Noble in Reason (34 page)

Stephen gave me a glance of fury; clearly nobody was allowed to show concern for his mother except himself.

“We mustn't be uncivilized about this, Stephen, must we?” I continued—
civilized,
I knew, was the fashionable word in Stephen's circle at the moment.

“I'm not being uncivilized,” said Stephen in the high shrill voice of extreme rage. “I've no desire whatever to interrupt your evening's plans.”

“Right! Then you and I had better start, Netta,” said I, briskly, seeing that Stephen was not to be conciliated. I helped her firmly into her coat.

“Don't think too hardly of him, Chris. He's never had a father, you see,” said poor Netta as we went down the stairs.

“I was just as bad when I was a boy,” said I.

I spoke with intent to comfort, but perceived the truth of my remark as soon as I had uttered it, and in that moment it became clear to me that the new generation was indeed afflicted with the same psychological problems as my own.

On the following Sunday afternoon my family and I went out for our usual walk on Bairstow Moor; Hermia and I walked together, the twins in front, while Rie ranged back and forth around us. Suddenly she rushed between Hermia and myself, pushing Hermia rudely from my side, and seized
my hand. Hermia, smiling, stretched out her own hand to the child (then some eight years old), but Rie with a look of defiance turned ostentatiously away from her and clung to me. My wife looked hurt though she said nothing and quietly withdrew her hand. Remembering the pain Hermia had suffered to bring the child to birth and the long anxious years she had given to nourish her, Rie's behaviour struck me as peculiarly wounding, though of course the child was unaware of these facts—there must be many occasions when parents have to murmur to themselves about their children:
forgive them, for they know not what they do.
I could not bear to think of Hermia suffering as Netta did. If I partly excused Stephen because he had lacked a father to bring him up, I should regard my own paternal position as all the more responsible. Accordingly I said, taking the child's hand firmly in my own:

“Come with me to the Stone by the quick way, Rie.”

Rie jumped with joy at this apparent mark of favour, and turned on her mother a disagreeable glance of triumph, while a look of pain and then of controlled acquiescence passed over Hermia's face, as if she suffered because I was supporting Rie against her, yet loyally accepted my decision. To correct this impression I was obliged to add in a rather stern tone:

“Rie and I must have a serious talk about manners.”

To see a child of mine looking up at me with apprehension in its eyes was decidedly painful, but it simply could not be helped on this occasion. Rie and I clambered silently up through the bracken, the rocks and the heather until we stood on the high Bairstow Stone, commanding a superb view of the West Riding massif, which I had selected as a suitably inspiring point for our important interview.

“Sit down a minute, Rie.”

Rie skipped over to a ledge on an overhanging spur of rock. The wind tore at the child's hair and skirts, and I was not sorry
for the excuse to put my arm round her to hold her down.

“Now listen, Rie. You're an intelligent child and I'm going to talk to you intelligently.”

Rie smiled and snuggled up to me, well pleased by this compliment.

“You've been rather ill-mannered and naughty lately, especially to your mother.”

Rie's face clouded, she pouted and tossed her head.

“In fact, unkind.”

“Unkind!” exclaimed Rie astonished.

“Yes. Now don't imagine that these jealousies and miseries you feel about your parents and Nick and Chrissie are anything out of the ordinary, Rie, or that you experience them because you're particularly sensitive or clever.”

Rie looked stunned by this attack on her self-conceit.

“Everybody has these feelings.”

“Everybody?” exclaimed Rie incredulously.

“Pretty well everybody. Some people who have nicer dispositions don't feel them so strongly, and some people control them better than others, that's all.”

“Haven't I a nice disposition?” wailed Rie.

“Your mother and I think you have. But you mustn't spoil it by giving way to these bitter feelings.”

“But how do you know what kind of feelings I have?”

“I had them myself when I was a child.”

“
You
did?”

“Certainly. And your mother too. She was not very happy with her mother.”

“Did she tell you so?”

