 pires who want to have their souls tickled and their bowels 
 churned up. Until, if he takes any notice of them, he 's exhausted 
 and done for and has to grovel in himself and do his little tricks 
 over again in a false frenzy of inspiration until he dies. . . . I 'm 
 sick to death of having a career dangled before me. How can I 
 tell what things will be like when we get to London? I may fail. 
 I may not have the scientific trick. I may not want to succeed." 
 
 " Well, if you don't, it will be your own fault," I told him 
 rather sharply. " You 're being sent to college to give you a 
 chance you Ve wanted ever since you 've wanted anything." 
 
 He rubbed his head until his hair stood up in stricken wisps. 
 
 " You would be perfectly happy if you could just be left alone 
 with the earth and the colors thereof. Artists are like that, I 
 suppose." He made one of his unexpected swoops. " What have 
 they ever done to make the world fit for other folk to live in? " 
 
 "You have no right to ask art to do good," I said rashly. 
 " It is a good."
 
 24 THE HAPPY HIGHWAYS 
 
 " What do you mean, a good? " Mick jeered. " Is it good to 
 eat or good to look at? There can only be one good, one su- 
 preme meaning that makes all this mess worth while, or 
 else makes it an indecent nightmare. Life for Art's sake I 
 read that in a book. It would be just impertinent if it were not 
 so silly. I don't see myself that art has anything to do with life, 
 except the accident that most artists can only stick dead slabs of 
 it on to their canvas." 
 
 " It 's too damned hot to argue with you," I said. " Besides, 
 I don't see how all this bears on you and your inability to stick 
 to your last. Must you have all the world tidied up, with smiling 
 morning face, before you can get down to the work you 've trained 
 for? " 
 
 " Don't be an ass, Joy," he said. " That 's not what I 'm get- 
 ting at. Only, for pity's sake, persuade them at home to shut 
 up about my chances and my career. It makes me sick." 
 
 He stood up. His hands were full of fine warm sand. He let 
 it trickle slowly between his fingers. 
 
 " I might be poured out like that," he said, with a quick smile, 
 ** and to as much purpose." 
 
 We walked back along the sands. I had an irrational sense 
 that I owed Mick an apology. 
 
 " I 'm sorry if I seemed unsympathetic," I began. " I know that 
 if I were free to do as I pleased, I 'd waste my life pretending 
 there is no muddle and no misery. If I were rich I should prob- 
 ably have spent my youth at art schools, or tearing round Paris 
 and Italy, licking the varnish off great men's pictures, and explain- 
 ing why my own were greater than they looked. But there the 
 disorder is and I suppose one ought to take a hand at clearing 
 it up." 
 
 Mick was not listening. A girl, leaning over the Spa wall, had 
 smiled down at him, an impudent, challenging beauty with bared 
 breast and dusky hair. He set off at a great rate for the Spa gates.
 
 IT was growing dark when we reached London. Scattered sub- 
 urbs and fields flowed past the train, a limpid, colorless stream. 
 Houses thickened and piled upon each other. On the elfin green 
 of the sky, roofs, and spires and squat gasometers traced an intri- 
 cate pattern of thrusting lines and flat shadows. Narrow streets 
 rushed 'a way from the train and poured themselves into the teem- 
 ing obscurity. The town turned a frowsy back to the railway line, 
 with gaping seams of alleys and exhausted, dragging limbs. 
 
 We felt very small and thin in the rush of King's Cross. Mick 
 was for taking a taxi to the rooms we had engaged, but we were 
 afraid to spend so much money, and in the end left our boxes 
 in the cloakroom, and stepped out with our bags into the confused 
 brilliance of the streets. We found our way to the Strand. The 
 wide pavements, splashed with light, and fantastic shadows, ex- 
 cited me. I could have shouted along the streets. I wanted to 
 open my arms and gather the rushing life to me, abandon myself 
 to it, let it sweep through me. 
 
 We found the entrance to King's and walked shyly round the 
 quadrangle. " It hardly seems to be in the same world as all 
 that," Mick said, jerking his head towards the Strand. 
 
 We came out and wandered east. Fleet Street was a magic 
 name. We babbled of dead men and peered into the faces of 
 the passers-by as we might have peered at the citizens of a city 
 in the moon. At the foot of Ludgate Hill we summoned up cour- 
 age to ask directions, and a little while later got wearily into a 
 train at St. Paul's. We were so tired that we crossed the river 
 without seeing it, and walked away from Herne Hill station like 
 men in a trance. We tried to tell each other what we thought of 
 London, but our words were spiritless. 
 
 " It is different," Mick kept saying, " it 's not as I thought it 
 would be. It 's bigger and finer and worse." 
 
 25
 
 CHAPTER VII 
 
 MICHAEL and I were up for a year before the others came. 
 We were poorer than usual and our rooms were greasy and 
 detestable. Mick made friends, as he always does, and betook 
 himself to the cheerful flat shared by two school teachers. They 
 read " The New Age " to him and tried to poison him with camp 
 coffee. One of them had rather pretty hair: she used to take it 
 down for him to feel as she read, thus mingling, with a nice 
 judgment, intellectual and sensuous titillations. 
 
 Accident or perversity led me for a time into a college set whose 
 habits I did not like and could not afford. It included two or 
 three fine-featured Jews who spent their money with an air con- 
 temptuously tolerant of Gentile whims. The rest of us rode in 
 their cars, drank their wine, and hit them boisterously between the 
 shoulder blades in mute reminder that we bore them no ill-will for 
 the dark ages when they incited bur fathers to persecute them. 
 
 Michael watched my progress among the Sons of Belial with an 
 amusement that ignored my constant ill-temper. I ran into debt, 
 neglected my work, and at the end of a month regarded my com- 
 panions with an indiscriminate loathing. I think they drank as a 
 kind of mental exercise: certainly I never knew them to allow their 
 minds any other. Such of them as came from the shire aristocra- 
 cies held social and ethical views that I can only explain on the 
 theory that the old county families are succumbing to a slow form 
 of insanity induced by in-breeding. 
 
 They talked of their wretched adventures into Piccadilly with a 
 determined, heavy cynicism. I have to own that it intimidated me 
 into concealing my innocence of like adventures. 
 
 It is easy to exaggerate their viciousness. Indeed, I do not 
 believe them to have been vicious at all in the real sense of the 
 word. It was just that their code permitted them any self-indulg- 
 ence so long as they did not transgress certain well-defined rules of 
 breeding. They believed in the existence of what some of them 
 
 26
 
 IRRESPONSIBILITY 27 
 
 did actually call pure women of their own class. And these 
 they held inviolate, partly, I suppose, because of the need to keep 
 up the supply of desirable wives. Women below their class were 
 fair game. If a pretty shop-girl liked to be a fool, why should 
 one not profit by her folly, doubtless arranged for by a God who 
 understood the need for pretty fools? 
 
 I believe that they regarded the lower classes in general as exist- 
 ing for their support and convenience. They did not, of course, 
 think out any deliberate philosophy of life: they did not think at 
 all. But their lives were based on some such unconscious mental 
 attitude, bred and fostered in them from their youth up. Some 
 of them Louis Sarscon for one were destined for the higher 
 civil service, and there they will carry on a complicated system 
 of misgovernment with a faith in its worth and permanence that 
 would be pitiful were it not so arrogant and expensively futile. 
 
 We met most often to drink in Sarscon's rooms. Like every- 
 thing he owned, they toppled over the far side of comfort into 
 ostentation. There was a full-sized grand, and three huge ches- 
 terfields, too fat and too low for real use. I grumbled at the heat 
 of the room. 
 
 " 'S Louis' fault," some one said. " It 's warm round Jerusa- 
 lem, you know." 
 
 Louis Sarscon looked calmly at the speaker. 
 
 " Fairly hopeless sort of a fool, aren't you? " he said. 
 
 " Fool, is it? " Hervey spluttered. " Well if I am, you 're a 
 Jew." 
 
 " Hervey 's beastly drunk. Hervey, you ought to get your nurse 
 to put you to bed." 
 
 Hervey became outrageous, and the blood began to show under 
 Sarscon's pale skin. 
 
 " If I ever feel inclined to wish I were not a Jew," he said, " I 
 have only to look round at my Christian friends." 
 
 " The distinction is n't a true one," I interrupted, " for your 
 friends are n't Christians and you 're not a Jew." My mind ap- 
 peared to me amazingly lucid : I wanted to take half-a-dozen bril- 
 liant lines of argument and crush him once and for all. " A Jew 
 has a religion and the features and manners of an ancient race. 
 You have no religion and you pride yourself on possessing the
 
 23 THE HAPPY HIGHWAYS 
 
 features and bearing of the country where you happened to be 
 born. Why, you have n't even a nationality. You don't want to 
 go back to Zion: you only want Palestine for the others to go 
 there." 
 
 "Well," he said coolly, " where 'd you be without us? You 
 used to rob and torture us. Now we rule you. We control more 
 than half the wealth of the world. We sway nations conti- 
 nents." 
 
 " Europe," I said thickly " Europe has the Jews she deserves." 
 
 His self-control snapped: he flung himself towards me, and I 
 stood laughing stupidly at his waving arms as he struggled in 
 the grasp of a muscular engineering student. 
 
 Hervey drunk was at least as humorous as a modern comedy 
 or as his father stalking to bed in a dignified intoxication after a 
 day spent in the trial of drunkards and poachers. Somewhere 
 about the fifth glass he thought he was a boy scout and took cover 
 under the rug. He wriggled with infinite care round the legs of 
 the grand, and pounced, squealing, upon Sarscon. Louis kicked 
 him viciously. Shouting with rage, Hervey picked up the Jew, 
 staggered away into the bathroom, and there held him in the bath 
 with both taps running until he was soaked through. We laughed 
 so much that we could not pull Hervey off him. When at last 
 he was free he stood tearing at his sodden clothes, looking more 
 like a Jew than I had ever seen him. The swaying electric globes 
 over the bath took Hervey's attention : he watched them gravely for 
 a while and then, lifting his hand, deliberately smashed one after 
 the other. Then he gathered up his hat and coat and went with 
 the bearing of the Gentile conqueror. We followed, still laugh- 
 ing weakly, through the deserted streets and squares between the 
 British Museum and Euston Road. In King's Cross station he 
 gave twopence to every porter and left a shilling with his card for 
 the station-master. Outside on the pavement he sat down and 
 cried because, he said, I was such an awful liar. I do not re- 
 member how we got him away, or how I reached home. 
 
 The thought of my lost control annoyed me intensely in the 
 morning. When Englishmen get drunk they make such fatuous 
 and puerile fools of themselves. Two or three such scenes sick- 
 ened me of the whole crowd, and I should have broken with them
 
 IRRESPONSIBILITY 29 
 
 sooner than I did had it not been for Mick's ironical prophecies 
 of disaster. 
 
 An evening in March put an end to my exalted friendships with- 
 out much regret on either side. I had met Sarscon and half-a- 
 dozen others hurrying across the quad. " Come along, J. J.," 
 Louis called, " we 're tearing it to-night." We called in at three 
 or four places and we were none of us quite sober when Hervey 
 said " I know a house where they '11 be glad to see us. What 
 you say? " Louis patted him on the head. " Good boy," he said. 
 " Lead on." I did not know London then, and I am not sure 
 where the house was. We certainly stumbled along Gower Street 
 and made two or three turnings before we stopped in front of a 
 tall house in a darkened side-street. Hervey knocked at the door. 
 He waited "a bit and knocked again. It opened barely half-way. 
 Hervey thrust his head through the opening. " Let us in, Anna 
 Mary," he said. " We Ve come to call." 
 
 The door was flung wide and we trooped in. Anna Mary was 
 old and incredibly active. She swirled and chuckled before us 
 into a large empty room on the first floor. There was a slam- 
 ming of doors and a rustle of dresses on the stairs. Five or six 
 girls ran into the room and one of them threw her arms round 
 Hervey. "Oh, Dickie boy," she cried, "where have you been? 
 It 's ages since you kissed your little Gracie." 
 
 It was suddenly clear to me that I did not want to be there. I 
 thought of the scene there would be if I tried to get away, the 
 oaths and the screeched protests. While I thought of escape the 
 others had finished drinking and got themselves out of the room. 
 I was left with the old woman. She looked at me and began a 
 long soothing speech. It was a moment or two before I caught 
 the drift of it. She had got into her head that I wanted one of the 
 girls who had gone. She was trying to pacify me for having to 
 wait my turn. I made her understand somehow that I did not 
 want any of them. I would wait for the others to come down 
 oh yes, I would wait. She regarded me with half-roused sus- 
 picions that vanished when she saw I did not mean to leave the 
 house before the rest. Evidently I was annoyed at having missed 
 my choice. She shrugged her shoulders and prepared to be agree- 
 able. I have a confused memory of her rambling talk: she told
 
 30 THE HAPPY HIGHWAYS 
 
 me about her girls and her adventures with the police. I began 
 to be interested : one by one the others came down ; no one seemed 
 to realize that I had been there all the time, and we left with much 
 caution and subdued laughter. 
 
 It must have been five o'clock before I reached home. A great 
 arc of saffron light, barred and rimmed by drifting clouds, 
 gleamed in the east. I had lost my latchkey and I groped for 
 small stones to throw through the open window of Mick's room. 
 He looked out at me for a minute and then came stumbling 
 down to open the door. " Dejected philosopher," he observed, 
 " worn in studying the nature of Sin." 
 
 " Don't be a fool," I said irritably, " I 'm through with it, I 
 tell you."
 
 CHAPTER VIII 
 
 AT the end of our first year Oliver joined us. We moved into 
 better rooms and took in with us another second year man. 
 Anthony Calvert had attracted us first by his dry wit in debate. 
 He was a Yorkshireman like ourselves not one of your hybrids 
 .from the West Riding but a Yorkshireman from the North 
 Riding^dales, with an uncommon gift for apt phrases. He had no 
 uncouth convictions, but professed himself amiably a Guild So- 
 cialist, and read in the literature of the Middle Ages for pleasure. 
 His face and his silences belied him. He looked a pleasant type 
 of the English intelligentsia: he was in truth a quick, subtle 
 thinker, something of a scholar and a hardy lover of moors and 
 ploughed earth. He had a truly magnificent collection of folk- 
 songs, to which he wrote and played his own accompaniments, get- 
 ting out of that unsatisfactory instrument the piano, some of the 
 poignant qualities of the violin. 
 
 Anthony had been with us just a week when Mick had one of 
 Margaret's rare letters. He took it from the postman on the door- 
 step and did not open it until we were half-way down Denmark 
 Hill. He turned the first page and stopped in the middle of 
 the road. " I 'm damned," he said. " Listen to this." 
 
 He read us the dry, casual sentence in which Margaret told 
 her engagement to an engineering student. Mick waved the let- 
 ter in our faces. " I 'm enraged," he said. " I 'm thoroughly an- 
 noyed. What right has any man to come thrusting in alienating 
 Margaret's young affections? She's done for! She's in love. 
 She '11 never do another stroke of work." 
 
 Oliver stood and laughed at him. "You'll have to listen to 
 dreamy raptures. She '11 empty bucketsfull of female psychol- 
 ogy on you. Serve you damn well right. Trafficking in souls! " 
 
 He flung back his head and laughed so loudly that a decent old 
 gentleman of the stockbroker sort looked at him as if he were 
 
 an open drain. 
 
 31
 
 32 THE HAPPY HIGHWAYS 
 
 But although Mick wrote recklessly for details of the tragedy he 
 got neither raptures nor psychology. Margaret wrote "You 
 ask for details. Any I could give would deservedly bore you. 
 I hope it will not be long before you meet Keith. We have 
 been friends too long you and I for me to pretend indiffer- 
 ence to your opinion of him." 
 
 After this letter she did not write again for nearly a year. 
 
 Long afterwards, when pretenses and reservations were no 
 longer possible between us, Margaret told me the story of that 
 year. I might have spared her the telling. She told me nothing 
 that I had not guessed, but the things had to be said between us. 
 
 We thought that they had. To tell the truth, a dozen words 
 had been ample. We were too young to have that much wit: 
 nothing would do for us but that we must plunge into one of those 
 dreadful discussions wherein youth endeavors to discover its soul 
 and is ever after heartily ashamed of its nakedness. 
 
 " It is absurd to blame Mick for the muddle I have made of 
 things," Margaret said. " He did have an influence on me. I 
 had never heard any one talk as he did. His ideas were new and 
 amazing. I had nothing to measure them by. You know what 
 sort of a childhood I had, shut off from other children. Why, 
 I never left that great house on the moor edge until I insisted 
 upon coming to school. Eighteen months at school, and then 
 college. Think for yourself what a chaos of impressions and 
 ideas my mind must have been. I tried to hide it. I wanted to 
 get things straight. Then I met Keith. I liked him because he 
 reminded me of Mick. When I knew him better, I was aston- 
 ished to find him talking the same sort of misty nonsense. It 
 was as if I had stumbled on a language I knew in a country of 
 strangers. We sought each other out." She hesitated. " I sup- 
 pose there is something fine about a youthful mating. I thought 
 so then." 
 
 She paused again. "There was a kind of ferment in my 
 thoughts started somehow by Mick, and the new crowded life. 
 Oh," she cried suddenly, " you know the sort of creature a sex 
 idealist is. Wallowing . . ." 
 
 "Margaret!"
 
 IRRESPONSIBILITY 33 
 
 " It 's true." Her voice hardened. " You know that it 's true. 
 I don't idealize you. I love you : I 'm not in love. Keith was 
 different. There was a kind of deliberate fantasy romance 
 about that. It was fine and unreal. Can a thing be fine 
 and unreal, or are all unreal things vile at bottom? It did not 
 seem vile. It took our breath with its beauty then." 
 
 A curious tender smile flickered in her eyes. " You must n't 
 think that Keith took advantage of me, or anything so stupid and 
 untrue as that." 
 
 " He took advantage of your ignorant enthusiasms," I said. 
 
 " His own were as ignorant," she answered swiftly. " We were 
 both y,ptmg: we talked it over together. We talked and thought 
 about it too much. I don't know whose fault that was. You 
 can talk yourself into anything. . . . We could n't, in the nature 
 of things, marry for years, and it seemed useless and wrong to 
 wait." She drew her brows together. " The moral code did n't 
 grip us at all. I suppxase that for many young people it is losing 
 its grip. Not only for freaks. There was nothing particularly 
 freakish about me. And Mick's teaching did n't really influence 
 me much. I think still that we were right. There is something 
 indecent, to my mind, about the spectacle of two young people 
 clutching futilely at each other, living for months and years in 
 a kind of hot-house of exaggerated passion, until they have been 
 solemnly legalized to take their passion to a decent marriage bed." 
 She looked at me with a half -mocking defiance. " I can't put it 
 any more tactfully, Joy, or I would." 
 
 I laughed a little, and something of the strain was gone from 
 her voice when she went on. 
 
 " I don't admit for a moment that we were wrong. Only it 
 did n't work out right. It was n't love. I can't tell you when I 
 found that I was beginning to live up to Keith. Pretenses that 
 were involuntary at first became conscious and irksome. I hid 
 things from him, pretended things I did n't feel. The life I lived 
 with him was full of suppressions and unhappy failures. We 
 lived a furtive sort of life. Feelings that surprised us both 
 irritations flashes of hatred kept thrusting up through the 
 tenderness. Keith felt it too. We tried desperately hard to pre-
 
 34 THE HAPPY HIGHWAYS 
 
 tend it was n't so, but we knew . . . And all the time there was a 
 kind of pity in us for the beauty that was going. I feel it 
 now . . ." 
 
 I watched the red marks fading on her fingers where one hand 
 had gripped the other. " Margaret," I said, and moved towards 
 her. But she held herself from my touch. 
 
 " Let me finish, Joy," she said. " It is hard to say which feel- 
 ing was most real, the tenderness or the ugly irritations. Keith 
 often thought me perverse. He tried to alter me in little ways. 
 Even, I tried to alter myself. I could n't do it, you know. My 
 pretenses came clattering down upon my head. The strain was 
 too great. It would have been a a sort of temperamental hari- 
 kari." She stopped and looked at me with a smile that twisted 
 her mouth. " Why don't you laugh, Joy? " 
 
 " I can't." 
 
 She thought a minute. " Our differences did n't matter at first, 
 not until we 'd got past the little delights of being together, the 
 gentle, intimate things. When we got further down, to the things 
 that really matter, the bedrock of personality, there were hideous, 
 gaping differences. We had to draw back and pretend that they 
 were not there. At bottom, Keith is a creature of conventions. 
 He likes to think what the rest think. His adventure into the ro- 
 mantic began to feel unstable to him. He wanted it to end com- 
 fortably. Things I said worried him. He began to think that 
 a legal marriage would put things right. He complained that I 
 was a pagan." 
 
 " So you are," I interrupted. " Your mind is pagan, logical, 
 loving order and ordered beauty." 
 
 She was not listening. 
 
 I opened the window and a breeze came into the room. She 
 seemed to have grown suddenly tired, leaning against the wall in 
 the shadow by the window. I stood looking at the outline of 
 her throat against the dark curtains, and her pale averted face. 
 It hurt me intolerably. 
 
 " That is just how things are. Keith keeps writing of marriage. 
 We have no one to consult. My uncle would n't interfere with me 
 in a thing like that. Besides, he rather likes Keith." She turned 
 to me with a swift, fierce movement. " I am sorry for Keith.
 
 IRRESPONSIBILITY 35 
 
 Something in me goes on loving Keith. I can't bear to hurt him." 
 
 " You can hurt me," I said hardly. 
 
 " You can take care of yourself," she answered, and turned her 
 head to look at me. 
 
 I took a step towards her. " Margaret," I said, and again stu- 
 pidly " Margaret. You can't treat me like this. Don't you see 
 you can't? You 're asking the impossible of me of yourself." 
 My self-control broke. I knew that she was sore and wretched 
 beyond all desire or thought of passion. Her whole being cried 
 out to me to leave her alone, but I took her in my arms and kissed 
 her white face and held her. She slipped from me. Her words 
 were arv v instinctive defense. 
 
 "HaVen't you understood yet? " she whispered. "You don't 
 want me Keith's mistress." 
 
 "What do I care? " I said. "What does anything matter like 
 that? I never knew Keith's mistress. It 's you I want." 
 
 I talked at her. I tried absurdly to wake the spirit in her. I 
 blustered. And all the time she stood and looked at me with 
 an infinite patience for my unkind folly. When I fell silent, she 
 stooped and kissed my hair and was gone. I sat on while the 
 room grew cold, and the wind blew the ashes on the hearth. 
 
 Life would be much simpler if we were a little more parsi- 
 monious of speech. I wish I could blame Ibsen and the Russians 
 for the habit of soul-dissection that is spreading a gray slime over 
 modern conversation. But the French had a hand in that too. 
 The old saloon and coffee-house talkers did things better. 
 
 We avoided each other for several days. 
 
 We took ourselves so seriously. Heaven knows where our sense 
 of humor was during that horrible conversation. Grinning in 
 some distant corner, I suppose. What solemn mountebanks!
 
 CHAPTER IX 
 
 IV THEN Margaret wrote to Michael again it was to tell him that 
 W she had been offered a research scholarship and meant to 
 study in London. We held a conference on the letter. Michael 
 was anxious to have her share our rooms. " She '11 monopolize 
 the best chair and want her books carrying to the 'bus," Oliver re- 
 marked viciously. 
 
 We discussed the question from our various points of view, 
 and then sat looking at each other. Anthony, who had never met 
 Margaret, poked carefully at his pipe and said "What you 
 really mean is that there '11 be intellectual flirtations and all that 
 sort of thing H. G. Wells in real life." 
 
 "Margaret isn't like that and neither are we," Mick said 
 shortly. He looked at me. "What do you say, Joy? " 
 
 " I don't mind," I answered slowly. " She 's your friend, not 
 mine. I never really knew her. I daresay it '11 work all right." 
 
 Margaret was traveling in Scotland at the time, and Michael's 
 letter asking her to share our rooms was not forwarded. We 
 wondered at her silence. It was late in August when she ap- 
 peared in Scarborough, penitent and explanatory. I had not seen 
 her since she left school and Mick had not prepared me for the 
 change in her. She was beautiful, with a gravely radiant beauty 
 like the dusk in summer. A serene self-possession had replaced 
 the school-girl's defiant shyness. She was so light-hearted withal : 
 it hurts me to think of that untouched gaiety. 
 
 She had not made up her mind to share our rooms. I think 
 she was afraid of Oliver. He had replied to some remark of hers 
 with a sarcastic reminder of the unwieldy, endless essays that she 
 wrote at school. She flushed and did not answer him. After- 
 wards, when Mick and I were sitting with her on the sands, she 
 said slowly "Are you sure that you have room for me and 
 want me? " 
 
 " Of course we want you," Mick said. " The question is do 
 you want to come? " 
 
 36
 
 IRRESPONSIBILITY 37 
 
 " I 'd be only too glad to come. I Ve never been to London." 
 She looked at me. 
 
 " We '11 be fearfully sorry if you don't come," I assured her. 
 " It seems so silly, too, when we have decent rooms and could 
 help you a lot, showing you round the town, and all that sort 
 of thing." 
 
 In a while she agreed, hesitating a little, as if she doubted our 
 sincerity. 
 
 We persuaded her Mick and I to come to town with us a 
 fortnight before the beginning of the term. The first night that 
 we were there, she said that she hated armchairs and liked a decent 
 straight-backed seat. We accepted the statement in good faith, 
 and continued to quarrel over the two easy chairs as was our cus- 
 tom. Long afterwards, Margaret owned to the diffidence that had 
 suggested the lie: she did n't want us to feel she had a feminine 
 right to the armchair. 
 
 Truth to tell, she slipped BO easily into our way of life that 
 her coming made no difference to our habits. She roved round 
 the town with us as if she had been another man. We must 
 have been a queer sight. Margaret's tweeds came from a famous 
 house in the Haymarket, and we boys prided ourselves on the vil- 
 lainous state of our clothes. I believe Mick was, for a few weeks, 
 actually out at elbow. I have seen people turn and glance from 
 Margaret to Oliver's vile yellow norf oik and mass of red gold hair. 
 He never wore a cap and his eyes were bright and green like the 
 eyes of a wild cat. No one looked at the rest of us when he was 
 in the room, though I stood head and shoulders above him and 
 Mick had the face of a youthful gargoyle. 
 
 One of Oliver's objections to Margaret had been her money. 
 Her mother died at her birth and her father shut himself and 
 his daughter in a vast house on the moors. The child grew up 
 in a solitude peopled by creatures of fantasy. Her father assured 
 himself at times that the servants were not preaching a God who 
 strikes wilful children dead, and then forgot her. He was a free 
 thinker by birth and believing that questing faith to be still in need 
 of defense from priests and women, wrote sad books in praise of 
 Pan. Margaret spent her lonely freedom between the barren
 
 38 THE HAPPY HIGHWAYS 
 
 sweep of moor and the shore of the sea that filled the wide air with 
 a myriad-mouthed chorus. 
 
 A sullen persistence had got her the brief schooling at Scar- 
 borough, and during her second year at college her father died. 
 The house on the moors was sold to pay his debts. An unknown 
 uncle came from Scotland to make the arrangements. He was ex- 
 clusively Whisky: you will have seen him on labels in clubs and 
 in unobtrusive advertisements in " Country Life." He adopted 
 Margaret but, strange to say, made no attempt to order her way 
 of life. There was something queer about all Margaret's rela- 
 tives on her father's side: they did n't seem to have any of the 
 decent domestic virtues of unlimited interference with the young. 
 
 When she came to live with us she refused the massive allow- 
 ance he tried to make her. " I have never been used to a lot of 
 money, and I don't want it," she said. I do not know how far 
 this was sincere and how far prompted by a determination to have 
 no advantage over the rest of us. 
 
 We came to London early in the September of 1910, and I spent 
 my days in the reading room of the British Museum, while Michael 
 and Margaret surveyed London together. They spent enormously 
 in 'bus fares and ate sparse meals in out-of-the-way corners. I 
 came into the entrance hall one day and found them waiting for 
 me. Mick was absorbed in conversation with a young woman 
 done in primary colors. Margaret stood helpfully at his side, 
 grave and attentive. When I caught her eye she smiled radiantly 
 upon them and came to meet me. They took no notice at all of 
 her departure: we left them there and went home together. 
 
 "Who the devil?" I began. 
 
 Margaret grinned. " She 's an American. Mick is telling her 
 the exact number of vases in the Greek section, the miraculous 
 birth of Amen Hetep, the diameter of the pillars and the location 
 of the man-traps for burglars, and she is writing it all down in a 
 little book." 
 
 Mick reached home an hour after we did, vastly indignant at 
 what he called our callousness. " Leaving me there with that fe- 
 male," he said. " I might have been on my way to Minneapolis 
 by now, for all you cared. I believe I shall go to America, there 's 
 scope for enterprise there."
 
 IRRESPONSIBILITY 39 
 
 Shortly afterwards, declaring that he must have tobacco, he 
 left by way of the window for the little shop at the top of the 
 street. He had been gone two minutes when there came a great 
 knocking at the door. Margaret went to let him in. I heard her 
 voice in the passage raised with an intonation of anxiety. ** Oh," 
 she said, and then " We did n't expect you until to-morrow." 
 
 " Well," Oliver answered brusquely, " we Ve come to-night. 
 This is Anthony Calvert. Calvert, this is Margaret." 
 
 They came into the room as Mick flung himself through the win- 
 dow. He rushed at Oliver, re-introduced Anthony to Margaret, 
 and shouted for food. Oliver threw himself violently at an arm- 
 chair: il.cried out, shook, and collapsed in the fender. 
 
 " You silly ass," Mick cried wrathfully. " Can't you be a big 
 blond beast without breaking chairs? You low superman, you! 
 Heaven knows what we '11 have to pay for that." He grumbled 
 until food came in, and the landlady, whom he so bewildered with 
 explanations, grief and promises, that she retreated before the 
 wrecked chair with no more than a broken exclamation. 
 
 Some time after dinner, Margaret and Oliver began a dispute 
 that ran the course of all Oliver's arguments through sarcasm 
 to ill-temper and a moody silence. He was dogmatic beyond all 
 bearing in a youngest brother, and as intolerant of other folks' 
 opinions as he was contemptuous of their intelligence. Strang- 
 ers, fascinated by Mick's charm of manner, wondered discreetly 
 how he came to have so uncouth and ruffianly a brother. Three 
 months later, supposing them to have made difficult advances in 
 intimacy, they wondered why Oliver, with his simplicity of speech 
 and purpose, was so tolerant of Mick's superficial brilliance and 
 wilful instability. 
 
 But strangers, who like poor Glaucon ask the silly questions, 
 deserve the punishment that descends. Glaucon might sit i' the 
 sun tearing acanthus leaves to shreds, and let his thoughts go 
 dreaming through deep groves or lie couched among the violet 
 leaves beside the white limbs of Callia, while the thunder rolled 
 harmlessly over his head and Socrates spun his wordy immortal- 
 ity. But you, luckless wretch, must sit reading in an English 
 drawing-room while I bemuse myself with ruthless psychological 
 intent. Faith, I am so moved by the contrast that I cannot do 't.
 
 40 THE HAPPY HIGHWAYS 
 
 All my mother in me rushes to my eyes: my pity for you is such 
 that I will spare you the psychology. Subtle is as subtle does, 
 and Mick is now an F.R.S. and almost a rich man, while Oliver 
 but you read the sixpenny papers and know all about Oliver. 
 He writes those vivid, pellucid poems of his in a two-roomed cot- 
 tage, and all his money would go in the Shepherd's Purse that 
 grows beyond his door-step. Perhaps you know himself, and he 
 has done you some kindness. Friend nor enemy ask him for help 
 in vain. Or he has made trouble for you by one of his prepos- 
 terous social blunders. Choose for yourself between the strang- 
 er's judgments, and let me get on with my tale. 
 
 I forget what they quarreled over. Mick crowed and thumped 
 his book, and Anthony swung round on his piano stool to listen. 
 In her way Margaret was as dogmatic as Oliver but immensely 
 more critical a critic unburdened by any notions of what she 
 ought to like and dislike. She disliked the plays of W. B. Yeats. 
 " Feeble, windy ghosts," she called them, and when Oliver began 
 an indignant mouthing of the lyrics, said " If you must quote 
 Yeats, don't let it be * Innisfree.' When no other distinction re- 
 mains to the Irish lyricists they may still pride themselves on 
 having evolved the ugliest adjective in modern poetry. The 
 bee-loud glade. Bee-loud! Good heavens! " 
 
 From poetry they got somehow to Wagner, and Margaret made 
 scornful reference to the circus-music of Tannhauser. Anthony 
 lifted his eyebrows and played gentle airs from Die Meistersinger. 
 I cannot remember the musical argument, which went all in Oli- 
 ver's favor. Margaret's technical knowledge failed, and she was 
 fain to drag ethics from its bench to help her. Wagner's music, 
 she said, harked back to the satyr-gods, and gathered to itself all 
 the elements that had been purged from tragedy in its long ascent. 
 
 " When I see people reeling drunkenly away from Tristan und 
 Isolde," she added, " I thank God I am not as other men." We 
 laughed at her, but Oliver was too angry to laugh. Anthony 
 turned back to the piano and got himself softly into Beethoven. 
 We were silent, listening.
 
 CHAPTER X 
 
 IV THAT amazes me when I look back on our life in London is 
 VV not its inconsequence, nor its unleashed enthusiasms, nor 
 even its perilous freedom. It is our devastating indulgence in talk 
 and self-explanatory criticism. It might be forgiven us, for we 
 were born in an era of talk. People were talking all round 
 us, explaining life to themselves and themselves to life. We had 
 a desire to make trial of life that might have led to adventures if 
 we had been in Texas, but since we were in London, led only 
 to confusion of thought and blunting of sincerity. 
 
 There have been earlier eras of talkers. Certain men met in 
 a grove of plane-trees and talked to the stars, who continue to 
 echo their words. There were also men and women who sat on 
 silk brocade, talking graceful revolution until the ground opened 
 and swallowed them up. I have no quarrel with such disinter- 
 ested babblers. 
 
 But the talkers of our day were afflicted with the Russian fever 
 and the Fabian itch. They could neither let themselves nor their 
 surroundings be. They tore both to pieces, strewing the frag- 
 ments to the suffering winds, or re-arranged them in grotesque 
 mosaics. They sat in cafes and talked art with their quaint 
 women folk. They founded reviews wherein to scratch each oth- 
 er's backs. They became bitter and wrote unkind manifestos. 
 They were abusive and superior, austere and licentious, and each 
 according to the best and newest tradition. They talked them- 
 selves into every kind of pose. They even became marytrs. 
 
 It was not to be expected that we should escape the plague. 
 
 We were in London, held and fascinated by the ferment of a 
 million-minded, million-bodied activity. We belonged to no set 
 or class, but we touched the fringes of many of them. We could 
 make a show of watching their interplay of forces. For we 
 affected a dispassionate attitude to life: we investigated it, talked 
 about it, but never admitted either to bewilderment or awe. We 
 
 41
 
 42 THE HAPPY HIGHWAYS 
 
 had a half-conscious idea of ourselves as skeptical young Olym- 
 pians, clear-eyed before the shams and ridiculous absorptions of a 
 middle-aged society. 
 
 At least we had a halting perception of the extraordinary chaos 
 of modern life, rushing into blind creeks, sweeping back in wave 
 upon wave of seemingly resistless power, with leaping white 
 spume of cross-currents and sunlit, day-born shallows. At the 
 older Universities, we said, men hear life through the shutters 
 of warm-lighted rooms a far-off murmur, kindly and alluring, 
 the sea calling to quiet inland towns, so distant and secure that 
 the harshness and the fretting are only deeper notes in the ordered 
 harmony. They are an ancient and isolated people, holding even 
 against their will to the attenuated feelings and ideals that the 
 years have smoothed and softened for them. They cannot help 
 being swayed by that murmuring age-old voice. Life is refracted 
 for them by a glass that mellows all its colors, thinning them. 
 Doubtless they talk as much as we do, plan and speculate, but 
 they have it all out of perspective. Things that matter enter their 
 life from wrong angles and in distorted shapes. Some of them 
 take up socialism and others actresses. The actresses are more 
 amusing, but the socialism is considered to be in better taste. The 
 earnest ones read revolutionary pamphlets, with cover designs of 
 classic youths and maidens fronting the dawn : it must bother them 
 immensely to meet the complacent, greasy cave-man of the lower 
 middle-class, and the broken torn wreckage of the slum if in- 
 deed they permit themselves to run the risk of meeting such an- 
 noying contradictions of their orderly ideals. It is far more 
 likely that from Oxford and Cambridge they retire to county and 
 parliamentary fastnesses, or if they are very earnest, become talk- 
 ing members of the National Liberal Club and the Fabian Society. 
 
 Women come into their world in an awkward fashion, thrust- 
 ing athwart their dream of life, rather than taking a place in the 
 fabric of its reality. Some of them still affect a romantic belief 
 in the essential fineness of women. They cannot, such is the un- 
 fortunate keenness of their intellect, help having secret, pleasur- 
 able doubts, but these they suppress with nobility. They discuss 
 the new demands of women, and nerve themselves to a gracious 
 and comprehending toleration, ignorant apparently, that women
 
 IRRESPONSIBILITY 43 
 
 long since passed the stage of needing or caring to be believed 
 in. And afterwards, when their easy toleration is laughed at or 
 ignored, they are hurt and fall into psychological quagmires and 
 bemusings. Some of them write novels about it. 
 
 "They have two sorts of ways of regarding women in those 
 old-world retreats," Margaret said. " For one kind of man 
 there 's nothing between the fatuity he marries and the painted ad- 
 ventures of Piccadilly. The other, the better kind, is still trying 
 hardily to understand us, when really we don't care a damn 
 whether we 're understood or not. You 've only got to live with 
 us and let us live with you without picking at our souls or dis- 
 tracting yourselves with a preposterous sex psychology." 
 
 Margaret lived with us for three years, and during the whole of 
 that time I do not remember that her femininity obtruded itself 
 upon us, either as a pleasing study or as a nuisance. She just was 
 there: we quarreled among ourselves, argued and fought, and 
 wandered round London together as if we had been five men. 
 Even when Oliver fell in love with her, it made no difference 
 to the rest of us, except that he sulked a good deal and sat hud- 
 dled up over the fire in the best armchair. Margaret ignored his 
 moods admirably. He would have fallen in love just the same 
 had she lived at the other end of London with her or another 
 and it would have made neither more nor less difference to 
 the rest of us. There were one or two incidents, but they were 
 kept in the background by both. 
 
 My love for Margaret stands out as something apart from the 
 cheerful, careless comradeship of that student life, a force that 
 appeared out of the darkness and went again, leaving us shaken 
 and blinded, but nowise afraid of our life together or awkward 
 in the daily intimate relationship. We knew each other too well: 
 were too aware of the littleness and meanness in each other as of 
 the fine possibilities and the things that stirred and held. 
 
 I think it rather an important thing our freedom from the 
 obsession of a romantic sex ideal that keeps bursting out even 
 now in books by men on the Soul of Woman, or thrusts up in a 
 strange, perverted form as a bitter antagonism to all that savors 
 of feminism. We had no delusions even about those feminine de- 
 mands and rebellions that so intrigued the imagination of the
 
 44 THE HAPPY HIGHWAYS 
 
 thinking male ten or twenty years ago. We had seen them in 
 their stark and futile silliness. 
 
 It must have been early in the spring of 1913 not six years 
 ago, and how queer and doll-like the figures and colors are now 
 when we walked down Charing Cross Road into a crowd that 
 eddied about the Square, flowed over in the track of the 'buses, 
 and stood in detached quarrelsome groups on the steps of the Na- 
 tional Gallery. At the foot of the Monument a wisp of a woman 
 shook and worried her body in the throes of a speech we could 
 not hear. A few men and girls held banners round her and lis- 
 tened indifferently. We hesitated. 
 
 " Oh, come on," Oliver said, with a violent affectation of scorn. 
 We pushed and scrambled round the edges of the crowd and got 
 into Whitehall, delayed once by Mick's halt before a scared little 
 man whom he accused of being a detective. " Come out and stand 
 round in those boots, and think you '11 not be known," he said. 
 " You must be silly." 
 
 " I 'm no detective," the little creature cried indignantly. 
 "Why, I'm a Fabian." 
 
 " I see no difference," Mick retorted. 
 
 We were half-way down Whitehall before we realized that the 
 noise behind had become deafening. A nondescript crowd, wav- 
 ing its arms, and shouting " to Downing Street," poured out of the 
 Square and rolled past us, the little woman vociferous in front. 
 A single line of police stretched across the road, and before that 
 thin barrier the huge crowd wavered, turned and broke into help- 
 less confusion. A red-faced man with a desolate squint put a 
 protecting arm round the small woman, and the two reeled across 
 the road in frantic embrace. Policemen on horseback appeared 
 and began to drive the people back towards the Square. A man 
 was caught and squeezed between two horses and screamed fear- 
 fully. Bodies of mounted police poured suddenly out of North- 
 umberland Avenue and the Mall, and rode down upon the crowd 
 already surging towards them. Possibly the policemen were 
 alarmed, or their horses ran away with them. Whatever its cause, 
 the effect upon the crowd of the double charge was disastrous. 
 Men and women ran madly backwards and forwards. We saw 
 a man coming out of Scotland Yark struck down on the pave-
 
 IRRESPONSIBILITY 45 
 
 ment and carried off with the blood pouring down his face, and a 
 woman rescued by foot police from two roughs. Michael rushed 
 in to help and was seized : we saw him fighting and kicking igno- 
 miniously. In the confusion the little woman was borne off in 
 a police taxi: we thought that the red-faced man wept. 
 
 Then two mounted police bore down upon us: I flung an arm 
 across Margaret and pressed her against the wall. For a min- 
 ute the murderous hoofs slipped on the glass roof of the cellar 
 below our feet, recovered, and slipped again. Margaret, inco- 
 herent with rage, shook her fist at the nervous riders. They drew 
 away: pushing somehow through the demoralized crowd and the 
 frightened animals, we got out into the Strand. An old gentle- 
 man stood beside us with a torn coat and hot, creased face. He 
 was furiously angry, and gesticulated in our faces. " On the pave- 
 ment," he said, " it is shameful, shameful. To ride those mad 
 animals on the pavement." 
 
 The English, who are the most disorderly race in the world, 
 have the greatest reverence for the appearance of order. 
 
 He stammered. " I walk on the Embankment with my wife, 
 as I have done every fine afternoon for twelve years. My wife 
 thinks we should return for tea, and so we do, and suddenly 
 those monsters are upon us, riding on the pavement among decent 
 folk." 
 
 " But where is your wife? " Margaret said gently. 
 
 He looked at us once in reproach and plunged back into the 
 crowd. Shortly Mick joined us, in an indescribable state of mind 
 and apparel. He had been kicked" 1 in the mouth and could not 
 speak. 
 
 Some weeks later Margaret was mixed up in a suffrage row in 
 Hyde Park and came home white and shaken, clutching the torn 
 fragments of a ruffle that she had worn round her neck. She had 
 been turned out of the Park six times, and finally rescued from 
 arrest by a kindly gas-worker, who lifted her over the railings into 
 the sympathetic arms of a frayed young man. The frayed one 
 told her inopportunely that he was an Anarchist with Shavian 
 leanings. 
 
 She was indignant beyond measure and too ashamed of herself 
 to keep up her pose of Olympian serenity. We stared at her
 
 46 THE HAPPY HIGHWAYS 
 
 stupidly and wondered what had wrought such madness in our 
 self-possessed Margaret. 
 
 " I don't know," she said. " Really I don't know. It just hap- 
 pened to me. I didn't even know there was a suffrage meeting 
 until I came upon it out of Kensington Gardens. Some one a 
 gray little woman with untidy hair asked me to speak. They 
 were speaking in groups all over the place and the police kept 
 separating them and moving them on. I made a speech. I 
 don't know what I said some sort of deflated nonsense, I sup- 
 pose. Then the police grabbed us and ran us out into Park 
 Lane. I got excited and angry. I must have gone rather mad, 
 I think. Anyway, I went back into the Park, dragging that poor 
 little woman with me. I went back six times, and the police were 
 worse each time. I knew I was making a fool of myself, and I 
 could n't help it." 
 
 She pushed her sleeve up, and we saw that her arm was dis- 
 colored and swollen from shoulder to wrist. " They twisted my 
 wrists," she said, " and one of them got me by the throat. The 
 things I said and did. You would n't believe. I kicked him 
 and trod upon his feet. I made unspeakable remarks: I didn't 
 know they were in my mind. One of them put a large damp hand 
 over my mouth. I bit it." She paused and regarded us de- 
 fensively. 
 
 " I understand now what makes them fight policemen and kick 
 stewards of meetings and chain themselves to railings. It goes 
 to your head like Wagner," she finished vaguely. 
 
 " Oh," she cried suddenly, " did you ever hear of anything so 
 silly. The fool I 've been. That help women ! How could I 
 make such a fool of myself? Kicking policemen in petticoats 
 and thin shoes! " She laughed abruptly. " That poor woman. 
 Towards the end she thought I was a malicious fiend. The last 
 time I saw her she was limping after the 'bus that runs down 
 Park Lane all rags and ends of hair crying and wiping at her 
 tears with her gloves. * I '11 never come out with you again,' she 
 said. As if she had n't started it all." Margaret poked absently 
 at the fire. " I thought once what a silly game it all was this 
 governors' game of bluffing with policemen, and putting large 
 damp hands across your mouth. It seemed almost cruel to call
 
 IRRESPONSIBILITY 47 
 
 the bluff. Somebody shrieked 'Cossacks' at them. Cossacks! 
 Poor, bewildered, perspiring, angry men, chasing women off 
 the grass, twisting their wrists. And the one I bit . . ." 
 
 Mick interrupted rashly. " Hanging on to the vote by the skin 
 of your teeth " 
 
 She turned on him. " It had nothing to do with the vote all 
 that. Nor freedom, nor anything. It was just kicking about in 
 petticoats. What a fool Oh Lord, what a fool ! " 
 
 She was moodily bad-tempered for the whole of the evening. 
 Once I caught a wry face as she sat pretending to read her 
 Beowulf, that lupine futility of an Anglo-Saxon saga. I think 
 she was tasting policeman. Just before supper she got up and 
 went out alone and returned near midnight, tired out and serene, 
 having been to Isleworth on the 'bus. 
 
 I remember now the spasm of fury that seized me at the sight 
 of that slender bruised arm.
 
 CHAPTER XI 
 
 \ Y7"E formed the habit of meeting once a week to talk and 
 W smoke. There would be a dozen of us, all students at 
 King's : we met in the common room or in our Herne Hill rooms. 
 Though Mick dominated these talks, we were always conscious 
 of the strain and tug of two other personalities, bitterly and in- 
 stinctively hostile to each other. Of all those bold debaters, 
 Chamberlayn and Kersent alone remain with the standards of their 
 hot youth. Boyle returned to South Africa: he went in on the 
 wrong side in the miners' strike, gaining wealth and damnation 
 thereby. Seumas O'Donnel married ships and took his wit to 
 lighten the austerities of the Dublin Castle party: I think he is 
 bored and repentant, and no one will take back his silver pieces. 
 But Chamberlayn and Kersent will never now turn traitor or 
 grow old. 
 
 Kersent's bitterness was older than he was. It had lived with 
 his father since he first came to Walthamstow, a raw lad, squeezed 
 out of his native village because its noble owner liked building 
 stables better than cottages. The two-legged cattle had therefore 
 to get out when they arrived at marriageable age, taking their 
 vulgar and inconvenient passions with them. 
 
 The lower humans are lacking in self-control and self-respect: 
 they will litter as readily on a gentleman's estate as in a filthy 
 slum. They continue to be prolific when decency and necessity 
 are alike against their folly. What is to be done with such cattle? 
 Clear them off the land. The noble landlord writes to the papers 
 on the falling birth-rate. Pray continue to breed, my dear crea- 
 tures, we need you in the factories, on the docks, and in the 
 bloody trenches. But not on my estate! Is it a warren or a stye? 
 God forbid! But continue, my brave fellows. Heroes as well 
 as blacklegs, are born in foetid slums. We have need of both to 
 keep our smiling land for us. To keep our land smiling for US. 
 
 48
 
 IRRESPONSIBILITY 49 
 
 Kersent was born two months after his father's marriage and 
 arrival in London. This mishap delayed his college course by 
 three years. 
 
 In his eighteenth year a philanthropic religieuse interested her- 
 self in the pale studious boy. She offered to pay his fees at any 
 college of London University, asking only to be satisfied of his 
 respectability. When her investigations discovered the disgrace- 
 ful circumstance of his birth, she withdrew with her offer, her 
 interest, and the wild hopes she had raised, tumbling Kersent dis- 
 dainfully off her opulent lap, back into the mud where she had 
 found him. He said that in his despair he wanted to kill himself. 
 He laughed queerly as he told us this. 
 
 "I'm a nice specimen of manhood, don't you think?" he 
 said, twisting himself round before the glass over our mantel- 
 shelf. He passed his hand down the reflection. The thin, livid 
 face under its sheaf of colorless hair nodded sardonically back at 
 him. The deep-set ironic eyes glanced down over narrow chest 
 and bent shoulders. 
 
 " I was always pale and skinny," he said, " but not like this 
 hunched and done-for. This is what I Ve paid for college. I 
 taught all day and studied all night. Four years it took me to 
 get the fees together. I am done for, you know," he added, in 
 the constrained silence. " Played out. I have n't the stamina of 
 a louse. I 'm twenty-four, but I look forty, eh? " 
 
 He was taking Psychology. Chadding, his professor, said that 
 Kersent was the finest psychologist he had had through his hands 
 in thirty years. He held out glowing promises. The deep- 
 rooted irony peered out of Kersent's eyes. 
 
 " Do you think his moral scruples will let him keep his prom- 
 ises? " he asked us. " If he goes sniffing after marriage and birth 
 certificates, I mean." 
 
 " Those people have more sense than that," I told him. 
 
 "Have they? " he said in his soft melancholy voice. "What 
 makes you think that? If they are so wise, why don't they see 
 that I sha'n't live to finish my college course if I don't get out of 
 that damned Walthamstow court? " A gentle smile twisted his 
 mouth. "That paunchy, feather-trimmed old moralist dropped 
 me because I was conceived in sin. Old Chadding asked me to
 
 50 THE HAPPY HIGHWAYS 
 
 dinner once. His wife did n't like my coming in morning dress. 
 He has n't asked me since." 
 
 We admired Kersent. We could not help admiring the obsti- 
 nate will in his frail body, and the terrible incisive skill in 
 analysis that made him dreaded in debate. But we never got 
 from admiration to affection. Something in Kersent repelled us. 
 I don't know if it were simply that there was nothing in him to 
 kindle to the warmth in us. He might have been frozen, so that 
 the fumbling tendrils of friendliness were chilled and dead before 
 they touched him. Or it might have been that all the positive 
 powers of his personality were deflected to the shielding and 
 fostering of the genius he felt in him, leaving only a negative 
 repellant aspect for other men. God knows he had every reason 
 for his self-centered passion. 
 
 However it may be, he was always in our circle, a lonely, 
 puzzling figure. He talked and listened to us with the pale re- 
 flection on his face of a smile that was somehow turned inward. 
 He seemed to smile at himself in a melancholy and ironic solitude. 
 We fought against a dislike of him. Only Mick poured out before 
 him an ardor of praise and affection. He thrust upon Kersent all 
 the attributes of strength and surety that he felt lacking in himself. 
 Kersent was his idol, his mysterious, compelling sphinx. He 
 forced Kersent at us until our latent dislike became almost active. 
 
 One man made no secret of his dislike. Chamberlayn frankly 
 hated Kersent. He could never argue with him, for he lost his 
 temper under Kersent's rapier thrusts and flung away his argu- 
 ment in a flurry of wrath. I suppose there was something nakedly 
 personal in their antagonism. Kersent hated Chamberlayn's class 
 with a cold, quiet hatred, more dangerous and more bitter than 
 any wild crying. Such hatreds are the icy mountain springs that 
 pour down into the spumy torrent of revolution. He hated Cham- 
 berlayn and despised him. I do not believe that he envied him 
 for a minute: his scorn was too stern for that. And Chamber- 
 layn was studiously careful to keep any hint of class prejudice 
 out of his wildest argument. 
 
 Yet I daresay he had an unconscious sense that Kersent was 
 the latest and most deadly of the forces arrayed against his class 
 and all that it stood for in prejudice and self-esteem. Chamber-
 
 IRRESPONSIBILITY 51 
 
 layn was the last of a family that came down in an unwinking 
 radiance of prestige and honor from the remote easy ancestor 
 whose wife had pleased a king. Kersent was the emerging intel- 
 lect of the servile classes to which that prestige and honor had 
 hitherto opposed an arrogant front. Unconsciously, Chamber- 
 layn sensed a conqueror. Discontent, greed, misery all such 
 diseases and stirrings of these servile classes could be met and 
 defeated. But its awakening intellect never. That was im- 
 mortal. It might be numbed by poverty and misled by false 
 dawns, but not killed. 
 
 What Chamberlayn felt unconsciously, Kersent knew. He had 
 been subjected to the numbing process. He resented it, and he 
 despised Chamberlayn. 
 
 Jack Chamberlayn was a professed democrat. His father had 
 been for sending him to Oxford. 
 
 " But I would n't go," he said. " I wanted to have a decent 
 chance in life. They started me badly enough. My Aunt Jane 
 paid for me at Eton. You know, it's very fine and jolly and 
 all that but they hold and teach you a tradition altogether at 
 variance with modern life. Life has changed, and women have 
 changed since the tradition was made, but their attitude to these 
 things has n't changed at all. I don't see how the older public 
 schools can ever be changed. Seems to me they will just have 
 to be side-tracked. Pity they had n't been side-tracked in time to 
 save me. I 've got their spirit in my blood. I could never rid 
 myself of it now. What could I have done the son of a 
 pauper Duke if I 'd been educated at Oxford, but let myself 
 be boosted into the diplomatic service? And there I 'd have 
 blundered, with neither the brains nor the inclination for the 
 peculiar type of lying required of me, until maybe I 'd blundered 
 the whole world into a war. I 'd have had to live in a foreign 
 capital with a lot of jabbering foreigners, and dance attendance 
 on pot-bellied, starred and gartered fools and amateur Napoleons 
 in petticoats, eaten up and bedizened with vanity. God, what a 
 life. 
 
 " I 've always wanted to do things with my hands," he added 
 shyly. " I '11 build a bridge perhaps." 
 
 So he had come to King's to give himself a chance. He tried
 
 52 THE HAPPY HIGHWAYS 
 
 \ 
 
 and wearied of several socialists and socialist groups before he 
 stumbled on us, or we on him. Indeed, when we first noticed 
 him, he was arguing in the Common Room with a Fabian. 
 
 " You 're neither one thing nor the other," he was saying. 
 " Don't you see that you can't have all the pretty graces of a 
 Versailles civilization in a democratic state? You Ve got to 
 choose. Democracy can be a lot of beautiful and fine things, 
 but it can't be an aristocracy." 
 
 The Fabian was stammering a little, overawed by the godhead 
 in a Duke's son. We bore down in our overbearing way, and 
 elbowed him off the stage. 
 
 "Scornst thou that man?" Anthony cried. "How we love 
 you." 
 
 Chamberlayn turned and began to explain to us eagerly his 
 scheme for reforming society by an alliance of Tory and So- 
 cialist. 
 
 But, apart from the democratic aberrations in him, it was hard 
 to say just what had made Chamberlayn a member of our group. 
 We prided ourselves on a hatred of the established disorder. 
 Chamberlayn, frankly, could see no disorder that a few wise 
 reforms would not right. He had a single-eyed faith in the 
 civilizing influence of the British Empire. He wanted the lower 
 classes to be thrifty and have clean homes and receive a decency 
 of food and learning. He thought that if Radical parliamenta- 
 rians, brewers and stockbrokers, could be reduced to a proper 
 subservience to t&e Conservative party, that party would shine 
 out in wisdom and beneficence on all men, black and white, 
 who toiled and paid taxes under the good British sun. " You 've 
 got to help us, you socialists," he said. " You know things we 
 don't: we can lead as you can't." 
 
 Kersent thrust venomously at what he called this bric-a-brac 
 socialism. "You got it out of the Wells bran-tub," he said. 
 " Don't you ever think for yourself? " 
 
 The taunt was just enough. Chamberlayn took his ideas 
 straight over from the best authorities; that is to say, from those 
 who disturbed him least. He liked above all things to know 
 where he stood. He liked to think what the best people thought. 
 He turned a resolute back upon all that might shake his belief
 
 IRRESPONSIBILITY 53 
 
 that things were as he thought they should be in a decent god- 
 fearing world wherein wives respected their husbands, children 
 were round limbed and healthy, maidens all pure, men all anxious 
 to deal fairly by each other if only they were not hindered 
 and confused by cranks, agitators and Radicals. We laughed 
 at him: we got angry, and stormed at him. But it was all to 
 no purpose. He had persuaded himself that all tended towards 
 the best in a good world, and towards the best he saw it tend. 
 
 Our weekly meetings were retit asunder by his futile, hot- 
 mouthed quarrels with Kersent. Sometimes we got them pre- 
 cariously on to common ground, but Chamberlayn could not 
 long forbear tilting at Kersent, nor Kersent from pricking Cham- 
 berlayn's prancing ardor. We fumbled our way through their 
 quarrels to a definite idea of what we might do to help the world 
 to the millennium. 
 
 We hung for a time in the outskirts of a rather conscious self- 
 scorn. There was so much to do, and we seemed to do nothing. 
 We filled up the time with hearty abuse of a decrepit society. 
 We were to be the new Eikonoklasts, and under that bombastic 
 standard talked and swaggered until we were brought up sharply 
 by one of Kersent's poisoned barbs, and collapsed deflated. 
 Youth and arrogance blew us out again, and off we sailed. 
 
 " This world," Mick said, " is run by dead men, horrid hairy 
 men like the Rev. Strut, who cluck in their throats and put heavy 
 flat hands on your heads. How that old beast loathed us: you 
 could see his loathing in his little red eyes, and yet we never 
 set out to annoy him. He just came to hating us because we were 
 young, and did n't believe in him any more. You remember that 
 sly-mouthed, slithering son of his scared to death of the Rev- 
 erend, and relieving himself in all sorts of dirty pranks out of 
 the reverent sight. If I had a son like that I 'd hold his head un- 
 der water until he choked. When Chamberlayn 's an old man 
 he '11 oppress his sons, only he '11 do it in a dignified, upright 
 sort of way that they won't be able to kick against." 
 
 " Don't you want your sons to respect you? " Chamberlayn 
 said. 
 
 " No. I don't. Why the devil should they? What is there 
 to respect in dried-up shanks and white hair? They can respect
 
 54 THE HAPPY HIGHWAYS 
 
 my work if I 've done any and I hope they '11 treat me kindly 
 for the sake of it." 
 
 Chamberlayn shrugged. "I don't understand you," he said 
 carelessly. " I think you 're only talking." 
 
 " Of course you don't, dear man. You were born to be re- 
 spected, and a ruler of men. Your sort does actually rule. You 
 simply can't feel how unjust and beastly things are. And if you 
 do, you deceive yourself into thinking that it 's all for the best, 
 that the poor and dirty are a natural balance to the rich and 
 beautiful, and it must be their own fault if they 've got no bath- 
 room and God will reward 'em for it anyway. You couldn't 
 rule or live comfortably if you did n't deceive yourself like that. 
 You 'd turn traitor to your own class, and then they 'd fall on 
 you and kick your corpse into the river . . ." 
 
 " It 's not his fault," Kersent put in maliciously. " His psy- 
 chology is still somewhere in the early feudal stages. It runs in 
 blinkers. He has the idea of a wonderful, beneficent ruling class 
 with the common herd clustering trustfully round learning to 
 read at mother's knee, so to speak. His mind is so full of a 
 golden haze that he just can't see that life never was like that, 
 nor ever will be. In a dim sort of way, he knows there 's blood 
 and misery, but he thinks the blood flows to manure the ground 
 and the misery is sent to purge the spirit . . ." 
 
 " I do know where I stand," Chamberlayn cried hotly, " and 
 that 's more than you do. If my world is all out of drawing, 
 yours is a nebulous mess." 
 
 "It must be wonderful to have things so sharp and clear," 
 Mick said softly. " To know what the world ought to be like 
 and then to see it so. To lean like a tired child on the broad 
 bosom of tradition, and be there lulled to sleep. Cradle Song 
 by chorus of bankers and merchant princes ' The world is fair 
 and round and full of juice. We '11 squeeze it while it purrs its 
 happiness. Hush-a-bye, baby, up in a tree: Grow up and work 
 for wifie and me.' " 
 
 Kersent sat smiling to himself. *' Chamberlayn 's wise. He 's 
 very wise and old. He has all the wisdom of his fathers. Don't 
 you see that if his mind responded at all to the changes in life 
 he couldn't deal with life in the broad, simple fashion of your
 
 IRRESPONSIBILITY 55 
 
 great statesman ? It 's to the interest of those in power to keep 
 things as they are. The old wolf likes, the pack to run in the 
 old known ways. Old men like old familiar things. New things, 
 strange, disturbing things, shake them and destroy their self- 
 confidence. They don't know how to adapt themselves to a new 
 order: they tremble for their power. All change is associated 
 with a troubling sense of insecurity. And they count on this. 
 They say ' Don't go shifting about: you '11 upset the boat. The 
 bottom will come out, and you can't swim.' And there they go, 
 pretending that the timbers aren't rotten and quivering until 
 one day the whole thing will drop to pieces and we shall all be 
 floundering in an uncharted sea." 
 
 A faint flush appeared over his high cheek bones. He gazed at 
 Chamberlayn, and spoke in a winning, almost a beseeching voice. 
 " Can't you see you 're on the wrong side? " he said. " You 're 
 young, but you 're ranging yourself with the old withered men. 
 You just won't give to experience. You deny the evidence your 
 senses bring before your brain. You are the very forces that 
 keep the world in chaos. You are allied with the men who see 
 only what they want to see, because it would be bad for business 
 if they saw the real thing. Just let me describe to you one room- 
 ful of people one room in a million such rooms. It is in a 
 house in the court where I live. There are six people in it. 
 They eat, sleep, and perform every act of life in full view of 
 each other. Behind that screen is the bed where the father and 
 mother sleep with the two youngest children. As you see, the 
 screen is dusty and full of holes a skeleton of a screen. When 
 the last child was born it was night time. The man went and 
 stood outside in the pouring rain, and two young children sat 
 up in their bed to watch the affair. Next day, when the nurse 
 went in to wash the woman, she had to reach across the man to 
 get at her. He was on a night shift at the docks. He was dog 
 tired and it was his bed. His wages, by the way, don't keep 
 his family even in that one room: he is a casual laborer. In 
 strike time, he blacklegs until he dare n't do it any longer. The 
 woman goes out charring most days a week. She locks the chil- 
 dren out, and last year one of them was knocked down and killed 
 in the gutter by a dray. That made room for the next. The
 
 56 THE HAPPY HIGHWAYS 
 
 eldest girl is sixteen. She works in a jam factory. Her wages 
 don't keep her: she makes them up by intermittent prostitution. 
 I have seen her sick with weariness." 
 
 Kersent's voice was suddenly very gentle. " Oh," he said, 
 " you think I 've taken the worst place I ever saw. But it is not 
 so. There are rooms worse than that. Rooms where girls and 
 boys in their teens have to share a bed. Rooms where the vermin 
 eat the children. I don't tell you of these things. I don't want 
 to sicken you." The pleading in his voice hurt me. I wanted 
 to get away from it. We listened like men in a trance. " Don't 
 you see," he said, his burning eyes still fixed on Chamberlayn, 
 " don't you see that these things are n't accidents? They 're in- 
 evitable: they follow directly from the arrangement of the world 
 as old, old, hide-bound men have ordered it. They are in the 
 tradition! The tradition breeds cruelty. You can't get away 
 from it. Your beautiful lawns and spacious houses are built on 
 that room. The hems of soft white gowns are spattered in blood. 
 The blood and the cruelty are what you have wished" 
 
 Chamberlayn cried out harshly. " Now you are lying. Now 
 you are unjust. Who has wished it? What decent man would 
 wish such things? " 
 
 He seemed to appeal to the rest of us. 
 
 Kersent laughed softly. He leaned back in his chair: the 
 mocking ironical note was back in his voice. 
 
 " Now, you 're getting beyond me," he said. " What is decency 
 and which of us is the decent man? It has been considered 
 decent to eat your grandmother, let alone marry her. Of course, 
 I know you are convinced that the decencies of English family 
 life were ordained by God on a hill in Palestine. They hang in 
 the empyrean, like Plato's Ideal Values. They were born in 
 full Anglican canonicals. An honorable man is very sound on 
 the commandments. He bathes in cold water every morning, and 
 morality is all very simple and fine and manly. I suppose it 
 is for you. Black is black, and white is white, and you know 
 what you think, eh? Your sort of mind doesn't run any risk 
 of mental anguish and indecision. The throes of birth are the 
 first agony it will have to endure, and most likely you will die 
 before reaching that disastrous stage."
 
 IRRESPONSIBILITY 57 
 
 Half an hour later we were jolting across Waterloo Bridge on 
 the bus. " I should n't wonder," Mick said, " if I dreamed to- 
 night that I was skulking about outside the Garden of Eden and 
 the angel with the flaming sword had a moth-eaten beard and 
 cleared his throat in a horrid shameless fashion before wheezing 
 at me to move on." 
 
