Tea-time came; the sister brought out the tea-tray into the garden. And immediately, the wife appeared. She had changed, and was wearing a chicory-blue dress of fine cloth. The little secretary had gathered up her papers and was departing, on rather high heels.

  “Don’t go, Miss Wrexall,” said the wife.

  The little secretary stopped short, then hesitated.

  “Mother will be expecting me,” she said.

  “Tell her you’re not coming. And ask your sister to bring another cup. I want you to have tea with us.”

  Miss Wrexall looked at the man, who was reared on one elbow in the hammock, and was looking enigmatical, Hamletish.

  He glanced at her quickly, then pursed his mouth in a boyish negligence.

  “Yes, stay and have tea with us for once,” he said. “I see strawberries, and I know you’re the bird for them.”

  She glanced at him, smiled wanly, and hurried away to tell her mother. She even stayed long enough to slip on a silk dress.

  “Why, how smart you are!” said the wife, when the little secretary reappeared on the lawn, in chicory-blue silk.

  “Oh, don’t look at my dress, compared to yours!” said Miss Wrexall. They were of the same colour, indeed!

  “At least you earned yours, which is more than I did mine,” said the wife, as she poured tea. “You like it strong?”

  She looked with her heavy eyes at the smallish, birdy, blue-clad, overworked young woman, and her eyes seemed to speak many inexplicable dark volumes.

  “Oh, as it comes, thank you,” said Miss Wrexall, leaning nervously forward.

  “It’s coming pretty black, if you want to ruin your digestion,” said the wife.

  “Oh, I’ll have some water in it, then.”

  “Better, I should say.”

  “How’d the work go — all right?” asked the wife, as they drank tea, and the two women looked at each other’s blue dresses.

  “Oh!” he said. “As well as you can expect. It was a piece of pure flummery. But it’s what they want. Awful rot, wasn’t it, Miss Wrexall?”

  Miss Wrexall moved uneasily on her chair.

  “It interested me,” she said, “though not so much as the novel.”

  “The novel? Which novel?” said the wife. “Is there another new one?”

  Miss Wrexall looked at him. Not for words would she give away any of his literary activities.

  “Oh, I was just sketching out an idea to Miss Wrexall,” he said.

  “Tell us about it!” said the wife. “Miss Wrexall, you tell us what it’s about.”

  She turned on her chair, and fixed the little secretary.

  “I’m afraid” — Miss Wrexall squirmed — ”I haven’t got it very clearly myself, yet.”

  “Oh, go along! Tell us what you have got then!”

  Miss Wrexall sat dumb and very vexed. She felt she was being baited. She looked at the blue pleatings of her skirt.

  “I’m afraid I can’t,” she said.

  “Why are you afraid you can’t? You’re so very competent. I’m sure you’ve got it all at your finger-ends. I expect you write a good deal of Mr. Gee’s books for him, really. He gives you the hint, and you fill it all in. Isn’t that how you do it?” She spoke ironically, and as if she were teasing a child. And then she glanced down at the fine pleatings of her own blue skirt, very fine and expensive.

  “Of course you’re not speaking seriously?” said Miss Wrexall, rising on her mettle.

  “Of course I am! I’ve suspected for a long time — at least, for some time — that you write a good deal of Mr. Gee’s books for him, from his hints.”

  It was said in a tone of raillery, but it was cruel.

  “I should be terribly flattered,” said Miss Wrexall, straightening herself, “if I didn’t know you were only trying to make me feel a fool.”

  “Make you feel a fool? My dear child! — why, nothing could be farther from me! You’re twice as clever, and a million times as competent as I am. Why, my dear child, I’ve the greatest admiration for you! I wouldn’t do what you do, not for all the pearls in India. I couldn’t anyhow — ”

  Miss Wrexall closed up and was silent.

  “Do you mean to say my books read as if — ” he began, rearing up and speaking in a harrowed voice.

  “I do!” said the wife. “Just as if Miss Wrexall had written them from your hints. I honestly thought she did — when you were too busy — ”

  “How very clever of you!” he said.

  “Very!” she said. “Especially if I was wrong!”

  “Which you were,” he said.

