Testament of Youth: An Autobiographical Study of the Years 1900-1925 (88 page)

‘I do realise that after all we shall not meet on an equal footing. You, in spite of your letters which say so much (I will not, as yet, put “too much”), are still more or less of a stranger to me, whereas to you, apparently, I am both so much more than a stranger and so much less . . . How can I tell until I have seen you whether I want you to come or not? You cannot expect too much discretion from a woman’s curiosity. Moreover, the “simple and naïf tale” that you have outlined . . . does interest me as a story - and I want to know how it ends. No, I think on the whole that I will not tell you not to come . . .’

3

G. arrived in England on June 10th, having previously informed me of the date by wireless cable. It happened to be the day on which the murder of Matteotti began a wave of anti-Fascist feeling in post-war Europe, but for the moment I was less troubled by atrocities in Italy than by the sudden panic which drove me out of the flat for the afternoon. My only clear purpose amid the hectic confusion of my thoughts was the determination to postpone the uncomfortable decision whether to marry or not. In Roland’s case the choice had made itself; in this one, numerous incompatible claims would have to be weighed, and contending issues faced. How much easier never to be asked and therefore never to have to choose!

So I deliberately fixed an interview with Lady Rhondda at the Six Point Group office, and attended a conference at the League of Nations Union in Grosvenor Crescent, where G., after vainly telephoning to our flat, attempted without success to ring me up. At last he returned - with how much chagrin I never learnt - to his father’s rooms in Oxford, and from there telephoned asking if he might call to see me on Friday, June 13th. It was hardly an auspicious date for a first meeting, and the unfamiliar voice which persuaded me over the telephone to agree to it alarmed me a good deal, but in my secret heart I knew that I had always regarded thirteen as my lucky number. Later, an amused letter described to me, without criticism or resentment, his fruitless endeavour to find me at the Union headquarters.

‘To the inquiry whether you happened to be about in the office I received the reply in a super-Oxford accent: “What is your name?” “I want to see Miss Brittain if she happens to be about and is not engaged at some meeting.” “Are you Miss Brittain?” “No, I am not Miss Brittain - I want to see her. But I do not want to interrupt her if she is engaged.” “Oh, is she?” I gave it up; the diplomacy of the L. of N . . . . is too much for me. I took the next train.’

On the Friday he came to tea and escorted me that evening to Bernard Shaw’s
Saint Joan
; we also spent the Saturday together, walking about Richmond Park and Kew Gardens beneath a sunny sky softly shadowed by nebulous clouds. I knew that marriage would be suggested during the weekend, and it was; I knew that I should repudiate the suggestion, and I did, for I had not yet completely identified this stranger with the writer of the letters. But the day happened to be Sunday, June 15th, and the sixth anniversary of Edward’s death, a coincidence which seemed to emphasise the curious link that already existed between my dead brother and this new, persistent companion, whose determination appeared during the next three weeks to be in no wise damped by rejection.

Ten days after his first appearance, he came up to town again for the afternoon to persuade me to spend a week-end at Oxford and let him take me on the river - an invitation which I at first resisted, for I was well aware that Oxford and the river, with their sad, lovely memories, would fight on G.’s side against my resolution. But as we sat together in the dark church in Abercorn Place and listened to the solemn thunder of the organ - with its sudden reminder of the emptiness left in my life by the music that I had abandoned in self-defence after Edward’s death - I was already reflecting how different was the peaceful independence of a post-war courtship from the struggle against intrusive observation which had harassed Roland and myself in 1914; and at last, after a day or two’s meditation, I wrote and said that I would go to Oxford. I knew then that my resistance was done for, and I was right, for I returned to London engaged, once more, to be married.

‘At twenty-eight you ought to be courting a girl of twenty-one instead of trying to marry a woman of thirty,’ I told him without compunction, but he only answered gravely:

‘I am not interested in immaturity.’