 I stretched myself lazily. " Look how the shadows play with 
 the little pools of moonlight in the water, shaking them from one 
 hand to the other, making patterns and breaking them. You 
 would n't be able to tell that there was a moon in London if it 
 were n't for the river."
 
 CHAPTER XII 
 
 KERSENT told us of the days when he studied and taught to 
 scrape together his college fees. 
 
 " I loathed teaching," he said, " and I was a bad teacher. 
 The sickening repetition of it, emptying oneself into thirty wrig- 
 gling bodies and thirty dull minds. I could n't stand it. I used 
 to lose my temper and be sarcastic. I killed what bit of en- 
 thusiasm they had for their work. I knew I was doing it, but I 
 couldn't help it. And then at night, raking together the pieces 
 of my brain, I tried to blow life and eagerness into them. I have 
 worked till the gray light coming over the blind slit itself into 
 a hundred stabbing darts that pierced my head. Crown of 
 thorns, you know. I used to reel and be sick. And the time I 
 wasted over useless stuff! I had no help. The evening classes 
 were no use to me. The only creature I could ask for advice 
 was my headmaster, and he was as much use as a rotten stick. I 
 suppose he had had some education, but he 'd either forgotten 
 it, or it had made no impression on him. He was positively 
 illiterate. I 've heard him say to a boy ' Come 'ere, you young 
 brat, you. I '11 learn you, I '11 make an exemplar of you.' He 
 did his best for me. He lent me a debauched-looking Shake- 
 speare, and he used to recommend me vaguely to read the stand- 
 ard works. * Get a groundwork,' he said. ' Read Green's 'istory, 
 and a 'istory of literytoor. The flummery can wait.' I went to 
 the local library on my way from school, and chose books by 
 their titles. As like as not, when I got them home, they were 
 useless. I 'd read them all the same: I was afraid to miss one of 
 them out. I did n't trust myself to know the real thing when I 
 saw it. Now and then I 'd buy a book, but only after I had had 
 a good look through it. 
 
 " I '11 not forget going into a West End book shop and asking 
 to see a book with a title that made me think it was a philosoph- 
 ical treatise. It was nothing of the kind, but the shop was so 
 large and I so conscious of my shabby clothes and the scornful 
 assistant that I bought it. Going home I chucked the beastly 
 
 58
 
 IRRESPONSIBILITY 59 
 
 thing in the gutter, and I cried and sniffed over my tea to think 
 of the wasted money." 
 
 He looked at us with his gentle smile. " Instructor of the 
 young in tears for his sins," he said. And a few minutes later, 
 in a musing tone " I 'd have sold my soul to any dull devil in 
 those days for a little decent guidance." 
 
 " There must have been plenty of men at college then who 'd 
 have helped you gladly," I said rather helplessly. 
 
 " Could I have gone and asked them? " 
 
 We hung for a minute over that. 
 
 " We change," Kersent mused, " but our environment does n't. 
 Look at my father. In his village he lived in a two-roomed, 
 rose-grow.!* hovel. He still lives in two rooms. He can't imagine 
 himself in any better place. I am supposed to be content with 
 the same two rooms or at most, a workman's model dwelling 
 and to get children with like manageable desires. I 've killed 
 myself because my desires were n't manageable. I 'm a freak, a 
 degenerate. My family will die off in me. The world has no 
 use for me because I had no use for the life it offered me. Down 
 where I live," he said quietly, " there are thousands of men 
 whose desires are unmanageable out of proportion to their 
 station. Don't you think there will come a time when they on 
 their part will have no use for the world, but will rise and destroy 
 it, good and bad alike? Rulers shut their eyes and try blind pres- 
 sure: the keenest of them make little safety valves. They don't 
 see the incredible danger they are courting. They '11 die in their 
 blindness. But sooner or later disaster will come: one way or 
 another it will come. They say men will perish as the sun grows 
 cold. The poor last of mankind, savages with no Renaissance 
 below the iron sky, will crouch in caves until the last human 
 breath goes out on the frigid air. For my part, I believe that if 
 men do not soon awake to the need of consciously directing their 
 progress, they will disappear long before the sun does. There 
 will be more and more men like me freaks with unmanageable 
 desires. Until in the end the desires will crack and destroy the 
 imperfect life. And since mankind is the world's greatest dis- 
 aster, I don't suppose there will be found even a very little devil 
 to mourn the loss of Balder, the hairless ape . . ."
 
 
 
 CHAPTER XIII 
 
 NCE, on his way from college, Kersent saw a young girl step 
 V, clumsily from a moving 'bus. She fell sideways with a 
 sprained ankle. He took her to her home in Leyton, and had 
 from her an awkward letter of thanks and an invitation to tea. 
 He forgot the letter. Finding it two months later between the 
 pages of a book, he felt an impulse to make apologies. He called 
 at the house in Leyton, and was received with pleasure and re- 
 proach. 
 
 The girl's name was Ruth. She taught in an elementary school. 
 Her mother had been a rheumatic cripple for many years, and 
 her father was writing a book on sylphs. He explained to 
 Kersent that the air was inhabited by several orders of beings, 
 of whom the sylphs were the lowest and least intelligent. They 
 were none the less attractive, and their stupidity was only relative 
 to their celestial nature. In reality, their intelligence was so 
 little superior to our own that men could hold profitable con- 
 verse with them. An older sister shared with Ruth the privilege 
 of supporting the sylphomaniac and his wife. 
 
 Kersent made several calls at the house. He had discovered 
 in himself an undeveloped vanity. He played with Ruth's ad- 
 miration as Montaigne with his cat, and had the same question- 
 ing satisfaction therein. Ruth became his mistress. Her mother 
 regarded the situation with sardonic amusement. Her father, his 
 eyes turned celestially, remained in ignorance of it. The sylph 
 morality was itself so doubtful that there is no need to suppose 
 his disapproval. 
 
 Kersent forgot the girl for months together. Remembering 
 her at odd times, he would take himself to the house at Leyton 
 for a week-end. He found her always the same, placidly re- 
 proachful of his neglect, placidly happy in his remembrance. 
 
 I had tea with them once at Ruth's home. The mother sat in 
 her chair, a shapeless hulk of clothes, topped by a smooth pink 
 
 <m 
 
 60
 
 IRRESPONSIBILITY 61 
 
 face. She seemed to have sucked in cheerfulness from every 
 other member of the family. She thrust her barbed wit at Ker- 
 sent, and treated Ruth with contemptuous kindliness. I thought 
 that she had said to herself " Since I cannot go to the play, I 
 will have the play staged on my own hearthstone, but it is a poor 
 show after all, and poorly acted. If I were not there myself, 
 how bored I should be." 
 
 The older sister was eaten up by hatred of Kersent. She could 
 hardly look at him in patience, but flitted about the room, glower- 
 ing upon him from unexpected angles. This also amused the 
 mother, and her amusement awoke a dumb rage in the girl's eyes. 
 
 I sfid not at this time understand Kersent's relations with Ruth, 
 but I guessed at them. Later in the evening, a paunchy, middle- 
 aged man came in and sat staring at her with an air miserably 
 indulgent of her caprice. He was a chemist. He appeared to 
 be suffering tortures, and the sardonic cripple in the rocking- 
 chair aggravated them with skilful spite. I began to see things 
 clearly. 
 
 The father tried to talk to Kersent. " How goes philosophy 
 these days? " he said absently. " Sweet philosophy, the pastime 
 of the gods." 
 
 His wife nodded her head. " Oh, don't ask him that. He 
 finds her the rarest mistress in the world. She never complains 
 and he never neglects her." She chuckled and rocked. 
 
 Ruth blushed, and her sister trotted agitatedly round the room. 
 
 Kersent smiled at the rocking malice. He never resented nor 
 retorted upon her. A tenuous affection existed between them. I 
 felt suddenly that the mocking elf in the twisted body was some- 
 how kin to the smiling elf of irony in Kersent. I had the pre- 
 posterous idea that Kersent had made Ruth his mistress because 
 it amused her mother. 
 
 "What makes you think philosophy a woman? " he said. 
 
 She twisted her face into a grimacing mask. " Who but a 
 woman would draw so infatuated a host of lovers? " 
 
 " Circe " her husband began. 
 
 " Circe made swine of her lovers," she interrupted, " though it 
 would have been more fitting if she 'd made them goats and apes. 
 La Filosofia takes out her lovers' hearts and turns their brains
 
 62 THE HAPPY HIGHWAYS 
 
 into wheels to spin the moonshine. Oh, a very fine sorceress. 
 Don't tell me the gods made a pastime of her. They had more 
 sense on Olympus." 
 
 "Juno" 
 
 She flung up her hands. " Don't talk to me about the hussy." 
 
 At eight o'clock the chemist sighed heavily and prepared to go. 
 
 ** Good-night," she said, and " Since you can't cure me, 
 couldn't you make me a little simple thing like a love-philter? " 
 
 "Ah, if only I could!" 
 
 She laughed delightedly at his face of a stricken cow. 
 
 I left soon afterwards, but Kersent stayed on. 
 
 He did not visit Ruth for some months. Then she wrote to 
 him. She was to undergo a small operation, and with half- 
 pitiful cunning, tried to call up a tragic vision. He showed me 
 the letter. 
 
 " My dear," she wrote, " I do not at all think I shall die. But, 
 sometimes I suppose these things go wrong. I would not like 
 to think as I went under the chloroform that I had hidden 
 anything from you. If I were to die . . . Sometimes, when I 
 think of you, you seem a stranger, who has come coldly into my 
 life, and taken all I had to give. You have taken it almost with- 
 out recognizing the gift. You come, and I have you, and then 
 you go again for weeks and months. At first, when you never 
 came and never wrote, I thought I should go mad. I tried to 
 pretend that I had never known you, but I could n't do that. I 
 couldn't be the old Ruth. The new Ruth was restless and dis- 
 satisfied. I went about my work on fire for you. There came a 
 time when, if I had wished, I might have taken the easiest way to 
 forget you. There is no need for me to write the man's name. 
 He did not count with me. But one night I sat with him in the 
 firelight. His eyes were on me. I felt a madness creeping over 
 my limbs. Just for a minute, I gave way to wicked desires. I had 
 only to lift my eyes . . . Oh, it was only a mood, but I had to 
 tell you of it now. I ran away and left him. He never 
 knew" 
 
 I gave Kersent the letter. " Poor Ruth." 
 
 " Don't you see the magnificent insincerity? " he said quietly. 
 "She'd never have so accurately remembered a mere mood, if
 
 IRRESPONSIBILITY 63 
 
 there had n't been something bigger connected with it. I daresay 
 she invented the whole tale, so that by confessing to a passing 
 desire she would get relief for some treachery that she 
 dare n't confess. Treachery is a silly word. But I wonder who 
 it was. The chemist, I suppose. Her mother would know. How 
 the old satyr must have reveled in it! She might have shared 
 the jest." 
 
 He did not go near Ruth again. Even when her mother died 
 he did not go. He seemed to resent the old woman's miserly 
 treatment of him in the matter of that jest she had not shared. 
 " She~will laugh to find herself free of her old hulk of a body," 
 he said, and added grudgingly " I 'm sorry she died." 
 
 I had forgotten them, and remember them now so well that I 
 am reluctant to let them go. They have waited so long for me 
 to blow life into them again gentle Ruth, and her vengeful 
 sister, and the laughing cripple, and even the chemist. 
 
 I regret particularly the chemist, that good, paunchy man, 
 for I am convinced that he is full of citizen-like virtues and 
 votes on the right side in elections. 
 
 I do not think that Kersent ever loved anything in his life 
 unless it were the jade Humanity.
 
 CHAPTER XIV 
 
 I HAVE tried to explain what we owed to the accident of spend- 
 ing our student days in London. At first, no doubt, we were 
 simply bewildered provincials. We wandered up Southampton 
 Row into the yellow, greasy squalor of Euston Road and through 
 that to the big houses round Regents' Park. We could not see 
 how either endured the existence of the other. Beyond Ealing 
 Common we came upon miles and miles of horrible villas, full 
 of black, frock-coated little animals and incredible, scurrying 
 hordes of their mates, fed from the ill-stocked, fly-haunted, dusty 
 shops of shopkeepers who cannot afford even to be clean. And 
 then, all about Hyde Park and Kensington Gardens, the great 
 houses with their hierarchies of attendants, maids, valets, hair- 
 dressers, and a few steps away, jewelers, florists, court dress- 
 makers all the busy, elaborate machinery that turns and turns 
 and makes nothing at all. We boggled at the chaotic immensity 
 of wealthy London and the anti-climax of the east end, trailing 
 furtively to the docks and the gray river. 
 
 We had peculiar opportunities to cultivate our intellectual 
 snobbery. Chamberlayn's father was the most poverty-stricken 
 Duke in England. The Cleveland estate was let to Lacquered 
 Goods; the St. James' house was sold, lock, stock, and barrel 
 to an American who got a bad bargain, for the vast, inconvenient 
 basement was eaten up with cockroaches, and not one of the 
 pictures was genuine. Even the Adams fireplace was a fake. 
 
 The Duke kept for himself a dark little house in one of the 
 byeways of Mayfair, and he did not often use that. A cousin 
 of fabulous age lived in it, and behind closed windows preserved 
 carefully an atmosphere of dried rose leaves and old leather. 
 The Duke himself had two rooms in an hotel in Liverpool, and 
 there he posed for incoming Americans. He came to the Kensing- 
 ton cottage now and then. The old satyr had taken a fancy to 
 Margaret. He was kind to us and took us into houses we should 
 
 64
 
 IRRESPONSIBILITY 65 
 
 not have seen without him. Doors opened to that raddled old 
 sinner that were still closed to the Lacquered Goods and the Beer 
 Barons. And the more we saw, the more we were perplexed and 
 doubtful. What possible scheme of life, what high vision could 
 sweep in and hold together the complacent stupidity of Putney 
 and the starved, instinctive stupidity of Bethnal Green? 
 
 We had been too well and truly brought up not to know that 
 it was our duty to feel like this about London. 
 
 It was, after all, the Duke who played Lucina to our laboring 
 minds. There was some vague talk of Disestablishment, and he 
 had cotfife up, he said, to flagellate the Bishops. He was standing 
 gloomily regarding the imitation stone facade of his house in 
 St. James' when I made some careless remark on his attitude to 
 the Church. He surprised me by a queer, cracked vehemence. 
 " The traitors," he said, " the filthy, time-serving traitors. Look 
 at my house, given over to nasal snobs, and my birds being shot 
 at picnic parties with champagne and giggling women. There 
 was a time when the Church and the old families ran together. 
 We boosted them up, and they made us out a little lower than 
 the Almighty. Then you knew where you were: we were the top 
 and head of the building. People looked up to us. We had the 
 books and the pictures and the fine houses and the parks. Things 
 centered on us. All these Beer and Buns people knew their places 
 then. We were respected. And before you knew where you were, 
 beastly little houses shot up at your very doors and the towns ran 
 amuck all over the country with factories and business houses, 
 and working-men's clubs and bed and breakfast for five bob in- 
 cluding the palm court and hot water installed in all the bed- 
 rooms." 
 
 I tried to get him back to the Anglican treachery. "What 
 they done? " he said. " Well, what han't they done? Traf- 
 ficking with Socialists. Letting up on hell-fire. Encouraging 
 grocers and bank clerks to think their souls as good as mine. 
 Hobnobbin' with Beer and Buns, and all because the money was 
 slipping into their hands and they were sneaking into our houses 
 and peacocking around in our clothes. They 've got the top 
 story now, but there ain't any bottom to it. The bottom 's fallen 
 out, only they don't know it, going parrotting away above thore,
 
 66 THE HAPPY HIGHWAYS 
 
 thinking no 'un could tell them from us. After a bit the Bishops 
 'ull fall through, and then Beer and Buns on top of 'em, splosh 
 on their great bellies, God be thanked." 
 
 Strange rhetorical noises rose in his throat and strangled his 
 speech. It balked and then came with a fine sweep. " After 
 the old nobility the Church will go, and after the Church the 
 ignobility of Beer and Bluff." He seemed pleased with the 
 phrase, and I discovered afterwards that he was quoting from an 
 article he had written in a penny weekly of the baser class. He 
 did this sort of thing, and he also sat on Welfare Committees 
 and Maternity Centers and things of that kind. They had his 
 aristocratic company and he had a good lunch and expenses 
 allowed. One of them cut down the expenses to half and there 
 were actually tears in the poor old scoundrel's eyes when he 
 told us. 
 
 There was not a little mental humbugging in our concern with 
 the sociological aspect of London, due, I daresay, to a too pro- 
 longed course in sociological novels and pamphlets thrust upon 
 us when our minds were at their most impressionable stage. 
 
 We developed a kind of imaginative Fabianism. We insisted 
 on pigeon-holing London, and regarding our intellectual sleight- 
 of-hand as an achievement. 
 
 The structure of things, and all the outward show, belongs to 
 the eighteenth century. The big estates are still there, fenced 
 off. The shops still make pretense of catering for exclusive 
 tastes. The thing looks the same dignified Churchmen, fine 
 ladies, subtler and subtler private magnificences but the heart 
 is gone out of it. It means nothing now. The powers above, 
 that stood in our sight once for national traditions and a fine 
 spacious outlook, stand now for nothing but profits squeezed from 
 common needs, kept up by newspaper jingoisms and shameless 
 scheming and self-advertisements. The new powers have scram- 
 bled into castles and Mayfair houses that are built out over f 
 nothing. The older feudal hierarchy of class has crumbled away 
 beneath them. Below the white-sleeved bishops are now only 
 empty churches and indifferent, scornful crowds: below Beer and 
 Buns an ever-increasing and incalculable ferment of discontents, 
 strivings, and insecure pretenses.
 
 IRRESPONSIBILITY 67 
 
 We could see also a lateral cleavage in the general upheaval 
 and subsidence of the social revolution that followed the in- 
 dustrial one and shook our old Duke from his great house and 
 his feudal security. 
 
 The line of partition runs somewhere through the middle 
 classes. Above it are what are called the upper middle classes, 
 fairly prosperous families, employing three or four or more 
 servants, professional men, secretaries, clerks of the nobler sort. 
 These believe in Beer and Buns as those mighty ones do not 
 believejn themselves, work for Beer and Buns, draw salaries and 
 philosophies therefrom. Their wives join in the conspiracy to 
 assume the permanence of Beer and Buns, dress themselves to 
 
 look more like Beer than Lady B does, take in illustrated 
 
 papers which show them how to achieve the Beer effect at an 
 infinitesimal fraction of the Beer income, talk Beer, court and 
 marry and pray Beer; assume, in fact, that the only difference 
 between them and Beer is an illusory and non-essential difference 
 of money, always capable of readjustment by some lucky accident 
 or unforseen opportunity, Putney and Croydon and Dulwich are 
 all given over to this Beer cult. We traced it down through less 
 and less pretentious suburbs and more pitiful, shoddy, and spirit- 
 less reflections of Beer until we arrived again at the crushing 
 vulgarity of Ealing. And we wondered whether they would all 
 perish with Beer, loyal and slow-witted devotees, or save them- 
 selves at the last. 
 
 Below the line of cleavage comes a vast mass of men and 
 women moving slowly towards a sharper and more conscious 
 antagonism to Beer. The shams and affectations of those others 
 simply do not exist in their ungracious and unlovely lives. They 
 keep themselves in a grim respectability, too near the under- 
 world to forget the need of that. They are as intensely stupid 
 as the others, and even more bigoted and warped in spirit. 
 
 And yet, nothing more important has happened to the human 
 race since the first speck of life moved and moved again, creep- 
 ing blindly in the mud, than is happening now in the restless 
 stirrings of these very lives, lived without leisure or security or 
 any beautiful and spacious thing. Half unaware of their power, 
 too often thwarted and led wrong by craven and interested
 
 68 THE HAPPY HIGHWAYS 
 
 guides, they invite and get no help save from a handful of men, 
 longer-sighted or less class-loyal than their kind. Your palpably 
 loyal and healthy-minded citizen, glancing reluctantly at what 
 he calls the masses, distinguishes between the commendably 
 thrifty and the wantonly agitated and perverse. Farther than 
 that he dare not go, without grave risk to his mental health. It 
 might even become necessary for him to think. 
 
 And we looked at these thwarted, strenuous lives and had the 
 preposterous, childish audacity to sneer at them. We sat up 
 o' nights and wondered what sort of a social order would be 
 fathered by uneducated slaves and sponsored by labor leaders. 
 To be sure, we swung later, in the inspiration of the Scheme, 
 to an enthusiasm as ill-advised as our scorn. Not that there was 
 any scanting in the advice thrust upon us. The Scheme was 
 indeed near suffocated and over-lain by advice.
 
 CHAPTER XV 
 
 YOU would be grievously misled if you imagined that we 
 spent the whole of our time wandering round London in a 
 state of intellectual frenzy. 
 
 We folind it difficult to get rid of a suspicion that we were 
 rather priggishly-minded in this social concern of ours. It did 
 not preclude an enjoyment of life that might find expression in 
 kicking a tin can all the way through the tarnished gentility of 
 Denmark Hill to Camberwell Green, or set us scouring London 
 for a cheap copy of a coveted book, or keep us on our weary 
 feet at promenade concerts or rare first nights. But it filled 
 our thoughts to an extraordinary extent. 
 
 I suppose it takes as sharp a hold upon the thoughts of long- 
 thinking youth in any condition of life. But when youth seeks 
 a legitimate outlet for his desire of service there is none to his 
 hand. The socialist societies of the day offer about as much 
 attraction to his eagerness as a spent fire-balloon. Either he 
 comes to them bearing his own fire, to burn itself out in an unin- 
 telligent huckstering of socialism in barren places. Or else he 
 falls to wandering through his days in a fever of discontent, 
 bemusing himself with a sociology borrowed from his reading, 
 until the fever leaves him or is transmuted into something of 
 more value to Trade. It is not given to many of us to marry 
 money, enter Parliament, and inaugurate the Endowment of 
 Motherhood. 
 
 The fever and the desire to serve existed once in the most 
 respectable of us. Then how amazingly potent must be those 
 social forces that make decent, orderly, obtuse and bat-eyed 
 citizens of the ninety and nine of us! At what point does a 
 man begin to pass from aching dissatisfaction with the injustice 
 that obese old men call social progress to the for-god's-sake-hold- 
 your-tongue-and-let-me-live attitude of successful middle-age? 
 Does age bring about the happy change, or success, or the blind, 
 
 69
 
 70 THE HAPPY HIGHWAYS 
 
 fearful pressure of the innumerable dead who struggled and 
 failed before us, of the burdens we take on us wives, children, 
 houses, brick-dust and dirt? Is it because we are so timorous 
 in the face of posterity that we go on introducing it into a dull 
 and searing insecurity rather than outrage the decencies of 
 modern life by telling the truth about it? 
 
 We would rather be left in the filth we are used to than adven- 
 ture on an untried road with our train of helpless dependents. 
 And so we rend the unbalanced altruist: and so we tell our 
 earnest young men " Ah, I thought so at your age, but when 
 you get to mine, you will have other things to think about than 
 Utopias " and, gazing upon our deflated enthusiasms over an 
 acquired convexity of frontage, we puff and wheeze ourselves 
 to bed. 
 
 Even Mick felt the weight of the aged impotence that presses on 
 every department of life, from the instinctive lisping of folk-lore 
 to the accepted misinterpretations of history and the smearing 
 of beauty by scuffling moralities. At the height of our earnest- 
 ness we were pricked by a dread of making fools of ourselves. 
 We did not want to appear priggish . . . We had caught the 
 prevailing English horror of appearing to think about things. 
 In England, marks of the effort of thought are commonly held 
 to be undignified and unnecessary almost indecent. Your 
 well-bred politician producing his reforms poor things that 
 they are does so in an offhand, gentlemanly way " a little 
 thing I thought of in an odd half-hour." A man may rob and 
 starve his fellow-men, thwart them of every joyous and beautiful 
 thing, cheat them by lying hopes of heavenly bliss, ruin and 
 spoil and demoralize, and be rewarded for it by the emulative 
 respect of godly folk. But let him attempt to expose his fellows 
 to the horrid anguish of thought, or drag Truth indecent from 
 her decent well, and there is an end of him, so far as this world 
 goes. 
 
 Or, for the matter of that, any other world peopled by the 
 spirits of our neighbors. Sad that we are all fated to be neigh- 
 bored by thick-skinned stupidity! 
 
 Should he have the good fortune to live until his ideas are 
 stale and stingless, he may found a self-explanatory society or
 
 IRRESPONSIBILITY 71 
 
 edit a review, and finu himself taken seriously when it no longer 
 matters whether he rot above or below ground. 
 
 Or, like Mr. Shaw, he may disguise his earnestness by doing 
 his own clowning. Or wink behind his gravity at his friends 
 like any successful politician returning to the rich man in 
 private what he has taken from him in public, an amiable and 
 harmless Robin Hood. But to be in earnest, in or out of Parlia- 
 ment, without mitigating your madness by humor or mellow- 
 ing it by compromise, is to stand self-accused of lack of breeding 
 and an undisciplined mind. 
 
 In our ramblings round London, in our flushed and arrogant 
 earnestness, we made the absurd and inevitable mistakes of in- 
 experience". But where the border-line between the earnest and 
 the priggish becomes shadowy, did we not save ourselves when 
 we took refuge in the Scheme? I believe we did. Let us say 
 that we did. We did not stop at words: we made an effort that 
 was not entirely futile, though there is little to see now of aught 
 it did. " Thoughts like swords " Margaret said, hesitated, and 
 left the phrase in a winged uncertainty. I believe the world has 
 especial need of thoughts like swords. In our fumbling eager- 
 ness we were trying to think clean through perplexities that have 
 baffled better heads than ours, broken better men. We made all 
 kinds of fools of ourselves, but on the whole I am not ashamed 
 of our follies. 
 
 It was inevitable that we should fall into follies other than the 
 folly of believing in the possibility of social justice. I fell among 
 the Jews, you remember who were kinder to me than I merited.
 
 CHAPTER XVI 
 
 LONDON dominated Mick from the first. Night after night 
 he prowled about the streets, east to the docks, west to the 
 swirling vibrant life of Regent Street and Piccadilly. Sometimes 
 it excited him and he would come home and talk, waving his arms 
 about: at other times he returned tired and depressed. During 
 his first year he worked desperately hard, but discovering soon 
 that he was far and away the best of the Physics men, he gave 
 way to fits of unbroken indolence. 
 
 He would sit in the easiest chair with one leg over the arm, his 
 vile, bubbly pipe in his mouth, and abuse Bergson and the Sidney 
 Webbs until I had to take my books and study upstairs. He 
 made of science a kind of fairyland through which his mind 
 trailed clouds of iridescent speculation and thrust pathways to 
 the stars. 
 
 He wasted our time as well as his own, for he had a knack of 
 inveigling attention for the wildest of the schemes and notions 
 that flourished in his brain. I do not mean that he was one of 
 your scientific dilettantes, dabbling in a kitchen chemistry or 
 scraping up enough biology to produce horrid hybrid psychol- 
 ogies of the pithecoid type. He had a deeper and infinitely 
 more intelligent knowledge of his work than that of the ordi- 
 nary clever student. His professors were gravely encouraging. 
 Towards the end of his third year they promised a scholarship 
 at Cambridge, and later still the idea of a Fellowship appeared 
 from somewhere and took a definite place in his vision of the 
 future. There seemed to be no limit to the success he might 
 achieve if only he did not abandon himself to one of the whims 
 that took periodic hold on his imagination. 
 
 At one time he agreed with a wealthy agricultural student that 
 they would emigrate to California and a fruit farm, to grow the 
 fruit of gods in electrified soil. Their plans were minutely elab- 
 orated before Mick wearied of the scheme. 
 
 Another caprice almost ended badly. I wonder how many 
 
 72
 
 IRRESPONSIBILITY 73 
 
 people knew or remember Bronterre Gascoyne? He was 'that 
 hairy, wild Irishman who burst upon London society from some 
 remote Atlantic creek. With several rich women, an odd Duchess 
 or two, and a few men a little less mad than himself, he took a 
 suite of rooms in a west end hotel and prepared to open com- 
 munications with the guardian spirits of the next world. He 
 seemed to know them intimately. I forget where Mick met him 
 probably at some house where he had gone with Jack Chamber- 
 layn and the Duke. He flung himself into the old maniac's 
 schemes with enthusiasm, and readily agreed to converse with 
 Aldabeezar III, the Guardian of the Lintel. For a whole fort- 
 night he>.fasted on a rusk and a glass of water a day. Then 
 Gascoyne dosed him with some drug that took instantaneous and 
 fearful effect upon him. He told us afterwards that he seemed 
 to be thinking at an incredible rate. His thoughts mounted up 
 in a spiral of white flame to a point of dazzling light, and there 
 burst into fiery rays. 
 
 The onlookers saw nothing but the rapid dilation of Mick's 
 pupils until his face was a white mask with eyes that burned in 
 their sockets. Then he flung up his arms and dropped like a 
 stone. He was still unconscious when they brought him home. 
 We called in a doctor who accused us in his bewilderment of 
 making fool experiments with some stuff from a college lab. 
 We had time to become half-crazed with anxiety before Mick 
 recovered and struggled to sit up. 
 
 " Well, I '11 be damned," he said, as light came slowly back. 
 " When I get used to that stuff I '11 be able to live in the next 
 era and think in Mars. Those Guardian Spirits are the boys, 
 take my word for it." 
 
 Bronterre Gascoyne died three months later, just in time to 
 escape a madhouse. Mick bought himself a black tie and a 
 black, watered silk ribbon for his eyeglass. 
 
 " I 'm sorry he 's dead," he said. " He was an interesting 
 beast, but altogether too optimistic for this world." 
 
 It was during the fortnight of fasting and initiation that 
 Mick's Physics lecturer stopped me in the upper corridor of 
 King's. He made a few wandering remarks, eyeing me absently 
 the while, and then came abruptly to his point.
 
 74 THE HAPPY HIGHWAYS 
 
 " I wish you 'd drop a word in season to that brother of yours, 
 Hearne. He 's quite a good man I might say, an exceptionally 
 good man. But there 's an idea getting about that he 's not 
 Sound. It 's fatal, of course, for an idea like that to get about 
 among the people who can do things for him. If he wants to 
 get on he must be Sound, and he must let them know that he is. 
 If you can drop a hint he 'd take it better from you. Most 
 interesting, these new experiments of Sir Julian's. What d' you 
 say? " He turned and stalked nervously away. 
 
 I repeated the conversation to Mick. He opened his eyes and 
 smiled like a young cat. 
 
 " He 's a kind soul, is Sanday, and sound oh, enormously 
 sound. All his vital juices, if he has any, drain off into scientific 
 and professional channels. He couldn't tell a woman from a 
 tripod, if you presented them to him offhand. Do you know, 
 when Dr. Jane Joyce came into the lab. for the first time, he 
 thought she was the new lab. boy, and shoved a lot of crocks 
 at her to wash. She put them down in a high old rage and was 
 flouncing off when he caught sight of her petticoats. What 
 does the old dear do but conclude she 's a medical masquerade ! 
 He hustles her out of the lab. with much withering sarcasm 
 about female graces, and comes back rubbing his skinny hands. 
 * I 'm very short-sighted, gentlemen,' he croaked, * but not so 
 short-sighted as that.' Joynes says the old girl reported Sanday 
 for obscene and indecent conduct and that he had to crawl on 
 his stomach to put things right, but Joynes is a bit of a liar. 
 Last week I found the old fellow fumbling with his key at the 
 door of the lab. * Is that you, Hearne? ' says he, stuttering and 
 blinking round at me. * I can't find the key-hole at all.' Oho, 
 thinks I, the old Adam's kicking at last: we'll make a man of 
 him yet. He 's as drunk as a Duke. But he was n't, you know. 
 He was just dazed for want of sleep: he'd been working day 
 and night for seven days, without a break except for an odd meal 
 or two. ' I 'm unusually tired, Hearne,' he says, * what would 
 you advise? ' I told him to try a music hall, and I 'm damned 
 if the fool did n't go straight off to the Oxford for three solid 
 hours before he went to bed. He said next day he had n't been 
 inside a place of amusement for ten years, and had quite for-
 
 IRRESPONSIBILITY 75 
 
 gotten the extraordinary art and precision required in sitting 
 with another man's knees in the small of your back, a feather 
 tickling your nose, and a hatpin presented at either ear." 
 
 I had made one or two attempts at interruption, like a feather 
 beating against a head wind. I flung myself upon him and laid 
 him gently on the ground. He fended me off, gurgling helplessly 
 in his throat. 
 
 "Oh, I'm weak," he gasped. "Don't! You'll break me, 
 you will." 
 
 " All these selections," I said, " are so much shuffling from 
 the point. You 've got to pull up. Things are come to a pretty 
 fine pass when the lethargic Sanday rouses himself to warn you." 
 
 " Sartday's love for me makes him over-anxious," he answered. 
 " But what do you suppose it is that makes me yearn after a 
 treatise on old red sandstone when I ought to be in the Physics 
 lab., or keeps me rooted in the lab. when I ought to be swinking 
 at something else? These science courses are all wrong. They 
 leave no margin for original work. They might have been de- 
 vised for the especial murder of genius. That 's what it is, 
 Joy. It 's genius the unpruned roots of genius annoying the 
 tidy, academic mind." 
 
 " Well, the sooner you get to work with a pruning knife, the 
 better for you," I retorted, and left him to his rusk and a mon- 
 strous version of the Mahabharata. He was studying it for the 
 local color, with the intention of dumbfounding Aldabeezar HI. 
 
 During his second year the moods of depression and idleness 
 became more frequent. We were at our wit's end to get him to 
 work at all. Then Margaret came, and for a few weeks we 
 thought that she was succeeding where we had failed. He took 
 her about London, for, like him, she could not work except in 
 long sleepless stretches, with days and weeks of idleness between. 
 He was eager and full of the old ambitions. But the impulse 
 died out, and he relapsed into a moody uncertainty. 
 
 It would be easy to present Michael as a tragic figure, wrestling 
 with the crushing problems of human existence. He seemed to 
 have in him an instinctive revolt against the environment in 
 which he found himself. He would abuse it at one and the same 
 time as a fatuous and commonplace routine, and as a chaos of
 
 76 THE HAPPY HIGHWAYS 
 
 blood and misery, too cruel and unjust to be endured. From 
 his spasms of depressed silence he emerged into a >vindy dis- 
 satisfaction with the universe. He sprawled in the armchair 
 and talked with a mocking humor that glanced edgeways at him- 
 self, or he pranced about the room, arguing, Oliver said, like a 
 drunken Rationalist. 
 
 " The Christian religion is the biggest and most successful bluff 
 in human history. But it loses its potency. Folk are beginning 
 to see through it to the horrid, bloody tribal rites behind. The 
 sacrifice of one for many a heathen scattering of human blood. 
 And, yet, if you take away the Cross from Christianity, what is 
 there to distinguish it from say the teaching of Confucius? 
 Except a sentimentality that makes it acceptable to the timorous 
 and self-seeking. Of course, I know it 's usual to get lyrical about 
 the parables. But you can make the Gospels justify anything, 
 from child labor to putting sand in the sugar." 
 
 " You should n't judge Christianity by bishops and amateur 
 theologians," I put in. 
 
 " If Christianity is n't to be judged by Christians," he shouted, 
 "what on earth is it to be judged by? A faith must be judged 
 by the company it keeps. There is no faith, apart from its 
 expression in human minds and human modes of life. And you 
 know the company kept by this Cross business. It gets hold of 
 the savage in us. It calls up fears and superstitions we would n't 
 dare drag into the light of day. Perhaps religion is sacrifice, 
 after all a continuous sacrifice of will and personality." 
 
 Another night, he sat smoking in his chair until the small 
 hours of the morning. Margaret and I had worked late, and 
 we were gathering up our books and papers when he began to 
 talk. 
 
 " Devils for work, you two," he said. " I suppose you think 
 I ought to have been working alongside you ! Sometimes I think 
 I '11 throw the whole thing up and go. It gets on me this 
 town and other things. Things look secure to you. They do 
 to me. I look round and I see a continuous procession of solid, 
 satisfied citizens going up to town to buy cheap and sell dear, 
 coming back to sleep with solid wives in solid beds. Sometimes 
 I want to shout and chatter at them. Wasn't there some one
 
 IRRESPONSIBILITY 77 
 
 who ran through the streets of Lichfield crying * Woe, woe, 
 to this bloody town? ' I 'd like to take and shove their noses in 
 it, show 'em that they 're standing in blood, drinking it, giving it 
 to their children blood pouring from a million exhausted 
 bodies." 
 
 The stem of his pipe snapped suddenly in his hand. He 
 looked absently at the pieces. 
 
 "The beastliness and the injustice of it crush me," he said. 
 " Why is it they are n't crushed and shamed? " 
 
 " They don't see it," I said vaguely. 
 
 He jabbed at the table with the broken pipe. 
 
 " People have interests in life," he said. " They trade and 
 groce and cheat and play golf. They march through life towards 
 a fixed star. There is disorder and suffering a universal lazar- 
 house. What purpose does it all serve? Suppose it does n't 
 serve any purpose, or serves a bad one? I 've tried to fill my 
 mind with other things, but they all fail me. I keep falling 
 through the bottom of my self-deceptions. I 've run round blow- 
 ing out little social bladders thinking what could be done, 
 what sort of tricks one could play to dodge the universe and 
 bluff it into producing a decent life for men. But all this social 
 stuff is n't it, after all, as if one were fussing round about the 
 drainage when the whole house is threatened with destruction? 
 What 's the use of it all if the world does n't mean anything any- 
 way, or if it 's fixed towards evil and injustice? One works and 
 works and thinks and plans and at the end of it all there we 
 are still, perhaps a little better clothed, a little better fed, a little 
 healthier, but still clinging like insects to the face of the earth, 
 menaced by catastrophes over which we have no control." 
 
 I clutched at my wits and tried to divert the torrent. 
 
 " There 's plenty of meaning in life," I said, " if you 'd give up 
 trying to measure yourself by the planetary system. There's 
 art" 
 
 "Art can't be the meaning of things, you color-drunk fat- 
 head. If it were, every one would have at least some sense of it. 
 I have none. And I can't rid myself of the notion of an artist 
 as the subtlest of liars, forcing a false simplification on to the 
 complexity of life, crying * order ' where there is n't order. Don't
 
 78 THE HAPPY HIGHWAYS 
 
 you, honestly, think that art is only another of the self-deceptions? 
 It is brave and beautiful, but only bluff after all. No one but 
 an artist would be crazed enough to suggest that empires rise 
 and perish and the generations travail for the sake of producing 
 a canvas or marble idol. Did Greece exist to produce Phidias? " 
 
 " You could argue that it did," I interrupted. 
 
 " You 'd argue anything," he shouted. " But if you argued 
 that, you 'd be talking, let me tell you, like a fool or an artist. I 
 never could make up my mind whether priests or painters were 
 the more colossal egoists." 
 
 His eyes fell on the broken pipe. 
 
 " Well, I 'm damned ! " he said. " You 've trodden on my 
 pipe, one of you. You you murderers . . ." 
 
 In my thoughts I seem to miss the source of Mick's unrest. 
 Queerly it eludes me. As a child he suffered acutely from the 
 hardships that I endured in silence and Oliver did not even see. 
 There seemed a deep-drawn, hidden discord between some part 
 of his consciousness and life. I do not know, indeed, whether 
 life was the antagonist, or life malformed and twisted and made 
 hideous by greed and apathy. 
 
 It would be easy, I say, to present him as a tragic rebel against 
 the God of this world. Easy and intriguing and untrue. 
 There was nothing tragic about him. There was something 
 twisted and something devilishly clear-sighted that kept him from 
 drugging his brain with the deceptions and excuses that most 
 of us offer ourselves for the sorry spectacle of dead and maimed 
 along the wayside of progress. And between the two, he had 
 moments when he came near a headlong renunciation of every 
 plan and ambition that seemed to hold him in a decent and self- 
 seeking world. 
 
 He had a passion for order and he found himself in a world 
 where disorder is the rule of the road. He loved beauty with a 
 sharp and subtle love, and he could only snatch it hardily from 
 the ugly rush of a man-made struggle for existence. 
 
 Certainly he was not tragic, unless there is such a thing as 
 a tragic sprite, bitter and joyous, mocking and cheerful, by turns 
 or all at once, full of mental whimsies and freakish as Puck.
 
 IRRESPONSIBILITY 79 
 
 No. Freakish is wrong. He was not really freakish. There was 
 too deep a purpose in him for that. 
 
 There were weeks when he overflowed with an exuberant happi- 
 ness that swept us in and out of adventure. He got himself in- 
 vited to a house in Dulwich, and there posed as a distinguished 
 scientist. He came home at night and described how he had 
 enthralled a drawing-room-full of people with the incredible 
 wonders of science. I have no doubt of their incredibility in 
 Mick's mouth. 
 
 In the course of a speech at the Debating Society he invented 
 a Czech^ philosopher, whom he called Sinciwincs and endowed 
 with views of astounding audacity on marriage and the nature of 
 the Trinity. A doctor of theology sputtered and foamed at the 
 mouth in refutation of what he said was barbarous and degraded 
 Gnosticism, and the librarian was besieged next day for possible 
 translations of the engaging heretic. 
 
 Mick's garrulity overflowed into parks and meeting-places of 
 the damned. His enormous stick and queer cracked laugh be- 
 came familiar as its bed to the bowler-hatted humanity that 
 gathered in Brockwell Park on Sunday afternoons and listened 
 while he bemused it with the most preposterous of social sciences. 
 
 He wasted so much time and had to make up for it by such 
 devastating onslaughts upon arrears of work that we did not see 
 how even his amazing vitality could stand the strain. 
 
 We were afraid to worry him about it lest he should get out of 
 hand altogether, refuse to take a degree, disappear. There was 
 about Mick none of that parsimonious decency that keeps most 
 of us well on this side of our follies. We play the fool with 
 the sure inward knowledge that we are bitted citizens and family 
 men with regular habits and bellies to be filled. But one could 
 not be sure of Mick. 
 
 He began to make mysterious excursions to the west end of 
 London. Three or four times a week he left King's at dinner- 
 time and came home near midnight. I sat up for him one night 
 when he was later than usual. He came in about two, and 
 dropped rather wearily into a chair. I waited for him to speak 
 but he said nothing.
 
 80 THE HAPPY HIGHWAYS 
 
 " It 's no business of mine," I began carefully, " but I guess 
 you 've forgotten that your Final comes off in two months. 
 You 're wasting a hell of a lot of time, you know." 
 
 He laughed at me. 
 
 " I know what I 'm doing," he said. *' I can take the Finals 
 on my head. Don't you worry yourself." 
 
 I pushed my books into a corner of the shelf and prepared to 
 leave him in his conceit. 
 
 " Don't go, Joy," he said abruptly. " Sit down, and I '11 tell 
 you where I 've been. She lives in South Kensington, and I 
 spoke to her at the Queen's Hall. She 's all right. I 've met her 
 family and all that." 
 
 I stared at him. 
 
 ** You always were a fool," I said, " but I did n't think you 
 were fool enough to ruin your chances of a First for the sake of 
 holding hands with a girl you picked up at a concert." 
 
 " Shows how little you know me," he said cheerfully. " To 
 tell you the truth, I 'm nfot keen on letting it run on much longer, 
 but one must keep this off." He waved his hand at the hid- 
 den street. 
 
 After that night I noticed that his visits to South Kensington 
 were always followed by a mood of weary excitement when he 
 would walk about the room, debating with the universe. 
 
 " I Ve thought," he said once, " that science might be the mean- 
 ing of the world. It might be worth living just for the sake of 
 knowledge and mastery. But back I come again knowledge for 
 what? For comfort? If I knew all there were to know of na- 
 ture's secret I 'd still be unsatisfied." 
 
 It wanted a month to his Finals when he asked Margaret to 
 go with him to South Kensington. 
 
 " You can come too, Joy," he said. " I 'd like them to see that 
 I have a presentable relative." 
 
 The girl lived, we found, in one of those faded yellow squares 
 that cling round the skirts of fashionable London. A half-fed 
 and startled-tooking maid opened the door to us. Mick walked 
 unannounced into a room on the right of the hall. We hesitated 
 in the doorway. A woman, lounging in a cane chair, jumped up 
 with premeditated vivacity.
 
 IRRESPONSIBILITY 81 
 
 " Oh, Mickie," she said, " and you 've brought your friends. 
 How sweet of you! Olive is upstairs. She won't be long." 
 
 Mick waved a hand at us. " Margaret. My brother. Mrs. 
 Champion." 
 
 Mrs. Champion smiled archly, with one eyebrow lifted over 
 Mick's unceremonious methods. 
 
 " How good of you," she said. " How too good of you." 
 
 She seemed to grope in her mind for words to express our 
 transcendent goodness. The door opened, and a girl came into 
 the room. She stood a moment poised against the black curtain 
 in the doorway, and looked at us with a half-sullen defiance strug- 
 gling faith her smile. Her first words were ungracious. 
 
 " So you 've brought them," she said to Mick, with a sidelong 
 glance at me. " I did n't think you would." 
 
 " We are glad to come," Margaret said unexpectedly. "Mick 
 has often spoken of you." 
 
 She took a step towards the girl, whose face brightened. 
 
 " And I 'm so glad you 're here," she answered. " I wanted 
 to see you." 
 
 I found myself sitting beside Mrs. Champion in a horrible lanky 
 chair. In the pauses of fending off her conversational rushes, I 
 gave a furtive attention to her daughter. 
 
 Olive Champion had a curious exotic beauty of ivory skin and 
 full red mouth. I thought there might be Jewish blood in her. 
 Then I thought that she was really a Beardsley woman, but plump 
 and youthful, with a quick feline vitality. She watched Mick 
 with a defiant possessive air, as if she knew how little and yet 
 how fiercely she held him. I did not like her and I was sorry for 
 her. 
 
 We had tea on a series of sma41 tables that pulled out from 
 under each other, and stood perilously round on creaking spindle 
 legs. It struck me quite suddenly that Margaret was a surprise 
 to them. They had not expected her to be well, Margaret 
 very graceful and slender in her long gray coat. Mrs. Champion 
 affected a constrained and unnatiw-al ease of manner -and talked 
 brightly on innumerable subjects. She poked little informative 
 remarks at us. The father was in the city: I suppose he played 
 3 part in one of the many shady byways of modern finance. He?
 
 82 THE HAPPY HIGHWAYS 
 
 must have done it quite well, for the house was full of thick low 
 couches, horrible satin cushions and gold-threaded curtains. 
 Black bowls stood about the room, with scarlet poppies floating on 
 the water. The tea-cups were scarlet, with black saucers and 
 black plates, and small red-handled implements like ineffectual 
 palette knives. Olive wore a red frock, very narrow in the body 
 and full below the hips, and her mother had wriggled into a 
 black gown that thinned off over shoulders and back. She had a 
 white, solid back. 
 
 I could not place them. Neither mother nor daughter appeared 
 to have any work or interest in life. They obviously spent a 
 good deal of care on their bodies, and Mrs. Champion had dabbled 
 in Women's Suffrage and Cubism and Christian Science without, 
 however, ruffling her mental placidity in the slightest. 
 
 "There's something in healing by faith, isn't there?" she 
 appealed to me. 
 
 " Oh, yes," I said helpfully, " there must be." 
 
 " That 's what I feel," she said. " Soul calling to soul, you 
 know, with healing in their wings." I saw that Mick was restrain- 
 ing himself and I drew her gently from the subject. 
 
 Olive said little. She seemed to be constantly on the verge of 
 snubbing her mother quite conclusively. She sat with compressed 
 lips and half-closed eyes. Margaret made some tentative remark 
 about "The New Machiavelli." Wells was our conversational 
 standby. 
 
 Olive looked up. 
 
 " Oh," she said, " did you like that? I thought it rather silly. 
 The idea is all right, I suppose, but it 's mixed up with such a lot 
 of rubbish. That about love being spoilt by secrecy. It 's non- 
 sense, isn't it? And all the political stuff bored me. It's out 
 of date, too, is n't it? " 
 
 " Olive 's a bit of an anarchist," Mick interrupted. " She thinks 
 Wells is a fussy old bird." 
 
 Mrs. Champion burst upon the conversation with a bewildering 
 excursion into politics. As I listened I found myself uncon- 
 sciously trying to understand the household. I had never met 
 people like the Champions before, and their aimless attitude puz- 
 zled me. They did not seem to touch reality at any point. They
 
 IRRESPONSIBILITY 83 
 
 squatted among their dreadful cushions like mislaid wives of some 
 uxorious monarch. They had not, so far as I could see, the remot- 
 est notion of any life outside a routine of shops, cafes, and 
 theaters. 
 
 Of course, they were not the oddities they seemed to me at that 
 time. I came later upon similar households everywhere in Lon- 
 don, curious by-products of the social chaos. They lived on 
 money made by anti-social charlatanry, and copied their manner 
 of life from households where charlatanry had been raised to the 
 dignity of high finance. Nothing had any grip upon them. Half 
 a century ago they would have carefully observed all the forms 
 of religion and social convention, and arranged their lives by a 
 well-regulated tradition. But formal religion has exhausted itself, 
 the old class landmarks have disappeared, and the Champions and 
 their kind, abandoned to their own sense of fitness, have disinte- 
 grated into a mob of half-educated, acquisitive women, spending 
 their abundant leisure on little futile dashes at new sensations. 
 
 With the rigidity of convention these people seemed to have 
 dropped some of the underlying decencies. There was, one gath- 
 ered, a tacit understanding between mother and daughter that cer- 
 tain " boys " belonged to the mother and certain " men " to Olive, 
 and a furtive conspiracy against the obstrusiveness of Mr. Cham- 
 pion. 
 
 He was not conventionally obstrusive. Her parents went to 
 bed and left Olive sitting on Mick's knee with an unctuous trust- 
 fulness that made him feel like a hardened seducer. 
 
 They felt, I believe, that she must be allowed a free hand in 
 her adventures after marriage. She was no fool, and could be 
 trusted not to cheapen the market. 
 
 Mrs. Champion disappeared after tea, and Mick plunged into 
 conversation. I imagined that he was diverting energy from 
 some hidden source of passion to create the artificial passion of 
 his words. 
 
 Olive listened to him with a half-scornful admiration. Now 
 and then she would dispute his doctrines, more, I thought, for 
 the sake of differing from him, than because she was really 
 moved or interested. 
 
 "Every one knows," he cried, "why there is all this rushing
 
 84 THE HAPPY HIGHWAYS 
 
 round and hushing up of sex, this nodding and winking and 
 whispering over the heads of children. It's from fear: people 
 keep the young shut up as long as they can, and then they push 
 them out into the world and say, ' Thank goodness, they 're off 
 our hands, and if they come a cropper through ignorance or curi- 
 osity, it 's none of our business.' They 're jealous too: they hate 
 to think of their sons and daughters knowing as much about life 
 as they themselves do, and so they try to keep them innocent, 
 and teach them that love is all a matter of holding hands among 
 the daisies." 
 
 Olive glanced at him with a curious, sleepy pleasure. Her 
 cheeks were flushed, and she sat with her hands open, palms up- 
 ward in her lap. 
 
 " The old ethics don't grip people now," Mick added, " and 
 that doubles the confusion. There 's only the jar and pull of fear 
 and jealousy. The old are jealous of the young, and afraid of 
 what they '11 do. They can't help themselves : it 's an instinct, 
 just as old animals are jealous of their young. One sex is 
 jealous of the other's power. Class is jealous and fearful of 
 class, nation of nation . . ." 
 
 We escaped from Mick's insatiable lust for moral scalps, and 
 found ourselves talking of artists and cafes. Olive displayed an 
 unexpected animation. 
 
 *' I know a painting man," she said. " He is a wonderful crea- 
 ture. I went with him once to a night club where there was 
 dancing and singing." She turned to Mick. " There 's the free 
 life for you. No stupid conventions about that. In art there are 
 no conventions," she echoed vaguely. 
 
 " Conventions! Art! Night Clubs! " Mick spluttered. " What 
 the devil do you think all those posturers have to do with art? 
 Getting excited in cafes, seducing models, working themselves 
 up into a state of silly, dirty-minded passion in which they con- 
 ceive their rotten pictures! Most art is nothing but premeditated 
 lechery." 
 
 There were tears in Olive's eyes. 
 
 " You need n't make fun of me like that," she said. 
 
 Mick seated himself on the arm of her chair.
 
 IRRESPONSIBILITY 85 
 
 " Never mind, sweetheart," he said, " I don't mean more than 
 half I say." 
 
 He stooped and kissed her hair. She shut her eyes and pressed 
 her body against his. I glanced at Margaret in time to see the 
 flickering contempt that twisted her mouth. 
 
 " She 's an incurable romantic, my little Olive," Mick said ten- 
 derly, " and she '11 never see that romance is only the refuge of 
 the cowards and the second-rate." 
 
 " Oh-oh," said Olive. " What about Shakespeare and the 
 Tempest? " 
 
 " CouW n't be a more disgustingly realistic play," Mick told 
 her. " Think of Miranda's gloating over the young man, and 
 her father's plans for making her irresistible and keeping her 
 from spoiling her chance of a respectable marriage bed. No 
 romance about that, my girl." 
 
 When we took our leave, Mick and Olive lingered behind. 
 Margaret and I hesitated in the passage, wondering what had 
 become of Mrs. Champion. We heard Mick say unsteadily, " Kiss 
 me, Olive." 
 
 A moment later they came out together, the girl clinging to 
 his arm. She made no attempt to hide the urgency of her desire: 
 her eyes shone with an exultant ecstasy, and her hand moved 
 caressingly down the lines of his body. 
 
 We did not talk much on the way home. Not until we were 
 half way up Herne Hill did Mick say, " Well, what do you think 
 of Olive? " 
 
 *' She 's amazingly pretty," I answered. 
 
 " I '11 admit that she attracts me very strongly," he said. " Of 
 course, her family are awful. The mother is a well, I believe, 
 a downright bad lot, and her father an etiolated little Jew. One 
 would n't want to marry into a family like that. Olive 's much 
 finer than her family." 
 
 " She seems to have read quite a lot," Margaret ventured. 
 
 " She has, and she likes you to know it," Olive's lover said. 
 " She 'd like to pose as having an original intellect. She did n't 
 say much to you, but she 's always talking to me of the books she 
 has read and the extraordinary people she has met. It doesn't
 
 86 THE HAPPY HIGHWAYS 
 
 take me in. I know perfectly well she 's got the brains of a well- 
 read parrot." 
 
 I don't know how the girl came to have the hold on Mick that 
 she undoubtedly had. I suppose her tremendous physical vital- 
 ity offered an easy refuge from the unrest that grew in him as his 
 work at King's drew near completion. She was wonderfully beau- 
 tiful. I believe that his dislike of her was at least as great as 
 his love. Her unrestrained passion drew him fiercely and re- 
 pelled him as fiercely. There were times when he seemed curi- 
 ously afraid of her and her need to absorb him. " She wants 
 keeping in her place," he said, " and I 'm the man to do it." But 
 he had doubts of his own strength of purpose and he did not relish 
 the prospect of a lifetime spent in keeping her off. 
 
 Once, when he and I were working alone, he said, " Margaret 
 did n't like Olive, did she? " 
 
 " She 's hardly Margaret's sort," I answered cautiously. 
 
 " No." He considered a minute. " Margaret can live with 
 you without always trying to get at you. That girl would suck me 
 dry mind and soul dry as an old glove if I gave her half a 
 chance. I 'd never be able to do anything. I sha'n't give her the 
 chance. I don't intend to marry her. She 'd make a rotten 
 mother, would n't she? That means quite a lot to me, you know." 
 
 After a while he added abruptly, " I suppose you all think she 's 
 my mistress. Well, you 're quite wrong. I 'm not going to give 
 her any such hold upon me. There 's not the least likelihood of 
 my making that particular fool of myself." 
 
 A week later he went to South Kensington after promising to 
 come home early. He did not come. Margaret and I sat up 
 for him until midnight, and then Margaret went to bed. He 
 came about three, and stood in the doorway, regarding me with 
 a triumphant defiance. I did not need to be told that he had 
 made that particular fool of himself after all.
 
 CHAPTER XVII 
 
 BRIXTON is the queerest suburb of London. In some sense it 
 stands for all the rotten shams of the society that has sprung 
 from the wreckage of the feudal system. It stands for cheap, 
 showy rubbish as against honorable craftsmanship, for senseless 
 waste, and for pinching squalor overlaid by a horrible, electric- 
 lit superfluity of imitation silk blouses, brown paper patent shoes, 
 gilt watehfes and dyed cat-skin. You may stand with bulging eyes 
 and reeling brain before the blue glare of a plate-glass wilderness, 
 and then walk away round the corner into a narrow street a-swarm 
 with human maggots and fostid with the smells of rotten fruit and 
 snippets of bad meat. 
 
 Walk further towards the river through the exhausted, color- 
 less streets of Kennington, the sleeping-places of human beings 
 whose days are a frenzied scrambling on the insane slippery pyra- 
 mid of a Beer and Buns civilization. 
 
 Walk the other way into the meretricious neatness of Herne Hill 
 where the small fry of the professional classes perch dangerously 
 over the abyss, clinging to their salaried respectability, their brick 
 and stucco, and the cuffed and collared decency of their wasted, 
 useless lives. 
 
 In these catacombs of murdered humanity the industrial sys- 
 tem spreads itself out for you, a monstrous futile circle of greed, 
 over-production and poverty, achieving for the race nothing, but 
 everything for the stuffing and adorning of a few men and women 
 without pride of ancestry or thought for posterity. An organized 
 futility, defended by jack-priests, politicians, and a spreading, 
 scabrous belief that black coats, gramophones and brick villas de- 
 scend with the other middle-class decencies straight from God 
 through the capitalist. 
 
 We walked into Brixton one night a week for several weeks 
 to the flat shared by Mick's school teachers. They were a T.P.'s 
 Circle. If you do not know what that is you are ignorant indeed, 
 and unfitted to converse on the uplifting of the masses. We went 
 
 87
 
 88 THE HAPPY HIGHWAYS 
 
 because Mick said it was our duty to go, and moreover, the two 
 girls had done him kindnesses. 
 
 Every Friday evening a round dozen members, mostly very 
 young, met at the flat for social and intellectual high- jinks. There 
 were agile, high-collared young men subject to sudden attacks of 
 humor, and two or three young women, very bright and vivacious 
 in white blouses and assorted skirts. Camp coffee and flat lemon- 
 ade excited the company to unrestrained outbursts of wit and 
 gaiety. The young women laughed, wiped their eyes, said their 
 hair was coming down, and Mr. Cole was too funny or too aw- 
 fully clever for words. Sometimes papers were read on the phil- 
 osophy of Bernard Shaw, or the Georgian poets, or anything else 
 on the intellectual plane of the circle, and earnest discussions 
 followed, lasting until one of the young men broke away and had 
 a particularly virulent attack. 
 
 The really amazing thing about these papers was their intelli- 
 gence. Their writers were not to be hustled into admiration : they 
 were quite unexcited about Mr. Shaw and very tolerant towards 
 vers libre. 
 
 " Idees," said Mr. Cole, " idees are all very well. This Shaw 
 now, what you might call pro-lif-ic in his head. Pro-lif-ic. If 
 you girls don't know what that means, I 'm not going to tell you: 
 go and look it up if you think it's a naughty word." He sur- 
 veyed the hopeful smiles of the company. " What I say is give 
 us something a man can get something out of. More meaty. 
 None of your pre-digested breakfast idees. Or else something a 
 man can look at. Legs and dresses not too much of the dress. 
 These idees now. What I mean is they give you an idee, like 
 giving a dog bones. You worry at them: nothing to get off them 
 though. They 're just idees bones. Some folk like chewing 
 bones, maybe." He stopped, tried to get back to his argument, 
 and tangled himself up in a hopeless attempt to express his sense 
 of the futility of the intellectual drama. 
 
 Michael came to the rescue, and Mr. Cole collapsed into his 
 chair, rather hurt and worried. Afterwards I saw him talking 
 earnestly to Margaret, who listened with an appearance of sym- 
 pathetic interest that soothed him. 
 
 I should not forget Charlotte. Charlotte was the middle-aged
 
 IRRESPONSIBILITY 89 
 
 daughter of a music hall artiste whose wife and family avenged 
 themselves upon him by a searing respectability. She had trav- 
 eled: she looked down upon the gambollings of the younger mem- 
 bers with contemptuous impatience and turned to us for spiritual 
 refreshment. I am afraid that she did not get it. From the 
 heights of our own peacock-arrogance we laughed at her eager su- 
 periority and her fierce determination to be all mind. She wrote 
 extraordinary plays which mixed up the Theban and Arthurian 
 cycles in a finely impartial spirit. She went to live in a garret 
 and tried to persuade Oliver to share it. We were lent the manu- 
 script of her plays and could not decide whether to tell her hon- 
 estly hew bad and impossible they were, or attempt the hopeless 
 task of editing them. The scene of one was laid in " A place of 
 light and silence," and the characters were all embodied aspects 
 of a debauched Theosophy. We were consistently kind and 
 respectful to her. I am ashamed to remember our inhuman kind* 
 ness. Poor, pitiful, lonely Charlotte, keeping alight her absurd 
 enthusiasms with a courage that defied middle-age, neglect and 
 endless disappointment. I do not, even now, see what place there 
 could be for her in any society, since the only society that would 
 make Charlotte happy would be one that liked to listen in a semi- 
 drunken ecstasy to Charlotte's plays. I don't know. Perhaps she 
 would have been born and brought up more successfully in a 
 wiser kind of State. 
 
 For a short time a young German was a member of the Circle. 
 I do not know how he got into it, nor what he must have thought 
 of it. He did really seem to be in a perpetual state of amaze- 
 ment at its cheerful fatuity. We were a peculiar grief to him. 
 He seemed to think that a University education must ensure a 
 certain level of intelligence and approached us with the joyous 
 intention of being heavily and mercilessly intellectual. When he 
 could not satisfy his horrid lust for raw brain he became very 
 angry. He told us how much bigger and better everything was in 
 Berlin. Business houses, theaters, streets, parks " much big- 
 ger," he said, " oh, much bigger and besser than here." 
 
 "Well, what about the docks? " Mick asked. 
 
 " Docks in Germany," said he, " are much bigger and besser 
 than any docks in England."
 
 90 THE HAPPY HIGHWAYS 
 
 "And our municipal parks? " 
 
 " In Berlin the parks are much bigger and besser than Hyde 
 Park or any park." 
 
 "And our municipal asylum? " 
 
 "Oh, in Berlin," he began, "much bigger, oh much big- 
 ger " 
 
 The guffaws of the agile young men interrupted him. He 
 stopped, saw his blunder and jumped from his chair. The blood 
 rushed into his face and neck and there were tears in his eyes. 
 
 " We show you," he stammered, " one day we show you." 
 
 He was angry, but he was also genuinely hurt that a trap should 
 have been laid for him. 
 
 Oliver laid a hand upon his arm. 
 
 " You must n't mind Mick," he said, " the poor fellow can't 
 help it." 
 
 The young German shook him off. 
 
 ** I don' care," he said with a fierce dignity. " In Berlin we 
 show more courteous than this." He took his hat and went, 
 the honors of the field with him. 
 
 As soon as we were out of the house we fell upon Mick and 
 abused him heartily. 
 
 " Playing off a thing like that on a stranger," Oliver said. 
 "A schoolboy would be ashamed of it. Did you think you 
 were proving your English superiority over the simple Ger- 
 man? " 
 
 " It was pretty feeble," Mick admitted, " but he was insuffer- 
 able, and he ought to have seen through it: any one else would 
 have. Besides," he added sharply, " you 're a nice crowd to talk 
 of superiority. Don't you sit with your tongues in your cheeks 
 every time we go there? I suppose you think they won't see 
 you 're making fun of them." 
 
 " Well, I 'm not going there any more," I said. " I Ve got to 
 work." 
 
 We did go once more, when Oliver read them a long, dull paper 
 on J. M. Synge. We sat in the silence of the tomb. Even the 
 lemonade could not rouse us, and the meeting broke up in 
 gloom and depression. The intellect should be judged by its 
 fruits: we labored and brought forth a dull dog!
 
 IRRESPONSIBILITY 91 
 
 Perhaps because Mick's accusation pricked me, I thought about 
 that T.P.'s Circle long after we had left it. I did not at the time 
 think so much of the queer pathos of that handful of clerks and 
 shop-assistants reading papers to each other in a shamefaced sort 
 of way, struggling with awkward, unused faculties to understand 
 things, to get to know things that had nothing to do with ledgers 
 and tape-measures. 
 
 " Pootry," Mr. Cole said wistfully to Margaret. ** I suppose 
 you know a lot of pootry now? I mean this Keats. Would he be 
 as good a pote as Browning, f'r instance? " 
 
 His face brightened when Margaret said she thought him as 
 good 6'r better. 
 
 " Why," he said, " I can understand about Keats. I could n't 
 seem to get away with the other one. Real sad he died like 
 that, wasn't it? Gave me quite a shock when I read about it." 
 
 We had not laughed at them, but I suppose we could not avoid 
 a half-conscious contempt, because, forsooth, they had n't had 
 our chances. 
 
 Of course, they wanted to have a good time. But it seemed 
 to me that there was more in it than that, and more than the crav- 
 ing for knowledge and beauty so soon to be choked out of them. 
 All but Charlotte were very young: they would n't have been there 
 otherwise. As they grew old or were married, they dropped 
 slowly out of the Circle and were lost in the dull complexities 
 of a responsible life. And you must remember that our partic- 
 ular Circle was only one of thousands, bearing many names but 
 groping towards the same thing. 
 
