The Wimsey Papers (3 page)

Well, we must try to be cheerful. What do you think one of my younger "cats" (quite a "KITTEN really!) said to me the other day? , She said, "Oh, I do hope the British Agents who have been captured in Holland weren't either of them Lord Peter!" I said, "My dear girl, Lord Peter wouldn't ever be captured, how can you think he would be so thoughtless? Besides, he has much too much sense and experience to let Germans get the better of him! And if he'd been killed, he'd be certain to have let us know." So I hope we shall soon have a letter from you to say you are NOT killed or anything dreadful!!
My reports are very encouraging, really, and show that there is a wonderful spirit among the people, just as the papers say, but they do rather feel that the Government has been a little UNIMAGINATIVE about some things - dislocation of commerce, and evactuation and that kind of thing. They seem (the Government, I mean) to have thought out the beginning of everything very well, and then to have rather stopped thinking! For instance, there was one poor gentleman who works for a French firm that makes scent-bottles over here - Well, I suppose you might say nobody ought to want luxuries in war-time, but still, they've put a lot of French money into the firm and employ British workers, and it is all employment, isn't it, and after all the French are our ALLIES and we must all have money for the war! And you can't have money unless you make it, can you? Anyway, these people can't go on making their bottles because of one tiny part that has to be imported from FRANCE, and the Board of Trade won't let them import it because of letting money go out of the country. So the poor French people have offered to send over the little part for nothing and only be paid after the war's over - but apparently that won't do either, so they'll have to stop manufacturing and all the bottles and stoppers and things will be wasted and the men thrown out of work, and it doesn't seem very kind or sensible, does it? Especially when we are talking such a lot about a United Economic Front, whatever that means? Of course, it may be quite right - but don't you think, if there's any good reason for obstructing trade, the Board should give it and EXPLAIN, and not just say flatly they see no hope of ever doing anything.
It's rather like the school-children. I expect it was necessary to get them out without any books or pencils or anything to the nearest available place; but I do think the Government might have helped the subsequent arrangements rather more, and got the schools together and organised the distribution of equipment and things. If they would only make a picture in their heads of what it MEANS to teach under such difficulties! I do think it's a pity so many children are drifting back to Town - it's being so good for them to find out how people live in the country. I must tell you about my nice taxi-driver the other night. He'd driven me back a long way in te dark and we had such a conversation on the door-step while I was finding change, having stupidly put my money in the wrong compartment of my hand-bag, and got it all mixed up with my gas-mask.
His wife and family had been evacuated to Hertfordshire (quite near your wife's village, so perhaps she knows them) and he said his wife found the country a little dull, but the CHILDREN were doing splendidly and getting so fat and sturdy on the good country food and fresh air. He said he thought country people were so kind, much more NEIGHBOURLY than they were in Town. So I said, I expected that was because on had fewer neighbours and VALUED them more, and of course, in case of sickness and so on, one couldn't always get to a doctor or hospital so quickly, so that neighbours expected to help one another. But the thing that MOST struck him, he said, was that his children were learning such a lot. He said: "You'd be surprised, the things my kiddies are getting to know - all about animals, and what they eat and how to look after them, and how to grow things - the know a lot more than their parents, my kiddies do. It makes me realise," he said - he was a very intelligent man and so nice - "that I don't know nothing! What do I know? Only how to drive a cab round London - anybody could do that. But I go down there and talk to the family that's taken us in - very kind people they are - and we sit down after supper and talk about quite different TOPICS from what I'm used to. My wife, too - you know, the women usually (excuse me, miss) just talk gossip and that; but down there, we all discuss topics."
Now isn't that a splendid tribute to the country people? And isn't it nice to think that those children, when they grow up, will understand what they read about Agriculture, and Milk and Pig-Marketing Boards, and all those DIFFICULT "Topics" that we all have to vote about - so often without knowing anything!
I've put all this into my report, of course, but it cheered me up so much, I thought I'd like to tell you. Your friend in "the Department" (even to you, I'd better not mention names, had I?) is most friendly, and says our reports are VERY helpful, because we just LISTEN to what people say, instead of asking questions - and as you so RIGHTLY say, dear Lord Peter, if you ask questions, everybody gets self-conscious and tells you what they think will sound well. I used to think it was so cynical of one's nurse to say, "Ask no questions and you'll hear no LIES" - but I dare say she was really a very good psychologist in a practical sort of way.
