III
'IN SOLUTION'
"Well, you see, things are rather in solution just now."
Most people have a formula or two by which they try to introduce some order into the lumber-room of the mind. Such a lot of things are dumped down there, and without a formula or two they get so mixed. The above was Stephen Aikenhead's favourite. Many of his friends preferred to say "in transition." That phrase, he maintained, begged the question. Perhaps, after all the talk and all the agitation, nothing would be changed; the innovators might be beaten; they often had been; the mass of mankind was very conservative. Look at the ebb and flow of human thought, as history recorded it – the freedom of Athens and the licence of Rome followed by the Dark Ages – the Renaissance tamed, if not mutilated, by the Counter-Reformation on the one hand and the rigours of Puritanism on the other. Certainly the foundations of all things were being, or were going to be, examined. But it is one thing to examine foundations, a different one to declare and prove them unsound. And even when the latter process has come about, there is the question – will you shore the building up or will you pull it down? The friends who favoured "transition" often grew impatient with this incurable doubter; they were as convinced that the future was going to be all right and going to come very soon as they were certain that the present was all wrong and could not possibly resist the assault of reason for many years more. They were sanguine people, apt to forget that, right as they undoubtedly were (in their own opinion), yet the Englishman at least accords his support to progress only on the definite understanding that it shall be slow. "Put the brake on!" he urges, envisaging innovation as a galloping downhill. Stephen's friends pathetically pictured it as a toilsome assent – toilsome, yet speedily to be achieved by gallantly straining horses. No need of brakes, though! Argument by metaphor is perilous either way.
In this case the formula was administered to Winnie Maxon, within the space of two hours after her arrival at Shaylor's Patch. Stephen's pretty house in Buckinghamshire – it lay Beaconsfield way – took its unassuming title presumably from a defunct Shaylor and certainly from a small plot of grass which lay between two diverging roads about a hundred yards on the way down to the station. The house was old, rambling, and low – a thoroughly comfortable dwelling. The garden was fair to see with its roses, its yews, and its one great copper-beech, with its spread of smooth lawn and its outlook over a wide-stretching valley.
"A home of peace!" thought Winnie, relaxing weary body (she had packed that morning for more than a fortnight's absence) and storm-tossed mind, as she lay on a long chair under the shade of the copper-beech.
Stephen sat opposite to her, a tall man of three and thirty, fair, inclining to stoutness, with a crop of coarse, disorderly, mouse-coloured hair; always and everywhere he wore large horn-rimmed spectacles. He had inherited a competence more than merely sufficient; he had no profession, but wrote articles when the spirit moved him and had them published more rarely. At twenty-two he had married. It was before the days when he began to doubt whether people ought to – or anyhow need – marry, and his union had been so happy that the doubt could not be attributed to personal experience. His wife was not pretty, but pleasant-faced and delightfully serene. She had very strong opinions of her own, and held them so strongly that she rarely argued and was never ruffled in argument. If anybody grew hot over a discussion, she would smile at him, and hand him a flower, or at appropriate moments something nice to eat. They had one child, a girl now ten years old, whom they had just sent to a boarding-school.
It was in connexion with little Alice's being sent to the boarding-school that the formula made its appearance. Winnie had expressed the proper wonder that her parents "could bear to part with her." Stephen explained that they had been actuated by a desire to act fairly towards the child.
"If I was sure I was right, and sure the ancients were wrong, I would teach her myself – teach her to believe what I believe and to disbelieve what they believe. But am I sure? What do I believe? And suppose I'm right, or at all events that they're wrong, most people mayn't think so for many years to come. I should be putting her against the world, and the world against her. Is that fair, unless I'm bang sure? Not everybody can be happy when the world's against them. I can't teach her what I can't believe, but why shouldn't she learn it from people who can? She must settle it in the end for herself, but it seems fair to give her her chance of orthodoxy. While things are, as I said, in solution – in a sort of flux, don't you know?"
"What do you mean by things being in solution – or in a flux?"
The daughter of a clergyman, wife of Cyril Maxon since she was nineteen, a devout member of Attlebury's flock, she came quite fresh to the idea. In her life and her world things had seemed tremendously solid, proof against an earthquake!
"I suppose it's really been the same in every age with thinking people, but it's more widespread now, isn't it? It gets into the newspapers even! 'Do we Believe?' 'Is Marriage a Failure?' It's not the answers that are most significant, you know, but the questions."
"Yes, I think I see what you mean – partly." The words came in slow ruminating tones. "Do you go very far?" she went on, in accents drolly apprehensive.
He laughed jovially. "There are no bombs. I'm married to Tora. Is it terrible that I don't go to church very often? Never, I'm bound to add in candour, if I can help it."
"I shall go while I'm here. Do you think it funny that I should suddenly propose myself for a visit?"
"To tell the truth, I didn't think Maxon would come."
"Or that I should come without him?"
"We pictured you pretty extensively married, I confess."
"So I was – so I am, I mean." She remembered her promise; she was not to mention her great resolve. But it struck her that the pledge would be hard to keep. Already the atmosphere of Shaylor's Patch suggested that her position was eminently one to talk over, to discuss with an open-minded sympathetic friend, to speculate about in all its bearings.
"But you mustn't think I'm absolutely hidebound," she went on. "I can think – and act – for myself." She was skirting the forbidden ground.
"I'm glad of it. Is Maxon?" There was a humorous twinkle behind his spectacles.
"Why are we to talk of Cyril when I've just begun my holiday?" Yet there was nothing else that she really wanted to talk about. Oh, that stupid promise! Of course she ought to have reserved the right to lay the case before her friends. But a promise is a promise, however stupid. That certainly would be Cyril's view; and it was hers. Was it, she wondered, the Shaylor's Patch view? Or might a question of ethics like that be to some extent "in solution"?
"He thinks me an awful reprobate?" Stephen asked.
She nodded, smiling.
"So they do down here, but my friends in London call me a very mild specimen. I expect some of them will turn up while you're here, and you'll be able to see for yourself."
"You don't mind being thought a reprobate down here?"
"Why should I? I don't want their society, any more than they want mine. I'm quite well off, and I've no ambitions." He laughed. "I'm ideally placed for defying the world, if I want to. It really needs no courage at all, and would bring me no martyr's crown."
"You mean it would be different if you had to work for your living?"
"Might be – or if I wanted to go in for public life, or anything of that kind."
"Or if you were a woman?"
"Well, if I were a woman who was sensitive about what society at large thought of her. That's one
