Sleep in Peace (73 page)

“What do you think of the problem of the generations, Byram?” said Frederick over dinner, briefly recapitulating his recent argument with Laura.

Kay's face took on its wonted look of angry contempt.

“To a Marxist it is one of the most reactionary items in the bourgeois ideology,” he said in his rough Yorkshire tones. “That sort of wishy-washy sentimental family stuff is only possible in your secluded bourgeois family world. There won't be time for it in the proletarian state; it will be liquidated.”

“I don't know that our world is specially secluded,” objected Laura.

“Secluded from the economic struggle, not threatened by economic insecurity, I mean,” said Kay.

“Not threatened by economic insecurity!” exclaimed Laura in capital letters. “My dear boy, you're talking nonsense. I have scarcely enjoyed one minute's economic security since the day I was born—never for longer than two years at a time, to speak without exaggeration. The Armistead family have been in the economic struggle, threatened by economic insecurity, all the days of my life.”

“Why, then,” argued Kay, with a sly gleam in his blue eyes:
“if the capitalist system doesn't even work well for the capitalists, you'd think they'd be glad to give it up.”

“You would. For my part I'm ready,” stated Laura. “To get rid of the cramping respectability in which I was brought up, and the tedious monotony of financial troubles at present inseparable from industry, I'd be willing to adopt almost any other system. Add to that my desire, shared by all decent people, for economic justice, and you see how ready I am for another system. Except—except, Kay,” she said emphatically, “any system which postulates a benevolent tyranny for its working. I utterly decline authoritarian regimes of every kind, whether political or,” she added, thinking of Ludo, “religious. You don't know what benevolent tyrannies are like, or you wouldn't want to plunge us into one. I do; I was brought up under a benevolent tyranny. The rejection of the benevolent tyranny is the achievement of our generation, and now you want to throw it away.”

“Who's talking about benevolent tyrannies?” said Kay in a tone of icy fury. “I'm speaking of the dictatorship of the proletariat.”

“Exactly,” said Laura. “Look, Kay—to judge of a regime you must imagine yourself living as an ordinary little person under it, not as a highly respected authority, a commissar.”

“Perhaps you'll do the same for this regime, then,” shouted Kay. “Imagine that you are my mother, for instance.”

They continued to wrangle, to the distress of Frederick and the amusement of Madeline, who spurred them on. Suddenly Kay dropped his voice, and in a cool precise tone gave a succinct account of the world as it appeared to him to-day: the capitalist civilisation decaying, cracking, like the walls of a sand-castle before the advancing tide; the Communist ideal everywhere pouring in; the capitalists rushing vainly hither and thither, plastering here a rift and there a crack, the Fascists urging the replacement of the sand by a mixture of concrete, the Labour and Liberal parties digging small canals beneath the walls, to which they begged the sea
to limit its current. His exposition was clear and comprehensive, his manner remarkably like Edward's as he spoke.

“But why must you treat everything in terms of merely material welfare?” argued Laura. “However, if you think I object to the idea of my generation being the last of the capitalist era, I've told you already that I don't—provided you will substitute a system less thwarting than the old.”

“Then there's nothing more to be said, is there?” said Kay with a scornful look. “Your life will span the decay and final collapse of your class.”

Laura, sighed. “You don't understand what I'm talking about,” she said.

“And you don't understand what I'm talking about,” said Kay. “How could you?”.

“Let's go to the theatre,” said Madeline suddenly. “It would be more interesting than listening to you two squabbling about money and class. The artist does not recognise such irrelevant baubles.”

“Proletarian art,” began Kay.

“Oh, shut up,” said Madeline.

“I ought to catch the train leaving in forty minutes,” began Laura wistfully, looking at her watch. “But I should love to have gone with you.”

“Don't you ever do anything you want?” said Madeline impatiently. “There's a train just after midnight for Hudley; I've travelled on it. It makes perfectly lousy time, of course, but it gets you there for breakfast. Of course if you prefer a comfortable journey to our company, say so and I'll call you a taxi.”

“I don't,” said Laura meekly.

