Meanwhile, a background to discord, the woods were green and the hedges starred pink with wild roses and the cow-parsley a white foam in the ditches, and the clouds shreds of white fleece in the blue above, and cows knee-deep in cool pools beneath spreading trees, and, behind the jubilance of larks and the other jocund little fowls, cried the perpetual questioning of the unanswered grey bird....
In the course of July, Eddy became engaged to Molly Bellairs, an event which, with all its preliminary and attendant circumstances, requires and will receive little treatment here. Proposals and their attendant emotions, though more interesting even than most things to those principally concerned, are doubtless so familiar to all as to be readily imagined, and can occupy no place in these pages. The fact emerges that Eddy and Molly, after the usual preliminaries, did become engaged. It must not be surmised that their emotions, because passed lightly over, were not of the customary and suitable fervour; in point of fact, both were very much in love. Both their families were pleased. The marriage, of course, was not to occur till Eddy was settled definitely into a promising profession, but that he hoped to be in the autumn, if he entered the Denisons’ publishing firm and at the same time practised journalism.
“You should get settled with something permanent, my boy,” said the Dean, who was by now well enough to talk like that. “I don’t like this taking things up and dropping them.”
“They drop me,” Eddy explained, much as he had to Arnold once, but the Dean did not like him to put it like that, as anyone would rather his son dropped than was dropped.
“You know you can do well if you like,” he said, being fairly started in that vein. “You did well at school and Cambridge, and you can do well now. And now that you’re going to be married, you must give up feeling your way and occupying yourself with jobs that aren’t your regular career, and get your teeth into something definite. It wouldn’t be fair to Molly to play about with odd jobs, even useful and valuable ones, as you have been doing. You wouldn’t think of schoolmastering at all, I suppose? With your degree you could easily get a good place.” The Dean hankered after a scholastic career for his son; besides, schoolmasters so often end in Orders. But Eddy said he thought he would prefer publishing or journalism, though it didn’t pay so well at first. He told the Dean about the proposed paper and the co-operative system, which was sure to work so well.
The Dean said, “I haven’t any faith in all these new papers, whatever the system. Even the best die. Look at the Pilot. And the Tribune.”
Eddy looked back across the ages at the Pilot and the Tribune, whose deaths he just remembered.
“There’ve been plenty died since those,” he remarked. “Those whom the gods love, etcetera. But lots have lived, too. If you come to that, look at the Times, the Spectator, and the Daily Mirror. They were new once. So was the English Review; so was Poetry and Drama; so was the New Statesman; so was the Blue Review. They’re alive yet. Then why not Unity? Even if it has a short life, it may be a merry one.”
“To heal divisions,” mused the Dean. “A good aim, of course. Though probably a hopeless one. One makes it one’s task, you know, to throw bridges, as far as one can, between the Church and the agnostics, and the Church and dissent. And look at the result. A friendly act of conciliation on the part of one of our bishops calls forth torrents of bitter abuse in the columns of our Church papers. The High Church party is so unmanageable: it’s stiff: it stands out for differences: it won’t be brought in. How can we ever progress towards unity if the extreme left remains in that state of wilful obscurantism and unchristian intolerance?... Of course, mind, there are limits; one would fight very strongly against disestablishment or disendowment; but the ritualists seem to be out for quarrels over trifles.” He added, because Eddy had worked in St. Gregory’s, “Of course, individually, there are numberless excellent High Churchmen; one doesn’t want to run down their work. But they’ll never stand for unity.”
“Quite,” said Eddy, meditating on unity. “That’s exactly what Finch and the rest say about the Broad Church party, you know. And it’s what dissenters say about Church people, and Church people about dissenters. The fact is, so few parties do stand for unity. They nearly all stand for faction.”