 They were so many blind feelers, reaching out to an ideal of 
 social consciousness that is almost as far from realization to-day as 
 it was when the first savages crept together for warmth and safety. 
 Along the road begun then the human race still creeps, fumbling 
 towards the stars. 
 
 Man has vast, undeveloped powers of inter-communion for 
 which no adequate expression has been devised, for which no 
 adequate expression can be devised in a world torn by fear and 
 jealousy and organized for the satisfaction of greed. 
 
 I am convinced that the task for the race is to find some means 
 whereby all these powerful feelings for social unity and against
 
 92 THE HAPPY HIGHWAYS 
 
 egoism and wolfish lusts shall be turned into channels of human 
 usefulness. 
 
 The mystic yearns to merge his identity in a union with the 
 Absolute-and-all-that-sort-of-thing. The lover turns all his un- 
 realized altruism into the rushing tide of his sexual desire. The 
 former achieves in the last resort an annihilation of personality 
 in an experience beyond sense-experience. The latter achieves 
 matrimony and children: his altruism narrows and hardens into a 
 family-egoism hardly to be distinguished in its nature from the 
 egoism of the mere bachelor. 
 
 We are all mystics and lovers at one time or another; we have, 
 in more or less conscious degree, the instinct towards union with 
 the beyond-self. And the world is so arranged that these very 
 instincts that should have gone to the making of a perfect State, 
 are a handicap in the competitive struggle and must be turned 
 into the comparatively harmless channels of religious or family 
 egoism. 
 
 Mysticism: the consummation of human egoism. Family love: 
 egoism which sees itself reflected in a series of mirrors, wife, 
 children, household goods. 
 
 That unborn State, the fine, spacious State for which men lie 
 dead in the mud of Flanders, is perishing in the womb for want 
 of these thwarted and diverted social instincts. 
 
 Suppose there were tiny holes in the barriers that hold these 
 great forces in check, would not the waters trickle out into just 
 such little pools of T.P.'s Circles, and Societies to Enforce Peace, 
 and art and poetry circles, and all the rest of the futile ways 
 through which men try to express their sub-conscious longing for 
 a social unity founded on brotherly respect and understanding? 
 
 We stumbled into artistic circles with the same uneasy sense of 
 being out of place that we had had in the cheerful flat in Brixton. 
 I do not remember how we came to meet young Stavrillov. I do 
 not, indeed, remember anything of him before the afternoon that 
 Margaret and I had tea in his studio. He was eager to show his 
 pictures. They were rather wonderful. There was a Magician's 
 City, with white domes and minarets hung in the clear, deep blue 
 of a night sky, and white walls that showed slowly as tall cowled 
 figures, watching with hidden eyes.
 
 IRRESPONSIBILITY 93 
 
 " I paint," Stavrillov said, " not men or things, but states of 
 mind. This is the wizard in man, buried deep in his conscious- 
 ness, but watching, always watching to seize him unawares and 
 cast him into the abyss." 
 
 "Abyss? " Margaret queried. 
 
 *' Where there is no faith and no God, but only a hopeless 
 struggle with the secret of the universe." 
 
 We had the dimmest idea of his meaning, but we admired 
 his work, and preferred his states of mind to those of the Man 
 Posting a Letter, whose features we had seen at the Exhibition, 
 scattered all over the canvas in an agony of disintegration. Our 
 open admiration pleased him and he took us into various studios. 
 We found ourselves invited to Chelsea teas and small private 
 exhibitions. Once we attended a lecture on scenic art. The lec- 
 turer had made models of his stage settings and as we sat frown- 
 ing over their black and purple symbolism, an eager old lady 
 tapped Margaret on the shoulder. 
 
 "I beg your pardon, my dear," she said, "but I can't quite, 
 catch everything he says, though I can see the beautiful models. 
 I suppose that is the bathroom he is showing now? " 
 
 It was a Hamlet setting, I think. Or it might have been Mac- 
 beth. I do not myself think that Shakespeare would have cared 
 for the new stage settings. Poor wretch, he had the defects of 
 his age. 
 
 We progressed into the region of drawing-room art and stood 
 perilously about on polished floors and priceless rugs, fragile 
 china in our hands and fear in our hearts, listening to the endless 
 talk. These people did not exactly read themselves papers, but 
 their mentality differed not at all in kind and very little in de- 
 gree from mentality of our T.P.'s Circle. There was the same 
 vague circling argument, the same pawing over of scraps of knowl- 
 edge, but it was all mixed up with vanities and jealousies that did 
 not appear among their Brixton kinsfolk. And there was un- 
 mistakably the same fumbling desire for completer understand- 
 ing. More sharply, because through more finely developed 
 senses, these people felt the need of a synthesis of social elements 
 ^that now are discordant and jarring. It did not, of course, pre- 
 vent their quarreling and hating each other quite violently.
 
 94 THE HAPPY HIGHWAYS 
 
 We met Barlow in one of the drawing-rooms. He was a dark, 
 intense young man, with a fluttering scorn of the rugs and the 
 fragile china. He said they reeked of the Royal Academy. Later 
 we discovered him to be a handy-man of the arts. He painted 
 pots and lampshades, designed jewelry, dresses, cushions and cur- 
 tains, all in what he called virile colors. He had, indeed, an 
 unappeasable appetite for virility. He yearned after it: when 
 he had drawn a red-headed woman with narrow, pallid face, 
 red slit mouth, and dark slit eyes, and sheathed her in red and 
 purple and gold, he became enraptured of his male dignity and 
 drew her again on the same sheet of paper without the sheath. 
 He had a collection of these double designs. Mick called them the 
 Seventy Skinny Sins. 
 
 Barlow's wife, a plump, brown-skinned woman, watched over 
 him with jealous adoration. She made frocks after his Bakst-like 
 designs and wore them with a scared defiance. I believe she had 
 a secret longing for gracious lines, but she sacrificed it with her 
 other pale ideas on the altar of Barlow's extraordinary egotism. 
 Once in our hearing she roused herself to a shy defense of the 
 Roman Church. He cut her short in the harshest manner, and 
 drew her fiercely aside. 
 
 " I hope you '11 never talk like that again," he said. " It up- 
 sets my balance, and it is most important that I should not be 
 upset. My art . . . balance . . . my art." The expostulatory 
 voice followed me through the crowded room, interrupted by the 
 eager murmuring of his wife. 
 
 Afterwards she made fluttering excuses. 
 
 " He 's not angry when he talks like that," she said, " it 's his 
 way. He 's so high-strung. I feel so stupid beside him. All that 
 I am he has made me, and I know that I don't fully understand 
 him. His spirit is too great for him. He works so hard, oh, so 
 splendidly hard." 
 
 He did work hard. He swept up fragments from every artistic 
 table and shamelessly fathered the ideas of other men. He also 
 wrote verse in what he swore to be the manner of Verlaine 
 sewer-stuff, Mick called it. In some strange fashion, he regarded 
 art as a kind of home-made aphrodisiac. 
 
 As the Finals drew nearer we gave up our outside interests. We
 
 IRRESPONSIBILITY 95 
 
 had not seen Stavrillov for weeks when he descended upon us at 
 King's and dragged us to the private exhibition of a popular 
 young artist. The boards were as polished and the rugs as price- 
 less as ever. The long narrow room was crowded. Margaret 
 crossed over to a group of young women whose necks cannot pos- 
 sibly have been so long as they looked. I found myself with some 
 artists who were abusing the pictures violently under cover of 
 the loud talk. When I met Margaret again, she was listening to 
 Barlow's wife. I caught a fragment of their talk. 
 
 " My dear," the little woman said, " the agony of his face. It 
 was terrible. I said to myself never again. I can't bear him 
 to go^through such suffering for me." 
 
 I got Margaret away. 
 
 "Who's been murdered?" I said. "Whose were the 
 9 
 
 agonies.' 
 
 " Barlow's," Margaret answered. " She wanted me to recom- 
 mend her a woman doctor because of the anguish in Barlow's 
 eyes when Mrs. Barlow calls in a man to cure her ailments." 
 
 I laughed. Margaret regarded me dourly. 
 
 " She said she could n't bear to see Barlow talking to another 
 woman and that he suffered dreadfully if she spoke to another 
 man. They 're unclean," she finished, with her mouth twisted in 
 distaste, " positively unclean." 
 
 We looked round for the others. Oliver was sitting on the edge 
 of a table, very red and angry, thrusting some artistic dogma at 
 a group of excited men. Barlow was one of them. 
 
 " You will tell us next," he said, waving a thin hand in Oliver's 
 face, " that we don't know what we 're saying. We artists 
 know nothing of art." 
 
 " No more you do," my brother retorted. " Artists ! Are you 
 an artist? Daubing pots is n't art." 
 
 I was about to interfere when Mick appeared suddenly. He 
 took Oliver's arm and pulled him off the table. 
 
 "You mustn't mind him*" he said sweetly, "he was dragged 
 up in the gutter. Along with me," he added as an after-thought. 
 
 He led Oliver through the astonished young men, and we took 
 our leave. 
 
 We never saw our good friend Stavrillov again, nor heard of
 
 96 THE HAPPY HIGHWAYS 
 
 him until I read he had died for France. Peace be with you, 
 Stavrillov of the subtle brush. Sleep untroubled, restless mind, 
 and hands obedient to the dreaming eyes. 
 
 We forgot Chelsea but we were not allowed to forget Brixton. 
 It jerked up again in exalted company. Anthony had persuaded 
 us to go with him to the Ethical Church. We sat through a lec- 
 ture on Hamlet of which an undergraduate in his first year should 
 have been ashamed, and blinked unhappily at a series of scantily- 
 clad youths chasing each other with torches round a large flat 
 disc. A scroll, or a banner, or it may have been a pulpit, offered 
 " Praise to the Human Heart by which we live." It seemed un- 
 called-for. Christ and Buddha looked forlornly round their alien 
 temple upon furred women and frock-coated men. There was a 
 thick fog outside when we left, but it was nothing to the fog 
 inside. 
 
 We climbed to the top of a 'bus that was trying to find Victoria 
 Station. Mick leaned over the front. 
 
 " Driver," he shouted, " drive like hell to Charing Cross." 
 The 'bus started with a jerk, and the next minute ran into a 
 lamp-post. After the crash of broken glass and the shrieks of 
 women passengers, the driver's voice could be heard, laying direct 
 responsibility for the accident upon Mick. 
 
 We went two or three times to the highbrow tabernacle, but 
 never acquired the taste for potted knowledge. The people were 
 much heavier in the hand than our friends in Chelsea, more tol- 
 erant and less witty, broader-minded and less generous, and infi- 
 nitely farther from a spiritual renaissance. By the same token 
 their mental state was nearer that of their Brixton prototypes, but 
 immensely more sophisticated, and confused by notions of the in- 
 tellectual life drawn from dull books and duller quarterlies. 
 
 They tried to wangle a communal harmony by proclaiming a 
 common search for Truth. Truth, that has been sought and 
 missed in travail of mind and spirit, does not come at the beck of 
 easy folk. They ought to have known they had the blood- 
 stained testimony of the ages that order is not conjured out of 
 disorder, nor truth out of error by singing Swinburne instead of 
 Wesley and absorbing indigestible slabs of cold, dead science and
 
 IRRESPONSIBILITY 97 
 
 literature. Some of them, no doubt, worked very hard, as your 
 well-fed intellectual understands hard work, and produced a 
 number of little truths which did not hang together. They had 
 no power to make them hang together. They did not, in fact, 
 achieve a synthesis, but only an attitude . . . 
 
 * 
 
 A wind from the moors clears my brain of these phantoms. 
 In a few minutes my good landlady will come to shut the window 
 and draw the curtains Then she will bring in the lamp and light 
 it fussily. It is one of her little ways of pretending that I am 
 not blind. I should not, after all, like to think that I was sit- 
 ting in a dark room. 
 
 She will set the table for tea and draw it up to the fire, and tell 
 me that the hyacinths are coming out in the big green bowl. I 
 have a fairly good idea of this room of mine, though I have not 
 seen it. It is wider and more gracious than the little red-walled 
 room at Herne Hill. The walls are gray, and the carpet is white 
 and gray and black. Low book-shelves run round two sides of 
 the room. They are filled with my own books. Stupid to have 
 books one cannot read? Ah, but I can read some of them. I 
 know my old Morte d'Arthur so well that I can trace my finger 
 along any passage and read it to myself. And there are others: 
 my school copy of Palgrave's Golden Treasury among them. 
 
 It is a pleasant room: the windows look across the valley to 
 the moors. But do you suppose I think of moors and asphodel 
 to-night? Not I. 
 
 The years shrivel and are blown like ashes in the wind. I sit 
 in a knobby leather chair, listening to four eager voices. What 
 are they talking about? Perhaps Wells. Probably "The New 
 Machiavelli." We were always discussing " The New Machia- 
 velli." For a long time we had no copy of our own, and then 
 Margaret brought it back from Antwerp in two yellow Tauchnitz 
 volumes. They passed from hand to hand in King's, pored over 
 and annotated, until only the veriest fragment was left to return 
 to their owner. Significantly enough, we went near ignoring the 
 social ideals and philosophy to quarrel over the sex problem. 
 Margaret, under the influence of a clever weekly, said that Rem-
 
 98 THE HAPPY HIGHWAYS 
 
 ington and Isabel were weak slaves, and could have kept them- 
 selves out of their troubles if they had had foresight and will 
 enough. 
 
 Mick would have none of it. 
 
 " Their love was the finest part of them," he cried. " It makes 
 me angry to see Wells using the phrase ' two bad people.' They 
 ought n't to have apologized for themselves : they should have 
 justified themselves shamelessly and gloriously." 
 
 "Well, they couldn't do that, even if they wanted to," Mar- 
 garet told him, " unless they had posed. The whole weight of 
 the tradition against them was bound to make itself felt in their 
 minds now and then." 
 
 We never finished our arguments, for Mick broke away and 
 rode violently over the discussion. 
 
 " This silly moral sanctity," he raved, " you know it 's all rot. 
 Bolstering up a lot of rotten nerd-cowardice by pretending it 's 
 divinely ordained. Look at it from a broad biological standpoint. 
 Try and get away from trousers and claw-hammer coats and ask 
 yourself what life life, I say has to do with our environ- 
 ment of fenced-off gardens and rabbit-marriages. A mind in tune 
 with the present order of things a mind, I mean, that can view 
 bishops and slums, and brothels and middle-class weddings with 
 equanimity may appear healthy and ordinary, but really it 's 
 rottenly diseased. It 's a perfect hotbed of disease and filth " 
 
 " Oh, for pity's sake " Margaret protested. " Besides 
 
 minds are bound to be influenced by their surroundings, even 
 minds that are at strife with them. Remington was influenced, 
 and so he could n't help feeling at times that he was wicked " 
 
 Oliver jerked himself noisily off the fender. 
 
 " So he was," he said heavily, " and the book is a wicked book 
 an immoral book." 
 
 " What d' you mean, an immoral book? " Mick shouted. 
 
 " I mean a book that ought n't to be in the hands of any one 
 under twenty-five. A book that just reproduces the disorder and 
 ugliness of life. A book should be beautiful and full of happy 
 things. Is n't life beastly enough? " 
 
 " You mean baby hands and daisies and love among the ruins," 
 Mick jeered.
 
 IRRESPONSIBILITY 99 
 
 " No, I don't," Oliver said stolidly. " Is that what you mean 
 by beauty? I tell you it 's immoral because it 's ugly and because 
 it has an evil influence on the adolescent mind. You can't deny 
 it. Is n't Mick driven to rank lunacy and Joy to defending adul- 
 tery? " 
 
 And though we joined in pouring scorn on his low-minded, 
 Puritan aesthetics, we could not shake him in the least. 
 
 "Remington should have stuck to his wife. She's the finest 
 character in the whole book. I 'm not even taking into account 
 the work he flung down. If he did n't think enough of that him- 
 self . . ." 
 
 Mai>y~mghts we worked until twelve and then talked far into the 
 morning. Oh, the great city of talk we made, with twisting by- 
 ways and well-trodden streets, little houses set a-wry and filled 
 with small peering things, and brave palaces where the citizens 
 ruffled it i' the sun a city of gables and thrusting towers that 
 sank into white ashes at the dawn. 
 
 We read Lombroso and were astonished at the number of de- 
 generates among our friends. 
 
 We discovered Strindberg, poring over his few supreme plays 
 until the phantoms of his tortured mind peered at us from the 
 shadows, and Oliver drove Margaret to a frenzy by finding in her 
 all the traits of a vampire woman. Under Strindberg's influence 
 we planned a monstrous, gloomy tragedy. There was a cold- 
 blooded Scientist who was Mick and a Philosopher who was 
 Oliver. Oliver saw himself in the role of serene, moralizing on- 
 looker. There was another scientist, to whom we gave I can- 
 not think why the appalling name of Ashton Pallisser. He was 
 a good scientist but weak in the will, and to save him from him- 
 self the Scientist who was Mick persuaded a woman colleague to 
 sacrifice herself in the hope of restoring balance to the Pallisser 
 mind. The Philosopher, by his devilish insight, discovered all, 
 and predicted the end, which was horrid. The woman, in a 
 revulsion of feeling, shot the cold-blooded one and herself; Ash- 
 ton Pallisser committed suicide, and the Philosopher was left to 
 take the bodies out to be cremated. I have somewhere a frag- 
 ment of the great ruin, in which the Philosopher ** proceeds to 
 argue the point," the Scientist " lays down his position," and Pal-
 
 100 THE HAPPY HIGHWAYS 
 
 lister, " after some forced cheerfulness," goes out for the evening, 
 probably with the worst intentions. 
 
 We were working at this outrage one evening when Margaret 
 began to laugh. 
 
 " What 's the matter? " I asked. 
 
 She leaned back helplessly. 
 
 " It 's so damn funny," she said, and choked. 
 
 After a moment's indignant silence we saw how damn funny it 
 was, and the fearsome thing perished in a burst of inextinguishable 
 laughter. 
 
 We were not always talking or working in that Herne Hill room. 
 Anthony played for us, and we sang for ourselves. We sang any- 
 thing, from Indian Love Lyrics and the " Star of Eve " with its 
 immoral use of semitones, to attempts at Palestrina. But our inti- 
 mate songs, the songs we cherished, were worthless things that 
 slept under hedges and hung about the streets. 
 
 " I want 'ter see the dear old home again," 
 and 
 
 "Is London where It used to be? 
 
 Is the Strand still there? 
 
 Do the boys still stroll down the west . . ." 
 
 and the melancholy lilt of " Lindy," which we sang very inac- 
 curately and punctuated with an Oxford sniff . . . 
 
 I have drawn back the curtains and unlatched the window. 
 Above the sound of waters rushing and the restless fret of pines, 
 a lusty voice comes singing from the other end of the years 
 
 " It 's the go-o-od ship Robert EL Lee 
 Has come to carry the cotton away.'
 
 CHAPTER XVIII 
 
 FINALS gathered speed and swept upon us. During the exam- 
 ination week we never saw Michael. He went straight from 
 the hall to Olive, and came home long after midnight. In the 
 morning he got up just in time to gulp his breakfast and rush away 
 for the day's papers. Questions irritated him, and we did not 
 know whether he was doing well or ill. The examination over, he 
 hung about in London, dividing his time between South Kensing- 
 ton and the Natural History Museum. He made the excuse that 
 Sanday had promised to give him his results before they were 
 officially posted. The others went home, but I stayed in town 
 with a vague idea of looking after him. He guessed this and 
 laughed at me. 
 
 We were lounging in the common room at King's when Sanday 
 came along the corridor and caught sight of us through the open 
 door. He thrust his long neck through the opening. " Come up 
 to Gower Street, and see me to-night," he said to Mick. " Er 
 you too, Hearne," he added, with a nod at me. 
 
 "That means news," Mick said, with a cracked excitement in 
 his voice. " Let 's go somewhere. We can't fool round here all 
 day. Somewhere outside." 
 
 " Hampstead? " I ventured. " I 've never been to Hampstead." 
 " Nor ever will with me," he said. " Is n't there a Garden City 
 there? Who the hell wants to see a Garden City? " 
 
 We went to Richmond and lay drowsily in the tawny, brittle 
 grass while the sun wheeled slowly through a colorless sky. 
 
 We had no money for lunch, but on our way back stopped in 
 a pink and green cafe and ordered tea. I came out as parched as 
 I went in, for Mick emptied the tea-pot, pressing his share of the 
 bread and butter on me by way of compensation. 
 
 The streets gave off a terrible airless heat. We crawled along 
 Oxford Street and through the cooler, dusty byways round the 
 
 Museum. 
 
 101
 
 102 THE HAPPY HIGHWAYS 
 
 Sanday was out when we reached his rooms, but the landlady 
 knew Mick and showed us into his sitting-room on the first floor. 
 Mick flung himself on to the couch and a cloud of dust flew out, 
 settling slowly in the stifling heat. All the windows were shut. 
 I opened one, but slammed it up again hurriedly as a breath 
 of air came drifting in from Euston Road. We heard Sanday's 
 high voice in the passage and a minute later he came into the 
 room. 
 
 " Glad to see you," he said, " glad to see you. Sit down, sit 
 down. I 've been to Mudie's. I never go to Mudie's if I can help 
 it, but I just happened to see a book I wanted. It 's a dreadful 
 place. Don't you think it 's a dreadful place? Full, absolutely 
 full of useless books. Who reads them? I don't know, I 'm sure. 
 Who writes them is a greater mystery still. People who write 
 novels ought to have their brains sterilized before the horrid 
 thing gets such a grip on them. A kind of mental castration, I 
 mean. Don't you think so? Don't you think so? " 
 
 He fussed round the room, opened a window and shut it up 
 again, lifted books from their shelves and laid them down about 
 the room. Suddenly seating himself, he began to flutter the leaves 
 of one of them with an aimless haste. 
 
 " Well, Hearne," he said, " well, what are you doing with your- 
 self these days? " 
 
 " Just knocking round," Mick said. " I Ve worked a little 
 in the Museum Reading Room." 
 
 "Oh have you?" Sanday interrupted. "Have you really? 
 Now I could never work in that place. As soon as I get seated 
 some one brings me a lot of books I never asked for. Or some 
 female sits down in the next chair and empties a lot of letters and 
 pencils and hairpins and things out of a little bag. She takes 
 her hat off, and runs a hatpin through her hair, and I think 
 she 's transfixed herself. Then she jabs me with her elbow and 
 goes off into apologies. She rustles about with her books and 
 fidgets in her chair and scratches away with a little pen until I 
 am quite feverish with apprehension. Then off she goes and 
 comes back with another worse than herself, and they kiss and 
 whisper away. I said once ' Madam, you would be doing me 
 an inestimable favor if you could conduct your conversation with
 
 IRRESPONSIBILITY 103 
 
 fewer sibilants.' They both bristled and glared at me, turned 
 their back and talked for an hour. I can't stand it, you know. 
 I have to come away. It 's sheer waste of time for me to go to 
 that place." 
 
 " You might have an appliance to go across your head and fit 
 over both ears," Mick suggested gravely. 
 
 Sanday looked up with quick interest. "Yes, I might," he 
 said. " Of course I might. I must think about that." 
 
 He began to talk at a great rate about the experiments he was 
 conducting in the deserted laboratory at King's, and broke off 
 suddenly to say " But then, you know, I should still see her 
 mouth"moving, and I really think that would be worse." 
 
 Mick's lips framed the word "blinkers." I made a hurried 
 remark about the heat. Sanday rolled a glazed eye at me and 
 turned to Mick. 
 
 " I 'm sure you want to hear about the examination," he said, 
 and fell abruptly into long silence. Mick smoked on with an im- 
 perturbable gravity. Sanday sighed, and seemed to rouse himself 
 with an effort. 
 
 " You Ve done well," he said. " You Ve done as well as I 
 expected you to do." 
 
 We waited again. " I don't know what your expectations were, 
 sir," my brother ventured. 
 
 Sanday sat bolt upright. " My expectations? " he said. " I 
 expected you to distinguish yourself, young man, and so you have, 
 so you have." 
 
 A flush crept slowly up Mick's face. He examined his pipe 
 carefully. " I 'm glad of that," he said at last. 
 
 " Of course," Sanday added, " some things might have been 
 improved on. But on the whole a creditable performance. A re- 
 markably creditable performance. I congratulate you, Hearne." 
 
 "Thanks, sir." 
 
 " And now you may look forward to Cambridge for a year or a 
 couple of years, until we see how you shape at original research, 
 and then we '11 see again. If you stick to your work and show 
 the proper amount of development, you need have no fear for your 
 future. I can say that without hesitation." 
 
 There was a long silence. I stared out of the window. The
 
 104 THE HAPPY HIGHWAYS 
 
 houses hung in the motionless air. A girl came out of the swing 
 doors of a cafe and moved slowly away, a streak of color across 
 my sight. Two taxi-drivers, leaning against their cabs, sawed 
 monotonously with their arms in an interminable argument. I 
 glanced across the room. Mick was still smoking silently, his 
 eyes fixed on the empty fireplace and his arms crossed on his 
 chest. Sanday appeared sunk in dejection on the edge of the 
 couch. I realized with a shock that he was really watching Mick 
 quite sharply with eyes that had become bright and hard beneath 
 their colorless lashes. 
 
 Mick may have been half-aware of the unseen scrutiny. He 
 shifted uneasily in his chair, and spoke at last with a hint of 
 reluctance. 
 
 *' I 'm really very grateful for the interest you have taken in me, 
 sir." 
 
 " So you ought. Not at all," Sanday snapped. 
 
 The words came quickly now. " I 'm grateful for this Cam- 
 bridge offer. Immensely grateful. But I don't think I shall be 
 able to take it. When it is offered me, I mean. I should like to 
 go to Cambridge for some things. I should like it no end. 
 But I could n't go unless I 'd made up my mind to stick to this 
 sort of life for good. And I don't think I can do that." 
 
 " What 's the matter with the life? " 
 
 "There's nothing the matter with it in a way, and in a way 
 there 's everything the matter with it. It 's fine to be able to 
 research, to be sure of time and liberty to do it. But that 's 
 not all. To spend one's life between library and lab., shut off 
 from all the struggle and the fight out there." He nodded at the 
 street. " To pretend there is no struggle. To go on making one's 
 little discoveries, writing memoranda, reading papers, growing old 
 and dried-up " he broke off with a suppressed vehemence. 
 
 Sanday nodded. " Like me," he said. 
 
 Mick made a choking noise in his throat and began with stum- 
 bling eagerness to explain. 
 
 Sanday cut him short. " Don't lie, Hearne," he said. " Of 
 course you were thinking of me. Why shouldn't you be? I 
 should, in your place." He leaned forward and began to talk 
 with an earnest coherence, oddly at variance with the jerking
 
 IRRESPONSIBILITY 105 
 
 movements of his hand. The long, twisted face with its fringe of 
 straggling hair took on a stiff, unwonted dignity. " I won't pre- 
 tend, it 's no use pretending," he said, " that the life we 're offer- 
 ing you entails no sacrifice. It entails sacrifices which I can un- 
 derstand even better than you, though you may not believe that." 
 A curious light flickered and died in his eyes. " It means giving 
 up certain definite things. Cutting off parts of your activity. 
 Leaving them to dry up and die. It means all that and other 
 things. Some one a clever Jew said that a politician should 
 have a wife or mistress to whom he came with repugnance at night 
 and left gladly in the morning. And if that is true of a little 
 intriguing chatterer, how much more likely is it to be true of a 
 man of science! For look you what science offers in return for 
 your life. To take your place in a line that stretches back to the 
 beginning of the world. That line runs like a white thread 
 through the dark ages. It shines steadily in the myriad-hued radi- 
 ance of Greece. It burns with a dark flame in the old grave ages 
 of Empires that are dead dead and vanished utterly from our 
 sight, as if they had never been, with all their tale of men who 
 strove and loved, and were jealous and brave, and made tre- 
 mendous decisions and wrought themselves to great renunciations. 
 All are gone, while science lives. Never a State or a faith that 
 can show a bloodier roll of martyrs, or purer passion of devo- 
 tion, or nobler achievement." His voice rose on an exultant note. 
 " Where men fumble and lie to each other and themselves, sci- 
 ence faces boldly to the truth and sets herself to know. Against 
 all the ignorance and futile longings and nameless apprehensions 
 that men have heaped up and called God, she opposes the death- 
 less courage that will not be crushed by a fear out of the darkness 
 or turned aside by comfortable lies. You give up what is it 
 you give up? Little strivings, restless, feeble longings things 
 too small to live in thought, and you get eternal life. Out of 
 death into life." 
 
 He seemed to shrink in his chair. The lines of strain came back 
 to his face and he ran a nervous hand through his reddish wisps 
 of hair. " I mean," he stammered, " there 's a lot you should 
 think of before you decide to give up the chances we offer you." 
 
 When we were leaving he held Mick's hand in an absent sort
 
 106 THE HAPPY HIGHWAYS 
 
 of way. " If you should," he said rapidly, " mind I 'm not ad- 
 vising you to such a course but if you should find that you 
 must, in honesty, refuse the Cambridge scholarship, I might be 
 able to help you to something else. The man on the agricultural 
 experiment station in India is a friend of mine. I can't say any- 
 thing more; I 'd try to help you. But think it over. You '11 have 
 plenty of time before you need decide." 
 
 We left him standing in the doorway, peering into the shadows 
 that deepened round him as he stood. 
 
 While we waited at King's Cross for the 'bus to Camberwell 
 Green Mick discovered that he was penniless. I sought in all 
 my pockets and found three-halfpennies and a Greek coin that 
 was remotely like a shilling. 
 
 Mick eyed it doubtfully. " Do you think they 'd take it? " he 
 said. 
 
 " I don't think they would." 
 
 He darted across the road and I saw him offer the coin to a 
 woman bulging behind the counter of a small fruit shop. When 
 I reached them she was turning it over in her hand. 
 
 " Nay," she said, in a broad north-country accent, " I can't dea 
 owt wi' that." 
 
 Mick smiled like a little prattling child. " Tha wean't let a lad 
 fra' t'owd spot gang trapsing ower Lunnon wi' nowt 's mich as a 
 little rotten apple in 's pocket? " he said. 
 
 " Tha' conies fra' Yorkshire? " she cried. " Eh, lad tha 's wel- 
 come. Come thi ways in." 
 
 She led and pushed us into the small hot room at the back of 
 the shop. A red-faced gowk of a lad was lounging in the rock- 
 ing chair. Him she routed out and bade bestir himself to get the 
 supper. We had such a meal as we had not seen since we left 
 the North and departed at last with our 'bus fares in our hands 
 and our pockets full of nuts and apples. Mick flung both arms 
 round her. Apples burst from him and shot away in all direc- 
 tions. She groped for them and returned them to his pockets with 
 tears in her eyes. 
 
 " Tha 's welcome," she said. " Tha 's welcome to a bit and sup 
 as long 's iwer a 've got 'un. Him an' all," she added as an after- 
 thought.
 
 IRRESPONSIBILITY 107 
 
 "That's a good kind soul," Mick remarked, as we climbed 
 unsteadily to the top of the 'bus. 
 
 He grabbed frantically at the pineapple under his arm. " I 
 feel like a Sunday school treat. Now, there 's the scientific mind 
 for you. I picked her out in the first place because she looked 
 kind-hearted and I thought she might give me a few pence for 
 the thing. But when she opened her mouth I could have danced 
 'for joy." 
 
 Next day we went north, glad at heart to hear again the deep, 
 slow speech of northern tongues, breathe the good north air and 
 look upon the gaunt hills and the golden vales that sleep between. 
 My mother seemed worn and tired. Her eyes shone when Mick 
 told her that he had done well, done indeed far better than he 
 had expected. He repeated Sanday's sparse praise with a mock 
 boastfulness that annoyed her. 
 
 " And what next? " she asked sharply. 
 
 " Oh," Mick said, " Sanday thinks I '11 be a professor before 
 I die. They 're going to offer me a scholarship to Cambridge. 
 I have n't made up my mind about it yet." 
 
 She turned round at that, with a white-faced anger. 
 ** Your mind," she said, " is it always to be your mind and 
 what you want? Is it nothing to you that I have starved and 
 scraped to get you the chance to study, that you can be talking of 
 making up your mind whether it 's all to be wasted and gone for 
 nothin? " She held out her trembling hands. " Look at my 
 hands," she said. " Cracked and spoilt, and seamed with black, 
 so that you could keep yours soft and useless. How many lads of 
 your age are keeping their mothers in idleness, while you you." 
 She choked. " Oh," she wailed, " what does one get children for 
 and suffer and slave and starve for them? And they take it all 
 as if it were nought, and think of nought but their own wilful- 
 ness. They 're trouble and disappointment and a pain at the 
 heart from the moment they 're born to the moment you die and 
 are free of them." She pressed her hand upon her breast. " Will 
 you never know your own mind? " she cried bitterly, and left him 
 standing, mute and pale, in the middle of the room. 
 
 " Will you come out with me, Joy? " he got out at last. 
 We tramped as far as Hackness that day, and Mick said hardly
 
 108 THE HAPPY HIGHWAYS 
 
 a word. Only once, when we were lying in the heather, he rolled 
 over on his face and cried impatiently "Oh, to be out of it! 
 Look you, Joy, if it weren't for the mother and disappointing 
 her I 'd go to-morrow. I 'd take Sanday's offer and go to India." 
 
 " How do you think you 'd be better off in India? " I said. 
 " You 'd be taking yourself with you." 
 
 " Myself 's good enough company," he retorted. " And 
 should n't I be leaving behind all their stuffy professorial cant? 
 
 Parochial socialisms. Sty morals. That girl " he paused 
 
 and left that. " I feel hemmed round by people all pressing me 
 towards things I don't want to do or be." 
 
 And later "How can I know my own mind? What is in 
 my mind? " 
 
 I sat that night in a corner of the Spa gardens. Through 
 the windows of the theater the intolerable sweet crying of a violin 
 came borne upon the dizzy air. The hidden surf murmured by 
 the wall. All the wide dominion of the night was alive with a 
 secret solemn movement. Only my mind refused its accord in 
 the harmony. I was restless and fought against the tide that 
 ebbed through the world and bore away the silly cries and silenced 
 the brief laughter. 
 
 " What is in my mind? " 
 
 When we were children on the farm the women told us tales 
 of men who came home late across the moor and took the short 
 cut through the desolate churchyard. Woe to him who was so 
 rash or stupid as to find himself there at midnight. For men had 
 been known to return thence, dumb and blasted with the horrors 
 they had looked upon. We imagined that a particularly gro- 
 tesque idiot, who shambled through the village on hands and 
 feet, had been one of these luckless ones. Nothing could persuade 
 us to pass the churchyard after dark. It had indeed a gray and 
 somber air, even in the sunlight. The heather that crept up to its 
 very edge was always brown and dead beneath the crumbling 
 walls. We gathered that it was scorched, and filled in the rest of 
 the tale from the sermons of the Rev. Strut, who knew hell down 
 to its red-hot cobblestones and the Devil as a dear friend. 
 
 I wondered that night whether a man might not be dumb and 
 blasted who had looked only upon his own mind. " What is in
 
 IRRESPONSIBILITY 109 
 
 my mind? " A dreary upland, with rude altars stained by the 
 blood of a dread sacrifice. Bestial forms that rent each other and 
 defiled what they touched. A fear-stricken, naked thing that 
 cowered under the crashing heavens. One that held yearning 
 arms to the wonder of the sun. A man, pricked by a need greater 
 than his fear, creeping and peering through the sacred groves 
 to understand the mystery of the God. One who cried defiance 
 and bared his breast to the lightning. One who looked with a 
 strange new pain at an alien misery. One who ran and toiled 
 with bleeding hands at the stones in the road beneath the feet 
 of othe^F-men. 
 
 In a metaphorical burst of unwonted audacity, psychologists 
 and philosophers have likened the mind to a stream. On the 
 surface lie the conscious thoughts and desires, and far below run 
 the hidden currents of impulses and feelings that rarely emerge 
 into the light of day. The more geologically inclined talk of the 
 strata of the mind. These similes and phrases seem too simple 
 and tidy to hold more than a suggestion of the truth. I do not 
 believe that the creatures of the mind savage, wizard, skeptic, 
 priest, Christ inhabit an orderly mansion with the least reput- 
 able confined in the lowest dungeon, to emerge only at catastro- 
 phic moments. The savage will be found clothed in black vicuna, 
 taking tea upstairs, or officiating at High Mass. His fears tor- 
 ment the skeptic and his lusts defile the Christ . . . 
 
 I thought of Sanday and his mind turned always to some 
 ordered and wonderful vision of a world set free by Science. 
 I wondered what bowed, mis-shapen creatures ran and scurried 
 round the fringes of that disciplined march . . .
 
 CHAPTER XIX 
 
 MICK promised my mother to accept the scholarship and stay 
 in England. She would not hear of India. The name 
 conjured up visions wherein naked savages crawled through 
 jungles with knives between their teeth, and man-eating tigers 
 leaped upon Englishmen in eyeglasses and white hats. Mick was 
 very cheerful about his future. He talked a good deal of the day 
 when the world would be ruled by the scientist. " Kings used to 
 tremble before the wizard," he said. " The wizard became a 
 priest and the priest a man of learning. There will come a time 
 when emperors and plutocratic grocers will take their rightful 
 place below the thinker who serves, not the greed of a few, but 
 the good of all." 
 
 His enthusiasm burned with a fine flame, but it seemed to me 
 that he fed it from himself, taking recklessly from his dwindling 
 stock of ideals and ambitions to keep it going. He went down to 
 the school to see old Silcox, and gladdened the dear man's heart 
 with a hypocritical outburst about the gratitude and regret with 
 which he looked back upon his schooldays. He even went to 
 chapel with my mother. "Do I smell of sanctity, Joy?" he 
 asked, when he came home. " I 'm sure I ought to. I sat next 
 to old Butterby, who starves his assistants and seduces his girls: 
 he wrestled with God for an hour, right at my elbow. I got a 
 whiff from the crystal sea." 
 
 He wrote to Olive at great length, and had in return scrappy 
 letters that seemed to give him little satisfaction. " She 's hav- 
 ing a rare old time, punting and dancing," he said savagely. 
 
 My mother regarded him with a tremulous happiness. Even 
 his brothers began to believe in his regeneration. 
 
 And then he went back on all his promises, threw up the 
 scholarship, and left England without money or plans, or indeed 
 any idea except to get away and be free. 
 
 We returned to London in September, I with a biological 
 
 110
 
 IRRESPONSIBILITY 111 
 
 scholarship, to study at South Kensington, and Oliver to finish 
 his course. Michael came with us to make final arrangements 
 for his post-graduate work. We met Sanday unexpectedly in 
 the quad. He stared and blinked at Mick. " So you Ve given 
 in," he said queerly. And then, in a different tone "Most 
 gratifying results, Hearne. We expect good things from your 
 work at Cambridge." 
 
 Mick stood looking after him. " He 's sorry I 'm staying in 
 England," he said slowly. "The funny old bird. After all 
 he said." 
 
 The*next day he took himself to South Kensington, and there- 
 after we saw little of him. 
 
 He had not expected to be in town more than a fortnight, 
 but they kept him hanging on until the middle of December. 
 It was a delay that altered the whole course of his life. If I had 
 not been so preoccupied with myself I must have seen marks 
 of the strain that was becoming unendurable. I noticed nothing. 
 The end came quickly. 
 
 It wanted a week until Mick was due at Cambridge. He was 
 never in before midnight, and one night did not come in at all. 
 He turned up on the following evening, tired and dusty, full of a 
 repressed excitement that showed itself in his restless movements 
 from bookcase to chair and chair to bookcase. At last he 
 tumbled the whole contents of his shelves upon the floor, and 
 went down on his knees to sort them out. 
 
 " For goodness' sake, be quiet," Oliver growled. " If you 
 don't want to work, you needn't prevent every one else from 
 doing so." 
 
 Mick looked at him in swift amusement. " Did it have its 
 brain rubbed the wrong way? So sorry. But keep cool: to- 
 morrow you '11 be quit of me for good. I 'm off to South America 
 on a windjammer." 
 
 Anthony grinned, and said " Good enough." I glanced up 
 for a minute, and went on with my work. There was a brief 
 silence, and then Margaret pushed away her books. 
 
 " You don't mean anything, I suppose? " 
 
 " You 're a bright crowd," Mick said. " A lot of stony-hearted, 
 cold-blooded fishmongers. Next time I go to South America.
 
 112 THE HAPPY HIGHWAYS 
 
 I '11 spare you the parting tears and the tender farewells. I 'm 
 damned if I won't. Where do you suppose I Ve been all day? " 
 
 Oliver opened his mouth and shut it again on the obvious. 
 
 " I Ve been scrounging round from Fenchurch Street to Tidal 
 Basin, and I 've signed on with the captain of a sailing ship that 
 sails for Buenos Ayres the day after to-morrow. I '11 be on board 
 to-morrow night while you 're bemusing your brains in this 
 kennel, and moving down the river when you 're sleeping the 
 sleep of the damned and done-for." 
 
 We did not doubt his words at all. 
 
 Oliver said, "You fool." 
 
 Margaret spoke with a kind of wail. " Oh, you must be mad. 
 A sailing ship. You '11 die on the voyage. You 've got no 
 proper clothes. They 're dreadful things : you 've no idea of the 
 sort of life you '11 lead. You don't mean it." 
 
 " But I do. And as for clothes, there 's a man going to have 
 everything I want ready for me to-morrow." 
 
 " He '11 cheat you," Margaret said, " and you Ve got no money. 
 The life will kill you." 
 
 " Well, you don't suppose I 'm going to spend all my days be- 
 fore the mast, do you? " Mick shouted. " It 's only to get away. 
 I '11 find plenty to do in South America. I 'm going to look up 
 John Bellers, who went out there from King's last year. He 
 does things with cattle somewhere in the Argentine. He gave me 
 an address in Buenos Ayres and said it would always find him." 
 
 " Why not wait and see what Sanday can do for you? " I 
 asked. 
 
 He shook his head. " I Ve got to get away now." 
 
 We gave in at last and tried to treat the matter in the proper 
 spirit. Between us we could only raise seven or eight pounds. 
 
 " I could get you more," Margaret ventured, " if you 'd wait." 
 
 Mick, grinned. " You '11 need more," he said. " You can't 
 live on the memory of my sweet soul until next pay-day." 
 
 He stowed the money in an inner pocket. " Now," he said, 
 " let 's talk about ghouls or something really pleasant for a 
 change." 
 
 We talked with a heavy-footed cheerfulness until Anthony 
 and Oliver went to bed. As the door shut behind them, Mick
 
 IRRESPONSIBILITY 113 
 
 leaned back in his chair with a sigh. " They 're good fellows," 
 he said, "but our little brother is rather heavy in the hand, 
 don't you think? " 
 
 Margaret laughed. "Why are you going to South America? 
 Js it because of that girl ? " 
 
 Michael raised his eyebrows. "Leading questions ruled out 
 of order," he said, and became abruptly serious. " If I said that 
 it was, I 'd be telling about half the truth. It 's partly Olive 
 but I guess I 'd have gone anyway. She 's only been one dissatis- 
 faction among many. I 'm dissatisfied with the sort of life I 'd 
 live i^ I stayed here. I 'd get just like Sanday. You can imagine 
 me in twenty years' time, with all my habits crusted on me, 
 writing papers, lecturing, turning off my little jokes on suc- 
 ceeding generations of students like a mannered automaton. I 
 could n't stand it." 
 
 " All professors are not Sandays," Margaret interrupted. 
 
 " No," he answered, " but I should have been. I can imagine 
 myself just such a lopsided prodigy of work and nerves. I could 
 never be a really sound and heavy-handed professor, but the 
 academic atmosphere would have got at me just the same. 
 There 's no life in the English academicians. They exist in a kind 
 of fine-spun unreality, getting fearfully excited about things that 
 don't matter, and making awful fools of themselves when they 
 come meddling into flesh and blood problems. They 're warped 
 by the tradition like bishops. I should have had to stifle a 
 whole part of me, and it would have worked its way out in a 
 licensed eccentricity. Students would wax witty about my little 
 ways, I should put jokes about the pithecantropus erectus into 
 my books, and have reviewers writing of my Gallic style. Poor 
 devils, they 're so used to the abysmal dullness of learned men 
 that they lose their heads when they find one with a dawning 
 sense of style. The whole thing the whole scientific life, as it 
 has to be lived in a commercial world is one-sided and unreal. 
 In a sense, it's the only real life: in another sense it's divorced 
 from reality and exists on a deliberate make-believe of sham util- 
 ity. Scientists are only tolerated because they make a discovery 
 that will treble profits, or invent a new and ghastlier instrument 
 of death. They 're not expected to trouble about the destination
 
 114 THE HAPPY HIGHWAYS 
 
 of the profits, or the use of their new explosives. They 're serv- 
 ants who acquiesce in their servitude. They squirm with pleas- 
 ure when some fat profiteer talks with his tongue in his cheek 
 about the glories of science. They lap up that sort of insolence 
 and sit on their haunches for more. Panders. That 's what they 
 are. Panders and pimps to the iniquitous system that bleeds the 
 nations for the enrichment of a few. Do you suppose I could 
 acquiesce in that sort of smug, unthinking treachery? " 
 
 " You need n't " I began. 
 
 " I know I need n't and I know I should if I stayed." He 
 laughed, and leaned forward to poke a twisted paper into the 
 blaze. His pipe lit, he gesticulated with the burning remnant. 
 " I 'm not giving myself the chance of going under to it," he 
 said, and sat staring at the curling ashes in the fender. 
 
 " I Ve made a mess of things. They '11 all think so my 
 mother, Silcox, the professors. They '11 never understand. I 
 don't understand it myself. I have a scientific genius. I '11 never 
 be happy until I get back to science in some form or another, 
 and yet I could n't fit myself into the life that was arranged for 
 me. I want something freer or bigger. If the world were 
 simpler . . . No, that doesn't seem to have anything to do 
 with it: life is simple enough for old Sanday, would have been 
 simple enough for me. An artificial simplicity? That's nearer 
 to it. The contrast between the sham peace of his life and the 
 strife outside. From their laboratories they can see the strife, 
 and they ignore it, let it grow fiercer and more bitter, driving on 
 to some unthinkable disaster, powerless to avert it. I suppose 
 they dare n't see it." 
 
 He must have been talking to himself. 
 
 "Am I making all this up? Trying to explain my failure to 
 myself? Or is it true? Cloistered studies and laboratories 
 where men gather up a science of humanity while, outside, 
 humanity is maimed and spoiled and thwarted, wastes itself in 
 blind, useless activities, struggles on in confusion and mis- 
 management to I don't know where the struggle and confusion 
 lead. One can't serve two masters. Be in the laboratory and 
 in the struggle. Divided energies. Distrust from both sides. 
 There 's no cooperation, no call for scientific rule." He looked
 
 IRRESPONSIBILITY 115 
 
 up with a quick smile. "Do you remember the Samurai, and 
 their Greater and Lesser Rule? That's fine, you know. Only 
 a scientist could have thought of it. Only men who were scien- 
 tists and rulers both could carry it through." His face bright- 
 ened. " My life 's only beginning, after all. I '11 make some- 
 thing of it yet. But not here. I couldn't have done anything 
 here." 
 
 " You see," he added slowly, " there 'd have been other things 
 to contend with." He hesitated. " I 've made a damned mess 
 of things," he said cheerfully. A reminiscent smile flickered 
 round the corners of his mouth. 
 
 " I thought things were going wrong," he said. " When I 
 was at home this summer I thought they were wrong. She 
 wrote such queer letters. I did n't tell her I was coming up, and 
 when I went to see her, of course she did n't expect me. There 
 was a man with her, a pleasant-looking enough young fool. I 
 thought the girl was trying to tell me something in the passage, 
 but I took no notice of her and just walked in. They were 
 standing close together, and the man seemed taken aback. He 
 got himself away, and I turned to look at Olive. I suppose 
 I was n't seeing things straight, but she looked different to me. 
 I turned sick and disgusted. 'You don't seem pleased to see 
 me,' I said. 
 
 " ' Why should I be? ' she said hardly. ' You did n't expect me 
 to greet you with open arms after a letter like that.' She fum- 
 bled in her dress, and flung a letter on the table. It was the last 
 I had written her. I suppose it had its share of bitter, ugly 
 things, but she might have seen the pain as well. She ought to 
 have seen it. 
 
 " ' Who 's that man? ' I asked her. 
 
 "She looked at me for a second: I couldn't believe it was 
 really hatred I saw in her eyes. Then she said ' He 's quite a 
 nice boy. A poet. I met him at a dance at Henley. He's a 
 solicitor's clerk. You 're not jealous, are you? ' 
 
 " Jealous! Me! Of an embryo lawyer she 'd met at a dance! 
 I could have turned and left her then. I wish I had. I did n't, 
 of course. I took her in my arms and let her soothe me and call 
 me her cross darling. I wanted her so that I did n't care." He
 
 116 THE HAPPY HIGHWAYS 
 
 laughed, a quick, low laughter that broke off in his throat. " She 
 let me have her to keep me quiet." 
 
 He thrust his face forward in the firelight, with a half un- 
 conscious grimace of distaste. " It opened my eyes. I saw 
 things I had n't seen before. Her attitude to her mother. The 
 way her mother treated her, and the way she treated me. I 
 sensed a conspiracy of silence a mean, dirty silence. I used to 
 swear I 'd give her up, but I went back to her again, and she kissed 
 me and stroked me. She 's a pleasing little animal. Then one 
 day I saw her coming out of a cafe in Regent Street with the 
 rhyming clerk. He held the door open for her, and rested one 
 hand on her shoulder. She was smiling up at him. I knew then. 
 I knew, without any other proof, that she 'd play me false, and 
 lie about it, and I should believe her, and crawl for more lies . . . 
 I went to her again that night for the last time . . . She does n't 
 know about South America. They think I 'm going to be a pro- 
 fessor and marry her. I shall write her and post the letter on 
 the quay. I was really taking my leave of her that night, 
 only she did n't know it, and thought me very loving and 
 deluded." 
 
 " That 's rather horrible," Margaret said suddenly. 
 
 "To go like that?" Mick said. "You think it's not fair. 
 Well, how have they treated me? " His voice rose. " My God, 
 I sha'n't feel free or clean until I Ve put a continent between 
 us. She 's a fool, I tell you, a dirty little fool. And if I stayed 
 I 'd be no better." 
 
 " I was n't thinking of your flight," Margaret answered. 
 " I was thinking of that last night. It seems cruel, almost 
 inhuman." 
 
 Mick stared. "I don't see that," he said, and then, with a 
 sudden change of tone "Margaret, my dear, are you sorry 
 to lose me? We 've been friends, eh? " 
 
 Margaret flung out her hands. " Oh," she cried, " if only you 
 were n't going. I wish I were coming with you. I wish I 
 wish . . ." She broke into a fit of weeping. Michael opened 
 his arms. She clung to him, and he soothed her as if she had been 
 a child,
 
 CHAPTER XX 
 
 MICHAEL had been gone two days when Margaret had a brief 
 letter from Olive Champion. " I 've got no claim on you," 
 she wrote, " but I 'd be glad if you would come and see me." 
 
 Margaret went reluctantly. " I suppose I '11 have to go," 
 she said. " Mick's little ways come rather hard upon his friends, 
 though, don't they? You can meet me in the South Kensington 
 tube station if you like, Joy." 
 
 She came about six o'clock. " I don't want to sit in a crowded 
 train," she said. " Let 's try for the top of a 'bus." 
 
 We were in Piccadilly when she spoke of her visit. Olive had 
 come up to the situation in picturesque but trying fashion, " like 
 a stricken mannequin, all in black soft stuff with a rose at her 
 throat." 
 
 I laughed. 
 
 " No, I 'm sorry I said that," Margaret cried. ** She 's hurt 
 underneath it all hurt and sore. She did care, I think; but he 
 was n't enough of a fool to satisfy her properly." 
 
 "Was she civil?" 
 
 " Oh yes. She was dreadfully dignified at first. ' Where has 
 he gone? ' she asked. I told her all we knew. Then suddenly 
 she broke out * Oh, why did he go ? I don't understand.' 
 She almost wrung her hands. Her grief was incongruous some- 
 how, as if an alien power had got inside a comic mask and was 
 twisting and distorting it. She turned on me once. ' You Ve 
 looked down on me all of you. What does college teach a 
 woman about love? I loved him better than any of you could 
 with all your clever talk. You 've set him against me.' She 
 rubbed at her tears. I could only stare at her. I felt stupid 
 and ashamed. We have despised her, though not for the things 
 she seemed to think. I was despising her then because she could 
 give way like that, and talk so absurdly. She felt it, I think. 
 She stiffened herself, and clutched at her role. * You don't know 
 
 117
 
 118 THE HAPPY HIGHWAYS 
 
 how I loved him,' she said. ' I gave him everything, all I had. 
 My life is wasted and empty now.' My pity hardened a bit. I 
 felt that she could n't give much." 
 
 Margaret looked at me with a rather twisted smile. " I 'm a 
 superior-minded beast, Joy, for all my pretense at freedom of 
 thought." 
 
 " Oh, my dear " I began. 
 
 " Don't interrupt me," she said quickly. " You 're upsetting 
 all my psychological effects. Let me finish about Olive. I tried 
 to tell her I was sorry, but she did n't believe me. I tried to 
 make her feel that I was sorry, but she 'd got back on to her 
 farcical, pitiful dignity, and I could n't reach her at all. She was 
 pitiful and yet I didn't feel sorry for her. It's not just that 
 Michael is my friend. But her queer, deliberate pose would keep 
 thrusting itself at me. She gesticulated like a marionette. In 
 some fashion, her grief was real, but she was not. She had a mo- 
 ment of reality just before I left. ' I suppose he was bored,' she 
 said. ' I remember he got bored with his work, although he was 
 so keen on it and so clever. He got bored with London. He 
 must have been bored with me.' Her eyes blazed. ' I think he is 
 the most selfish man I have ever known,' she cried. When she 
 was opening the door for me, I said awkwardly, ' If there is any- 
 thing I can do ' ' I want nothing of any of you,' she said 
 
 quickly. * I want to forget you. You 've come into my life and 
 hurt and spoiled it. I think I hate you all.' When I glanced 
 back, she was still standing in the doorway, a stiff, tragic figure. 
 Do you remember the dancing Columbine at the Coliseum, who 
 died on Harlequin's body in such a fantastic travesty of despair? 
 She was like that." 
 
 We waited two months for a letter from Mick. It came at 
 last from a little village in the south-eastern part of San Miguel 
 in the Azores. 
 
 He had fared worse than our worst fears. The captain of the 
 sailing ship was a nervous, jumpy Swede, with a horror of the 
 open sea. They dodged down the coast of Europe, and Mick was 
 fearfully sick. The mate had taken a dislike to him, and they 
 were hardly out of the river when he landed Mick a kick on the 
 ankle. Mick hobbled round in a half -crippled state for a couple
 
 IRRESPONSIBILITY 119 
 
 of days and then his leg was so painful that he complained. The 
 mate declared him to be a dirty malingerer, and forced him to go 
 on working. He could not eat the food and he was half-dazed 
 with pain. At last, when they were off St. Vincent, he was so 
 clearly ill, and his ankle looked so ugly, that they debated whether 
 to leave him. I daresay the mate was a little scared. The men 
 were grumbling at the way he had treated Mick. 
 
 "A hefty brute, the only other Englishman of the crew the 
 rest were Swedes and Danes, and damn bad sailors they are 
 took a liking to me and swore to get him into trouble if I died." 
 And then, as Mick was limping about, he stumbled over the 
 galley step and broke his leg just above the inflamed and swollen 
 ankle. That settled it. Perhaps the mate reflected that if Mick 
 died on board there might be trouble. Things are not what they 
 were in the autocratic merchant service: the times are rotten with 
 sentiment, and dead men have to be accounted for. If he died 
 in hospital there would be an end to it, and so to hospital he 
 went. He was delirious, and remembered very vaguely that he 
 changed ships. 
 
 ** Or perhaps it was only the ship's boat," he wrote. " But 
 I seem to recall a little yellow-skinned man with a kindly face, 
 who bent over me and poked at my ankle. He chattered in 
 Spanish or Portuguese over his shoulder while he dressed my 
 leg. Certainly it was already dressed when I reached the hos- 
 pital, and lucky for me it was. The place was run by Portuguese 
 monks and they were a queer crew. They never washed me or 
 changed the bed-clothes or looked at my leg, the whole month 
 I was there. A full belly maketh a kind heart, so I suppose 
 they were kind enough. The only one I ever saw work was a lean, 
 sardonic-looking son of God who came round twice a day with 
 bowls of broth and boiled chicken. He used to sweep the room 
 out now and then in a desultory sort of way. I don't know what 
 his name was. I christened him Pedro, and he answered to it 
 without any trouble. When I 'd been there a week, he began to 
 sit on my bed and talk to me. I thought he was an Irishman at 
 first, but he turned out to be a Bavarian who 'd lived in a North 
 Irish monastery for six or seven years. My name deceived him 
 into thinking I came from that distressin' country. He led off
 
 120 THE HAPPY HIGHWAYS 
 
 with an astonishing attack on Irish priests. He said they were 
 an intolerant and barbarous lot. He had seen a priest whip a 
 woman once, and he kept coming back to it over and over again 
 in an indignant sort of way. I was too weak to care much what 
 he talked about, but after a while I roused up enough to ask 
 him the cause of the chastisement. His indignation bubbled up 
 at once. 
 
 "'For what? ' says he. 'Why, for human nature and nought 
 else. He was a fool, that priest. He had all the unmarried 
 women and widows joined together in a society he called Daugh- 
 ters of Mary. And he would have all the bachelors to be Sons of 
 John. The young men held off, but some of the older ones came 
 in for what they could get. This woman I speak of was a widow. 
 Her husband was dead, and she a fine, upstanding woman in her 
 prime, with never a wrinkle on her. There were two cottages 
 she had, side by side, and one she let to a Son of John. What 
 would you expect? ' He shrugged himself in an ungainly way. 
 ' There was a fine to-do when it all came out, and down goes the 
 priest and whips the woman in her own garden, and puts a ban 
 on them both. Of course, he took it off, but what good can 
 come of stupidity like that? Bah, I spit upon all such.' 
 
 " And there 's a pretty tale for you. I don't see that it has any 
 relation to Home Rule, but you might put it to a suitable Orange- 
 man if you can find one. 
 
 "He was a queer customer, that Bavarian monk. A mixture 
 of knave and Simple Simon. You could never be sure which 
 predominated. A huge Catalan monk called Daniela seemed 
 to be the ruling power in the hospital. He extended his powers 
 over the village, and acted as an unofficial judge in local disputes. 
 They brought him one day a man one Galdos caught steal- 
 ing fowls. It was a clear case: he'd been at it for months, and 
 the peasants clamored for his blood. Old Daniela blazed and 
 blasted at the thief, and soothed the peasants with promises 
 of an awful vengeance. The thief was an engaging-looking scoun- 
 drel, and I felt sorry for him. ' What will Father Daniela do? ' 
 I asked Pedro. 
 
 " He looked at me slyly. * Oh, nothing,' he said. * He dare n't.
 
 IRRESPONSIBILITY 121 
 
 He 's fathered too many of the rascal's children. Galdos has a 
 rare wife as dark as a gipsy, and holds up her head like a 
 young mare. Father Daniela will keep him working here for a 
 month and then let him out to run till he 's caught again.' 
 
 "'The old villain! ' I said. 
 
 ' That one? He cannot help himself: his mother was a 
 thief, and his father a liar and a heretic.' 
 
 ; ' I don't mean Galdos,' I said. ' It 's Daniela I 'm talking 
 about.' 
 
 "Pedro revolted. 'A villain? ' he cried. 'You are mad to 
 say it. He is a good and generous man. He would give of 
 his last crust to the needy. Moreover, he never asks favors of 
 a woman. But he is of a pleasing figure. Women like a fat 
 man. Fat men are comfortable and easy in their habits. A thin 
 lover is passionate and too ready with his fingers at your throat.' 
 Complacently ' I was a passionate man myself in my youth.' 
 
 " Pedro told me that in a village another mile or so inland lived 
 an English clergyman and his wife. The wife, he said, was so 
 and flung open his arms to express an incredible elongation. 
 'The man pokes with his nose at you, and says Ah.' Pedro 
 twisted his face into a donnish solemnity. ' But perhaps they 
 would assist you to communicate with your friends,' he finished 
 delicately. 
 
 " I recited to Pedro the full tale of my accomplishments, and 
 sent him to interview the English heretic. He promised Pedro 
 to call, and did the next day. I believe he thought I was at 
 my last gasp, for he had, wrapped in a piece of brown paper, 
 a surplice or a cassock, or whatever the devil it is they don to 
 speed the souls of the departing. When he found me propped 
 up in bed, digging in at a Portuguese grammar that old Pedro 
 had discovered for me, he looked horribly taken aback and 
 disappointed. He tried to conceal the cassock, but it was burst- 
 ing out of the paper in all directions. He kept poking at it, 
 and sitting on it, and tucking it under his arm, and dropping 
 it on the floor and scrambling for it until I was dizzy. He en- 
 tered upon a long account of his trials in a heathen land. I was 
 so bored that I pretended to wander in my mind to get rid of him.
 
 122 THE HAPPY HIGHWAYS 
 
 ' The elephant has drunk all the milk,' says I, and rolls my eyes 
 at him. It came out of the Portuguese grammar, but he didn't 
 know that. 
 
 " * My poor boy,' he says, ' I '11 send for you. You must be 
 got away,' and off he hurries like a twig in the wind. I did n't 
 believe he 'd do anything, but sure enough, a couple of days 
 later he and his wife turned up at the hospital and haled me off 
 in a horrible cart. Pedro stood mournfully in the doorway, 
 watching me out of sight. He was a good man, was Pedro, and 
 extraordinarily conscientious, considering the climate . . . 
 
 " That grammar was some book, I tell you. The first sentence 
 in it ran ' We have the oranges, but the foreigners have all 
 the watches,' which I take to be a horrid aspersion on the char- 
 acter of English fruit-merchants . . . 
 
 " Well, here I am, in a white-walled, picturesque house of in- 
 credible inconvenience. I fight a losing battle with hordes of 
 spiders and sleep with my head under the sheet for fear one 
 should drop on me from the ceiling. 
 
 " I can't quite make out what the Holts are doing in this God- 
 forsaken village. They had a vicarage near Cardiff. I believe 
 I may be doing her an awful injustice that Mrs. Holt is the 
 reason. She looks like a reformed kleptomaniac, and he adopts 
 a queer, watchful attitude to her, which may, however, be part of 
 the usual domestic amenities of an Anglican household. 
 
 " The ostensible reason for their exile is Mr. Holt's great work. 
 He is writing a book which shall once and for all settle the Arian 
 question. The house is crowded with the Old Fathers; they 
 fall on your head off shelves, lurk about in boot cupboards, trip 
 you up round corners, and even find their way into the kitchen, 
 where the little Portuguese wench uses 'em as hassocks and 
 pastryboards. A lovely 4ittle thing, and Mrs. H. tracks me 
 round like a bloodhound when she is anywhere near. A blood- 
 hound in creaking corsets and bodices that hook up behind. Old 
 Holt must spend half-an-hour on them every morning. Oh, voice 
 that breathed o 'er Eden, what Adam escaped! Oh, sacred wed- 
 ded bliss! Their bedroom is next to mine and as the walls 
 are made of thin wood, I have to listen to their nocturnal com- 
 munings. Last night, old Holt began 'My dear, it is abom-
 
 IRRESPONSIBILITY 123 
 
 inably close. I think I must really have a bed put in the spare 
 room.' 
 
 ' That would be unnatural. My dear parents never slept 
 one night apart, except in illness, during their whole married 
 life. They were married fifty-five years.' 
 
 " Unnatural ! how sweetly natural that four withered limbs 
 should be compelled to lie side by side in comfort and discomfort, 
 year in and year out, until death releases 'em. My mind balks 
 at the vision . . . 
 
 " I am supposed to be acting as secretary to the old boy, and to 
 tell you the truth, I earn my board. The thing is hopeless, of 
 course; Tout I 'm doing quite invaluable work in sorting out notes 
 and looking up authorities. I shall hereafter quote the Fathers 
 with the Devil himself . . . 
 
 " He 's a courageous old stick, you know, is Holt. Here he is, 
 slaving away in a land he detests, for a Church that will never 
 see or thank him for his service, preserving his English identity 
 by talking a wretched dog-Portuguese and eating meat on Fri- 
 days always brushed and active in a country that positively 
 clamors for indolence and shirt-sleeves . . ." 
 
 There followed vague plans for his future. " When I Ve 
 limped myself back to health," he wrote, " I '11 get down to 
 Ponta Delgado and set off again for South America and the 
 unknown. * I 'd like to roll to Rio roll really down to Rio 
 Some day before I die ' . . . 
 
 "There's a British Consul in the offing, of course, but I'd 
 rather not, if I can manage any other way . . . 
 
 " I suppose you 've seen and heard nothing of Olive? " 
 
 After " Your affectionate brother, Mick," was a sentence writ- 
 ten jerkily across a corner " I shall be very lame for the rest 
 of my life, you know." 
 
 We looked at each other, and found nothing to say. 
 
 I took the letter to Sanday. He read it through with a peering 
 earnestness and handed it back without a word. For a few 
 minutes he stared out of the high window of the lab. at high 
 peaks of clouds in a blue sky. Then he came back to the bench 
 and stood there, picking up weights between the pincers and 
 dropping them about a sheet of paper.
 
 124 THE HAPPY HIGHWAYS 
 
 " Is he really lamed, do you think? " he asked. 
 
 " He says so," I answered. " I suppose he knows what he 's 
 saying." 
 