At the close of the performance the orchestra, to Kay's glee and Laura's surprise, did not play
God Save the King;
discussion of
this phenomenon was postponed, however, by an argument as to the party's next proceeding which began as the four emerged from the theatre. Madeline announced that she wished to go home; Frederick, who would have preferred, Laura saw, to accompany her to the station, seemed to feel it his duty to go with Madeline and Kay to Chelsea, though Laura thought she also saw that he was not wanted by the young cousins. For herself, she was glad to be alone; the day seemed already to have lasted a month, and to have contained sufficient crises to enliven years.

When she reached the station, the behaviour of the orchestra received its explanation, for newsboys stood about the platforms bearing special editions of the evening papers, and posters which read:
Kings Life Draws Peacefully Towards Its Close
. Laura, who had not realised that George V was so ill as to be in danger, bought a paper and found that the sentence on the poster was to be relied upon, being part of the latest bulletin issued by the Court physicians. It's the end of an era, thought Laura, remembering the day of the old King's accession, with Edward and Frederick and Ludo quarrelling on the road to Ha worth, and Gwen standing smiling by. Everything seems to turn to the same theme to-day, thought Laura mournfully; the poor old King dies, Kay talks of the death of my class, my art is superseded by Madeline's, and Grace's revolt by Kay's and Madeline's; Geoffrey takes the reins of Blackshaw Mills. She sighed, and having sent a telegram to Blackshaw House to postpone Gwen's expectation of her arrival, climbed into the train and prepared for a dismal journey north.

The journey proved indeed worse even than she had anticipated, for fog, sleet and wind by turns added to its discomforts and alarms. The train experienced delays which appeared interminable; long black hours seemed to crawl over her head like slow-moving insects with innumerable ponderous feet. To pass the time Laura took out her sketching pad and pencil, and, as her habit was, began to draw the people of special interest to herself whom she had met that day. But she found small pleasure in drawing
either Grace or Frederick—she had drawn them so many times before with the fire of youth in them—while Kay and Madeline she found she could not draw at all. She could not, she found, design the lineaments of the new generation; her pencil slipped, as it were, on their unfamiliar surface. The mouth and chin (somewhat similar) of the cousins, the high bridge of Kay's nose, the loops of Madeline's hair, appeared in the drawings, certainly, but they quite lacked significance; the faces were blank because Laura could not penetrate the minds which lay behind. She threw her pencil aside and began to consider this problem of the generations which had been so urgently forced on her notice that afternoon.

It seems so disappointing, thought Laura, that the next generation cannot accept the previous generation's solution of life's problems; here have Edward and Grace and Frederick and Ludo and Gwen and I, for instance, been struggling all our lives with the problems of duty and freedom, self-sacrifice and self-expression, the common good and the individual achievement; and now Geoffrey and Kay and Madeline throw our solutions contemptuously away. I was hurt, for instance, thought Laura, when Madeline did not wish to let me place her work. Madeline hates, I see that now, any talk of “placing” or “earning”, she thinks it is careerist, mercenary; I've spent my whole life establishing my right as a woman artist to earn, and now she throws it away. Not that I commend my life, or the life of my generation, highly, thought Laura; I don't at all, I see it as full of cowardice, evasion, ignorance, inexcusable neglect (of Kay, for example), egoism, uncertainty, waste, and general feebleness of will. But it has its fruits, its achievements, its knowledge, too. At least we've brought the problem to a different stage.

Yes, that's it, thought Laura, somewhat consoled; we've brought the problem to a different stage. It is because I have spent my whole life establishing my right to earn, that Madeline is able to decide whether or not to throw the idea away. It seems to me, thought Laura, feeling her way carefully, that probably that is
what each generation can do for its children. It cannot provide them with a ready-made solution, it must indeed leave them free to find their own solution (which, by the way, it must not attempt to imitate), but it can provide a standard by which to judge. The higher the form of life we offer, the higher standard the next generation has by which to judge its innovations. The contribution of each generation may thus be retrograde or progressive, as regards human happiness, for the next generation as well as its own; it must be judged by the standard of good life it provides as criterion.

She fell asleep wrestling with practical applications of this idea —for instance, to her own art and her niece's.

