Before he went home, Colonel Bellairs proposed a scheme to him. His youngest boy, Bob, having been ill, had been ordered to spend the summer at home, and was not to go back to Eton till September. Meanwhile he wanted to keep up with his work, and they had been looking out for a tutor for him, some intelligent young public-school man who would know what he ought to be learning. As Eddy intended to be at home for the present, would he take up this job? The Colonel proposed a generous payment, and Eddy thought it an excellent plan. He went home engaged for the job, and started it next morning. Bob, who was sixteen, was, like all the Bellairs’, neither clever nor stupid; his gifts were practical rather than literary, but he had a fairly serviceable head. Eddy found that he rather liked teaching. He had a certain power of transmitting his own interest in things to other people that was useful.
As the Dean got better, Eddy sometimes stayed on at the Hall after work hours, and played tennis or bumble-puppy with Molly and Bob before lunch, or helped Molly to feed the rabbits, or wash one of the dogs. There was a pleasant coherence and unity about these occupations, and about Molly and Bob, which Eddy liked. Meanwhile he acted as amanuensis and secretary to his father, and was useful and agreeable in the home.
Coherence and unity; these qualities seemed in the main sadly lacking in Welchester, as in other places. It was—country life is, life in Cathedral or any other cities is—a chaos of warring elements, disturbing to the onlooker. There are no communities now, village or other. In Welchester, and in the country round about it, there was the continuous strain of opposing interests. You saw it on the main road into Welchester, where villas and villa people ousted cottages and small farmers; ousted them, and made a different demand on life, set up a different, opposing standard. Then, in the heart of the town, was the Cathedral, standing on a hill and for a set of interests quite different again, and round about it were the canons’ houses of old brick, and the Deanery, and they were imposing on life standards of a certain dignity and beauty and tradition and order, not in the least accepted either by the slum-yards behind Church Street, or by Beulah, the smug tabernacle just outside the Close. And the Cathedral society, the canons and their families, the lawyers, doctors, and unemployed gentry, kept themselves apart with satisfied gentility from the townspeople, the keepers of shops, the dentists, the auctioneers. Sentiment and opinion in Welchester was, in short, disintegrated, rent, at odds within itself. It returned a Conservative member, but only by a small majority; the large minority held itself neglected, unrepresented.
Out in the rolling green country beyond the town gates, the same unwholesome strife saddened field and lane and park. Land-owners, great and small, fought to the last ditch, the last ungenerous notice-board, with land-traversers; squires and keepers disagreed bitterly with poachers; tenant farmers saw life from an opposite angle to that of labourers; the parson differed from the minister, and often, alas, from his flock. It was as if all these warring elements, which might, from a common vantage-ground, have together conducted the exploration into the promised land, were staying at home disputing with one another as to the nature of that land. Some good, some better state of things, was in most of their minds to seek; but their paths of approach, all divergent, seemed to run weakly into waste places for want of a common energy. It was a saddening sight. The great heterogeneous unity conceived by civilised idealists seemed inaccessibly remote.
Eddy this summer took to writing articles for the Vineyard about the breaches in country life and how to heal them. The breach, for instance, between tenant-farmer and labourer; that was much on his mind. But, when he had written and written, and suggested and suggested, like many before him and since, the breach was no nearer being healed. He formed in his mind at this time a scheme for a new paper which he would like to start some day if anyone would back it, and if Denison’s firm would publish it. And, after all, so many new papers are backed, but how inadequately, and started, and published, and flash like meteors across the sky, and plunge fizzling into the sea of oblivion to perish miserably—so why not this? He thought he would like it to be called Unity, and to have that for its glorious aim. All papers have aims beforehand (one may find them set forth in many a prospectus); how soon, alas, in many cases to be disregarded or abandoned in response to the exigencies of circumstance and demand. But the aim of Unity should persist, and, if heaven was kind, reach its mark.
