“I can’t think,” Rachel exclaimed, “how anyone does it!”
“Explain, Miss Vinrace,” said Richard. “This is a matter I want to clear up.”
His kindness was genuine, and she determined to take the chance he gave her, although to talk to a man of such worth and authority made her heart beat.
“It seems to me like this,” she began, doing her best first to recollect and then to expose her shivering private visions.
“There’s an old widow in her room, somewhere, let us suppose in the suburbs of Leeds.”
Richard bent his head to show that he accepted the widow.
“In London you’re spending your life, talking, writing things, getting bills through, missing what seems natural. The result of it all is that she goes to her cupboard and finds a little more tea, a few lumps of sugar, or a little less tea and a newspaper. Widows all over the country I admit do this. Still, there’s the mind of the widow—the affections; those you leave untouched. But you waste you own.”
“If the widow goes to her cupboard and finds it bare,” Richard answered, “her spiritual outlook we may admit will be affected. If I may pick holes in your philosophy, Miss Vinrace, which has its merits, I would point out that a human being is not a set of compartments, but an organism. Imagination, Miss Vinrace; use your imagination; that’s where you young Liberals fail. Conceive the world as a whole. Now for your second point; when you assert that in trying to set the house in order for the benefit of the young generation I am wasting my higher capabilities, I totally disagree with you. I can conceive no more exalted aim—to be the citizen of the Empire. Look at it in this way, Miss Vinrace; conceive the state as a complicated machine; we citizens are parts of that machine; some fulfil more important duties; others (perhaps I am one of them) serve only to connect some obscure parts of the mechanism, concealed from the public eye. Yet if the meanest screw fails in its task, the proper working of the whole is imperilled.”
It was impossible to combine the image of a lean black widow, gazing out of her window, and longing for someone to talk to, with the image of a vast machine, such as one sees at South Kensington, thumping, thumping, thumping. The attempt at communication had been a failure.
“We don’t seem to understand each other,” she said.
“Shall I say something that will make you very angry?” he replied.
“It won’t,” said Rachel.
“Well, then; no woman has what I may call the political instinct. You have very great virtues; I am the first, I hope, to admit that; but I have never met a woman who even saw what is meant by statesmanship. I am going to make you still more angry. I hope that I never shall meet such a woman. Now, Miss Vinrace, are we enemies for life?”
Vanity, irritation, and a thrusting desire to be understood, urged her to make another attempt.
“Under the streets, in the sewers, in the wires, in the telephones, there is something alive; is that what you mean? In things like dustcarts, and men mending roads? You feel that all the time when you walk about London, and when you turn on a tap and the water comes?”
“Certainly,” said Richard. “I understand you to mean that the whole of modern society is based upon cooperative effort. If only more people would realise that, Miss Vinrace, there would be fewer of your old widows in solitary lodgings!”
Rachel considered.
“Are you a Liberal or are you a Conservative?” she asked.
“I call myself a Conservative for convenience sake,” said Richard, smiling. “But there is more in common between the two parties than people generally allow.”
There was a pause, which did not come on Rachel’s side from any lack of things to say; as usual she could not say them, and was further confused by the fact that the time for talking probably ran short. She was haunted by absurd jumbled ideas—how, if one went back far enough, everything perhaps was intelligible; everything was in common; for the mammoths who pastured in the fields of Richmond High Street had turned into paving stones and boxes full of ribbon, and her aunts.
“Did you say you lived in the country when you were a child?” she asked.
Crude as her manners seemed to him, Richard was flattered. There could be no doubt that her interest was genuine.
“I did,” he smiled.
“And what happened?” she asked. “Or do I ask too many questions?”
“I’m flattered, I assure you. But—let me see—what happened? Well, riding, lessons, sisters. There was an enchanted rubbish heap, I remember, where all kinds of queer things happened. Odd, what things impress children! I can remember the look of the place to this day. It’s a fallacy to think that children are happy. They’re not; they’re unhappy. I’ve never suffered so much as I did when I was a child.”
“Why?” she asked.
“I didn’t get on well with my father,” said Richard shortly. “He was a very able man, but hard. Well—it makes one determined not to sin in that way oneself. Children never forget injustice. They forgive heaps of things grownup people mind; but that sin is the unpardonable sin. Mind you—I daresay I was a difficult child to manage; but when I think what I was ready to give! No, I was more sinned against than sinning. And then I went to school, where I did very fairly well; and then, as I say, my father sent me to both universities. … D’you know, Miss Vinrace, you’ve made me think? How little, after all, one can tell anybody about one’s life! Here I sit; there you sit; both, I doubt not, chock-full of the most interesting experiences, ideas, emotions; yet how communicate? I’ve told you what every second person you meet might tell you.”
“I don’t think so,” she said. “It’s the way of saying things, isn’t it,
