Potterism: A Tragi-Farcical Tract

by Rose Macaulay

CHAPTER III

THE PRECISIAN AT WAR WITH THE WORLD

1

Jane's baby was born in January. As far as babies can be like grown human beings, it was like its grandfather—a little Potter.

Lord Pinkerton was pleased.

'He shall carry on the papers,' he said, dandling it on his arm. 'Tootooloo, grandson!' He dug it softly in the ribs. He understood this baby. However many little Yids Jane might achieve in the future, there would be this little Potter to carry on his own dreams.

Clare came to see it. She was glad it wasn't like Oliver; Jane saw her being glad of that. She was beginning to fall in love with a young naval officer, but still she couldn't have seen Oliver in Jane's child without wincing.

Gideon came to see it. He laughed.

'Potter for ever,' he said.

He added. 'It's symbolic. Potters will be for ever, you know. They're so strong….'

The light from the foggy winter afternoon fell on his face as he sat by the window. He looked tired and perplexed. Strength, perpetuity, seemed things remote from him, belonging only to Potters. Anti-Potterism and the Weekly Fact were frail things of a day, rooted in a dream. So Gideon felt, on these days when the fog closed about him….

Jane looked at her son, the strange little animal, and thought not 'Potter for ever,' but 'me for ever,' as was natural, and as parents will think of their young, who will carry them down the ages in an ever more distant but never lost immortality, an atom of dust borne on the hurrying stream. Jane, who believed in no other personal immortality, found it in this little Potter in her arms. Holding him close, she loved him, in a curious, new, physical way. So this was motherhood, this queer, sensuous, cherishing love. It would have been a pity not to have known it; it was, after all, an emotion, more profound than most.

2

When Jane was well enough, she gave a party for Charles, as if he had been a new picture she had painted and wanted to show off. Her friends came and looked at him, and thought how clever of her to have had him, all complete and alive and jolly like that, a real baby. He was better than the books and things they wrote, because he was more alive, and would also last longer, with luck. Their books wouldn't have a run of four score years and ten or whatever it was; they'd be lucky if any one thought of them again in five years.

But partly Jane gave the party to show people that Charles didn't monopolise her, that she was well and active again, and ready for work and life. If she wasn't careful, she might come to be regarded as the mere mother, and dropped out.

Johnny said, grinning amiably at her and Charles, 'Ah, you're thinking that your masterpiece quite puts mine in the shade, aren't you, old thing.'

He had a novel just out. It was as good as most young men's first novels.

'I'm not sure,' said Jane, 'that Charles is my masterpiece. Wait till the other works appear, and I'll tell you.'

Johnny grinned more, supposing that she meant the little Yids.

'My books, I mean,' Jane added quickly.

'Oh, your books.'

'They're going to be better than yours, my dear,' said Jane. 'Wait and see…. But I dare say they won't be as good as this.' She appraised Charles with her eyes.

'But, oh, so much less trouble,' she added, swinging him up and down.

'I could have one as good as that,' said Johnny thoughtfully, 'with no trouble at all.'

'You'd have to work for it and keep it. And its mother. You wouldn't like that, you know…. Of course you ought to. It's your duty. Every young man who survives…. Daddy says so. You'd better do it, John. You're getting on, you know.'

Young men hate getting on. They hate it, really, more than young women do. Youth is of such immense value, in almost any career, but particularly to the young writer.

But Johnny only said, with apparent nonchalance, 'Twenty-seven is not very old.' He added, however, 'Anyhow, you're five minutes older, and I've published a book, if you have produced that thing.'

Johnny was frankly greedy about his book. He hung on reviews; he asked for it in bookshops, and expressed astonishment and contempt when they had not got it. And it was, after all, nothing to make a song about, Jane thought. It wasn't positively discreditable to its writer, like most novels, but it was a very normal book, by a very normal cleverish young man. Johnny wasn't sure that his publishers advertised it as much as was desirable.

