第47章 THE SEVENTH(8)

"Measured by the end we serve, we don't matter.You know we don't matter.""We have to find our fun in the building and in our confidence that we do really build.""So long as our confidence lasts there is no great hardship,"said Sir Richmond.

"So long as our confidence lasts," she repeated after him.

"Ah!" cried Sir Richmond."There it is! So long as our confidence lasts! So long as one keeps one's mind steady.

That is what I came away with Dr.Martineau to discuss.Iwent to him for advice.I haven't known him for more than a month.It's amusing to find myself preaching forth to you.It was just faith I had lost.Suddenly I had lost my power of work.My confidence in the rightness of what I was doing evaporated.My will failed me.I don't know if you will understand what that means.It wasn't that my reason didn't assure me just as certainly as ever that what I was trying to do was the right thing to try to do.But somehow that seemed a cold and personally unimportant proposition.The life had gone out of it...."He paused as if arrested by a momentary doubt.

"I don't know why I tell you these things," he said.

"You tell them me," she said.

"It's a little like a patient in a hydropath retailing his ailments.""No.No.Go on."

"I began to think now that what took the go out of me as my work went on was the lack of any real fellowship in what Iwas doing.It was the pressure of the opposition in the Committee, day afterday.It was being up against men who didn't reason against me but who just showed by everything they did that the things I wanted to achieve didn't matter to them one rap.It was going back to a home, lunching in clubs, reading papers, going about a world in which all the organization, all the possibility of the organization I dream of is tacitly denied.I don't know if it seems an extraordinary confession of weakness to you, but that steady refusal of the majority of my Committee to come into co-operation with me has beaten me--or at any rate has come very near to beating me.Most of them you know are such able men.

You can FEEL their knowledge and commonsense.They, and everybody about me, seemed busy and intent upon more immediate things, that seemed more real to them than this remote, theoretical, PRIGGISH end I have set for myself...."He paused.

"Go on," said Miss Grammont."I think I understand this.""And yet I know I am right."

"I know you are right.I'm certain.Go on.

"If one of those ten thousand members of the Sokol Society had thrown back his brown cloak and shown red when all the others still kept them selves cloaked--if he was a normal sensitive man--he might have felt something of a fool.He might have felt premature and presumptuous.Red he was and the others he knew were red also, but why show it? That is the peculiar distress of people like ourselves, who have some sense of history and some sense of a larger life within us than our merely personal life.We don't want to go on with the old story merely.We want to live somehow in that larger life and to live for its greater ends and lose something unbearable of ourselves, and in wanting to do that we are only wanting to do what nearly everybody perhaps is ripe to do and will presently want to do.When the New Age Martineau talks about begins to come it may come very quickly--as the red came at Prague.But for the present everyone hesitates about throwing back the cloak.""Until the cloak becomes unbearable," she said, repeating his word.

"I came upon this holiday in the queerest state.I thought Iwas ill.I thought I was overworked.But the real trouble was a loneliness that robbed me of all driving force.Nobody seemed thinking and feeling with me....I have never realized until now what a gregarious beast man is.It needed only a day or so with Martineau, in the atmosphere of ideas and beliefs like my own, to begin my restoration.Now as Italk to you--That is why I have clutched at your company.

Because here you are, coming from thousands of miles away, and you talk my ideas, you fall into my ways of thought as though we had gone to the same school.""Perhaps we HAVE gone to the same school," she said.

"You mean?"

"Disappointment.Disillusionment.Having to find something better in life than the first things it promised us.""But you--? Disappointed? I thought that in America people might be educating already on different lines--""Even in America," Miss Grammont said, "crops only grow on the ploughed land."Section 8

Glastonbury in the afternoon was wonderful; they talked of Avalon and of that vanished legendary world of King Arthur and his knights, and in the early evening they came to Wells and a pleasant inn, with a quaint little garden before its front door that gave directly upon the cathedral.The three tourists devoted a golden half hour before dinner to the sculptures on the western face.The great screen of wrought stone rose up warmly, grey and clear and distinct against a clear blue sky in which the moon hung, round and already bright.That western facade with its hundreds of little figures tells the whole story of God and Man from Adam to the Last Judgment, as the mediaeval mind conceived it.It is an even fuller exposition than the carved Bible history that goes round the chapter house at Salisbury.It presented the universe, said Sir Richmond, as a complete crystal globe.It explained everything in life in a simple and natural manner, hope, heaven, devil and despair.Generations had lived and died mentally within that crystal globe, convinced that it was all and complete.

"And now," said Miss Grammont, "we are in limitless space and time.The crystal globe is broken.""And?" said Belinda amazingly--for she had been silent for some time, "the goldfish are on the floor, V.V.Free to flop about.Are they any happier?"It was one of those sudden rhetorical triumphs that are best left alone."I trow not," said Belinda, giving the last touch to it.