He moved restlessly over on to his side.
“It won’t happen again, mother. Never again.”
CHAPTER XVII.
CONVERSION.
ON Midsummer Eve, which was the day before his marriage, Eddy had a number of his friends to dinner at the Moulin d’Or. It had amused him to ask a great many, and to select them from many different quarters and sets, and to watch how they all got on together. For many of them were not in the habit of meeting one another. The Vicar of St. Gregory’s, for instance, did not, in the normal course of his days, as a rule come across Billy Raymond, or Cecil Le Moine, with whom he was conversing courteously across the table; Bob Traherne, his curate, seldom chatted affably with Conservative young members of Parliament such as Nevill Bellairs; Mrs. Crawford had long since irrevocably decided against social intercourse with Eileen Le Moine, to whom she was talking this evening as if she was rather pleased to have the opportunity; Bridget Hogan was wont to avoid militant desirers of votes, but to-night she was garrulously holding forth to a lady novelist of these habits who resided in a garden city; Eddy’s friend, the young Irish Unionist, was confronted and probably outraged by Blake Connolly, Eileen’s father, the Nationalist editor of the Hibernian, a vehement-tongued, hot-tempered, rather witty person, with deep blue eyes like Eileen’s, and a flexible, persuasive voice. At the same table with Bob Traherne and Jane Dawn was a beautiful young man in a soft frilly shirt, an evangelical young man who at Cambridge had belonged to the C.I.C.C.U., and had preached in the Market Place. If he had known enough about them, he would have thought Jane Dawn’s attitude towards religion and life a pity, and Bob Traherne’s a bad mistake. But on this harmonious occasion they all met as friends. Even James Peters, sturdy and truthful, forbore to show Cecil Le Moine that he did not like him. Even Hillier, though it was pain and grief to him, kept silence from good words, and did not denounce Eileen Le Moine.
And Eddy, looking round the room at all of them, thought how well they all got on for one evening, because they were wanting to, and because one evening did not matter, and how they would not, many of them, get on at all, and would not even want to, if they were put to a longer test. And once again, at this, that he told himself was not the last, gathering of the heterogeneous crowd of his friends together, he saw how right they all were, in their different ways and yet at odds. He remembered how someone had said, “The interesting quarrels of the world are never between truth and falsehood, but between different truths.” Ah, but must there be quarrels? More and more clearly he had come to see lately that there must; that through the fighting of extremes something is beaten out....
Someone thumped the table for silence, and Billy Raymond was on his feet, proposing their host’s health and happiness. Billy was rather a charming speaker, in his unselfconscious, unfluent, amused, quietly allusive way, that was rather talk than speechifying. After him came Nevill Bellairs, Eddy’s brother-in-law to be, who said the right things in his pleasant, cordial, well-bred, young member’s manner. Then they drank Eddy’s health, and after that Eddy got on to his feet to return thanks. But all he said was “Thanks very much. It was very nice of all of you to come. I hope you’ve all enjoyed this evening as much as I have, and I hope we shall have many more like it in future, after....” When he paused someone broke in with “He’s a jolly good fellow,” and they shouted it till the passers by in the Soho streets took it up and sang and whistled in chorus. That was the answer they unanimously gave to the hope he had expressed. It was an answer so cheerful and so friendly that it covered the fact that no one had echoed the hope, or even admitted it as a possibility. After all, it was an absurd thing to hope, for one dinner-party never is exactly like another; how should it be, with so much of life and death between?
When the singing and the cheering and the toasting was over, they all sat on and talked and smoked till late. Eddy talked too. And under his talking his perceptions were keenly working. The vivid, alive personalities of all these people, these widely differing men and women, boys and girls, struck sharply on his consciousness. There were vast differences between them, yet in nearly all was a certain fine, vigorous effectiveness, a power of achieving, getting something done. They all had their weapons, and used them in the battles of the world. They all, artists and philosophers, journalists and politicians, poets and priests, workers among the poor, players among the rich, knew what they would be at, where they thought they were going and how, and what they were up against. They made their choices; they selected, preferred, rejected ... hated.... The sharp, hard word brought him up. That was it; they hated. They all, probably, hated something or other. Even the tolerant, large-minded Billy, even the gentle Jane, hated what they considered bad literature, bad art. They not only sought good, but eschewed evil; if they had not realised the bad, the word “good” would have been meaningless to them.
With everyone in the room it was the same. Blake Connolly hated the Union—that was why he could be the force for Nationalism that he was; John Macleod, the Ulsterman, hated Nationalists and Papists—that was why he spoke so well on platforms for the Union; Bob Traherne hated capitalism—that was why he could fight so effectively for the economic betterment that he believed in; Nevill Bellairs hated Liberalism—that was why he got in at elections; the vicar of St. Gregory’s hated disregard of moral laws—that was why he was a potent force for their observance among his parishioners; Hillier hated agnosticism—that was why he could tell his people without flinching that they would go to hell if they didn’t belong to the Church; (he also, Eddy remembered, hated some writers of plays—and that, no doubt, was why he looked at Cecil Le Moine as he did;) Cecil Le Moine hated the commonplace and the stupid—that was why he never lapsed into either in his plays; Mrs. Crawford hated errors of breeding (such as discordant clothes, elopements, incendiarism, and other vulgar violence)—that was why her house was so select; Bridget Hogan hated being bored—that was why she succeeded in finding life consistently amusing; James Peters hated men of his own class without collars, men of any class without backbones, as well as lies, unwholesomeness, and all morbid rot—that was probably why his short, unsubtle, boyish sermons had a force, a driving-power, that made them tell, and why the men and boys he worked and played with loved him.
And Arnold, who was not there but ought to have been, had hated many things, and that was why he wasn’t there.
Yes, they all hated something; they all rejected; all recognised without shirking the implied negations in what they loved. That was how and why they got things done, these vivid, living people. That was how and why anyone ever got anything done, in this perplexing, unfinished, rough-hewn world, with so much to do to it, and for it. An imperfect world, of course; if it were not, hate and rejections would not be necessary; a rough and ready, stupid muddle of a world, an incoherent, astonishing chaos of contradictions—but, after all, the world one has to live in and work in and fight in, using the weapons ready to hand. If one does not use them, if one rejects them as too blunt, too rough and ready, too inaccurate, for one’s fine sense of truth, one is left weaponless, a non-combatant, a useless drifter from company to company, cast out of all in turn.... Better than that, surely, is any absurdity of party and creed, dogma and system. After all, when all is said in their despite, it is these that do the work.