‘I want to tell you a story, Sylvia,’ said Herbert that evening, taking the child on to his knees. ‘About a little girl, who had a daddy who loved her so much, so much.’ Sylvia looked at him suspiciously, but said nothing. ‘And one day that little girl, who was sometimes rather a thoughtless little girl, though I don’t believe she was really naughty, was doing something that it wasn’t right or good for her to do. And her daddy told her not to. And what do you think that little girl did? She spat in her daddy’s face. And her daddy was very very sad. Because what his little girl did was wrong, wasn’t it?’ Sylvia nodded a brief defiant assent. ‘And when one has done something wrong, one must be punished, mustn’t one?’ The child nodded again. Herbert was pleased; his words had had their effect; her conscience was being touched. Over the child’s head he exchanged a glance with Martha. ‘If you had been that daddy,’ he went on, ‘and the little girl you loved so much had spat in your face, what would you have done, Sylvia?’
‘Spat back,’ Sylvia answered fiercely and without hesitation.
At the recollection of the scene Martha sighed. Sylvia was difficult, Sylvia was decidedly a problem. The cab drew up at the gate; the Claxtons unpacked themselves and their luggage. Inadequately tipped, the driver made his usual scene. Bearing his rucksack, Herbert turned away with a dignified patience. He was used to this sort of thing; it was a chronic martyrdom. The unpleasant duty of paying was always his. Martha only provided the cash. With what extreme and yearly growing reluctance! He was always between the devil of the undertipped and the deep sea of Martha’s avarice.
‘Four miles’ drive and a tuppenny tip!’ shouted the cab-driver at Herbert’s receding and rucksacked back.
Martha grudged him even the twopence. But convention demanded that something should be given. Conventions are stupid things; but even the Children of the Spirit must make some compromise with the World. In this case Martha was ready to compromise with the World to the extent of twopence. But no more. Herbert knew that she would have been very angry if he had given more. Not openly, of course; not explicitly. She never visibly lost her temper or her smile. But her forgiving disapproval would have weighed heavily on him for days. And for days she would have found excuses for economizing in order to make up for the wanton extravagance of a sixpenny instead of a twopenny tip.
Her economies were mostly on the food, and their justification was always spiritual. Eating was gross; high living was incompatible with high-thinking; it was dreadful to think of the poor going hungry while you yourself were living in luxurious gluttony. There would be a cutting down of butter and Brazil nuts, of the more palatable vegetables and the choicer fruits. Meals would come to consist more and more exclusively of porridge, potatoes, cabbages, bread. Only when the original extravagance had been made up several hundred times would Martha begin to relax her asceticism. Herbert never ventured to complain. After one of these bouts of plain living he would for a long time be very careful to avoid other extravagances, even when, as in this case, his economies brought him into painful and humiliating conflict with those on whom they were practised.
‘Next time,’ the taxi-driver was shouting, ‘I’ll charge extra for the whiskers.’
Herbert passed over the threshold and closed the door behind him. Safe! He took off his rucksack and deposited it carefully on a chair. Gross, vulgar brute! But anyhow he had taken himself off with the twopence. Martha would have no cause to complain or cut down the supply of peas and beans. In a mild and spiritual way Herbert was very fond of his food. So was Martha—darkly and violently fond of it. That was why she had become a vegetarian, why her economies were always at the expense of the stomach—precisely because she liked food so much. She suffered when she deprived herself of some delicious morsel. But there was a sense in which she loved her suffering more than the morsel. Denying herself, she felt her whole being irradiated by a glow of power; suffering, she was strengthened, her will was wound up, her energy enhanced. The dammed-up instincts rose and rose behind the wall of voluntary mortification, deep and heavy with potentialities of force.
