Victor Forges Ahead
From 1924 to 1929

IT WAS OVER FIVE YEARS before I met Victor again. During most of this time I was teaching in India. I had always wanted an opportunity to see the East; and when the chance came to take up a post as lecturer in English in an Indian college, I accepted it. Not till 1929 did I return to England on leave. Victor had occasionally written to me, but he was not a painstaking correspondent, and I knew little of his affairs except the bare fact that, very soon after I had seen him, Maggie had come to live with him. In the eyes of the law they were still unmarried, because he was still anxious lest he should have another relapse. But in spirit they were man and wife. The actual marriage was not to come till later, when Victor felt himself completely secure, and it was time for Maggie to have children.

When at last I visited them, I found them established in a little suburban house in the north-country town which was the centre from which Victor worked. Victor opened the door to me himself, and greeted me warmly. As we held each other’s hands in greeting, I stared at him. For he had changed. The years had naturally left a mark on his face, but there was something there besides the signs of maturity. There was a new expression which I could not yet decipher, a curious combination of gentleness about the eyes and hardness or perhaps bitterness about the lips. I stared so long that he laughed and said, “Oh, yes, I’ve weathered a lot. So have you, but you look quite well, though a bit dried up with the sun.”

He took my hat and coat, and called for Maggie. She emerged from the kitchen with a welcoming smile that gave me some hint of the beauty that Victor alone could see in her. Her features were even more pronounced and strange than they had been when I saw her some eight years earlier, as a waitress. But in spite of the years, and a few lines on the forehead and round the eyes, she looked quite young; partly, no doubt because her face was bronzed from a recent holiday, but more because of a general air of well-being and zest.

The little sitting-room was sparsely furnished, mostly in the light wood that was then becoming modish. Over the mantelpiece was a print of a Breughel. On another wall were some rather luscious forest scenes which I could not believe to be quite in accord with Victor’s taste. Altogether the room was a mixture of the highly sophisticated and the naive. The curtains suggested a lodging-house, a thoroughly nice lodging-house; but we drank sherry out of Swedish glasses. Strangely, this curious combination of styles throughout the house did not offend me. They effected a sort of humorous harmony which, I suspected, symbolized the relation between Victor and Maggie themselves.

It was soon clear that the unofficial marriage was a great success, and that in many ways Victor depended on Maggie for security. His eyes would often quickly seek hers as though for confirmation of something which he had just said to me. And once, as he passed behind her chair to fetch something, he fleetingly laid a hand on her shoulder.

Later in my visit, while Maggie was preparing a meal, and Victor and I were sitting in the little garden, he remarked that before she had come to him he must have been spending a great deal of energy in “merely keeping the Dolt at bay,” but that with her daily presence to strengthen him he had far more energy to spare, and a new sense of peace and security. Only on occasions when they were separated for a week or more did he feel anything of the old need to watch himself, and then merely as a vague loneliness and anxiety, not as a real threat.

In more practical ways also, Maggie was helpful. Not only did she look after the house, but also she entered actively into Victor’s affairs. She had visited all his evening classes, and had struck up a real friendship with several of his students. Evidently she fulfilled an important function in his work. She said, “When Victor works up a new subject, he always tries it on the dog first, namely me. Sometimes the poor animal finds it heavy going and can’t keep awake. Sometimes it has a nervous breakdown, like those unfortunate dogs he told me about that some great Russian experimenter tormented with intelligence tests that were just a bit too difficult for them. Sometimes this adoring dog just sits enthralled, forgetting its knitting. Sometimes it asks such a lot of silly questions and raises so many difficulties that poor Victor gets quite cross with it.” Here Victor put in, “And then I have to go away and rewrite the whole thing. Oh, she’s a useful critic, though exasperating, and wilfuly stupid. Then — how I hate her!” On the occasions when she visited his classes, her function (I gathered) was partly to watch the reactions of the members, and partly to watch Victor himself. On the journey home she would report her findings; protesting, perhaps, against Victor’s mannerisms, or suggesting that some disheartened or timid individual needed special treatment. “In fact,” said Victor, summing it all up, “her function is to give me hell.”

On one occasion during my brief visit, Victor expressed perplexity about a certain class secretary who had shown more zeal than honesty by marking on the class register attendances that had not occurred, What ought the wretched tutor to do about it? Should he turn a blind eye, or make a fuss, and cause endless trouble with the authorities? The question was not a real request for advice but rather a statement of perplexity. I was amused by Maggie’s technique for dealing with Victor on this occasion. I saw her take a sidelong glance at her man, and then she continued her knitting in silence. Presently she said, “What would happen if you made a fuss?”

“Trouble, hate, and a shindy with the B. of E.”

“What would happen if you turned a blind eye?”