 "Strange," Sanday murmured, "he was so active. But what 
 shall it profit a man if he gain the whole world and lose his 
 soul?" 
 
 I did not get his association of ideas. I folded up the letter 
 and prepared to go. He snatched at my sleeve. " You must n't 
 hurry away like that. We must think what to do." 
 
 He sought vaguely in his pockets. " I had a letter," he said, 
 " an important letter." He discovered it at last, so scrawled 
 over with figures that he had to read it with one finger tracing 
 along the lines. 
 
 ** I wrote to my friend in India, after you had been to see me 
 in Gower Street. I had an idea it would be necessary." He 
 peered at me round the corner of his glasses. " He replied that 
 he did not need any more assistants, but would recommend the 
 young man to the Agricultural Experiment Station in Barbados. 
 I think that 's enough." 
 
 He darted at the door with an amazing activity. "We must 
 cable write ." I heard him pattering along the corridor, 
 talking over his shoulder as he went.
 
 BOOK II 
 THE EIKONOKLASTS: A SCHEME
 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 MICHAEL left England in the last month of 1911. The days 
 after he went were extraordinarily empty. Life was nar- 
 rower, and in some way poorer and thinner. My own restlessness 
 grew: I began to make secret plans for getting out of England. 
 I wondered if Sanday could help me. A man I knew well at 
 King's" was going to Mexico on some doubtful errand to do with 
 oil concessions. He said himself that he was engaged as a 
 head-hunter. " You 'd better come with me, Hearne," he added. 
 " Climate along the coast like an afternoon in heaven. Girls, 
 real girls, not washed-out color prints. Adventure, romance up- 
 to-date. Make your know you 're alive. Not like this." He 
 waved a contemptuous hand at the somber, hurrying crowds. 
 
 Many times after he had gone, I wished I had taken the jesting 
 offer. I talked to Margaret, boasted of the things I would do 
 when I had got me away from a worked-out country. Afterwards, 
 I sat and wondered at the incredible things I had said. 
 
 We went our way through the year of 1912, busied with many 
 things. We were in the midst of activities that bore no visible 
 fruit until the very early days of the next year. We met people: 
 we made and re-made our plans. I feel that we were trying to 
 blow life into things that were never alive at all. To be sure, we 
 had, during this time, every appearance of life and liveliness. 
 We ran about after people, and worked like slaves. We blew 
 ourselves a great bladder of enthusiasm and mounted on it with 
 perilous buoyancy. 
 
 The Scheme was born in Herne Hill. It was we who sug- 
 gested it, and we who toiled like madmen to keep it going. And 
 yet, from the very first, we had less pleasure and less faith in it 
 than any of those who came round to help us. It is not that I 
 think it was wrong, either in its intentions or in its effects. It 
 taught us not a little, and knocked the more obvious conceit out 
 of us. It worked well. It was appreciated. But it was wrong 
 
 127
 
 128 THE HAPPY HIGHWAYS 
 
 for us. We should have left it to others. When I can take up 
 again the work we dropped, I shall take it up altogether dif- 
 ferently. 
 
 When we came to London we found socialism grimed and 
 harassed from its toiling life in factories and workshops. It 
 wore an air of bristling efficiency. It was up-to-date of the 
 latest cog-wheel in the industrial machine. All that the older 
 socialism lacked it had. It had technical knowledge and the 
 sense of economic proportion. And yet we missed in it something 
 vital, something that we stumbled on in other places and hailed 
 with gladness: in a poem by Morris, in the untroubled thunders 
 of an old Social Democrat, in odd, unconscious illuminations of 
 minds, still unconverted to the one true and dried-up faith. 
 From the first we felt ourselves awkward and alien in its whirring 
 activities. We had to struggle against a numb, glowering stu- 
 pidity that settled down on our minds in the presence of one 
 of those gleamingly efficient young socialists from Oxford, shrewd, 
 skilled experts, emitting sparks of commonsense at every pore. 
 We tried angrily to drag him into contradictions, but he rode 
 delicately and surely over our massed irrelevancies and left us 
 unsatisfied behind. 
 
 We wrestled with our dissatisfaction. We read enormously 
 
 in the latest pamphlets, and began to exude technicalities with 
 
 vigor. And the sense of something lacking grew with equal 
 
 vigor. I could not understand it. A curious piece of mental 
 
 * trickery enlightened me. 
 
 One bitter cold day I let the fire in our room go out. With 
 a pile of reviews and a handful of damp sticks, grudgingly sup- 
 plied from the kitchen, I tried to get that fire going before the 
 others came in. The more expensive a paper, the less is it likely 
 to set a brook on fire. The sticks spit and gurgled and would 
 not catch. In desperation I seized the great bunch of heather 
 we had brought from home to remind us that in Herne Hill we 
 dwelt five haughty exiles. It was bone dry and the flames leaped 
 through it. I squatted down before the blaze with one of those 
 clear and irritating pamphlets. The blue smoke of the burning 
 heather filled the room with a pungent, acrid smell. In the 
 blinking of an eyelid I was in the farm kitchen. The wooden
 
 THE EIKONOKLASTS: A SCHEME 129 
 
 settle ran from fireplace to door. The tall clock droned and 
 wheezed behind it. On the flagstones of the hearth the peat 
 glowed, smoldering. It murmured of brcvwn streams trickling 
 through the heather, of the close leaves of the ling, soft green 
 lace of moss, the treacherous greedy butterwort, and the tall harsh 
 belfries of the foxgloves in the disused quarry. 
 
 That conclusive beast of a little book was still in my hand. 
 Impulsively, I flung it on the fire and the flames hissed and 
 mocked. The ashes swept up the stone chimney and the moor 
 wind blew them down the road the Romans made. With a clatter 
 of sticks and tongues the others came along the passage, opening 
 the deoT right through the phantom settle. " Who 's burning 
 peat, who 's burning peat? " they cried. " The beast, he 's 
 burned the heather." 
 
 Rather bruised and sore in body, I reflected later on my im- 
 pulsive contempt. I had burned that excellent and informative 
 treatise because it was utterly out of place in the farm kitchen. 
 Suppose Luke Pearson of Moor Acres had come in and picked 
 it up, or John Wardle of Wardle's Close, how they would have 
 spat their contempt! I would no more dare produce in a com- 
 pany of northern dalesmen those glib and reputable theories, the 
 economic currency of the town, than I dare walk down the 
 Strand in the leathern breeches that were my father's and then 
 mine and Michael's and last of all Oliver's, before they came, at 
 the auction, on evil days and alien legs wherein raced no drop 
 of the dark Hearne blood. Indeed, I would sooner outrage the 
 Strand: the folk there are kinder and more tolerant than the 
 dalesfolk. 
 
 That second of insight taught me many things. It taught me 
 that socialism, which had made more play with the land than 
 has any other economic creed, knows least about it. Between 
 the well-meaning, well-informed industrialist and the bulwarked 
 stolidity of Luke Pearson and his nine great sons, is a gulf never 
 to be bridged by exhortations and common sense. 
 
 Their days, rooted in ancient prejudice, are spent pitting a 
 stark courage against the treachery of the moor that creeps to 
 the edges of their fields, biding its time to take them back. To 
 the tide that sweeps out from the towns and the cities they will
 
 130 THE HAPPY HIGHWAYS 
 
 oppose the wall of their blind hatred of alien things. The harsh- 
 ness and the cruel strength of the upland dales is in that hatred. 
 They are not stupid, the dalesmen, nor even uneducated. Many 
 a one, like young Nathaniel Pearson, reads through the winter 
 evenings when the animals are settled for the night. The winter 
 I lived at Moor Acres he read patiently through " The Decline 
 and Fall -of the Roman Empire." At the end of it he judged 
 slowly. 
 
 " They were a good folk," said he, " but bloody minded and 
 ower-hasty, and they had nobbut a poor sense o' justice." 
 
 " No sense of justice? " cried I. " What about Roman Law? " 
 
 " Now did I say -aught o' law ? " he retorted. 
 
 His father was given to like sweeping judgments on men 
 and things. He had heard of socialism and did actually believe 
 in the existence of honest socialists. But he argued that their 
 honesty was due to lack of guts: the clever ones were all born 
 scoundrels. By a queer chance, he had been in Paris during the 
 Commune. When young Boulby got himself shut up there dur- 
 ing the siege, his father the Squire could find no braver or wiser 
 man to send for news of him than young Luke Pearson. A lad of 
 twenty, who had never been out of his native dales, he got himself 
 across the Channel and somehow into the city just before the start 
 of the Commune. He found young Boulby, and kept that hare- 
 brained youth from rushing headlong into revolution. 
 
 His opinion of the Communist leaders was almost kindly. 
 "They meant well," he said, "but they were nobbut daft oils. 
 Should 'a' done it thoroughly or let it be. Revolution bean't 
 noa time for honesty: the daft gowks should ha' known that. 
 Them others knawed it: reel well they knawed it. They dealt 
 sorely wi' them honest fools. The streets were fair wet wi' 
 revolutionist blood. Sick at heart I wor for the bairns they 
 took an' shot for being communists. There bea n't noa honest 
 socialism. 'T is all folly and self-seeking. I doan't say but that 
 some on 'em means well, reel well, but they knaw namore o' life 
 than yon owd bitch. Ha' na truck wi' such. 'T is a mock and a 
 delusion." 
 
 His hearers said "Ay" in their throats, and stretching huge 
 arms, stamped slowly with great feet.
 
 THE EIKONOKLASTS: A SCHEME 131 
 
 When you talk of the land -and say what you will do with it, 
 do you never think that the land has also two stout legs, two 
 great arms, body like a tree trunk, and a mind rooted with 
 Ygdrasil in the old earth? Legs and arms and body and mind 
 that loathe and scorn your city faith, will have none of it, 
 will spit on it, and oppose it with the strength of an earth-fast 
 prejudice? 
 
 I know that this is so because I have felt in myself the painful 
 tug of old instinctive hatreds. I have sat in the back of your halls 
 and meeting-places, listening to the disciplined phrases of the 
 modern socialist creed, and felt suddenly that had I the barns 
 and farms of my fathers I would burn them to the last door-post 
 before I would be torn from my fierce and self-ordered isolation. 
 Were I Luke Pearson and had got me with such fearful effort a 
 living from the grudging soil, would I not fight to the end against 
 the new alien obedience demanded of me in a wise and socialist 
 State? 
 
 Civilization is a failure, not because it is cruel or bloody, but 
 because it has so ordered things that some men are cut off from 
 the land all their lives, and others are rooted in it so fiercely 
 that nothing else for them has meaning or value or any life at 
 all. It is wrong that there should be a man living who does not 
 somewhere touch the soil. It is wrong and wicked beyond belief 
 that a child should be born and bred out of sight of the meadow 
 grass and sound of the homing birds. 
 
 Men must work in towns, but their homes should be decently 
 spread through the countryside. Before God, I swear this has 
 nothing to do with garden suburbs, those middle-class travesties 
 of the Manor and the Hall. 
 
 No man should have to live in cities, save from choice, and 
 none all his life round. 
 
 During the whole of the time we worked with the socialists 
 of London, we never met one who understood us when we told 
 them of the immovable forces of the earth that they would surely 
 have to face. They laughed and shrugged. A little earnest 
 propaganda, a judicious pointing of the moral, would bring the 
 dalesfolk into line with the workers of the busy outside world. 
 So they said, and so believed.
 
 132 THE HAPPY HIGHWAYS 
 
 We knew them wrong. Because they had not in them the mur- 
 muring of a voice deep with the sound of many streams and the 
 memory of many men, should we be deaf to it who heard it in 
 ourselves? 
 
 We were conscious always of our difference from the men who 
 were our friends and fellow-workers. Even Mick's freakishness 
 was based on something hard and stolid, and slow to move as the 
 hills themselves. Our life had been different, bearing a heritage 
 of sorrow lightly, as the green earth bears the burden of many 
 feet . . . 
 
 There are times when I hate the very thought of the moorland. 
 I think of her stretching bony arms down into the fertile valleys, 
 greedy and menacing, taking every year her toll of human life. 
 And then I see her in her ripe loveliness, decked with the yellow 
 gorse, twisting in her hair the red clusters of the mountain ash. 
 She has crooked an elbow round the stark, gray rock and let her 
 fingers rest in the narrow creeks of the sea. She smiles tenderly 
 and proudly, dreaming of her triumph and her sorrow. 
 
 But in winter the wind tears through the black heavens, and 
 the hollows are filled with dark, bitter water. Then a man 
 crossing the moor reels on the flinty path, and the walls of the 
 cottage quiver and strain in the storm. The wet peat burns 
 slowly, and the wind rushes under the door, lifting the carpet in 
 little billows across the floor. A man must have good thoughts 
 who would live alone on the moors. 
 
 I belong to the moor. It is because I know that, and knew it 
 all along, that I was uneasy and ill-contented in the work we be- 
 gan in London. I shall go back to my own place and begin 
 afresh.
 
 CHAPTER II 
 
 HOW am I to write the story of these years? No sooner do I 
 get me in the way of an orderly account than my mind 
 
 thrusts out odd scenes to trip me up and call me halt. Am I to 
 ignore them for the order's sake? And if I do, shall I have 
 robbed my tale of half its sense and savor? 
 
 I do not know why I, sitting in the sun on the dried pine needles, 
 should remember all at once an obscure, ill-lit cafe, and myself 
 at a corner table, bending across to Margaret's sweet face. It is 
 not one of the cafes we frequented, and I do not know what we 
 are doing there. Before I have time to consider, another memory 
 has elbowed that one out of the way. 
 
 We are making one of our rare intrusions upon Olympus. 
 The Duke is in town. Margaret and I and his son have lunched 
 with him in Soho. 
 
 " It 's twelve o'clock," he said. " At two we lunch again. 
 We '11 all go to see Jane. Jack, you neglect your Aunt Jane. 
 You should n't do it, my boy. She '11 be useful to you one of 
 these days. A determined woman, and as unlike your mother, 
 sweet saint, as a sister could be. Jane reverts to type, I think. 
 Her father stuck pigs in Chicago, and I '11 be bound it was a de- 
 center sight than one I saw in India. All drugged to a pig, my 
 boy, and his lordship shot 'em in droves. It was a Gadarene 
 massacre." 
 
 We doubted whether Jane, Lady Cricklewood, expected us. 
 
 The Duke stared. " What 's that to do with it? " he demanded. 
 "Ain't I taking you? My dear," he said to Margaret, with a 
 sorry echo of the gallantry that had shadowed his sweet saint's 
 life, " she should be honored to have you at her table." 
 
 We did, indeed, pass almost unnoticed. Lady Cricklewood 
 kissed Jack on the forehead, and smiled very kindly on us. She 
 might have been relieved that we were no worse. Jack told 
 me that his father took the queerest people to lunch with Jane. 
 
 133
 
 134 THE HAPPY HIGHWAYS 
 
 Once it was a large shabby journalist who roared all through the 
 meal in a deafening voice. The ends of his mustache dragged 
 in the coffee, and he wiped them on his tie. He could not use his 
 napkin because he had thrown it away. 
 
 Almost always, the people whom the Duke brought regarded 
 the rest of Jane's guests with an aggressive contempt. She re- 
 belled at last, and told him that he must come alone or not at all. 
 
 He answered her solemnly. " My good Jane, if you cannot 
 see fit to bestow your hospitality upon me and my friends, I shall 
 go on the stage and have my own and my wife's family history 
 in all the papers." 
 
 Jane quivered and collapsed: the Chicago pigs were the least 
 of her ancestral shortcomings, and she dwelt precariously in 
 places still unravished by mixed breeding. 
 
 The lunchers that day were austerely varied. His aunt, Jack 
 said, was secretly bored by her pure-bred relatives. She tried 
 to escape from them by developing a mind. This she did in the 
 two most reputable directions the high political and the dis- 
 tinguished literary. 
 
 " There they are, all three together," Jack said. " That horse- 
 faced frump is my aunt's sister-in-law. Inbreeding produced 
 that nose. The dreamy-eyed haberdasher on her left is Bloomer, 
 the new sociological novelist. Out- Wells Wells, you know. The 
 other side of him is political wife to a Cabinet Minister, I 
 think." 
 
 Lady Cricklewood directed the conversation with a heavy zeal. 
 In the one moment that it slipped her, it turned on divorce. 
 There may have been a Commission sitting: I do not remember. 
 
 Bloomer turned on his right-hand neighbor a face that quivered 
 with intelligence. "Something should be done," he urged. 
 "Don't you think so? What is your opinion? How do you 
 view these things? " 
 
 The thin lips opened for a trickle of icy sound. "Do they 
 require thought? It has always seemed to me that nothing 
 but an instinct for what is base could explain this yearning 
 for license that has come upon our race. I have always blamed 
 America. But do you suppose that the infection could have 
 so spread if we had not been maliciously, insidiously weakened
 
 THE EIKONOKLASTS: A SCHEME 135 
 
 by^ unbalanced minds and a foolish sentimental government? " 
 
 " You mean, dear lady ? " the novelist murmured. 
 
 "I^mean this pandering to the mob. Giving them to read. 
 
 They 're not fit for it. Ideas get into their heads and they can't 
 
 judge of them. The lower classes are drunken with the license 
 
 we have allowed them. Oh, I know it is usual to flatter them. 
 
 There is not a journal that dares tell them to their face that 
 
 they are narrow, servile fools." 
 
 "But," ventured the Minister's wife, "hasn't it caused great 
 
 hardships among the poorer people the difficulty of divorce, 
 
 I mean? " 
 
 "Suppose your wife is in the lunatic asylum," the Duke 
 grunted. 
 
 He got no further, for Lady Cricklewood's voice rose and set- 
 tled down upon him like a clumsy bird. 
 
 "Pray, my dear John," she gurgled, "don't inflict upon us 
 one of your heroic outbursts. We know just what you are going 
 to say, and just what value to place upon it. In the first pace, 
 these creatures' sense of decency is in a quite elementary stage, 
 and requires less, not more indulgence. And in the second 
 place, you exaggerate the hardships." 
 
 Her sister-in-law interrupted. " There is nothing to be said 
 upon the subject. The best spiritual advice is quite clear that no 
 possible circumstance can justify the sin of re-marriage. Say 
 adultery, rather. Trials are for purification: the harder and 
 more bitter our suffering, the greater will be our reward. Lust 
 may be legalized. It cannot be sanctified." A mottled flush 
 spread over her face. 
 
 The novelist intervened, and Lady Cricklewood boomed her 
 way placidly through the rest of the meal. There was only one 
 break, when the Cabinet Minister's wife took courage to wonder 
 why the people shoujd not reach a point where they would be fit 
 to rule themselves. 
 
 "Why should we rule them? " she said, with a pretty, flushed 
 insistence. She opened her eyes very wide and fixed them on 
 Bloomer. He blinked, and tripped across the ice on agile toe. 
 
 *' I must nail you for my next book. You shall be my aristo- 
 cratic heroine, sweet and bold-minded, and full of illuminating
 
 136 THE HAPPY HIGHWAYS 
 
 remarks on the social chaos." This is not what he said. I think 
 it is what he thought. 
 
 "My dear," Jane said kindly, "there is no earthly reason 
 why they should n't rule themselves and us, but they 've got to be 
 bred to it. And is it likely we shall hasten to breed our 
 masters? " 
 
 Bloomer had a moment. " It might be better to breed them," 
 he said, " than to leave them to chance." 
 
 I believe we were unfortunate in our Olympians. They cannot 
 all be so purblind, so obstinately, magnificently obsessed by their 
 possessions. Probably Chamberlayn, with his ideal of a com- 
 fortable, well-mannered, and docile democracy is nearer the mod- 
 ern spirit of them. 
 
 Two nights later Oliver and I dined at the Kensington cottage. 
 As dinner progressed, the Duke began to get excited by the 
 quantity of wine he drank. The unpleasant side of him peered 
 out. He joked maliciously with the old cousin. 
 
 " Ah, Mary," he said, " I suppose I shall not keep you much 
 longer. Some fortunate man will storm the virgin fortress and 
 carry you off, and my little home will be desolate." 
 
 The poor thin hand shook, and a flush crept into the wrinkled 
 cheeks. She looked pitifully at us. 
 
 " You 're at the dangerous age, you know, my dear." 
 
 But at that, she lifted her withered neck in its yellow lacee 
 and struck like a feeble serpent. 
 
 " I am no older than you, my dear John, but I thank God I 
 have learned a little to respect myself and my fellow-men." 
 
 When she had gone, he grew moody and irritable. He turned 
 on his son with a mulish rage. 
 
 " Don't contradict me," he cried. "Am I your father? Then 
 treat me as such, or by God, I '11 let you know what it is to set 
 yourself up against me. 'Pon my word, I don't know what boys 
 are coming to. In my day, your grandfather would have had me 
 whipped by the groom if I 'd dared as much as lift an eyelid 
 against him." 
 
 With a suddenness that startled us, he was transformed into a 
 broken old man. His shoulders drooped against the high straight
 
 THE EIKONOKLASTS: A SCHEME 137 
 
 chair, and in the light of the candles his face was incredibly 
 aged and woeful. 
 
 "You all draw away from me," he said. "Have you not the 
 right? Who respects the withered mountebank? Don't 1 sing 
 for my supper like any clown? " 
 
 This was horrible. Jack sat miserably staring at the wall. 
 
 " Poor Mary and I are the same rotting branch," he murmured. 
 "And I have grieved and offended Mary. I, who alone knew 
 what she has suffered. Was n't I there when her lover was mur- 
 dered? " 
 
 A gleam came into his eyes, and he smiled round the table. 
 " Boys," he said, sitting suddenly upright, " there 's a tale for 
 you. The blood runs through me to remember it. 'T is a paltry 
 knock-kneed crew ye are by the side of your fathers. I '11 not tell 
 ye his name," he said cunningly, " ye know it too well. We were 
 friends, but the brains were all his. He would ha' been Prime 
 Minister before now, I tell ye. He was marked out for it. And 
 then the fool must get into a mess with a harlot on the other 
 side. Her husband called him out: he knew he 'd be ruined, 
 anyway, for they had it all laid to spread the tale abroad. He 
 fired into the air, and took the other man's bullet clean through 
 his lung. He was to have married Mary the following week. It 
 was me took the news to her, and devil a word did she say, but 
 within the year she 'd hounded that yellow-haired baggage to 
 disgrace and poverty. She came whining to Mary for mercy, 
 and Mary had her shown out of the back door." He lifted his 
 glass. " Come, boys," he roared, " drink to the men who had 
 red blood in their veins, and the women who drove it mad. 
 Drink, I tell ye." 
 
 After a while he began to dwell with an unctuous pleasure on 
 the hypocrisy of well-known men. He spoke of a famous So- 
 cialist. 
 
 " Shall I tell you why he 's incorruptible? " he said. " Be- 
 cause he makes his money out of sixth-rate cafes. He has shares 
 in them all. He stands and talks of the evils of the streets, with 
 his eyes rolling to heaven and his hands in his pockets, jingling 
 the money he makes by paying girls wages that drive 'em to the
 
 138 THE HAPPY HIGHWAYS 
 
 trade. I daresay he has shares in Beer, for he's a rare tem- 
 perance man. I '11 write an article beginning ' I appeal from 
 Honest sober to Honest drunk . . .' " 
 
 We roared with laughter. We never knew whether the tale 
 were true or not, but we made use of it to annoy Kersent. 
 
 He wandered off among the incidents of his youth, lingering 
 wistfully over the more indecent of them. When we left, he was 
 beginning to instruct Chamberlayn, with much emphatic detail, 
 in the methods of acquiring a rich wife. 
 
 We walked past the great, shadowed buildings in silence. As 
 we stood shivering in Trafalgar Square, Oliver said abruptly 
 " Do you suppose we shall get like that lecherous old beast? " 
 
 We had not done with fathers. When we got home, we found 
 Anthony sitting gloomily over a letter from home. He handed 
 it to us without a word. It ran : 
 
 " MY DEAR SON, 
 
 "I was very much surprised to receive your request for 
 money. As I explained to you when you took the scholarship 
 for college, you must not expect help from me. Your 
 scholarship allows you, when all your fees have been paid, at 
 least twenty-five shillings a week, exclusive of the many weeks 
 when you enjoy the shelter of my roof and food at my table. 
 Purely as an act of grace, I have given you at various times 
 during the past three years, sums that amount to more than 
 eighteen pounds. When you began your college course, I pre- 
 dicted that you would lose all sense of proportion on finding 
 yourself able to handle and dispose of money without guidance. 
 It grieves me to see my fears justified. You further write 
 that upon leaving college, you expect to get a good position 
 as lecturer at an agricultural college, and will then repay me the 
 sums you have borrowed I might say, acquired from me. 
 Since I have no guarantee, either that you will obtain such a 
 post, or will see fit to remember your debts, you can hardly ex- 
 pect that I shall imitate your rashness and accede to your de- 
 mands, which may well be limitless. When will you learn to 
 cut your coat according to your cloth? As I did not, however, 
 wish to act without due reflection, I carried the question to the
 
 THE EIKONOKLASTS: A SCHEME 139 
 
 Lord, last Sabbath evening. It was made clear to me that I 
 should be acting with criminal weakness did I give further 
 rein to your extravagance or create further opportunities for 
 you to debase your mind, your morals, and your health by fre- 
 quenting a low music hall. You talk as if assured of a pros- 
 perous future. But let me tell you this: by no clever trickery 
 can profligacy and low living be brought into possession of the 
 beatitudes. 
 
 "David was to-day ploughing the hill field. Your mother 
 grieves sorely over your fall. She sends her love, in which I join. 
 "Your loving father, 
 
 " JAMES CALVERT." 
 
 "What was it you wrote for? " I asked. 
 
 " Money to pay my examination fees," Anthony said. " How 
 the devil does he think I can get that out of twenty-three shillings 
 a week? I know for a fact that he turned over close on a thou- 
 sand last year. I 've never asked him for anything but money to 
 buy books. Fact of the matter is, he has never forgiven me for 
 taking that scholarship and so getting out of his control. He 
 treated me like a dog or a slave, and would have gone on doing it 
 until I was gray-haired. He treats David that way. David 's 
 only a year younger than I am, but he daren't open his mouth 
 at table unless he 's spoken to, and then it 's only to say * Yes, 
 father No, father.' And he 's slaved on the farm since he was 
 twelve years old, doing the work of two hired men. He hates it: 
 he was a far better pianist than I shall ever be, and his fingers 
 have got so thick and stiff that he can't strike the notes and he 's 
 ashamed to have people see them. The queer thing is that my 
 father seems to dislike David, faithful, respectful David, as much 
 as he dislikes me. He hates David's subservience, though he has 
 insisted upon it, and beaten the poor lad down to it. As for me, 
 I believe he loathes the sight of me since I left home. He 's 
 persuaded my mother that I 'm sunk in sin, and degraded beyond 
 belief . . ." Anthony laughed shortly. " If you can beat for 
 meanness your real narrow religious bigot . . . Dirty-minded, 
 prying . . ." 
 
 With a sudden change of tone, he added lightly " It was n't
 
 140 THE HAPPY HIGHWAYS 
 
 God told him I 'd been to the Coliseum. He 's been at David's 
 pockets again, thieving my letters to him." 
 
 He began turning out his own pockets. He had a shilling and 
 a few pennies. 
 
 " To profligacy," he said, " one-and-sixpence. Account closed."
 
 CHAPTER III 
 
 IT was during the hurrying months of this year that Margaret 
 and I prepared our own pitfalls. We had been good friends 
 from the first week of her coming to town. When Michael began 
 to spend his time at South Kensington we were left to ourselves 
 almost entirely. We worked and talked and discovered London 
 together. I found myself mentally noting things that must 
 be brought to Margaret for her criticism. We lived in each 
 other's minds. 
 
 There was no sense of disloyalty to Keith in our friendship. 
 Why should there have been? The disloyalty would have begun 
 with the fear of it. For more than two years we went our un- 
 concerned way. 
 
 I have a vivid remembrance of the moment when I knew that 
 Margaret was very dear to me. The moment should have warned 
 me might have warned me, had I not been in such fierce revolt 
 against the filthy old respectability that runs frantically about 
 shrieking " Oh, for God's sake don't let our boys and girls get 
 intimate. They'll fall in love. All sorts of disgraceful things 
 will happen. Keep 'em away, keep 'em off. You '11 destroy the 
 romance; they won't fall in love. The birth rate '11 go down. 
 There '11 be no babies. There 11 be too many babies." I shut 
 my ears. 
 
 We did fall in love and we set our teeth and took our punish- 
 ment. Now were the scratching old men justified? A thousand 
 times no. I tell you we had rather go through it all again, suffer 
 as we suffered, endure the searing madness of regret, than give 
 up one moment of our brief, defiant joy. Margaret, my beloved, 
 to have had you in my arms, to have felt your lips against my 
 throat, were worth a hundred lifetimes of ease and little loves. 
 
 I write like a fool, clumsily on big sheets of paper, a man 
 scrawling in the dark. I shall not see your face again, nor pine 
 
 141
 
 142 THE HAPPY HIGHWAYS 
 
 trees black against the golden air. A fool, scrabbling in the 
 past . . . 
 
 You see that we did not come on love quite unawares. Mar- 
 garet must have had her warnings just as I had. We could have 
 stopped it at one time. But we did not stop it. That would 
 have meant the sacrifice of things we valued more than we cared 
 to realize an intimacy so rare and delightful that we feared 
 to spoil it by thinking about it. 
 
 I do not fall into the mistake of thinking ours an uncommon 
 story. Friendships between men and women friendships of 
 a closer and freer nature than was possible in the past are 
 nowadays not only possible: they are inevitable. Almost as 
 inevitable is their ultimate conflict with an unyielding moral 
 code and the result in disaster, social or personal. For us, there 
 was more than the mere legal barrier: there was all the dread 
 pressure of centuries of mute repression and suggestion that 
 weakened and confused us. It is clear to me that if you are 
 going to allow this freedom of intercourse between men and 
 women, somehow or other those repressions must be removed. 
 The alternative is a return to the harem ideal of Victorian ages. 
 
 I do not believe such a return to be possible. I believe that 
 if the social code will not stretch to the new ideals of personal 
 freedom it will have to be broken and re-made. It is useless 
 it is worse than useless for mitred old men in gaiters and aprons 
 to run round like flustered hens, crying " sanctity of marriage " 
 in the face of a problem which may very well be disastrous to 
 civilization unless it is tackled by subtler and less feeble hands. 
 
 We paid heavily, Margaret and I, for the chance we took and 
 lost. But what price does a man pay for the caution that halts 
 him at the beginning of friendship with a " For goodness' sake, 
 be careful, you might fall in love and have no end of 
 trouble . . . ? " 
 
 It was a very little thing that set our feet in the road we trod 
 gaily to its appointed end. Who would have believed that the 
 momentum could come out of the Grafton Galleries? 
 
 The years just before the war were full of an amazing stirring 
 in the graveyard of the arts. Poets whose eyes had for half a 
 century been set backwards in their heads were brutally thrust
 
 THE EIKONOKLASTS: A SCHEME 143 
 
 aside. Artists and sculptors wearied of competing with the at- 
 tractions of the popular novelist and the illustrated papers. So 
 far as we were concerned the new art leaped upon us in the 
 Exhibition of 1912. We went to jeer and came away in a state 
 of incredible exultation. Margaret wanted to hire a taxi and 
 drive madly round the town. We found ourselves instead in a 
 cafe, drinking detestable tea, eating quantities of black sticky 
 cake and talking in eager undertones. After all these years I 
 feel a faint throb of that amazing experience, youth making in- 
 stinctive answer to the tempestuous morning energy of a new 
 art. Even when we had narrowed our admiration down to a 
 dozen pictures, there remained with us that sense of peaks in 
 Darien. 
 
 I remember sunlit villages and a road that wound round a 
 high place into infinity, and priests in a chapel whose shifting 
 walls changed beneath our eyes, sweeping back to the edge of the 
 world. 
 
 In a corner, I came across a picture that had for me the queer 
 attraction of distant lights seen faintly in the sea-filled night. 
 A road, scarred by white cart tracks, ran gray and stark between 
 stark trees a mountain road, still and desolate, and chill with 
 the austere chastity of the heights. I came back to it again 
 and again. I would have sold all that I had to buy it, if I had 
 had anything to sell. 
 
 Oliver frankly loathed the new art. He said it was indecent, 
 like an old aunt kicking her legs in a flurry of green and crimson 
 petticoats. " I don't want to be excited and stirred," he said. 
 " Art should soothe me. Is n't there disorder and chaos enough 
 in the world without glorifying it in paint? " 
 
 The rest of us quarreled furiously with him, but to no purpose. 
 He said that he had asked the policeman at the entrance to the 
 Galleries his opinion of the paintings. The policeman replied 
 that for his part he could see neither art nor beauty in them. 
 
 " Look here," Oliver said one evening, after a bitter argument, 
 " it 's not that I want to be perverse and different. But I can't 
 like the stuff. It disgusts me. You say it 's a return to the 
 primitive. Well, I say you can't return to the primitive like that 
 not in human decency. It 's like Nebuchadnezzar eating grass.
 
 144 THE HAPPY HIGHWAYS 
 
 It 's natural for the beasts of the field, but for a man it 's just 
 beastly." 
 
 " Well," Margaret said unexpectedly, " in a way I agree with 
 you. But after all, there must be something about an art that 
 could produce the Mountain Road if it never produced anything 
 else." 
 
 "You liked that?" I said quickly. "It reminded you of 
 things moor roads ? " 
 
 She looked up with a smile, and the firelight fell suddenly 
 across her face. I caught my breath, dazed with a sense of her 
 beauty, and filled with a wild, half-realized desire. The moment 
 passed, and the mood with it, dropping back into my unconscious 
 mind to bide its time . . . 
 
 It was, perhaps, unfortunate that we chose a day of blazing 
 sunshine to show Margaret the National Gallery. She came away 
 chilled and depressed. 
 
 "I don't know what I expected," she said, "but nothing so 
 monumentally heavy." 
 
 The Rossetti and Burne-Jones pictures annoyed her. " When 
 we had a headache," she said with seeming irrelevance, " or any 
 other ailment, my grandfather came thundering into the house 
 and told us that a good day at the wash-tub was all the cure we 
 needed. Those women want a house-full of work and a day at 
 the wash-tub. Spineless horrors." 
 
 At the end of an hour she insisted upon coming away. " I 'm 
 sick of fat Venuses," she said. 
 
 Oliver, whose idea of feminine beauty was just a plump, pink 
 Venus, remonstrated scornfully. " Look at the color," he said, 
 " and the line. You Ve had no training. We ought n't to expect 
 you to appreciate the real thing when you see it." 
 
 " I don't see any line," Margaret told him courteously, " only 
 a lot of lines, and if training means groveling before all those 
 fleshy mountains and those picturesque posters (Turner's sunsets, 
 oh, Margaret ! ) I 'm glad I never had any." 
 
 We were happier at the Museum. Margaret could hardly be 
 got out of the Egyptian gallery. She stood in front of Amen 
 Hetep III and talked about the line and the eternal verities. 
 
 '* Who's groveling now?" Oliver triumphed, "And who's
 
 THE EIKONOKLASTS: A SCHEME 145 
 
 degenerate? I have no patience with the attitude of mind that 
 comes and swoons about in an ecstasy of abasement before mere 
 bulk. 'Oh, what a hell of a lot of stone! What a worm is 
 man! ' , 
 
 Margaret flushed a little. " Well," she said slowly, " I don't 
 think that the bulk counts here. It seems to me that a statue 
 should be perfect and universal shouldn't, I mean, have any 
 of the restless strivings of music, or for the matter of that, paint- 
 ing. That 's why I like this better than the Greek. It is serene 
 and immutable a symbol of human dignity and power. I like 
 its gravity * eternal lids apart.' You know, Joy?" she ap- 
 pealed^ 
 
 " Yes, I know," I said, " you mean that after the courage and 
 beauty of the Belvedere Apollo classic art gets nearer and 
 nearer the drawing-room and farther from the temple." 
 
 "That's just it," she said eagerly, "until the bust of Caesar is 
 full of modern dissatisfaction and unrest. It might be a Rodin. 
 Look at that faun. It does n't belong to woods but to an orna- 
 mental garden. It is Versailles, years and years before a Louis 
 drew his sacred breath." 
 
 We led Oliver away and fed him on buckwheat cakes in a 
 little American cafe. Even they did not please him. "Linen 
 with an undernote of flannel," he said, and took all my maple 
 syrup with his own. Margaret laughed. 
 
 " Have half mine, J. J.," she said. 
 
 When we left the lights were lit and the streets a fantasy of 
 black jerking limbs and white faces, sharp and mask-like in the 
 yellow light. We were filled with an irrational happiness and 
 our feet trod the streets of fairy . . . 
 
 I suppose that the real bitterness of the attack on the new 
 art was rooted in an unconscious hatred and jealousy of its 
 arrogant youthfulness. For after all, this is an old men's world, 
 reverencing age, ruled by the cautions of old men, listening 
 eagerly to any senile mumbling that wags a beard and smells of 
 the grave. On every side the questing mind of youth comes up 
 against the inert forces of toothless ignorance and the traditions 
 of the herd. The traditions may be fine, may even be necessary 
 or useful, but we are not allowed to satisfy ourselves on that
 
 146 THE HAPPY HIGHWAYS 
 
 point. Impulses and desires that alarm the natural and seemly 
 timidity of old age are checked, and by an ancient cunning the 
 prohibitions are given the force of divine law. The fat patriarch, 
 greedy for wives and cattle, terrified lest audacious young men 
 should snatch the power from his stiffening hand, created a God 
 who was ashamed of his works and displeased by the naked 
 splendor of youth and young desire. And the prohibitions so 
 created have come rolling down the ages, gathering dust and 
 weight as they came. You can see the process going on to-day: 
 is it not common talk, that above all things God shrinks from 
 a fair distribution of wealth and leisure, quivering in all his 
 planets at a socialist success . . . ? 
 
 The truth is that half the prejudices of the social code do 
 not fit the facts of modern life. They never fitted the facts, 
 but only facts seen through the fear-distorted vision of old men, 
 and strengthened now by such forces of ignorance, jealousy and 
 age-long repression as to be well-nigh unassailable by reason. 
 We let youth blunder into a world dominated by a tradition 
 which wars with his every feeling and the witness of his senses, 
 his feeling for justice outraged by shameful injustices condoned 
 and practised by rulers of states; his impulse to decent frankness 
 blunted by the indecent and furtive stealth with which we ap- 
 proach the most important things in life; his instinct for beauty 
 and splendid dreams twisted and crushed out altogether by the 
 squalid makeshifts born of indolence and greed. 
 
 One of two things happens. He achieves that indifference 
 which is called good citizenship, or he wastes his energy in a 
 passionate and foredoomed struggle against the ancient lies of 
 the social order. Am I making too much of a common lot? Is 
 it nothing that energy, courage, and the desire for service which 
 is in youth, should be lost to a world that has sore need of all 
 these things? 
 
 I have thought sometimes that the radiant courage of those 
 paintings was the forerunner of some youthful renascence. And 
 then, out of the blunders and pompous trickeries of the past, 
 rose and swept upon us the incredible and cataclysmic torrent 
 of the war. The old men sowed the whirlwind and youth went 
 to a bloody harvesting. This is an old men's war, fought to save
 
 THE EIKONOKLASTS: A SCHEME 147 
 
 ideals put in peril by their acts. Never was a war so applauded 
 and embittered by bloodthirsty old men, achieving a vicarious 
 youth through the life and death of their sons. 
 
 If youth ruled, do you suppose it would waste energy and 
 its short span of years in such a beastly, bloody carnage as this? 
 With all the disorder and misery of the world to right, the squalid, 
 wasted lives to straighten, knowledge unachieved, a universe 
 unconquered by the acolyte sciences? I do not believe it. The 
 desires of youth are finer than that. 
 
 I pray to die before I grow a timorous old man, impotently 
 greedy of life, fouling and betraying the splendid ensigns of my 
 youth. Better be out of life altogether than in it thus. I have 
 had great joy of life. Is it a poor thing to have watched the 
 paling stars flicker and die before the rushing sun, to have known 
 love as I have known it, standing between the murmuring black 
 wings of the night? Is it nothing to have lived, known friend- 
 ship, rain, wind, bright waters, and the unimagined miracle of 
 light?
 
 CHAPTER IV 
 
 IT was borne in upon me slowly that Michael's departure had 
 started a subtle disturbance in the balance of power. From 
 being intermittently aggressive Oliver went on to an attempted 
 despotism that, while it lasted, made our lives a burden to us. 
 He would argue with Margaret, and after shouting her into 
 silence, hold forth in a roaring voice on art, on his own poems, 
 on the craven timidity that neglected poets, on everything that 
 could be dragged, kicking and protesting, into connection with 
 his future greatness. 
 
 " I '11 make them listen to me," he bellowed. " I '11 ram poems 
 down their silly throats. I '11 recite 'em in the Strand. I '11 
 force them to respect me." 
 
 " The world 's mine egg-shell, and I '11 bash it in," Anthony 
 murmured. 
 
 Oliver reduced his friends to a hostile pulp. We shrank from 
 crossing him. He read us his poems in cafes and public places 
 until he must have laid the foundations of a legend. His red 
 hair bristled and he gesticulated like a madman. His poems 
 at this time alternated the bawlings of a Fleet Street superman 
 with a morgue-like atmosphere of death and pale women. The 
 pale women became an obsession. 
 
 " Look here," Anthony said at last. " This is for your good. 
 Unless you can get rid of that air of excessive weariness and 
 gone-to-my-hole-to-die attitude, people will never be interested 
 in your stuff." 
 
 The pale women disappeared from his poems, and he began to 
 write a quantity of verse that he did not read us. Searching 
 among his shelves one day, I came upon a whole sheaf of poems 
 pushed down among the books. They were one and all addressed 
 to Margaret. 
 
 The thought of Oliver riding out to make love with a poem 
 
 148
 
 THE EIKONOKLASTS: A SCHEME 149 
 
 in one hand and a bludgeon in the other struck me as so ex- 
 tremely funny that I sat on the floor and laughed. 
 
 This explained things. It explained his attitude to Margaret, 
 his extraordinary self-assertion. I understood that I had sus- 
 pected it all along. 
 
 I do not think that I was at all sorry for him. For some 
 reason or other, my mind has always refused to credit love with 
 an aspect of tragedy. I do not see love ever as tragic. And 
 this in spite of the reality and intensity of my own futile desire. 
 At times I sorrowed like a madman. I talked of my agony, 
 to myself, to Margaret. And yet I could never, at my most 
 preposterous moments, persuade myself that I was a tragic 
 figure, or that the thwarting of our love and our unrealized 
 dreams was in any fashion tragic. At the back of my mind I 
 knew that they were not. I have always known it. 
 
 But when I had to see Oliver in the attitude of desperate lover, 
 I lost all sense of decency. I rocked and roared with laughter. 
 I thought it irresistibly comic. 
 
 I do not believe there was any malice in the laughter. No 
 more than the unconscious malice inextricably mixed up with 
 the finest of our thoughts and ideals. Whatever else there may 
 be in the universe, kind gods or evil, there is also assuredly a 
 spirit of malice that was awake and biding its time before ever 
 life quivered in the primal mud. 
 
 It was malice made the disturbance that started this ancient 
 mischief of life. 
 
 Love is a ridiculous passion. I have felt it to be so at the very 
 height of my own desire, while my body throbbed to the touch 
 of cool lips. Something destructive lurks in my mind, emerging 
 round the corner at the most uncalled-for moments. 
 
 We have made love ridiculous with all the trappings of chivalry 
 and the ceremonial posturings of betrothal. They are comic, 
 those two creatures who prance and clutch and parade an 
 elaborate mimicry of passion before the cynical discretion of 
 experience. Two ludicrous little creatures . . . 
 
 It cannot all be laid to the account of civilization. Even 
 savages go through ceremonials that differ not at all in spirit 
 from the decent weddings of cultured folk. Animals and birds,
 
 150 THE HAPPY HIGHWAYS 
 
 and I suppose insects, have their own ceremonies of rivalry 
 and parade. The ridiculousness of man is rooted in the very 
 springs of his life . . . 
 
 All the artists I have known have been very garrulous men, 
 greedy of sensation, and drawing all experiences into the glowing 
 center of their self-glorification. They hold that the purpose of 
 life is art that is, their own art. That first stirring in the mud, 
 is in their sight a stirring towards the perfect picture and the 
 Wyndham Lewis. 
 
 Only by reducing words to a pithless mush can life be said to 
 be art, or art life. Art at its best is only one expression of life's 
 multiplicit unity. The most expressive art is the most social- 
 minded. Unconsciously, our artist knows this, when he tries to 
 make his work a door upon the universal. 
 
 But in his conscious mind the wretch forgets his super-conscious 
 knowledge. He peacocks about, screeching the importance of his 
 paltry self. He forgets that the only great thing about him, often 
 the only tolerable thing, is the stream of powers, memories, and 
 visions poured into his mind by generations of men who strove 
 and dreamed before him. 
 
 The super-consciousness of the artist is quick and complex be- 
 yond our understanding. His conscious mind is often at a lower 
 stage of development than that of the plodding scientist of his 
 scorn. 
 
 I do not know whether this will help you to understand Oliver 
 at all. He is indubitably an artist. His art shook free of that 
 early nonsense with amazing ease. It has nothing in common 
 with the blustering and ranting of his common speech. Yet, in 
 everything but his poems, he is as clumsy a roysterer as ever 
 broke noses and gave away his last shirt. 
 
 His love-making was doubly ridiculous in the mirror of Mar- 
 garet's critical habit of mind. I believe that at first she did not 
 credit his love. She had all her share of the diffidence that goes 
 with a critical intellect. A little incident helped to open her 
 eyes. 
 
 We had spent the whole day walking about Epping Forest. 
 We lunched at " The Owl " on bread and cheese, and escaped with 
 difficulty from the clutches of Boccaccio, who was sitting outside
 
 THE EIKONOKLASTS: A SCHEME 151 
 
 the inn door in a patch of sunlight, bleared and shivering in 
 his rags, dreaming of olive groves and full of disreputable songs. 
 We reached home tired out, and lounged about the room in vary- 
 ing stages of exhaustion. Anthony improvised weakly for a while 
 and then took himself to bed. After he had gone, Oliver dragged 
 Margaret into an argument. He was more than usually aggres- 
 sive, and she lost her temper. 
 
 " Ton my word, you are conceited," she said hotly. ** Drop 
 some of it. What have you ever done to justify your idea that you 
 are the people and that wisdom will die with you? " She recov- 
 ered herself quickly. " I 'm tired. Don't let 's quarrel." 
 
 Olive? said nothing. He sat for a while with a sullen purpose 
 growing in his mind. Then he got up and walked across to Mar- 
 garet. 
 
 ** See," he said slowly, marking his words with a queer, unfin- 
 ished gesture, " listen to me. I 've got a road to follow, I 'm not 
 going to be dragged out of it by you or any one." 
 
 She looked up with a smile. The ready jest died in her throat 
 before the expression on his face. He hesitated, and then strode 
 stiffly out of the room. 
 
 " What 's wrong? " Margaret said uneasily. 
 
 " He thinks he 's in love with you," I told her roughly. " You 
 might have seen it long ago." Then, at the distress in her eyes, 
 I added honestly " It 's not your fault, and it 's not the fault of 
 your being here. If you 'd lived next door, or in Hammersmith, 
 it would have been just the same. You or some one else. It 
 need n't worry you."
 
 CHAPTER V 
 
 OLIVER'S love was so oddly mixed up with his work and his 
 poems that Margaret had the less trouble in ignoring it. I 
 know, of course, that poets are supposed to spend their lives com- 
 bining love and inspiration into a viscous fluid that somehow 
 crystallizes out into poetry. This is called temperament, and 
 viewed with a sidelong indulgence, as delicate minds view the 
 necessity of manure. 
 
 I do not myself put much faith in this theory. It may hold 
 good of those languid, sticky poems that ooze sentiment wherever 
 you touch them. But I think that the real art is different. It 
 has to work its way clean through the emotions and come out 
 on the other side to spread its wings. Certainly this holds true 
 of Oliver's art. His poems at this time were turgid, unwieldy 
 things, slabs of voluptuous sentiment. They wore an ass's head 
 and brayed in the sun. You would hardly recognize their kin- 
 ship with the later poems, written when Margaret had become for 
 him a kind of archetype, a silent, beautiful image, wrought of 
 ivory and gold. 
 
 Margaret reckoned, with a faint ironic assurance, on Oliver!s 
 outlet in his poems. She passed over his moody angers, never 
 disputed with him, and never made the mistake of trying to soothe 
 him. Forced into a closer intimacy simply by her knowledge of 
 the emotion which he threw round her, she dropped naturally into 
 Anthony's methods of dealing with him. She adopted the same 
 indifferent tolerance of Oliver's moods and tempers that had given 
 Anthony such a hold on him. 
 
 I believe she did it instinctively: she had none of that feminine 
 feeling for the " situation " that would have led her on from 
 finesse to finesse until she was irrevocably entangled in an irksome 
 affair. Her keen wits were no keener than her judgment of other 
 folk and of herself. She was always sure of herself, and felt 
 simply and clearly. Her emotions did not much color and con- 
 
 152
 
 THE EIKONOKLASTS: A SCHEME 153 
 
 fuse things for her. It is not easy to put into words the quality of 
 simplicity that her mind possessed. She thought along lines 
 so simple and broad that her thoughts had an appearance of 
 subtlety. And yet she was not subtle, but direct, and drew her 
 serene self-confidence from some deep and tranquil source. Her 
 mind advanced surely and boldly. It never occurred to us to 
 think of her "Ah, there was a woman's reasoning: you think as 
 women do." Yet she could not possibly have been regarded as 
 an echo or imitation of any one of us. 
 
 This suggests to me that the differences between the masculine 
 and the feminine mind either do not follow the lines of sex, or 
 have been vastly exaggerated. There was a pink-eyed youth in 
 my own classes whose mind finicked with problems just as a 
 woman's is supposed to do does do, if feminine psychologists 
 are to be taken at their face value. But Margaret thought as we 
 did, and tackled problems as we did. There was nothing excep- 
 tionally brilliant about her intellect. She had rather the mind of 
 a clever young man. She had taken a brilliant First at college 
 but, as she said herself, largely because the " examination fac- 
 ulty," that curious mingling of imagination and a special kind 
 of audacity, was developed in her to an abnormal degree. Or- 
 dinarily, her memory was given to awkward and unaccountable 
 lapses. But let her mind be faced by a problem, and at once 
 everything she had ever read, or heard, or thought, remotely con- 
 nected with the point, rushed to her aid and fell into its proper 
 order. 
 
 I did not intend to set out upon an examination of Margaret's 
 intellect, but just to note that she never seemed to have a feminine 
 mind : a mind, that is, lacking a certain amplitude of imagination 
 and a certain unconscious confidence, a feudal confidence of 
 power. Margaret had lived the first sixteen years of her life 
 alone, and thereafter had men as friends and lived with men. 
 
 I suppose this made things easier for her with Oliver. He cer- 
 tainly did his best to develop a situation which would have been 
 an irresistible temptation to many women. I could imagine my- 
 self the exploitation it would have undergone in skilful hands. 
 Margaret walked unseeing through its every possibility. This 
 first annoyed my touchy brother, and then drove him to open
 
 154 THE HAPPY HIGHWAYS 
 
 rage. I think he simply could not understand Margaret's indif- 
 ference. It seemed almost blasphemous to him. He began an 
 unabashed dance of love, and at last staked his all on a " crown- 
 ing mercy " of truly Puritan arrogance. 
 
 It was the first week of the summer vacation. Anthony had 
 gone home, and we were packing to go north next day. Margaret, 
 kneeling on the hearth rug, sorted books and arranged them in 
 tea-chests. We paid what our landlady called retaining money 
 for our rooms during the long summer vacation, but we knew 
 that she would let them as soon as our backs were turned, and we 
 did not care to have strangers pawing our books. 
 
 " What am I to do with Mick's books? " Margaret said sud- 
 denly. " Shall I pack them with yours, Joy, or put them in a 
 separate box? He might send for them." 
 
 " How much room ? " I began. 
 
 " Put the damn things in the fire," Oliver interrupted, " and for 
 pity's sake stop shuffling them about. I want to talk to you. It 's 
 the last chance I shall have for weeks. Can't you finish that in 
 the morning? " 
 
 Margaret looked at him, and then got obediently to her feet. 
 She seemed to have come to a decision. 
 
 "What do you want to talk about? " she said. Every chair 
 was piled with books: she seated herself on the table. 
 
 I prepared to give Margaret my moral support in any argu- 
 ment. There was no argument. Oliver was too much in earnest 
 and too unexpectedly wary for that. 
 
 " I don't know that I want to talk about anything," he said 
 deliberately. " But there 's some things I 've got to tell you before 
 I go. The first is this. When you were at college, you got your- 
 self engaged. You were too young to know what you were doing, 
 and you made a mistake. You can't deny it I 've watched you 
 over his letters. Things you 've said oh, you did n't know your- 
 self what you were saying: I 'm not accusing you of whining or 
 disloyalty." 
 
 "Thank you," Margaret said softly. 
 
 Oliver glared at her. " Don't fool," he said angrily. " Can't 
 you see things are too serious for that? " 
 
 I stifled a desire to laugh. I felt that if I laughed, Margaret
 
 THE EIKONOKLASTS: A SCHEME 155 
 
 would laugh too, and the scene would slip from comic melodrama 
 into unpleasant farce. 
 
 " Perhaps you 'd like me to go? " I turned towards the door. 
 
 " Don't go, Joy," Margaret murmured, 
 
 "You can go or stay as you please," Oliver said. "It's all 
 one to me. What I 've got to say to Margaret can be said any- 
 where." He swung himself off the arm of the chair and stood in 
 front of her. " You know you 've made a mistake. Very likely 
 the map-'s a fool, an attractive fool." 
 
 Margaret flicked the ash off her cigarette. Her hand shook as 
 she did it. She was coldly angry. The comedy began to taste 
 bitter. 
 
 " Your judgment on a man you 've never seen is well worth hav- 
 ing," she said. Her voice softened. " Don't be a fool, Oliver. 
 You 're making a far worse mistake yourself than I am ever likely 
 to make." 
 
 He tugged at his hair until it stood round his face like the 
 fiery bush. " Be quiet, and listen to me," he shouted. 
 
 She smiled at him. " Very well," she said carelessly. " Go 
 on: I '11 listen. We might as well have it out now." 
 
 Oliver began to talk with an odd emphasis. As he talked, his 
 eyes shone, and he seemed half mesmerized by the sound of his 
 voice. He made a kind of song to love. Afterwards he turned 
 it into a sonnet: the sonnet gained in concentration what it lost 
 in humanity. 
 
 He was in desperate earnest. While I listened, the unconscious 
 resentment I had been harboring against him stole to the brink 
 of my mind and was lost in a half-anguished tenderness. I re- 
 membered him as a fat, sobbing child. I remembered the time 
 he fell down the cliffs and I scrambled after him, frantic and 
 dizzy, slipping down the sheer rocks and clutching at moss and 
 trees. The tenderness swept out and encircled Margaret. I 
 thought of her vaguely as very fair and pleasant. Oliver's love 
 seemed an alien legend. 
 
 Oliver's voice rose and fell. 
 
 " You don't understand what I mean. You don't feel with me. 
 I must try to make you feel. You must see the things I see, 
 and then you will feel them as I do. One day I stood on the
 
 156 THE HAPPY HIGHWAYS 
 
 school asphalt and looked down at the flowers in the valley gar- 
 dens. The buds were opening on the trees, and the sky was 
 clear, swept by the wind. The sea called up the valley. As I 
 looked, I felt all at once light and diffuse. My brain was quite 
 clear. There was nothing mystic about my sensations. Now, is 
 there anything mystic about me? 
 
 " I felt that I had only to reach out a hand to touch the rim of 
 the sea. I laid the tips of my fingers on the edge of the hill. 
 I floated on the cold green waves. I brushed with my hair the 
 stately white galleons of the sky. I was lifted up and scattered 
 over the world. Oh, I was happy. I was happy like children 
 and young lovers and puppies playing in the sun. All the sor- 
 rows of the world fell from me in shining drops as I rose, fell and 
 were lost in the crying sea. I was youth before sorrow came upon 
 men. I was in all things. I was the yellow crocus, brave between 
 the dark spaces of the trees as a trumpet calling through the bat- 
 tle. I was the folded leaves in the pink, shining buds of the syca- 
 mores: I throbbed with secret life and pressed against the calyx 
 to burst into the radiance of the world. I thrust up through the 
 dark earth between the cool, whispering leaves of the daffodils. 
 I was the sea: I flung myself against the circling cliffs; I ran with 
 white foam of laughter along the untouched sand. I was the rush 
 of the hill against the sky: trees sprang from my bosom and flow- 
 ers gleamed in my valleys. I was the bounding arch of the sky: 
 I stooped through space in a curve of ecstasy: the stars rode in 
 me ... 
 
 "That day I knew I should be great; I should say words the 
 world would hear. I knew that men would do me honor. And 
 that day there was born in me also a secret pain. It grew, and 
 darkened at last the sea and the heavens, it sought out and 
 chilled the smallest of the flowers. I never understood it. I 
 strained against the bars that held me. I tried to find again that 
 joy. But I could not. Not until now have I understood what 
 held me back. It was desire. It is my desire for you. I might 
 be all the world else, but not you. If you deny me, how can I 
 ever be free again? You cannot deny me." 
 
 The room was filled with his pleading: it came from afar off 
 and swept against the walls. We three stood in a place held
 
 THE EIKONOKLASTS: A SCHEME 157 
 
 above time and the world. Below us passed the dead lovers, 
 dry leaves scurrying before the wind, and those who lived, and 
 scattered themselves in flowers along the road. 
 
 The red, level rays of the sun came through the window behind 
 him. He was a Viking in shabby tweeds, inaureoled in his hair. 
 
 Margaret seemed to rouse herself from a long reverie. She 
 sighed, and her voice was gentle. 
 
 " I don't love you," she said. " I admire you and honor you. 
 You would be laying me under a great obligation if you would 
 believe that I say this from my heart. I love you for what you 
 do ~*-T>ut not you." 
 
 " Are you sure of that? " Oliver said incredulously. He stared 
 at her as a man might stare over the edge of a dizzy gulf. 
 
 Margaret smiled. " Quite sure, dear old thing." 
 
 " I shall respect what you say, but you are making a great 
 mistake," he told her solemnly. 
 
 Comedy returned to the world, shutting the fantastic doors be- 
 hind her. 
 
 He did not go back on his word. From that day, he presented 
 a stolid, friendly front to her criticisms. What inner strife and 
 triumph that front may have masked, I do not pretend to guess. 
 I do not doubt but he will marry, and rear a family. Neither 
 do I think he will cease to wonder at the want of sensibility that 
 deprived Margaret of so excellent a husband. 
 
 He no longer quarreled with her, and shut his love in some 
 eerie of his mind.
 
 CHAPTER VI 
 
 MICHAEL'S departure did more than disturb our domestic 
 balance of power. It threw into high relief the dominat- 
 ing quality of Kersent's intellect. 
 
 Kersent was the most frigid of men. He seemed to have no 
 affections except a rudimentary liking for Mick. He disliked his 
 father, and hardly noticed that his mother existed. His unfailing 
 courtesy and gentle voice were chill as winter sunlight. And he 
 professed an unbounded love of Humanity. All the respect and 
 admiration that he withheld from greedy, servile, struggling man, 
 he poured out before a shining myth. Once remove the blighting 
 weight of the capitalist, and the stunted growth would expand and 
 flower in the sun. It would be full-blown and glorious on the in- 
 stant. He cherished the dream in his frozen heart like a flame im- 
 prisoned in crystal. His mind refused obstinately to dwell on 
 the perverted growth and useless blossomings that would precede 
 the final flower. 
 
 He had the most acute mind I ever encountered. But he was 
 beguiled by that ancient Deessa of philosophers the perfecti- 
 bility of man. Before you let loose your scorn, you instructed 
 and clear-sighted ones, remember that Aristotle, yea, Aristotle the 
 sane and golden, is fabled to have frisked on hands and knees 
 with a lady on his back, at the bidding of a desired mistress. 
 
 It followed naturally from this dream of his, that Kersent 
 should shrink from the fact of man's kinship with the perishing 
 beasts. In a vague way he understood that the purely human 
 standard he set up in his psychological work was unjust and nar- 
 row. But man's natural history repelled him. So did embryo 
 man. The plates in my biology books turned him sick. He had 
 an innate contempt for imperfect, struggling things. I believe 
 that this was born in some queer way of his own fearful struggle 
 against a maimed existence. 
 
 "You biologists are indecently curious," he said to me once. 
 
 158
 
 THE EIKONOKLASTS: A SCHEME 159 
 
 " You upset the balance of power : you 'd destroy our self-respect 
 if we gave you half a chance." 
 
 " We 'd correct it, you mean. You rest your respect and pride 
 on a lot of things that seem to you finely human your desire 
 for a God, your mechanical skill, your moral inhibitions, all the 
 rest of it things that don't in the least belong solely to man." 
 
 " I don't," he interrupted. 
 
 " We are looking at the same thing from different sides. 
 You.^e looking persistently forward: you find the developing 
 stage repulsive. You want your mind to be very clean and or- 
 derly, with pamphlets laid neatly in rows under the white light 
 of an unimpeachable and frigid love of humanity." 
 
 He denied this, but it was more than half true. 
 
 He felt in just the same way about the stages of national 
 development. He refused to believe that there lingered on in 
 modern nations echoes of tribal hates and jealousies. He thought 
 that the capitalist explained every evil strain in national life. 
 Sweep him away, and men would straightway fall into each other's 
 arms in an ecstasy of brotherly love. The idea of strife was hate- 
 ful to him. He sought to gloss it over in the tale of man's growth. 
 He would have none of it in that fair ideal future. 
 
 "The old common rule was built on fear," he said, "but the 
 men of modern nations do not fear or hate each other, though 
 their rulers may try to persuade them that they do. Such 
 treachery will never succeed again as it did in the past." 
 
 But of course, you cannot get rid of fear by pretending that 
 it is not there.
 
 CHAPTER VII 
 
 /"^HAMBERLAYN brought a message from his father. That 
 \jl preposterous aristocrat was playing with the idea of editing 
 a new weekly paper and he wanted to talk to us. The paper 
 which had already a name and no body was to express the soul 
 of the worker in art. It was bred in the weary imaginations of 
 two rich young men who had swung into fantasy as a relief 
 from their fathers' bourgeois industry. I think they were in- 
 trigued by the idea of a ducal editor: the Duke himself was 
 filled with divine madness and the soul of all the workers was 
 born in him. Chamberlayn was very annoyed and looked to us 
 to discourage his incredible father. 
 
 Margaret would not come. We were very late in reaching the 
 Mayfair cottage, and dinner was ending confusedly in coffee and 
 Benedictine. The Duke was excited and introduced us rapidly 
 to his other guests. One of its youthful founders was explaining 
 the purpose of " The Machine," and resented the interruption. We 
 seated ourselves in corners. I found myself beside Jack Cham- 
 berlayn who was glowering at the company in mute disgust. 
 
 The rich young man struggled with a desire to make an ora- 
 tion. He kept rising from his chair and slipping back into it as 
 he recaptured his first sweet faintness of speech. " I have been," 
 said he, " in tramcars, and looking at the tired faces and worn, 
 stained hands, wondered what dreams and ambitions strained be- 
 hind those stolid masks. I have thought that we who know so 
 much, we tolerant, audacious ones, might go reverently 
 * lights in hands, old music on our lips ' and open the world for 
 those anxious eyes." 
 
 There was a sudden movement at the other side of the table 
 and another young man got violently to his feet, tugging at the 
 collar of his shabby tweed jacket. The Duke put a restraining 
 hand on his shoulder and he collapsed unexpectedly. ** He 's a 
 real worker," Jack murmured, " I wonder where they trapped 
 him." 
 
 160
 
 THE EIKONOKLASTS: A SCHEME 161 
 
 My memories of that dinner are vague. The room was warm 
 and through a thick haze of smoke I caught sight of the real 
 worker wiping vigorously round the inside of his collar. 
 
 A glass was broken, and on the polished table the fragments 
 were tiny opalescent pools gleaming in the candle-light. The only 
 light in the room came from the candles grouped in the center 
 of the table, and the faces of the Duke's strange guests made nar- 
 row slits in the surrounding shadows. 
 
 An ^American poet emerged into the circle of light and read a 
 poerrf of his own writing. He read it deliberately, and Oliver 
 wrote it on the back of an envelope. 
 
 If you were a girder you would feel that which I do 
 
 The iron throbbing of a new heart: 
 
 The heart of the new world, 
 
 The world that we have made. 
 
 It throbs as the Nasmyth hammer throbs, 
 
 In steel and granite it is forging a fresh creation. 
 
 God was an amateur: even his rocks are our playthings. 
 
 In our naked impulse we challenge malignant Nature. 
 
 Afterwards he made a long speech. He had all the nai've 
 earnestness of the American. I felt worn out and sick of an effete 
 civilization. He spoke of his flag, with a reverence that made 
 us squirm. And he produced the Peace of God from its starry 
 folds with a gesture charmingly complacent. His words rose over 
 the flickering candles like little doves fluttering to rest. I heard 
 them in fragments, infinitely soothing and warm. "A new fra- 
 ternity . . . confused spontaneous outgrowth of sympathy . . . 
 no more war . . . conference . . . council . . . arbitration boards." 
 
 The mask-like faces on either side of him, upturned to his 
 earnestness, reflected it oddly. He flung out his arms. "The 
 vast armies, the powerful military class, the allied interests of 
 depredators the world over, will vanish with slow steps before the 
 incoming tide of the brotherhood of man. Meekness will breed 
 meekness, and through the silent suffering of injuries the world 
 progresses to a universal friendliness." 
 
