A Man of Parts (37 page)

The receipt of her letter disturbed his thoughts for the rest of the morning, but the second post brought another one from Cambridge which calmed him. ‘That’s a coincidence,’ he said to Jane, as he quickly scanned it. ‘A young man I met in Cambridge, Rupert Brooke, one of Amber’s Fabian friends, is inviting me to talk to a group in his rooms at King’s. He’s said to be a very promising poet, and certainly looks the part. I think I might go.’

‘Can you spare the time?’ Jane asked.

‘These young people are worth it. They’re the hope of the future. And I learn something myself from talking to them.’ So he said yes to Rupert Brooke, taking the earliest of the dates that were offered him, and a few days afterwards had a similar invitation from a Mr Geoffrey Keynes of Pembroke College, which could be conveniently combined with the other engagement, making a stay of a few days.

He was in a restless, febrile state of mind such as usually followed the completion of a book, and looking for distractions like these. He had at long last finished
Tono-Bungay
, or at least got to the end of it and written the concluding words: ‘
I have come to see myself from the outside, my country from the outside – without illusions. We make and pass. We are all things that make and pass
.’ Jane was engaged in typing up the final chapter. After he had read it through there would be some rewriting to be done, and more retyping, but essentially the thing was finished. It was to be serialised in a new literary magazine provisionally called the
English Review
, which he had been planning with Hueffer and Conrad, and in which he was going to invest some money in return for a share of the profits. The idea was to provide a platform for new writing that was truly ‘modern’, and Fordie had the taste and the contacts to make a success of it. All agreed that the first instalment of
Tono-Bungay
would be an ideal lead item for the inaugural issue, being an ambitious and experimental work by an established author with a large following. He was thinking that his next novel might be on the theme he had vaguely entertained a year ago, of a young woman who dared to assert her independence in defiance of parental and social disapproval. He had it in mind to draw in the topical issue of the suffragette movement, which had lately taken a more militant turn, but the project was still at the tentative, note-making stage. In the meantime he occupied himself with expanding his Cambridge lectures of the previous autumn into
First and Last Things
.

He saw Amber several times when he went to Cambridge and found her more captivating than ever. She was clever and articulate and beautiful, but what he most admired was her fearlessness – exactly the character trait he had in mind for the heroine of his next novel. She questioned everything and took nothing for granted, which naturally alarmed those who were
in loco parentis
to her. On his last afternoon he visited her at Newnham and was introduced to Miss Jane Harrison, the tutor who had passed her paper to Gilbert Murray. ‘We think very highly of Amber,’ she said confidentially to him when the girl was out of earshot for a few minutes. ‘But we wish she were not quite so headstrong. She does tend to rush in where angels fear to tread.’ ‘But she’s no fool,’ he ventured to say. ‘No indeed, I used the proverbial phrase loosely,’ she said blushing slightly. ‘We all hope she will get the Double First she deserves.’

Amber herself did not use the bright student’s customary spell for warding off hubris, deprecating one’s prospects of success. On the contrary she said she would drown herself in the Cam if she didn’t get a First in her Part Two. Having introduced him at Newnham as an old friend of her family she was allowed to give him tea in her rooms in Clough Hall, which were smaller than Ben Keeling’s, but bright and comfortable, with chintz curtains and floral wallpaper. There were piles of books and magazines on every surface and socialist posters on the walls. She sat him down in the one upholstered armchair and squatted on a leather pouffe beside the fire to toast muffins on the end of a fork.

‘Why does getting a First matter so much to you?’ he asked her.

‘Partly vanity, and partly to annoy the men,’ she said. ‘But also because I want to do postgraduate research at the London School of Economics.’ She had an interesting thesis topic in mind, the question of Motivation in social service: what motivated those who chose to work in this area of local and national government, poor relief, community health, and suchlike? Was it idealism or professionalism? Were they driven by a vision of what an ideal society should be, or by a practical concern to improve the conditions of life for the masses? It was a subject very close to the bone of the Fabian, full of fascinating possibilities, moral and psychological as well as philosophical.