  “How very extraordinary!” she cried. “Well, I am once more mistaken!”

  There was a complete pause.

  It was broken by Miss Wrexall, who was nervously twisting her fingers.

  “You want to spoil what there is between me and him, I can see that,” she said bitterly.

  “My dear, but what is there between you and him?” asked the wife.

  “I was happy working with him, working for him! I was happy working for him!” cried Miss Wrexall, tears of indignant anger and chagrin in her eyes.

  “My dear child!” cried the wife, with simulated excitement, “go on being happy working with him, go on being happy while you can! If it makes you happy, why then, enjoy it! Of course! Do you think I’d be so cruel as to want to take it away from you? — working with him? I can’t do shorthand and typewriting and double-entrance book-keeping, or whatever it’s called. I tell you, I’m utterly incompetent. I never earn anything. I’m the parasite of the British oak, like the mistletoe. The blue bird doesn’t flutter round my feet. Perhaps they’re too big and trampling.”

  She looked down at her expensive shoes.

  “If I did have a word of criticism to offer,” she said turning to her husband, “it would be to you, Cameron, for taking so much from her and giving her nothing.”

  “But he gives me everything, everything!” cried Miss Wrexall. “He gives me everything!”

  “What do you mean by everything?” said the wife, turning on her sternly.

  Miss Wrexall pulled up short. There was a snap in the air, and a change of currents.

  “I mean nothing that you need begrudge me,” said the little secretary rather haughtily. “I’ve never made myself cheap.”

  There was a blank pause.

  “My God!” said the wife. “You don’t call that being cheap? Why, I should say you got nothing out of him at all, you only give! And if you don’t call that making yourself cheap — my God!”

  “You see, we see things different,” said the secretary.

  “I should say we do! — thank God!” rejoined the wife.

  “On whose behalf are you thanking God?” he asked sarcastically.

  “Everybody’s, I suppose! Yours, because you get everything for nothing, and Miss Wrexall’s, because she seems to like it, and mine because I’m well out of it all.”

  “You needn’t be out of it all,” cried Miss Wrexall magnanimously, “if you didn’t put yourself out of it all.”

  “Thank you, my dear, for your offer,” said the wife, rising, “but I’m afraid no man can expect two blue birds of happiness to flutter round his feet, tearing out their little feathers!”

  With which she walked away.

  After a tense and desperate interim, Miss Wrexall cried:

  “And really, need any woman be jealous of me?”

  “Quite!” he said.

  And that was all he did say.

  A DREAM OF LIFE

  NOTHING depresses me more than to come home to the place where I was born, and where I lived my first twenty years, here, at Newthorpe, this coal-mining village on the Nottingham-Derby border. The place has grown, but not very much, the pits are poor. Only it has changed. There is a tram-line from Nottingham through the one street, and buses to Nottingham and Derby. The shops are bigger, more plate-glassy: there are two picture-palaces, and one Palais de Danse.

  But nothing can save the place from the poor, grimy, mean effect of the Midlands, the little grimy brick houses with slate roofs, the general effect of paltriness, smallness, meanness, fathomless ugliness, combined with a sort of chapel-going respectability. It is the same as when I was a boy, only more so.

  Now, it is all tame. It was bad enough, thirty years ago, when it was still on the upward grade, economically. But then the old race of miners were not immensely respectable. They filled the pubs with smoke and bad language, and they went with dogs at their heels. There was a sense of latent wildness and unbrokenness, a weird sense of thrill and adventure in the pitch-dark Midland nights, and roaring footballing Saturday afternoons. The country in between the colliery regions had a lonely sort of fierceness and beauty, half-abandoned, and threaded with poaching colliers and whippet dogs. Only thirty years ago!

  Now it seems so different. The colliers of today are the men of my generation, lads I went to school with. I find it hard to believe. They were rough, wild lads. They are not rough, wild men. The board-school, the Sunday-school, the Band of Hope, and, above all, their mothers got them under. Got them under, made them tame. Made them sober, conscientious, and decent. Made them good husbands. When I was a boy, a collier who was a good husband was an exception to the rule, and while the women with bad husbands pointed him out as a shining example, they also despised him a little, as a petticoat man.