I must stop now. All your "cats" and "kittens" send you their very LOUDEST purrs!!!
Most sincerely yours,
KATHERINE ALEXANDRA CLIMPSON
7. Extracts from the private Diary of Lord Peter Wimsey, somewhere abroad.
Tuesday
... My brother writes that he is planting oak-trees in the Long Coppice. I acknowledge that there is something in him that is indomitable. He is persuaded that the next generation, if not this, will see the end of our stewardship, and for him (being what he is) that means the end of everything that was England. Even if we, by some miracle, are not left ruined beyond repair, even if a new kind of society does not take the soil from us and hand it over to God knows what kind of commercial spoliation, his personal situation is hopeless, because he can place no confidence in his heir. He knows well enough that Jerry would not care if the whole place were surrendered to ribbon-building or ragwort. But what the land requires, the land shall have, so long as he is alive to serve it. All the same - oaks!
Two hundred years ago, life presented little difficulty for such as us. Personal privilege and personal responsibility marched together. Now, something within us makes common cause with those who attack privilege, but forbids us to deny the responsibility. I have tried - Heaven knows how hard - to view myself in the light of history and acquiesce in my own decay, but there is some vital imperative in my blood that breaks down my own indifference. ...
Wednesday
Arguing all evening with P-; very leftish, of course, denouncing the present economic system and eloquent about freedom and equality. What madness coupled those two words together? They are mutually destructive. The "system" arose from the determined struggle to "free" economics from the control of Church and State. The war-cry was "equal opportunity" for all. What happens when you demand equal opportunity for the rabbit and the tiger? P- talks about "the natural law"; I presume he does not mean the law of the jungle, nor yet whatever it is theologians understand by the term. (Who was it said that whenever the word "nature" came into an argument he prepared himself to hear bad reasoning?) What do we know about nature, except that it is man's nature to be "unnatural"? Where does man begin? Marx said that man "first distinguished himself from the animals when he produced the means of subsistence." First - chronologically? We have no means of knowing what man did "first". If he lived like an ape on wild fruit and made a song to celebrate the largest pumpkin, was the song the act of an animal? And where is the proof that the song came into history later than the sowing of pumpkin-seed? This is Rousseu's noble savage all over again. We have no proof either way. Song and pumpkin-seed are alike subject to mutability.
Birds sing - but it is always the same song. Only man sings a new song every day.
"Man first distinguished himself" - "first," then, in the sense of the primary quality of the distinction. But that is to assume what you set out to prove. ...
Thursday
... I was glad last night's discussion was carried on in French. It would have been better still if I could have spoken Z-'s language, or he mine, but at least we had both to make the same kind of mental adjustment, in order to think in the same speech. To negotiate, not knowing what the other fellow's words mean to him, or what one's own words mean to him, is like wrestling with a feather bed. The professional interpreter is a minor miracle - far better than a man translating his own words badly into a language in which he cannot think - for he does interpret and not merely de-code. Even so, I have heard a phrase change status and stature - change emphasis - in the course of interpretation. The original speaker is still thinking in his own tongue, and the hearer in his. It's a question of approach to the subject; in speaking another language one instinctively alters one's mental attitude to suit the medium. The mere knowledge that other attitudes are possible is a safeguard against insularity of thought, and the politician with no language but his own can never really hope to solve international problems - worse, he can never really understand what the problem is at all. That was the value of the classical education - nothing to do with whether Latin fits you to be a successful pill-merchant or engineer - the value of the double mind. If a diplomatist is not double-tongued he will almost certainly appear double-faced; not through treachery but through ignorance. I would have no man eligible for Parliament that could not think in two languages. ...
