“Twenty-five next month. Why?”
“You seem to have grown a little and I couldn’t remember how long we had been here. It is a devil of a long time. Sit down there for a minute and tell me something I want to know. Aren’t you wasting your time a bit, young woman? frousting down there with Emma Gainsborough. Or is it what you want?”
“I am rather in a fog,” said Teresa. He said nothing and she went on, “I used to look at people paddling along in the mud, streaming past all the time; you remember the first time we went down to the docks together and came back on a tram? It fascinated me. I had always felt that there was something that my mind was chasing after, as if I were half asleep and shouldn’t wake up until I had found out what I wanted to know. Have you ever felt like that?”
“No, I am not much troubled with what is called the Higher Mind,” said Cyril. “But I don’t disbelieve in it on that account. In fact I think it is a good thing if properly used. But go on. How does it work out?”
“Well, they all look so angry and miserable and discontented,” she explained. “There was some mystery or other that cut me off from them like a misunderstanding; some enormous grievance or injustice that divided us and our lot from them and their lot, and I felt as if I wanted to break through it somehow—anyhow—and say, ‘Here! Let me in! I won’t be left outside. Tell me what you want and I will get it for you somehow.’ I wanted to give them everything I had; not only money, but the kind of pleasure that makes it of no importance whether one has money or not. And then they let me in. Strickland let me in first. She told me such a lot when she found that I wasn’t inquisitive or preaching. She explains things so clearly and I began to see what the grievance is and then it got more hopeless than ever, because I saw that before you can get into the frame of mind that is independent of poverty you must be decently fed and warm or else you can’t think at all for sheer animal discomfort. I suppose mystics come back down the same road by smashing the body after they have used it to get a mind with. They couldn’t begin as slum babies and say, ‘I must fast and subdue the flesh.’ You see, if you start hungry, unless you have a perfectly sweet nature you probably think of nothing but clawing for food and knocking down someone else who has got some. Then you find people down there with all sorts of wonderful qualities so strong that they manage to keep their end of the stick up in spite of everything. So that topples down all your hopes when you see that all the virtues that you were going to bring in by making more comfortable surroundings are there already in the most wonderful perfection. It just thickens the mystery and makes the barrier and the fog more unaccountable than it was from outside. If you could see the horrors that some people contend against and still remain as good as gold and gay as larks, I think you would stop being so perfectly disgusting as you are sometimes about my Potters and people.”
“No, I shouldn’t, my dear,” he said, “but not because I don’t believe you. But why should I make myself sick with smells that I can’t prevent? I should be of no earthly use sitting by the bedside of an aged fish-wife with my nose in my handkerchief, and I don’t understand accounts or babies. I am much more use at my own job, which neither Emma nor your friend Jason nor even the lion-hearted Fisk could do.”
“No, no, you are much better where you are,” she agreed. “And now you see I have got beyond the first fog into a worse one. I feel cut off from the side I left and I can do nothing for the others because they have got all the means of happiness that I wanted to give them. You see, if anything good survives there it gets awfully good because it takes so much exercise.”
“Yes?” said Cyril.
“I don’t know how much you were ever in love with anyone, but you wouldn’t, would you, have married Mother if she had not been rather extra pretty and very, very well washed?”
“No, Dicky, you are not going to win on that. I should never have got within speaking distance of her, so the Higher Mind would not have contended with the lower. No war, no victory. You see, your Misters and Misseses of the unwashed brigade start on an equal footing. Mr. Potter has nothing to forgive before he inquires into the perfections of Mrs. Potter’s character.”