‘Have you read William James’s latest book,
Pragmatism
?’ he asked.

‘No, but I really want to,’ she said eagerly. ‘I love Schiller’s
Studies in Humanism
, and he’s a great admirer of James.’

He was acquainted with the work of the Oxford don F.C.S. Schiller, and had met the man himself when he gave a paper to the Oxford Philosophical Society in 1903, so was able to take this reference in his stride. ‘Yes, they have a lot in common. But “humanism” is such an over-used and abused word that I don’t think it serves Schiller well. James’s “pragmatism” is more precise.’

‘Tell me about it,’ she said, laying the toasting fork aside, and giving him her full attention.

‘Well, he makes an interesting distinction in the first chapter which might be a useful tool for analysing Motive, a distinction between the tough-minded and the tender-minded.’

Amber smiled. ‘That doesn’t sound like philosophical language!’

‘But it’s what I like about William James – he uses ordinary language to make difficult concepts intelligible.’

‘Not like his brother, who uses difficult language to make ordinary concepts unintelligible,’ Amber said.

He laughed. ‘Very good! Arnold Bennett would agree with you. Have you read a lot of James – Henry, I mean?’

‘Not much, I have to admit,’ she said. ‘I loved “Daisy Miller” when I was a girl, and some of his other stories, but I tried
The Wings of the Dove
and gave up halfway.’

‘A pity – the last section is the best. The book has its longueurs, admittedly.’

‘It seemed like one long longueur to me,’ she said. ‘I much prefer
your
novels. Once you start reading them, you don’t want to stop.’

‘Well thank you, Amber,’ he said. ‘But as I said to Arnold, there are things in
The Wings of the Dove
that I couldn’t do, and
he
couldn’t do.’

‘The question is, are they worth doing?’

‘Well, of course, that’s always the question. Which only posterity can definitively answer. But about
Pragmatism
…’

She listened attentively as he outlined James’s distinction between two basic types of mental make-up. The Tender-minded was rationalistic, idealistic, optimistic, religious, monistic, dogmatic. The Tough-minded was empiricist, materialistic, pessimistic, irreligious, pluralistic, sceptical. Idealist philosophers and Christian apologists were typically tender-minded. Scientists and engineers were tough-minded. ‘You might find you can classify people in the social services that way,’ he concluded.

‘Yes, I can see that might work,’ she said, thoughtfully. ‘Thank you. But which type are you?’

‘Well, basically tough-minded. Most people who’ve had a scientific education are. But the point is that both are unsatisfactory on their own. As James says, quite rightly, the tender-minded are on the back foot these days, mainly because of Darwinism and advances in the physical sciences. But tough-mindedness alone leads eventually to pure materialism, which doesn’t satisfy the human spirit, because it leads only to death – death of the individual and in the long run the death of the planet. So no hope. The tender-minded offer transcendence in one form or another – God, the Absolute Mind, personal immortality …’

‘But those ideas have no logical foundations,’ Amber objected.

‘Exactly. But we can’t just dismiss them. There must be some non-materialistic principle to make life meaningful, purposeful, hopeful. Pragmatism, James says, values an idea not in the abstract but for what its practical consequences are. For instance, does it or does it not contribute to the betterment of human life? Socialism triumphantly passes the pragmatic test.’

‘It’s both tough-minded and tender-minded?’

‘Exactly.’

‘That’s all extremely interesting. I must obviously read
Pragmatism
as soon as possible,’ said Amber.

‘I expect Wallas would look after you at the L.S.E,’ he said.

‘I did speak to him about my thesis idea – at a party at Christmas – but he thought it was a rather ambitious project for a young girl like me. I need to get a First to really impress him.’

‘Well, I’ll tell him how impressed
I
am, already,’ he said.

She blushed, and dropped her eyes, and there was silence between them, suddenly charged with sexual feeling. He broke it by saying that he knew an officer of health called McCleary who would be a good source of information and that he could put her in touch with him when the time came. ‘Thank you, H.G.!’ she said, raising her big dark eyes to him again, and smiling, her composure regained. ‘You’re so kind.’