He was at any rate, I thought, of the War generation, and that was all that really mattered. Had he been post-war I could not under any circumstances have married him, for within the range of my contemporaries a gulf wider than any decade divides those who experienced the War as adults from their juniors by only a year or two who grew up immediately afterwards. Even as it was, I announced my engagement with every symptom of scepticism to the much-enduring Winifred, who had never attempted to influence my decision although at that time my marriage seemed likely to involve considerable disruption in her own existence.

There were too many potential slips between a betrothal and a wedding - as I of all people ought to know, I thought sadly. Marriage perhaps a year hence, with all the possibilities of death and accident and disagreement that twelve months contained, seemed almost equivalent, just then, to no marriage at all. Anyhow, I felt, it was quite absurd to marry so late in the day, after I’d turned thirty, when I had been in love for the first time such years and years ago. But eventually I was to realise that half my generation of women seemed to be marrying as late as I was, or even later, and their children and mine would be contemporaries - still babies when we were reaching the end of our thirties. This belated maternity, as I now admit, has had its compensations; small children have a habit of conferring persistent youth upon their parents, and by their eager vitality postpone the unenterprising cautions and timidities of middle age.

‘There is indeed no second best in life,’ I wrote to G., not untruthfully, at the end of June. ‘One can assuredly say that one thing will be different from another, but one must not - indeed one cannot - say that it will never be as good, or better. You rightly said that there can be no such assessment of experience . . . I had forgotten that I am still quite young - the world of sorrow and experience seemed so old.’

After my inordinate encounters with a large and disputatious family, I felt thankful that G. appeared to have no relatives in the world apart from his retired cleric of a father, though I was sorry that I should never know his dead, courageous mother, a fierce advocate of woman suffrage who had found in the movement for the vote the chief inspiration of her brief, turbulent life. In type and in temperament he resembled her, I gathered; the rampageous feminism of
The Dark Tide
had certainly struck a responsive note. My own parents accepted G. with resolute benevolence, and took very well this apparently precipitate arrangement; they were hardened by now to my singular preference for highly intelligent young men with no money except that which they could make by their brains. Quite suddenly, too, I realised - for I was now old enough to realise - that the inevitable clash between the generations diminishes, also inevitably, with the passing of the years.

For a short time, G. and I discussed getting married very soon, but I did not, as yet, feel quite ready for this, nor wish temporarily to adjust my life and work to the unknown conditions of the New World until I had fulfilled my determination to discover, by an expedition through Central Europe, the after-effects of the War upon the Old. Eventually we agreed to postpone our marriage until his return for the Long Vacation in June 1925 - though I never concurred in this ‘sensible’ decision with the full consent of my will. Apprehension was too familiar and weary a companion to be suffered patiently for nearly another year, and its persistence was not banished by the inward conviction, inherited from the War, that for me the love of men was for ever destined to be inconclusive and impermanent. By allowing myself to become engaged to G., I knew that I had once more put myself into the hands of fate, towards which, since Edward’s death, I had done my best to remain, in personal matters, cautiously on the defensive.

‘All happiness to me is incredible,’ I wrote to G. in July. ‘The supreme moments of the War did not bring happiness; how should they, lived as they were under the shadow of death? . . . My obstinate diffidence arises partly . . . because I am afraid of giving life the means wherewith to deal me another of its major blows . . . So like me to get engaged to someone who has to go abroad even when there is no war.’

4

For the time being, however, I determined to forget the ten months of suspense that were still several weeks away, and gave myself up to a summer of week-ends spent in G.’s company alternately in London and Oxford, with long mellow evenings on the river above the Cherwell Hotel or below Magdalen Bridge, and week-day intervals in which daily letters, added to the normal routine of writing and lecturing, made being engaged almost an occupation in itself. But other and more public happenings also brought an eventful summer, and with my journey through Central Europe in front of me, even the most absorbing personal preoccupations could not blind me to those international changes which appeared possible now that Socialist Governments, for the first time since the War, flourished simultaneously in both England and France.

At the end of July the Inter-Allied Conference in London opened its discussions on the best method of getting the Dawes Plan to work in Germany, and the arrival of the German delegation at this conference began, as one weekly paper remarked, a ‘peace after the War’ phase which the Treaty of Versailles should have inaugurated but did not.