Laura awoke and looked out. The sky was just lightening to a stormy dawn; the train had passed the borders of Yorkshire; a poster on a tiny wayside station announced:
Death of the King
.

The West Riding lay harried beneath a winter gale, which however it received not prostrate, but battling, defiant. The icy blasts, which shook the windows of the railway carriage and blew in sharp gusts round Laura's feet, reminded her of the stories Ludo had often told her of the day of her birth, and as she had woken with the question of her generation's contribution still in her mind, it amused her to compare the scene as it must have been then with what she saw before her now. The hills of dark millstone grit, rising and falling in rhythmic succession like the surge and die of notes in some vast symphony, seemed, as their slopes grew grey in the cold dawn, to link arms in a harsh chord, and stand staunch and solid against the raging wind which howled across their massive heads, felted with tough-stemmed heather and rough grass, and shrieked savagely down the narrow intertwining valleys to their populous bases. The chains of lights which wound about their lower folds, fed from the electric grid of some neighbouring
council, stood firm, clear and green beneath the icy rain; as Laura watched, a time mechanism automatically extinguished them. The long heavy clouds which drove powerfully across the greying sky outmatched the tattered plumes beneath them, though the buzzers were sounding and the day's work about to begin; for the hundreds of mill chimneys which forested the lower slopes trickled only a thin black smoke into the air—in the mills where dynamos hummed, a high pressure of steam was no longer needed, and the great chimneys were gradually becoming obsolete; already some progressive firms had taken theirs down stone by stone. Madeline's lifetime doubtless would see them all felled. Windows rattled, doors banged, as the convulsed air moaned and shouted round them; the noise penetrated men's ears—attuned to disaster, sensitive to disturbance—and echoed in their hearts; dismayed but did not daunt a race as grimly tenacious as their own Pennines. In the engine-rooms, the sheds, the foundries, diverse opinions, clashing together in love and hate, like atoms constantly combining and dissolving, seemed in labour to precipitate, to crystallise, some new and more stable, perhaps more beautiful, compound. For some men strove to keep the wheels turning, the looms clattering, the coins passing from hand to hand, so that men might eat and live until to-morrow; some strove to secure mastery of these means of production, some to retain that mastery, some to share it; while some wished only to enjoy the passing hour. A few wished to save man's soul, more, to disprove its existence; some were concerned only with his body's welfare; some yearned to dragoon, and some to liberate, the spirit of man. Within the houses the same opposing principles clashed and jarred; all was unstable, uneasy, uncertain.

What a change from the day of her birth, thought Laura, from that various but homogeneous Victorian world! Was this a particular moment in the world's history, or did the generations always repeat this pattern of mutation? Always to some extent, slie judged, rarely to so great, so overwhelming, an extent as now
to-day. It should be her part, in any case, gladly to set the next generation free to choose its own ideals of life, having possessed them of the highest form of her own. Had that highest form been, in fact, offered to them as a criterion? Had her generation really given its own ideals, painfully acquired, of liberty, justice, truth, intensified awareness, a fair showing? Laura rather thought not. We didn't see clearly enough, thought Laura, we didn't wish strongly enough, we lacked courage to throw off soon enough the stringent inhibitions of our youth. Hence these tears, thought Laura mournfully, looking round her at a world convulsed by tyranny and war. To work, thought Laura, taking her decision; she would strive now vigorously to implement the ideals of her generation, as a standard of comparison for the newer ideologies—if there was still time.

THE END

Phyllis Bentley was born in 1894 in Halifax, West Yorkshire, where she was educated until she attended Cheltenham Ladies College, Gloucestershire.
In 1932 her best-known work,
Inheritance
, was published to widespread critical acclaim and commercial success. This was in contrast to her previous efforts, a collection of short stories entitled
The World's Bane
and several poor-selling novels. The triumph of
Inheritance
made her the most successful English regional novelist since Thomas Hardy, and she produced two more novels to create a trilogy;
The Rise of Henry Morcar
and
A Man of His Time
. This accomplishment made her a much demanded speaker and she became an expert on the Brontë family.
Over her career Bentley garnered many awards; an honorary DLitt from Leeds University (1949); a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature (1958); awarded an OBE (1970). She died in 1977.