Chapter XXI

Palgrave, apparently, had formed no conjectures as to their conversation and was thinking still of Adrienne's wrongs rather than of his own situation. "Did you take her home?" he said. "I see you're sorry for her, Roger. It's really too abominable, you know. I really can't say before her what I think, I really can't say before you what I think of Barney's treatment of her; because I know you agree with him."

Oldmeadow felt all the more able, shaken though he was by the interview below, to remember, because of it, what he thought. "If you mean that I don't consider Barney in the very least responsible for the death of the baby, I do agree with him," he said.

"Apart from that, apart from the baby," said Palgrave, controlling his temper, it was evident, in his wish to keep the ear of the impartial judge, "though what the loss of a child means to a woman like Adrienne I don't believe you can guess; apart from whose was the responsibility, he ought to have seen, towards the end, at all events, if he'd eyes in his head and a heart in his breast, that all she asked was to forgive him and take him back. She was proud, of course. What woman of her power and significance wouldn't have been? She couldn't be the first to move. But Barney must have seen that her heart was breaking."

"Well," said Oldmeadow, taking in, with some perplexity, this new presentation of Adrienne Toner; "what about his heart? She'd led it a pretty dance. And you forget that I don't consider she had anything to forgive him."

"His heart!" Palgrave echoed scornfully, yet with a sorrowful scorn; "He mended his heart quick enough. Went and fell in love with Nancy, who only asks to be let alone."

"He's always loved Nancy. She's always been like a sister to him. Adrienne has infected you with her groundless jealousy."

"Groundless indeed!" Palgrave reached for his pipe and began to stuff it vindictively. "Nancy sees well enough, poor dear! She's had to keep him off by any device she could contrive. She's a good deal more than a sister to him, now. She's the only person in the world for him. You can call it jealousy if you like. That's only another name for a broken heart."

"I don't know what Barney's feeling may be, Palgrave, but I do know, it was quite plain to me, that Adrienne was jealous long before she had any ground for jealousy. If Nancy's all Barney's got left now, it's simply because Adrienne has taken everything else from him. You don't seem to realize that Adrienne drove him from her with her airs of martyrdom. Took vengeance on him, too; what else was the plan for Barbara going abroad with you? I don't want to speak unkindly of her. It's quite true; I'm sorry for her. I've never liked her so well. But the reason is that she's beginning, I really believe, to find out that her own feet are of clay, while her mistake all along has been to imagine herself above ordinary humanity. All our feet are of clay, and we never get very far unless we are aware of the weakness in our structure and look out for a continual tendency to crumble. You don't get over it by pretending you don't need to walk and imagining you have wings instead of feet."

Palgrave, drawing stiffly at his pipe during this little homily, listened, gloomily yet without resentment. "You see, where you make _your_ mistake--if you'll allow the youthful ass you consider me to say so--is that you've always imagined Adrienne to be a self-righteous prig who sets herself up above others. She doesn't; she doesn't," Palgrave repeated with conviction. "She'd accept the feet of clay if you'll grant her the heart of flame--for everybody; the wings--for everybody. There's your mistake, Roger. Adrienne believes that everybody has wings as well as herself; and the only difference she sees in people is that some have learned and some haven't how to use them. She may be mortal woman--bless her--and have made mistakes; but they're the mistakes of flame; not of earthiness."

"You are not an ass, Palgrave," said Oldmeadow, after a moment. "You are wise in everything but experience; and you see deep. Suppose we come to a compromise. You've owned that Adrienne may make mistakes and I own that I may misjudge her. I see what you believe about her and I see why you believe it. I've seen her at her worst, no doubt, and to you she's been able to show only her best. So let it rest at that. What I came to talk about, you know, was you."

"I know," said Palgrave, and he gave a deep sigh.

"Be patient with me," said Oldmeadow. "After all, we belong to the same generation. You can't pretend that I'm an old fogey who's lost the inspirations of his youth and has marched so far down towards the grave that the new torches coming up over the horizon are hidden from him."

"That's rather nice, you know, Roger," Palgrave smiled faintly. "No; you're not an old fogey. But all the same there's not much torch about you."

"It's rather sad, isn't it," Oldmeadow mused, "that we should always seem to begin with torches and then to spend the rest of our lives in quenching them. It may be, you know, that we're only trying to hold them straight, so that the wind shan't blow them out. However!--you'll let me talk. That's the point."

"Of course you may. You've been awfully decent," Palgrave murmured.

"Well, then, it seems to me you're not seeing straight," said Oldmeadow. "It's not crude animal patriotism--as you'd put it--that's asked of you. It's a very delicate discrimination between ideals."

"I know! I know!" said Palgrave. The traces of mental anguish were on his worn young face. He knocked the ashes out of his pipe and rose to lean against the mantelpiece." I don't suppose I can explain," he said, staring out at the sky. "I suppose that with me the crude animal thing is the personal inhibition. I can't do it. I'd rather, far, be killed than have to kill other men. That's the unreasoning part, the instinctive part, but it's a part of one's nature that I don't believe one can violate without violating one's very spirit. I've always been different, I know, from most fellows of my age and class. I've always hated sport--shooting and hunting. The fox, the stag, the partridge, have always spoiled it for me. Oh, I know they have to be killed--poor brutes! I know that; but I can't myself be the butcher."

"You'll own, though, that there must be butchers," said Oldmeadow, after a little meditation. He felt himself in the presence of something delicate, distorted and beautiful. "And you'll own, won't you, when it comes to a war like this, when not only our national honour but our national existence is at stake, that some men must kill others. Isn't it then, baldly, that you profit, personally, by other people doing what you won't do? You'll eat spring lamb as long as there are butchers to kill the lamb for you, and you'll be an Englishman and take from England all that she has to give you--including Oxford and Coldbrooks--and let other men do the nasty work that makes the survival of England and Oxford and Coldbrooks possible. That's what it comes to, you know. That's all I ask you to look at squarely."

