Potterism Part 25

'Well,' she said, 'I don't mind your knowing. You'd better not let on to him that I told you, though; he mightn't like it. The fact is, Arthur thought I'd done it. He thought it was because my manner was so queer, as if I was trying to hush it up. I was. You see, I thought Arthur had done it. It seemed so awfully likely. Because, I left them quarrelling. And Arthur's got an awfully bad temper. And _his_ manner was so queer. We never talked it out, till two days ago; we avoided talking to each other at all, almost, after the first. But on that first morning, when he came round to see me, we somehow succeeded in diddling one another, because we were each so anxious to s.h.i.+eld the other and hush it all up.... Clare might have saved us both quite a lot of worrying if she'd spoken out at once and said it was ... an accident.'

Jane's voice was so unemotional, her face and manner so calm, that she is a very dark horse sometimes. I couldn't tell for certain whether she had nearly instead of 'an accident' said 'her,' or whether she had spoken in good faith. I couldn't tell how much she knew, or had been told, or guessed.

I said, 'I suppose she didn't realise till lately that any one was likely to be suspected,' and Jane acquiesced.

'Clare's funny,' she said, after a moment.

'People are,' I generalised.

'She has a muddled mind,' said Jane.

'People often have.'

'You never know,' said Jane thoughtfully, 'how much to believe of what she says.'

'No? I dare say she doesn't quite know herself.'

'She does not,' said Jane. 'Poor old Clare.'

We necessarily left it at that, since Jane didn't, of course, mean to tell me what story Clare had told of that evening's happenings, and I couldn't tell Jane the one Clare had told me. I didn't imagine I should ever be wiser than I was now on the subject, and it certainly wasn't my business any more.

When I met Clare Potter by chance, a week or two later, on the steps of the National Gallery with another girl, she flushed, bowed, and pa.s.sed me quickly. That was natural enough, after our last interview.

Queer, that those two girls should be sisters. They were an interesting study to me. Clare, shallow, credulous, weak in the intelligence, conventional, emotional, sensitive, of the eternal type of orthodox and timid woman, with profound powers of pa.s.sion, and that touch of melodrama, that sense of a situation, which might lead her along strange paths.... And Jane, level-headed, clear-brained, hard, calm, straight-thinking, cynical, an egotist to her finger-tips, knowing what she wanted and going for it, tough in the conscience, and ignorant of love except in its crudest form of desire for the people and things which ministered to her personal happiness....

It struck me that the two represented two sides of Potterism--the intellectual and moral. Clare, the ignorant, muddle-headed sentimentalist; Jane, reacting against this, but on her part grabbing and exploiting. Their att.i.tude towards truth (that bugbear of Potterism) was typical; Clare couldn't see it; Jane saw it perfectly clearly, and would reject it without hesitation if it suited her book. Clare was like her mother, only with better, simpler stuff in her; Jane was rather like her father in her shrewd native wit, only, while he was vulgar in his mind, she was only vulgar in her soul.

Of one thing I was sure: they would both be, on the whole, satisfied with life, Jane because she would get what she wanted, Clare because she would be content with little. Clare would inevitably marry; as inevitably, she would love her husband and her children, and come to regard her pa.s.sion for Oliver Hobart and its tragic sequel as a romantic episode of girlhood, a sort of sowing of wild oats before the real business of life began. And Jane would, I presumed, ultimately marry Gideon, who was too good for her, altogether too fine and too good. For Gideon was direct and keen and pa.s.sionate, and loved and hated cleanly, and thought finely and acutely. Gideon wasn't greedy; he took life and its pleasures and triumphs and amus.e.m.e.nts in his stride, as part of the day's work; he didn't seek them out for their own sakes. Gideon lived for causes and beliefs and ideals. He was temperamentally Christian, though he didn't happen to believe Christian dogma. He had his alloy, like other people, of ambition and selfishness, but so much less than, for instance, I have, that it is absurd that he should be the agnostic and I the professing Christian.

7

The Christian Church. Sometimes one feels that it is a fantasy, the flaming ideal one has for it. One thinks of it as a fire, a sword, an army with banners marching against dragons; one doesn't see how such power can be withstood, be the dragons never so strong. And then one looks round and sees it instead as a frail organisation of the lame, the halt, and the blind, a tepid organisation of the satisfied, the bourgeois, the conventionally genteel, a helpless organisation of the ignorant, the half-witted, the stupid; an organisation full to the brim of cant, humbug, timid orthodoxy, unreality, self-content, and all kinds of Potterism--and one doesn't see how it can overcome anything whatever.

What is the truth? Where, between these two poles, does the actual church stand? Or does it, like most of us its members, swing to and from between them, touching now one, now the other? A Potterite church--yes; because we are most of us Potterites. An anti-Potterite church--yes, again; because at its heart is something sharp and clean and fine and direct, like a sword, which will not let us be contented Potterites, but which is for ever goading us out of ourselves, p.r.i.c.king us out of our trivial satisfactions and our egotistic discontents.