 The word " progress " stuck in my throat and I could not say 
 Amen. While I sat staring at the American's round cheerful 
 face it changed and became subtly rounder and looser and dis-
 
 162 THE HAPPY HIGHWAYS 
 
 pleasing. He lifted his napkin to his lips and the illusion was 
 complete. Erasmus Butterby grimaced in his place, wiping the 
 overflow of repletion from his beard, as I had often seen him wipe 
 it when he rose from the table at our school Speech Days, oozing 
 benevolence. 
 
 Now, Erasmus Butterby's grandfather was of the belief that we 
 progress inevitably towards the disappearance of evil. The par- 
 son told him so, and the scientist jogged his elbow on the other 
 side and babbled " Survival of the fittest: adaptation to environ- 
 ment," and other sayings that sounded very impressive to the 
 earlier Erasmus Butterby. " If only those survive who are fit," 
 thought he, " and only those survive who adapt themselves to their 
 surroundings, then fitness and adaptability are the same thing. 
 And since evil is certain to disappear in time, all is for the best 
 in the best of all possible worlds; let the surroundings be what 
 they will, the fittest men will survive them and good will tri- 
 umph." And the parson wagged his head and the scientist his 
 tongue. 
 
 So the Butterby ancestor went out and helped to create for a 
 few million folk an environment that relegated Hell to the cate- 
 gory of summer resorts and watering places. He crippled chil- 
 dren in factories, tied half-naked women to carts in mines, and 
 persuaded whole families of peasants to fill their bellies with 
 the filth of the earth's produce. The folk who could survive that 
 would be very fit indeed, he thought, and the triumph of good so 
 much the more swift and certain. His excellent intentions were 
 frustrated, but not before he had made smooth the way for Eras- 
 mus Butterby his grandson, to slaver imperially on our school 
 platform, and build him a brick palace to house his lothly carcass 
 on our very cliffs. 
 
 See what comes to a race that consents to adapt itself to any 
 environment. Butterby spawn! 
 
 Anthony jabbed me vigorously with his elbow. The Duke was 
 appealing for my opinion on " The Machine," and his son was 
 whispering nervously, " For God's sake, Hearne." I tried to 
 get rid of Erasmus Butterby. 
 
 " I hardly know what you want the paper to do," I said un-
 
 THE EIKONOKLASTS: A SCHEME 163 
 
 happily. " Some one said Art and some one said Brotherly Love. 
 It 's no good singing ' Our hope is the hope of the world ' in a 
 dirty room to a vacuous audience. But there 's desire behind all 
 that messy sentiment. We are being pushed towards a society 
 wide as the world and tolerant as the air that shrinks from no 
 man." 
 
 A voice came wearily from the shadows " Oh, shut up ! " It 
 was the real worker. I tried to see him, but two of the six candles 
 had guttered out and his face was a mere hovering malice. I for- 
 got * The Machine " in my eagerness to explain to him. 
 
 " Progress," I repeated vaguely, " we 've progressed because 
 each of us had at his service all the minds of all the other people 
 he could understand. The more minds a man can touch and un- 
 derstand the further he gets. When we arrive at the limit of our 
 capacity for this kind of sympathy we Ve arrived at the limit of 
 human progress. We 've got to choose now between our ancient 
 instinct to sympathy and our old reasons for fear. Fear has had 
 its biological day. It served us once, but we must escape from 
 that prison-house." 
 
 The rich young man lost patience. " I think," he said suavely, 
 " that we are forgetting the purpose of our meeting, which is the 
 format of ' The Machine.' I have here a few sketches of my own 
 that we propose giving to the world. They are expressive of the 
 new spirit. As the poet said, * In teel and granite it is forging 
 a new creation.' It is the soul of the worker in art" 
 
 He unrolled a large sheet of paper. It bore a drawing in char- 
 coal of a naked and horribly bulbous female. The young man in 
 the shabby Norfolk pointed a fork at it. " Put it away," he said 
 angrily. " It 's not decent." 
 
 The artist flushed. " The bourgeois are rotten with morality," 
 he said, "but I should not have imagined that the prolet- 
 ariat " 
 
 "Proletariat nothing! " the other shouted, and "Hell to your 
 imaginings . . .! Art . . .! " 
 
 He choked and rushed from the room. Oliver, who was near 
 the door, rushed after him, and Anthony and I followed as quickly 
 as we could get away.
 
 164 THE HAPPY HIGHWAYS 
 
 There was no sign of Oliver outside, and we had been home an 
 hour before he came. He had been walking about London with 
 the angry young man. 
 
 " His name is Donnel. I asked him to come to-morrow night 
 to see if there was any of your books he wanted. Seems he yearns 
 after a treatise on Mezozoic jungles. Wonder what he thought 
 ' The Machine ' was going to do for him." 
 
 We lent him books, and that week I spent some hours helping 
 him. The following week we found ourselves lending books and 
 playing tutor to half a dozen of his friends. Our small room was 
 unpleasantly crowded. We contemplated hiring an empty room 
 somewhere and offering our priceless boon of education to the 
 service of the new spirit. We thought that we could serve it at 
 least as well as " The Machine." We were filled with a missionary 
 impertinence and a passionate longing to help. We talked of 
 our vague plans as the Scheme, and sat up o' nights to elaborate 
 it. Before men can want better things, we said, they must know 
 about them. In place of the rewards of heaven we would make 
 them covet the rewards of earth. We would take them into a high 
 place and show to the dispossessed heirs the power and glory 
 of their heritage. As once before, the humanities should prepare 
 the way for a new communion of man. 
 
 Kersent was full of doubts. 
 
 "The humanities aren't bred in slums," he said scornfully. 
 " Nor understanding. What does my father understand except 
 that he lives the life he was born to the life of his kind? He 
 says ' Such things are n't for the likes of we.' He is sure that I 
 am climbing for a fall. Of course there are others, but not like 
 him. Men who are discontented and aggressive. But they don't 
 understand aught but the injustice done them. Most of them only 
 want more for their bellies and their backs. A few want power, 
 but even they will give you a poor sort of answer if you ask them 
 Power for what? Freedom for what? " He frowned. 
 
 " Suppose," I said, " when you were struggling on by your- 
 self, you 'd known of a group of young men who would have felt 
 honored to help you and lend you books. Suppose you 'd known 
 of a room where they came every night to lecture and talk, 
 would n't you have taken advantage of it? "
 
 THE EIKONOKLASTS: A SCHEME 165 
 
 His hesitation was inexplicable. " I might " he said, and 
 
 added " If I 'd been sure that you were n't trying to uplift me 
 or get me. Under some damned social reform scheme." 
 
 " We should have to avoid giving that impression," I said. 
 " You could help us there." 
 
 After a while he began to enter into our plans with a question- 
 ing enthusiasm. We had to get a room. We had to enlist the 
 help of labor groups and societies. We had to go with care, lest 
 we should be found trespassing on established preserves. Michael 
 had been gone more than a year when we held our first meeting, 
 class, whatever you like to call it: we shrank from defining it our- 
 selves.
 
 CHAPTER VIII 
 
 % VTHEN we began to look round for a room, Kersent said 
 W " We 'd better go to see Dora and Tommy. If you can get 
 their support, it may save you a deal of trouble." 
 
 He took us to Dora and Tommy. They lived in Acton, in an 
 amorphous street of small houses facing on to a forlorn field. 
 Theodore Gurney was a slack-bodied youth with a frayed smile, 
 and Tommy was his wife. " I '11 not tell you anything about 
 them," Kersent had said. "You can judge them for yourself. 
 They 're college-bred northern university. No : not yours, Mar- 
 garet. One of the others. Always one of the others accord- 
 ing to which one you 've come from. He 's a fairly well-known 
 organizer in the I.L.P., and it will be worth your while to interest 
 him." 
 
 We waited in a small sitting-room while Dora went upstairs 
 to look for Tommy. 
 
 " She 's in bed," he explained. " We were up awfully late 
 last night. She writes most of her articles in bed. I expect you 
 know her writing. She 's * Goldfinch ' in the ' Beacon.' Fine 
 style, eh? " 
 
 He was gone before we had time to confess ignorance. We 
 sat looking round the room. Books strewed the chairs and over- 
 flowed on to the floor. The hearth was littered with pans, and 
 in one corner a tray of unwashed pots balanced itself on a hassock. 
 A cupboard stood open on an indescribable medley of pots, books, 
 groceries, scraps of food, and mixed garments. A large hat 
 perched, leering, on a tin of fish. The room's second door led to 
 a small kitchen where the dirty pots and pans were thick as flies. 
 Dust coated everything, even the typewriter standing on the table 
 in a litter of papers. Dora had been typing when we came. We 
 struggled with the temptation to look at his work. 
 
 A scrambling sound upstairs was evidently Tommy. A few 
 
 166
 
 THE EIKONOKLASTS: A SCHEME 167 
 
 minutes later she came into the room, peering at us with large 
 pale eyes. Wisps of hair hung round her colorless face. Kersent 
 introduced us. 
 
 " Oh, how do you do? " she said carelessly. " You don't mind 
 my untidiness, do you? I just rolled out of bed and threw 
 something on when Dora said you were here." 
 
 We began to tell them our plans, feeling like peddlers at an 
 inhospitable back door. Tommy fidgeted round the room. She 
 kicked the cupboard door shut, and began to make tea, searching 
 in both rooms for clean cups. 
 
 "Oh damn," she said, "they're all dirty. Dora, you're a 
 filthy pig; you promised to wash up." 
 
 Margaret got up to help. 
 
 " Now for goodness' sake, don't think you ought to bother," 
 Tommy said. " You '11 only get grease on you. The place is 
 disgustingly dirty. It 's really Dora's week to clean up, and he 's 
 too beastly lazy." 
 
 Dora protested. " Well, you know you never cleaned up last 
 week. You can't expect me to do all the mucky work." 
 
 Margaret walked into the kitchen. The door shut behind them. 
 We discussed things with Dora, and at odd moments through the 
 discussion I heard Tommy's high voice and fragments of her 
 talk. Once she said " This is no work for a trained mind, now 
 is it? I say we were fools to take a house. But Dora would 
 have one. He likes to have somewhere to ask his silly Labor peo- 
 ple. He feeds 'em, and I 'm supposed to clean up the mess. But 
 not me. I say he 's got to take his share." 
 
 And again " Yes, I know all that, but it 's a degrading job all 
 the same. Why should I have to waste time doing work any un- 
 trained, brainless fool could do? " 
 
 Dora smiled at us in a deprecatory way. " She does n't really 
 do much house-work," he murmured. " It 's absurd to ask her to 
 do it. If only we had more money. I 'm rottenly paid. Don't 
 ever tell me that Socialism is a paying game. And, of course, 
 Tommy can't earn any money. She has the house to look after 
 while I 'm up at the Hall. She used to teach once, but it was 
 monotonous work for a girl of her abilities. And you could n't 
 get in the front door for dirt and muddle . . . Now, what exactly
 
 168 THE HAPPY HIGHWAYS 
 
 is it you want? I 'm awfully glad to see you. Kersent should 
 have brought you before. It 's very dull for Tommy all day, with 
 no one to talk to. She can't make friends with the women round 
 here. They think of nothing but their houses and babies. Be- 
 sides, they don't approve of us. They think we 're anarchists or 
 something." 
 
 When the tea was made, Tommy carried in the tray and set 
 it on the table. She brushed some of the papers on to the floor 
 to make room for a loaf and a tin of protose. 
 
 " Help yourselves," she said, and thrust a knife at each of us. 
 " Come on, draw up. Sorry there 's no butter, but Dora forgot to 
 bring any home yesterday. Have some protose: it 's better than 
 butter." 
 
 It was rather rank, but we tried it. 
 
 "You don't like it," she said. "More fools you. Have a 
 cigarette, old girl? " 
 
 " You must n't mind Tommy's want of manners," Dora said 
 proudly. "She calls every one fool, or old girl, or old man, 
 before she 's known 'em five minutes." 
 
 " If they don't like it, they can lump it," Tommy said calmly. 
 " I can't stand your sniffy amateur aristocrats. I 'm jolly hungry, 
 I can tell you. I don't know whether Dora had any dinner, but 
 he forgot to bring me any. I suppose you thought I could snooze 
 empty, eh ? " 
 
 " I did n't bother with dinner," her husband said. " This book 
 has got to go back to-night, and I must get it summarized. You 
 need n't grumble. As like as not, when I come home to-morrow 
 you '11 have forgotten to get anything ready." 
 
 He spoke with a rather ragged complacence. I caught the echo 
 of an obscure resentment. 
 
 After tea, he made an effort to assert himself against Tommy's 
 aggressive capture of the talk. He was an unabashed intellectual, 
 very anxious to make it clear that he was of a different breed 
 from your down-at heel fanatic. He had a wonderful library of 
 Labor and anti-war publications. He showed us a pile of fat 
 note-books filled with summaries of these books. He burrowed 
 his way through the heavier kind of socialist literature, and threw 
 up notes on every side, cross-referenced, and dotted with news-
 
 THE EIKONOKLASTS: A SCHEME 169 
 
 paper cuttings . . . There was a bundle of cuttings labelled " The 
 Goldfinch warbles." 
 
 He declared, and I daresay believed, that emotion had no 
 place in his scheme of life. He told us, lest there should be any 
 doubt of the icy ruthlessness of his intellect, that he would grieve 
 for no dead soldier. " I would n't weep for my dearest friend if 
 he 'd been killed in a war." 
 
 " Don't think," he said eagerly, " that I 'm on this job through 
 any illusions about the nobility of mankind. I don't slave day in 
 and day out for a lot of chicken-hearted skunks, but for an Idea. 
 The human race is a disaster. Ideas are the only vital things." 
 
 " Half a minute," Tommy said, " while I get my book and put 
 that down. It 's not often you sparkle." She blew smoke rings 
 at him, and propped one foot on the electric bell. " Damn thing 
 does n't ring," she remarked. " Like everything else in this place. 
 These houses are n't a year old yet, and they 're dropping to bits 
 while you watch." 
 
 " Oh, be quiet about the house," her husband said, " they can 
 see what it 's like without your telling them." 
 
 " All right, old boy. Talk on. Don't get roused. Tell them 
 what a wonder you are. Kersent 's heard it all before. He '11 
 talk to me." 
 
 Kersent smiled absently, and crossed one leg over the other. 
 She might have been gambolling round his feet. 
 
 Dora began to describe his I.L.P activities. He made great play 
 with the stupidities of his colleagues, working-men. 
 
 " Good Lord," he said, " if you could fathom the abyss of 
 bigotry, and the narrow-minded cowardice of them. It 's enough 
 to make a man give it all up, and go in for making money." 
 
 "Well, why don't you? " his wife interrupted airily. "You 
 slave on all their damned committees and precious little thanks 
 you get for it. Do you know," she said to Margaret, " I worked 
 like a nigger ask Dora if I did n't and got up one of their 
 socials, ordered food and organized the program, and never as 
 much as a thank you. All taken for granted, as if you were born 
 to be their bell-boy. It 's not good enough." 
 
 As a matter of fact, I believe that both of them got considerable 
 pleasure out of the endless intrigues that weave themselves round
 
 170 THE HAPPY HIGHWAYS 
 
 the local I.L.P. branches. They sat up o' nights taking counsel 
 how to get on to committees, and be mentioned in the " Beacon." 
 Dora showed us his syllabus of lectures. 
 
 ** I lecture to them twice a week," he said. " It would n't be 
 worth it it 's an awful fag except that one gets known 
 through things like that. I shall be standing for the Executive 
 before too long, I think." 
 
 He had dreams of the House. If he does not achieve at least 
 that ideal and become a member of the permanent opposition, I 
 shall be considerably surprised, for he is a born politician, with 
 an innate aptitude for political scheming. To be sure, he talked 
 largely of the brotherhood of man, and flapped his wings over 
 the pettiness of Labor leaders. But I do not think that he will 
 talk in the House of international brotherhood : for he has a keen 
 sense of what is fitting and expedient. He talked of it to us 
 because it was a necessary part of his mental stock-in-trade. It 
 was the largest of the ideas he took over when it became clear to 
 him that he was an intellectual with a mission. Of any imagina- 
 tive conception of the phrase he had not a particle. It may be 
 that he really believes it will be accomplished by successive tri- 
 umphant resolutions passed in socialist conference. His political 
 sense did not carry him beyond a view of politics as a continual 
 wrangle in which the devil took the least cue. I could never 
 make up my mind whether he really had brought himself to be- 
 lieve it possible to achieve a social revolution on the floor of the 
 House, or whether that were only another of the attitudes he 
 took up in the interests of his career: whether on this point he were 
 more fool than knave. 
 
 Tommy interrupted him ruthlessly at short intervals. I guessed 
 that her brain was a little above the average, but not within hail- 
 ing distance of her ambition. She told him once that she was sick 
 of his arrogance. 
 
 "You and your lectures," she said. "You seem to think 
 they 're bound to be good because you wrote them. Men are like 
 that. I reckon I 'm the intellectual equal of you or of any other 
 man I know." 
 
 She came back once or twice to this matter of her intellectual 
 equality. I daresay she had half-conscious doubts of it. We
 
 THE EIKONOKLASTS: A SCHEME 171 
 
 soon found that she was always watching for slights, especially 
 from the men she knew. She rated Dora like a vixen for dis- 
 puting her authority in some matter of literary criticism. If she 
 had reflected that men do not talk to each other of their intellec- 
 tual equality, she would have refrained, for she was very anxious 
 to be credited with a masculine outlook. To this end were her 
 slangy speech and off-hand manners. There was no getting away 
 from her determination to be a sport and a good fellow. 
 
 Dora took her interruptions placidly. Whatever inward dis- 
 taste he" felt for his comfortless house, he never allowed it to be- 
 come articulate. He professed great pride in Tommy's cleverness. 
 
 " Of course," he said. " We 're comrades. We don't pretend 
 to be husband and wife. We only got married because this silly 
 world puts all sort of obstacles in your way if you don't. I make 
 no claim on her, nor she on me." 
 
 Oliver asked bluntly " Which of you earns the money? " 
 
 " He does," Tommy said shrilly. " And don't I wish he 'd 
 stay at home and let me go out and earn it. Only there 's no 
 market for your brains if you 're a woman. You 're expected to 
 wash pots and breed children and shut up. Not yours truly." 
 
 "Well, I suppose you claim your share of the money? " 
 
 Tommy stared. " Well, don't I need it to keep the house go- 
 ing? What do you think I am? A penny-in-the-slot meter? As 
 it is, we've not enough money to do more than keep us alive. 
 Nothing for theaters or magazines, or music or decent clothes. 
 I 'm absolutely cut off from things. I 'm supposed to find all my 
 interests and spiritual refreshment in him, of course." 
 
 Perhaps to keep her quiet, Dora got the " Beacon " and read us 
 her latest warble. It was very smart and shrill. We protested 
 our admiration, but I suppose we had not satisfied her, for as the 
 front door closed behind us, I heard her say " A bit sniffy, eh? " 
 
 We left with Dora's promise to arrange for a room in Hammer- 
 smith. 
 
 " I can get you a good basement there," he said, " under the 
 shop of our treasurer. He '11 let you have it every night a week 
 if you like, for something purely nominal. He 's got a great idea 
 of me, you see. The local temperance people had it, but he turned 
 them out because they used to be singing when he was trying to
 
 172 THE HAPPY HIGHWAYS 
 
 balance up his books, and it put him off. We '11 come and help 
 you. Tommy is a first-class lecturer." 
 
 We made our way to Shepherd's Bush, and climbed an east- 
 bound 'bus. 
 
 " If that were my house," Oliver said, " I 'd take a fire-shovel 
 to that female but I 'd make her keep it clean. What on earth 
 does she do with herself? She doesn't earn money, and she 
 doesn't work." 
 
 " Housework is a wearisome business unless you like it," Mar- 
 garet said. " And that 's a rotten life for educated people." 
 
 " Which is the educated? " Oliver retorted. " She 's not, unless 
 you mean that she 's wetted the tips of her fingers in half the arts 
 and a few of the sciences. But she does n't know anything. She 
 imposes on that poor bruised reed by repeating his reflections in 
 a derisive tone. And their home need n't be so sordid, and they 
 need n't eat pressed grass. By God, I 'd teach her a few things." 
 
 " A fire-shovel is an excellent text-book," Margaret scoffed. 
 
 " Some folk will learn off no other," he said, " and she 's one 
 of them." 
 
 " He should n't have married a girl like that," Kersent said. 
 " She 's no wife to him. In his way, he 's a good man. I mean 
 that he took a brilliant first in Physics. But, of course, he '11 die 
 of overstrain and indigestion before he 's forty. It 's silly to rave 
 at her though," he added reflectively, " she 's out of joint with the 
 times. There 's plenty of women like her fit for nothing, 
 happy in nothing. It 's no good sneering or kicking at them. 
 They 're all products of the muddle. Very nearly helpless pro- 
 ducts, too." 
 
 There followed a series of interviews with I.L.P officials and 
 Trades Union secretaries. We found the latter rather tired, har- 
 assed men, quite willing to display our notices and talk about 
 us. They did not, of course, guarantee the tenor of their report. 
 We heard of one hefty Irishman who addressed his fellow-workers 
 thus " There 's some bloody intellectuals taken a room in Ham- 
 mersmith you can read about it on the notice board for the 
 purpose of dispensing book-learning to the meek and humble. 
 Mebbe some of you had better go and look them up, if it 's only 
 to show 'em that they don't know damn-all about everything."
 
 THE EIKONOKLASTS: A SCHEME 173 
 
 The I.L.P. suspected us first of bad faith towards themselves, 
 and then of deliberate benevolence. " You can't come the uplift- 
 ing of the masses over us. We 've got no use for college cranks. 
 And your sort never did as much good as harm. What 's a uni- 
 versity ever done for a working man but turn him against his 
 class and ruin him? For all we know, that may be your idea. 
 Thank God, we 're past being dazzled by your brassy educations." 
 
 Dora dropped a few remarks in our favor, but he was afraid of 
 rousing the latent prejudice against his own college education. 
 HoweWr, we got the room, and our obscurity disarmed any active 
 prejudice. I remember only one man in whom indifference or 
 contempt passed into real resentment. He was a gray-haired, 
 withered little man, the secretary of a small branch. 
 
 " Why d 'you want to go setting yourselves up for stinking mis- 
 sionaries? " he said. "Who asked you to offer to teach us? 
 Who wanted you? Fine use we shall make o' your sort of 
 learning. It would be better for you to come and learn of us. 
 We '11 teach you things you did n't know. Only maybe you don't 
 want to soil your white hands." 
 
 " You '11 teach me nothing of poverty," I said fiercely. " Nor 
 what it is to go short and walk bare-foot. What do you think we 
 are? We come of as hard-working stock as ever you did." 
 
 I stopped, ashamed of myself. 
 
 " If you are our sort," he retorted, " why are you coming 
 round here, talking of knowledge and education and lending 
 books? Lending books! Will ye lend books to me that slaves 
 till I 'm done, and starts At six the next morning? I suppose you 
 think I 'd just be enjoying a read of your books, with me eyes nicely 
 rested by a day's work and me mind clear and bright with golf 
 and good living? Pah! And if you must talk, what 's to hinder 
 ye from coming to an I.L.P. and talking there? Face us on our 
 own ground. We '11 listen to you. We '11 ask you a question or 
 two. Mebbe it 's that you 're afraid of? Anyhow, here 's a plat- 
 form. What 's the matter with it? " 
 
 We explained humbly that it was easier for us to have a place 
 of our own where we could store our books, and come every night. 
 
 "And why should you have things made easy for you? " he 
 said resentfully.
 
 CHAPTER IX 
 
 IV /fc had decided upon a biological groundwork in our lectures. 
 VV we would teach biology itself, and then history, psychology 
 and sociology, all from the same view-point of man's ascent and 
 his place in the scheme of nature. And then, building on that, we 
 would reach the lesson that gave meaning to all the others, and 
 show the possibility of a continued ascent. We would show it as 
 not only possible but imperative that man should follow the path 
 whereon his feet were set, the path of cooperation and mutual 
 understanding. I was resolved not to let Kersent draw us into 
 glossing over the story of human development 
 
 But whether they fitted in or not, we were determined to get 
 in classic and renaissance sculpture, painting, poetry, story- 
 telling. Evening classes and associations were giving the every- 
 day fare of knowledge. We wanted to offer the rare things, the 
 beautiful things that are unnecessary because they have no money 
 value, and supremely necessary because their value is beyond 
 money. "We'll bring the old heady wine into a basement in 
 Hammersmith," Oliver said. 
 
 " In cracked goblets," Kersent added. 
 
 But, of course, it did not work out in the least as we intended. 
 From the very first, cracks opened between our plans and the 
 manifest intentions of the men who should have been our docile 
 listeners. They listened. They asked questions. They read our 
 books, and wrote critcisms of them, but neither questions nor criti- 
 cisms followed the expected course. Our plan got twisted out 
 of all recognition. We pretended to revise it, saving our faces. 
 We found ourselves giving an undue amount of time to biology, 
 pure and simple, and neglecting history and sociology for the 
 sake of literature and art. Margaret's twelve lectures on the 
 Renaissance led to demands for more. She had to give another 
 course on Florentine history, and another on Rome. In the end, 
 hers were the only lectures left to us out of our intentions. Sun- 
 
 174
 
 THE EIKONOKLASTS: A SCHEME 175 
 
 day night was given over to her: she stuck to what she called the 
 strictly useless. The best liked lecture of all was also the most 
 peculiarly literary. It was a description of fourteenth century 
 Florence, with a queer inspired beauty for which we prophesied 
 disaster: our snobbishness had its punishment in the triumph 
 achieved. 
 
 We began in the January of 1913, and at the end of April were 
 overflowing into three other rooms in the same street. During 
 the first weeks, we had a shifting crowd of students, friends of 
 Kersent, men from the local I.L.P. branches, men from Trades 
 Unions, boys just left school, and old tired men. We had meant 
 to attract boys and men who had been studying alone, and most 
 of those who came to us did indeed come for help in subjects al- 
 ready familiar to them. 
 
 It was not long before the regular students emerged from the 
 crowd. We started a formal enrolment. We charged threepence 
 a month. Each man chose the subject in which he desired tui- 
 tion we stuck to the phraseology of the colleges and pledged 
 himself to attend on the evenings given up to that study. We set 
 no limit: a man might enroll himself for every night a week. 
 We lent books, and pestered our friends for cheap editions. Once 
 we took up a subscription at King's, and gathered between ten and 
 eleven pounds for the purchase of books, but we shrank from the 
 notoriety involved in that method of getting money. 
 
 We started the idea of having one lecture a week given by a 
 student. Men volunteered for this. They talked about the things 
 they knew best, their work, their life, their views on education 
 and politics. I have wished many times that some record had 
 been kept of these lectures. Of all the things that we did and 
 tried to do during that busy year and a half, I am proudest of 
 the lectures we did not give but only called forth. 
 
 I cannot possibly tell the story of these months. They were 
 very hard-working months. Oliver and Anthony were in their 
 Final year, and the bulk of the work had to be done by Margaret 
 and by me. Kersent was small use outside his own subject. Mar- 
 garet worked up to the limit of her strength, but practically all 
 the drudgery and hackwork of the thing fell upon me. I have 
 gone a fortnight on less than two hours' sleep a night,
 
 176 THE HAPPY HIGHWAYS 
 
 Inevitably, we had to get through days and weeks when our 
 work seemed a useless waste of strength and time. We felt that 
 we were making fools of ourselves, doing nothing in llie least 
 commensurate with the strain entailed. If we gave up, it would 
 not make any difference in the inevitable march of events. We 
 had even to meet and conquer the insidious fear that we might, 
 after all, be setting ourselves up for " stinking missionaries." I 
 can feel now the black depression against which we struggled, 
 more than half due to bodily exhaustion and our lack of proper 
 food and sleep. 
 
 Incidents and memories crowd back on me. For a short time 
 we were afflicted by a group of young men from some college of 
 London University, who came and made speeches under the pre- 
 tense of asking questions. I remember Chamberlayn's lecture on 
 the building of bridges. He was desperately nervous, and began 
 to clear his throat. " Haw," he said, and shortly " Haw." The 
 audience first smiled and then laughed aloud. Chamberlayn was 
 very angry. He thumped on the table. 
 
 "Do you want to hear about the things or don't you? " he 
 shouted. " If any one here thinks he knows more about it than I 
 do, let him come up and tell it: I '11 be glad to listen." 
 
 They cheered him at that, and he began quite happily. I do 
 not remember a lecture that was listened to in greater silence. 
 He was full of his subject: his eyes shone with the romance that 
 he imagined in it, and at the end, when he tried to give honor 
 to the toiling obscure workers who wrought other men's ideas in 
 the labor of their hands, he stumbled on an eloquence we would 
 not have believed possible in him. I can see now the brown hands 
 resting on the table, and the tall, lithe body bent forward in 
 his eagerness. 
 
 I remember very little active unpleasantness, and what there was 
 arose among people who came to us with mistaken notions about 
 our work. For a few weeks a youth from Dora's own I.L.P 
 branch tried hard to drag our center of gravity into politics. 
 He would get up at the end of a class in biology and ask bitterly 
 what damned good was all this to a working-man. We tried pa- 
 tience and humility. We took him aside and explained as man
 
 THE EIKONOKLASTS: A SCHEME 177 
 
 to man that he would not find in the whole register of students 
 one who was not, in the narrowest sense of the words, a working- 
 man, and that the classes were arranged to their requests. When 
 our patience wore thin, we took to plain speaking. 
 
 " If they want your thimblerigging Labor politics they know 
 where to go for them," I said. " But they don't come here for 
 that. They come here to learn about the things they can't learn 
 anywhere else. We 're not an auxiliary I.L.P." 
 
 " Any one can see that," he said scornfully. " The feeblest 
 LL.P/branch would n't waste its time on the useless rubbish you 
 ask us to." 
 
 " We don't ask you," I retorted. " You came of your own ac- 
 cord, and you can go as soon as you like. The useless rubbish is 
 what the rest of the men want. Why the devil should you set 
 yourself up to tell them what they want? And for what must 
 they always keep their noses glued to the useful? That's what 
 makes the difference between you and the rich fortunate ones. 
 They have the sense to know the value of the useless things, as well 
 as their beauty. You don't even understand the things you are 
 pleased to call the useful. How should you, always up to your 
 neck in them? " I was irritated and irritable from overwork, and 
 I found it hard to keep on this side a decent show of resentment. 
 "You know Dawson, the docker?" I said, struggling for self- 
 control. " Of course you do, he 's a member of your own branch. 
 Well, he and Forbes Forbes is at the docks too came to me 
 last week and asked if they could be lent books on Egypt. I 
 thought they meant Bernard Shaw and the Denshawai incident, 
 but it turned out that they meant Ancient Egypt, the Pharaohs and 
 the Pyramids. They 're deep in Moret and Wallis Budge at this 
 minute." 
 
 " More fools they," said he. He had what is called horse sense. 
 
 He had read Marx, and believed in the Marxian infallibility 
 as earnestly as ever a Catholic in the Pope's. He was full of 
 schemes for getting himself on to Divisional Councils and the 
 like queer bodies, and keeping other people off. He kept bringing 
 me little pamphlets to read, until I got to loathe the sight of their 
 cheap grayish paper and close print. I lost my temper altogether.
 
 178 THE HAPPY HIGHWAYS 
 
 " Damn it, man," I shouted, " do you think I have nothing to 
 do but suck up your filthy, concentrated pap? Take 'em away. 
 I haven't time. I haven't patience." 
 
 My head ached and my eyes burned. He smiled at me with 
 round malicious eyes. All the angles of his undergrown little 
 body expressed delight in my annoyance. The blood rushed to 
 my head: I wanted, insanely, to jump upon his face in heavy 
 boots. 
 
 " You don't care really for the interests of the working-classes," 
 he said. 
 
 " Well then, I don't," I answered. " If it means coming out in 
 a perfect eruption of irritating tracts, I don't. I don't care a 
 damn what happens to you and your kind. Now go away. For 
 goodness' sake go away." 
 
 He went, perfectly satisfied at having penetrated to my 
 treachery. 
 
 Of course, I was ashamed and horror-stricken afterwards. I 
 could not account to myself for the amazing irritability that pos- 
 sessed me during these days. I would have sought out the little 
 man and begged his pardon, if that would have been anything 
 but a self-indulgence. He had had such a mean, cramped life. 
 What could I have been about to sneer at his pamphlets? I might 
 as honorably have sneered at a cripple's crutch. 
 
 '* I have let loose on him the resentment I ought to have kept 
 for the men who made him what he is," I cried. " The pot-bel- 
 lied, club-reared fools who don't even read pamphlets, whose 
 brains are lower than his, because they 're not even trying to 
 reach out. I behaved to him as they would have done. He has 
 every right to look down on me. I 'm not so good a man as he is." 
 
 " Joy," Margaret said gravely, " you '11 come a real break-down 
 one of these days if you don't give yourself a rest. You know 
 you 're talking the most utter rubbish. There 's no question of 
 looking down on any one. The man was in the wrong all the 
 time. He wanted us to be quite different from the people he 
 found us. He had to be sent away." 
 
 "Am I a fool, Margaret? " 
 
 " An incorrigible fool," she said softly. She stopped, and the 
 color flamed in her cheeks. We looked at each other so for a
 
 THE EIKONOKLASTS: A SCHEME 179 
 
 minute. Something stirred in my mind, stirred and left me 
 half-aware . . . 
 
 Then there were the two Christians. They wrote to us before 
 coming to Hammersmith. "Dear friends We have heard of 
 your work, and feel that it has been laid upon us to help you. 
 We do not know what you require, but what you ask, that will 
 we do. We believe that your work has no religious bias. We are 
 simply Christians." 
 
 No *ch>ubt they believed themselves to be just that. But how 
 they hated Christ! 
 
 They had to conceal it from themselves by glossing over all 
 the incidents in His life that revolted them. They must have 
 had some dreadful moments. I caught a glimpse once of the 
 hidden conflict. The man was talking to Kersent, and I sat be- 
 hind them, reading over essays. 
 
 " My dear friend," he urged softly, " you cannot think that the 
 rubbing of the ears of corn was meant to justify sabbath breaking. 
 It was merely symbolic. It was directed against the papish prac- 
 tice of fasts. His eye foresaw the Romish heresy. Man must 
 eat, even on the Lord's day. Our Lord condemned the devilish 
 practice of the Babylonian whore." 
 
 He was convinced that Jesus could not have been other than 
 a sound temperance man. The marriage feast at Cana annoyed 
 him. He seemed to feel, firstly, that the water had not been 
 turned into wine, but into some herbal effusion; and secondly, that 
 it had, on the whole, been rather silly of Jesus. 
 
 I looked up as he was talking to Kersent, and for a brief mo- 
 ment saw in his eyes a gleam that was certainly not the light of 
 reverence. It was more like resentment and a dull, aching dis- 
 like. There was so much in Christ of which he could not approve. 
 He wrestled with Him in secret, abused and argued with Him. 
 Outwardly nothing appeared but an over-warm, simmering love: 
 doubtless he was conscious of nothing else. 
 
 At times he wallowed in religious emotion. " I have given 
 myself to Christ," he told us, with an ungainly wriggle of his 
 body. He was ecstatic as other men are drunk, and with much 
 the same intellectual enfeeblement. There is no more hopeless 
 bigot than the emotional one.
 
 180 THE HAPPY HIGHWAYS 
 
 His wife was altogether harder and brighter. She was consci- 
 entious to the point at which conscience becomes a vice to be in- 
 dulged at the expense of the community. She ran one of those 
 houses where erring women are punished by the charity of the 
 more wary or more fortunate. She had always a scared, cringing 
 girl with her as her maid, a brand plucked from the burning and 
 quenched viciously. Christ simply had not a chance with her. 
 She would have made short work of His sentimentalizing over 
 strumpets and sinners. She despised Him in her heart, but he 
 made a good jack-o'-lantern to frighten the timid, so she had Him 
 truss up His points and come down like a flail on the ungodly. 
 
 " She hath the itch," Kersent said, " the moral itch." She had 
 indeed a selection of tales that in a different dress would have 
 shocked a smoke-room. Nothing vicious missed her glance. The 
 poets were degraded: Shakespeare should have been burned by 
 the common hangman. The Rokeby Venus deserved its slashing 
 for its indecency. 
 
 The woman soon left us, but the man clung to us like a bur. 
 We could not use him as a tutor, and it was simply ridiculous to 
 regard him as a student. He sat at the back of the room, and 
 afterwards came to us with urgent deprecatory whispers. He in- 
 sisted upon telling us all about his private life. God forbid that 
 I should accuse the pair of ungodly lusts. They were united in the 
 most delicate and refined tie. But if ever I met unrestrained, rav- 
 ening wickedness of the flesh it was in that man's vicarious 
 caresses. He talked about his wife and their holy partnership 
 as mystics tell of the Divine Bridegroom, or starving men reflect 
 on roast sucking pig. 
 
 We had at last to tell him that as he was not a working-man, 
 we could not enroll him with the other students. After that, 
 he haunted us reproachfully in Herne Hill, poking his lean face 
 round the door with a gentle " Do I intrude? " 
 
 He did most damnably. He affected with Margaret an exag- 
 gerated impressive manner. I believe he regarded her presence 
 in our rooms with a delightful horror. He came there to rub his 
 hands over it in secret. After a while, he ceased to intrude, and we 
 did not see either of them for several months. 
 
 We had great trouble with an odd anarchist named Darley.
 
 THE EIKONOKLASTS: A SCHEME 181 
 
 It was not personal trouble, for he was a charming old creature 
 with a passion for first editions. But he had a thunderous voice, 
 and burst upon our classes with furious orations on the need for 
 personal liberty. There was not a single thing that he did not 
 bring back to this question of liberty. He had once written a 
 poem. It began : 
 
 " Oh, Liberty, thy wings are molting now, 
 Thy feathers strew the lofty Caucasus." 
 
 This he read aloud several times, without any provocation, on 
 the ground, I suppose, that he was at liberty to do so. We got rid 
 of him at last, but not before he had called Kersent a black-hearted 
 caterpillar, smearing and sliming the most precious things of 
 the spirit with his vile communistic leanings. 
 
 I have met many anarchists but never one who doubted but 
 liberty meant that a man may make himself any kind of an 
 aggressive nuisance so long as he do it in the service of an Ideal. 
 How is it, I wonder, that an Ideal has so often such a scurvy, loud- 
 voiced, domineering train of servants? 
 
 We lost the help of Dora and Tommy in less than four months. 
 Tommy lectured for us once or twice on German literature. She 
 had, we found, a quite considerable ability to heap up an untidy 
 mass of facts, but not the least grasp of their significance or power 
 to coordinate them. And yet she was, even at that time, attaining 
 a reputation in the outskirts of journalism. Nowadays you can 
 hardly pick up a newspaper or magazine of a certain type with- 
 out finding in it one of her thin, irritating articles, running like 
 venomous little spiders over half the topics of the day. I cannot 
 account for it, except on the supposition that a mediocre intellect 
 may make a good show if it is employed in an unusual or un- 
 popular cause. 
 
 We differed with them first over the philosophic basis of our 
 work. Dora was as reverent of Reason as an eighteenth century 
 poetaster, and he got very acrimonious when I refused to give up 
 my biology classes for classes in the political economy of the 
 I.L.P. 
 
 Then later, both Dora and Tommy were seriously annoyed 
 because we would not allow them to turn their work for us to
 
 182 THE HAPPY HIGHWAYS 
 
 their advantage. They wanted to talk about themselves in con- 
 nection with it. We were not only dead set against any such 
 advertising of our schemes, but determined that they should not 
 potter round a little, pretending to work for us, and then go 
 away to boast about it. I told them at last quite frankly what I 
 thought about their intentions. 
 
 " If you will help us, we shall be most uncommonly grateful," 
 I said, " for we 're sadly in need of help. We 're over-taxed. 
 But you must understand that we can't let you talk about what 
 you do here. We 're not running that sort of thing at all." 
 
 Tommy flung herself back in a chair, and kicked her high heels 
 on the ground. I tried not to notice that the front of her dress 
 was covered with spots of grease and gaping at the waist. Dora 
 must have had a hot dinner that day. 
 
 " Oho," she said, " we 're the modest violet, are we? Well, it 's 
 not good enough for me. No good works in secret for your hum- 
 ble. I 've seen too much of the world for that. There 's precious 
 little credit going about in this life for any one, but what little I 
 earn, I intend to have. I might as well tell you that straight out. 
 I 'm not one to beat about the bush, whatever else I may be." 
 
 Her husband was not so frank. He regarded us gravely. " If 
 it 's help you want," he said, " you simply must talk about your- 
 selves, or let others talk about you." 
 
 " It 's not that sort of help we want," I explained. 
 
 He had the air of a man who is determined not to be fooled. 
 He suspected us of some subtle duplicity. 
 
 "Well, I don't understand what you do want," he said slowly. 
 "You 're not trying on any good-by-stealth game, are you? " 
 
 He puzzled over us. 
 
 After our final break with them, Tommy wrote an allusive at- 
 tack upon us in the " Beacon." We were referred to sarcastically 
 as the gray brethren who work by night. It was suggested that 
 we were working cunningly to an end, doubtless political. All 
 this work of ours was a preliminary to vote-catching. The com- 
 rades were warned not to be taken in by our crude methods. It 
 was a most acrid article, but we were by this time well enough 
 established in our little way to be proof against such things. 
 
 As time went on, we became gradually a kind of bureau. We
 
 THE EIKONOKLASTS: A SCHEME 183 
 
 drew up courses of study for men, and told them what books to 
 read. We hunted up information in newspaper files or original 
 documents at the British Museum. We never refused help how- 
 ever trivial the subject. We made a rule that men might, without 
 enrolling themselves, come to two lectures or classes, as friends of 
 a regular student. In that way, we were approached several times 
 by men who had for years been studying some subject and wanted 
 help on a particular point. Often they came full of suspicion, 
 prepared to stand on their dignity as experts. I like to think that 
 in every instance we disarmed them by our pleasure in talking 
 to them, and our eagerness to be of use. Sometimes we captured 
 them for our Saturday evening classes. 
 
 Our work divided itself, roughly, into three departments. 
 There were the men who came, wanting nothing more than to hear 
 about things, strange things, new things, anything unconnected 
 with their routine life. They were too tired to try any inde- 
 pendent study. 
 
 We left this side of the work to Margaret. She not only lec- 
 tured herself, but went boldly to demand lectures from experts. 
 She used to go with burning cheeks and limbs shaking with nerv- 
 ousness. She never met with but one refusal. But she suffered 
 such agonies in apprehension of a rebuff that we begged her to let 
 one of us go in her place. Always she shook her head. 
 
 " I have a better chance of success than you. It 's what 's called 
 underhand influence of sex." 
 
 She made a grimace, and smiled at us, and went off in all her 
 slim, trembling courage to ask a man with half the alphabet after 
 his name to come to an obscure room in Hammersmith, and tell 
 work-worn men the tale of his adventures in a South American 
 forest. Or it might be a Dante scholar, or an English-speaking 
 Russian revolutionist. 
 
 Then there were the men and boys who wanted real tuition. 
 We were always trying to work this side of our work up to uni- 
 versity standards. This was not, of course, easy to do. We had 
 to supplement our classes by private tutoring to special students. 
 
 Then came the bureau side of our work. This grew larger and 
 larger, overflowing into all the other sides. We enlisted the help 
 of a few King's men, but the strain became almost unbearable.
 
 184 THE HAPPY HIGHWAYS 
 
 We had so far limited our classes only by the space in our use. 
 We began to think of cutting down the numbers. Then we 
 thought of taking a larger place altogether and asking Margaret's 
 uncle for funds to arrange things in a way that would relieve us 
 of a little of the work. 
 
 And yet, you know, for all we worked day and night, even be- 
 yond our strength, to fit our own studies with our voluntary task, 
 we accomplished so pitifully little. At the very most we had 
 eighty or a hundred regular students on our roll, and I suppose 
 that in the whole eighteen months before we had to give things 
 up, we reached and helped not more than three hundred men. 
 Three hundred! 
 
 And all the time I, at least, was struggling against an un- 
 defined dissatisfaction. The smallness of our achievement made 
 the effort seem ludicrous. We were painfully conscious of its 
 latent absurdity. We spoke of our work, when we had to speak of 
 it at all, in an off-hand, allusive fashion. And then we were 
 ashamed of that too, and reproached ourselves for belittling the 
 men who were so anxious to learn that they would learn in a base- 
 ment of a handful of students. 
 
 We tried to steer a middle way between an affectation of in- 
 difference " just an amusement of ours, you know, so original " 
 and a detestable boastfulness. We worked furtively, afraid 
 alike of ridicule and unmerited praise. 
 
 I know now that my dissatisfaction rose from the unrealized 
 knowledge that there was work nearer my hand. Any man, 
 with the scholarship and the wish, could do the work we tried to 
 do, but not many could reach the independent dalesfolk whose 
 power for good or evil in the coming change is neither reckoned 
 nor understood. 
 
 We learned a good deal more than we taught in Hammersmith. 
 At some things we could only guess. 
 
 I believe that there exists in the intellect of the working class 
 a vigor and freshness that may well bring forth a new Renais- 
 sance. For generations crushed under the industrial slavery, I 
 believe that it will move when it does move, with a mighty bound. 
 Reflect that it has no academic shackles to burst. No spectacled 
 generations tread it down. The world is new to it a world as
 
 THE EIKONOKLASTS: A SCHEME 185 
 
 full of blossom and fresh stir of life as ever set men's feet wan- 
 dering in unknown lands, and their throats swelling with the 
 songs of a world at Spring. A world crying out for a new mind 
 to understand it, a new heart to fashion it. We saw that mind 
 rousing itself from long sleep in the men who came to us during 
 those feverish days. We saw, in glimpses, an intellect that will 
 make short work of classic and modern controversies, and all 
 such efforts of a worn-out mind, trying nervously to make things 
 as easy for itself as possible. The awakening giant will take these 
 things in his stride. Yes: we learned much. 
 
 And since we did not go into that work for the sake of saving 
 our own dirty little souls, how should we be able to reckon any- 
 thing that we did then to our credit? 
 
 Days and nights pass behind my eyes, from the days when we 
 shivered and froze in the unwarmed cellar to the days when we 
 could not get a breath of air between its four dark walls. 
 
 I step out of the underground station at Hammersmith into the 
 vortex of converging streets. Margaret, rather white and droop- 
 ing in her thin frock, hurries beside me across the road. We 
 reach the house and pass behind the shop to the basement stair- 
 case. Oliver and Kersent have gone further up the street to the 
 rooms where the less advanced students are already at work. We 
 stand at the foot of the stairs, and a man touches me on the 
 shoulder. 
 
 " I 'm so glad you 've come in good time," he said. " There 's 
 something been worrying me for three days in this variability of 
 species business. I wanted to see you about it before the others 
 came." 
 
 I begin rather nervously to tackle the question. Young Donnel 
 has something approaching a biological genius, and I am afraid 
 of not being able to teach him properly. He was, I remember 
 now, in my own battalion when we first went out. I lost sight of 
 him afterwards. He may be dead, the questioning brain still and 
 trodden into the earth. 
 
 Sometimes, when our work was over for the night, Margaret 
 and I found our way down to the river. It would be cool then. 
 
 The buildings behind us blotted out the glare and rush of Ham- 
 mersmith. Just below our feet the river went darkly to the sea.
 
 186 THE HAPPY HIGHWAYS 
 
 We wished to follow it. At how many little boats and flat barges 
 should we not have tugged in our swift hurrying! Past the de- 
 cent, stately Government buildings, past the furtive sleepers on 
 the seats, past the ends of narrow streets still echoing and flur- 
 ried with the tread of the day's feet, past empty hives of trading 
 houses, past the barns and storing-houses of the world, past docks 
 where the great ships waited in the darkness beside wooden 
 quays, past gray flats of mud and scattered houses with one 
 bright eye winking across sad fields to the heedless river, past all 
 the stress of little lives, all the restless pressure of little brains 
 throbbing with schemes that have walled the river with stone and 
 scarred it with keels and bridges, past them all to the waiting sea. 
 We were two specks of life, caught between sky and sea, caught 
 and forgotten with our futile longings. We cried out in secret for 
 the quiet roads, and the hollows of the hills, and the sweet breath 
 of the northwest wind. 
 
 During those warm, stifling days in the early summer of 1913, 
 when we were just beginning to feel the real burden of the work 
 we had undertaken, my personal life was tangling itself into a sore 
 perplexity. Between the two, I must often have gone nearer mad- 
 ness than any decent biologist should.
 
 CHAPTER X 
 
 ON an afternoon in late Spring, Margaret and I went to Kew. 
 Oliver would not come with us, but I was tired out under the 
 strain of our double work. I felt that I must get away from it, 
 if only for an afternoon. We walked slowly across the gardens 
 and reached a narrow path between tall trees. Sitting in the 
 warm green light, we talked, and then forgot to talk. Margaret 
 lay back with half -closed eyes. Abruptly, there were shouts and 
 a curious muffled clatter. A huge young cart horse, come from 
 God knows where, appeared at the top of the path and tore down 
 upon us. I leaped to my feet and dragged Margaret out of the 
 way with hardly an inch between her and death or horrible injury. 
 The mad creature turned at the end of the path, and swung across 
 the open grass. It was crazy with fear. I believe it lamed itself 
 in the end, and had to be shot. 
 
 I forgot it on the instant. I held Margaret in my arms, sooth- 
 ing her, kissing her, calling on her like a fool to answer me ... 
 
 Followed days of harassed uncertainties. Margaret avoided 
 me. I worked myself up into a querulous rage. I wanted to have 
 things settled, to know where we stood. I could not get a word 
 with her. At last I hit upon the absurd plan of writing a letter. 
 " If you won't give me a chance to speak to you, I '11 make a scene 
 before the rest," I wrote. " I must talk to you. This is absurd." 
 I went out and posted the letter with a sense of having been very 
 decisive and resourceful. I watched her across the breakfast 
 table as she read it. She moved her head restlessly, as if shaking 
 off a burden. I was full of remorse and a sense of my blunder- 
 ing. 
 
 We entered upon days and days of inconsequent discussion. 
 We lost all sense of humor and behaved like psychological novel- 
 ists. For a while I held to my purpose. I wanted Margaret. I 
 did not see that any scruple could be strong enough to separate us 
 if she cared at all. I reproached her. 
 
 187
 
 188 THE HAPPY HIGHWAYS 
 
 " You 're spoiling my life and yours for the sake of a promise, 
 a convention. Would Keith want you if he knew? " 
 
 " There is no reason why he should know," she said. " You 
 don't understand. It 's not the promise. It 's the things I feel. 
 I should n't be happy. I 'm as much bound to him as if we were 
 married. I've been his. I am his. I can't just walk away 
 and leave it all behind repudiate it pretend I 'm free as I 
 was before . . ." 
 
 " You are free. You know you are free." 
 
 " I don't feel free. Try and understand. I can't just begin 
 again with Keith unhappy and betrayed. I 'm not made like 
 that." 
 
 Sometimes I would not let her speak. I shouted at her. I 
 took her in my arms and pleaded with her. She hardened, and 
 then broke into a pitiful appeal. I would not try to understand 
 her. 
 
 " You are a coward," I said hardly. " You 're bound and 
 scared by a stupid tradition. You can neither think nor act for 
 yourself." I turned and left her. 
 
 How am I to tell of the coming and going of our love? We 
 wrangled like bitter enemies, and clung to each other in a passion 
 of tenderness and terrified longing. 
 
 There were times when we were content just to be together, 
 seeing each other every day, sharing thoughts and plans and en- 
 thusiasms. 
 
 For weeks I beat on the queer hardness I had discovered in 
 her. With a vague memory of the best traditions, I spent one 
 night walking about the empty streets in a stupor of rage and un- 
 happiness. Somewhere in Kingsway I almost fell over a woman 
 crouched sleeping in a doorway. I stopped and put what money 
 I had on the skirt between her sunk knees. My own grief seemed 
 part of the incredible misery of a world awry. Nothing fitted: 
 everywhere were great cracks and chasms between the smooth 
 seeming and the sick reality. Vast stone buildings braving the 
 stars, and at the foot of the steps a huddled woman, spoiled, 
 broken and utterly undone. I shouted absurdly at the skies. 
 Half -remembered words came to me " Some dim, mysterious 
 laughter, from the blind, tongueless wardens of the dead." I said
 
 THE EIKONOKLASTS: A SCHEME 189 
 
 them over as I walked, and stopped to cry "Margaret," and 
 began again, and came again to her name. She held herself from 
 me. I should not be able to take her if she came to me and said 
 "Take me now: I can't bear it." I fought with puny madness 
 against the inert forces that thrust down through the centuries to 
 keep us apart. I felt suddenly that I snatched my love from 
 vile hands, snatched and held it aloft. 
 
 God knows I was wretched enough, but I think that I had an 
 unconscious satisfaction in the completeness of my misery. Trag- 
 edy may in sober truth be joyful for youth : for old age, it is only 
 pitiful and to be endured. 
 
 I was stumbling over the short grass in Hyde Park when the 
 madness dropped from me, and I heard, blown strangely by the 
 wind across green spaces, the broken, quivering cry of wakening 
 birds. I lay down under the distant light of dawn and slept. 
 
 I abandoned my unbearable attempt to browbeat Margaret. I 
 loved her. I wanted to understand her. We had always under- 
 stood each other. I went to her, determined to be very patient and 
 kind. 
 
 " Show me why you can't tell Keith the truth and come to me," 
 I said. " I won't try any more to force you to my way of thinking. 
 But I must understand. I want you to be free." 
 
 "My own deeds bound me," she said somberly, "but I can't 
 free myself." 
 
 " Margaret," I began, resentment pricking me again. 
 
 " No, don't argue with me," she pleaded. " Listen instead. 
 I 'm right. I know I 'm right. It might be easy, it might be right 
 for another woman to do as you wish me to do to tell Keith I 
 love you and just leave him. It would be wrong for me: I feel 
 that it would be wrong." She pressed her hands against her 
 breast. " There 's something in me you call it fear of tradi- 
 tion and convention I don't think it 's that. It can't be that. 
 Why should that tradition of all others bind me? Perhaps I 
 was born a sort of Puritan. There 's a fierce, a terrible revolt in 
 me against turning from one man to another. That sort of thing 
 can't be done unless it 's done as the easiest thing almost un- 
 concernedly. I could n't do it unconcernedly. I can't think of 
 it unconcernedly. It would be false thinking for me. I should
 
 190 THE HAPPY HIGHWAYS 
 
 be false to myself, sinning against myself. Oh, why don't you 
 see? I 'm made like this. How can I help it? I can't be what 
 you want me to be, not without a pretense that would be fatal. 
 It would turn our love bitter. I couldn't bear it. . . ." She 
 held out her hands to me. " Oh, Joy, Joy," she cried, " Joy, my 
 beloved I love you too well to lie to myself. Oh, my 
 dear " 
 
 I stood unresponsive, struggling with the last remnants of my 
 labored and ridiculous superiority. 
 
 " You would n't have me pretend happiness and ease? " she 
 cried. " It would be useless wrong." 
 
 ** Yes," I said at last. My voice sounded queerly. " I know 
 what you mean. I Ve felt it too . . ." 
 
 A forlorn sense of defeat came to me. I crossed the room 
 and stood beside her, resting my face against her hair . . .
 
 CHAPTER XI 
 
 A WEEK later I met Margaret's lover for the first time. He 
 came through London in June on his way to Southampton, 
 and stayed one night with us. He had an American uncle to 
 meet; I think. His wire came while we were at breakfast. Mar- 
 garet frowned and hesitated over it. 
 
 ** I suppose he can have Mick's old room? " she asked diffi- 
 dently. 
 
 It is curious that I have never been able to regard Keith 
 Ainslie as altogether real. I cannot now recall his face, nor the 
 tone of his voice, though both were pleasant. I suppose he was 
 real enough to Margaret, but even after she married him, he lived 
 in my thoughts with far less of significance or palpable reality 
 than did the impalpable barrier that divided us. 
 
 During the whole of the evening that he stayed with us, I had 
 a queer sense of detachment. I sat in my chair smoking; I 
 answered questions, and was very lifelike. But nothing that was 
 said made the least impression on me. Can you imagine a world 
 from which all color has been withdrawn, where the forms of 
 things are dimly indicated, shadows in a prevailing shadow? 
 Things had a colorless, empty aspect for me that night. The 
 flames of the fire burned without light. The voices of the speak- 
 ers trailed off into thin spirals that eddied through the room and 
 passed into dim and dimmer circles as wide as the earth. I kept 
 jerking myself back to reality, and seizing on a word which I 
 took back with me into the outer darkness. 
 
 I believe that Keith had come prepared to dislike us. He 
 was very agreeable and talked easily of many things, but a curious 
 defensive attitude lurked behind his words. It showed itself at 
 odd times. Oliver got out of hand early in the evening, and at 
 last became outrageous. Keith treated him with polite amuse- 
 ment until his patience gave way. Then he said coolly " Well, 
 of course, I know you 're all godalmighties in the universities. I 
 was a student myself a year ago. You will grow out of it." 
 
 191
 
 192 THE HAPPY HIGHWAYS 
 
 Oliver stammered. " Don't try to come the man of the world 
 over us. You 're a fool now: you were probably more of a fool 
 at college." 
 
 Margaret looked at me, but it was Anthony who answered her 
 mute entreaty. 
 
 " I '11 apologize for Oliver," he said smoothly. " He '11 not 
 apologize for himself. He cultivates all the external attributes 
 of genius with great care, and among others the proverbial lack 
 of sense and manners. You might otherwise miss the genius." 
 
 Oliver took himself out of the house, and Keith fell back on 
 his smiling hostility. 
 
 I left the next morning before the others came down to break- 
 fast. My lectures were over at eleven, and I took myself to the 
 Museum Reading Room. There I arranged books round me in a 
 defensive disorder, and set myself to think. 
 
 At first I could think of nothing but the senseless position 
 into which I had drifted. I tried to trace the steps that had led 
 me into it. I wanted to see where I had gone wrong, what I 
 could have done to avert disaster. I was haunted by a feeling 
 that there must have been some decisive moment. I had over- 
 looked it, or bungled it. I had failed to say the right things. I 
 had been blind, or stupid, or absurdly baffled . . . 
 
 An attendant brought a book and laid it at my elbow. I 
 turned mechanically to thank him. Margaret was standing ir- 
 resolute behind my chair. I suppose she had been to Waterloo 
 with Keith. She looked tired. Her eyes sought mine in a 
 silent unhappiness. I stared at her for a minute, and then 
 pushed back my chair. 
 
 " Come along," I whispered. " Let 's go and look at old Amen 
 Hetep. You like looking at him."
 
 CHAPTER XII 
 
 JULY found us at the end of our tether. Margaret and I had 
 intended to stay in town and carry on the classes, but we saw 
 that it 'was impossible. As we jolted through Walworth Road, 
 waves of hot foetid air rolled against the 'bus, turning us sick and 
 faint. 
 
 " You could n't stand many summers of this," I said to Mar- 
 garet. 
 
 " I sha'n't have to," she answered coolly. " I shall be married 
 and living outside London next July." 
 
 Margaret had a habit of such queerly insensitive remarks. 
 
 " You '11 at least have air and fields there," I said shortly. 
 
 "Yes, but what fields! They have no character. Smooth, 
 smiling, stupid school-girls of fields. When I think of fields, I 
 see a wife rough slope running from loose stone wall to broken 
 fence. The gorse bushes are creeping across, and hillocks of 
 brown reedy grass break the green monotony. A field that re- 
 members the ordered feet of legions, and the wild cries of sea 
 rovers bringing fire and death." 
 
 That evening we decided to go away together for a week. 
 I suggested the idea, and urged it on Margaret. 
 
 " One week out of a lifetime," I said. " Oh, we '11 keep all the 
 rules of the road, never fear. Let 's pretend for a week that 
 we 've been shot into another star, where there is neither marrying 
 nor giving in marriage, nor Walworth Roads, nor any other 
 fretting thing. Let 's get into some old, wide-skied Utopia where 
 men do not have bad dreams." 
 
 We went to the sea-coast village a mile from Margaret's old 
 home. Margaret stayed with a huge-armed, red-haired woman, 
 her foster mother, who bestowed upon her a much warmer affec- 
 tion than she had for her ten lusty sons and daughters, the common 
 stuff of her life. I slept in the attic bedroom of a fisherman's 
 cottage, and we spent our days on the cliffs and the shore. 
 
 193
 
 194 THE HAPPY HIGHWAYS 
 
 It was a good play. The young sun shone on a young world. 
 We climbed the narrow, cobbled streets between the cliff-fast 
 houses, and followed the valley inland until the river narrowed to 
 a beck and was lost along the slope of the gorge. Summer comes 
 late to the North, no flaunting, assured beauty, but a shy bride, 
 stepping delicately down the dales between the moors, over dark 
 green of primrose leaves and under the virginal green of the 
 young birch trees. The yellow gorse is her rude courier, and 
 the tardy rose swings from the tangled hedges. 
 
 On one hot afternoon we wandered over the flat rocks below 
 the eastern cliffs. The tide had turned to come in, but Margaret 
 led me confidently away from the town. Slipping on the rocks, 
 we came round the corner into a desolate bay. From the stark 
 shore, a black ridge of rock thrust out to sea. A narrow channel, 
 bare and dry beneath the sun, lay between its sharp slope and the 
 cliff. Margaret took off her shoes and scrambled up the ridge. 
 Small stones rattled down on to the rocks below. She stood for 
 a moment and then ran with swift, perilous footsteps to the far- 
 ther end. Here the narrow ridge broadened out in a platform 
 whose sides ran steeply to the sea. At one side a mass of rocks 
 made a slippery stairway. I followed her slowly. Already, the 
 narrow pools between the flat rocks were filling stealthily. 
 Feathery algae and pink anemones lifted and floated in their green 
 depths. 
 
 I lay down beside her. The heat of the sun-warmed rock 
 struck through our thin clothes. I drowsed, watching the tide. 
 
 "Are you sure this is safe? " I asked lazily. 
 
 A thread of water lay between our couch and the cliffs, widen- 
 ing as I looked at it. 
 
 " Safe as can be," she told me. " The foot of the cliffs will 
 be deep in water two hours before the full. But this ridge of 
 rock is safe enough. Only the Spring tides sweep over it. Don't 
 I know! I used to come here every day the long summers 
 through. The sea slipped round me, and there I was on an island, 
 like all the Crusoes that ever were." 
 
 We talked in sleepy voices. Margaret lay face downwards, 
 her chin resting on her folded hands. 
 
 " It is queer that I should be here with you," she said. " I
 
 THE EIKONOKLASTS: A SCHEME 195 
 
 have been so often alone. I used to sit trying to explain the 
 world to myself. I made me a city of dreams: you went in by 
 one gate in the shining, untroubled morning, and left by the other 
 in the mysterious night. It had gardens and tawny gleaming 
 hills. Sometimes its walls were linked creatures of flame, singing 
 together for joy; and sometimes marble, many-hued marble, 
 barred and tipped with gold. I carefully threw outside the city 
 walls all the things I could n't understand and all the things that 
 seemeth to contradict each other. I played with children who 
 looked up to me. I was as brave as I was beautiful." She 
 laughed. " Oh, you could n't fathom my conceit." 
 
 " Poor little lonely conceited ghost," I said softly. 
 
 I put an arm round her, and drew her to me. Her body lay 
 warm against mine. I heard nothing but the lift of the waves 
 against the rock, and saw only her face, cool and fair between 
 her loosened hair. The cliffs behind us might be the mountains 
 of the moon and Utopia be indeed beyond them, its white roads 
 waiting the pressure of our feet. It did not matter then. 
 
 " Things got mixed. The walls faded. The contradictions 
 grew and defied me. I began to dream of getting away into the 
 world beyond the scarped hills. I thought I could come back 
 later and tidy up the city in the light of wider knowledge. But, 
 of course, the gates don't open to me now. Some other child 
 has the key." 
 
 She drew herself out of my arms, and sat looking out to sea. 
 A chill wind ruffled the tops of the waves. The color was gone 
 from the water, and clouds hid the sun. I shivered and stood up. 
 
 " There '11 be a storm," Margaret said. 
 
 *' We 'd better go. We could just get through to the foot of 
 the cliff." 
 
 She hesitated. 
 
 " No," she said. " Let 's stay. There 's no danger." 
 
 The sky darkened, and a spirit woke in the sea, maddening the 
 waves. From the gathering darkness, they swept down upon us. 
 We stared at a green wall, laced with spume. It shivered into 
 spray that drenched and blinded us. Swirling and screaming, 
 it was sucked down and back, wrenching itself from the rock with 
 a hollow, deafening thunder. The wind stung us. Margaret
 
 196 THE HAPPY HIGHWAYS 
 
 swayed and almost fell. We lay down and pressed ourselves 
 against the platform of the rock. 
 
 " We can't get away now," Margaret said. 
 I nodded. We should have been crazy to attempt it. If we 
 had not been blown off the narrow part of the ridge we had been 
 battered to death in the raging cross-currents of the little ghaut. 
 We waited. The waves broke against the rock, and thin streaks 
 of foam ran across it to pour themselves over the lower edge. 
 Margaret lifted her head and smiled at me. I thought that we 
 should be swept into the sea. If there had been anything that 
 we could do, I could have done it coolly enough. But there was 
 nothing to be done. With defenses down, we abandoned our- 
 selves to the universal madness. 
 