Gideon came up to Jane and Charles. He had just arrived. He had three evening papers in his hand. His fellow passengers had left them in the train, and he had collected them. Jews often get their news that way.

Johnny saw his friend Miss Nancy Sharpe disengaged and looking lovely, and went to speak to her. He was really in love with her a little, though he didn't go as far as wanting to work for her and keep her. He was quite right; that is to go too far, when so much happiness is attainable short of it. Johnny wisely shunned desperate measures. So, to do her justice, did Miss Sharpe.

'Johnny's very elated,' said Jane to Gideon, looking after him. 'What do you think of his book, Arthur?'

Gideon said, 'I don't think of it. I've had no reason to, particularly. I've not had to review it…. I'm afraid I'm hopeless about novels just now, that's the fact. I'm sick of the form—slices of life served up cold in three hundred pages. Oh, it's very nice; it makes nice reading for people. But what's the use? Except, of course, to kill time for those who prefer it dead. But as things in themselves, as art, they've been ruined by excess. My critical sense is blunted just now. I can hardly feel the difference, though I see it, between a good novel and a bad one. I couldn't write one, good or bad, to save my life, I know that. And I've got to the stage when I wish other people wouldn't. I wish every one would shut up, so that we could hear ourselves think—like in the Armistice Day pause, when all the noise stopped.'

Jane shook her head.

'You may be sure we shan't do that. Not likely. We all want to hear ourselves talk. And quite right too. We've got things to say.'

'Nothing of importance. Few things that wouldn't be better unsaid. Life isn't talking.'

'A journalist's is,' Jane pointed out, and he nodded.

'Quite true. Horribly true. It's chiefly myself I'm hitting at. But at least we journalists don't take ourselves solemnly; we know our stuff is babble to fill a moment. Novelists and poets don't always know that; they're apt to think it matters. And, of course, so far as any of them can make and hold beauty, even a fragment of it here and there, it does matter. The trouble is that they mostly can't do anything of the sort. They don't mostly even know how to try. All but a few verse-makers are shallow, muddled, or sentimental, and most novelists are commercial as well. They haven't the means; they aren't adequately equipped; they've nothing in them worth the saying. Why say it, then? A little cleverness isn't worth while.'

'You're morbid, Arthur.'

'Morbid? Diseased? I dare say. We most of us are. What's health, after all? No one knows.'

'I've done eighty thousand words of my novel, anyhow.'

'I'm sorry. Nearly all novels are too long. All you've got to say would go into forty thousand.'

'I don't write because I've got things to say. I haven't a message, like mother. I write because it amuses me. And because I like to be a novelist. It's done. And I like to be well spoken of—reasonably well, that is. It's all fun. Why not?'

'Oh, don't ask me why not. I can't preach sermons all the evening.'

He smiled down on her out of his long sad black eyes, glad of her because she saw straight and never canted, impatient of her because her ideals were commercial, loving her because she was gray-eyed and white-skinned and desirable, seeing her much as Nancy Sharpe, who lived for music, saw Johnny Potter, only with ardour instead of nonchalance; such ardour, indeed, that his thoughts of her only intermittently achieved exactitude.

Two girls came up to admire Charles. Jane said it was time she took him to bed, and they went up with her.

Gideon turned away. He hated parties, and seldom went even to Jane's. He stood drinking coffee and watching people. You met most of them at the club and elsewhere continually; why meet them all again in a drawing-room? There was his sister Rosalind and her husband Boris Stefan with their handsome faces and masses of black hair. Rosalind had a baby too (at home); a delicate, pretty, fair-haired thing, like Rosalind's Manchester mother. And Charles was like Jane's Birmingham father. It was Manchester and Birmingham that persisted, not Palestine or Russia.