“Nothing! It wouldn’t even make a difference to the Government grant earned by the class, because there’ll be more than enough attendances anyhow.”

“Which do you care for most, educating the workers or personal righteousness?” He laughed, and turned to me. “It’s terrible,” he said, “to be linked for life with an immoral woman. Instead of being a force making for righteousness, she leads me into temptation at every turn.”

She too laughed, and remarked, “Poor Victor! He never has the moral courage to be immoral; so when he wants to be, he always has to get me to take the blame for him. Then he can do it with a good conscience.”

Maggie had also been of service to Victor in the writing of the book which he had begun some six years earlier. This incipient masterpiece had been rewritten several times, and was now radically different from the early draft that his father had seen. “He calls it,” said Maggie, “his web, and himself Penelope.” He explained, “The trouble is, I’m mentally growing up rather fast, and everything I wrote even a year ago begins to look puerile.” I suggested that he should not hold it back, but publish it in its present form as a sort of interim report. “No good,” he said. “It would all have to be got into shape and polished, and I can’t be bothered to do that with stuff that I have already outgrown. Besides, there are far too many half-baked books already.”

Maggie seemed to regard her function in relation to the book as twofold. She must stimulate him into finishing it and publishing it as soon as possible, and she must force him to write so that ordinary intelligent people could follow him without undue effort. But Victor, who regarded his “web” neither as educational nor as propaganda but as sheer self-expression, rebelled against both these orders. “After all,” he said, smiling at Maggie, “it’s meant for educated people, not for country wenches and the scum of provincial towns, like you.” Ignoring the sally, she said, “He’ll never publish anything really worthwhile unless I stand over him with a rolling-pin. Of course there were those very respectable contributions to highbrow magazines, political and philosophical. They really began to make a name for him. But he gave up that sort of thing long ago because he said his ideas were still in the melting-pot, and he must get them clear before inflicting any more of them on people. Then at one time he used to write marvellous little articles for Leftish journals, but even that has stopped now. And anyhow he can’t really put the whole of himself into that sort of thing. It’s time he got his teeth into something that will call out all his powers.” Victor insisted that the book certainly did that. She said, “Well, yes, in a way; but it’s like a rough sketch that is always being rubbed out and begun again. For your soul’s health it’s necessary to produce a finished bit of creation. Otherwise you’ll go bad on my hands.”

She looked at him long and anxiously. He replied in a serious voice. “No, Maggie, I have to judge for myself in that field. You can help me a lot, but you can’t dictate the sort of thing I want to write. At present I am mentally in a muddle, and it’s no use rushing into print until I have straightened things out. And as for being intelligible to ordinary people, you always claim to be one of them, and you seem to follow it all pretty well.”

“But,” she said, “I don’t follow it until I’ve made you rewrite it all in simpler language. And of course, I’m no longer really ordinary. I have been hopelessly infected by you. If I had not been, I shouldn’t be able to make head or tail of the stuff.”

“The fact is,” he said, “you’re so anxious to react as the ordinary person that you over-compensate, and affect a sort of wilful, pigheaded stupidity that goes far beyond ordinary people.” He gave her a love-signalling smile, to which she replied in kind.

“The fact is,” she said, “you think ordinary people are like the people in your classes, but they’re not. They are far stupider, and moreover they don’t want to think.” He closed the matter by saying, “Well, anyhow, I’m not writing for ordinary people. I reach them (more or less) in my teaching. In my writing I’m writing for myself, to straighten out my own mind. But unfortunately my mind won’t stay put. It keeps seeing new things which involve restating everything.”

I wanted to find out what Victor’s book was about, and if possible to persuade him to let me read the manuscript. All he would say was, “The jumping-off point was dialectical materialism, but by now it’s neither dialectical nor materialist in any but the most Pickwickian sense.” When I asked him point blank if I could read it, he answered, “Of course, if you like; when I have straightened out a few things.” But he was still straightening them out when I left.

Altogether, I found it impossible to form a clear picture of Victor’s state of mind at this time. He was not very communicative. I learned that he had been drawn more and more into Left Wing political activity, and that there had been difficulties with the university. He had joined the C.P. His articles in Left Wing journals had in early days all been written under a pseudonym; but later this secretiveness irked him, and he took to using his own name, in the form “Vic Smith.” It was this frankness that had caused difficulties with the authorities. There was also trouble over his expression of “Communistic” opinions in his classes. The work of adult education was supposed to be “non-political,” in the party sense. It was concerned with teaching people to think for themselves, not with political propaganda. Certain prominent Conservatives in the town started an agitation against spending public money to aid classes that were hotbeds of “Marxism.” Further, Victor had been mixed up in scandals connected with the unemployed. Once, for instance, he had entertained a party of them at the city’s most exclusive restaurant. He had also been mixed up with disorders that had occurred when a procession of unemployed was refused admission to the Town Hall. He was arrested, and had to spend a night in a police cell, but was released because the evidence against him was insufficient. That night, Maggie suffered acute anxiety, fearing that the shock might recall the Dolt. But he returned to her as his normal self, and indeed elated. He said, “A little direct action is exhilarating after all the mere talking.”

