She was instantly swept off again into the sea.
“Therein you outline the most glorious of all relationships, I need not say—do not tell me that I need say—that I allude to that between mothers and sons. Had I been so fortunate as to have a son, granting the premiss that I had already gained the most essential of all conditions for that—namely, that of husbandhood—there is nothing that would delight me more than the existence of that supreme and entrancing uncertainty of how a son is going to behave. The younger generation, my dear lady, must inevitably be ahead of us in development, and, therefore, in incomprehensibility. If you could understand your dear Robin—may we say ‘our’ dear Robin?—it would imply that he was a generation behind his time. Nothing fills me with more delighted wonder and surfeits me with more entranced surmise than how the younger generation are going to govern the world. The reins are already slipping from our effete and rheumatic fingers—you will understand, of course, that no fingers of those which I see so gracefully round me are alluded to in any sort of implication, however remote—but, in point of fact, mothers and fathers, and the elderly bachelors and the even more elderly maids, are now, at this present moment, sitting round in a dusk and Dämmerung, and bright eyes, dimly seen, but sparkling with purpose, gleam from the corners of our crumbling habitations, and watch for the opportunity which must surely come, and come soon, of, in fact, scragging us.”
Lady Grote gave a little shiver, quite involuntary, quite sincere.
“You are horrible,” she said. “Do you mean that Robin is going to cut my throat? But you are more than fascinating. You are a Pied Piper; is he not, Mr. Kuhlmann?”
Kuhlmann, who was sitting on the other side of her, made a little purring noise in his throat like a contented cat.
“Also,” said he, “I do not understand a word of what Mr. Bellingham says. But I like the noise he makes. Ach, one word I did understand, and he says you are in the Dämmerung. There is a dusk closing in on England. So?”
Mr. Bellingham remembered, with a sense of relief, the fact that Kuhlmann had not arrived till after his remarks about the sea so impudently called the German Ocean.
“A dusk closing in on England?” he said. “I must surely have expressed myself with more than my accustomed infelicity, if I have left that impression. The dusk, Mr. Kuhlmann, is but the dusk of certain expiring ashes, such as my own, which will rekindle in a nobler fire to light the ways of our world’s obscure transit through infinite space, than has ever yet been seen. The words that should convey to you how eagerly I make fuel of myself for that incomparable Phœnix immeasurably fail me. But if, in the ways of a stuttering tongue and a speech to which the babbling of a brook—any brook you please—is of the nature of speech more coherent than is given to me, I am capable of conveying the impression that is so irradicably fixed on my mind that no other picture is aught but colourless beside it, I would endeavour to make this at least plain.” Bellingham was now in full splendid blast. He outlined and emphasized his point with strokes of his unlit cigar, using it like a brush against the canvas of the air, and his voice boomed out impressively.
“From a race of heroic fathers and mothers has come forth, with explosion as of gorse-seed, an infinitely more heroic offspring. The steadfast eyes of boys and girls to-day, I assure you, frighten me. They are steadfast on their pleasure, if you will, or on each other, or on those extraordinary games they play, in which you have to hit a small india-rubber ball, or so I take it to be, as few times as possible, putting it, at uncertain intervals, into a species of small jam-pot sunk in little lawns, in order to win this very serious game. Golf, I think, is the name of the sport which I am feeling for. Or, again, they fix those same steadfast eyes, unwittingly perhaps, but in obedience to the life force, as poor Shaw put it, on the mist that assuredly now more than ever veils the future from us. The destiny of the world! Where does that lie but in the solar plexus of boys and girls? How commonplace to the verge of conspicuousness that sounds! But in the history of the world did ever the future lie—like, like this plucked peach, all pink with the sun that has ripened it, more fatefully, more conclusively, in the hands of the young? There it lies, as it were, a bomb built of fire and explosiveness, tame for the moment as this plucked peach, which it really would be a crime not to eat, and, as I am without criminal instincts, I forthwith proceed to plunge the spoon in it, thus and thus—and, in fact, may the future be as soft and as sweet.
“The fuse is attached; I image it for you, in fact, with what seems to be, and in fact is, if for the moment you will allow me to translate such imagery into the actual terms of what we may call, in the analogy of cutlery implying steel, argentery, implying silver, with this spoon, and push it into the peach which so beautifully awaits me. But the peach, irrespective of this consuming and already delighted mouth, must stand for us as the bomb which the Robins and the swimmers of fresh rivers hold in their hands, and will deal with, as the Dämmerung of the older generation closes round it, and the clouds brighten with the dawning of a day that is, to the licence allowed to the self-made seer, the herald of the more serene than ever was yet day.”