  But nearly all the men of my generation are good husbands. There they stand, at the Street corners, pale, shrunken, well-dressed, decent, and under. The drunken colliers of my father’s generation were not got under. The decent colliers of my generation are got under entirely. They are so patient, so forbearing, so willing to listen to reason, so ready to put themselves aside. And there they stand, at the Street corners and the entry-ends, the rough lads I went to school with, men now, with smart daughters and bossy wives and cigarette-smoking lads of their own. There they stand, then, and white as cheap wax candles, spectral, as if they had no selves anymore: decent, patient, self-effacing sort of men, who have seen the war and the high-watermark wages, and now are down again, under, completely under, with not a tuppence to rattle in their pockets. There they are, poor as their fathers before them, but poor with a hopeless outlook and a new and expensive world around them.

  When I was a boy, the men still used to sing: ‘There’s a good time coming, boys, there’s a good time coming!’ Well, it has come and gone. If anybody sang now, they’d sing: ‘It’s a bad time now, and a worse time coming.’ But the men of my generation are dumb: they have been got under and made good.

  As for the next generation, that is something different. As soon as mothers become self-conscious, sons become what their mothers make them. My mother’s generation was the first generation of working-class mothers to become really self-conscious. Our grandmothers were still too much under our grandfathers’ thumb, and there was still too much masculine kick against petticoat rule. But with the next generation, the woman freed herself at least mentally and spiritually from the husband’s domination, and then she became that great institution, that character-forming power, the mother of my generation. I am sure the character of nine-tenths of the men of my generation was formed by the mother: the character of the daughters too.

  And what sort of characters? Well, the woman of my mother’s generation was in reaction against the ordinary high-handed, obstinate husband who went off to the pub to enjoy himself and to waste the bit of money that was so precious to the family. The woman felt herself the higher moral being: and justly, as far as economic morality goes. She therefore assumed the major responsibility for the family, and the husband let her. So she proceeded to mould a generation.

  Mould it to the shape of her own unfulfilled desire, of course. What had she wanted, all her life? — a ‘good’ husband, gentle and understanding and moral, one who did not go to pubs and drink and waste the bit of wages, but who lived for his wife and his children.

  Millions of mothers in Great Britain, in the latter half of Victoria’s reign, unconsciously proceeded to produce sons to pattern. And they produced them, by the million: good sons, who would make good, steady husbands who would live for their wives and families. And there they are! we’ve got ’em now! the men of my generation, men between forty and fifty, men who almost all had Mothers with a big m.

  And then the daughters! Because the mothers who produced so many ‘good sons’ and future ‘good husbands’ were at the same time producing daughters, perhaps without taking so much thought or exercising so much willpower over it, but producing them just as inevitably.

  What sort of daughters came from these morally responsible mothers? As we should expect, daughters morally confident. The mothers had known some little hesitancy in their moral supremacy. But the daughters were quite assured. The daughters were always right. They were born with a sense of self-rightness that sometimes was hoity-toity, and sometimes was seemingly wistful: but there it was, the inevitable sense that I-am-right. This the women of my generation drew in with their mothers’ milk, this feeling that they were ‘right’ and must be ‘right’ and nobody must gainsay them. It is like being born with one eye: you can’t help it.

  We are such stuff as our grandmothers’ dreams are made on. This terrible truth should never be forgotten. Our grandmothers dreamed of wonderful ‘free’ womanhood in a ‘pure’ world, surrounded by ‘adoring, humble, high-minded’ men. Our mothers started to put the dream into practice. And we are the fulfilment. We are such stuff as our grandmothers’ dreams were made on.

  For I think it cannot be denied that ours is the generation of ‘free’ womanhood, and a helplessly ‘pure’ world, and of pathetic ‘adoring, humble, high-minded’ men.

  We are, more or less, such stuff as our grandmothers’ dreams are made on. But the dream changes with every new generation of grandmothers. Already my mother, while having a definite ideal for her sons, of ‘humble, adoring, high-minded’ men, began to have secret dreams of her own: dreams of some Don Juan sort of person whose influence would make the vine of Dionysus grow and coil over the pulpit of our Congregational Chapel. I myself, her son, could see the dream peeping out, thrusting little tendrils through her paved intention of having ‘good sons’. It was my turn to be the ‘good son’. It would be my son’s turn to fulfil the other dream, or dreams: the secret ones.