And there was Juke, with his white, amused face and heavy-lidded eyes that seemed always to see a long way, and Katherine Varick talking to a naval officer about periscopes (Jane kept in with some of the Admiralty), and Peacock, with whom Gideon had quarrelled two hours ago at the Fact office, and who was now in the middle of a group of writing young men, as usual. Gideon looked at him cynically. Peacock was letting himself be got at by a clique. Gideon would rather have seen him talking to the practical looking sailor about periscopes. Peacock would have to be watched. He had shown signs lately of colouring the Fact with prejudices. He was getting in with a push; he was dangerously in the movement. He was also leaning romancewards, and departing from the realm of pure truth. He had given credence to some strange travellers' tales of Foreign Office iniquities. As if that unfortunate and misguided body had not enough sins to its account without having melodramatic and uncharacteristic kidnappings and deeds of violence attributed to it. But Peacock had got in with those unhappy journalists and others who had been viewing Russia, and, barely escaping with their lives, had come back with nothing else, and least of all with that accurate habit of mind which would have qualified them as contributors to the Weekly Fact. It was not their fault (except for going to Russia), but Peacock should have had nothing to do with them.

Katherine Varick crossed the room to Gideon, with a faint smile.

'Hallo. Enjoying life?'

'Precisely that.'

'I say, what are you doing with the Fact?'

Gideon looked at her sourly.

'Oh, you've noticed it too. It's becoming quite pretty reading, isn't it.
Less like a Blue Book.'

'Much less. I should say it was beginning to appeal to a wider circle.
Is that the idea?'

'Don't ask me. Ask Peacock. Whatever the idea is, it's his, not mine…. But it's not a considered idea at all. It's merely a yielding to the (apparently) irresistible pressure of atmosphere.'

'I see. A truce with the Potter armies.'

'No. There's no such thing as a truce with them. It's the first steps of a retreat.'

He said it sharply and suddenly, in the way of a man who is, at the moment, making a discovery. He turned and looked across the room at Peacock, who was talking and talking, in his clever, keen, pleasant way, not in the least like a Blue Book.

'We're not like Blue Books,' Gideon muttered sadly. 'Hardly any one is.
Unfortunate. Very unfortunate. What's one to do about it?'

'Lord Pinkerton would say, learn human nature as it is and build on it. Exploit its weaknesses, instead of tilting against them. Accept sentimentality and prejudice, and use them.'

'I am aware that he would…. What do you say, Katherine?'

'Nothing. What's the use? I'm one of the Blue Books—not a fair judge, therefore.'

'No. You'd make no terms, ever.'

'I've never been tempted. One may have to make terms, sometimes.'

'I think not,' said Gideon. 'I think one never is obliged to make terms.'

'If the enemy is too strong?'

'Then one goes under. Gets out of it. That's not making terms…. Good-night; I'm going home. I hate parties, you know. So do you. Why do either of us go to them?'

'They take one's thoughts off,' said Katherine in her own mind. Her blue eyes contracted as she looked after him.

'He's failing; he's being hurt. He'll go under. He should have been a scientist or a scholar or a chemist, like me; something in which knowledge matters and people don't. People will break his heart.'

3

Gideon walked all the way back from Hampstead to his own rooms. It was a soft, damp night, full of little winds that blew into the city from February fields and muddy roads far off. There would be lambs in the fields…. Gideon suddenly wanted to get out of the town into that damp, dark country that circled it. There would be fewer people there; fewer minds crowded together, making a dense atmosphere that was impervious to the piercing, however sharp, of truth. All this dense mass of stupid, muddled, huddled minds…. What was to be done with it? Greedy minds, ignorant minds, sentimental, truthless minds….