Pondering on this scheme, Eddy could watch chaos with more tolerant eyes, since nothing is so intolerable if one is thinking of doing something, even a very little, to try and alleviate it. He carried on a correspondence with Arnold about it. Arnold said he didn’t for a moment suppose his Uncle Wilfred would be so misguided as to have anything to do with such a scheme, but he might, of course. The great dodge with a new paper, was, Arnold said, the co-operative system; you collect a staff of eager contributors who will undertake to write for so many months without pay, and not want to get their own back again till after the thing is coining money, and then they share what profits there are, if any. If they could collect a few useful people for this purpose, such as Billy Raymond, and Datcherd, and Cecil Le Moine (only probably Cecil was too selfish), and John Henderson, and Margaret Clinton (a novelist friend of Arnold’s), and various other intelligent men and women, the thing might be worked. And Bob Traherne and Dean Oliver, to represent two different Church standpoints, Eddy added to the list, and a field labourer he knew who would talk about small holdings, and a Conservative or two (Conservatives were conspicuously lacking in Arnold’s list). Encouraged by Arnold’s reception of the idea, Eddy replied by sketching his scheme for Unity more elaborately. Arnold answered, “If we get all or any of the people we’ve thought of to write for it, Unity will go its own way, regardless of schemes beforehand.... Have your Tories and parsons in if you must, only don’t be surprised if they sink it.... The chief thing to mind about with a writer is, has he anything new to say? I hate all that sentimental taking up and patting on the back of ploughmen and navvies and tramps merely as such; it’s silly, inverted snobbery. It doesn’t follow that a man has anything to say that’s worth hearing merely because he says it ungrammatically. Get day labourers to write about land-tenure if they have anything to say about it that’s more enlightening than what you or I would say; but not unless; because they won’t put it so well, by a long way. If ever I have anything to do with a paper, I shall see that it avoids sentimentality so far as is consistent with just enough popularity to live by.”
It was still all in the air, of course, but Eddy felt cheered by the definite treatment Arnold was giving to his idea.
About the middle of June Arnold wrote that Datcherd had hopelessly broken down at last, and there seemed no chance for him, and he had given up everything and gone down to a cottage in Devonshire, probably to die there.
“Eileen has gone with him,” Arnold added, in graver vein than usual. “I suppose she wants to look after him, and they both want not to waste the time that’s left.... Of course, many people will be horrified, and think the worst. Personally, I think it a pity she should do it, because it means, for her, giving up a great deal, now and afterwards, though for him nothing now but a principle. The breaking of the principle is surprising in him, and really, if one comes to think of it, pretty sad, and a sign of how he’s broken up altogether. Because he has always held these things uncivilised and wrong, and said so. I suppose he’s too weak in body to say so any more, or to stand against his need and hers any longer. I think it a bad mistake, and I wish they wouldn’t do it. Besides, she’s too fine, and has too much to give, to throw it all at one dying man, as she’s doing. What’s it been in Datcherd all along that’s so held her—he so sickly and wrecked and morose, she so brilliant and alive and young and full of genius and joy? Of course he’s brilliant too, in his own way, and lovable, and interesting; but a failure for all that, and an unhappy failure, and now at the last a failure even as to his own principles of life. I suppose it has been always just that that has held her; his failure and need. These things are dark; but anyhow there it is; one never saw two people care for each other more or need each other more.... She was afraid of hurting his work by coming to him before; but the time for thinking of that is past, and I suppose she will stay with him now till the end, and it will be their one happy time. You know I think these things mostly a mistake, and these absorbing emotions uncivilised, and nearly all alliances ill-assorted, and this one will be condemned. But much she’ll care for that when it is all over and he has gone. What will happen to her then I can’t guess; she won’t care much for anything any of us can do to help, for a long time. It is a pity. But such is life, a series of futile wreckages.” He went on to other topics. Eddy didn’t read the rest just then, but went out for a long and violent walk across country with his incredibly mongrel dog.
Confusion, with its many faces, its shouting of innumerable voices, overlay the green June country. For him in that hour the voice of pity and love rose dominant, drowning the other voices, that questioned and wondered and denied, as the cuckoos from every tree questioned and commented on life in their strange, late note. Love and pity; pity and love; mightn’t these two resolve all discord at last? Arnold’s point of view, that of the civilised person of sense, he saw and shared; Eileen’s and Datcherd’s he saw and felt; his own mother’s, and the Bellairs’, and that of those like-minded with them, he saw and appreciated; all were surely right, yet they did not make for harmony.