CHAPTER XXIX
We grow. We acquire. Do we change?
We talk of the formation of character, as if character were not already triumphant in the infant that defies its father and seduces its grandmother months before it can speak. We talk of character—but do we not mean habit? Daily, weekly, yearly, we add to our habits, literally our habits, our garments, the Joseph-coats of manner and custom, of tolerance and caution and indifference, in which we clothe and conceal ourselves, our unchanging, unchangeable selves, old as age, young as youth, sexless, amoral, unconvinced by human logic, unbound by human laws.
And for years we—I, with a hole in my stocking, and you, Collaborator, incapable of any such thing, and Martha in the kitchen, and the Kaiser at Potsdam, train up ourselves in the way we should go and criticize our neighbours’ departure therefrom without a thought for our sleeping partner, biding his time within us. But when his time comes, in emergency, in crisis, then, as sure as you sit there knitting, Collaborator, that original self wakes up, with a rending of garments, and takes charge. But, when the occasion is over and it has sunk to sleep again, it is we—our bewildered, protesting surface selves who have to take the consequences. That explains, I imagine, why it is always the most unlikely people who behave in the most incongruous way, and why John Smith (condemn him or admire him as we may) remains the last person we should have expected to murder his great-uncle or marry the princess, or why Laura Valentine, who loved Justin more deeply than even his mother did (I cannot put it higher) and had a fine sense of humour of her own, should yet be setting out at ten o’clock of the morning of the last Sunday in June, convinced that by the smashing of his birds’ eggs she would save his soul alive, and that there was nothing ridiculous in the situation.
As she walked, she argued it out with him, the old imaginary Justin, in the old childish way. It was long since she had had him at her side. Her common sense had recognized the danger of such make-believe, the folly of using her mind as a mere play-house in which her thoughts were actors, rehearsing each coming event with such richness of setting, such significance of detail, such completeness of result, that, in comparison, the reality must always disappoint her. She had conquered, she believed that she had at last conquered the tendency, and prided herself a little on the effort; for it had been surprisingly difficult. Laura, arm-in-arm with Nemesis, did not for one instant recognize her companion, did not guess that the old creative instinct that she had so conscientiously scotched a year before was not, was never killed, that if growth were denied it in one art it would be bound to appear in another, and again and again denied its body, would find a ghost-life in her very dreams. Dear Laura was merely pleased with herself because, as Justin would have wished her to do, she had put an end to childish things, such as telling herself stories when she went to bed, deciding the colour of her eldest grandson’s eyes, and talking to Justin when he was not there.
But, as I say, she had reckoned without her sleeping partner. On that June morning she walked the long mile between Green Gates and the Priory, unregenerate, a recusant, lips moving, eyes eloquent, rehearsing an ordeal, haranguing Justin.
He would be angry—violently angry. She conceived her act, envisaged its consequences, nor lost her head when the explosion came. She was face to face with the anger of Justin and was able to ignore it. She argued: she overbore him: for once she let herself go. She had no need to stumble for words: the stinging phrases jostled for precedence upon her lips. She ranged her charges, calling this and that incident in witness: held up to ridicule his lethargy, his complacency, his lack of purpose. Her passion rose, she convinced herself anew, as she sorted her sentences, flung her taunts.
She told him that his collection typified his attitude to life and, therefore, though it had been priceless, irreplaceable, instead of the trumpery it was, she would have destroyed it just the same. He asked her how she dared stand there—? (Justin’s few contributions to the discussion strike one as having a distinctly feminine flavour) how she dared—and she told him that she dared anything where he was concerned; that she knew what she was doing, what she was risking, what she was losing; but that he should not make himself a laughing-stock if she could help it; that if he could not see that he was making himself a laughing-stock, she did—she did!
She was furiously rude to him; she——
She began all over again.