The Haste made such a fool of itself over the miners that we came to blows with them, and quarrelled all through July and August, mostly over trivial and petty points. I may add that the Fact was not supporting immediate nationalisation; we were against it, for reasons that it would be too tedious to explain here. (As a matter of fact, I know that all I record of this so recent history is too tedious; I do not seem to be able to avoid most of it; but even I draw the line somewhere). The controversy between the Fact and the Haste seemed after a time to resolve itself largely into a personal quarrel between Hobart and myself. He was annoyed that Jane occasionally wrote for us. I suppose it was natural that he should be annoyed. And he didn't like her to frequent the 1917 Club, to which a lot of us belonged. Jane often lunched there, so did I. She said that you got a better lunch there than at the Women's University Club. Not much better, but still, better. You also met more people you wanted to meet, as well as more people you didn't. We started a sort of informal lunch club, which met there and lunched together on Thursdays. It consisted of Jane, Katherine Varick, Juke, Peacock, Johnny Potter, and myself. Often other people joined us by invitation; my sister Rosalind and her husband, any girl Johnny Potter was for the moment in love with, and friends of Peacock's, Juke's, or mine. Juke would sometimes bring a parson in; this was rather widening for us, I think, and I dare say for the parson too. To Juke it was part of the enterprise of un-Potterising the Church, which was on his mind a good deal. He said it needed un-Potterising as much as the State, or literature, or journalism, or even the drama, and that Potterism in it was even more dangerous than in these. So, when he could, he induced parsons to join the Anti-Potter League.
We weren't all tied up, I may say, with the political party principles very commonly held by members of the 1917 Club. I certainly wasn't a Socialist, nor, wholly, I think, a Radical; neither at that time was Peacock, though he became more so as time went on; nor, certainly, was Katherine. Juke was, because he believed that in these principles was the only hope for the world. And the twins were, because the same principles were the only wear for the young intellectual, at that moment. Johnny, in all things the glass of fashion and the mould of form, wore them as he wore his monocle, quite unconscious of his own reasons for both. But it was the idea of the Anti-Potter League to keep clear of parties and labels. You can belong to a recognised political party and be an Anti-Potterite, for Potterism is a frame of mind, not a set of opinions (Juke was, after Katherine, the best Anti-Potterite I have known, though people did their best to spoil him), but it is easier, and more compatible with your objects, to be free to think what you like about everything. Once you are tied up with a party, you can only avoid second-handedness, taking over views ready-made, if you are very strong-minded indeed.
Thursday was a fairly free afternoon for me, and Jane and I somehow got into a habit of going off somewhere together after lunch, or staying on at the club and talking. Jane seemed to me to be increasingly interesting; she was acquiring new subtleties, complexities, and comprehensions, and shedding crudities. She wrote better, too. We took her stuff sometimes for the Fact. At the same time, she seemed to me to be morally deteriorating, as people who grab and take things they oughtn't to have always do deteriorate. And she was trying all the time to square Hobart with the rest of her life, fitting him in, as it were, and he didn't fit in. I was interested to see what she was making of it all.
4
One Thursday in early September, when Juke and Jane and I had lunched alone together at the club, and Jane and I had gone off to some meeting afterwards, Juke dropped in on me in the evening after dinner. He sat down and lit a pipe, then got up and walked about the room, and I knew he had something on his mind, but wasn't going to help him out. I felt hard and rather sore that evening.
Soon he said, in his soft, indifferent voice, 'Of course you'll be angry at what I'm going to say.'
'I think it probable,' I replied, 'from the look of you. But go on.'
'Well,' he said quietly, 'I don't think these Thursday lunches will do any more.'
'For you?' I asked.
'For any of us. Not with Jane Hobart there.' He wouldn't look at me, but stood by the window looking out at Gray's Inn Road.