2
The two years that followed his encounter with Chiffan had been crowded with experience for Rud. He had come up again to Camford with a greatly enhanced self–confidence. Chiffan had inflated and confirmed and strengthened him enormously. A certain shyness in making personal contacts had diminished. He began to expect things from people, to demand them and get them. His revolutionary conviction increased. He knew the world was in a phase of revolution and that inevitably he had to play a part in it. He talked now to fellow undergraduates and even to young dons, very much as Chiffan had talked to him. He took a first class in his stride though he did not get a fellowship. Then for a while he felt his progress checked.
He came down, he found himself at home for a time without a job and the vaguest of plans. He got some lecturing in a London college and took mean lodgings in a back street in Bloomsbury. His assured income, he found, was less than in his scholarship days, and in London poverty is more obvious and galling than at Camford. He added to his income by writing a book for a publisher fortunately affected by the series mania, and by doing a little reviewing of sociological and historical books. For the better part of a year his political prospects ran along cramped, unpromising lines.
But nevertheless he had supporters now and a sense of reality about his activities. At first he had been disposed to conceal Chiffan from Camford; he did not want Camford to notice how much he owed to Chiffan; then he felt the need of him and got him to come up for a week–end of talk with the new associates. They had formed a discussion circle and Chiffan came as their common guest. He did much to confirm and develop their impression of a certain large flexibility about Rud's imagination, his capacity for political enterprise and the political effectiveness of his storms of passionate speech.
Now after a phase of loneliness, doubt and depression in Bloomsbury, Rud found his friends turning up in London and resuming their Camford conversations with him. One of his most steadfast supporters was a rich young man named Steenhold. Steenhold was half American and he was in his middle twenties. He had come up to Camford explaining himself rather copiously; he did not want a degree, he had said; he did not need a degree, but he wanted to learn; he wanted to see what Camford had for him. He wore strange clothes, he drank excessively and then took to living on carrots and water, he tried poetry of a mystical inaccurate sort; he got as far with art as investing in a painter's outfit, he tried on a purple shirt but stuck at Jew–baiting, he was drawn to "Guidance" for a while, he was a member of the Communist Party for a fortnight, and then he decided that what Camford had for him was Rud. And he settled down to be Rud's disciple with a quite unprecedented steadfastness. He liked in particular the idea of a common revolutionary movement in Britain and America. He displayed a strange prophetic insight. "Rud's real," he said. "Rud's going far."
He established himself in two large flats in Camborne Square just out of the Euston Road. In the upper one he lived, in the lower he set up a sort of headquarters for Rud and such Rudites as were gathering round him. He refreshed them with a sideboard bearing bread, which they cut for themselves, cheese, carrots, plentiful carrots, apples, bananas, cider, water and beer. The cider and beer were in casks, and there were blue chequered earthenware mugs but no plates. The floor of this lower flat was covered with cork carpet, bathroom and kitchenette included, and the walls of its four rooms were adorned with a disorderly collection of election posters, caricatures and very modern pictures with a political bias. There were chairs, forms, a settle or so, two sofas, five or six folding beds, a spinet and several tables bearing piles of old newspapers, and warmth was supplied by electric radiators and light from cornice lights and casually placed reading lamps.
A queer miscellany of people drifted into this place. It had points of resemblance to the crowd at the summer school, but there was a greater reality about it. There was a sprinkling of young scientific workers, there were rising and ambitious artists, there were unusual–looking young women who were models, there were incidental, bright and excessively usual–looking American girls, some rather encumbered with disconcerting mothers, there were journalists, the secretaries of one or two politicians and various peculiar friends of Steen–hold's too diverse and irrelevant to describe. There were fewer school teachers, and pairing arrangements played but a minor role in the interests of the company. Here Rud would sit in a corner and talk and improve his talking powers. The political atmosphere was much more various than the unchallenged, uncorrelated progressivism of the summer school, and he learnt to parry and deal with a number of new points of view. He learnt with a sort of angry reluctance—he would rather he knew without this learning—but he learnt continually. He was moody; he was often manifestly sulky; he seemed to feel a smouldering hostility to many of them; and yet the discipleship of Steenhold infected most of the crowd. Occasionally his brain seemed to light up and then there could be no doubting his originality and vigour.
His onsets of political clairvoyance took him by surprise almost as much as they surprised his following. He had little introspection; his disposition was to be consistent and always right, and he passed from phase to phase almost unwittingly. At one moment he would be sullen, rather angry, disinclined to speak, with a cloudy confusion of facts and impressions, things he had heard, partial suggestions he had never tackled, old reveries and present impulses swirling about in his brain, and then suddenly like a crystallisation, everything fell into place, with a conviction, an absolute certainty of rightness and fitness, and with it came words and phrases, coherent, continuous. Life, which had been like a dispersed jigsaw puzzle, appeared then as a stateable and manageable problem, and the only astonishing thing about it for him was that it was not as clear and compelling to everyone as it was to himself. It was as if some different intelligence, a sort of parasitic lucidity, was hidden in his brain, with contacts and a range that went far beyond his personality; it was a genius he had, a genius in the Socratic sense, like that of a musician or a calculating boy or a poet. It seemed not to affect his general character at all.
Gradually he became aware of the alien nature of this mental being within him, and shaped his conduct to exploit it. Generally he would sit in a corner drinking little and smoking less, and waiting. It became a leading interest to "get Rud going ". Sometimes when he had a feeling of inadequacy, he would stay away for days at a time, so as not to spoil the impression he perceived he was creating.