He saw, as he passed a newspaper stand, placards in big black letters—'Bride's Suicide.' 'Divorce of Baronet.' Then, small and inconspicuous, hardly hoping for attention, 'Italy and the Adriatic.' For one person who would care about Italy and the Adriatic, there would, presumably, be a hundred who would care about the bride and the baronet. Presumably; else why the placards? Gideon honestly tried to bend his impersonal and political mind to understand it. He knew no such people, yet one had to believe they existed; people who really cared that a bride with whom they had no acquaintance (why a bride? Did that make her more interesting?) had taken her life; and that a baronet (also a perfect stranger) had had his marriage dissolved in a court of law. What quality did it indicate, this curious and inexplicable interest in these topics so tedious to himself and to most of his personal acquaintances? Was it a love of romance? But what romance was to be found in suicide or divorce? Romance Gideon knew; knew how it girdled the world, heard the beat of its steps in far forests, the whisper of its wings on dark seas…. It is there, not in divorces and suicides. Were people perhaps moved by desire to hear about the misfortunes of others? No, because they also welcomed with eagerness the more cheerful domestic episodes reported. Was it, then, some fundamental, elemental interest in fundamental things, such as love, hate, birth, death? That was possibly it. The relation of states one with another are the product of civilisation, and need an at least rudimentarily political brain to grasp them. The relations of human beings are natural, and only need the human heart for their understanding. That part of man's mind which has been, for some obscure reason, inaccurately called the heart, was enormously and disproportionately stronger than the rest of the mind, the thinking part.

'Light Caught Bending,' another placard remarked. That was more cheerful, though it was an idiotic way of putting a theory as to the curvature of space, but it was refreshing that, apparently, people were expected to be excited by that too. And, Gideon knew it, they were. Einstein's theory as to space and light would be discussed, with varying degrees of intelligence, most of them low, in many a cottage, many a club, many a train. There would be columns about it in the Sunday papers, with little Sunday remarks to the effect that the finiteness of space did not limit the infinity of God. Scientists have naïf minds where God is concerned; they see him, if at all, in terms of space.

Anyhow, there it was. People were interested not only in divorce, suicide, and murder, but in light and space, undulations and gravitation. That was rather jolly, for that was true romance. It gave one more hope. Even though people might like their science in cheap and absurd tabloid form, they did like it. The Potter press exulted in scientific discoveries made easy, but it was better than not exulting in them at all. For these were things as they were, and therefore the things that mattered. This was the satisfying world of hard, difficult facts, without slush and without sentiment. This was the world where truth was sought for its own sake.

'When I see truth, do I seek truth
Only that I may things denote,
And, rich by striving, deck my youth
As with a vain, unusual coat?'

Nearly every one in the ordinary world did that, if indeed they ever concerned themselves with truth at all. And some scientists too, perhaps, but not most. Scientists and scholars and explorers—they were the people. They were the world's students, the learners, the discoverers. They didn't talk till they knew….

Rain had begun to drizzle. At the corner of Marylebone Road and Baker Street there was a lit coffee-stall. A group clustered about it; a policeman drinking oxo, his waterproof cape shining with wet; two taxi-cab drivers having coffee and buns; a girl in an evening cloak, with a despatch case, eating biscuits.

Gideon passed by without stopping. A hand touched him on the arm, and a painted face looked up into his, murmuring something. Gideon, who had a particular dislike for paint on the human face, and, in general, for persons who looked and behaved like this person, looked away from her and scowled.

'I only wanted,' she explained, 'a cup of coffee …' and he gave her sixpence, though he didn't believe her.

Horrible, these women were; ugly; dirty; loathsome; so that one wondered why on earth any one liked them (some people obviously did like them, or they wouldn't be there), and yet, detestable as they were, they were the outcome of facts. Possibly in them, and in the world's other ugly facts, Potterism and all truth-shirking found whatever justification it had. Sentimentalism spread a rosy veil over the ugliness, draping it decently. Making it, thought Gideon, how much worse; but making it such as Potterites could face unwincing.

The rain beat down. At its soft, chill touch Gideon's brain cooled and cooled, till he seemed to see everything in a cold, hard, crystal clarity. Life and death—how little they mattered. Life was paltry, and death its end. Yet when the world, the Potterish world, dealt with death it became something other than a mere end; it became a sensation, a problem, an episode in a melodrama. The question, when a man died, was always how and why. So, when Hobart had died, they were all dragged into a net of suspicion and melodrama—they all became for a time absurd actors in an absurd serial in the Potter press. You could not escape from sensationalism in a sensational world. There was no room for the pedant, with his greed for unadorned and unemotional precision.