The upshot of all this activity was that his employers reluctantly warned him that his rashness was damaging to his authority as a teacher, and that unless he would promise to avoid entanglement in party politics, he would have to go. Victor firmly rejected this ultimatum, much to Maggie’s distress.

His father also was much upset. The old gentleman had maintained friendly, though intermittent, relations with his “new” son. On Victor’s brief visits to the old home there had always been violent arguments, but always an underlying mutual respect. Not until Victor’s name began to appear in the press as an agitator and a revolutionary, did the father try to assert his paternal authority. Of course he failed; and according to his own ethic he was left with no alternative but to “disown the boy” and refuse to see him again. Sir Geoffrey was now beginning to threaten to disinherit his son. Natural affection, however, in the end triumphed over his political principles. Worry brought on by this conflict in the old man’s mind seems to have hastened the stroke from which he died.

Victor was much distressed at the breach with the parent for whom he had conceived a warm, though critical, respect. His first impulse was to renounce the small amount of capital which came to him, and hand it over to some worthy cause which would have been approved of by his father. But the practical Maggie, with an eye on Victor’s precarious future and her own future maternity, dissuaded him from this course.

Meanwhile the university authorities who employed Victor were no less distressed than his father; for they regarded Victor with respect and affection, and also as a valuable asset. Every effort was made to persuade him to agree to refrain in future from compromising activities; but in vain. So Victor was regretfully dismissed. This was shortly after the end of his winter classes.

But, to everyone’s surprise, before work began again in the autumn, he had accepted the conditions and was preparing for his usual classes.

Naturally I was curious to know what it was that had brought about this change of attitude. It was quite incredible that Victor should simply have taken the line of least resistance. It was not until my last evening that he made any serious attempt to explain himself. Hitherto, when challenged, he had merely said, “I just had to get away from it all and think,” or “I found I wasn’t really sure of my own foundations after all.” But on the last evening I managed to provoke him into fuller explanation.

We were all three in the little sitting-room. Maggie was working through a pile of mending. Victor, who liked to have some manual work on hand when he was carrying on a desultory conversation with an easy guest, was repairing an electric iron. I sat idly smoking.

I pressed him to tell me why he had given up political action. For a while, he merely went on fiddling with the intestines of the iron; but presently he said, “Well, it was like this. When I was trying my hand at agitation for the unemployed, I met a lot of people in that line whose hearts were right (up to a point) but their heads all wrong. And their wrong heads kept pulling their hearts askew, so to speak. They were afire with generous passion for the underdog, but they had theories that didn’t go deep enough; theories about human nature and historical forces. Misinterpreting Marx, they believed that human nature was simply an expression of environmental influences, whereas, of course, in truth, at every stage of evolution, there’s alwayssomething inside reacting to something outside. This mistake led inevitably to a muddle over morality, and in the end to sheer opportunism. Then there were others whose trouble began in the heart and reacted on the head. Their real motive was not a generous passion, though they thought it was, but some sort of bottled-up hate. And this, of course, messed up their ideas. Mind you, the work we were doing had to be done. It was important. But sooner or later it was going to be important to have the right ideas behind it, otherwise it would all go bad on us. And as no one else seemed to be worrying about that side of the thing, it was clearly up to me to do something about it. That meant giving up active political work, for a while anyhow, and trying to digest what I had learnt through it. For really did learn a lot, about human nature, and about myself. But I had an increasing feeling that I needed new light if I was to form clear ideas about social problems, and about man’s nature. In fact what I needed was to think things out with all possible concentration, and without distraction from current urgencies.”

He lapsed into silence, intent upon the dismembered iron. It was Maggie who prompted him, saying, “Come on, Victor, tell him what you did learn.”

“I learned,” he said, “the huge difference between man’s best and his worst. And I learned more about the oddness of my own nature, compared with other people’s. And I saw that all ordinary people are in a way a mixture of me and the Dolt, and that my relation with the Dolt threw light on the whole social problem.”

Again he fell silent, working with his pliers. But Maggie prompted him, “Tell him about the demonstrations of the unemployed.”