He would sit in a corner under a chalk caricature of himself that one of the artistic contingent had made. It was on brown paper and the forehead was exaggerated and done in white. His normal scowl was exalted to intensity, his eyes were alight, and he raised one eloquent fist to the level of his forehead. It was one of those brilliant caricatures that seem to exercise a moulding influence upon their originals.
Since the war scares of 1937 and 1938 the process of world armament had been going on with an ever–increasing intensity and an ever–increasing stress and dislocation of the ordinary life of mankind. Everyone now was being regimented, enrolled, enlisted, taxed beyond all reason, intimidated. If a new world was being born, it was being born very uncomfortably. A feverish exacerbation of human consciousness was manifest under these conditions. Overt criticism was dangerous and suppressed, but doubt and unbelief gathered intensity through their lack of expression. One dogmatism destroyed another and was in its turn destroyed. Everything was being openly accepted and furtively questioned. No tacit assumption and no established institution was safe from this seeping away of belief. A mean superficial cynicism spread like a miasma over every land.
Compared with any former period in human history the second and third decades of the twentieth century saw a stupendous diffusion and ferment of ideas round and about the earth. The only approach to a parallel is the intellectual, moral and religious confusion of the world that occurred between the break–up of the ancient localised paganisms and mythologies and the onset of the first syncretic, universalist experiments, Christianity, diasporic Judaism and Islam. And that was an infinitely fainter and slower mental turnover. One instance marks the difference in tempo and the change of scale. In the eighties of the nineteenth century, communism was the imagination of an obscure group of exiles in London. Marx wrote his articles in Highgate and made a scanty living, and young Mr. Bernard Shaw, after speaking, chiefly for his own amusement, at a little meeting in Hyde Park, was accosted by an unrecognised stranger who proclaimed himself: "I am Friedrich Engels!" It did not seem to be anything very wonderful in the way of an encounter at the time. Engels indeed struck Shaw as a needlessly self–important person. "0–o–oh !—Engels!" he said, with the rising inflection of surprised enlightenment. Yet within thirty years there was not a country in the world, from Quito to Lhasa and from Greenland to Papua, where the names and doctrines of Marx and Engels were unknown; and communism and the doctrine of the class war were as widespread as Christianity and far better understood. It was a diffusion ten times as rapid as the former instance—and with a vastly greater range.
One evening Rud found himself eloquent upon this point, rephrasing—and greatly improving—some of Chiffan's remembered wisdom.
"Revolution so far!" said Rud. "Bah!…
"Just class bickering, rows in the street, changes of management! The mere beginnings…
"The real revolution," he went on, "is still going about the world like a mighty spirit seeking a body. For a couple of centuries now the world has been troubled by needs that have never once found a suitable working expression. All the time the stress has been getting worse. Life gets more unbalanced, more dislocated, clumsier and more abundant. Then tension of population increases. More and more people suffer. Pointless, silly, bloody warfare! Pointless, silly, bloodless unemployment! This real revolution going about the world―"
"Like an evil spirit," said one of the models.
"No! A great spirit, a monstrous spirit beyond good and evil, resolved to embody itself somehow…"
Steenhold murmured approval. "Beyond Good and Evil," he thought. "Nietzsche! Good!"
"I tell you," said Rud, becoming more and more prophetic in his manner, "social trouble has been growing and growing, ever since civilisation began to use money and roads and ships. All the religions, all the loyalties of the past three thousand years, are just the childish palliatives, the insufficient clothes, the shapes, men have tried to impose upon this growing monstrousness to prevent it from disorganising life too frightfully.
"And it's growing now—faster than ever—always more intolerant of these shreds and patches, these Gulliver strings, we put about it."
"Gulliver strings?" queried Steenhold, and then with delight: "Oh! Gulliver strings, tying him!"
"Yes, tying him," said Rud. "The real revolution, mind you, will never endure these limitations—not for another ten years. 'Damn you,' it says to us, 'clothe me properly, equip me properly! I am the Age of Plenty, I am the new life. The new world is getting impatient. It is a new life—absolutely—and it wants the shape and it wants the endorsement of a new life. Communism wasn't enough for it. Not nearly enough. A mere feud of existing classes. The new world has to burst all these racial and national and class ideas, Fascism, Judaism, Nazism, Sovietism, by which people are trying to incarnate it. It is bursting them now. They are being tried and found wanting. All of them. They were all experiments. All experiments. Temporary—to the last degree. It is the turn of our generation, of our sort, now, to try and fit the case better. It has come to us, now. Now! Now! We have to solve the problem or go down in our turn. Go down! And every generation that goes down will go down heavier. There is no fury like a revolution frustrated—no disorder like a world in which a new pattern of living has failed to realise itself."
"Now that's real stuff, Rud," said Steenhold. "That's real live stuff. That goes on to something. That goes on."
"But I don't quite see…" began a spectacled Bloomsbury intellectual, sitting on the floor and nursing his knees.
"I tell you, he's fine," shouted Steenhold, quenching the intervention. "Let's have more of it, Rud. Tell us some more."
"That's the gist of it," said Rud.
He was trying to remember exactly what he had said. He himself felt he had said something fine. It was like his first outbreak of eloquence at the Union all over again.