Gideon sighed sharply as he turned into Oxford Street, Oxford Street was and is horrible. Everything a street should not be, even when it was down, and now it was up, which was far worse. If Gideon had not been unnerved by the painted person at the corner of Baker Street he would never have gone home this way, he would have gone along Marylebone and Euston Road. As it was, he got into a bus and rode unhappily to Gray's Inn Road, where he lived.

He sat up till three in the morning working out statistics for an article. Statistics, figures, were delightful. They were a rest. They mattered.

4

Two days later, at the Fact office, Peacock, turning over galley slips, said, 'This thing of yours on Esthonian food conditions looks like a government schedule. Couldn't you make it more attractive?'

'To whom?' asked Gideon.

'Well—the ordinary reader.'

'Oh, the ordinary reader. I meant it to be attractive to people who want information.'

'Well, but a little jam with the powder…. For instance, you draw no inference from your facts. It's dull. Why not round the thing off into a good article?'

'I can't round things. I don't like them round, either. I've given the facts, unearthed with considerable trouble and pains. No one else has. Isn't it enough?'

'Oh, it'll do.' Peacock's eyes glanced over the other proofs on his desk.
'We've got some good stuff this number.'

'Nice round articles—yes.' Gideon turned the slips over with his lean brown fingers carelessly. He picked one up.

'Hallo. I didn't know that chap was reviewing Coal and Wages.'

'Yes. He asked if he could.'

'Do you think he knows enough?'

'It's quite a good review. Read it.'

Gideon read it carefully, then laid it down and said, 'I don't agree with you that it's a good review. He's made at least two mistakes. And the whole thing's biased by his personal political theories.'

'Only enough to give it colour.'

'You don't want colour in a review of a book of that sort. You only want intelligence and exact knowledge.'

'Oh, Clitherton's all right. His head's screwed on the right way. He knows his subject.'

'Not well enough. He's a political theorist, not a good economist. That's hopeless. Why didn't you get Hinkson to do it?'

'Hinkson can't write for nuts.'

'Doesn't matter. Hinkson wouldn't have slipped up over his figures or dates.'

'My dear old chap, writing does matter. You're going crazy on that subject. Of course it matters that a thing should be decently put together.'

'It matters much more that it should be well informed. It is, of course, quite possible to be both.'

'Oh, quite. That's the idea of the Fact, after all.'

'Peacock, I hate all these slipshod fellows you get now. I wish you'd chuck the lot. They're well enough for most journalism, but they don't know enough for us.'

Peacock said, 'Oh, we'll thrash it out another time, if you don't mind.
I've got to get through some letters now,' and rang for his secretary.

Gideon went to his own room and searched old files for the verification and correction of Clitherton's mistakes. He found them, and made a note of them. Unfortunately they weakened Clitherton's argument a little. Clitherton would have to modify it. Clitherton, a sweeping and wholesale person, would not like that.

Gideon was feeling annoyed with Clitherton, and annoyed with several others among that week's contributors, and especially annoyed with Peacock, who permitted and encouraged them. If they went on like this, the Fact would soon be popular; it would find its way into the great soft silly heart of the public and there be damned.

He was a pathetic figure, Arthur Gideon, the intolerant precisian, fighting savagely against the tide of loose thinking that he saw surging in upon him, swamping the world and drowning facts. He did not see himself as a pathetic figure, or as anything else. He did not see himself at all, but worked away at his desk in the foggy room, checking the unconsidered or inaccurate or oversimplified statements of others, writing his own section of the Notes of the Week, with his careful, patient, fined brilliance, stopping to gnaw his pen or his thumb-nail or to draw diagrams, triangle within triangle, or circle intersecting circle, on his blotting paper.