He mused on that moment of charged silence as he travelled back to London in the evening, staring through the blurred reflection of his face in the train window at the dimly visible flat fields of Cambridgeshire. There was no doubt that the girl was in love with him; the question was whether he was falling in love with her. His sexual life was dormant at present – surprisingly so, because when he finished a big project like
Tono-Bungay
he normally let off steam in that fashion. But his affair with Violet Hunt was over. She had begun one with Hueffer, a really serious relationship by all accounts, and ironically enough he had been responsible in a way. She had shown him some short stories which he thought were rather good, more honest and less prolix than her novels, and he had suggested that she offer them to Hueffer, for the
English Review
. Hueffer liked the stories, they met, and now they were apparently besotted with each other and wanted to marry. It was a pity that Fordie already had a wife from whom he was estranged, but no doubt they would work something out in due course. He wished them well, and had no jealousy or regrets in relation to Violet, for their affair had run its natural course. So he was at a loose end as regards female company. He encountered opportunities for new
passades
, but somehow he didn’t have the urge to follow them up. Whenever his thoughts wandered in that direction, the image of Amber would pop into his head, laughing, arguing, and gesticulating with her friends, kneeling on the floor of the playroom in Spade House, building a fort for toy soldiers with the boys, or silently absorbed in a book, unaware she was observed. And now there would be another image: Amber squatting by the fire with a toasting fork in her hand, talking philosophy. If he wasn’t already in love with Amber Reeves, he was certainly dangerously near the brink.

She wrote very shortly after his return home to say how much she had enjoyed their talk in her rooms, and how greatly she appreciated his support and encouragement. He was virtuously restrained in his reply and subsequent correspondence, keeping to a tone of avuncular-tutorial concern for her welfare, and he resisted the temptation to find new reasons to go to Cambridge. Instead he threw himself back briefly into Fabian politics. He and Jane were both re-elected to the Executive in March, rather to his surprise, because he had attended hardly any meetings in the past year. But the ordinary members didn’t know that, and a significant number obviously still regarded him as their spokesman. He felt an obligation to their loyalty, and picked up once again the much-chewed but currently dry bone of the Basis. Apart from the addition of the clause about equal citizenship for women which had been approved last September, thanks mainly to Maud Reeves’s efforts, the Basis remained unchanged from its original form, and the small committee of himself, Shaw and Webb, charged a year ago with the task of revising it, had achieved nothing. Accordingly he got out the papers and wrote yet another draft, with which he was rather pleased, and sent it off to his two colleagues, only to get dismissive replies from both to say that they saw much in the document with which they disagreed but were too busy with other matters – Poor Law reform in Webb’s case – to respond fully. He fired off a furious missive to Webb saying ‘
You two men are the most
intolerable egotists, narrow, suspicious, obstructive, I’ve ever met
’, which Webb evidently passed to Shaw who favoured him with one of his patronising, sarcastic homilies: ‘
There is an art of public life which you have not mastered, expert as you are in the art of private life
.’ The effect of this correspondence was to make him wish he had never allowed his name to go forward for re-election on to the Executive. He had really had enough, more than enough, of being treated by the Old Gang like some promising but disruptive young pupil at the back of the class. He made up his mind to resign from the Fabian, but he would choose his own moment, one that would not make him look as if he were merely sulking.

Early in April Jane received a letter from Maud Reeves to say that she was worried about Amber, who was at home for the Easter vacation and showing signs of nervous tension about her forthcoming exams, not eating or sleeping well. ‘
I feel I should be looking after her more, but the trouble is I have so many speaking engagements for the suffrage movement that I’m rushing up and down the country and often away for days at a time, and Will of course is always busy with his work. I know she loves staying with you and H.G. – she was in raptures about her visit after Christmas – and I wonder if you could bear to have her again for a few days. The sea air and your company I’m sure would do her the world of good
.’

‘What shall I say?’ Jane asked him when she had shown him this letter.