"I know, I know," Palgrave repeated. He had looked at little else, poor boy. Oldmeadow saw that. "But that's where the delicate discrimination between ideals comes in, Roger. That's where I have to leave intuition, which says 'No,' and turn to reason. And the trouble is that for me reason says 'No,' too. Because humanity--all of it that counts--has outgrown war. That's what it comes to. It's a conflict between a national and an humanitarian ideal. There are enough of us in the world to stop war, if we all act together; and why, because others don't, should I not do what I feel right? Others may follow if only a few of us stand out. If no one stands out, no one will ever follow. And you can't kill England like that. England is more than men and institutions," Palgrave still gazed at the sky. "It's an idea that will survive; perhaps the more truly in the spirit for perishing in the flesh, if it really came to that. Look at Greece. She's dead, if you like; yet what existing nation lives as truly? It is Grecian minds we think with and Grecian eyes we see with. It's Plato's conception of the just man being the truly happy man--even if the whole world's against him--that is the very meaning of our refusal to go with the world."

"You'll never stop war by refusal so long as the majority of men still believe in it," said Oldmeadow. "There are not enough of you to stop it now. The time to stop it is before it comes; not while it's on. It's before it begins that you must bring the rest of humanity not to behave in ways that make it inevitable. I'm inclined to think that ideas can perish," he went on, as Palgrave, to this, made no reply, "as far as their earthly manifestation goes, that is, if enough men and institutions are destroyed. If Germany could conquer and administer England, I'm inclined to think the English idea would perish. And war need not be unspiritual. Killing our fellow-men need not mean hating them. There's less hatred in war, I imagine, than in some of the contests of peaceful civilian life. Put it fairly on the ground of humanitarianism, then, Palgrave; not of nationality. It's the whole world that is threatened by a hateful idea, by the triumph of all you most fear and detest, and unless we strive against it with all we are and have it seems to me that we fall short of our duty not only as Englishmen, but as humanitarians. Put it at that, Palgrave: would you really have had England stand by and not lift a finger when Belgium was invaded and France menaced?"

Palgrave was not ready with his reply and he turned away while he looked for it and shuffled the papers on his desk with a nervous hand. "Yes, I would," he said at last. "Hateful as it is to have to say it--I would have stood by." He came back to his place at the mantelpiece and looked down at Oldmeadow as he spoke. "The choice, of course, is hateful; but I think we should have stood by and helped the sufferers and let France and Germany fight it out. It always comes back to them, doesn't it? They're always fighting it out; they always will, till they find it's no good and that they can't annihilate each other; which is what they both want to do. Oh, I've read too many of the young French neo-Catholics to be able to believe that the hateful idea was all on one side. Their ideals don't differ much, once you strip them of their theological tinsel, from those of the Germans. Germany happens to be the aggressor now; but if the militarist party in France had had the chance, they'd have struck as quickly."

"The difference--and it's an immense one--is that the militarist party in France wouldn't have had the chance. The difference is that it doesn't govern and mould public opinion. It's not a menace to the world. It's only a sort of splendid pet, kept in a Zoo, for the delectation of a certain class and party. Whereas Germany's the _bona fide_ hungry tigress at large. What you really ask of England, Palgrave, is that she should be a Buddha and lie down and let the tigress, after finishing France, devour her, too. It really comes to that. Buddhism is the only logical basis for your position, and I don't believe, however sorry one may be for hungry tigresses, that the right way to deal with them is to let them eat you. The Christian philosophy of the incarnation is the true one. Matter does make a spiritual difference. It does make a difference, a real difference, that the ideal should be made flesh. It's important to the world, spiritually, that the man rather than the tigress should survive."

"Christ gave his life," said Palgrave, after a moment.

"I'm not speaking of historical personages; but of eternal truths," said Oldmeadow.

But he knew already that he spoke in vain. Palgrave had turned away his eyes again and on his sad young face he read the fixity of a fanatic idealism. He had not moved him, though he had troubled him. No one would move Palgrave. He doubted, now, whether Adrienne herself had had much influence over him. It was with the sense of pleading a lost cause that he said, presently, "Adrienne hopes you'll feel it right to go."

Palgrave at this turned a profound gaze upon him. "I know it," he said. "Though she's never told me so. It's the weakness of her love, its yearning and tenderness, not its strength, that makes her want it. Because she knows it would be so much easier. But she can't go back on what she's meant to me. It's because of that, in part at all events, that I've been able to see steadily what I mean to myself. That's what she helps one to do, you know. Hold to yourself; your true, deep self. It's owing to her that I can only choose in one way--even if I can't defend it properly. It seems to come back to metaphysics, doesn't it?"

"Like everything else," said Oldmeadow.

"Yes. Like everything else. It would take a four-years' course in Greats to argue it out, Roger. Come back to me--if you're here and I'm here then--and we'll see what we can make of it."

"I will," said Oldmeadow, rising, for the room was growing dark. "And before that, I hope."

"After all, you know," Palgrave observed, "England isn't in any danger of becoming Buddhistic; there's not much nihilism about her, is there, but hardly much Christianity, either. England has evolved all sorts of things besides Oxford and Coldbrooks. She's evolved industrialism and factory-towns."

"I don't consider industrialism and factory-towns incompatible with Christianity, you know," Oldmeadow observed. "Good-bye, my dear boy."

"Good-bye, Roger," Palgrave grasped his hand. "You've been most awfully kind."