“No, I just saw it.”

“I never thought of grown-ups having feelings,” wept Rie. “Well, think of it now.”

Just then Hermia and the twins appeared at the foot of the rock, having approached it by the longer path. Rie tore
herself from my arm and shouting: “Nick! Nick!” bounded down towards them at reckless speed. I sighed as I saw how eager she apparently was to go.

Whether I did right or not to try to appeal to the child's reason against her deep feelings, I still do not know. Rie, it is true, has turned out well, suddenly in her teens plunging into music with sustained energy and passion, but whether my appeal strengthened or weakened her character I cannot judge. Her conduct to her family on the whole improved after our talk on Bairstow Rock, but what that meant in her mind, I do not know.

But what is one to do for one's children, after all? Too strict a discipline, such as my father with the best of motives imposed on us, brings fear, with all its wretched consequences; but too lenient an indulgence, such as Netta's with Stephen, brings fear too, because it offers the child no protective framework, no certainty of cause and effect. Stephen's
leave me alone, mother
is no doubt the cry of every adolescent generation to its predecessor; but at what point does leaving alone become neglect? One cannot just abdicate from responsibility. My own scrupulous restraint towards Robert, my indifference towards Stephen, caused them suffering. Children can suffer from lack of love and guidance as well as from too much. The proper degree can surely only be determined, in the conditions of modern civilization, by exercising all the rational powers with which modern civilization has endowed us.

Sometimes, I admit, I have felt that a good hearty slap would do Rie more good than a reasoned argument, and have wondered whether after all the thoughtless spontaneous expression of feeling is not the best way to deal with the young—John's children, for instance, who were brought up on those lines, though they are not especially attractive to me, seem well-adjusted. There is much truth in Somerset Maugham's remark that as soon as an emotion becomes
conscious it becomes false. But to return at this stage to omitting reason from our dealings with those we love is like attempting to banish anaesthetics or restore the tribal system; we must not sink back towards the animal level; we must go on.

All we can do for our children perhaps is to enable them to start where we left off if they wish. We do this, surely, by exhibiting to them the best knowledge of life and mode of conduct we have acquired. We must leave them free to choose whether to accept these, reject or modify, but at least we have given them .a standard by which to judge, a light by which to see. Those bearing torches must, as Plato remarks, pass them on; what those receiving the torches do with them is their own affair.

I had laid aside this record some years ago as complete, but life is never complete until it is over, and it seems I had still something to learn, and to say about myself, in my old age.

There are advantages and disadvantages, I find, in growing old.

Age has many temptations. Perhaps the greatest of these is the temptation to sit back and think that no further effort on one's own part is needed. I am seventy, one reflects—or eighty or ninety or what have you; I have played my part, let others now shoulder the burden and make the running, I needn't do any more. This is never true; the sphere of one's action may have contracted, but within that sphere the effort to behave rationally, to control the passions, to be unselfish is, I find, always required. Then again, in old age one must guard against the temptation to slip into reactionary or selfish ideas out of sheer fatigue; one must not let the torch drop after trying to bear it aloft all one's life. (I, for instance, find the bossiness, the bureaucracy, the curtailment of freedom, of the Welfare State and modern Socialism, quite unendurable, altogether too paternal in the worst sense, and I think I am right to do so; nevertheless, it is well for me to examine this view carefully from time to time, to see that it does not spring merely from the dislike for innovation and change, traditional in the old.) I often find in myself, too, a weary impatience when some young man brings forth as a dazzling novelty a stale old fallacy which I exploded years ago—young people
are far too highly susceptible to slogans and fashions, it seems to me. I therefore need constantly to remind myself that the act of discovery of the falsity of an opinion is almost as valuable as the content of the discovery itself, and the young must therefore be left to make their own discoveries. I find too that after a lifetime spent in trying to impose pattern on my life and work, I have grown too closely wedded to pattern, that is to order, and am apt to become irritable when this order is interrupted and spoiled, for example by untidiness and unpunctuality. I am well aware that these manifestations of age on my part are precisely the faults in my father which maddened his offspring; that is why I say that struggle with one's ageing self is always very necessary.

