Sorrell and Son (Alfred A. Knopf, printing 9)/Chapter 35
IN July Sorrell came to spend a few days with Christopher at No. 107 Welbeck Street.
Sorrell still retained that peculiar sensitiveness towards his son, and on the very first night Kit gave his father an impression of restlessness, of some inward hunger that was unappeased. For, indeed, Kit was restless, chafing under the hair shirt of his obstinate scrupulousness, feeling both a fool and a hero, and looking like neither. He had erected a prodigious and chivalrous fence around the memory of that June night upon the island; he had written one solitary letter to Molly and had received nothing from her but silence. He had not seen her.
But the erecting of fences is very well, provided that you cease to be curious about what is happening on the other side of the fence, and Christopher was curious, most sayagely curious. Obviously, a very attractive young woman need not remain alone, shut up in a garden. There are other adventurous males in the world. And that some other man should seek to possess himself of what might have been his brought Kit such mad restlessness that the cark of it could not be hidden.
His impatience would not let him be. It gathered like blood on the knives he used, and in the wounds he made, a film of blurring restlessness; it seemed to weave itself into his diagnoses; it quivered in his fingers; it kept him awake at night. It would whisper in his ear "You fool, you noble fellow, you scrupulous ass. It is quite true what she said. You are afraid of the old women." Another thing that exasperated him was the fact that he did not know Molly's London address. He had not written to Molly. There was nothing to prevent him going to her club and trying to find out, but he did not go. He was a mass of warring impulses and inhibitions. And there were those tempestuous moments when he felt that he must leave everything; crush on his hat, and rush out to find her, somehow and somewhere. He had nothing to say. It was just a torrential and inevitable impulse, a crave, both physical and spiritual. He wanted to see her, to be sure that she existed, to inhale the perfume of her existence, to feed his heart upon it.
On the second night he talked to his father, like the boy-man that he was. They sat near an open window, with the dusk gathering, and a few stars pointing the sky above the horizontal darkness of the roofs opposite. Sorrell sat very still, in contrast to the quick and changing movements of his son.
"Well, what was I to do? The big thing, you know, at last, pater. I couldn't play with it. I could not let myself go."
sori had grown impartial, but he had learnt to value security. A nice and elvish cunning tempers a man's maturity, and now that he had made that little green and secret sanctuary for himself and filled it with flowers, life seemed less disturbing. He did not feel things so acutely; he was growing old.
"She won't marry you—because she is keen on her job?"
Kit nodded.
"Says that we are both workers."
"Well, is not that true? Why should a woman marry—when marriage may mean the end of everything—so far as her inspiration is concerned?"
"Pater, do you really believe"
"Marriage as a career? O, for some women, of course. But not for the Molly Pentreaths; not ordinary marriage."
Kit looked infinitely disturbed.
"You agree with her, pater?"
"Oh,—I don't know. Partly. She was willing to give you a good deal, much more than most women are capable of giving. Then, of course, there is Mrs. Grundy, very much alive still, always will be, though she wears a hat instead of a bonnet. Dangerous old lady."
"The problem seems as old as the hills."
"And young as youth. Each generation, and the same old problems dressed up a little differently. What about your own job?"
"It would not suffer."
"Through marriage? I dare say not. But any other sort of relationship, awkward, delicate"
"Don't, pater," said the son. "I have made up my mind as to that."
The making up of Christopher's mind was more full of the subconscious process than he knew. We may design our ethical clothes to disguise our desires, the passion for complete and individual possession, the lust of the hunter to kill, all the old moral rages of the "jealous God," but the sublimated elements are there. Molly was wiser than the man.
Pursued, she knew that complete capture cannot be tolerated by a woman who has her life to live. Even as the Amazons burned off their right breasts in order to use bow and sword the better, so Molly knew that a woman with a creative urge other than the urge towards motherhood, may be happier with no breasts at all.
As she said to Cherry—"Kit thinks he is being the noble fellow, when he is nothing but a romantic male tyrant."
"I don't suppose he thinks about it—at all," said Cherry; "we go the way we are pushed."
"Every man is at least a lawyer. He wants the human document signed and sealed."
Incidentally, she met Sorrell. They were brought together by chance in Cherry's music-room, and the old gladiator and the Amazon sat down together and crossed glances. She had smiled straight into his eyes with a gleam of humorous defiance. She assumed that he knew everything, which he did. Their mutual introduction would have astonished Christopher. They seemed to understand each other from the very first, responding to a temperamental sympathy, those flashes—half intuitive—half inspired. Sorrell had given himself to his garden, but he was somewhat wise as to women. And as he looked at this frank, fearless, fastidious creature with her deep eyes and her expressive mouth, he thought of Kit's boyishness.
"Is it war or peace?" she asked him.
She understood his smile. Here was a man who knew something of life as it was lived.
"I am Kit's father."
"And his mother."
Sorrell nodded.
"A mother sends out spies to survey Canaan."
"Oh,—I am not a woman of Canaan. Why should I let your son hurt himself in hurting me? The problem is so simple if you remove it from social interference."
"Can one?"
"All social affairs imply compromise? Yes, and in tke end a sense of humour."
Sorrell looked at her kindly.
"Kit is too much in love to have a sense of humour."
She suffered him to see her passionate seriousness.
"And I—cared sufficiently—to suffer from a sense of responsibility. He is rather a dear boy. He knows so little of the real me,—thinks I should be so easy. I shouldn't. I'm a temperamental devil."