 I held Margaret in my arms in an exultant ecstasy. I kissed 
 her cold face. I pushed back her hair and kissed her eyes 
 that laughed into mine. Through her soaked dress, I felt the 
 rounded body. I loved as the gods love that know neither 
 urgency of desire nor satiety. 
 
 " Heart of mine, body of mine, I love you," I said. She could 
 not hear me, but her lips moved in answer. We lay beneath the 
 darkened arch of the sky while the solid universe split and 
 crashed round us. The wind dropped, I felt the prick of rain 
 between the showers of spray. Our kisses were salt and sharp 
 with the sharpness of imminent parting. " Only a little while," 
 I whispered, " a little while, dear love of mine, and we shall be 
 free." 
 
 Anti-climax dogs mortal men. We were neither drowned nor 
 free. The rain stopped. The clouds slunk behind the rim of the 
 sea, and the sun shone over the thrusting waters. Margaret 
 laughed a little unsteadily. 
 
 " Did we die? " she said. 
 
 "Not quite." 
 
 After a while she sat up and shook out her hair. Stooping, 
 she drew my head against her knee. " I should not have minded 
 death like that. Would you? " she said. 
 
 " I don't know." 
 
 Apathy and an unreasoning resentment pressed on me. I did 
 not touch the hand that rested on my shoulder.
 
 THE EIKONOKLASTS: A SCHEME 197 
 
 " Most people are afraid of death when it comes to the point," 
 I said roughly. " I never knew one who was not, except my 
 father, and he play-acted with death until it took him unaware and 
 he had not time to realize that it was real. He died well in spite 
 of himself." 
 
 *' That 's a hard thing to say." 
 
 " It 's a true one. If he 'd had time to realize things, I daresay 
 he 'd have died cringing and protesting. And yet I don't know. 
 He had queer ideas. He believed that all life was a matter of 
 bargains. Once you made a compact with life or your fellow 
 men, you had to keep it, or else submit yourself to be broken 
 by the destiny you had flouted and outraged. Man could not, 
 with impunity he said break any contract that his mind 
 and soul had once assented to. The penalty was death in 
 life." 
 
 " He had got hold of something," Margaret said slowly. 
 
 " Maybe so," I answered indifferently. " If he had, it was 
 the only thing he ever held surely in all his incompetent life." 
 
 She moved a little. 
 
 " You talk sometimes as if people even your own people 
 were somehow impersonal, had nothing to do with you. I don't 
 understand you then. There is something in you I can't touch." 
 She frowned. " A man should not detach himself from men and 
 judge them." 
 
 "I don't," I said. "What is there that you can't touch? 
 Except just the reserve that we all must have. Every self 
 should have its virgin fortress. It 's only decent so. Moreover, 
 it 's inevitable. There must be barriers." I struggled to explain 
 something that was in my mind. It refused to deliver itself up. 
 " People are somehow not real to me," I said. " Not always real, 
 I mean. I get a sense that it is all play-acting. Even we who 
 love. People recede into an infinite distance. [ can't feel 
 them. I am unreal and you. Nothing is real but the bar- 
 
 riers." 
 
 " Just now," Margaret said in a low voice, " were they there - 
 the barriers? Was I unreal to you? " 
 
 I sat up and looked at her. Her face was hidden by her 
 hair.
 
 198 THE HAPPY HIGHWAYS 
 
 "No, they weren't." I trampled on my doubts. "There 
 were no barriers." I laid my head against her arm. 
 
 She bent her face to mine, and I shut my eyes before the 
 radiance of hers. 
 
 The waves lifted tawny heads to the passing sun. Still we 
 stayed on the rock, while the waters sank slowly between us and 
 the cliffs . . . 
 
 I kissed her hair and her face, pale below mine in the darkness. 
 A wind slipped over the edge of the world. The red gold of 
 the hidden sun lay across the waters and trembled between the 
 drifting clouds. Heavy shadows came over the eastern cliffs, 
 following each other down the dusk. The first shadow reached 
 the edge of the sea and swept the hesitant light. Sea and sky 
 leaped together, and we watched until the universe strode back 
 and nothing was visible save the thin white verge of the waves 
 and the blackest mass of cliffs behind us. 
 
 We walked along the ridge and stood looking into the gleaming 
 shadows of the little ghaut. Then, gathering up her dress, 
 Margaret slipped down into the water: it rose above her knees. 
 We splashed out and ran along the foot of the cliffs to the broken 
 upward path, stumbling as we went through pools of shimmering 
 light . . . 
 
 I am amazed at the ease with which we forgot that a week was 
 not a lifetime. I suppose that by all the rules of loving, it should 
 have been one long parting. But we never thought of the parting. 
 We were perfectly happy and perfectly careless. Perhaps un- 
 consciously we did not believe in its reality. On the night of the 
 last day I was suddenly convinced that it could not be real. It 
 was absurd to think that Margaret intended to marry another 
 man, and that I was tamely acquiescing in the folly. 
 
 We had started after tea for the moors. It was late when we 
 reached the narrow lane that climbed up from the valley to the 
 moor edge. We stumbled over loose stones, and caught our feet 
 in the brambles that stretched out from the hedges. The thin 
 scent of the honeysuckle fled before us through the darkness. 
 The warm night pressed on us. I lifted a branch from Margaret's 
 way, and a shower of cool drops fell on my hair. The wild roses 
 slipped past like ghosts of flowers that had swooned in the
 
 THE EIKONOKLASTS: A SCHEME 199 
 
 heavy air. We splashed into a little stream that ran across the 
 road. 
 
 At the top of the lane I swung open the wide gate and we 
 walked over the marshy ground. Reeds, and young bracken, 
 and then the heather. We disturbed peewits. They rose, wheel- 
 ing and screaming away from us. On the slope of the first rise we 
 sat down. The sky sprang away on either side. A faint luminous 
 light, infinitely remote, hung above the hill where the languid 
 crescent moon lay on her back. 
 
 I sat very still. Margaret drew me down so that I rested in 
 her arms, but after a while I could not endure it. 
 
 *' Don't you see now that you can't do this thing? You can't 
 make me give you up. You dare n't." 
 
 " Ah," she said, " don't. Don't spoil it, Joy. It was to be our 
 week. Don't go letting in reality now." 
 
 " This is reality," I said. " The other was madness wicked- 
 ness. How can you ? " My voice rose. " How can you go 
 
 to another man you that have lain in my arms these days? " 
 
 I had an unhappy sense that I was making my protest as of 
 duty bound. I must protest for my pride's sake. 
 
 Margaret took my hand in hers. She spoke quickly. 
 
 " See. I love you as I never knew it possible to love. I would 
 give the rest of my life to cut out the past years to be free. 
 I would give it gladly. If you will now, you can force me to say 
 that I cannot let you go. I should cry out and cling to you. 
 And to-morrow I should break my word to you and go back 
 to the other." 
 
 " And what if you can't bear it, Margaret? What if you find 
 the other intolerable? " 
 
 " I can bear it," she said quickly. " You don't understand me. 
 Don't think I sha'n't regret. I shall regret and suffer. I shall 
 want you. I shall want to die. But I shall neither die nor come 
 to you. There is something stolid in me something deep down 
 and stolid as a rock. I can bear anything." 
 
 "Why should you bear it? Why set yourself to bear grie 
 
 and parting? " . , 
 
 "I can bear those things," she repeated. "But I could nt 
 bear the other kind of regret. The sense of of betrayal and
 
 200 THE HAPPY HIGHWAYS 
 
 weakness. A light woman, taking one love and then another. 
 The idea offends me as an ugly picture might. It 's nothing to do 
 with the moral rubbish. It 's just that I feel able to bear the one 
 misery but not the other. Ah, you don't understand. I don't 
 understand. I only feel. And there is pity, my pity for Keith." 
 
 She turned to me with a little cry. I would not look at her. 
 
 " Do you remember the end of that story of Tolstoy's," I said 
 slowly, " where he repeats that the sin is in the eyes? Whosoever 
 looketh on a woman to lust after her . . ." 
 
 Her face burned. 
 
 "Haven't we sinned?" I went on harshly. "What does it 
 matter that we 've stopped short of technical adultery? In your 
 thoughts have n't you been just what you say you cannot be? 
 It 's the spirit that matters. You 're exalting the body above the 
 spirit . . ." 
 
 She stumbled over her words. " No it is not so. To say 
 that the sin is in the eyes is an overstrained sentiment. It 's 
 not so. It does matter that the body is withheld. It matters 
 everything. Body is personality as much as is spirit. And I can 
 control my body. A wanton spirit is harder to control, but it 
 need n't mean a wanton body " 
 
 She broke off with a short, distressed laugh. " What is the use 
 of talking ethics, Joy? This has nothing to do with ethics. It is 
 a matter of feeling. What I feel another may not and feeling 
 is the guide. I do what I must. This is our week. Let us have 
 it. Afterwards when I am married dignity, if nothing else, 
 will keep us apart. We cannot be forever clutching at each 
 other round corners. Just for this week we are free to love as 
 much as we may. After all," she smiled wryly, " if Keith could 
 be consulted, he would assuredly prefer a faithless spirit in a 
 faithful body to complete and irrevocable betrayal." 
 
 And while I felt still that I should make a scene and call upon 
 the indignant heavens to witness her folly, I knew the futility 
 of protestation. I had come to something in Margaret that I 
 could neither move nor alter. I might for a while carry her 
 with me, but as surely as ever I knew anything, I knew that 
 I could not keep her. I should have to let her go.
 
 THE EIKONOKLASTS: A SCHEME 201 
 
 " After all, a bargain 's a bargain," she whispered. I saw her 
 quick smile. 
 
 I put my head down on her knees, and let the anguish sweep 
 over me. 
 
 We did not go home that night, but slept in the shelter of an 
 old quarry. Margaret slept in my arms. I woke and stared at 
 the paling sky through the sparse branches of a mountain ash. 
 " My sweet," I whispered. " My wife." She woke with my 
 lips oh hers. In that moment we knew the bitterness of death. 
 
 Early in September we gave that preposterous Eikonoklast 
 dinner. A week later, Margaret and Keith Ainslie were married. 
 Keith had come up to London to manage in an aeroplane factory 
 that his firm had just built. He and Margaret went to live at 
 Purley. Margaret came every day to the Reading Room and the 
 Hammersmith classes. Sometimes she came to Herne Hill, and 
 worked with Oliver and Anthony, but only when she knew I 
 should not be there. We avoided each other. In some in- 
 definable way her marriage had destroyed our self-confidence. 
 We distrusted ourselves and our capacity to take up the old, 
 careless intimacy.
 
 BOOK III 
 CHAOS
 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 autumn of 1913 brought more changes in our household 
 _ than Margaret's marriage. I had my scholarship extended 
 for a further year, and Oliver bowed his proud spirit to teach 
 English and the lower kind of classics in a Dulwich school. He 
 got on with the work better than I expected, managing somehow to 
 keep it in a compartment of his brain that could be barred and 
 bolted every day at five o'clock. It may have been bad pedagogy 
 but it was sound sense in an age when pedagogy is no profession 
 for a decent man. Anthony's plans went all awry. He did not 
 get the expected post in an agricultural college in spite of 
 recommendations from three professors. The post went to the 
 needy relative of a Bradford millowner whose endowments were 
 worth a good deal more to the college than professional pro- 
 testations. James Calvert wrote a bitterly playful letter offering 
 him work on the farm. Before Anthony could compose a refusal 
 to his liking Keith Ainslie invited him to come into the aeroplane 
 factory. His uncle had, he said, given him something of a free 
 hand in the choice of departmental managers. He urged Anthony 
 to accept the offer. " We could train you as a tester of machines," 
 he said: "if you care for that sort of thing. We are all be- 
 ginning, you see. Now is the time to come into these things." 
 Anthony had no hesitation. He accepted, and sent a jubilant 
 letter home. 
 
 " The old man could never resist success," he said. " You 
 see: he '11 begin to assure my mother that I 'm not so bad as he 
 feared." 
 
 Alas for youthful charity. The letter his father returned 
 began " Can it be possible that of your own free will you have 
 entered upon the most fatal of occupations? Where was your 
 conscience, where the training of your devoted mother, when you 
 elected to fling away all the years of an expensive education to 
 enroll yourself with the fools and evil livers who pursue such 
 
 205
 
 206 , THE HAPPY HIGHWAYS 
 
 dangerous careers? Believe me, there is neither honesty, worth, 
 nor money in the life you have chosen. I should be glad if you 
 would return to me the gladstone bag I loaned you. If a merciful 
 God permits you to live long enough to rue your follies I shall 
 be glad to let you have it again. Meanwhile, prepare to meet 
 thy God Your loving father, J. Calvert." 
 
 To this letter Anthony made no reply. Three months later 
 a scrawl from his brother David sent him flying north. His 
 father was dying, and his mother, to punish Anthony's un- 
 dutiful silence, had determined to withhold all news until her 
 husband was dead and buried. A week later Anthony returned. 
 He said nothing of his journey until Oliver asked awkwardly 
 " How is your father? " Anthony seemed to rouse himself 
 from a dull dream. " The old man? Oh, he 's off." 
 
 " Off? " I repeated. " Off where? " 
 
 " Dead." 
 
 It was several days later when he told us that his father had 
 refused to see him. " He would not set eyes on me unless I 
 promised to give up the work at the factory. So I never saw 
 him." He added " There 's something about the old people 
 that there isn't about us. Something hard and stable, I mean. 
 Something we're none the better for losing. I can't imagine 
 David, for instance, or myself, running that farm as my father 
 has run it for sixty years, in good years and bad, extending 
 it and bettering it every year. For it 's a hard farm with the 
 moor hanging about all the upper fields. I suppose I shall 
 have to go back to it but not yet I can't go yet." 
 
 Anthony went oftener than any of us to the house at Purley. 
 He stayed on in Herne Hill and bought a motor-cycle to take 
 him to his work. Keith Ainslie liked him rather more than 
 he disliked the rest of us. His smooth manners deceived Keith: 
 they deceived other people who did not live with Anthony. 
 Keith believed him to be free of the conceit that raged in the 
 Hearne clan: he clung rather pathetically to the idea that among 
 all Margaret's unhappy choice of friends, Anthony, the only 
 reputable one, was also the one who appreciated Margaret's 
 husband. 
 
 Oliver and I went down to Purley for odd week-ends. It
 
 CHAOS 207 
 
 came upon me with something of shock that Keith was pain- 
 fully jealous of Oliver. The boy allowed his dislike of Keith to 
 be so childishly clear that an older man would have laughed at 
 it. Keith did not laugh. He quarreled with Oliver: he even 
 came to Herne Hill with no apparent purpose but to continue 
 their senseless disputes. Mutual jealousy drove them into each 
 other's company. Keith was given to fits of irritability and at 
 these times his hatred of Oliver obsessed him. He would sit 
 for an hour staring at Margaret and Oliver with eyes devoid of 
 expression. Up to the very last, Margaret did not seem to 
 realize the depth of this feeling. She ignored his ill-temper, and 
 never guessed at the suspicions that inflamed it. I remember 
 an incident that might have warned her. It occurred during the 
 performance at some theater or other where she and Oliver spent 
 the time between the acts on the syllabus of her Sunday lectures. 
 During the long interval Keith got up sullenly to make a telephone 
 call and I followed, with a vague idea of lightening his gloom. 
 Coming back, he stopped abruptly in the aisle. My eyes followed 
 the glance of his. Oliver's arm was flung along the back of 
 Margaret's seat as they bent together over their scraps of paper. 
 He looked up, saw us staring at him, and stooped his head to 
 Margaret's with a half-deliberate air of possession. Keith sat 
 throughout the rest of the evening in a speechless rage. His wife 
 passed over his discourtesies as if he had been a fretful child. 
 I had a moment of sympathy for him. 
 
 The moment recurred at odd times during the next few months. 
 I do not believe that Keith had many days of untroubled happiness 
 in his marriage. He must have come to loathe the sight of us. 
 He was sensitive enough to feel the want of sympathy between 
 himself and Margaret, and we were associated in his mind with 
 everything that he blamed for the subtle difference in her. He 
 burned to take her away from us, away from all memory of her 
 Herne Hill life. If he could do that, she would be his again as 
 in the first days of their love. He resented her absorption in our 
 work at Hammersmith. It made it necessary for her to see us 
 every day. And since he could not accuse her of neglecting him 
 Margaret too plainly put him and his comfort before every 
 other interest he fell to ridiculing the Scheme. He accused
 
 208 THE HAPPY HIGHWAYS 
 
 us of intellectual slumming. The accusation may or may not 
 have been true, but it was made in bad faith. 
 
 I gave up going to Purley and kept Oliver away as much as 
 possible. 
 
 And yet Keith Ainslie made his own unhappiness. I do 
 verily believe that if he had not added jealousy to a naturally 
 moody disposition, he would have made a success of his marriage: 
 so ready is mortal man to accept the second best. Margaret 
 loved him with a tenderness that had no part in her love for me. 
 She bore with his moods and cared for him unwearyingly. If 
 she had guessed at his jealousy I think she would have thrown 
 Oliver overboard without the least compunction. To save Keith 
 pain became something of a passion with her. 
 
 He had, indeed, an appealing charm. I felt it myself. I do 
 not mean the phrase to imply the least suggestion of weakness. 
 He had practical skill and a genius for management. He made 
 friends easily and kept them. I do not think he was very easy 
 to live with: he had his full share of the obstinate suspicious 
 temper that is often the underside of a sensitive personality. 
 He could love his wife and suspect her good faith at the same 
 time and with the same fervor. This alliance of emotions seems 
 to hold an essential place in every decent and sanctified home: 
 and few of the sanctified decencies had been omitted in the 
 training of Keith Ainslie. 
 
 Margaret's upbringing had ill-fitted her to cope with them. 
 An orthodox home life might have taught her to recognize their 
 presence in Keith's moody tempers. The very tenderness that 
 she lavished on him aggravated his fears. He felt, I think, 
 that she would not be so tender if she were not conscious of 
 having taken from him her early passionate love. He was just 
 fine enough to regret its loss and not so fine that he could take 
 with an honest faith what she could honestly give. 
 
 Margaret would have been happy enough in her marriage. 
 I suppose she had her moments of wretchedness and longing. 
 I know that she had. We were left alone one day in our sitting- 
 room at Herne Hill. She stood looking out of the window for a 
 minute or two. Then turning abruptly, she made a step towards 
 me. " Joy," she whispered, w Joy," Her voice was hardly
 
 CHAOS 209 
 
 audible and she put her hand to her throat as if the word hurt 
 her. The blood sang in my head. We looked at each other. I 
 should have had her in my arms. The smell of the moors struck 
 across my senses with the sharpness of a blow. It tore at my 
 heart. I held out my arms. Abruptly she evaded me, and the 
 door shut behind her. 
 
 Oh, we suffered. No doubt but that something had gone out 
 of our lives, something fine and to be desired. And yet the 
 heart of our lives was not gone, and in our sane moments we 
 knew that. We had left to us the most precious things, work, 
 youth, and friendship. Men have wrecked their lives for a 
 lesser love than ours. And yet we could never, outside brief 
 intolerable moments, doubt that, losing each other, we had still 
 the noblest part of our heritage. I do not know why this should 
 be so. It was not so because our love was a little thing. 
 
 Friendship is an emotion finer and sweeter than the greatest 
 love in fable and romance. I did not console myself with this 
 reflection. Consolation would have been futile sometimes and 
 the rest of the time unnecessary. But I knew it to be true. 
 
 The queer fact of woman's hopeless tendency to mix up sex 
 and friendship, or friendship and her domineering instinct, must 
 be taken into account when we consider the growing freedom 
 of intercourse between men and women. If you are to teach 
 that liberty is good, good as means or end; if you are to have 
 women sharing in every activity of life, you must face the 
 certainty of tremendous changes in the whole view-point on 
 sex relations. You have, indeed, one aspect of the change already 
 in the outcrop of agglutinous philosophies of free love and 
 matriarchal revivalism. 
 
 It is, after all, not so easy to slough off the puritan reverence 
 for words that can make our bowels turn to water at the mere 
 flourish of phrases about chastity and license. And yet it must 
 be done, if we are ever to be free men again in a commonwealth 
 of real things. If an enforced chastity is no chastity at all, 
 neither is a spineless indulgence of every stray desire to be swollen 
 by the title of license. License, after all, implies an exercise 
 of will, even if it be an ill will. 
 
 No doubt of the coming change. And since the world cannot
 
 210 THE HAPPY HIGHWAYS 
 
 be pushed back either to a joyous paganism, or to a joyless purity 
 fostered and shaped by the cat o' nine tails, it must even go on 
 its way. 
 
 Where does the way lead? Perhaps you are assured that it 
 goes straight to hell, and you try to waft it back with much 
 fluttering of lawn sleeves and petitions against divorce. Inasmuch 
 as you are doing what you must, I can only wonder and smile 
 a respectful smile. But if you have not an assurance of your 
 unlimited right and ability to interfere in men's lives and the 
 striving of their minds, if you are only a perplexed mortal with 
 no assurance of a divine ordinance to be infallibly impertinent, 
 you will have at least a show of patience with my uncertainties. 
 
 I think it almost certain that in the immediate future, feeling 
 will be taken more and more for guide in the conflicts that arise 
 between wish and tradition. The arbitrary inhibitions have no 
 longer a secure hold on minds. On those minds, I mean, that 
 are not partakers in the divine infallibility. Common men 
 like ourselves go looking within to our own half-realized desires 
 for understanding and assurance. The old dogs of " shall not " 
 are no longer to be whistled up. The striving mind goes fum- 
 bling and groping past them for less blind guides of conduct. 
 
 Ho, infallible ones, a word in your ear. 
 
 How if you were to drop the cat o' nine tails and set out with 
 the searching mind? Its first steps into freedom will be dan- 
 gerous, may easily be fatal. 
 
 I feel that somewhere in this question of the friendships of men 
 and women lies the clue that will unravel a good many bewilder- 
 ments. And I feel also that the possibility of such friendship is 
 rooted in a subtler and bolder self-knowledge. We go astray 
 because of confused and unrecognized desires. We desire one 
 thing and in our fumbling ignorance achieve another, and wonder 
 at our dissatisfaction and unrest. It looks, on the face of it, as if 
 Margaret and I had made the usual failure of our friendship. 
 And yet I believe I have an answer to that if I could but get it 
 into words. Margaret had at least two other close friends 
 among the men we knew, bound to her by a long untroubled 
 intimacy. She had a capacity for friendship that seemed to 
 spring from the double root of her intellectual self-confidence
 
 CHAOS 211 
 
 and her single-mindedness. She neither mothered nor intrigued 
 men. For the matter of that she certainly did not " mother " 
 or make love to me. We found it quite possible nay, quite 
 natural and easy to maintain a serene friendship alongside 
 our passionate love. It was the love and never the friendship 
 that took on the appearance of an episode, an accidental, ob- 
 trusive thing. 
 
 I cannot explain why it should be so. I only know that it is. 
 
 My mind returns again and again to this, as if it were the 
 significant thing. Is it possible that the future will explain 
 it and be explained through it? We may, I mean, leave behind 
 us the fierce possessive hunger that consumed Keith Ainslie's 
 happiness and wrecked his life. The whole romantic structure 
 of passionate love may come in our eyes to take up a position 
 of subsidiary importance. I believe that it is indeed subsidiary. 
 Only we cannot see it undistorted because it is mixed up with so 
 many other things that we passionately desire beauty, adven- 
 ture, companionship, sympathy. 
 
 We have to get things sorted into their places. 
 
 Much that is confused will be clear, much that is inaccessible 
 must be accessible, before that which a man wishes is at the same 
 time his and the world's surest guide. 
 
 In the meantime, is it conceivable that the race will wait on 
 the flutterings of the infallible or stand still until freedom is 
 taught in continuation classes?
 
 CHAPTER II 
 
 EARLY in the following year I had a letter from Mick. He 
 wrote from an island in the Danish West Indies where he 
 was putting in a month's holiday with a man he had met in St. 
 Vincent. He sang his host's praises with the fervor of two 
 months' acquaintanceship. 
 
 " Mayo 's a fine fellow. You 'd take him to your heart. He 
 is the son of an Englishman, and his father had him sent to 
 Edinburgh. His mother died off before she 'd had time to get 
 fat and horrible: all these native beauties get fat. So Mayo's 
 father kept a kind of romantic affection for her. When he went 
 back home and married, he did n't forget Mayo, who by the way, 
 looks more English than I do. He left him half his cotton land, 
 and Mayo 's one of the most successful planters hereabouts. He 
 keeps ten dogs, a gramophone with a magnificent collection of 
 'cello records, and a cook who is also his mistress. I don't know 
 anything about her other qualifications, but she 's a real cook. 
 Mayo knows more about modern European literature than we 
 know about English. Also he has a lovely wit. The society 
 what there is of society round here is hierarchical down to its 
 toe nails, and the ladies look a bit askance at Mayo. The Danish 
 Governor, a half-educated old wine-vat, is very fond of him, 
 except when his wife has been telling him he ought to have more 
 respect for the imperishable glories of civilization than to hobnob 
 with half-castes born in sin. Then he joggles up his languishing 
 ideals, forgets all about his stray sixty-six children, and squints 
 round his nose at Mayo. Mayo just waits until the poor old fool 
 has to come sneaking round for help with his correspondence, and 
 then he makes him listen to a long tale of Britain's glorious 
 supremacy before he '11 lift a finger for him. The Governor 
 hates Britain: he squirms and gobbles and gets congested about 
 the gills. Yesterday he rashly remarked that the English lan- 
 guage was corrupted Danish: that is actually what these daft oits 
 
 212
 
 CHAOS 213 
 
 here believe. Mayo turned his back and said nothing. The 
 Governor, to mollify him, began talking about Shakespeare, what 
 a great dramatist he was and his poetry and so on. 'Poor 
 devil,' said Mayo, ' he had to write in corrupt Danish.' " 
 
 Much of the letter was filled with Mick's thanksgiving that he 
 was out of England. 
 
 " I shall never come back. I should suffocate or take to 
 strangling parish councilors for fun. That 's what England is 
 a distended parish council. You Ve got no sense of proportion. 
 You can't see that the future of England is already settled 
 doesn't matter. The countries that matter are Eastern Asia 
 expanding into Siberia Australia, and America. The Pacific 
 and not the Atlantic matters now." 
 
 I had written him that I saw nothing at the end of my second 
 year of research but an assistant mastership in some public school. 
 Mick was relentlessly opposed to such a dead-alive life. 'He 
 argued about it. " You 've a lot of brain, but whether you '11 
 land on your feet as the servant of any one else I doubt. Like 
 all our family you have a rasping tongue, and how you '11 get on 
 with any headmaster God only knows. Look here, give up this 
 fooling round in London and come abroad. I am willing to go 
 anywhere you like. Think about it, Joy. I know what I 'm 
 saying. There 's plenty to do out here when you know your way 
 about. Why, Mayo would take us in with him if only to have 
 a little decent society. But I '11 do anything you like if you '11 
 only come." 
 
 I put the letter aside. The more I thought of it, the more 
 attracted was I by the notion. No doubt I should have fallen 
 in with it. I did, indeed, warn my mother that I might go. And 
 I told Margaret, for the poor pleasure of seeing her eyes darken 
 and her mouth twist. 
 
 I was at home when Mick's letter came. And while I sat 
 reading it on the windy cliffs, chance in London had already 
 prepared the first of a tale of happenings that, before ever the 
 war scattered the poor last of them, had made an end of nearly 
 all my plans. 
 
 Oliver and Anthony had stayed in town through the Christmas 
 vacation. We were expecting them to spend its last week with
 
 214 THE HAPPY HIGHWAYS 
 
 us. The Saturday when they should have come passed without 
 them, and on Monday night Oliver came alone. Anthony had 
 hurried to the farm with his brother's warning letter in his pocket. 
 Oliver was shortly explanatory. Margaret, he said, had stayed 
 the past week in Herne Hill. She and Kersent were drawing up 
 our next term's syllabus for all the classes except those in 
 biology. Keith, called hurriedly to Scotland, had agreed that it 
 would be easier for her to stay in London for a few days and 
 work without interruption. With reluctance he agreed also that 
 she might as well give herself the pleasure of staying with her 
 friends. 
 
 " Pretend you 're a free sprite if you must," he said. " If 
 that 's the sort of life you like." 
 
 So she came one Monday and on the following Saturday morn- 
 ing made her farewells to Oliver and Anthony over an early 
 breakfast. She was going back to Purley that afternoon and there 
 were still things to be settled. Ten minutes after she left the 
 house the post brought the news of James Calvert's illness. An- 
 thony hurried away to catch the morning train north. 
 
 Oliver hated to have his plans upset. If things failed to 
 happen as he expected he shut himself up in a sullen lethargy 
 and did nothing at all. After Anthony had gone he idled about 
 the house until it was too late to reach King's Cross for the 
 afternoon train. He decided to travel by the night mail. In 
 the evening a whim took him to the Elephant and Castle Theater. 
 There he sat for the better part of an hour, reveling in low 
 and rustic emotions, until it was borne in upon him that he could 
 not bear to leave London. He was very tired: he left the 
 theater before the hero had fully recovered from his first-act 
 downfall and returning to Herne Hill, went straight to bed. 
 Margaret walked into the house an hour later. She and Kersent 
 had worked on until late in the evening. It was not too late 
 for Margaret to go down to Purley, but she shrank from arriving 
 at that time of the night in an empty, fireless house. She had 
 sent the servants away for a week's holiday and neither of them 
 would be back until Monday. She made her way to Herne Hill 
 therefore. To May Rutherford, daughter of the house, she 
 apologized for presenting herself without warning and at such
 
 CHAOS 215 
 
 an hour. "I'm afraid you'll be annoyed with me," she said. 
 " Just when you thought you 'd got rid of the lot of us." The 
 girl looked at her and seemed about to speak. She said nothing, 
 however, and went up to bed, leaving Margaret in the chilly 
 sitting-room. Margaret read in a haphazard way until after 
 midnight and then herself went softly upstairs. 
 
 In the morning she breakfasted alone. An hour later Oliver 
 opened the door and stood staring at her. 
 
 "Margaret!" 
 
 " Why, I thought you 'd gone north." 
 
 Oliver began explanations. May appeared in the doorway 
 and Margaret turned to her. "You never told me Mr. Hearne 
 was still here." 
 
 The girl laughed and spoke amazingly. " There 's none so 
 deaf as those that won't hear," she said, and vanished into the 
 kitchen. The other two looked at each other. 
 
 "Touch of the sun," Oliver suggested. 
 
 " In January? " 
 
 Margaret puzzled over the incident for a few minutes and 
 then forgot it. After lunch she went down to Purley. Oliver 
 left Herne Hill with her. He intended to travel at night, but 
 in the end spent the night wandering round London and did not 
 go north until the following morning. 
 
 The queer episode of May Rutherford stuck in my mind long 
 after Oliver's casual recital. "What do you suppose she 
 meant? " I asked him. 
 
 "Oh, I don't know," he said indifferently. "Don't suppose 
 she meant anything. She always was rather insane." 
 
 " She 's had a grudge against Margaret ever since that night." 
 
 Oliver stared. "What do you mean, a grudge? What has 
 Margaret to do with the wench and her adventures? " 
 
 " I did n't think of it until this minute," I said vaguely. 
 
 My mind had suddenly flung new light across a piece of ancient 
 history. I imagined that I had always seen it thus. As a matter 
 of fact, the thing had never come into my mind in just that way 
 before. I went back to an evening in the winter before Mick 
 left England. We were sitting round the fire after dinner. The 
 rain rattled on the windows and bubbled up between the sashes.
 
 216 THE HAPPY HIGHWAYS 
 
 Anthony at the piano made wonderful minor poetry of Debussy. 
 A loud wailing came from the back of the house. We listened 
 with an uneasy annoyance. The wailing ended in quite un- 
 natural screams. Mick danced with nervousness: he stood first 
 on one leg and then the other. " We ought to interfere," he 
 said. " Should we interfere, do you think? " 
 
 Before we could decide on so nice a point the door was violently 
 opened, and our landlady stood on the threshold. The screams 
 must have been hers. She tore at the neck of her dress and 
 clutched her hair. We had never suspected her of Shakespearian 
 tendencies. Mick, who had been just inside the door, staggered 
 back. She took no notice of him and the scene passed rapidly 
 through farce to rank lunacy. Somehow we were all in the 
 kitchen. Whether she took us by the hair and dragged us there 
 I do not now remember. I do remember the small room and 
 the circle of lamplight on the middle of the table. A young 
 man stood in the shadows by the fireplace. Rain was pouring 
 off the rim of his hat and his clothes were soaked. He was thin 
 and sallow: he shivered and stared sullenly at us. An untidy 
 clothesheap on the floor moved and was Mrs. Rutherford's daugh- 
 ter. May waited on us. She was a plump, unwholesome damsel 
 with a fathomless appetite for low tales. She left a trail of lurid- 
 backed books all over the house: they were pushed under mat- 
 tresses and fell unexpectedly out of boot cupboards. She haunted 
 our bedrooms at dusk with a duster and the worst intentions. 
 Finally she neglected us. 
 
 Mrs. Rutherford was soaring untrammelled in an ecstasy of 
 adjectives. We gathered incredulously that we were called in 
 judgment on the soaked young man. He had stolen her one ewe 
 lamb: he had defied the world and mocked at God: he had se- 
 duced May, and now was showing a wanton reluctance to feeding, 
 housing, and clothing her for the rest of her life. We were 
 public opinion, thrust incontinent in his downcast face. 
 
 We tried wretchedly to escape. I had the utmost sympathy 
 for the young man. I heard Anthony murmuring, " You know, 
 really, Mrs. Rutherford, what can we do? I mean, it 's a family 
 matter, isn't it?" Margaret edged quietly towards the door. 
 Somehow we got ourselves out of the room, leaving Mick in-
 
 CHAOS 217 
 
 volved with Mrs. Rutherford in an incredible discussion of 
 eugenics. It raged for an hour while the youthful seducer grew 
 more and more sullen and finally fled past our door, uttering 
 dishonorable accusations. "There, but for the grace of God 
 . . ." Anthony began softly. 
 
 I suppose the two women had worked up the scene between 
 them. I do not know how matters arranged themselves. May 
 was not married. She lived on at home, growing more and more 
 lethargic, and read the novels of Mr. Bennett to develop her 
 intellect. We forgot the fantastic scene in the kitchen. As I 
 thought of it now I was reminded of the look on May Ruther- 
 ford's face when Margaret slipped out of the room. It had been 
 malevolent. At the time I had hardly given it a second's thought. 
 It presented itself to me now as the most livid incident in the 
 whole preposterous scene. I tried to fit it in with the girl's 
 senseless insolence. " There 's none so deaf as those ..." I 
 decided at last that her mishaps had cracked her brain.
 
 CHAPTER III 
 
 npHROUGHOUT the early months of 1914 our classes went 
 _L merrily on. Kersent gave less and less help. At last he 
 could do nothing for us. He was working through his second year 
 as a research student. He worked all day and half the night. 
 When at odd times he came to our rooms for an hour's rest, he 
 could neither talk nor listen. He sat in his chair and stared in 
 front of him with a desperate expectant look in his eyes. He 
 hated music. When Anthony played he got up and went away. 
 " Play on your damned piano if you like it," he said, " but keep 
 your fingers off me. I 'm not a keyboard." Once Anthony per- 
 suaded him to stay and then began a series of queer discords. 
 Kersent was transformed. He screamed and shook his fists at 
 Anthony. "You make me mad," he shouted. " I can't bear it: 
 you make me mad." 
 
 Afterwards he apologized in his half-mocking, half-diffident 
 way. " God help me," he said. " I must have been a bear 
 on a chain and danced to a fiddle in my last incarnation. I 
 do so loathe the noises men make. Music! Shall I tell you 
 what music is? You Ve tied a tin can on to your emotions 
 and persuaded yourself that its antics amuse you." 
 
 We could not get him to see his urgent need of rest. " I '11 
 rest next year," he promised. " Next year I shall be will 
 you believe it? lecturer in Philosophy in my own college. 
 Chadding has said it. I '11 take it easy for a year. I don't want 
 to die not just yet. There's things I've got to get out and 
 written down. One of these days there '11 be a brass plate on a 
 filthy Walthamstow court. * Here was born Henry Arthur Ker- 
 sent, Doctor of Philosophy,' with the name of my magnum opus, 
 and a verse or so. ' Breathes there a man with soul so dead, 
 Who never to himself has said, In hovel born, in gutter bred, 
 Long live the slum from which I fled.' " He pushed back his 
 untidy hair. " I shall climb on the heads of my fellows," he 
 
 218
 
 CHAOS 219 
 
 said, " a ghost from the land of the dead. Maybe I shall dine at 
 rich men's tables. I should n't wonder if I put my knife in my 
 mouth and wiped my nose on my napkin." 
 
 I worked doubly hard to make up for his involuntary defec- 
 tion. Now that I had almost decided to follow Mick, my own 
 research work seemed less important. I did enough at it to 
 satisfy my masters, but more and more I withdrew my living 
 interest from it. In spite of a certain relief that the prospect of 
 release gave me, I began to stagger under the double weight. 
 Headaches tormented me. I had to drive myself to get on with 
 lectures and study courses, driven as I was by the urgent crying 
 hunger of the men who came to learn of us, poor learners our- 
 selves. Work accumulated about me. The thought of it followed 
 me into my dreams. Sometimes even I could not work for that 
 sense of the dreadful goading need to hasten that was on me. 
 
 And as if we had not enough to do, Oliver suggested that 
 we wrote our own textbooks. The idea took hold upon me 
 until I began at last to feel that it must be carried out. It was a 
 bur that fastened on my unrest. I lay sleepless in bed composing 
 passages of a preliminary textbook of biology. The want of 
 suitable books had always hampered us. Our needs were pe- 
 culiar. We had to deal with men who were at one and the same 
 time ignorant and learned. Before young Donnel came to us he 
 had read voraciously in biological works, out-of-date and mod- 
 ern, all were alike to him. And he could not get his ideas and 
 his knowledge into the spoken or written word with half the ease 
 of a child of ten bred in a decent home. I was constantly amazed 
 at the extent of his knowledge of odd things, and as constantly 
 at the depths of his ignorance of common ones. His was a 
 normal type of mind among our students. We wanted special 
 books for their special needs. I began to think that with a 
 little correlating, revising and extending, the courses we had 
 worked through with them would make excellent textbooks for 
 new students. Not only biology and science generally, but 
 literature and all of the arts subjects could be arranged for in 
 the same way. The others had had just the same trouble as I 
 with the standard books. 
 
 We set to work. Kersent undertook a history of Greek phil-
 
 220 THE HAPPY HIGHWAYS 
 
 osophy that would give explanations of many things taken for 
 granted in all but the most elementary books, and answer ques- 
 tions asked and answered in the more abstruse. The men who 
 came to us wanted the little explanations and the abstruse answers 
 at one and same time. Margaret started a brief comparative 
 history of literature that should not be crammed with dates and 
 names. Oliver and Anthony helped her. I began with the bio- 
 logical textbook of my imagination. I meant to go on to 
 geology and psychology next. 
 
 A fury of work possessed me. I worked like a man im- 
 prisoned in a fallen tunnel, delving frenziedly at the earth. 
 Work was my food and sleep and the air I breathed. I felt an 
 unnatural inspiration. I wrote at night until I was worn out 
 and refreshed myself by writing again. Never before nor since 
 then have I been able to write like that. The worker bee is 
 supposed to work itself to death in quite a short time. It is a 
 perfection of the communal ideal which I cannot admire. I was 
 none the less imitating it to the best of my ability. A streak 
 of madness must have showed itself in me. I took to work 
 as my grandfather took to destruction and perhaps in much the 
 same frame of mind. 
 
 In March two of our books were printing. Margaret's uncle 
 lent her the money for the initial cost. We meant to sell the 
 books at cost price, and pay him back so, bit by bit. 
 
 One maggot begets another. We were bubbling over with the 
 things we wanted to say and could not fit into textbooks. Pearls 
 of wisdom were being lost to the swine because we were not able 
 to cast to them. We conceived " The Dawn." The mental effort 
 that produced the remarkable title carried us on to the poster 
 that advertised it. Streaks of red in a neutral sky and an un- 
 couth man with a pickax rising from the ground: the light 
 shone on his lifted hand. We painted it ourselves on wrapping 
 paper and pasted it on friendly house walls and palings. I saw 
 one of our posters after a rain storm. It looked like a civil war. 
 After that we displayed it on boards slung on the shoulders of 
 amateur sandwichmen. I took my odd holidays between boards. 
 
 I wrote a good deal of " The Dawn " myself. It had four 
 pages. As educators ourselves, we had much to say on the
 
 CHAOS 221 
 
 question of education. We had also a page of Eikonoklast notes 
 in which we were ironically severe with well-known politicians 
 and editors. We printed a poem or two of Oliver's in each 
 number. " You 'd better keep your copies," he said. " I sha'n't 
 have those poems reprinted. One of these days an old paper 
 with them in will be worth a lot of money." 
 
 But we were most concerned with education. We tried to set 
 ajar doors through which workers would get a glimpse of the 
 things they missed because their eyes and ears and minds had not 
 been opened to them. The old Roman wine was not for them; 
 nor Egyptian magic, nor the morning song of Greece, nor medie- 
 val glamour. They were men living in the cellars of a palace 
 more wonderful than any built in Babylon, poor blind things 
 that never saw the sun. 
 
 We printed "The Dawn" ourselves. Just ten numbers of 
 it appeared at irregular intervals. We had the free use of a 
 printing press that was owned by a handful of cranks with a 
 passion for seeing themselves in type. They had money, and 
 wanted men to think like gods and eat like monkeys. These 
 things marked their difference from ourselves. 
 
 There were two compositors among our students. One of 
 them undertook to set up the type and supervise the whole work. 
 The rest of us helped him to the best of our ability. We wrought 
 at night after our classes were over. Our compositor was a cheer- 
 ful little man with an incorrigibly faithless wife. As he worked 
 he told us of her whims. He read aloud from the proof in front 
 of him. " What is to be expected . . . She came back again last 
 night . . . of a class of sixty children ... I opened the door and 
 there she stood .. . . drilled into automatic obedience ... it was 
 pouring with rain. She was soaked through . . . but that they 
 will be trained to respond . . . * You 'd better come in,' I said 
 . . . to any mob cry ... So she came in and sat down. . . . 
 We have been a race of adventurers . . . * You Ve let them 
 brasses get awful,' she says . . . We are still adventurers . . . 
 Next minute she was down on her knees polishing at 'em with a 
 bit of rag . . . but you are quenching that flame . . . Soon 's 
 she 'd finished, * Now let 's have supper,' she says. * I 'm starv- 
 ing.' She opens the cupboard. ' Humph, you 've been doing
 
 222 THE HAPPY HIGHWAYS 
 
 yourself well. Cheese and sardines, and what's that butter? 
 You ain't missed me much ! ' ' Well, my dear,' says I, ' you been 
 off and then come back to your deserted hearthstone five times 
 now. You can't expect me to miss you with the same anguish 
 I used to. I was always one to suit myself to my surroundings.' 
 She took me up sharp. * Seems I shall have to stay at home.' " 
 
 My memories of " The Dawn " and its joyous enthusiasms are 
 all mixed up with the smell of the warm damp cellar and the 
 amours of the compositor's wife. She was a spry, lively woman, 
 her husband said, and a pleasure to have about the house. When 
 she was about the house. He said that he always knew when she 
 was getting unsettled because she mended up all his socks, and 
 baked a supply of bread and pies. She did n't want to have 
 strange women messing up her things when she was away. 
 
 " The Dawn " was the only part of our work that gave us pure 
 delight. Whether it is right to gratify one's partialities at the 
 public cost I do not know. But it is a practice not confined to 
 the editors of revolutionary flit-by-nights, nor indeed to editors. 
 
 We sold " The Dawn " at street corners, and outside theaters 
 and public-houses. With unappreciated generosity we presented 
 a copy to every socialist branch in London. We crept about 
 streets at night and shot copies through the letter boxes of drab 
 houses. We paraded the Strand and the streets round the Bank 
 and sold to the beautiful young men who crowded the pavements 
 at the luncheon hour. Jack Chamberlayn, with our posters slung 
 on his back and front, stood outside his Aunt Jane's house and 
 thrust the paper at her when she came out to her brougham. She 
 bought all he had, and gave him the ten-pound note he de- 
 manded for the cause to get him to go away. 
 
 We wrote at it, weary-eyed and heavy-headed, and roared with 
 laughter at our own wit and sense. Even the unimpassioned 
 Anthony wrote articles in a style heavy with images like the 
 bowed white branches of the may. 
 
 In March and April we made ourselves eight " Dawns." On 
 May Day we sold the ninth in Hyde Park, and eleven days later 
 we printed the tenth and last. 
 
 I knew it would be the last. As we came up out of the cellar 
 I stumbled dizzily over the doorstep.
 
 CHAOS 223 
 
 In the dark a finger had traced one narrow path of light, a 
 field of asphodel between the cloudy hills. 
 
 My eyes burned and my legs shook under me. I took hold 
 on Chamberlayn's arm. We went a few streets in silence. 
 
 " You 're ill," he said abruptly, " you 're damnably ill. Don't 
 you know you are? " 
 
 I thought he looked so queer with his hat down to his eyes 
 and his overcoat buttoned up round them that I stood and 
 laughed at him. The tears poured down my face. I leaned 
 against a wall and wiped them away. 
 
 " You look so damned funny," I gasped 
 
 " Not half so funny as you do, you whey-faced hyena. Here, 
 stand up. Do you want us to be run in jail for my Aunt Jane 
 to bail out? I '11 go home with you." 
 
 The cool air sobered me before we reached Herne Hill. 
 Chamberlayn hurried me into bed. I fell instantly into a half 
 delirious dream in which I ran after trains and walked the streets 
 of an unknown city in a frenzied eagerness to reach some place 
 or find some person. I opened my eyes for a second on Chamber- 
 layn. He stood beside my bed with a cup in his hand. Some 
 one said, " Better let him sleep. Drink it yourself," and I was 
 off again on my anguished search. 
 
 I woke about nine o'clock in a weariness of the flesh worse 
 than any I had ever endured. My brain sagged in my head. 
 A cold bath left me half suffocated. I wanted cups of tea. I 
 went downstairs and demanded them. 
 
 " Get back to bed, you maniac," Anthony shouted. " I 'm go- 
 ing for a doctor." 
 
 " I '11 not go back to bed. It 's too exhausting," I answered. 
 " And if you make an ass of yourself by going for a doctor, you 
 can put out your own interfering tongue at him. I sha'n't be 
 here. I 'm going out." 
 " Let 's run him upstairs." 
 
 Chamberlayn shook his head. *' I Ve a better idea. Will you 
 come out of town with me, Joy? You might just as well. You 
 can't do anything in your present state. We'll go down to 
 my cottage at Shenley. At least, it 's not mine. It 's my cousin's, 
 but he's somewhere in West Africa catching fever and snakes.
 
 224 THE HAPPY HIGHWAYS 
 
 It 's mine while he 's not here. Mrs. Hurford, who looks after 
 it, will take care of you like a mother. We '11 set you up in no 
 time." He got up from the table. " Oliver can pack you a bag." 
 " I '11 think about it," I said. " It 's decent of you. I '11 let 
 you know to-morrow. I can't come to-day. I 've got to fix 
 some things at King's." 
 
 I held on to my point with an insane obstinacy. At last he 
 gave up talking and let me have my way. It was Saturday, and 
 none of us had any reason for going up to college, but Anthony 
 pretended an urgent need of books and came with me. I was 
 so annoyed by his pestilential good nature that I would not speak 
 to him. 
 
 We went into the common room and sat down. It was empty 
 save for a few students playing a very poor game of poker in a 
 state of fearful excitement. I tried to think what I had to do. 
 A new note in Anthony's voice caught my attention. I began to 
 listen. I suppose he was talking to distract my mind. But 
 he had come to something that actively disturbed him. He was 
 speaking with a troubled emphasis. 
 
 " You were n't in when I got back from Purley yesterday 
 afternoon," he said. " I wished you had been. I wanted to talk 
 to you." He hesitated. " Things are not right down there," he 
 said. 
 
 I glared at him. " Say what you mean, for goodness' sake. 
 What 's not right? " 
 
 " Can't you see that I 'm trying to get it straight in my own 
 head? It's difficult to say. You'd see it all right if you were 
 there. I 've guessed at it before, but after staying with them for 
 a whole fortnight I 'm beyond guessing. I know there 's trouble 
 ahead. The wretched part of it is that there 's nothing any one 
 can do." 
 
 " If you 'd tell me " I began. 
 
 " I don't see that there 's anything you can do. You might 
 speak to Margaret. I spoke to her, but I 'm not sure that I 
 did n't do more harm than good. I 've made her self-conscious, 
 and that fool is bound to see it, and put it down to the wrong 
 cause. He watches her. He asks her questions and tries to trip 
 her up in her answers. I could n't make it out at first. I thought
 
 CHAOS 225 
 
 it was pure ill-temper. I could have kicked him into the road 
 more than once. Of course, Margaret can be damned irritating 
 when she likes. She 's so fiendishly obstinate over little things." 
 
 " We know that but she '11 give way on most things forthe 
 sake of peace." 
 
 " Does n't make up for the times she '11 not give way a fraction 
 of an inch. Still it 's Ainslie and not Margaret who 's respon- 
 sible for the uneasy atmosphere of that household." 
 
 "Oh, atmosphere," I said indifferently. "You made your 
 own." 
 
 " Yes, I thought that. But after a while I knew I was n't mis- 
 taken. He did for himself so far as I 'm concerned when he 
 tried to question me in an off-hand sort of way about Margaret 
 and our red-headed friend. I just about kept my hands off him 
 when it broke over me what he was getting at." 
 
 The walls of the common room swayed backwards and for- 
 wards. I turned my chair round and stared out of the open 
 door. Anthony put his hand on my knee. 
 " Say if I 'm boring you, and I '11 drop it." 
 " No, go on." 
 
 " It 's worried me rather. You see, I made a bad blunder. 
 Ainslie made me so mad that I was n't thinking straight at the 
 time. He 'd taken up something I said to him, and gone to 
 Margaret with it. It was at breakfast yesterday morning. ' I 
 thought,' he said, in a ghastly playful fashion, 'that you wrote 
 me Anthony and Oliver were leaving Herne Hill on the Saturday 
 that week you stayed there in January.' Margaret looked at 
 him. ' I don't remember,' she said. * I may have written so. 
 I thought they were leaving then.' Ainslie was excited. 'An- 
 thony did,' he told her quickly, ' but he says he left Hearne 
 behind and the slacker never got to Scarborough until the Mon- 
 day night.' I was furious at having had the amateur detective 
 played off on me. Margaret stared at the pair of us. ' I must 
 have told you some time since, that Oliver never left Herne 
 Hill until the Sunday. I went back there on Saturday night, but 
 he was in bed, and I did n't know he was in the house. The next 
 morning he walked into the room and we gave each other the 
 surprise of a lifetime. I must have told you.' Ainslie pretended
 
 226 THE HAPPY HIGHWAYS 
 
 to be thinking aloud. 'Left on Sunday? It took him a long 
 time to reach Scarborough.' Margaret lost her temper. ' What 
 do you want? ' she said. 'A Bradshaw? I didn't go running 
 after Oliver and pushing him into trains. Ask him what he did 
 with his time if you want to know.' " 
 
 Anthony laughed shortly. " This is where I make a fool 
 of myself. We finished breakfast, and Margaret slipped after 
 Keith into the hall. I heard her say, ' So sorry I was cross, 
 sweetheart.' When she came back into the room I told her right 
 out what was the matter with her precious husband. * You must 
 have seen it,' I said. 'He's jealous of Oliver.' Ton my word, 
 she hadn't seen it. She got hot. 'You can't think that? ' 'I 
 do think it,' I said. I knew I 'd done the wrong thing as soon as 
 I 'd said it. Next time Ainslie spoke of Oliver she turned peony- 
 colored, and was annoyed with him. Do you suppose he did n't 
 notice? He built a three-volume tragedy on that blush in as 
 many seconds." 
 
 Anthony got up and kicked a chair viciously out of his way. 
 " Any one can see the fool does n't do it out of malice. He 's 
 fond enough of her. Only he can't let her alone. He must be 
 forever picking over what she 's done or is doing, to see if there 's 
 anything in it that might be an offense against him." He grinned. 
 "There ought to be a middle way in married dignity, but of 
 the two extremes I prefer the manner of our little compositor. 
 Of course, Ainslie 's hampered by his liberal professions. He 
 can't say to Margaret, 'What the devil were you doing that 
 Saturday and Sunday? ' He has to sneak round corners, and 
 try to manceuver her into a compromising position. Under such 
 circumstances he 's bound to be rewarded by a sight of the com- 
 promising attitude sooner or later. Attitude is all a matter of 
 the angle of vision. And if you 're not looking straight . . ." 
 
 I was tired of watching the corridor ambling past the door like 
 an amiable snake. I turned on Anthony. 
 
 " What d 'you want to tell me all this for? " I shouted. " What 
 is it to me if they destroy each other? " 
 
 I rushed out of the common room. The poker players fixed 
 amazed eyes on me. 
 
 Half-way along the corridor I was struck by a sense of incon-
 
 CHAOS 227 
 
 gruity. The old walks echoed to my hurrying feet. In the si- 
 lence I was a detached, intrusive noise. My unrest shrank, 
 abashed: it became an angle of fire and hid itself between my 
 eyes, its apex in the center of my brain. I walked slowly. On 
 the stairs I met Chadding, Kersent's professor. He stopped. 
 
 "Ah, Hearne," he began, and then paused. "You look quite 
 unwell." He fumbled at his glasses. "Most unwell. Do you 
 work too hard? Perhaps you have too many outside interests. 
 Youth will try to serve two masters." He chuckled like an asth- 
 matic bird. "Two masters? Nearer ten, nearer ten." 
 
 I remembered what Kerseht had told us about Chadding and the 
 invitation to dinner. I longed to take the old snob by his broad- 
 cloth tails and dangle him over the iron bannisters. I could see 
 his plump little legs shooting out frantically, and his arms grasp- 
 ing for a hold. I laughed. 
 
 " Ah, you are amused," he said amiably. " You don't believe 
 what I say." 
 
 " I was only laughing because you are such a fool," I explained. 
 His surprise was so preposterous that it annoyed me. 
 
 " You are not yourself, Mr. Hearne," he said. " We will try 
 to overlook this." 
 
 He swelled on to the next step. I blocked his way. 
 
 "No more are you," I said. "What is yourself? Is it the 
 white podgy you under the broadcloth and the jaeger vest? 
 Good Lord, how funny you must look. Doesn't it make your 
 wife laugh? " 
 
 He spluttered down my neck. 
 
 " No, don't do that," I said. " This is fearfully interesting. 
 Let's think it out. Are you those ridiculous books you write 
 about the Abstract Truth and the Transcendental Reality? Did 
 you hatch them out in your mind? What a thing is this Truth 
 that can arch its back in the sky, and lay eggs in a professor's 
 brain! Do you believe in word-magic, professor? Oh, don't 
 be offended: wiser folk than you built temples on the banks of 
 the Nile and raised themselves a protean shield of names. What 
 a terrible power in the words you evoke that they come in the 
 end to mastering their master! Tell me now could you push 
 any of those words back into the nothingness whence you called
 
 228 THE HAPPY HIGHWAYS 
 
 them? There 's an ant or a beetle or something that lifts a few 
 times its own weight. Poor little Chadding-ant, staggering about 
 with Transcendental Reality on his back, looking for a hole to 
 hide it in! Old servant of words. Only words, Chadding, for 
 after all, you never saw the Shining Reality, did you? There 
 have been men said they saw it, but they were lean men with 
 souls of flame. You are a little fat man, and your soul is full 
 of whey." 
 
 He seemed to squeeze words out of his indignation. " I will 
 rouse the building. I will have you publicly disgraced. You are 
 drunk, sir. Drunk as a dog. Let me pass." 
 
 " No, no," I said. I felt that I was being very cunning. 
 " You sha'n't get away. If I let you go you '11 snap at my 
 legs as I go down the stairs, you old crocodile. I must tell 
 you who you are, and then you '11 be powerless. If you 're not 
 those books, what are you? Somewhere one must get at the soul 
 of you. When you pray. . . . Do you pray to Abstract Reality, 
 Chadding, on your knees by your little bed, and then get in be- 
 side your merry wife? Oh, what a queer little object you do 
 look then, to be sure. No, damn it, that can't be you. It 's too 
 funny. A soul can't be ridiculous, and would n't be uxorious. 
 I must find you. I '11 tear off the coverings." 
 
 I believe the poor little beast thought I was going to undress 
 him there and then. He raised a quavering cry. There was 
 hardly a soul in the building, and no one came running to his aid. 
 I plucked at his sleeve. His eyes bulged and mottled patches of 
 color appeared under his skin. 
 
 "What's this?" I said. "First shell scaly jealousy. 
 Jealousy of colleagues, jealousy of the rich men who patronize 
 you. Should n't let 'em, my boy. Uphold the dignity of scholar- 
 ship. Old Croesus hands you out his second best in wines, and 
 offers you a cigar, and bets you don't get cigars like this out of 
 philosophy. Your wife pesters you for dresses like Mrs. Croesus, 
 and wishes she 'd married a man with less learning and more cash. 
 Your little soul bubbles within you. You rush to scratch the eyes 
 of your brother monkey up the other philosophic tree. Oh, 
 fie, professor, where was your scholar's calm when you called 
 his cosmic system a pernicious and nauseating fraud? Aren't
 
 CHAOS 229 
 
 your coconuts as juicy as his? What 's this? You shock me 
 what makes you think your wife deceives you? The respectable 
 partner of your connubial joys seeks other arms when privileged 
 to sport in yours! Nonsense, man. It's absurd. No, you don't 
 think that. Your imagination wants toning up. It 's going 
 bad : try our septic wash : impurities vanish before it. What 's 
 this? Your dignity in danger? You think your daughter sneers 
 at you, and flouts you behind your back. Ah, you mistake. 
 She reveres you. She worships all your attitude; your habits 
 are lovely in her sight. She loves the way you thorough-clean 
 your ears with a corner of your handkerchief in moments of 
 inertia; and your legs surging against the trousers you will have 
 cut so tight. Now where are we? Who is this stately old 
 gentleman with the god-like brow, and the noble, kindly bearing? 
 You don't think that's what you look like! No! Not really? 
 Ha ! Ha ! Body o' me skin after skin. I should never come 
 to the end of them. Dignified jealousy, fear, self-adoration, 
 bashful lusts, cancerous crusts of prejudice layer on layer. 
 Is this the last? It must be. A door, and the door-plate reads 
 'Truth.' Now I shall see You. Come out, thou naked soul. 
 Come unashamed. Shall He that cares for sparrows forget 
 thee? Why, the place is empty. Clean empty. Did a spider 
 scuttle into that corner? What are you, then ? All hail, Abstract 
 Nonentity, Transcendental Husk. I 've named you now, so let 
 me go! " 
 
 I went stumbling down the stone steps, roaring and shaking 
 with laughter. 
 
 Anthony met Chadding coming along the corridor. Tears of 
 rage or mortification were in his eyes. "I've been insulted," 
 he stammered, " shamefully insulted. Mr. Hearne . . ." When 
 later, he was told of my illness, he accepted that in explanation 
 of the incredible scene. "The poor fellow was off his head," 
 he said. But he never forgave me. 
 
 Was I off my head to behave like that to an old man, no 
 meaner, no more self-seeking, no more fearful of opinion than 
 the rest of us? Or did I but hold up to him the glass of my own 
 
 soul? f 
 
 I stood in the hall, trying to think what I must do before
 
 230 THE HAPPY HIGHWAYS 
 
 I could go with Chamberlayn. I saw him standing in the en- 
 trance. " I 've got a taxi," he said. " Coming for a ride? " 
 
 I followed him into the car. " Just a run to clear my brain. 
 I 've no end to do." 
 
 Anthony, fearing heaven knows what after his meeting with 
 Chadding, had rushed down the stairs in search of me, and out 
 into the quad. Chamberlayn waved a reassuring hand in what 
 might have been the direction of Shenley, and shouted " See 
 you to-morrow." 
 
 We dodged along the Strand. I remember thinking that I was 
 dead, and that Chamberlayn was a jackal-headed god. Long 
 before we reached Shenley I was an unconscious log. They 
 carried me into the cottage and upstairs to bed. It was eight 
 weeks before I made my first feeble journey downstairs again.
 
 CHAPTER IV 
 
 I MUST try to be fair to Keith Ainslie. I feel that I am likely 
 to distort him and his motives in the very effort of trying to 
 understand them. Moreover I cannot be prying into his heart. 
 I am neither a confessor nor a psychological haberdasher in the 
 manner of our friend Bloomer. The professional augurs of an 
 older age drew omens from entrails. Civilization has carried 
 us past that. We content ourselves now with making books from 
 them. 
 
 I want to leave Ainslie the remnants of dignity that he left 
 himself, and gathered round his nakedness. When I call him 
 to mind, I feel a thrill of half -realized misery: I am abashed 
 before this strange sensing of his grief. I want to shield him 
 from any knowledge of his self-betrayal. I do not want to feel 
 his suffering. 
 
 Perhaps this instinctive shrinking of mine accounts for the 
 persistence with which he eludes me. I cannot now tell you 
 anything about him except that he played the fool poorly and 
 suffered for it. I remember things he did and things he said, but 
 I remember them as of one dead, separate disjointed memories, 
 with no sense of a living personal unity to hold them together. 
 
 He brought misery on himself and on Margaret. With his 
 own hands he destroyed the fair house of their love that she had 
 set so high. And yet I am grieved for him, and for the ruin he 
 wrought. I do not doubt that every injury he did Margaret turned 
 and rent him in equal measure. Neither do I doubt that he 
 loved her with a backward-glancing tenderness for their idyll. 
 And in spite of love, in spite of his impulses to a frankness that 
 might have saved them, he let his secret resentment carry him 
 uncurbed to disaster. He seemed driven. Pride had a share 
 in that, but only a share. Add the awkward sense of estrange- 
 ment from Margaret that waxed and grew strong, feeding on itself. 
 He persisted in his way as a wilful child persists in naughtiness 
 
 231
 
 232 THE HAPPY HIGHWAYS 
 
 through some queer kink in the mind that will not let it yield 
 to its unacknowledged longing for repentance and forgiveness. 
 
 While I lay passing from delirium to unconsciousness and 
 waking to delirium again, their play played itself to an end. 
 I saw nothing of it. I know of it only what Anthony told me, 
 sitting beside my couch in the small white-washed bedroom of 
 the cottage. He had left the aeroplane factory and gone back 
 to the farm. He came down and stayed nearly a month at the 
 cottage when I was getting better. He had not meant to tell 
 me then. But from Oliver's incautious silences I understood 
 that something was happening to Margaret. I insisted upon 
 having the whole story. ** You 've got to know," Anthony said 
 at last. " I suppose it 's better to tell you than to leave you 
 speculating on things." 
 
 As he talked, I imagined that I saw between his abrupt, sig- 
 nificant phrases the shadows of passions and longings that 
 fought and drew back and closed again in a phantom struggle. 
 He frowned and picked his words. He had heard the beating 
 wings of the hidden wrestlers. He was disturbed and rather 
 resentful. 
 
 On the day I went to Shenley in the taxi he had tea with 
 Margaret in the Museum cafe. She impressed him as having 
 suddenly and strangely lost confidence in herself. She was 
 tired. The lifting vitality had gone from her voice and her pose. 
 He told her that Chamberlayn had taken me to Shenley. "A 
 week or two there will do him good," she said listlessly. 
 " There 's nothing serious, is there? Only overwork." 
 
 "That's all," Anthony agreed doubtfully. "He's rather 
 queer, though. He 'd said or done something to Chadding- 
 bird this morning. The honey-mouthed old hypocrite was fear- 
 fully upset." 
 
 ** We 've printed the last ' Dawn,' " Margaret said. 
 
 " Until Joy comes back." 
 
 " The last of all," she insisted. " We were fools to start it. 
 Joy has half killed himself with work. We must carry on as best 
 we can at Hammersmith while he is away. If he 's going to be 
 away long . . ." 
 
 She sat looking absently at two Frenchmen who were talking
 
 CHAOS 233 
 
 at each other across the next table with every appearance of 
 overmastering excitement., To them a colorless Englishman. 
 They addressed him in overfluent English. "Ah, dear friend, 
 how much we have interested ourselves in your wonderful Mu- 
 seum. It is superb, but it is sorrowful. To think that the joy 
 and beauty of the Greeks those wonderful children should 
 come in the end, dismembered like Osiris, to a house in Blooms- 
 bury." 
 
 " Eh? " said the Englishman, " why not? " 
 Margaret glanced at Anthony, smiling faintly. She turned 
 her eyes from the too-reflective foreigner. " I wish," she said 
 abruptly, " you 'd keep Oliver away from Keith for a while." 
 She made a nervous gesture. " I know it sounds hateful. He 's 
 an old friend. A dear friend. But I must get things straight. 
 Somehow I must get them straight. I must try and get Keith 
 to talk. Things are impossible as they are." 
 
 Anthony began a vague apology. She frowned. " Oh, don't. 
 How could it be your fault? I should have seen it for mjself 
 in the end. Only I never thought. And I 'm glad to have it 
 plain." Her voice halted, and she straightened herself wearily in 
 the comfortless chair. When the Museum authorities decided on 
 concession to the horrid fact of scholarly stomachs, they took 
 care to concede as little as possible to that doubtless atrophied 
 organ. 
 
