The making of a bigot

by Rose Macaulay

“Molly will be a little disappointed in me,” he murmured, and crossed off the Primrose League from his list. “And I expect it would be generally thought that I ought to cross off the Tariff Reform League, too.” He did so, then proceeded to weigh the Young Liberals against all the Socialist societies he belonged to (such as the Anti-sweating League, the National Service League, the Eugenics Society, and many others), for even he could see that these two ways of thought did not go well together. He might possibly have been a Socialist and a Primrose Leaguer, but he could not, as the world looks at such things, be a Socialist and a Liberal. He chose to be a Socialist, believing that that was the way, at the moment, to get most done.

“Very good,” he commented, writing it down. “A bigoted Socialist. That will have the advantage that Traherne will let me help with the clubs. Now for the Church.”

The Church question also he decided without recourse to chance. As he meant to continue to belong to the Church of England, he crossed off from the list the Free Thought League and the Theosophist Society. It remained that he should choose between the various Church societies he belonged to, such as the Church Progress Society (High and Modernist), the E. C. U. (High and not Modernist), the Liberal Churchmen’s League (Broad), and the Evangelical Affiance (Low). Of these he selected that system of thought that seemed to him to go most suitably with the Socialism he was already pledged to; he would be a bigoted High Church Modernist, and hate Broad Churchmen, Evangelicals, Anglican Individualists, Ultramontane Romans, Atheists, and (particularly) German Liberal Protestants.

“Father will be disappointed in me, I’m afraid,” he reflected.

Then he weighed the Church Defence Society against the Society for the Liberation of Religion from State Patronage and Control, found neither wanting, but concluded that as a Socialist he ought to support the former, so wrote himself down an enemy of Disestablishment, remarking, “Father will be better pleased this time.” Then he dealt with the Sunday Society (for the opening of museums, etc., on that day) as incongruous with the Lord’s Day Observance Society; the Sunday Society had it. Turning to the arts, he supposed regretfully that some people would think it inconsistent to belong both to the League for the Encouragement and Better Appreciation of Post Impressionism, and to that for the Maintenance of the Principles of Classical Art; or to the Society for Encouraging the Realistic School of Modern Verse, and to the Poetry Society (which does not do this.) Then it struck him that the Factory Increase League clashed with the Coal Smoke Abatement Society, that the Back to the Land League was perhaps incompatible with the Society for the Preservation of Objects of Historic Interest in the Countryside; that one should not subscribe both to the National Arts Collections Fund, and to the Maintenance of Cordial Trans-Atlantic Relations; to the Charity Organisation Society, and to the Salvation Army Shelters Fund.

Many other such discrepancies of thought and ideal he found in himself and corrected, either by choice or, more often (so equally good did both alternatives as a rule seem to him to be) by the hand of chance. It was not till after four o’clock on his wedding morning, when the midsummer-day sunrise was gilding the river and breaking into the room, that he stood up, cramped and stiff and weary, but a homogeneous and consistent whole, ready at last for bigotry to seal him for her own. He would yield himself unflinchingly to her hand; she should, in the course of the long years, stamp him utterly into shape. He looked ahead, as he leant out of the window and breathed in the clear morning air, and saw his future life outspreading. What a lot he would be able to accomplish, now that he was going to see one angle only of life and believe in it so exclusively that he would think it the whole. Already he felt the approaches of this desirable state. It would approach, he believed, rapidly, now that he was no longer to be distracted by divergent interests, torn by opposing claims on his sympathy. He saw himself a writer for the press (but he really must remember to write no more for the Conservative press, or the Liberal). He would hate Conservatism, detest Liberalism; he would believe that Socialists alone were actuated by their well-known sense of political equity and sound economics. In working, as he meant to do, in Datcherd’s settlement, he would be as fanatically political as Datcherd himself had been. Molly might slightly regret this, because of the different tenets of Nevill and the rest of her family; but she was too sensible really to mind. He saw her and himself living their happy, and, he hoped, not useless life, in the little house they had taken in Elm Park Road, Chelsea (they had not succeeded in ousting the inhabitants of the Osiers). He would be writing for some paper, and working every evening in the Lea Bridge Settlement, and Molly would help him there with the girls’ clubs; she was keen on that sort of thing, and did it well. They would have many friends; the Bellairs’ relations and connections were numerous, and often military or naval; and there would be Nevill and his friends, so hard-working, so useful, so tidy, so well-bred; and their own friends, the friends they made, the friends they had had before.... It was at this point that the picture grew a little less vivid and clearly-outlined, and had to be painted in with great decision. Of course they came into the picture, Jane and Billy and the rest, and perhaps sometime, when she and Molly had both changed their minds about it, Eileen; of course they would all be there, coming in and out and mixing up amicably with the Bellairs contingent, and pleasing and being pleased by Nevill and his well-behaved friends, and liking to talk to Molly and she to them. Why not? Eileen had surely been wrong about that; his friendships weren’t, couldn’t be, part of the price he had to pay for his marriage, or even for his bigotry. With a determined hand he painted them into the picture, and produced a surprising, crowded jumble of visitors in the little house—artists, colonels, journalists, civil servants, poets, members of Parliament, settlement workers, actors, and clergymen.... He must remember, of course, that he disliked Conservatism, Atheism, and Individualism; but that, he thought, need be no barrier between him and the holders of these unfortunate views. And any surprisingness, any lack of realism, in the picture he had painted, he was firmly blind to.

So Molly and he would live and work together; work for the right things, war against the wrong. He had learnt how to set about working now; learnt to use the weapons ready to hand, the only weapons provided by the world for its battles. Using them, he would get accustomed to them; gradually he would become the Complete Bigot, as to the manner born, such a power has doing to react on the vision of those who do. Then and only then, when, for him, many-faced Truth had resolved itself into one, when he should see but little here below but see that little clear, when he could say from the heart, “I believe Tariff Reformers, Unionists, Liberals, Individualists, Roman Catholics, Protestants, Dissenters, Vegetarians, and all others with whom I disagree, to be absolutely in the wrong; I believe that I and those who think like me possess not merely truth but the truth”—then, and only then would he be able to set to work and get something done....

Who should say it was not worth the price?

Having completed the task he had set himself, Eddy was now free to indulge in reflections more suited to a wedding morning. These reflections were of the happy and absorbing nature customary in a person in his situation; they may, in fact, be so easily imagined that they need not here be set down. Having abandoned himself to them for half an hour, he went to bed, to rest before his laborious life. For let no one think he can become a bigot without much energy of mind and will. It is not a road one can slip into unawares, as it were, like the primrose paths of life—the novelist’s, for example, the poet’s, or the tramp’s. It needs fibre; a man has to brace himself, set his teeth, shut his eyes, and plunge with a courageous blindness.

Five o’clock struck before Eddy went to bed. He hoped to leave it at seven, in order to start betimes upon so strenuous a career.