My physical inabilities nowadays are frustrating and vexing, as well as painful. But there are compensations. The angina which now afflicts me with increasing frequency has taken me out of active life, so that I have had time to turn things over in my mind, and try to wrestle out the meaning of some points on which I found I was not quite satisfied.

Last Friday I had a bad attack of my trouble. When I came fully to myself again I saw John sitting at my bedside, looking so grim that it was clear the attack had indeed been serious. We were alone. It struck me that this was perhaps the last time we should be able to communicate intelligently with each other. On an impulse I said to him in my slight invalidish tones:

“But why didn't you marry Beatrice, John? Really, now?”

“I like that, from you, Chris!” exclaimed John, colouring. “When you were always nagging at me for trying to steal Henry's girl.”

“I never said a word to you on the subject in my life.”

“Happen not. But you looked plenty. I can just see you now as a kid, glaring at me from those large reproachful eyes of yours as I rode off on my bike. Henry stood like a ghost
between me and Beatrice, if you want to know, till I thought I'd only a week or two to live and I couldn't bear to die without once having her. You see, you always blamed me for Henry's death, Chris, and I knew it.”

“I did nothing of the kind. It was my fault, if you want to know.”

“Nay, I reckon it was Beatrice's. She couldn't be satisfied with either of us; she wanted me to be like Henry and Henry to be like me, and we couldn't.”

“Or it was the Jarmaynes' fault, ' I exclaimed, “because none of us satisfied her.”

“Maybe.”

We spoke of Beatrice for a while; her childhood beauty, Dr. Darrell's death, our marriage.

“There was nothing I could do about it in a German prison-camp even if I'd known, but the first I heard of Robert at all was when Edie told me in a letter that Beatrice was dead.”

“I'm making no accusation.”

“Aye, but you are!” exclaimed John with feeling. “You blame it all on me.”

“I do not.”

“You've always blamed everything on me, Chris.”

“I have not.”

“Yes, you have. I don't blame you, mind. I don't come up to your high-falutin' ideas, I know I don't. None of us do. Poor old father used to say to me sometimes with half a wink: ‘Of course Chris wouldn't approve of this, but we needn't tell him.'”

“Approve of what?”

“Oh, any bit of good business. I shall never forget the way you laid down the law about the ethics of buying cheap and selling dear, one night at a party at our house. Uncle Alfred almost had a fit. Mind you, I admired you for it, Chris; I've always admired you. But you don't make life easy, you know.”

“I don't remember saying a word about buying and selling,” said I thoughtfully.

“You don't?” exclaimed John, really astonished. “By Jove, but I do!”

Our voices had risen above the muted tones suitable to an angina patient, and Hermia now came in wearing a rather reproachful look.

“You shouldn't talk any more now, Chris dear,” she said.

So now the last knot of involvement is disentangled. The storm of all my passions has died away, the air is clear and serene and every point of the landscape is very distinctly visible; as I lie here I can see my whole life in its true perspective.

I see for instance that all my life I have been as much a nuisance and a difficulty to my family as they have been to me. My brothers felt quite as much inhibited by my censorious self-righteousness as I did by their various forms of philistinism. I allot myself a very considerable share of blame for Henry's death and Beatrice's tragedy. Henry's shame at having to face me with a fault he would never have committed but for my foolishness, contributed to his suicide, and the feeling of guilt which prevented John from marrying Beatrice had been enhanced or even created by me. My marriage to Beatrice was but a slight atonement for these faults. All the years of my youth while I went about pitying myself, I was causing others to suffer. (The same was true of them, of course; but that is their affair.) It amuses and even pleases me now to perceive that all the other persons in this record appear far more interesting and lovable, though less conscious, than I do myself.