‘To-day,’ I wrote to G. on August 4th, ‘ends the black decade that began with August 4th, 1914; perhaps if life is not too unkind . . . it also begins a very different ten years which, though they can never efface the memory of the others, will remove the bitterness from experience and leave only the triumph and the glory.’

With growing excitement I read that the French had agreed, as part of the Dawes Plan, to withdraw from the Ruhr within one year; Appenweier and Offenburg were evacuated, in token of good faith, before the end of August, though both Nationalists and Communists, strong in Germany after the May elections held in the fierce atmosphere of the Ruhr occupation, criticised the Conference for not insisting upon the immediate departure of the French. In England the Conference decisions were received favourably enough by all political Parties, since Russia had long replaced Germany as international bogy; the real sources of Tory perturbation were the Anglo-Soviet Conference in August, and the arrest and discharge of Mr Campbell, the Communist editor of the
Workers’ Weekly
, which was to lead in two months’ time to the ‘Scarlet Letter Election’ of 1924.

At Oxford, during my week-ends, I found these political events reflected in a number of Summer Schools; once or twice, with ironic memories of my enthusiasm at St Hilda’s eleven years before, I dropped in to listen, with the critical ears of a speaker, to Professor A. E. Zimmern brilliantly expounding his views on America to the League of Nations Union, and Messrs C. F. G. Masterman and H. D. Henderson, then editor of the
Nation
, telling Young Liberals what they ought to think of the international situation. This politically conscious atmosphere was emphasised, for me, by the presence in Oxford of a number of G.’s college friends, each one of whom was destined, nearly a decade later, to occupy some prominent niche in the world of affairs; they included a future newspaper leader-writer, the editor-to-be of an intellectual monthly, and the subsequent holder of a professorial Chair at a university in the north of England.

Early in September we spent our last week in England at G.’s North Oxford rooms; nothing, I told him, remembering Edward at Waterloo, would persuade me to watch him sail for America, so we agreed to part in Oxford on September 10th. His boat was due to leave Liverpool on the 12th, and I arranged to start on the same date with Winifred for Geneva. The tormenting psychological readjustments which the process of getting to know someone intimately always involves had united with the agitating prospect of re-adapting my aims and activities to marriage to impart to that summer a sense of prolonged conflict, but those final days in each other’s company, with their mornings of work, their afternoon walks, and their quiet meals together, seemed to resemble a happy married life more completely, and more encouragingly, than I had thought possible. The imminent parting, however, stirred me to familiar meditations on the subject of separation and loss, which were rendered the more poignant by the sudden death, in Yorkshire, of an old friend of Winifred’s - a naval officer whom I also had known.

‘I don’t think victory over death,’ I wrote to her, ‘is anything so superficial as a person fulfilling their normal span of life. It can be twofold; a victory over death by the man who faces it for himself without fear, and a victory by those who, loving him, know that death is but a little thing compared with the fact that he lived and was the kind of person he was . . . That’s why those war victories with which I was specially associated are still incomplete. That the people faced their own deaths without fear I have no doubt. It is through me that the victory is incomplete, because I cannot always quite feel that their deaths matter less to me than the fact that they lived, nor reconcile their departure, with all their aspirations unfulfilled, with my own scheme of life.’

On our last afternoon, G. and I had tea together in the Trout Inn at Godstow; outside the window a sudden shower of rain beat in thin silver spears upon the flaming snapdragons in the garden, until the steaming mist from the ground intensified their colour with the soft, unearthly radiance which flowers have always worn for me in moments of heightened emotion. That night, Oxford station was chill and heavy with the gloom of a wet September evening as we waited for the last train to London; its ill-lighted darkness and the consciousness of coming separation renewed the feeling of sick inertia that came when wartime leave had ended and someone was returning to the front. In the depths of memory I knew that, for those of us who were now experienced and disillusioned, no parting would ever again have quite that quality of desolation and finality which overwhelms the moment of farewell to one’s first love in early youth, but I shivered so much with cold that G. took off the scarf he was wearing and wrapped it round me as we sat together on a draughty seat, wishing that the train would come, yet dreading it as though it were death.