"And you—know so much more of him."
"Perhaps. And you,—after all these years, mother and father in one? Yes, he has talked a good deal. You have always been splendid to him. He is so young still, so lovably young, always will be—perhaps. And I was born old, like one of Shaw's young women out of an egg. I am keen on my work."
She saw consent in Sorrell's eyes.
"One's job. I know. And your job is not a childish one. Neither is Kit's. But in his affections—he is thorough."
"I could be thorough. Loving one's job need not mean. If Kit understood. I can't lie to him, pretend that marriage should be a complete surrender. It might take him years to learn that,—and meanwhile—wreckage."
"How did you learn it?"
"Oh, I don't know. Born with it. Ask the theosophists! But there it is. What is your feeling?"
Sorrell sat and stared at his hands.
"Feelings are complicated things. Kit has been my job—so to speak—all these years, and the completion of a job. Rather precious. I allow—that a woman is bound to have a hand in it."
"You are not jealous?"
"That's the unpardonable sin—in parents. I only ask for the right woman."
"And I."
"I think you would be," he said, "if he understood you as you understand him."
Tom Roland, leaning over his Italian well-head, and looking at Narcissus, while he smoked an after-dinner cigar, gave Sorrell the product of his reflections.
"Both right. But Molly is right for ten years, Kit for ten minutes."
"Is that quite fair? Some of us have an extraordinary capacity for caring."
"I know. Kit has. But then—it always seems to me that when a young man storms a tower with the idea of keeping it—and not just sacking it and treating it as a sexual orgy, he doesn't quite foresee the funny ways of the civil population. A tyrant is all very well. Your civilians have to be humoured. And Molly understands that. A dual throne, you know, and a happy handling of the fool mob. Kit might storm his town, but Molly is thinking of the fool mob that might be asking for free wireless sets ten years hence. Molly has vision."
"I know what you mean. If Kit"
Roland caressed the carved stone.
"Stephen, old chap, hasn't it struck you that woman's cleverness is a different sort of cleverness from ours? In some ways I feel myself a sort of child with Cherry. And there you are! A clever woman may love the simpler sort of man,—and never let him suspect her cleverness. Contrasts. She spins a conspiring web about him. Something maternal, too. And provided that the man is a happy lad, and not an inflated—listen-to-me—my dear—sort of ass"
"And not a bore."
"Oh, a woman will stand a lot of boring from her particular man."
"Aren't you rather flattering the women?"
"Some of 'em. As for Molly and Kit, these sort of problems seem to solve themselves. Things happen—if both parties really want them to happen."
Unknown to Christopher his father became the friend of Molly Pentreath. She had taken a minute flat at the top of a high building not half a mile from Westminster Abbey, and Sorrell went to tea with her. Behind his son's broad back—too! And Sorrell saw her writing-table, and her books and papers spread about, and felt himself in the midst of her young, individual, creative keenness. A thinker and a worker, and full of adroit mischief. She had caught Sorrell's old time cry of "No secrets." She confessed to her hatreds. "I don't pretend to like what I don't like. I'm a bad citizen. I mind my own business and write about other people's business. The only children in this block are three flights down, otherwise I should not be here. Noise; it is like a slap, and I want to slap back. Bad for one's work—that. And I don't love humanity, and I'm not an improver. God knows—there is enough work in your own job without our making jobs for each other like the Socialists. Nasty people. Want me to pretend with them that I am thinking more of seeing that my neighbours are getting their dinner before I get my own. I'm not. I'm cheerfully and intelligently selfish."
She made Sorrell laugh.
"Does Kit read Punch?"
Sorrell thought not. Kit was busy with his job.
"Well, you can tell him that when he is caught chuckling over Punch—I'll marry him—with reservations."
Sorrell went back to the Pelican, and his beloved garden, but not before his gardener's soul had discovered in Molly Pentreath characteristics that were worth perpetuating. If Kit needed a woman in his life, well—Sorrell thought that Molly might be that woman. She would bring to the comradeship the security of a subtle understanding. Her very insistence upon individual freedom would make for freshness; and the fruit would retain its flavour and its tang. Those flat, pulpy marriages whose only permanence depended upon a commercial slavery that rendered escape too costly! How insecure they were, for to be stuck in the mud of a mutual boredom could not be called security. Sorrell valued security, as men with gardens do. It is a high wall built about the pleasance of a man's independence.
But on the night before he left for Winstonbury he told his son that he had met Molly at the Rolands.
"So—she is in town."
"And I have been to tea with her. I have seen the room where she works."
Kit had the air of wishing to ask his father all sorts of questions, but was baulked by his own passionate obstinacy.
"She once told me my infatuation would not last a year.—I should like to disprove that. But—then—you know, one is always wondering."
"Whether some other fellow?"
"Yes, just that."
Sorrell smiled at his son's broad and bothered back.
"That young woman has her career. If you realized her keenness,—dear lad."
"Yes,—that is the whole trouble."
"You are jealous of it."
"I suppose I am."
"Because she refuses to jump over the precipice?"
Kit brooded.
"Pater—if she dared the precipice—I feel that there is nothing that I would not give up to her. Yes, all sorts of things. I'm not a fool. I understand—I think I understand—better than she realizes. But I can't help the way I feel about it."
Sorrell's eyes were intent, interested.
"Your feeling is."
"There ought to be complete surrender. Not this bargaining, this hanging back. Life takes its leap. If she would take it with me she would find that she had taken it with a comrade, not a little petty domestic bore."