He began reluctantly, “Oh, well! It sounds flat in the telling, but it really is significant. Unemployment was already very bad in this unhappy town. The Communists began organizing mass meetings of the workless, and I had a good deal to do with this job. I found the unemployed utterly disheartened and cynical. They were poisoned by the sense of being ‘not wanted,’ chucked on the scrap-heap. Many were so used to idling that they seemed to have lost all power of exerting themselves. Some of the long-timers, though not all, had turned apathetic through and through, even toward their own wives and families. And they had lost all self-respect. Yet, if once an idea or an ideal could penetrate their fog of misery, and really present itself to their minds, they might respond magnificently with acts of real generosity or comradeship. Thus the very same man who was so wrapped up in his personal misery that he had no heart for anything else, shrugging his shoulders over his child’s illness, might suddenly feel the child’s reality and nurse it with the utmost devotion. The man who lost job after job through irresponsibility or sheer slacking, or who habitually pilfered from his mates, might suddenly be lit up by the idea of a mass protest for human fellowship, and work splendidly for the cause. Mind you, many Leftish journalists sentimentalized the unemployed, making out that they were all saints. They weren’t. A few were magnificent. Most were just normal people for whom there were no jobs going, and of course most of these had been morally damaged by their bitter fate. Quite a lot were simply wasters and riff-raff. Inevitably in a labour glut there are bound to be unemployed of all calibres. It was cheering to find that nearly all but the lowest grade could see (with help) the idea of the march not merely in terms of individualistic clamouring for decent treatment but as a gesture for the idea of brotherhood. And for the sake of this gesture they could rise to heroism.”

Again he was silent. Maggie put in a word. “And it fell to Victor to wake these people; and to keep them awake, because they were always apt to break down under some silly little temptation.”

“And that,” he said, “was what made me realize so clearly the difference between them and myself. When they behaved in the awake way, nine times out of ten they had a grim moral struggle, and came through heroically. Even when they had formed regular habits of social loyalty, there was a perpetual tension in their minds. But with me, there’s no serious tension at all, I just see the thing to do, and wholeheartedly want to do it; even if from the point of view of my own self-interest it is very objectionable. To refrain from doing it would be repugnant and painful. It’s queer, I know, but there it is. Obviously I can’t take any credit for this. The credit belongs only to the moral heroes who struggle against temptation, and gloriously triumph; if credit is a meaningful notion, which I sometimes doubt.”

Maggie interrupted. “I think you make it clearer when you say, not that you have no struggle, but that the struggle does not enter into yourself. Once you said it went on outside your very self, like the struggle of the white corpuscles to conquer invading micro-organisms, which consciousness knows nothing of.”

“Yes,” he said, “it’s like that, except that I am not strictly unconscious of the struggle. I am conscious of it clearly enough, but objectively. For my consciousness there’s no internal struggle at all. The end, the goal, simply possesses and uses me.”

I felt incredulous about his claim to have no moral struggle, and I said so. After some thought he replied, “Yes, in a way you are right. I do have moral struggles sometimes, but they are all on a different plane from the ordinary ones that torment most people. So far as sheer individualistic self-interest is concerned, I really don’t have any struggle at all. I quite happily want to do the thing that others often find it impossible to will effectively. But I do have moral struggles of a kind. For instance, I have had a severe moral struggle to give up the C.P. and renounce political activity. You see, both political activity in general and the C.P. in particular still felt right for me; but little by little it was borne in on me that I ought to give them up to pursue another goal. It would have been much easier to carry on politically, but I had to take myself in hand and conquer my established moral habit. Yes, Harry, in a way you’re right.”

At this point I may as well break the historical sequence to mention a future moral struggle that Victor was to have. After turning away from political action and the C.P. he had inclined more and more to pacifism. This was during the earlier part of the inter-war period. Later, as the Nazi menace increased and the farce of “appeasement” developed, Victor was to be forced very reluctantly to see that even the sacred principle of non-violence must in certain circumstances be qualified. But he had formed such a strong moral habit of pacifism that he was faced with a grim moral struggle to break with that habit.

But I must revert to his situation during my visit in 1929, and his abandonment of political action. Victor had a good deal to say about his experiences over the demonstrations by the unemployed. “Of course,” he said, “the Communists had a lot to do with organizing the unemployed in this town. And though inevitably some Communists were mere wasters or spitemongers, most worked splendidly. Now some of these seemed almost to have passed beyond the stage of individualistic moral struggle, seeming to serve the cause with single-hearted passion. When they were at their best, temptation to put self-interest first didn’t seriously touch them at all. They really were ‘possessed.’ But with them the trouble was that their view of the goal and of the policy was often distorted by subterranean hungers. Some, for instance, were loyal to the Revolution not through love, but because under its banner their unwitting vindictiveness could find a sanctioned outlet.”

Maggie said, “At first the Communists admired him immensely. Some called him the English Lenin, because he was so good at inspiring and organizing. But when there were difficulties over the party line, they reviled him.”

Victor continued. “They had seen something of the true goal. (Call it fullness of life for all.) It really did, in a way, possess them. But they had on............