Friday
... Poor P-! he avoided me in the street today. At least I think so. Why else should he dive so hurriedly into the baby-linen shop by mistake for the café next door? It must have been an error of haste - even if some unfortunate indiscretion had brough baby-linen into his life, he would scarcely be making his purchases in person. He probably thought I was going to tackle him about Russia. I wasn't. Does one button-hole a man in the street for a chat about his wife's elopement? Le chef de gare il est cocu, poor devil, and that's all there is to be said about it. He's sincere, and the Helsinki business has been a severe shock to him. He isn't one of the whole-hoggers who are ready to accept an interregnum of fraud and vuilence as a necessary preliminary to the Kingdom of Man on earth. [Passage deleted here, dealing with probably military and political repercussions] Still, oddly enough, my own immediate feeling is a queer sense of liberation. All these years, to express my doubts about the Russian experiment has laid one under the imputation of upholding capitalism, class-privilage, and so on, for the sake of one's own advantage. As though one had been shown God and had slammed the door in His face for fear of judgement. Difficult to explain that the fear was of another kind - or perhaps not fear, but an instinctive mistrust - something in the back of one's mind saying "C'est louche." "A plague o' both your houses," one said, "Moscow and Berlin alike; the moment you get inside the door there's the same bad smell in the basement." Now the offence is rank, and stinks in P-'s nostrils. Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds. But was Soviet doctrine ever anything but a weed at root, like the other?
The Catholic padre makes no bones about it. "Both started," he says, "by denying God, and no figs could grow from that thistle." But I have no such rational grounds for saying, "I told you so." For me to say, "I object as a Christian" would be rather like saying "I object as a native of Norfolk" - the one qualification bearing about as much relation to my conduct as the other, and being just about as geographical. I don't demand that my bootmaker should have Christian principles. I don't object to an atheist barber - though, come to think of it, I suppose nothing in theory need prevent an atheist barber from cutting my throat if he feels like it. The law is framed on the assumption that my life is sacred; but upon my word I can see no sanction for that assumption at all, except on the hypothesis that I am an image of God - made, I should say, by a shockingly bad sculptor. And if I see no sanctity in myself, why should I see it in Finland? But I do. It seems altogether irrational.
All the same, I still have the sense of liberation. "Fall into the hand of God, not into the hand of economic humanity." One can say it now without feeling obliged to apologise for one's class prejudices. ...
Saturday
... Like the gentleman in the carol, I have seen a wonder sight - the Catholic padre and the refugee Lutheran minister having a drink together and discussing, in very bad Latin, the persecution of the Orthodox Church in Russia. I have seldom heard so much religious toleration or so many false quantities. ...
Tuesday
... My papers have arrived, so the balloon goes up tonight. When M- handed them over, he said, "You have a wife and family, haven't you?" I said "Yes," and felt curiously self-conscious. The first time it has mattered a curse whether I went west or not. M- looked at me as I used to look at my own married officers when they volunteered for a dirty bit of work, and it all seemed absurd and incongruous.
I shall not keep a diary over there. So, in case of accident, I will write my own epitaph now: HERE LIES AN ANACHRONISM IN THE VAGUE EXPECTATION OF ETERNITY.
8. From Mr. Paul Delagardie to Lady Peter Wimsey at Talboys.
EUROPEAN CLUB,
PICCADILLY, W.
December 9th, 1939.
My dear Harriet,
I am charmed to learn that you are all progressing favourable in your rustic retirement. Thank you, mon enfant, my arthritis is better, in spite of the idiosyncrasies of the climate, which continues to exhibit the British illogicality and independence of enlightened cosmoploitan opinion in its most insular and insolent form. However, it has its uses as a deterrent to that fellow Hitler's aerial ambitions; I understand from the papers that the elimination of this country is now postponed until May.
This will give us time to get forward with your scheme - of which I cordially approve - of immediately pulling down the disgusting rookeries in which the unfortunate proletariat are huddled. My only quarrel with your admirable pamphlet on National Housing is that it does not go far enough. I would pull down everything; but perhaps, when we have destroyed the hovels of the poor, enemy bombers will complete the process by blowing up the palaces of the rich and the soulless villas of the middle-class. Then (always supposing we survive the attack) we shall be able to start from a tabula rasa, to construct those houses for human beings which you - very wisely - desire, rather than the "houses for heroes" postulated by our previous grandiloquence. (What an expression! It suggests some species of Gothic Valhalla, decorated with baroque ornament in the German manner. But in fact, if I remember rightly, our first attempts to materialise this ambitious scheme were carried out in compressed cow-dung.)