 While Anthony sought for words, she began again slowly. 
 " I seem to have made a failure of things. I can't understand 
 why or how." She smiled. " I 've kept my share of the bargain. 
 One ought to keep one 's bargain, eh? But it is only just, surely, 
 to expect some one else to keep the other half of the pact. I must 
 have failed somewhere." 
 
 Her glance wandered to the next table again. The Englishman 
 had entered into a solemn discussion of automatic pianos. " Oh, 
 yes," he said loudly, " in a few years there will not be an or- 
 dinary piano made. All the tones and half-tones of expression 
 will be faithfully reproduced by the record. There will be no 
 need for hands. Hands stumble. The mechanical piano never 
 will." 
 
 His listeners nodded their heads. "The piano is a dreadful
 
 234 THE HAPPY HIGHWAYS 
 
 instrument," one mused. "The apotheosis of beer gardens, 
 drawing-rooms in the suburbs, picture palaces and mission-rooms. 
 But you are too optimistic, my dear friend. Alas, if there were 
 no more pianos, with what would your English misses amuse 
 their leisure time? " 
 
 Margaret laughed outright. " Come," she said. " Let 's go 
 before I disgrace myself any more. Things aren't so bad as 
 you might think, listening to my feeble moans. I shall come 
 through alright." 
 
 She walked through the Egyptian Gallery, with a smile for 
 Amen Hetep III. "You'll come up to Herne Hill now? " An- 
 thony said. Margaret hesitated. It was unusual for her to 
 be in town at the week-end. Keith never went to the factory on 
 Saturday, and we had arranged the classes so that we could do 
 without her that day. "Keith went off early this morning," she 
 said at last. " He, expected to get back about seven. I '11 come 
 up for an hour." 
 
 They reached Herne Hill soon after five. Through the open 
 window of the sitting-room they caught sight of Ainslie, sitting 
 there alone. Margaret gave a little gasp. She hurried indoors. 
 
 " Why, Keith," she said, " why did n't you say you would be 
 here? " 
 
 " I knew you would come," he told her somberly. At this mo- 
 ment Anthony had a queer foreboding of trouble. 
 
 " It 's just a chance that I came." 
 
 Keith shrugged his shoulders clumsily. 
 
 Anthony did not know just what happened. He said that they 
 seemed to be suddenly in the vortex of an incredible upheaval. 
 He went along to the kitchen to ask for more tea. May was there 
 alone. Her behavior puzzled him. He thought she seemed defi- 
 ant, and at the same time furtive and uneasy. He came back to the 
 sitting-room. As soon as he stepped inside the door the forebod- 
 ing returned, striking harshly across his senses. 
 
 Margaret was standing by the window. She spoke with a queer 
 note of amazement. " I don't see what you mean." 
 
 "Oh, yes, you do," her husband said. " You , see quite well. 
 Calvert here, sees too. What sort of a fool have you taken me
 
 CHAOS 235 
 
 for the lot of you? " He began suddenly to talk at the top 
 of his voice, beating upon one hand with two fingers of the other 
 in an impotent gesture of emphasis. He abused Margaret and 
 
 Oliver and indeed all of us. " You and your ideas " he said, 
 
 and choked. " To hell with your ideas." 
 
 Margaret stood with her fingers pressed against her cheeks. 
 It was a little nervous mannerism into which she fell uncon- 
 sciously in moments of excitement. Anthony remembered notic- 
 ing oddly that her cheek bones were quite high. " They 'd show 
 up if she got thin," he thought irrelevantly. Ainslie was get- 
 ting out an extraordinary tale. "A slut of a kitchen girl," he 
 said. " Could n't you even hide your intrigues from servants? " 
 
 Margaret gave a little gasping laugh. " Oh, Keith," she said, 
 " don't talk like that. We 're not at a play. Intrigues ! " 
 
 That sobered him: he tried to speak quietly. Anthony began 
 to see his way through the tale. The whole thing turned on that 
 week-end in January. May had started the mischief. " Filthy- 
 minded little harlot," Anthony thought. He was vaguely sur- 
 prised: he had not credited her with the brains. But it had not 
 been a question of brains, he reflected afterwards. An accidental 
 silence and then a piece of half -meaningless insolence that was 
 all there had been in it at first. Then Keith had come with his 
 suspicions. " I wonder if he questioned her outright," Anthony 
 said scornfully. " That must have been a queer affair." 
 
 May saw a chance of avenging her misfortunes on Margaret's 
 prosperity. I think she hated Margaret in an obscure unreason- 
 ing fashion just because Margaret had witnessed the piece of un- 
 successful play-acting in the kitchen. Maybe she hardly pro- 
 visioned the disaster she was drawing on. Untidy, muddy-eyed 
 Fate, she had not a whit of imagination. Her vengeance was half 
 just malicious stupidity. She fell to Keith's suspicions. She 
 wanted to make things disagreeable for Margaret. Afterwards, 
 she must have been frightened. She reiterated her accusation 
 blindly. 
 
 Keith had her in. She was sullen, and looked at Margaret 
 with an odd enough expression of appeal. To Keith's questions 
 she answered readily. Oh, yes, Mrs. Ainslie had known young
 
 236 THE HAPPY HIGHWAYS 
 
 Mr. Hearne was in the house that night. "I told her myself," 
 she said, with a quick indrawn breath. Margaret turned her back 
 deliberately, and stared out of the window. 
 
 Anthony's indignation got the better of his awkward resentment 
 of the scene. " If you don't send that girl away," he said to 
 Keith, " I '11 take her by the shoulders and run her out, and so I 
 tell you." May turned abruptly, and in the doorway ran into 
 Oliver. No one had heard him come in. She threw him one 
 scared glance, and scurried along the passage. They heard her 
 sobbing loudly in the kitchen. "You know, he must have been 
 listening in the passage, that precious brother of yours," Anthony 
 said. " He knew what was the matter." 
 
 But before he could say anything, Margaret had come up to 
 Keith and laid her hand on his shoulder. " Keith, my dear," she 
 said, " let 's go home. We can't talk about things here. Come." 
 He seemed to hesitate. Oliver rushed into the conversation like a 
 fool. " Yes, go," he said to Keith. " Take yourself away, and 
 by God, don't let me see your face here again, you dirty spy." 
 
 Anthony stopped in his narrative to reflect. " I think that was 
 unjust," he said. " I don't believe Ainslie came definitely to spy. 
 He must have brooded over that unfortunate week-end. I believe 
 he just came with a restless kind of feeling that there on the very 
 scene of it, something might turn up to illumine it for him. You 
 see, he could n't ask Margaret about it. He had to pretend that 
 he was an enlightened person with a soul above petty conven- 
 tions. And yet it had irked him to think of Margaret and Oliver 
 alone in the house. With all his jealous suspicions of Oliver." 
 
 Ainslie pushed Margaret's hand off his arm and turned on 
 Oliver. " They made the most unholy fools of themselves," An- 
 thony said. 
 
 Oliver did not see or did not care what mischief he was making 
 by his aggressive insanity. Keith worked himself into an incred- 
 ible rage. " I 'm not a fool," he shouted. " I don't go round 
 supposing unspeakable things just because a man and a woman 
 spend a week-end in each other's company. But if it was all right 
 why did you lie about it? Why tell me you were surprised to 
 meet each other the next morning, when the girl had told Mar- 
 garet you were in the house? And where were you on Sunday
 
 CHAOS 237 
 
 night? Walking about London. I don't believe you. Margaret 
 says she was at Purley, but no one saw her go into the house." 
 
 That may have been an angry venture: I do not think that 
 Ainslie had been questioning his neighbors. But it turned out 
 to be quite true. Margaret had let herself into her house in the 
 darkness of a January afternoon, made tea in the kitchen, and 
 gone early to bed. No one saw her go in: no one saw a light in 
 the house. 
 
 Keith stopped for breath: his face was distorted. Anthony 
 thought he might be a little mad. Margaret chose the moment 
 to make another appeal. She seemed unconscious of any one but 
 Keith. She held out her arms. God knows what she thought of 
 then. Maybe of a quiet waking, and Keith's face close to hers in 
 the luminous dawn. 
 
 " Come away, my darling." She just touched his cheek. 
 " Don't you see this is all madness? Take me away now. I want 
 to talk to you. I will tell you anything you like. My dear, oh, 
 my dear." Keith laughed. He said harshly, " Yes, you '11 talk 
 to me. I don't doubt that. You '11 talk until I don't know lies 
 from truth, and then laugh at me for a fool. I don't want you. 
 You can go where you damn well like, and do what you like. 
 I 'm done with you." 
 
 Margaret pressed her hands against her breast. " You don't 
 know what you 're doing, Keith," she whispered. " You don't 
 mean the things you say." 
 
 " I mean every word of it," he repeated loudly. " I 'm done 
 with you. Lies and lies ... I loathe the sight of you." 
 
 She turned to go, stumbling a little in the blindness of her 
 humiliation. She slipped away so quickly that she was at the 
 front door before Anthony reached her. 
 
 " Margaret, where are you going? Wait a minute. I '11 come 
 with you," he said uselessly. 
 
 " I 'd rather not," she told him. " I don't know yet where I 
 am going. I '11 go for a walk first. I '11 be all right." She 
 looked past him, and put her hand on the gate. 
 
 "A minute," he said, searching vainly for words. "You 
 can't go like that. Where can we find you? You '11 come back? 
 This will blow over."
 
 238 THE HAPPY HIGHWAYS 
 
 "That doesn't matter," she answered him in a level voice. 
 " I could n't come back. I don't think I want to see any of you 
 again." 
 
 " What about money? " 
 
 " There 's nearly fifty pounds in Lloyd's left of the money my 
 uncle put there in my name to use for the books. I '11 take part 
 of that until I can settle something." 
 
 She was gone. Anthony strode back into the sitting-room. 
 " You fools! " he stammered. " You fools. What in God's name 
 do you think you 've been doing? Quarreling like a couple of 
 drunken sailors in a bawdy house. You 've no right. You 've 
 no right. Don't you either of you think of any one but your- 
 selves? " He turned on Keith. He wanted to say more, but he 
 was startled by a glimpse of misery lurking behind the man's 
 fury. He let him go. 
 
 It was about a fortnight later that Margaret sent for Anthony. 
 He went to her rooms in Bernard Street and she told him that 
 Keith intended to divorce her. She did not tell him at once, but 
 spoke first of her plans. " It was well I finished my research 
 work to time," she said. " I gave in the thesis, and they were well 
 pleased with it. I have a good recommendation from that quar- 
 ter." 
 
 " You 're not going to teach, Margaret? " Anthony said. 
 
 " God forbid. But it has got for me a temporary post at a 
 school in Hampstead. A mistress is ill and taking half a term 
 off. That gives me time to think. I want to train for some- 
 thing. Something done with hands, I mean. I could n't be a 
 typist or anything like that, you know. I 'd like to work all day 
 with my hands and have my brain to myself at night. Did Keith 
 ever tell you that I wanted to go into the factory? I did, but he 
 would n't hear of it. I am trying to find out how I can be trained 
 in tool setting. I should like that." 
 
 " You 're really rather a queer old thing," he said affectionately. 
 
 She looked at him with a troubled frown. " Do you think so? 
 I don't care to be queer. I 've thought about it a good deal. 
 Only, there 's so little I could do. I have no taste for journalism 
 and no notion of how to set about such a career. I don't want to 
 be either a tsacher or a clerk or a secretary. The only thing I
 
 CHAOS 239 
 
 ever wanted to be was a student." She laughed diffidently. " I 
 have a passion for reading the works of other men. I want to 
 know languages." 
 
 " You know four," Anthony interrupted. 
 
 "I want to know more. I want to be able to read in Rus- 
 sian and those queer semi-Russian tongues. I want to know what 
 dead men thought and dreamed. What use I could make of such 
 learning I don't know. Indeed, I don't want to make use of it. 
 have no genius, but only a fatal attraction towards the genius of 
 other men." 
 
 " Sounds an unsatisfactory sort of an ideal to me." 
 " Yes. I know, I know," she said hurriedly. " And a selfish 
 one. Why should I enjoy such privileges with so many millions 
 of my fellows deprived of them forever? " 
 
 " I should n't worry about that, my dear," Anthony told her 
 drily. " By the time you 've learned tool setting and Russian 
 your scruples about sharing those delights with the rest of us will 
 have died a natural death." 
 
 " I should always be ready to help people who needed help," 
 she murmured. "People like our Hammersmith students, I 
 mean." 
 
 It was clear that she had a vision of herself in a garret, palely 
 ascetic over her books, growing old in scholarship amid a com- 
 pany of poor scholars. And upon my word, I might have had a 
 stout fight to drag her from her dreams. 
 
 Anthony stifled his doubts. "What about Keith? " he asked. 
 " Oh ! You don't know. I meant to tell you. He is apply- 
 ing for a divorce." 
 
 The imperturbable Anthony leaped to his feet. Margaret 
 looked at him with a flickering smile. She seemed rather pleased 
 with the effect of her words. I believe she suffered acutely dur- 
 ing this time, but she had a queer faculty of detaching herself 
 from her emotions and criticizing the play. 
 
 "Look here," Anthony babbled, "you 're well rid of the man. 
 
 But are you sure you're happy? I mean oh, damn it you 
 
 can't want to be divorced." He found himself in the middle of an 
 
 impossible offer to mediate. 
 
 "No, nothing can be done." Margaret assured him. "You
 
 240 THE HAPPY HIGHWAYS 
 
 see if he wants to be free, he 's got to be free. And there 
 doesn't seem any other way. I couldn't insist upon making it 
 hard to get rid of me." She stopped and flushed painfully. She 
 began again in a low hurried voice. "There's something else. 
 I went to see him again last week. At first I thought I 
 could n't go. I could n't forget things. But I did go. He 
 would n't listen to me. He wanted me to confess that I was 
 guilty, he called it. He said he 'd forgive me if I 'd confess." 
 She laughed softly. " I was very nearly tempted to work up 
 an heroic repentance." 
 
 Anthony stared at her. He had an impulse to get up and run 
 from her laughter that hurt like weeping and her absurd, pitiful 
 courage. 
 
 ** But anyway, it 's quite impossible now," she said. " I did 
 what I could. But after that scene at Herne Hill . . . And even 
 if he said he believed my word, and asked me to come back to 
 him, what sort of life would it be for us with all this behind? " 
 A little later, she added, " I sha'n't make any defense. If Oliver 
 likes to defend himself, of course I shall back him up. But if it 
 is left to me, I shall do nothing. It 's a pretty wretched sort of a 
 way out, but it 's the only one, and I 'd die rather than appear 
 to be trying to keep a man who wanted to be rid of me." 
 
 " You would n't," Anthony began. The hopelessness of the 
 situation broke on him, and he found nothing else to say. 
 
 He could find nothing more to say now, as he told me about it. 
 " There is nothing to be done," he repeated. " They 've got to be 
 free of each other. No reconciliation would hold now. Keith 
 has opened the only door on to freedom short of committing 
 suicide, or conspiring to appear a faithless and evilly-disposed 
 husband. I suppose he could have waited, and worked the de- 
 sertion trick. But when you 're hot and sore, you don't think of 
 waiting. And Margaret, being Margaret, won't hinder him." 
 
 I nodded. Anthony got up and stood with his back to me, 
 looking out of the window at the fields of long grass, whitening 
 beneath the passage of the wind. 
 
 " There 's something else to tell you. It has worried me rather 
 during the past few weeks knowing it. David saw you and
 
 CHAOS 241 
 
 Margaret last summer at that little place on the coast I forget 
 its name." 
 
 " The devil he did." 
 
 "He and my mother were staying at Scarborough, and they 
 went over there for the day. Of course, my mother did n't know 
 you, and David said nothing. He knew you from the photo- 
 graphs I have at the farm, and some old fisherman or other, 
 seeing him staring at you, told him you were staying in the 
 place. Told him your names and said Margaret was a good 
 lass, and you made a fine upstanding pair, or words in the dia- 
 lect to that effect." He swung round. " Of course," he said care- 
 fully, ** I know it 's got nothing to do with all this other trouble, 
 but I thought I 'd tell you. I 'd suspected once or twice before 
 that things were like that between you. But you were both so 
 damned cool." 
 
 I tried feebly to appreciate this sudden turn in the conversation. 
 " You 're right," I said at last. " It had nothing to do with all 
 this. Margaret wouldn't give Keith up for me. I wanted her 
 to." 
 
 " Besides," Anthony said, with a flicker of sarcasm, " it would 
 be no use to Keith even if he found out. They were n't married 
 then. Might be evidence of character in the Divorce Court, of 
 course." 
 
 " It would be no use to him," I murmured. " Everything wag 
 all square." 
 
 "Ask him to believe that." Anthony stopped, and with an 
 abrupt change of tone " You understand that I knew it had noth- 
 ing to do with this." He began at once to tell me that every one 
 of our textbooks had been sold. " We called a general meeting 
 just before I went home, and told them about you, and explained 
 that the classes would have to be given up for the time being. 
 We got permission to leave our little library in the cellar, and put 
 it in charge of young Donnel to lend out books and be generally 
 responsible for them. They were fed up to hear you were ill." 
 
 " That drawer," I interrupted, " is full of their letters. I 've 
 been meaning to get you to go through them and send suitable 
 replies." I yawned deliberately.
 
 242 THE HAPPY HIGHWAYS 
 
 Anthony grinned. " Oh, all right," he said. " I guess you 've 
 had as much as you can stand. I '11 go out for a bit." He paused 
 at the door. " I hope to God I' ve done the right thing in letting 
 you know all this now." 
 
 My head was heavy and stupid. I went back wearily over the 
 phrases of Anthony's tale. Margaret would be free. I had no 
 throb of exultation. I could feel her humiliation: it lay heavily 
 on my spirit. I wanted to comfort her. My weakness irritated 
 me. The couch was horribly narrow. I would get back to bed. 
 I wondered wretchedly why she did not write me.
 
 CHAPTER V 
 
 A NTHONY was leaning out of the window as she came down 
 jT\. the road. He left the window and stood beside my bed, look- 
 ing down at me. " Joy," he said gently, " Margaret is here. I 
 had a letter the other day, saying she would like to come.*' 
 
 " Go and bring her," I said. The weakness of my limbs seemed 
 turned to a quivering molten flame. I tried to sit up. He pushed 
 me back on the pillows and went. I heard the nurse's voice. 
 " Oh, yes, we were expecting you, Mrs. Ainslie. Mr. Calvert said 
 you 'd be here. I know he '11 be pleased to see a fresh face. He 
 is heartily sick of the rest of us. You '11 remember not to excite 
 him, of course." 
 
 She opened the door and Margaret followed her in. With the 
 least trace of hesitation Margaret walked across to the bed, and 
 bent down to kiss me. I felt her lips on my cheek, and the blood 
 thudded in my ears. The very power of response seemed drawn 
 out of me. I saw the nurse's round face, with its expression of 
 amiable surprise. Then she too went. The door shut behind 
 her. Margaret sat down in the low window seat. She was 
 thinner: her cheek bones showed more plainly. There was just 
 enough brooding of pain in her eyes to lift her from mere beauty 
 into the heart of loveliness. I watched her as she sat there, very 
 stiff in the neck and straight in the back, with no concession to 
 the curves of the chair-back. She held herself bravely. 
 
 "Anthony told you? " 
 
 "Yes." 
 
 She smiled at me. " I Ve made an awful mess of things. 
 Don't you think so, Joy? I couldn't do anything. I couldn't 
 take you and I could n't keep Keith." 
 
 I could only lie and look at her. The sights and sounds of 
 misery make the words stick in my throat. I feel before them 
 nothing but a blind, helpless rage. I could feel her misery, but 
 I could not touch it to comfort it. I wondered what waa wrong 
 
 243
 
 244 THE HAPPY HIGHWAYS 
 
 with me. Some fantastic twist of my mind evoked a forgotten 
 memory. I saw myself as a great awkward boy of nine or ten, 
 standing in the street beside a weeping child. I felt again my 
 acute misery and discomfort. The child wept on, and I stared 
 at it. My ears burned and my eyes smarted. Suddenly I dived 
 into my pockets and found there heaven knows what of treasure 
 knife, ha'penny, blood alley all the rest of a boy's hoard 
 when his hoard has to be guarded on his person from domestic 
 piracy. I stuffed the whole lot into the infant's hands and 
 pockets, and took to my heels, bowed down by a sense of irretriev- 
 able loss. 
 
 The absurd scene shone before me in the colors of life. I saw 
 the read streaks in the big blood alley, a king and a colossus 
 among marbles. Could I give Margaret anything? A wave of 
 hysterical laughter surged up in my throat. I glanced at her, 
 and the look on her face sobered me. 
 
 She was looking at something her own mind had conjured up. 
 Her hands were folded on her lap. Perhaps she was feeling her 
 isolation and my inability to help her. Suddenly her lips quiv- 
 ered. She turned her face to me, all twisted like a child's who is 
 trying not to cry. She got up and knelt down by the bed, and 
 laid her face against my breast. 
 
 " I can't bear it," I heard her whisper. *' Oh, Joy, I can't bear 
 it. What they' 11 say . . . How can I live among people again? " 
 I put my arms round her, and stroked her cheek and her hair. 
 
 Something moved in me, broke loose from its moorings, and 
 lifted in the new warm sea of happiness that filled my senses, 
 I lifted her hand so that it lay across my lips. Now it was I who 
 floated in that sea, in a radiant flood of light. I soothed her and 
 touched her. My fingers trembled. " My dear," I whispered. 
 ** My dear, my little girl. Oh, you are in my heart. I love you." 
 I tried to raise myself in bed so that I could hold her better. 
 The movement roused her from her abandon of grief. She lifted 
 her head, and drew herself out of my arms. " How wicked of 
 me," she said. " I am doing you such harm." 
 
 "Do I look as if you were doing me harm?" I answered 
 her. " Come here. Come beside me, or J '11 get up and hold you 
 go that you can't get away,"
 
 CHAOS 245 
 
 She laughed a little at that, and came to me again. " I want 
 to feel you in my arms," I said. " Oh, Margaret, to have you 
 again." She crouched down, kneeling on a little hassock, and half 
 lying on the bed. Her face was close to mine on the pillow, 
 and we lay in each other's arms like two children, tired of playing. 
 I kissed her dear face and her closed eyes. " You '11 let me take 
 you away after all this? " I whispered. "We'll go right away. 
 You shall forget." 
 
 She laid her hand against my mouth. " Don't let 's talk of 
 that now." 
 
 We talked no more. I shut my eyes, and opened them to look 
 at her again, lying beside me, still and content. My life seemed 
 ebbing away into hers. I tightened the grasp of my arms. She 
 moved a little and her lips touched mine. 
 
 She went away in the evening, after telling me to sleep and 
 grow strong. I listened to her voice and Anthony's as they 
 walked down the road. I pressed my face on the pillow where 
 hers had lain, and stretched out my arms in the fragrant dusk.
 
 CHAPTER VI 
 
 AINSLIE'S petition for divorce was heard and granted. There 
 was no defense. Between us, Anthony and I had restrained 
 Oliver's desire to go into court, and, he said, blast Keith Ainslie's 
 character for life. 
 
 Who would flog the dead dog of the divorce laws, if the rotting 
 corpse were not an offense on the public highways? The whole 
 thing is for pure amazement. I am inclined to think that it mat- 
 ters not one jot whether divorce be hard or easy, so long as it is 
 still made an occasion for public comment and embarrassment. 
 Imagine it! Grave and worthy gentlemen, reading the puerile 
 intimacies of the sinners' letters, squatting on their judicial heels 
 by the side of servant girls to peep through keyholes into bed- 
 rooms, pulling the very sheets off the adulterous bed. It is no 
 longer allowed to execute a man in public, although at the time 
 of his happy translation he is fully clothed, prayed over, and 
 otherwise sanctified according to the laws of revenge. But before 
 you can get rid of your wife you must strip her in open court, 
 with witness of letters, amateur detectives, hotel-keepers, or any 
 other little accessories before the fact of her nakedness. 
 
 Could anything be more revolting or degrading, more offensive 
 to common humanity and common decency except, perhaps, 
 the spectacle of a hardened loafer, incontinently starving himself 
 to death in the publicity of the Embankment instead of loafing to 
 his death in a club armchair behind a Piccadilly window and a 
 bottle of seltzer water? 
 
 Determined compassion might find excuse for the Embankment 
 nuisance: it may be that some chance made him ineligible for the 
 decent privacy of the armchair. But what, by the laughter of 
 the gods, can be said in defense of a people who permit the public 
 spectacle of Mr. A. flinging accusations at Mrs. A. " Madam, 
 you have allowed yourself to share beds with Mr. X.," and her 
 retort, "Sir, you are a liar, and as bad yourself"? 
 
 246
 
 CHAOS 247 
 
 There was once a judge who refused to make absolute a 
 woman's divorce obtained against her husband, because the mis- 
 erable woman had herself given birth to an illegitimate son. 
 The honorable judge, acting doubtless that it might be fulfilled 
 which was written in the scriptures saying, " I will visit the sins 
 of the fathers upon the children," condemned the woman to re- 
 main shameful in her own sight and her child to be a bastard 
 with a " Fie upon you for a bold-faced jig," delivered with all 
 the awful solemnity of the bench. 
 
 Oh, race of moral apes, who will credit in a thousand years 
 that his dress of a little brief authority could lead man into such 
 impertinent fatuity? 
 
 It would be better to return to the old Catholic ideal of in- 
 dissoluble marriage. That at least is dignified, and has the graces 
 of austerity. 
 
 But cannot a marriage be ended with decent dignity? Is 
 there nothing between the Catholic way and the present grave 
 indecency? 
 
 I wrangled with myself, arguing these things, through the 
 days before Margaret's divorce so that I should not find quite in- 
 tolerable the knowledge of her sick humiliation. 
 
 What she suffered, her husband suffered also. They were tear- 
 ing themselves free, bleeding and wretched. In their desperation 
 they dealt each other blind, mad blows. With whatever ardor 
 they had desired it, there could have been no reconciliation for 
 them after that sorry struggle. 
 
 Two days before the hearing of his petition, I saw Keith Ainslie 
 for the last time. I was sitting in the Temple Gardens. He came 
 striding through, passing me unseeing. His shoulders drooped, 
 and he walked like a man in the grip of an uneasy foreboding. 
 I thought, " He does n't altogether believe his own accusations." 
 He passed round a corner, and out of my sight. 
 
 Margaret left London the day after the divorce. She went to 
 Scotland, where her uncle had arranged to have her trained 
 in tool setting. He probably thought it an unconscionable whim, 
 but he gave way to it as readily as he would have done if she 
 had asked to be given an aeroplane and taught to fly. " He said," 
 Margaret told me once, " that my father was a fool, and that I
 
 248 THE HAPPY HIGHWAYS 
 
 was under the double disadvantage of being a woman and his 
 daughter." 
 
 I saw her the day before she went. I had known all along that 
 for a little while at least I should have to leave her alone. After 
 her tremulous surrender at the cottage, she had stiffened herself 
 and drawn away into an obstinate isolation. Maybe my weak- 
 ness had disarmed and my strength repelled her. She set up 
 against it a strength born of her terrible dread that we should pity 
 her. In her raw misery she asked nothing but to be left behind 
 her defenses until she had made herself a new shell to cover the 
 shrinking spirit. 
 
 I schooled myself to ask nothing of her, not even that I might 
 comfort her. Our last evening together shook my resolution. 
 She sat beside me in the lounge of her hotel. She had left her 
 rooms a week before, flying from an imaginary curiosity. We 
 watched the excited groups over their war news. 
 " When are you going, Joy? " she said. 
 
 " I shall go to-morrow," I answered. " I was only waiting for 
 this to be over. As a matter of fact I went yesterday and was 
 examined, and got three days' leave." 
 
 She looked at me, and then away across the lounge. " Give 
 you good luck, Joy," Her voice shook. 
 
 I bent over her. ** Is that all ? " I whispered. " Margaret 
 have you no love for me that I can take with me? " 
 
 I felt her arm tremble against mine. "Ah, don't make me 
 think of it," she said. " It sounds cruel. You are going per- 
 haps you will be killed. I know I ought to be ready to give you 
 anything, say anything. But I can't pretend to you." 
 " I don't want you to pretend." 
 
 "You must let me alone. Oh, I think I want nothing now 
 but to go quietly all the rest of my days. It is as if they 'd torn 
 the past away from me, and the beauty I had in it. Everything 
 has been spoiled not just the years of my marriage. It is my 
 past that he has made hateful and ridiculous the past that re- 
 mained beautiful in spite of all. I cannot bear to remember that 
 I put it in his power to such an extent. I have been so shamed." 
 We were silent awhile, and then she said, " I 'd like to go and 
 look at London. I may not come back to it again."
 
 CHAOS 249 
 
 We set out and walked down Southampton Row, and into the 
 Strand. I think Margaret found a kind of comfort in the 
 jostling of crowds who did not care and did not know her. I 
 thought of the exultation that had leapt through me on that night 
 when Mick and I made our trial of the great city. I laughed 
 a little at the two awkward boys. 
 
 We went back to her hotel along the darkened streets round 
 the Museum. My heart failed me. " Margaret," I said, and took 
 her in my arms. We clung to each other for a moment. She 
 lifted her face, very pale and youthful-seeming. I took off my 
 hat and stooped to kis* her. She drew my head down, and kissed 
 my hair.
 
 CHAPTER VII 
 
 war crept into my life as the sea floods slowly up the 
 creeks of an island that the full tide will submerge. My ab- 
 sorption in Margaret took off the fine edge of excitement. I went 
 mechanically about the business of enlisting. 
 
 I had come back to London in July. I meant to go out to 
 Mick. He had just got his chance of cotton land, and was hesi- 
 tating to take it. " My research work must come first," he wrote. 
 " I 'm doing big things out here. I tell you I 'm quoted all over 
 India. ... If you could come and manage for me, or something 
 of the kind, it would just about save the situation." 
 
 I cabled that I would come. 
 
 In a few weeks we should be scattered over the earth. We 
 revived the Eikonoklasts, and met twice a week to honor our pass- 
 ing youth with phrases. Anthony was on his farm. Chamber- 
 layn was going to Italy to make roads. Mick and I would be in 
 Barbados together. I did not intend to go until the late autumn. 
 I had not the least doubt but that Margaret would be ready then 
 to go with me. All my plans for the future were made in that 
 faith. Margaret knew it, and said nothing to upset them. She 
 went on planning her life as if it were to be lived alone. But I 
 think she would have come with me in the end. 
 
 I could not get her to join the new Eikonoklasts. On the nights 
 when she thought they would be at our rooms, she did not come 
 near us. When we left Herne Hill, we found temporary rooms in 
 a street of small houses off Shepherd's Bush Road. There we 
 lived in the bosom of a family that embraced ten canaries, three 
 dogs, two Spaniards, and a neurotic husband. Our overworked 
 landlady took a liking to Margaret and on the days she came to 
 see us ruthlessly turned birds, dogs, foreigners and husband out 
 into the kitchen. 
 
 Margaret came one night, and found Kersent already there. 
 She had not seen him for a long time. She shrank from meeting 
 
 250
 
 CHAOS 251 
 
 him. "He is inhuman," she said. "It didn't matter before. 
 But I don't want to meet him now. He will look upon me as a 
 person who has made a silly failure of things. He has only 
 scorn for failure." 
 
 She stiffened herself to meet him. Before she had been in the 
 room three minutes, I saw that she had been right in her judg- 
 ment of him. His attitude to her had altered in spite of himself. 
 He treated her with the rather exaggerated deference he kept for 
 inferior beings. It must have fallen on her like stripes on a raw 
 wound, but she smiled, and was hardily witty. 
 
 We had to decide what could be done for the students we were 
 abandoning. Curiously enough, Kersent, who had been least 
 enthusiastic for the Scheme, was most reluctant to give it up. 
 He could hardly be got to discuss things. But we could think of 
 no one to whom we might appeal to take our place. Alone, Ker- 
 sent and Oliver could do nothing. We decided to call a general 
 meeting of students. I intended to give away all my books, ex- 
 cept those that Oliver wanted. We would tell them that Kersent 
 and Oliver were ready and eager to give what help they could 
 to men who came to them. What more could we do? 
 
 We were still talking when the door opened, and Chamberlayn 
 came in with the news of the Austrian ultimatum. He was filled 
 with an incomprehensible excitement. We laughed at him. 
 
 I shall never be certain whether we laughed because we were 
 fools or because we were honest men. 
 
 I dare say our laughter was that of a good many honest fools. 
 For all our deep social preoccupation, we had never lifted our 
 eyes beyond the limits of our island society, its injustice and its 
 shortcoming. We had made some vague unconscious assumption 
 of the general peacefulness of civilized countries. True, there had 
 been war in the Balkans, but down there men were still half 
 savages small races lagging on the outskirts of civilization. 
 We drew no portents, imagined no subtle threads of inter-rela- 
 tionship with Near East doings. We simply were not interested. 
 The veriest gutterbred attached more meaning to the phrases of 
 Empire than we did, who professed ourselves an intelligentsia of 
 deeds. 
 
 I could give a dozen reasons for our ostrich-attitude to foreign
 
 252 THE HAPPY HIGHWAYS 
 
 affairs. But I believe the chief to be that we were never trained 
 to interest in them. The Imperial dash that was added to the 
 milk-and-water of board school and secondary education was just 
 calculated to sicken and disgust any honest child. We turned in 
 loathing from the fat men who babbled on our Speech Days of 
 the glories of our Empire. What were the glories of Empire to 
 us when they came dropping from the mouth of Erasmus But- 
 terby, whom we knew for an arrant scoundrel, buying cheap to sell 
 dear in all his sixty shops with their complement of starved and 
 bullied assistants? What were they to our neighbor in class, 
 whose under-paid sister was a cast-off mistress of Butterby, whose 
 father did the work of six horses for Butterby, and drew there- 
 from the wretched wage that his mother returned again to But- 
 terby's insatiable maw? We confounded the Empire with But- 
 terby in one precocious sneer. 
 
 We did not understand either, that the debauched Imperialism 
 offered to our shrinking gaze was not intended by way of honest 
 enlightenment, but only to fill us with awe of mysteries beyond 
 our ken, and keep us nervously wagging heads and flags a long, 
 long way behind our diplomatists' endeavors. 
 
 Perhaps they do these things better in the public schools. 
 
 I doubt, however, that there too they get the same suspicious 
 vintage only offered to their refined instincts in better bottles 
 than those that were thought good enough for us. 
 
 When we left school and came to London, our greedy, searching 
 interests fastened naturally on the things nearest us. We became 
 absorbed in our Hammersmith experiment. Gradually the But- 
 terby credo of Trade and Empire took in our minds the appear- 
 ance of a fantasy. Without really thinking about it at all, we de- 
 cided that his dreary, smudged picture of world-dominion was a 
 nightmare figment, lingering on in the minds of men who had not 
 noticed that the world was moving beyond them. Kings, generals, 
 ambassadors, all the pageantry of sovereigns, what were they but 
 a masque playing itself out before a curtain, while behind them 
 on the real stage the real play was preparing, the play of humanity 
 moving to the republic of the world? We never talked foreign 
 politics: we never thought of them, except in the way of half-con- 
 scious conclusions, arrived at and dismissed in some obscure
 
 CHAOS 253 
 
 region of our minds. We must assuredly have concluded that in 
 all countries right-minded folk thought of redressing the injustice 
 that oppressed their fellows, and were hindered from their incon- 
 tinent altruism by the selfish plots of rich men. No doubt we 
 recognized the existence also of the wrong-minded, whom preju- 
 dice, self-interest, or mere craven stupidity kept on the side of the 
 man in possession. Even, we knew that prejudice and fear were 
 worse enemies of justice than riches, however ill-gotten. Had we 
 followed up this train of thought we might have arrived at the pos- 
 sibility of war. But civilized nations do not fight. What then 
 are armies for? We might have replied that they were, strictly 
 speaking, to be regarded as a charming medieval relic, the last 
 of the Guilds. 
 
 As a matter of fact, the question never arose. We assumed 
 international peace. If we thought of war at all, it was to play 
 with the possibility of revolution and a barricade across the 
 Strand. And that we did not take seriously. 
 
 The murder of the Archduke had not much interest for us. It 
 interested me least of all, with my eyes drawn always to the 
 spectacle of Margaret's failure and humiliation. Besides, we 
 never read the type of newspaper that seized on all occasions, and 
 on this no less than others, to point the signs of the times for an 
 unheroic and trustful generation. 
 
 We laughed at Chamberlayn and his talk of war. Then, partly 
 to pacify him, we asked questions. 
 
 He was all too ready to answer us. He began at once to talk 
 at the top of his voice, in a strange tongue, words pouring out in 
 an awkward haste. 
 
 "Oh, be quiet with your incidents and your secret treaties," 
 Oliver groaned, " and tell us in plain English such as we poor 
 unlettered men have and use what you are talking about." 
 
 Chamberlayn had the air of an animated owl. " Look here," 
 he said, " and for God's sake stop pretending that you can't under- 
 stand. I tell you, I know what I 'm saying. It 's war not any 
 old backwater of a war, but real European war. I was lunching 
 at Jane's. She 's been complaining to the governor that I neglect 
 her. There was a brigadier-general there who said war was in- 
 evitable. No it was n't a case of the wish being f ather to the
 
 254 THE HAPPY HIGHWAYS 
 
 thought, for he positively looked upon it with dread. Not that 
 he is n't brave enough I did n't mean that. He lost an arm in 
 the Boer War, and he 'd have been lieutenant-general now if he 
 had n't had a sister, or if he 'd had another kind of sister. He 
 said it was well known that war was being planned by Germany. 
 He said the French knew it, and the Italians knew it, and the Rus- 
 sian court knew it. Every one knew it but the English, who never 
 know about anything they don't want to happen. Besides, you 
 can't frighten a race that was n't frightened of Napoleon." 
 
 Oliver laughed. 
 
 " I 'm only telling you what he said," Chamberlayn said angrily. 
 " The man 's no fool. He said we were n't frightened of Napoleon 
 because we vilified him and made him out such a contemptible lit- 
 tle monster that we came to believing he was one. Having a 
 Channel between us and him made a difference, of course." 
 
 " Your general seems to have thought about things," Margaret 
 said soothingly. 
 
 " He has. That 's why I believe in him. He 's not one of 
 your side-whiskered old blood-suckers. Besides, I 've heard it all 
 before all he said. He said that people who understood were 
 only waiting for the signs that would announce the opening of the 
 last act. This Austrian ultimatum is the sign. Servia will re- 
 fuse . . ." 
 
 " Servia won't dare refuse." 
 
 ** She will, she will. She 's got Russia behind her." 
 
 " Then it 's Russia that 's making war." 
 
 "You don't understand." Chamberlayn was beside himself 
 with excitement, and in an agony of annoyance at our stupidity. 
 " Austria did n't send that ultimatum. It 's Germany. Every one 
 knows it 's Germany. It 's either fight her or give in. And if we 
 do give in do you suppose this will be her last demand? She '11 
 go on from bad to worse. She '11 interfere and rattle swords all 
 over Europe. Sooner or later, it 's war or surrender to her. 
 Oh, damn you, can't you see it? " 
 
 I shook my head. " I don't believe it," I said. " It 's too, 
 too plausible. Things don't happen like that nowadays. Ger- 
 many pushes Austria on to Servia and spikes herself on Russia. 
 Russia leans on France, France on England, and the whole lot
 
 CHAOS 255 
 
 topple in the ditch. You shove the first man in the line, and 
 they all go over in turn. Oh, altogether too symmetrical. Try 
 again, my son. Besides, nations aren't to be shoved about like 
 that now. You '11 see, Servia will accept the Austrian terms, and 
 your pretty house of cards will crumble on your aunt Jane's dinner 
 table and be removed with the dessert. And the brigadier will 
 commit suicide in his coffee." 
 
 Chamberlayn had recovered his calm. " Will you believe I 'm 
 talking sense when you read that Servia has refused? " he asked. 
 
 " We '11 begin to think about it then," I assured him. 
 
 We tried to get back to our students. But Chamberlayn had 
 killed the spirit of discussion. He himself was too restless to join 
 in any planning. " What 's the use of talking about the future? 
 In a few weeks there won't be any future, but only one day after 
 another." 
 
 In a while he jumped up, and said he could not sit still there. 
 We saw him hurrying past the window with distraction in his 
 aspect. 
 
 He left uneasiness behind him. Kersent sat huddled in his 
 chair, a cavernous thing of broken basketwork and rags. His 
 fine hair straggled over the dingy cushions. He seemed sunk in 
 unhappy thought. I tried to rouse him by asking about his work. 
 " I was thinking of war," he said briefly. 
 
 "You don't believe in Chamberlayn's line of toppling na- 
 tions! " I exclaimed. 
 
 " On the contrary," he said slowly. " I was just thinking that it 
 would be in some such catastrophic madness that war might come. 
 It would have to come like that if it is to come at all nowa- 
 days." 
 
 " It won't come." 
 
 Kersent sat up. "What would you do if there were war? " 
 
 " Fight," said Oliver simply. 
 
 " I don't know," I answered, " that it would be so easy as that. 
 I might have to think about it. Would you fight whether the war 
 were just or unjust? " 
 
 " There is neither justice nor injustice in war," Kersent said, 
 before Oliver could speak. 
 
 " Some wars are simply a disgrace," I mused. " Like South
 
 256 THE HAPPY HIGHWAYS 
 
 Africa. But I can't imagine that there might be a war which 
 would have to be fought to stave off worse things. Oh, damn 
 it, what would you do? " 
 
 " I should refuse to fight," Kersent answered. 
 
 " No matter what the circumstances? " 
 
 " I should refuse in any circumstances." 
 
 Margaret was sitting at the table. She turned her head now 
 to look at Kersent with curiosity. " Tell us why," she said. 
 
 Kersent roused himself to answer her. It was queer how 
 quickly he responded to any probe of Margaret's. There was, I 
 think, some subtle antagonism between them, which showed itself 
 in Margaret's infrequent thrusts at Kersent; in his quite intol- 
 erable deference to her now, and always in his readiness to defend 
 himself before her. He would explain himself to Margaret when 
 indolence or a faint contempt kept him placid and silent under 
 my attacks on his philosophy. He was stirred to explain it now. 
 
 " I would n't fight in any war," he repeated. " It 's not that 
 I 'm afraid. Of course, I can't prove that. You can believe it or 
 not as you like." 
 
 " You can leave that bit out," Margaret said briefly. 
 
 Indeed we all saw it as absurd to associate cowardice with 
 Kersent's frail body and grim spirit. 
 
 " I might offer you all sorts of reasons. That I have better 
 things to do than fight. But you could counter that if you could 
 show the things to be fought for as more important than anything 
 in my life. I might refuse to fight in the wars of kings and cap- 
 italists. I 'd have a better case there. But after all, a lost war, 
 might be lost for others beside the rich man and his power. Of 
 course in any war, lost or won, he 'd suffer least. If war lasted 
 for a dozen years, his wife would n't be pawning her furniture for 
 clothes, nor crying over her starving children. But my reasons go 
 behind and beyond those." 
 
 " Religion," Oliver said. 
 
 Kersent shook his head. Through the serene voice ran a muf- 
 fled throbbing excitement, like a thread of fire through wet ling. 
 "No, not religion. I can imagine that a man might have the 
 command to love all men, even the enemy, so ringing in his
 
 CHAOS 257 
 
 ears that he would be prepared to die rather than lift the sword 
 struck from the hand of the disciple in the garden. He would 
 have arrived at my point of view, but by a swifter route." 
 
 " I wonder," Margaret began, and stopped. Kersent waited for 
 her to go^on. " No, finish what you 're saying," she said impa- 
 tiently. " I don't want to argue with you now. I want to under- 
 stand." 
 
 " It is this that for me nothing, nothing at all, can justify the 
 taking of life. I have come deliberately to the conclusion that 
 there is no value in life higher than the sanctity of life itself. I 
 would submit to death for this ideal, but there is no other fit to 
 die for." 
 
 He broke off. He seemed to be struggling within himself for 
 mastery over an excitement as powerful as Chamberlayn's. Mar- 
 garet frowned. 
 
 " There are certainly other ideals worth dying for." 
 
 " For truth," I murmured. 
 
 Margaret smiled at me. " Who but a fool would die for truth? 
 Knowing that his truth was but a fragment of a vision seen all 
 distorted that might be falsehood to-morrow." 
 
 " Martyrs are n't made in that spirit," I retorted. 
 
 " Wise men are. Sane men, that love the earth." 
 
 " And being earthy, love their own dirty bodies too well to risk 
 them," Oliver growled. 
 
 " Is it worse to cherish one's body than it is to cherish and in- 
 dulge one's soul in the way that Kersent is preparing to do? It 's 
 really only indulgence on his part, for he doesn't believe that 
 the soul is a spirit persisting after death." 
 
 Kersent looked at Margaret with a direct anger. " You 're 
 quibbling," he said. " When I said that no other ideal was fit to 
 die for, I meant only that it was the highest possible. Men have 
 died, and always will die for lesser ideals and all honor to 
 them. Men have been killed in the name of lesser ideals. Never 
 was such a trail of blood as that left by the most successful of 
 ideals the Christian Church. But a man who kills for his ideal, 
 who goes to war for it, only defames it. I would not fight for 
 my ideal, not because of its unworthiness, but because of its too
 
 258 THE HAPPY HIGHWAYS 
 
 great worth. There is no ideal worth killing for. All others 
 are paltry in comparison with that of refusing to kill. It is justi- 
 fiable only to die for an ideal." 
 
 " Now you 're quibbling," Margaret said coolly, " and the 
 quibble is really unworthy of you. The man who prepares to kill 
 for an ideal prepares to die. It might even be that the words 
 ' They that take the sword shall perish with the sword ' are no 
 more a reproach than they are a justification. They might only be 
 to see both sides of the shield at once." 
 
 Kersent laughed gently. " See how easy it is to persuade one- 
 self of anything," he said. " There is no surety for the man who 
 takes his stand on ground below mine. When I assert my belief in 
 the supreme value of human life, I place myself and my faith on 
 an unshakable rock, above all winds that blow. I assure you, 
 Margaret, that this belief of mine is not an emotional self-indul- 
 gence. Neither is it an intellectual or political foible. It 's my 
 reasoned philosophy, embraced after taking into account, as far 
 as one man may, the desires achieved and potential, that have 
 seemed to men worthy of being gratified, or will come to seem 
 worthy of gratification to their developed intellect. Look at all 
 the things to which men have pinned their faith. To the love of a 
 friend or a woman, and the woman betrayed and the friend grew 
 cold. To their country and their country slandered them, in- 
 jured them, starved them, and when they died made use of their 
 life and their labors to further aims they had held in life-long 
 loathing. To truth and even as they died, the cherished truth 
 slipped from their grasp and mocked them in its falseness. To 
 power what is power but a striving and fretting against un- 
 assailable barriers? To fame and a paltry couple of thousand 
 years is enough to make men doubt whether the famed one were 
 man or woman or legion." 
 
 " I don't know who wrote all that unpoetical balderdash of 
 Beowulf," Oliver interrupted, " but I should think he 'd be pretty 
 mad if he knew he was only the long process of years selecting 
 and arranging the myriad voices of the folk." 
 
 Kersent looked absently at him. " In a few centuries," he said, 
 '* you and your precious poems will be as hard to trace as your 
 imaginary Celtic ancestors, surviving down the ages in spite of
 
 CHAOS 259 
 
 oppression, massacre and extermination, to wring our hard hearts 
 and shame our wizened visioning." 
 
 "Who says my ancestors are hard to trace down?" Oliver 
 shouted. " We 've been in Yorkshire for six generations, but we 
 are descended from Kings of West Ireland who were thought 
 enough of to be held for gods after they were dead. I can prove 
 it." 
 
 " For pity's sake," Margaret interrupted. ** What do you take 
 us for? The meeting of a Yeats Society? Let Kersent finish." 
 
 " I have finished," Kersent said. " I have nothing to prove half 
 so fascinating as the possession of ancestors with the morals of 
 goats and the speech of Irish poetasters. Indeed, I have nothing 
 that I can prove. There are certain things that men have always 
 held as valuable the things I have spoken of love, truth, 
 all the rest of them. I believe that all these things prove in the 
 end a mockery and a half-satisfaction to the man who possesses 
 them, or thinks himself to possess them. I believe that the only 
 thing in life whose value is eternally certain and satisfying is the 
 sanctity of life. You either believe this or you don't Proof 
 is useless or a supererogation. Mark that I did n't just say life. 
 I said the sanctity of life. I can imagine circumstances under 
 which I would infinitely prefer death to life. I can imagine cir- 
 cumstances under which I should doubt that in depriving a fellow- 
 man of life, I was sinning against the highest vision I have. To 
 take away life is the ultimate sin. It is the supreme Denial. It 
 is Antichrist." 
 
 His voice broke on a high thin note. We sat looking at him. 
 He moved his head restlessly from side to side. He was like a 
 beast caught in a net. 
 
 "To will not to kill is to will only a negation," Margaret 
 said. She spoke as if the words were forced out of her. 
 
 " It has another side," Kersent answered. " And its other side 
 is the will to live more finely. That is to say in more love to 
 one's neighbors. Men who believe as I do will not take life and 
 will do their utmost, by the avoidance of offense, to take from 
 others the temptation to kill." 
 
 Oliver roared with laughter. "To listen to you," he said, 
 " you 'd think we were in the Middle Ages, with the inquisition at
 
 260 THE HAPPY HIGHWAYS 
 
 the door. Do you see the king's majesty and all the peers and 
 judges of the realm rushing to spank Kersent by way of showing 
 him the error of his ways? " 
 
 "Things might be made disagreeable for him in wartime," I 
 said. " You remember how in our low-minded and unphilosophic 
 infancy we were persuaded to help smash old Carstairs' plate-glass 
 windows because some one said he was a Pro-Boer. We thought a 
 Pro-Boer was a new and despicable kind of person and we were 
 filled with the reformer's zeal." 
 
 "My father was supposed to be a Pro-Boer," Margaret said. 
 ** We used to keep the lower windows shuttered, and once a 
 crowd of children from the nearest village came shouting after me 
 * Pro-Boer's lass, she 's a Pro-Boer's lass.' I hit at them and 
 cried." 
 
 We lost ourselves in reminiscence. Kersent sat silent. In the 
 gathering twilight his face took on an odd air of foreboding. 
 Margaret's eyes kept turning to him, but she did not speak to him 
 again. When we were walking down Shepherd's Bush Road she 
 said, " If all men were like Kersent there would be no war. But 
 all men are not, and never will be. There '11 always be men cruel 
 and bigoted and jealous and greedy. The task is to make a world 
 in which the tyrant, the bigot, the jealous and the grasping are 
 harmless. Are even given a chance of release from themselves. 
 Men like Kersent will help to do that."
 
 CHAPTER VIII 
 
 I STOOD on the edge of the pavement in Shaftesbury Avenue 
 and read that Servia had refused the Austrian ultimatum. As 
 I read I heard Chamberlayn's eager voice as if he spoke over my 
 shoulder. " Will you believe me when you read that Servia re- 
 fuses? " 
 
 I tried to understand the implications of the refusal. The 
 solid world seemed reeling under my feet. A phantom traffic 
 swung and roared past me. I stood in a crowd of hurrying phan- 
 toms, under a white sky, trying to grasp things that eluded me 
 on every side, queer things looming behind the phantoms, as 
 blurred and indefinite as they, but menacing and insistent. The 
 world as I knew it was cracking and falling apart before my 
 eyes. I peered through the cracks at a world where even the 
 common things of life took on a strange significance. I had 
 prided myself on my clear sight. I had said the comfortable 
 assurances of the satisfied citizen are not for me. It seemed that I 
 also had been living in a world of comfortable assurances. I 
 wrestled with the immensity of the gulf that opened in front of 
 me. We had all of us become small Margaret and her ordeal 
 and my love, Chamberlayn's ambition, and Mick's small and 
 remote. They receded and dwindled. Kersent's face as it had 
 been on that night when we talked of war hung for a moment 
 before my eyes, sharp and distinct, a tiny image flung on a vast 
 screen. 
 
 There followed a time of peculiar tension. We bought and read 
 our papers with a half-guilty air of expectancy. That England 
 should fight again in Europe was incredible. We reminded our- 
 selves that she had held back in 1870. We spoke of our fear lest 
 she should fight now. Quite suddenly we were conscious of a 
 fear that she would not fight. 
 
 The tension was lightened for us one evening by Margaret's 
 quarrel with a theological student in the quadrangle of King'*. 
 
 261
 
 262 THE HAPPY HIGHWAYS 
 
 We were standing there waiting for Oliver when the holy man 
 rushed up to us. His name was Farrel: we both knew him 
 slightly. We used to keep up a fiction that Kersent had killed 
 him in debate, flinging his torn limbs under the benches, and that 
 the Farrel who walked about the corridors was a disembodied 
 spirit blown out with the breath of sanctity and sent to haunt Ker- 
 sent for his contumacy. 
 
 He was panting with excitement. " It 's war," he cried. " Do 
 you know, I '11 swear it 's war. There 's nothing in the papers yet. 
 I 've just been out and bought one to see. But I met Chadding 
 coming out of the Principal's room, and he was saying over his 
 shoulder, 'Oh, there's no chance of peace: it's only a matter of 
 hours.' And you know Chadding's brother is in the Foreign 
 Office." 
 
 " You seem damned pleased," I said. 
 
 Melancholy descended on him like a cloud. His very hair be- 
 came lank and drooping. 
 
 " Oh, no," he answered. " Oh, dear man, no. Who would re- 
 joice at war? But if we fight it will be a holy war." 
 
 " Why, who the devil told you that? " I cried. " You 've been 
 peeping through Archbishops' keyholes and listening at cracks in 
 their doors. Common folk like the rest of us have n't been told 
 that yet." 
 
 " Why should England fight, if not to keep freedom for weak 
 countries like Servia? And if we fight for freedom it is a holy 
 war." He was perfectly clear on the point, and amazed at our 
 dullness. He forgot to be mournful, and beamed with satisfaction 
 as he went over his argument again. / 
 
 " It is a Christian duty," he said. 
 
 I was for leaving him to his pretty theology, but he had irri- 
 tated Margaret. 
 
 " Why a Christian duty? " she said sharply. " Won't all the 
 nations at war be officially Christian? They all accept the doc- 
 trines of the Christ, erect innumerable buildings to declare and 
 discuss them, and spend vast sums of money and much labor on 
 the upkeep of an intricately organized and influential religious 
 bureaucracy on the upkeep of you and your likes, incidentally. 
 And Christ was perfectly clear on the question of taking life. I
 
 CHAOS 263 
 
 am sure you know all the correct texts. *Love your enemies.' 
 'Resist not evil: but whosoever shall smite thee on thy right 
 cheek turn to him the other also.' Do you suggest that Clyrist 
 was n't in His right senses when He said that? " 
 
 Farrel blushed for her. " Oh, no. Oh, dear no. I am sure 
 you mean well. But haven't you heard oh, you must have 
 heard that the Germans are trampling down Belgium to get at 
 France. If Jesus were alive now, He would wish to avenge Bel- 
 gium. I have not the least doubt of it." 
 
 " Well to be you," Margaret retorted. " But you do not know 
 what Jesus would have done, and you do know what He said. No 
 amount^rrf cunning, and juggling with words be the juggler 
 never so apostolically ordained can square killing men with the 
 teaching of Christ. You profess to follow His teaching in every 
 respect, but if you kill, or if you advocate killing, you 're acting 
 in direct contravention of your Master's repeated words. I don't 
 see how you can get over it. I 'm not arguing that you should n't 
 fight. I 'm only pointing out that Christ forbade fighting to kill, 
 and you are supposed to be an expert in His commands and prohi- 
 bitions." 
 
 Margaret has a clear voice, and in her anger it becomes extraor- 
 dinarily clearer. A little crowd of students had gathered round 
 us. She did not seem to notice them, intent on her argument. 
 I daresay she was arguing as much for her own enlightenment as 
 for the annihilation of Farrel. Farrel was hardly worth the 
 
 trouble. . , 
 
 " I mean," she said, " that if to break the law in one point 
 to break it in all and you yourself have said, on the authority of 
 your Doctors, that this is so then you 're simply not a Christian. 
 " Oh I can't admit that," Farrel stammered. 
 Margaret shrugged. " It does n't matter whether you adm.t it 
 or not," she said. "The sophism of your Church on this poir 
 remains indefensible. In the old days, Churchmen made wars, 
 and to-day they condone them. But it is the blunt fact that what- 
 ever or whoever has to do with war is not Christ-like. The Church 
 I mean all organized Christianity except an odd sect or two 
 long since threw overboard a cardinal point in the teaching 
 the man whom it calls its divine Founder. Why can't you be hon-
 
 264 THE HAPPY HIGHWAYS 
 
 est about it? Of course, no one really cares nowadays what 
 you 've thrown overboard or what you Ve kept. Who would look 
 in the Church for simple faith and honesty? Why, if you your 
 priests and ministers were to come out with an honest declara- 
 tion of a revised and selected Christianity, the world might posi- 
 tively be startled into taking you seriously. But far from at- 
 tempting honesty, your Church has overlaid its betrayal with a 
 perfect colossal monument of theologies. You can see for your- 
 self. Hardly a soul would think it strange that you, a preacher of 
 Christ, should be blessing the slaying of your fellow-men. Once 
 upon a time, the first people to call themselves Christians went un- 
 resisting to their death. They had no doubt but they were in the 
 right. In fact, they shared your happy certitude, but as it hap- 
 pens, with an absolutely contrary conviction. Since that day their 
 company has not increased. It has diminished. Your Church is 
 about two thousand years of time from its founder. In spirit it 's 
 about a million years away. It touches His spirit only in minor 
 points. Look for yourself. The Church is rich. Was Christ 
 rich? It is militant. Was He militant? It is bigoted. Was He 
 a bigot? " 
 
 She became abruptly conscious that her audience had grown 
 until it filled the steps and overflowed into the quad. With a nod 
 of farewell to Farrel she hurried me away. We heard Parrel's 
 high-pitched voice raised in voluble refutation of her heresies. 
 
 We held our last Eikonoklast meeting that night. I described 
 the scene in the quad. 
 
 " Oh, good for Margaret," Oliver said. " Of course she was 
 talking rot, but who cares so long as it disturbed the Farrel in his 
 den? " 
 
 " It was n't rot," Kersent interrupted. " It 's literally true that 
 the man who bases his refusal on the words of the Christ is all 
 that is left of the disciples. I should say that Christ had a few 
 odd thousand followers to-day. I don't profess to be one of them 
 myself, but I Ve this in common with the unpruned Christian 
 that we don't regard anything as justification for the taking of 
 human life." 
 
 "Then why don't we turn out a revised Christianity? " I said
 
 CHAOS 265 
 
 idly. " A sort of new Creed. This I believe and this I cast from 
 me." 
 
 " Well, you can see how dangerous such a course is. If you 
 begin by casting out one point of faith, why should you stop at 
 that one? " 
 
 " We haven't, of course," I said. " Our Christian world does 
 n't give of its two cloaks to him that hath none, and it does n't 
 love its business neighbor as itself. We ought, in honesty, to stop 
 babbling of what Christ would have said if He 'd been preaching 
 in the City Temple on Sunday, and say right out that we can't 
 follow His doctrine as He laid it down. In fact, that we'd be 
 craven fools if we did. We should say: there are some circum- 
 stances in which men must prepare to slay men: we reject the 
 Christ standard of values: our high tradition sometimes leads us 
 up over the slain bodies of our fellows." 
 
 " Then, of course," Kersent added, " you 'd be challenged to 
 name the circumstances. You '11 have to find a higher value than 
 the Christ-value of unresisting endurance of injury." 
 
 " God knows what you all think you 're talking about," Cham- 
 berlayn interrupted. " What the devil could a man want more 
 to fight than to defend the power and glory of his own country? 
 I mean it 's awful rot to talk about it, really, but if you must 
 talk about it, that's the fact, isn't it? " He glared at Kersent. 
 " You don't want Englishmen to be scattered over the world like 
 beastly Jews? Though of course you can't really kill a race by 
 scattering it. The spirit of race is immortal." He produced this 
 aphorism with the air of a serious man who descends to bandy 
 wits. 
 
 Kersent groaned aloud. "Oh, my God, has Oliver been talk- 
 ing to you about the Celt? I suppose Matthew Arnold is really 
 to blame. He set us groping in a Celtic twilight after a flame- 
 haired, blue-eyed wraith, impulsive of deed, lofty of thought, gen- 
 erous of spirit, full of strange oaths and literary inversions of 
 speech. Who will rid me of the body of this death? Who'll 
 stake it down in the ancient past so that we can see face to face 
 the Irishman and Welshman of the day's reality grasping, un- 
 imaginative, unless imagination be vested in spook-ridden poets,
 
 266 THE HAPPY HIGHWAYS 
 
 generous and ungenerous, brave and craven, common like the rest 
 of common men? Man, there is no Celt such as ye hunger for. 
 Maybe the Celt of your tradition lives a vicarious and fragmentary 
 life in the blood of half the races of the world. I 'm damned if he 
 exists anywhere else." 
 
 " Then," said Chamberlayn triumphantly ," if you want to pre- 
 serve a nationality you '11 have to fight for it, or else be scattered 
 and blotted out." 
 
 " Is nationality worth fighting for? " I interrupted. 
 
 " Oh, if you 're going to get on to your paradoxes ! " He flung 
 up his hands. 
 
 " There 's no paradox about," I laughed. " Sniff again, old fox. 
 But listen a minute. England submitted to the Norman, and in 
 course of time English and Norman disappeared into the making 
 of a subtly different Englishman. Suppose Germany conquered 
 England and reduced Englishmen to an inferior status. . . ." 
 
 " They would n't submit to it." 
 
 " Whether they did or did n't, the end of a German occupation 
 would be the evolution of a different Englishman. Something 
 would be lost to him, but was it worth struggling for? Look at 
 the Pole. He has scratched his itching national aspiration until 
 it is a fever in his blood, destroying body and mind. Is it worth 
 it? After all, what is the value to a people of the peculiar qual- 
 ity of its Being known as its nationality? " 
 
 " Exactly nothing," Kersent said bluntly. " As a matter of fact 
 it simply doesn't exist. There are no races or nations: there 
 are only men and other men. Pride of nationality is an atavistic 
 ghost blown into a seeming of vitality by the bad breath of 
 politicians and self-seekers. Of course, if you look at them from 
 one angle of vision, the peoples of the world fall apart into sharp, 
 almost antagonistic groups. But if you look at them straight 
 they '11 sort themselves out in such a way that to find your spiritual 
 kin, my dear Chamberlayn, I should probably have to hunt 
 am6ng the tribes of Central Africa, or somewhere else where they 
 still worship fetishes and ju-ju men." 
 
 Jack became incoherent. 
 
 No doubt the spiritual brother of Erasmus Butterby lives in 
 a mud kraal and knowing nought of broadcloth " the best
 
 CHAOS 267 
 
 broadcloth from the best mills, my boy " decorates his paunch 
 with beads. 
 
 But there are some disadvantages in viewing the races of man- 
 kind from the standpoint of spiritual kinship. I take the chiefest 
 to be that there is so feeble a spirit in the worst of us and so 
 variable a spirit in the best of us as to make nonsense of the 
 saying, " There are no races and nations, but only men and 
 other men." You have to multiply the individual human spirit 
 by hundreds of his fellows before you get a spirit to juggle 
 with at all. The spirit of the wild ox is something of a flicker: 
 reinforced by the spirit of the rest of its herd it becomes a 
 formidjrWe flame. This is not the only analogy between, men 
 and oxen. 
 
 Even a nation of slaves may achieve something of distinction 
 in its national manifestations of spirit. May even at times so 
 pour into one man the suppressed fire of its aspirations as to light 
 a beacon for the world. So with the Jews and Christ.
 
 CHAPTER IX 
 
 ON the day of the declaration of war we met in the basement 
 at Hammersmith. We had made no appointment with each 
 other. Margaret and I had gone there to pack up our books and 
 arrange for their removal. Shortly Kersent came in, and then 
 Chamberlayn and Oliver together. 
 
 Outside the footsteps of the passers-by rang on the iron 
 grating above the narrow area. They went with nervous speed, 
 or shuffled languidly. I found myself listening to them, weaving 
 patterns in their ceaseless rhythm. In the dim basement a 
 leashed excitement drew us together. We sat round the place 
 on packing cases and piles of newspapers. Kersent and Margaret 
 went on methodically sorting out the books on the shelves while 
 the rest of us talked. I do not know whether Chamberlayn 
 realized Kersent's attitude to war. For some time he ignored 
 Kersent and devoted his attention to me. I was putting up a 
 half -deliberate pretense at hesitation. I hated to be rushed into 
 anything, even into war, and I was quite ready to argue about it. 
 
 " Good God, man," Chamberlayn said, " you 're not going to 
 tell us it 's not necessary to fight. We did n't ask for war, but 
 now it 's here it 's got to be won. I know you 're no shirker, but 
 your mind 's so full of kinks . . ." 
 
 "Somebody must have been asking for war," Kersent mur- 
 mured. " You said Germany was preparing for it, France hoping 
 for revenge, and your friend the brigadier expecting it. I dare- 
 say he faced the prospect with no undue horror, except at the 
 thought that we were n't ready. Seems to me there 's been a 
 good many Sister Annes hanging out of turret windows looking 
 for a cloud of dust." 
 
 " That 's all very well," Chamberlayn retorted, " but it has 
 nothing to do with us who are young. We didn't start it." 
 
 " When we know a little more about it, I daresay we '11 find 
 that it came out of the follies and sins of the past," I said. 
 