I suppose the fact is that the Church can only work on the material it finds, and do a little here and a little there. It would be a sword in the hands of such men as Gideon; on the other hand, it can't do much with the Clare Potters. The real thing frightens them if ever they see it; the sham thing they mould to their own liking, till it is no more than a comfortable shelter from the storms of life. It is the world's Potters who have taken the Church and spoilt it, degraded it to the poor dull thing it is. It is the Potterism in all of us which at every turn checks and drags it down. Personally, I can forgive Potterism everything but that.

What is one to do about it?

PART VI:

TOLD BY R.M.

CHAPTER I

THE END OF A POTTER MELODRAMA

1

While Clare talked to Juke in the vestry, Jane talked to her parents at Potter's Bar. She was trying to make them drop their campaign against Gideon. But she had no success. Lady Pinkerton said, 'The claims of Truth are inexorable. Truth is a hard G.o.d to follow, and often demands the sacrifice of one's personal feelings.' Lord Pinkerton said, 'I think, now the thing has gone so far, it had better be thoroughly sifted. If Gideon is innocent, it is only due to him. If he is guilty, it is due to the public. You must remember that he edits a paper which has a certain circulation; small, no doubt, but still, a circulation. He is not altogether like a private and irresponsible person.'

Lady Pinkerton remarked that we are none of us that, we all owe a duty to society, and so forth.

Then Clare came in, just as they had finished dinner. She would not have any. Her face was red and swollen with crying. She said she had something to tell them at once, that would not keep a moment. Mr. Gideon mustn't be suspected any more of having killed Oliver, for she had done it herself, after Mr. Gideon had left the house.

They did not believe her at first. She was hysterical, and they all knew Clare. But she grew more circ.u.mstantial about it, till they began to believe it. After all, they reasoned, it explained her having been so completely knocked over by the catastrophe.

Jane asked her why she had done it. She said she had only meant to push him away from her, and he had fallen.

Lady Pinkerton said, 'Push him away, my dear! Then was he ...'

Was he too close, she meant. Clare cried and did not answer. Lady Pinkerton concluded that Oliver had been trying to kiss Clare, and that Clare had repulsed him. Jane knew that Lady Pinkerton thought this, and so did Clare. Jane thought 'Clare means us to think that. That doesn't mean it's true. Clare hasn't got what Arthur calls a grip on facts.'

Lord Pinkerton said, 'This is very painful, my dears; very painful indeed. Jane, my dear ...'

He meant that Jane was to go away, because it was even more painful for her than for the others. But Jane didn't go. It wasn't painful for Jane really. She felt hard and cold, and as if nothing mattered. She was angry with Clare for crying instead of explaining what had happened.

Lady Pinkerton said, pa.s.sing her hand over her forehead in the tired way she had and shutting her eyes, 'My dear, you are over-wrought. You don't know what you are saying. You will be able to tell us more clearly in the morning.'

But Clare said they must believe her now, and Lord Pinkerton must telephone up to the _Haste_ and have the stuff about the Hobart Mystery stopped.

'My poor child,' said Lady Pinkerton, 'what has made you suddenly, so long after, tell us this terrible story?'

Clare sobbed that she hadn't been able to bear it on her mind any more, and also that she hadn't known till lately that Gideon was suspected.

Lord and Lady Pinkerton looked at each other, wondering what to believe, then at Jane, wis.h.i.+ng she was gone, so that they could ask Clare more about it. Jane said, 'Don't mind me. I don't mind hearing about it.' Jane meant to stay. She thought that if she was gone they would persuade Clare she had dreamed it all and that it had been really Gideon after all.

Jane asked Clare why she had pushed Oliver, thinking that she ought to explain, and not cry. But still Clare only cried, and at last said she couldn't ever tell any one. Lady Pinkerton turned pink, and Lord Pinkerton walked up and down and said, 'Tut tut,' and it was more obvious than ever what Clare meant.

She added, 'But I never meant, indeed I never meant, to hurt him. He just fell back, and ...'

'Was killed,' Jane finished for her. Jane thought Clare was like their mother in trying to avoid plain words for disagreeable things.

Clare cried and cried. 'Oh,' she said, 'I've not had a happy moment since,' which was as nearly true as these excessive statements ever are.

Lady Pinkerton tried to calm her, and said, 'My poor, dear child, you don't know what you are saying. You must go to bed now, and tell us in the morning, when you are more yourself.'

Clare didn't go to bed until Lord Pinkerton had promised to ring up the _Haste_. Then she went, with Lady Pinkerton, who was crying too now, because she was beginning to believe the story.