  Thank God I have no son to undertake the onerous burden. Oh, if only every father could say to his boy: Look here, my son! These are your grandmother’s dreams of a man. Now you look out! — My dear old grandmother, my mother’s mother, I’m sure she dreamed me almost to a t, except for a few details.

  But the daughter starts, husbandly speaking, where the mother leaves off. The daughters of my mother, and of the mothers of my generation, start, as a rule, with ‘good husbands’, husbands who never fundamentally contradict them, whose lifelong attitude is: All right, dear! I know I’m wrong, as usual. This is the attitude of the husband of my generation.

  It alters the position of the wife entirely. It is a fight for the woman to get the reins into her own hands, but once she’s got them, there she is! the reins have got her. She’s got to drive somewhere, to steer the matrimonial cart in some direction. ‘All right, dear! I’ll let you decide it, since you know better than I do!’ says the husband, in every family matter. So she must keep on deciding. Or, if the husband balks her occasionally, she must keep up the pressure till he gives in.

  Now driving the matrimonial cart is quite an adventure for a time, while the children are little, and all that. But later, the woman begins to think to herself: ‘Oh, damn the cart! Where do I come in?’ She begins to feel she’s getting nothing out of it. It’s not good enough. Whether you’re the horse or whether you’re the driver doesn’t make any odds. So long as you’re both harnessed to the cart.

  Then the woman of my generation begins to have ideas about her sons. They’d better not be so all-forsaken ‘good’ as their father has been. They’d better be more sporting, and give a woman a bit more ‘life’. After all, what’s a family? It swallows a woman up until she’s fifty, and then puts the remains of her aside. Not good enough! No! My sons must be more manly, make plenty of money for a woman and give her a ‘life’, and not be such a muff about ‘goodness’ and being ‘right’. What is being ‘right’, after all? Better enjoy yourself while you’ve got the chance.

  So the sons of the younger generation emerge into the world — my sons, if I’d got any — with the intrinsic maternal charge ringing in their ears: ‘Make some money and give yourself a good time — and all of us. Enjoy yourself!’

  The young men of the younger generation begin to fulfil the hidden dreams of my mother. They are jazzy —but not coarse. They are a bit Don-Juanish, but, let us hope, entirely without brutality or vulgarity. They are more elegant, and not much more moral. But they are still humble. before a woman, especially the woman!

  It is the secret dream of my mother, coming true.

  And if you want to know what the next generation will be like, you must fathom the secret dreams of your wife: the woman of forty or so. There you will find the clue. And if you want to be more precise, then find out what is the young woman of twenty’s ideal of a man.

  The poor young woman of twenty, she is rather stumped for an ideal of a man. So perhaps the next generation but one won’t be anything at all.

  We are such stuff as our grandmothers’ dreams are made on. Even colliers are such stuff as their grandmothers’ dreams are made on. And if Queen Victoria’s dream was King George, then Queen Alexandra’s was the Prince of Wales, and Queen Mary’s will be — what?

  But all this doesn’t take away from the fact that my home place is more depressing to me than death, and I wish my grandmother and all her generation had been better dreamers. ‘Those maids, thank God, are ’neath the sod,’ but their dreams we still have with us. It is a terrible thing to dream dreams that shall become flesh.

  And when I see the young colliers dressed up like the Prince of Wales, dropping in to the Miners’ Welfare for another drink, or into the ‘Pally’ for a dance — in evening suit to beat the band — or scooting down the black roads on a motor-bike, a leggy damsel behind — then I wish the mothers of my own generation, my own mother included, had been a little less frivolous as a dreamer. In life, so deadly earnest! And oh, what frivolous dreams our mothers must have had, as they sat in the pews of the Congregational Chapel with faces like saints! They must unconsciously have been dreaming jazz and short skirts, the Palais de Danse, the Film, and the motor-bike. It is enough to embitter one’s most sacred memories. ‘Lead Kindly Light’ —unto the ‘Pally’. The eleventh commandment: ‘Enjoy yourselves!’

 

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