 268
 
 CHAOS 269 
 
 ** Devil take its beginnings," Chamberlayn cried. " Ain't it 
 enough that we 're faced by the danger of a German Europe? " 
 
 "Is it possible? " Kersent interrupted smoothly. "Whatever 
 makes you suppose that there are fools in existence who dream 
 of a European Kingdom? And even if it were accomplished 
 and Germany dominated it, what difference would it make to the 
 millions of us? " 
 
 He finished the packing of the last case, and seated himself 
 carefully on the top of it. " You 're not fools," he said slowly. 
 "You don't really believe that the only statesmen who dream 
 of turning the lower classes into well-bred slaves dwell on 
 t 'othet side the Rhine and cry Hoch at the sight of sauerkraut. 
 Every modern State is rotten and built on self-interest and 
 greed. I would n't raise a finger to save one of them." He 
 lifted his head and looked at Chamberlayn. " I might as well 
 be frank about it. I don't intend to fight. I don't suppose 
 they 'd take me as a fighter." He shrugged his thin shoulders. 
 "But there are things I could do. Only, I will take no part 
 in war. I can't go over it all again." 
 
 Chamberlayn stared at him. " No part? What d 'you mean? 
 You can't help taking part." 
 
 "lean and shall." 
 
 Chamberlayn got to his feet. I suppose that in that moment 
 all the pent forces of his hatred of Kersent burst up and swept 
 away his lingering consideration for Kersent's frailty. "You 
 poor fool," he stammered. " Oh, you poor fool ! " 
 
 He poured on Kersent a torrent of denunciation. 
 
 Interruption came unexpectedly. Margaret ran across the 
 room and shook his arm. "Be quiet," she said. "We know 
 your heart is in the right place, and your head is not quite 
 hopeless, but you '11 make us want to prove both in the wrong. 
 Can't you see that we've none of us had time to think things 
 out yet? " 
 
 "Oh, for pity's sake," he shouted, "don't let's think about 
 it. If we think long enough we '11 all be Kersents." 
 
 Margaret laughed at him a little wildly. " Yes, that 's just you. 
 You '11 take any sort of risk, make any wild jump, consent to any 
 patching up and hiding of rottenness if only you 're not asked
 
 270 THE HAPPY HIGHWAYS 
 
 to take the trouble of thinking it out beforehand. You get 
 irritated when you think. It 's because you have n't thought 
 deep enough. You 've only scratched at your mind and irritated 
 it. Kersent has thought deeply, but only in his own nature. 
 He thinks Germans would all be Kersents if you gave them a 
 chance." 
 
 "Eh! " said Chamberlayn. "What does it matter? " 
 A dull calm succeeded his outburst. He began searching 
 for his hat. He found it and turned to Kersent. 
 
 " I 've nothing more to say. You can sit here in your cellar. 
 I don't know if I called you a coward just now. If I did I take it 
 back and apologize for it. The mischief 's in your mind. It 's 
 your mind I really loathe. You bloody Pilate! " 
 He went out and Oliver followed him. 
 
 "Are you coming? " I asked Kersent. He shook his head. 
 In the doorway Margaret hesitated. She walked back across 
 the room, and stood beside him. 
 
 " We Ve not always been the best of friends," she said, " and 
 I don't agree with you now. But if there's ever anything you 
 want doing that I can do, you will let me? " 
 " Thank you," he said, without stirring. 
 We went out and left him sitting there. 
 
 I stood next day in the upper windows of a newspaper office 
 in Fleet Street, watching while the khaki-clad companies went by. 
 I think they were Territorials. They had their band, and the 
 drums rolled in the distance. I tried to quiet the throbbing 
 of my heart. 
 
 I told myself that it behooved every man to think out the 
 question of his duty. Kersent had thought it out. We were 
 surely past the days when men went blindly to fight in any war, 
 caring nought for its injustice. I called up a scorn of my own 
 emotion. The whole of my ancient distrust of a Butterby-ap- 
 proved Empire rushed to join itself to that scorn. I thought 
 " I 'm damned if I '11 run like a fool because drums beat and 
 flags wave. I '11 understand things first." 
 
 I went down into the street. There among the crowds standing 
 along the pavement, I ran into Dora. He stood with his hands
 
 CHAOS 271 
 
 in his pockets and his hat on the back of his head, smiling while 
 other folks cheered. I had not seen him for months. He greeted 
 me cheerfully. 
 
 " What sort of a feeling does military music rouse in you? " 
 I asked him curiously. 
 
 "This sort of thing?" He waved a hand at the excited 
 crowd. "Oh pity, chiefly to think that there are so many 
 fools in the world." 
 
 " It doesn't make you want to rush off and join them? " 
 
 "Good Lord, no. Do you take me for a fool? " He flung 
 back His head and laughed. " Fight? Me? Fight for a lot of 
 bloody-minded capitalists? Fight for George and Mary? Not 
 me. Give me a barricade across a street and something worth 
 fighting for, and I '11 fight, by God I will." 
 
 He nodded to a man crossing the road in the wake of the 
 released traffic. " A man you ought to know," he said. " Landon. 
 Landon of the ' Beacon.' He and I are starting a peace cam- 
 paign right away." He introduced us. I had the curiosity to 
 ask Landon to explain his point of view. But he and Dora 
 were both so irritatingly sure that my intellect could not compass 
 the heights and depths of their pacifist philosophy that I lost 
 them in the crowd. 
 
 The conviction grew within me that my place was with Oliver 
 and Chamberlayn. As in our Hammersmith experiment we had 
 found it imperative to fly from thoughts to deeds, so now I 
 turned instinctively to action. At the moment I did not care 
 much on which side I was so long as it was not Dora's. And 
 there for the present I left my reflections. 
 
 I do not know whether I went into the war to save my soul. 
 It is a delicate question. Kersent remained at home to save 
 his. He lost his life and I my eyesight. At any rate I have 
 proved to my own satisfaction that the soul dwells not in the 
 eyes. Kersent has been able to make the final test. Who shall 
 say what he has proved and discovered ? 
 
 I must have met Charlotte later on that same day, Charlotte 
 of the T. P.'s Circle. I have a vague remembrance of talking 
 to her in some cafe. A little sharper of feature, a little cloudier
 
 272 THE HAPPY HIGHWAYS 
 
 of brain, a little more discontented was Charlotte. She said 
 amazingly, " Well, if the Germans do conquer England, at least 
 they will get plays like mine produced." 
 
 There was with her a fat and famous journalist, who fixed 
 me with a satyric eye and said, "What does it matter whether 
 this war be righteous or a madness? Better it were madness. 
 The glory of the warrior is not in the justice, but in the in- 
 justice of the fight. That men should pour away life for a 
 madness! The heroic age is come again! i
 
 CHAPTER X 
 
 I HAVE to record a gradual slackening of enthusiasm. In the 
 early days of the war I easily persuaded myself that we were 
 moving to that social unity of which we had imagined the faint 
 stirring in our Brixton circle, in the art circles of Chelsea, in a 
 dozen 'other side eddies of the national life. I believed that we 
 stood at a place in the upward path of humanity where all those 
 forces that drive man beyond the narrow circle of his egoistic 
 sympathies were bursting into conscious life. Impossible that 
 the chance would be missed. The tremendous winged forces 
 that beat so blindly against the distrusts of class and sex and 
 age would be set free, and like Pegasus, return to the hands of 
 their masters and be guided through the stars. We should be 
 a nation of brothers. A new age was being born, an age in which 
 all the khmaels, rich and poor, would find their place in a 
 commonalty of service. 
 
 Upon my word, I talked like Erasmus Butterby and never 
 thought of him once. 
 
 To tell the truth, there was, during the first months of the war, 
 a thaw in the ice barriers between class and class. It did not last. 
 The barriers hardened again with astonishing rapidity. Beneath 
 the much talk of unity, the old hostilities reared angry heads. 
 
 I gave up reading the " Beacon." It irritated me so with its 
 futile pin-pricks of jealousy, and its whimper of remonstrance. 
 I gave up looking to England to nourish a new state between 
 her ancient breasts. After all, said I, states are not born like 
 that. 
 
 I became absorbed in the efforts of individuals. For a long 
 time I tried to keep in touch with Kersent. During the first year 
 of the war he remained lecturing at King's. He read a paper to 
 the Oxford Philosophical Society. He drew breath after his 
 terrible struggle for the things that were life to him. 
 
 I do not think that the question of his views on war arose at 
 all during this time. Certainly he never proclaimed them. Jn 
 
 273
 
 274 THE HAPPY HIGHWAYS 
 
 one of his letters he wrote, " I wonder what Chadding would 
 say if he knew my opinion of his patriotic eruptions. He said 
 at a dinner last week that there was not, in the whole of German 
 philosophy, one single doctrine that was more than a developing 
 and a subtilizing of the howl of the wolf pack. I wish to God 
 I had the courage to remind him of his book on Hegel wherein 
 he compares that gentleman to a mountain whose head is veiled 
 in the serene clouds and whose feet stand firm-rooted in the 
 warm vibrant life of humanity. He has never asked me what 
 I make of the war. I think poorly of myself for concealing my 
 opinions from him. Indeed, I live in dread of the day when I 
 can no longer conceal them. I dread most of all that I should 
 find within myself the cowardice to deny them." 
 
 I wrote and told him that I saw no reason why he should 
 proclaim his opinions. After that I heard from him no more, 
 and on my next leave I went to look him up. I went to King's, 
 and was told that he had left the college. I sought him next in 
 Walthamstow. 
 
 He was there. The family had taken another room in the house 
 where they had always lived. It was fitted up as a study and 
 sitting-room for Kersent. His mother opened the door nervously 
 and showed me in. 
 
 I was stricken with horror at Kersent's appearance. His face 
 had taken on the aspect of a transparent mask. One could almost 
 see the taut nerves straining in the emaciated body. He ex- 
 plained briefly that Chadding had asked him to attest under the 
 Derby scheme. 
 
 " It was purely a matter of form, he told me. There would 
 be no question of my joining the army even if I were accepted. 
 Only, for the look of the thing, I must offer my services." Kersent 
 paused, "By God, Hearne, I nearly attested." He laughed; 
 I stared fascinated at the grotesque movements of his facial 
 muscles. " However, I did n't. Chadding wanted to know why, 
 and I told him. Oh, they did n't drop me right away. They 
 reasoned with me. They tried to persuade me to offer my services 
 to the Red Cross. Chadding said 'My dear fellow, what on 
 earth does it matter? You won't be accepted. You 're not 
 fit, and in any case, we should retain you here.' I believe it was
 
 CHAOS 275 
 
 my obstinacy that irritated them. I resigned to save them the 
 trouble of showing me the door." 
 
 The pity burned in my throat. 
 
 " Man," I urged, " why can't you take your share? You don't 
 need to fight and kill. There are other ways of fighting." 
 
 A somber flame sprang into his eyes. " Why should I fight 
 at all? " he said harshly. " Could the Germans do worse to me 
 than my own countrymen have done? Am I to fight for the 
 inestimable boon of having been born in fear, bred in misery, 
 and starved all my life? Ask a pig to defend his stye." 
 
 "Don't you care at all for the ideals in peril? " I said des- 
 perately. 
 
 He laughed his thin, mocking laugh. " Ideals? You talk 
 to me of ideals? Ideals that have produced me? " He beat his 
 hands on his chest. 
 
 " Can't you look beyond yourself? " 
 
 " What shall I see when I do ? A universal carnage in which 
 you ask me to join." 
 
 We sat in silence until Kersent rose. " You 'd better go," he 
 said. " We have nothing to say to each other. Thanks very 
 much for coming." 
 
 I had great ado not to run from the house to hide my anguish. 
 " What are you doing? " I asked. 
 
 ** Just at present, teaching in a preparatory school that hap- 
 pened to be in urgent need of teachers. I do not know what I 
 shall do next." 
 
 In the outer room his mother cried as she went to open the 
 door for me. " He was so happy," she whispered, looking nerv- 
 ously to see that Kersent had shut the door of his room. " He 
 was so happy. Why could n't they let him be? " 
 
 A bent figure by the fireplace lifted its head and scratched at 
 its wrinkled neck with long black nails. " Oh, ay, happy," Ker- 
 sent's father said, " happy, as fools be happy. I told him. Now 
 it 's come to him." 
 
 The mother looked miserably from her husband to the closed 
 door of her son's room. If it were not that men are so ridiculous, 
 how could one bear their suffering? 
 
 I went looking for the saving grotesque and found Oliver.
 
 CHAPTER XI 
 
 \ 
 
 OLIVER had been discharged from the army with the loss of 
 three fingers of his left hand and a slash down the side of his 
 chest that will pain him all his life. I went up north that night 
 to see him and my mother. He had joined the army as a private, 
 and held my commission in unconcealed contempt. It was 
 difficult to discover what he did not hold in contempt. 
 
 He strode about our small sitting-room, and talked in a voice 
 of thunder against every aspect of modern life. He damned it 
 root, branch and blossom. He said that our society was a swollen 
 corpse, which, instead of producing bees produced horrible prying 
 insects of politicians, and socialists, who were nothing but poli- 
 ticians out of a job. This charnel-house atmosphere he laid to 
 the account of modern art. 
 
 " In the Middle Ages," said he, " art was not only instinct with 
 life it was a part of life. It lived, and men breathed it in with 
 their common air. It spoke to them in furniture, in tapestries 
 whereon saints are received into glory, and babies display their 
 nakedness, and knights go hunting in the gay greenwood. It 
 sang for joy in Churches, letting imps and devils and angels 
 sport and sleep on its huge, jolly limbs. In the modern com- 
 mercial age, art is an excrescence, at best a protest. It stands 
 like Ruth amid the alien corn, and snivels until Boaz comes along 
 with a check. It can have no part in an order founded on self- 
 interest, for art is always disinterested. By that, I mean that its 
 interests are as wide as the world and its forms as many as the 
 forms of life. But if the forms of life are all twisted and ugly, 
 what can art do but fly from them and build itself out over the 
 air, held to the earth by as tenuous a thread as it can conceive? 
 Futurism is the last and worst expression of this building out 
 over the air. What the world's clowns, apes, fools whatever 
 you will call Naturalism, is the horrible abortion that resulted 
 when art attempted to join itself to modern life." 
 
 276
 
 CHAOS 277 
 
 "What do you propose to do about it? " I interrupted weakly. 
 
 "Let me tell you. I am an artist. Under the circumstances 
 there are only two courses open to an artist. He can either 
 be a Walter Crane and join his art to the last living thing left in 
 the modern world the half-articulate, volcanic forces of the 
 people's need. Or he can withdraw to the only mode of life that 
 is still fit to give birth to art. I mean the life of nature. I shall 
 be a laborer a peasant. You haven't forgotten old Luke 
 Pearson? I went to see him last week. I get a cottage and a 
 pound a week to work for him, and I shall begin next month. 
 By God, I 'm going back to the moors and the fields that slope 
 down to the valley and the wide meadows where the brown 
 streams leap between the drooping beech trees. I 'm getting 
 back into life as into a garment. What a fool, what a fool I 
 was ever to leave it off." 
 
 He threw his huge arms above his head, and the flames of his 
 hair made him a halo of fire. 
 
 " You '11 weary of it in a week," I said. 
 
 For the matter of that, he has not wearied of it yet, nor has 
 my mother, who went with her Benjamin. I do not suppose that 
 they will. 
 
 He took not the slightest notice of me now, but roared away 
 in the clouds. 
 
 "Art and life are one and the same thing. Art is life in 
 articulate song. Art is the rushing wind in the hair of life. 
 Tear them apart, and both are maimed, sterile, artificial. The 
 divorce of art and life is the root of evil." 
 
 Jove could not have been more inspired. I lit my pipe and 
 had pity of Juno.
 
 CHAPTER XII 
 
 ON leave in London, sometime in the winter of 1915, I wan- 
 dered into a Bond Street cafe. The pinch of war was tight- 
 ening on the poorer people, but the dainty, soft-shod women sat 
 here and talked delicate rubbish in the uninflected monotonous 
 drawl of refined speech. 
 
 " I said to young Harburn that the German women in England 
 should be put on the land. On the land. Set to dig." She 
 poked a slender white hand into the violets on her muff. " Har- 
 burn has the ear of the Home Office the ear, my dear . . ." 
 
 A frail ingenue of thirty leaned towards a young officer who 
 wore the ribbons of four decorations. " We shall never give 
 in, shall we? " she lisped. " We shall fight to the last drop of 
 blood and the last crumb." 
 
 He looked at her for a brief second before he said, " Of course." 
 
 I recognized old Lady Cricklewood, Jack Chamberlayn's ma- 
 ternal aunt. " I canteen at night," she boomed. " I do Red 
 Cross charity work all day. I Ve given recklessly, recklessly, my 
 love. And then they say that we of the upper classes do not 
 realize the war, and are not taking our share." She lifted an 
 impressive hand. " We are the only ones who do realize it. 
 What can the working-man understand of the intricate, world- 
 wide interests at stake? What is Imperialism to him? " She 
 sank her voice to a thunderous whisper. " Of course, I know one 
 should n't say it, with all this scandalous labor unrest about, 
 but do you can one indeed honestly believe that these people 
 feel losses as we do? My nephew went back to the front last 
 week. He seemed almost depressed, poor boy. I wrote to him 
 and said 'Fight on. God is with you. We are with you.' 
 Ah, what a spirit is in the old stock." 
 
 I tried to shift my chair out of the range of her eye. She 
 prided herself upon a memory for fapesj J thought that she
 
 CHAOS 279 
 
 might reach out a ponderous hand and pick me up to be ques- 
 tioned for the satisfaction of her cosmic insolence. The move- 
 ment brought me violently against a small table set back in the 
 corner. I jumped up to apologize to a girl sitting there, -half- 
 hidden by the curtains. Olive Champion turned her head. After 
 a moment's sharp scrutiny she held out her hand. " How well 
 you look," she said; "won't you sit here? " 
 
 I took the other chair, and wondered what I should say. She 
 leaned back in her seat, and eyed me with a deliberate assurance. 
 
 " Have I changed? " she demanded. 
 
 " You are thinner," I said doubtfully. 
 
 "And older and wiser, and not so pretty." She laughed. 
 "Bones don't suit my type of beauty." And then abruptly 
 "Where's Mick?" 
 
 "Hasn't he " I began. 
 
 " Now, don't pretend you thought he would have written to 
 me. You knew he would n't as well as I did. Oh, don't think I 
 care. I am long past that time. I 'm curious." 
 
 " He 's in Barbados," I said. " Chief assistant on an Agricul- 
 tural Experiment Station. He has a salary of 350. He 's doing 
 brilliant work. He got his F.R.S. this year for his work on 
 the diseases of cotton. Immunity of native cotton to Blister- 
 Mite. One of these days he '11 get his chance to make practical 
 use of his knowledge commercial use, I mean. He '11 be rich 
 perhaps. He has a white house, a pianola, and a bust of 
 Beethoven." She would not smile, and I finished lamely, "He 
 seems content. But then he might any day break away and 
 leave things, as he did before." 
 
 She sat brooding, her head resting rather wearily on her hand. 
 Then she said quietly, " He always said you could n't make 
 money honestly in a world so ill-arranged. He said all rich 
 men's hands were blood-stained." 
 
 " Perhaps it 's different out there," I said weakly. 
 
 She looked at me with somber eyes. " It would n't be different 
 anywhere for Mick. He 's altered or else he did n't mean the 
 things he said. Perhaps he only went to get away from me." 
 
 A queer pity seized me. " I think you 're wrong," I said. 
 " He went because he could n't stand the life of a professional
 
 280 THE HAPPY HIGHWAYS 
 
 scientist. It's a stupid life in England. Mick isn't made for 
 such things." 
 
 I knew that I was talking nonsense, and I tried awkwardly 
 to explain Michael to her. " You 're wrong about him," I re- 
 peated. " He 's a scientist. He 's got to be a scientist. Only, 
 here, things worried him and got at him. The meanness and 
 harshness of life kept thrusting in upon his work . . ." 
 
 I don't think she listened to me. 
 
 " I did n't believe in him when he was here," she said slowly. 
 " Since he went I Ve made myself believe in him. Not because 
 of himself, you know. But I wanted to have something sure." 
 She laughed loudly. " How mournful we 're getting. We might 
 be discussing a corpse. For pity's sake, let's try something a 
 little more cheerful." 
 
 *' What are you doing now? " I asked. 
 
 "I? Oh, just living. You wouldn't know, of course, that 
 mother and father have separated. I live with mother, but it 
 is n't all smooth going. Mother 's quite happy ; she has a man 
 to take her round and buy her things." She grimaced, and 
 leaned forward with an air of reckless candor. " Of course, 
 I know what you all think of me and of mother. But I 'm not 
 like that really. It 's not good enough for me. I must marry. 
 She would n't be sorry to have me out of the way. I shall do the 
 best I can for myself." 
 
 She gathered up her furs, and we walked to the door. 
 
 " Where are you going? " I said. 
 
 " Home. I 've been round the shops. Everything is awfully 
 dear. This silly war. I 'm going to the Palace to-night. I don't 
 suppose we shall meet again." She gazed across the street, talk- 
 ing in an absent, jerky fashion. 
 
 I put her into a taxi. 
 
 " Where shall I tell him to go? " 
 
 She leaned forward suddenly. " Why is n't Mick fighting? " 
 
 " Oh. You did n't know. I forgot. He 's lame. He got 
 knocked about on that ship." 
 
 She started at that. " Lame? Mick? Oh, how strange. I 
 think of him as so quick and eager. She settled herself against
 
 CHAOS 281 
 
 the cushions. " Tell him Belgravia, Eaton Terrace. Good-by. 
 Good luck." 
 
 I never saw or heard of her again. I wrote and told Mick 
 of the meeting. His comment was briefly characteristic. " Hope 
 she marries well," he wrote. " I bear her no ill-will. And self- 
 preservation is a law of immature life."
 
 CHAPTER XIII 
 
 /CHAMBERLAYN was killed a week later. He had trained as 
 V_^ an airman. " Building my bridges in the air," he had it. 
 He was skilful beyond the ordinary, and courageous in the com- 
 mon way of flying men. He held the D.S.O. when a German 
 airman shot him down in his twenty-fourth year. 
 
 I was at breakfast when a man who had known him came 
 into the mess and asked us if we had heard. Almost before 
 I could take in the sense of his casual words, I had an instant 
 and vivid vision of Chamberlayn. He stood in a darkened base- 
 ment with his hands resting on the table, and explained the 
 building of bridges to an odd fifty of tired, work-worn men. It 
 was as if he stood at the other side of the narrow breakfast-table. 
 Then the white cloth and the cups and plates came back, and 
 shone where the lean hands had pressed bare scarred deal, and a 
 khaki-covered shoulder blotted the stooping body back out of 
 life. I suppressed my cry of greeting and farewell. 
 
 Death and friendship play so swift a game out there that 
 when death wins there is small time for sorrow. It is an un- 
 kindly saying. But since the one player changes so often and the 
 other never at all the game loses at last even the interest of a 
 hazard. 
 
 I bore about with me for days a sense of loss that somehow 
 excluded thought of Chamberlayn himself. 
 
 The old Duke went out a few months later. I saw him a 
 week before he died. He was not ill, but he talked and moved 
 like a man already emptied of life. I thought that he must have 
 drawn his life from Jack, and was only waiting now for the 
 touch that should crumple him into silence, a little dust at the 
 end of four centuries of life. 
 
 I had just left the Duke when I ran into Tommy. I was walking 
 aimlessly up Fleet Street. Anthony's train was due in two hours. 
 
 282
 
 CHAOS 283 
 
 His leave and mine had fallen together for the first time, and we 
 meant London to remember it. 
 
 Tommy had with her the little man who had given me cause 
 for so much irritation and self-abasement in the early days of 
 our Scheme. He had not forgotten me. He stared at my uni- 
 form. "The machine got you, I see." He made the remark 
 with the air of a man who cannot take much pleasure in the 
 spectacle of folly just because he has always known the fool 
 to be a fool. 
 
 " It did n't get you," I answered. 
 
 " I should hope not." He began to explain at once that he was 
 not one of your snivelling Christians. 
 
 ** I don't care a damn one way or another about fighting," 
 said he. " I 'd as soon fight as not, if it comes to that. But I 'm 
 out to smash the machine." 
 
 " The machine? " I queried hopefully. 
 
 He didn't think me worth the trouble of explanation. I sup- 
 pose some one had been telling him that wars are arranged solely 
 for the benefit of the rich, and although his knowledge of eco- 
 nomics was confined to labor pamphlets he believed it, as he 
 believed everything written in labor pamphlets. 
 
 He told me that he was coaching the slower-witted of his 
 comrades for their appearance at tribunals. He had a gleeful 
 sense that he was assisting at treasonable practices. 
 
 "Come and have some tea," Tommy said. "If you're not 
 too good to be seen with the likes of us." 
 
 I was abject enough to rise to the taunt. 
 
 "There's a vegetarian place near, where we always go," she 
 added. 
 
 We walked down four side-streets to a small, steamy room 
 hung with reed mats, and full of the most horrible painted pots. 
 Tommy led the way to a corner table. "This is my treat," 
 she announced, and ordered three cups of some strange drink. 
 It turned out to be a coffee substitute, unspeakably vile of smell, ' 
 and abominable of taste. She eyed me unkindly while I sipped 
 the treat. 
 
 The little man ate poached eggs and abused England. He 
 seemed to hate England. No enemy accusation could have been
 
 284 THE HAPPY HIGHWAYS 
 
 more bitter than his. He would not discuss the follies or crimes 
 of any other nation, but he discoursed me with passion on the 
 treachery, greed, and ingratitude of his own. 
 
 " When I was home on my last leave," I interrupted, " I 
 saw some sailors brought ashore from a torpedoed tramp steamer. 
 It was a bitter day, with a wind like a lash and a cruel sea. The 
 men had taken to their boats, of course, and they had been fired 
 on as they crouched there. Some were killed and some were 
 wounded. The boat was beastly to look at. No worse than 
 the trenches, of course, but the sea is man's common enemy, and 
 it doesn't seem decent to me to take sides with her in the way 
 the Germans do." 
 
 He stared. " Our Navy does far worse things than that," he 
 said, " but they don't get into the papers." 
 
 " You guzzling little beast," I cried. 
 
 He grinned. " Of course, if you will believe all you read . . ." 
 
 He did, but then he and I read different things. I suppose 
 that neither of us considered the other's point of view worth the 
 attempt at understanding. Moreover I had a sudden loathing 
 of his loose-mouthed smile and general slackness of body. His 
 neck wanted washing, and I sought a feeble relief in calling him 
 a filthy blackguard. But that delighted him beyond measure. 
 
 " You must n't talk to Hearne like that," Tommy said mali- 
 cipusly. " He 's simply bursting with national feeling." 
 
 The little man wriggled for joy. "There is no such thing," 
 he said. " Take it from me it 's a newspaper dodge." 
 
 I opened my mouth to reply and shut it again. I should be 
 a fool and mad to argue with him. If I let his attitude of mind 
 annoy me, so much the worse for me. It had in reality no rela- 
 tion to the War. The War had not created him, nor even de- 
 veloped him. He was one of a class which exists, a menace and 
 a shame, in every modern state. He was a slave, and half edu- 
 cated. 
 
 Quite suddenly I understood why he was so ready to talk, 
 with his mouth full of poached egg, on the perfidy of the Briton 
 and the glory of the German. Distorted out of recognition by its 
 Struggle against the bitter sense of wrong done him, the ancient
 
 CHAOS 285 
 
 impulse to national pride yet stirred in him. Painfully, it was 
 forcing its way to the surface of his mind in the form of a savage 
 determination to find good in some alien nation in any nation, 
 so long as it were not the one that had starved and thwarted 
 him all his life. 
 
 " You 're only a Chauvinist upside down," I murmured. 
 
 "Eh? " he said, staring. 
 
 I pondered, in what Tommy would have called my crude fash- 
 ion, whether at this stage of human development, one might ex- 
 pect to find faiths that have as yet small credit housed with most 
 readiness and comfort in imperfect bodies. The hermits of the 
 early Christian age clearly thought so; they spared themselves 
 no rigors of mortification that could destroy the body. 
 
 " Have another cup? " Tommy said abruptly. 
 
 I tried to control my face. " Good God, no " I answered. 
 
 " You 're awfully rude." 
 
 " I thought you liked to be treated as if you were a man." 
 
 "Soldo. Why should n't I?" 
 
 " A man would n't have been offended at my reply." 
 
 " Neither am I," she cried shrilly. " You 've no right to say 
 I 'm offended." 
 
 " I wonder why you are a pacifist," I said. " You 're so re- 
 markably belligerent." I knew that I was behaving disgrace- 
 fully to my hostess. Hostess in spite of me, and to my grief. 
 But I had suffered so much from the pair of them. 
 
 She fell into the trap and began an involved defense of pacifism 
 from which I gathered that the intellectual position of the pacifist 
 was too lofty to be comprehended by the non-elect and that the 
 veriest fool ought to understand its inevitable commonsense and 
 righteousness. 
 
 Clearly, thought I, she is immensely attracted and made en- 
 vious by the intellectual arrogance of the pacifists she has met. 
 She seemed to dread lest she should appear so far unintellectual 
 as to be moved by sentiment. I think it was that prompted her 
 remark " Oh, my goodness, don't talk to me of noble mothers. 
 They are all fools and deserve their grief." 
 
 I guessed at another and more potent reason for her attitude.
 
 286 THE HAPPY HIGHWAYS 
 
 Consciously or unconsciously, she was jealous of the shadowed 
 part that women play in war. She imagined that it threatened 
 her longing for domination. 
 
 " I should never have forgiven Dora if he 'd joined the army," 
 she said, "never, never, never. For one awful week I thought 
 he was going to. But luckily for him, his senses came back in 
 time to save him. I 'd have left him and never gone back to him 
 again." 
 
 I believe she would. Instinctively, she was eager to do any- 
 thing to prove her contempt for so masculine a business as war. 
 She wanted to throw stones at the monster to compel recognition 
 of her own importance. 
 
 Her instinct was perfectly trustworthy, of course. War is the 
 enemy of all women. 
 
 But this woman did not hate war because it brought misery. 
 She hated the warrior, the fighting spirit, and the fighting intellect. 
 She loathed militarism as do all good men. But not for its 
 genuine evils. She feared it and disliked it through that jealousy 
 of what is distinctively male which all women have, but which 
 she had in an abnormal degree. 
 
 " Of course, I don't pity the mothers of dead sons. Why should 
 one pity wilful fools? They should have brought their sons up 
 better. If I had a son and he joined the army I 'd spit in his 
 face." 
 
 Curiously enough, it was of no sorrowing mother that I thought, 
 but of Jack Chamberlayn's father as I had just seen him. She 
 had so much damned talk, and he was dumb, with eyes through 
 which no spirit peered, staring upon a world that gave him back 
 empty stare for stare. 
 
 "Since you don't ever intend to have a son," I said, "your 
 fortitude is not likely to be put to the test, and your influence on 
 the next generation may be taken as nil." 
 
 I repented the words as soon as they were out of my mouth, 
 but I might have spared myself the trouble, for she hardly noticed 
 them. And before she could answer me, her attention was 
 caught by two people who had just come in and were looking 
 vainly for an empty table. 
 
 She stood up and waved her spoon at them. " Mrs. Mannick,
 
 CHAOS 287 
 
 Mrs. Mannick," she bawled. " There 's room here. Come and 
 sit with us. Heaps of room." 
 
 I turned my head. I had forgotten the name, but I could never 
 forget the person. With smiles and fluttering of hands the two 
 simple Christians approached our table. The man edged himself 
 in beside me as he had been wont to edge into our rooms with 
 his deferential smile for Margaret and his horrible, eager friend- 
 liness for us. His wife cut his greeting short. She looked at 
 me once. 
 
 " You are in the army," she remarked. Thereafter she said no 
 word to me, but many words and hard ones, at my degraded soul. 
 I think she had persuaded herself that she hated war because her 
 religion demanded it, but in very truth she ought to have blessed 
 the chance that had broadened her hunting-ground. Her store- 
 house of unpleasant tales was pressed down and running over with 
 new and startlingly foul stories of soldiers and women. She was 
 like the man in the Scriptures who had to build himself new barns 
 for his harvest. Her harvest simply could not be contained. 
 She spilled it all over, her conversation. 
 
 Her husband leaned heavily on Christ. It must have been a 
 real relief to him to find a ground on which he could meet the 
 Nazarene with no inward shrinking. " Will shed no man's 
 blood," he murmured, and, " Given myself to Christ." 
 
 I cannot think comfortably of Mr. Mannick and his castrated 
 Christianity. His Master might have forgiven him his helpless 
 treachery; but I would I were a Turk to address him as " Dog of a 
 Christian," by way of distinguishing him from honorable men 
 who have professed his faith with less unction and more grace. 
 
 At first, catching in him some faint echo of Kersent's fanatical 
 courage, I said to myself that he was actually tolerable. I com- 
 pared him with the cocksure intellectuals on the other side of 
 the table, and he found favor in my sight. But as he shambled 
 on, drenching me in a blashy spirituality, I suffered a violent 
 revulsion. I groaned inwardly "Any kind of intellectual ar- 
 rogance of any other kind of pacifist anything except this 
 man's sentimental humility." I even turned for relief to his wife. 
 She at least did not invoke divine authority for her anecdotes. 
 She was in the middle of a mild one, a veritable lamb among
 
 288 THE HAPPY HIGHWAYS 
 
 anecdotes, a Watteau-dream, a dew-empearled innocent. " Every 
 one knows," she finished solemnly, " that no officer ever goes into 
 the trenches. They sleep in the daytime, and carouse all night. 
 The poor men do all the fighting." 
 
 Credit me or not it is all one to Hippocleides but that is 
 what she said. And she supplied details of the carousals. 
 
 I shrank within my uniform. " It is not really just to look 
 upon this female as a pacifist," I reflected. "She is rather a 
 human type, whom an accident of upbringing or religion has 
 pitchforked into pacifism! " I became aware that she was wait- 
 ing for me to answer her. " I suppose officers get their wounds 
 throwing champagne bottles at each other," I said feebly. 
 
 Tommy giggled, and I burned with shame at the wretchedness 
 of my effort at self-assertion. But I was oppressed by the thought 
 that I should only be another fool among fools if I let myself 
 fall into sarcasm or indignation, or even honest remonstrance. 
 
 A few minutes later I lost my temper. "Upon my word," 
 I cried, " I 'm damned if I see how you dare withdraw so placidly 
 from the agony of this injustice of war you with your talk of 
 justice." I glared at the amazed Mannick. " War is not de- 
 testable just because Christ forbade it, but because it is a shameful 
 frenzied waste of the healthy body and the fine mind and the 
 courageous spirit. It won't be ended because you 've talked at 
 it and withdrawn from it. Nothing will end it except a just 
 ordering of society. And justice will have to be fought for 
 did you suppose it dropped like manna from the beneficent 
 capitalist? But your sort doesn't fight, either with body or 
 spirit. The world will have to be re-made before wars will 
 cease. You won't do that by giving yourself to Christ and going 
 on the land to avoid military service, nor yet by retreating to 
 Wormwood Scrubs lest you should be beguiled into tying ban- 
 dages round immortal devils in khaki." 
 
 Mannick's dropped mouth was very irritating and a new in- 
 dignation seized me. " Besides, you can't withdraw from your 
 kind like that," I said savagely. " You are men. To refuse aid 
 to one of them is to sin against your common humanity. I 
 don't see how it can be forgiven you that you stood aside not 
 only from the slaughter but from the suffering."
 
 CHAOS 289 
 
 Tommy giggled again. 
 
 Mrs. Mannick got up heavily, and stretched a hand across 
 the table. She removed the plate of cakes from her husband's 
 very grasp, and said, " Eat one more and I '11 not be answer- 
 able for the consequences. You 'd better come away now." 
 
 He hid his disappointment with a Christ-like cheerfulness, 
 and followed her out of the cafe. 
 
 Oh, wonderful woman, you were a dutiful wife and a con- 
 scientious mother. Your husband feared you and your sons 
 called you meddlesome. Your reward is not here. 
 
 " Oh Lord," said Tommy, " Oh Lordy me. That just reminds 
 me. I promised faithfully to go home and get tea ready, and 
 kick things into their places a bit. Dora 's bringing a man home 
 to tea. They '11 be there by now." 
 
 She pushed a shilling into my hand, and hurried out of the cafe, 
 leaving me to pay for the nauseous meal. I walked after her, 
 and caught her up just as she was climbing on to a 'bus. 
 
 " Here 's your shilling," I called. " I don't want the thing." 
 
 "Keep it." She leaned over the top of the 'bus as it moved 
 off. " Kersent 's dead," she screamed. " Did you know? Died 
 yesterday in prison." 
 
 I looked round to find the little man at my elbow, grinning 
 maliciously. " They murdered him," he said complacently. 
 
 I could have knocked him into the gutter. " Oh, you fool," 
 I stammered, " you fool. You were n't fit to clean his shoes." 
 
 I turned and ran along the Strand, leaving him gaping after me.
 
 CHAPTER XIV 
 
 A NTHONY began to chant at the top of his voice: 
 
 The naked earth is warm with Spring 
 And with green grass and bursting trees, 
 
 Leans to the Sun's gaze glorying 
 And quivers in the sunny breeze. 
 
 " I 'm sorry, dear old thing. I spoke in my haste. When I 
 crawled out of my cellar yesterday morning I found a whole bed 
 of violets. I 've brought you three in my pocket book to prove 
 it true." 
 
 We pushed our way along the platform, talking against each 
 other. 
 
 I sat on the bed in the room I had engaged for him, and 
 watched while he emptied his bag on the floor in a frenzied search 
 for Georgian poets. 
 
 " Some fool sent me that," he said, holding the volume between 
 finger and thumb. "Aren't people at home extraordinary? I 
 shall make a present of it to some one." 
 
 " Don't you carry books? " I asked. 
 
 "Oh yes, a few my Malory . . . Oh, and did I tell you? 
 Our G. S. 0. I. is a man of one book the 'Morte d'Arthur.' 
 Every night after dinner he lugs it out and reads in it until he 
 goes to bed. One day, in the course of a little quiet boasting, I 
 made mention of my own copy. He asked me what edition it 
 was, and I said Caxton's, at random. Whereupon he proved to 
 me by internal evidence that it could not possibly be. After- 
 wards, thinking he 'd depressed me too severely, he said * You '11 
 never be a scholar, my friend, but for your encouragement I '11 
 admit you have the makings of a soldier.' " 
 
 I laughed. "What sort of a Mess have you? I never saw 
 a Staff in its hours of ease." 
 
 " Signs of the times," said he. " In a Staff Mess of eight 
 people, the 'New Age/ 'New Witness' and 'New Statesman'
 
 CHAOS 291 
 
 are on the side-table every week. And the General looks graver 
 and more puzzled all the time. There 's a war on, of course, to 
 distract our minds and Heaven knows they need distraction 
 after reading the home newspapers. Look here, did I ever give 
 or lend you my ' Spirit of Man '? My stock of quotations is 
 getting low." He went across the room to look out of the 
 window. " Oh, London ! We did n't know how well off we 
 were in the old days. I 'm not taking away the palm from a 
 few other places on earth, you know. * In the Highlands, in the 
 country places, Where the old plain men have rosy faces.' Hills 
 and the sea. Snow in the pine woods and birch glens running 
 down to the sea. Streams and waterfalls." 
 
 " I 've seen the Duke, and Kersent 's dead," I said abruptly. 
 
 Anthony wheeled round. " Oh," he said. And then " I 
 never thought he 'd die. He did n't expect to die." 
 
 " How do you know that? " . 
 
 " I had a letter about him." He rummaged afresh among his 
 things. " Margaret wrote. She 'd been to see him in prison. 
 Here read it." 
 
 I put it away in my pocket. 
 
 " I '11 read it later," I said. 
 
 " Eh, but I 'm sorry," he added. " He was no coward. But 
 I Ve seen human nature very undisguised this last month, and do 
 now believe that only one man in a hundred is not a hero, and 
 that ninety-nine in a hundred are fanatical fools." 
 
 He was silent for a few minutes and then laughed. 
 
 " A funny thing happened the other day. You know there 's 
 a movement on foot to interest officers and men in social study 
 with a view to simplifying adjustments after the war. The 
 spirit of the thing is all right, but it 's being run by generals and 
 padres and people who have still to learn the rudiments. I say 
 it 's dilettante, and had better be run by omniscients from the 
 School of Economics and sic-like people. I proposed a systema- 
 tized education of padres and generals by the Central Labor 
 College, and one red-faced High Priest got up and said 
 * You 're little better than an Eikonoklast.' Truth will out, you 
 see." He chuckled with delight. " Who told you Kersent was 
 dead? " he asked suddenly.
 
 292 THE HAPPY HIGHWAYS 
 
 " Tommy. I met her this afternoon. 
 
 " The volatile Tommy. What 's that husband of hers doing? 
 Isn't he in prison? Perhaps he'll die too." 
 
 " He 's not in prison. He 's exempt so long as he stays at his 
 work. Tommy says he's going on the land got a Quaker 
 farmer to take him on as a carter or something. I don't know 
 how, but that 's saved him. The Mannick goes with him." 
 
 " And Kersent dead in prison." 
 
 Late that night when I was alone, I took Margaret's letter out 
 of my pocket and turned the pages awkwardly. There was a 
 good deal about Kersent, but I do not remember all. 
 
 " I went to see if there was anything I could do for him," she 
 wrote. " He seemed glad to see me. I imagine that in some 
 queer way it is a relief to him to be in prison. I suppose he feels 
 that he has reached rock-bottom and can drop no further. He is 
 full of plans. ' After the war, I shall be needed to rebuild,' he 
 said quietly. ' I could have been building now while the rest 
 of you are destroying, but it is no matter, after all. I don't mean 
 that I shall go into labor politics: I don't want to be paid for 
 special pleading. The world seems to have caught a malicious 
 madness. Anything of good is just now far more likely to fail 
 than to succeed. I haven't an idea how near we are to revolu- 
 tion, but I feel that anything may happen.' He is gnawed by 
 a lack of companionship yes, even Kersent, who seemed to live 
 so isolated a life when he had friends round him. There are 
 plenty of conscientious objectors in the prison, but he has only 
 dislike and contempt for them. * Most pacifists,' he said, * are 
 utter fools in everything else. They are all too intent on saving 
 their own souls to care about making the world fit for other 
 men. So long as they refrain from killing they think they are 
 entitled to sit in the deep that covers them and stroke their un- 
 conquerable souls.' I told him of Chamberlayn's death. He 
 showed no surprise. * I expected him to die,' he said calmly. 
 * If he had not been killed, he was still dead. There was nothing 
 of him growing. In reality he died years ago. He had nothing 
 to give to life. Men like that make a great show of vigor: they
 
 CHAOS 293 
 
 run madly into blind alleys and beat their heads on walls. They 
 accomplish nothing.' 
 
 " Afterwards he said, ' I am filling my days with reading about 
 engineering and scientific work which seems to be the only 
 kind this miserable race does well. Some of the tunnels and 
 bridges and things are wonderful. Only, it is all mixed up 
 with war and the things that make for war. And yet I believe 
 sometimes that the chemist and the engineer hold the key of the 
 future.' 
 
 " I could not help wondering what had turned his thoughts 
 to the work and the ambitions that so intrigued poor Jack, whom 
 he despised. And yet Jack Chamberlayn, dying in No Man's 
 Land under the wreckage of his machine, knew something that 
 Kersent did not. Kersent sacrificed himself on the altar of an 
 unattained perfection, but the other knew that it is sometimes 
 imperative to fight for the second best, undeterred by its im- 
 perfections. 
 
 " I thought that Kersent looked wretchedly ill. I asked him 
 if he were all right. He shrugged his shoulders and said, ' Oh 
 well, I can't eat the food they give me. It 's not that it is really 
 bad many of the men here are better fed than ever they were 
 before. My mother has spoiled me for ill-cooked, ill-served food. 
 I shall be all right. Chamberlayn died, but I shall live. The 
 world has need of me.' I thought he talked like a man shouting 
 in an echoing cavern. He said something about moral courage. 
 Unconsciously, he seemed to draw a distinction between the im- 
 moral bravery of the soldier and the moral bravery of his own 
 position. I was almost amused to see that the shield of Henry 
 Arthur Kersent's irony was not so impenetrable that he could go 
 untouched by this insinuating vanity." 
 
 I folded the letter and sat thinking, with my head pressed 
 against the window. The great buildings lay hunched in the 
 darkness like beasts asleep. A squat shadow with a low line of 
 houses on either side was a vast shoulder with menacing arms and 
 closed fists. I pretended to myself that the future lay in those 
 shut hands.
 
 294 THE HAPPY HIGHWAYS 
 
 Chamberlayn had died, Anthony was a V.C. and a Staff Cap- 
 tain, Oliver a peasant with a golden tongue. I shook with laugh- 
 ter. " God, what a queer crowd of friends are mine ! When the 
 ghost of Chamberlayn comes back to see us, does he prefer the 
 Staff Mess or the laborer's cot? Have you no warning for me, 
 old ghost? Good, kind ghost of my friend."
 
 CHAPTER XV 
 
 I WROTE those last words a week ago, and have not found it in 
 my heart to add to them. I have written nothing, but I have 
 though! a little about the fools who gathered round me, poor fool, 
 in that detestable cafe. 
 
 The conjunction of war and Mr. Mannick, and of war and the 
 malicious little man whom I did not kick into the gutter, raises 
 questions unconnected with the villainy of the Central Empire. 
 When war is loathsome why do we not all sit in a cafe and 
 exchange sad tales of old, unhappy far-off things? 
 
 I cannot think that the question is answered by assuming the 
 inferior spirit or the superior intelligence of Dora and the little 
 man whom I wish I had kicked into the gutter. 
 
 I loathe war and Mr. Mannick with equal fervor. Can it be 
 that I loathe Mr. Mannick because he is so godly? 
 
 Something of the discredit incurred in the stoning of the 
 prophets must be laid to the account of the prophets. The in- 
 cident of the children and the bears may be extreme, but Elisha 
 is not the only ill-natured man of God with whom it has been 
 impossible to live in amity. 
 
 It is probable that the contempt with which I had been treated 
 rankled in me and the coffee substitute. I had not merited 
 either. But the pacifist who assumes, as he usually does, the 
 transcendent superiority of his intellect, has frequently the pun- 
 ishment he challenges: he is misunderstood. It is hard to be 
 just to a man who is blatantly convinced that you cannot appre- 
 ciate his position because it is too high for you. Even Kersent 
 was inclined to pose himself and Life as matched antagonists. 
 
 He took up an attitude, as if life were somehow static, a 
 changeless attribute to be predicted of all animate things. 
 
 The thought of Kersent brought me up short. I might kick 
 the lay figure of Dora off the stage and come again with joy, 
 
 205
 
 296 THE HAPPY HIGHWAYS 
 
 but what good did that while the other remained, smiling his 
 ironic smile, unshaken and remote? 
 
 Kersent dead was a deathless challenge. Living, he could 
 be ignored and his prison walls no less. He sat in prison, a 
 secretive spider, hiding within himself his justification and his 
 future. Like his, my mind, leaping walls and years, could see 
 him already in the quiet times, pardoned and honored, guarding 
 his racked heart with irony, lest he should have pity or gratitude 
 of the men he could neither hate nor love even while he labored 
 for them. 
 
 He had died and taken with him alike his justification and his 
 future. He wrapped himself in death as in a cowl, and mocked, 
 saying, " I remain unjustified, and ye also." 
 
 In my first lonely weeks in this place I saw him constantly. 
 He came always as at that Eikonoklast meeting when the other 
 rushed in with his talk of war. He dragged his dingy basket- 
 chair into my room and sat himself down with me, his fine hair 
 straggling over the cushions and his burning eyes fixed on the 
 eyes behind my blindness. And there he talked of life and the 
 value of life. A dead man glorifying Life. " After all," I said 
 to him once, "in an age when men are pouring out life like 
 water you did but remind them that they were destroying that 
 which they could not create. Only, strange fate, you had to 
 pour away your own life to do it." 
 
 And yet I could never bring myself to credit even Kersent with 
 a greater share of moral courage than that in ordinary demand 
 from the soldier. The circumstances of Anthony's V.C. were 
 vivid in my mind. The war has revealed Anthony, releasing him. 
 The skilled phrase-maker became a skilled officer: the imperturb- 
 able student a brilliant man of action. If it takes a brave pacifist 
 to stand in a pit without crying, it takes precisely the same sort 
 of courage to hold a redoubt with a handful of men for four 
 days and four nights, to marshal your inadequate forces so skil- 
 fully as to repulse all attacks, to be witty on half a biscuit and 
 the prospect of immediate annihilation, and to impart to your 
 comrades the deathless spirit of your own endurance. 
 
 While I thought of Anthony the pity I had never felt before 
 for Chamberlayn was released in a whelming flood. I was sick
 
 CHAOS 297 
 
 at heart for the young limbs destroyed, the striving brain shat- 
 tered, ambitions unfulfilled, hopes unopened, the life he was so 
 eager to live taken away a half-tasted cup. 
 
 I understood that it was with these men that I contrasted 
 Dora of the slack body and the unjoyous smile. It is inevitable 
 but that the contrast will be made. It is responsible for the lean, 
 horrid, hairy pacifist of my obstinate imagination. 
 
 Mick has written me from his Agricultural Experiment Station. 
 I have had the letter read to me twice and its phrases are tossed 
 at random in my mind. " No one but you," he wrote, " can 
 imagine what it has meant to me just now this cursed lameness. 
 I have come to hate the very blueness of this sea: I stare at it 
 with a heart-sickening longing for the gray north seas. I make 
 every kind of fool of myself. A British destroyer came wander- 
 ing through these waters a few weeks ago and I tell you that 
 tears came into my eyes. I half killed one of these damned Danes 
 for abusing the English Navy. Yes I Michael rjearne 
 scoffer at parochial jealousies! The sight of that gray,, British 
 boat set the blood leaping in my veins. God, I could have fought 
 the whole world for England . . . 
 
 " You Ve a lot to say about Kersent. Well, as you know, when 
 we were at King's I more or less worshiped old Kersent. I can 
 hardly believe he's dead: he was such an indomitable blighter. 
 He was worth ten of Chamberlayn spiritually speaking. But 
 my sympathies are all with Jack and ' My country right or 
 wrong.' 
 
 "Kersent's ideals lit him as a torch is lit. Why didn't they 
 get hold of my imagination, and yours, and Anthony's, and Cham- 
 berlayn's? . . . 
 
 " I 've thought of those other savages that spilt the blood of 
 human sacrifice over their land to ensure its fertility. And 
 Christ spilt Himself a sacrifice to His own ideal. Half the 
 world gathered that harvest. And now Englishmen who call 
 themselves followers of the same ideal have scattered its tenets to 
 the winds to ensure our national freedom, whatever that may 
 mean. / don't know what it means : it 's mixed up in my mind 
 with the unreasoning affection I felt for that ugly gray boat,
 
 298 THE HAPPY HIGHWAYS 
 
 " I suppose it 's just that unreasoning feeling lifted us from the 
 beasts that perish, fighting only for lust or interest. I wanted to 
 fight for England. I 'd have fought any damned nation. And 
 that 's all wrong, you know . . . 
 
 " It 's a Janus feeling. One side of me remembers only the 
 tale of our island virtues and reflects jealously on their glories. 
 This is what your intellectuals call preserving-respect-for-national- 
 self -determination. You remember how our grandfather resented 
 interference with his domestic chastisements, which were appal- 
 ling, because by God, a man must be judge of his own house- 
 hold's needs, or where, by God, would meddling end ? 
 
 " The other side well, I 'm damned if I know what the other 
 side is like. The voice is the voice of Mr. H. G. Wells, but the 
 hands are closed and so may the eyes be for all I know . . . 
 
 " If I live until my brain has shrivelled like a dried pea in an 
 empty pod, I shall never stomach Kersent's love of Humanity. 
 How the devil can a man feel for a universal mush! But I 
 suppose the same impulse that drove us to a national vision may 
 push the boundaries to the world's rim. Or would that be the 
 old Napoleonic madness? . . . 
 
 " It 's quite certain that Jack Chamberlayn never thought of a 
 World-State. In some fashion, fumbling or confident, he only 
 thought that he ought to fight for the English ideal of gov- 
 ernance lest a worse be put in its place. But he did n't fight for 
 the slums with their starved and verminous children. He did n't 
 fight to keep millions of his fellows on the edge of a scrambling 
 respectability, cowed and coarsened by the insecurity that dogs 
 them from birth to death. 
 
 ** It will be dark in a few minutes. You never saw a Southern 
 night. It 's wonderful, of course, but I 'd sell all its silly stars 
 just once to lie face downwards on an English moor and smell 
 the peat, and the acrid bracken . . ." 
 
 Michael is right. Chamberlayn did not think of hunger and 
 misery when he thought of England. He thought of a State 
 upheld by free men, meting out an equal justice, demanding 
 from all men service and giving in return some beauty, the 
 grave delight of responsibility and the peace of a secure life.
 
 CHAOS 299 
 
 There is no such State. He and his comrades, whether they 
 knew it or not, died for a dream. 
 
 If an archangel were to descend in Piccadilly Circus and bring 
 to pass the scrapping of all armaments, the sinking of the 
 navies, the demolition of the munition works, and the conversion 
 to brotherly love of their owners and admirers there would be no 
 more war. The radiant vision for which the airman died would 
 leap into reality. Alas, the gods do not work like that; the 
 last trump may be a penny whistle after all. He will not come, 
 that healing angel, and in his stead, do you suppose that Dora 
 will be equal to the occasion? . . . 
 
 During the first days of the war I made a great pretense of 
 arguing its justice. And the outcome of it all, the foredoomed 
 outcome, was that I flung myself after Chamberlayn and Anthony, 
 afraid only of being left with Dora and Mr. Mannick. 
 
 What does it matter to me now? I shall not live to see which 
 fought best for the World-State of their fumbling imaginations, 
 Kersent dying in prison for his unmanageable desires, or Cham- 
 berlayn dying for the cracked, imperfect reality. 
 
 What does it matter to me? My faith, how lonely I am.
 
 CHAPTER XVI 
 
 MARGARET came yesterday. She came up the path as I 
 took my Golden Treasury from its wonted place. I knew 
 her step, and I heard her voice when my good landlady opened 
 the door. 
 
 She seemed to hesitate on the threshold, and then she came 
 and stood before me. 
 
 " I would have come before," she said, " but there were so 
 many things to do." 
 
 This seemed to me so strange an explanation of her three 
 months' silence that I stood stiffly and found nothing to say. 
 
 " I might have written, but I did not know who read your let- 
 ters." Her voice faltered. I held out a hand. Then in a mo- 
 ment I had her kisses on my eyes and mouth. I stood dry- 
 throated in the tide of love. 
 
 ** I can't see you," I said. 
 
 " Oh," she cried, " it does n't matter how old I get, or hard, 
 you will see only youth." 
 
 I held her hands wings that quivered to be free. 
 
 "Why have you come, and why have you stayed away? " 
 
 " My uncle is dead," she said simply. ** He was ill for six 
 weeks. I could not come before. There were things to do. I 
 did not want to leave you again. I wanted to stay near you 
 until we can be married." 
 
 " You can't stay," I answered dully. " Are you very rich 
 now? " I was like a child that tears curiously at a toy and 
 weeps for its destruction. 
 
 She laughed gently. " I could n't have come and lived on 
 your pension," she murmured, and then, " Joy, heart of mine, 
 don't you want me now? I am yours. Don't you understand? 
 The money isn't mine to spend on me, or on our two selves, or 
 even on our children. It 's got to be spent well. Who can guide 
 my hand but you? What does it matter, oh my dear? " 
 
 "You won't regret?" 
 
 300
 
 CHAOS 301 
 
 " I regret nothing not even the past." 
 
 While she rested in my arms, my mind sought to see itself in a 
 hundred things. I thought of a bird's cry, far-off and high 
 and shrill: of a giant ash that stood alone on a hill, and mocked 
 with Odin at the innocent sky and the young weak gods: of a 
 note struck by the careless wind on the first beech trees, caught 
 up and shaken, blown with a million hurrying echoes, until the 
 whole forest shudders with its mysterious and triumphant paean: 
 of a sUr that rushed between the knees of the universe, and stood 
 in the dome of the sky. My life swung to a point, crying with 
 bird, mocking with ancient tree, chanting with forest branches; 
 filled with the intolerable radiance of the star, it swung and rose 
 and made itself one with a sound more thin and piercing than 
 light, and a light rolling round the universe like sound. 
 
 I pressed my face against her breast. I could think that I 
 saw her, so sharply strove my spirit, a bird fluttering behind 
 closed doors . . . 
 
 In the late afternoon we took our way to the forest whose 
 first sparse trees are on the hill behind the house. Fallen leaves 
 crackled under our feet, and small creatures of the wood scurried 
 on either hand. As we went deeper into the forest the trees 
 closed round us like the cloak of a watchful god. We climbed 
 the slope of a small rounded hill, stepping between the roots of 
 the trees. The top was sunken, and our feet pressed into the 
 thick bed of leaves, covered with the fine pine needles. We sat 
 there, and when I turned my head a warm band lay across my eyes. 
 " The sun is passing behind us," I said. The spear of the dying 
 god thrust between the trees its lucent point. When that lowered 
 and was gone, and the forest murmured round us like a murmuring 
 verge of foam, I asked, " Is it too dark to see your book? Read 
 me something." 
 
 She turned the leaves as at random. " Earth hath not any- 
 thing to show more fair." The dear voice stopped. " Oh, it 
 is too dark. I cannot see to read." 
 
 " No, it is not dark. The forest is still awake." 
 
 ** I cannot see." 
 
 "Lift your head from my arm then, and look, oh wilfully 
 blind."
 
 302 THE HAPPY HIGHWAYS 
 
 The myriad small scents of earth and dying leaves mingled 
 with the scent of her hair. I held a strand of it across my eyes. 
 I touched the cool throat and small, rounded breasts beneath the 
 thin gown. "Are you wife of mine? " I whispered. 
 
 " Oh, love of yours, body of yours, yours, yours." 
 
 Ripples of life flooded out from our narrow couch out 
 through the green waves of the forest, further and wider, wide as 
 the world, troubling with faint eddy the shadowed star-girt space. 
 Thin sounds woke round us in the cloistered night, like lithe, 
 half-witted things who ran and leaped in the morning of the 
 forest that hid this forest in its womb. Cloven-hoofed and hairy, 
 they peered with bright eyes. The sunken couch that knew our 
 joy knew theirs. 
 
 Peace folded round our limbs. We lay still, sunk in the deep 
 wood that filled the night with tracery of shafts and spars. A 
 wind came from the empty downs, and went out across the world. 
 Far-off and high and shrill, a peewit wheeled, crying, in the 
 empty sky. All the earth was loosed of life and silence held 
 empery. 
 
 "Margaret." 
 
 She said no word, though her lips moved under mine. 
 
 "Margaret: you have taken life and hid it between your 
 breasts. The world is dead till you return to it." 
 
 I lifted her to her feet, and held her while she plaited her hair. 
 
 " My fingers shake," she said, and laughed softly to herself. 
 
 I took the plaits and fastened them round her head. We walked 
 slowly along the path that widened as we went. A moment 
 we stood with the forest behind us, and then descended towards 
 the valley that waited far below.
 
 CHAPTER XVII 
 
 AS Margaret reads over these papers for me, I find them full of 
 bitterness against something I have called prejudice. It 
 seems to me that whereas I was once sure of what I meant by the 
 word, I am now uncertain and hesitant. 
 
 There will always be prejudice. Faiths arise and die, and 
 their empty husks are tended by the kindly hands of prejudice 
 and their memories cherished in its fierce heart. Then comes 
 youth with the hammer of Thor, and tramples on hands and heart. 
 And in its turn, youth grows old. 
 
 It may be that an ancient prejudice, being frail and polite, is 
 least harmful. The prohibitions of the old code have so little 
 hold on youth to-day that they permit it a scarred freedom. It 
 troubles me that I cannot find even that altogether good. Sup- 
 pose restraint prejudice were necessary to the hardening 
 and sharpening of youth? 
 
 But one cannot think like that, or nothing would be done. 
 After all, we do what we must. 
 
 If a man could destroy within himself the bitterness of preju- 
 dice, its jealousy, its savage need to force all other men to wor- 
 ship its gods and enjoy its joys, it would be better with him. To 
 train oneself to understand and to respond would be to rob preju- 
 dice of its sting. 
 
 This was to have been, before all, a happy book. Somehow, in 
 the writing of it, the happiness has slipped through my fingers 
 and become small so very small on the highroad of life. Is 
 that the reality? 
 
 I do not believe it. I have but to close one door in my mind 
 and open another. But to pass through, and shut it behind me. 
 There, in a red-walled room, Margaret kneels on the floor before 
 her bookcase. Now and then she brings an odd book to the fire- 
 light to read the title. She smiles down at me as she passes. 
 She spends a good part of her leisure tidying her bookshelves, 
 and jealously rescuing books that have strayed into our shelves. 
 Michael is offering her affectionate sarcasm on the habit. The 
 
 303
 
 304 THE HAPPY HIGHWAYS 
 
 others are there, each in his favorite place, young and un- 
 troubled. I, alone of all of them, know that the door against 
 which Oliver is leaning, opens on to roaring, illimitable space. 
 The windows rattle in the wind and the rain clatters against 
 them. " Good thing those windows are stout," Mick says. " The 
 way the wind sweeps up this road." 
 
 And only I know that it is not the storm but the years beating 
 on them in vain. . . . 
 
 Kersent taunted me once that I achieved mental ease by heap- 
 ing up words and words. I do not at first understand why I 
 should have thought of that just now. Then I remember that 
 last night I dreamed of Kersent. I opened my eyes and seemed 
 awake. Yet even in my dream I knew I could not be awake, 
 else should I have wakened in darkness. But in my dream I 
 saw the furniture of a bedroom, and an open casement window set 
 high in the wall. I lay in bed, looking through it at the fiery 
 ripples of dawn, widening in the sky. A figure came between 
 them and me. Kersent stood at the foot of my bed. At his 
 right hand a young owl balanced itself on the wooden rail. 
 "Why have you come? " I asked. 
 " Only to greet you. We both fought and died." 
 " I am not dead." 
 
 " You are a prisoner behind bars." 
 
 " Tell me," I said, " do you think now that you were right to 
 keep out of the battle you with your brotherly love? " 
 
 He laughed, the ghost of a laugh that died before the god of 
 mirth was born. " Your words mean nothing," he murmured. 
 "No man ever had a brother of his own kind. His brothers 
 are the wind, the hills, eagles, rats anything on earth but other 
 men." 
 
 " Then what are men? " 
 
 "A dawrr-brood of birds, that are dead i' the sun. How 
 should I know? " 
 
 I cried out in involuntary protest, but he was gone and I 
 struggling to wake. 
 
 Just as I finished breakfast, my landlady came into my room. 
 She put something into my hand, something warm and soft, 
 that moved in my grasp, thrilling me queerly.
 
 CHAOS 305 
 
 " T is a baby owl," she said. " We found it in a corner of 
 your bedroom." 
 
 I must have heard it crying as I slept. 
 
 Kersent's words remained. All my life I have been vaguely 
 aware of a spirit in me that is alien to my human kind, that 
 responds to sudden half-comprehended calls, and remains ob- 
 stinately dumb to the spirit in other men. It cuts me off from 
 them. When I could see men, my eyes deceived me that I 
 touched them and had intercourse with them. Now that the 
 tricky glass is broken, I understand that it was shadows I called 
 and shadows answered me. The spirit in me waited, always 
 hesitant and afraid, behind the threshold of my thought. It 
 waited, burdened by its very longing to respond. 
 
 There had been times when it leaped in the shadows like a babe 
 unborn. When, as a boy, I came suddenly upon the lights of 
 the town, gleaming in the hollow. The man less often knew that 
 ecstasy. But once on a storm-threshed rock, and once in a forest, 
 surely my spirit had leaped to touch another. 
 
 I wondered abruptly if the forces of alienation would grow 
 more powerful as I grew old. A terrible gulf opened in front 
 of me. I turned from it, shuddering and sick at heart. 
 
 Margaret, coming lightly along the passage, opened the door. 
 For some reason she did not cross straight to me. Something 
 like terror seized me. ** Margaret," I cried. 
 
 She came quickly and seated herself beside me on the couch. 
 She drew me back so that I lay in her arms. " My dear," she 
 whispered. " Oh my dear, my lover." Her hand caressed my 
 hair. I laid my head against her breast and the warmth of her 
 body comforted me. 
 
 In a little while I was ashamed of my inexplicable anguish. 
 Was I a sick man or a child to be running for comfort? I held 
 her in my arms and she was silent under my kisses. A fierce, 
 perilous joy thrust into me, a sword into the scabbard of my body. 
 
 The happiness I have had I offer gladly to life, a votive gift. 
 The dappled road runs behind and before me, and the wind tears 
 apart the crying trees. Life is a good horse for youth to ride, 
 and death a good ostler, whosever may keep the Inn.
 
 CHAPTER XVIII 
 
 THE BROTHERHOOD OF MAN 
 
 Man that is brother to the beasts, 
 The witless beasts that leap, 
 
 May well be kin to thrusting grass 
 And the round sky's wanton sweep : 
 
 To stars that whirl in fire o' nights, 
 To thorn's sparse blossomings, 
 
 To fields earth-fast on western slopes 
 And roaring fiddle strings. 
 
 May brother be to horned Pan, 
 But alien ever unto man. 
 Man, ringed in iron loneliness, 
 Stalketh the earth in haughtiness, 
 
 Then in a narrow cell regretteth day, 
 Becometh brother to his own decay. 
 
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