In the struggle between the instincts Martha’s love of power was generally strong enough to overcome her greed; among the hierarchy of pleasures, the joy of exerting the personal conscious will was more intense than the joy of eating even Turkish Delight or strawberries and cream. Not always, however; for there were occasions when, overcome by a sudden irresistible desire, Martha would buy and, in a single day, secretly consume a whole pound of chocolate creams, throwing herself upon the sweets with the same heavy violence as had characterized her first passion for Herbert. With the passage of time and the waning, after the birth of her two children, of her physical passion for her husband, Martha’s orgies among the chocolates became more frequent. It was as though her vital energies were being forced, by the closing of the sexual channel, to find explosive outlet in gluttony. After one of these orgies Martha always tended to become more than ordinarily strict in her ascetic spirituality.
Three weeks after the Claxtons’ return to their little house on the common, the War broke out.
‘It’s changed most people,’ Judith remarked in the third year, ‘it’s altered some out of all recognition. Not Herbert and Martha, though. It’s just made them more so—more like themselves than they were before. Curious.’ She shook her head. ‘Very curious.’
But it wasn’t really curious at all; it was inevitable. The War could not help intensifying all that was characteristically Herbertian and Martha-ish in Herbert and Martha. It heightened their sense of remote superiority by separating them still further from the ordinary herd. For while ordinary people believed in the War, fought and worked to win, Herbert and Martha utterly disapproved and, on grounds that were partly Buddhistic, partly Socialist-International, partly Tolstoyan, refused to have anything to do with the accursed thing. In the midst of universal madness they almost alone were sane. And their superiority was proved and divinely hallowed by persecution. Unofficial disapproval was succeeded, after the passing of the Conscription Act, by official repression. Herbert pleaded a conscientious objection.
He was sent to work on the land in Dorset, a martyr, a different and spiritually higher being. The act of a brutal War Office had definitely promoted him out of the ranks of common humanity. In this promotion Martha vicariously participated. But what most powerfully stimulated her spirituality was not War-time persecution so much as War-time financial instability, War-time increase in prices. In the first weeks of confusion she had been panic-stricken; she imaged that all her money was lost, she saw herself with Herbert and the children, hungry and houseless, begging from door to door. She immediately dismissed her two servants, she reduced the family food supply to a prison ration. Time passed and her money came in very much as usual. But Martha was so much delighted with the economies she had made that she would not revert to the old mode of life.
‘After all,’ she argued, ‘it’s really not pleasant to have strangers in the house to serve you. And then, why should they serve us? They who are just as good as we are.’ It was a hypocritical tribute to Christian doctrine; they were really immeasurably inferior. ‘Just because we happen to be able to pay them—that’s why they have to serve us. It’s always made me feel uncomfortable and ashamed. Hasn’t it you, Herbert?’
‘Always,’ said Herbert, who always agreed with his wife.
‘Besides,’ she went on, ‘I think one ought to do one’s own work. One oughtn’t to get out of touch with the humble small realities of life. I’ve felt really happier since I’ve been doing the housework, haven’t you?’
Herbert nodded.
‘And it’s so good for the children. It teaches them humility and service. . . .’
Doing without servants saved a clear hundred and fifty a year. But the economies she made on food were soon counterbalanced by the results of scarcity and inflation. With every rise in prices Martha’s enthusiasm for ascetic spirituality became more than ever fervid and profound. So too did her conviction that the children would be spoilt and turned into wordlings if she sent them to an expensive boarding-school. ‘Herbert and I believe very strongly in home education, don’t we, Herbert?’ And Herbert would agree that they believed in it very strongly indeed. Home education without a governess, insisted Martha.
Why should one let one’s children be influenced by strangers? Perhaps badly influenced. Anyhow, not influenced in exactly the way one would influence them oneself. People hired governesses because they dreaded the hard work of educating their children. And of course it was hard work—the harder, the higher your ideals. But wasn’t it worth while making sacrifices for one’s children? With the uplifting question, Martha’s smile curved itself into a crescent of more than ordinary soulfulness. Of course it was worth it. The work was an incessant delight—wasn’t it, Herbert? For what could be more delightful, more profoundly soul-satisfying than to help your own children to grow up beautifully, to guide them, to mould their characters into ideal forms, to lead their thoughts and desires into the noblest channels?
Not
