5

Gideon stopped writing, and took Jane’s last letter out of his pocket.  It occurred to him that he was in no sense answering it.  Not that Jane would mind; that wasn’t the sort of thing she did mind.  But it struck him suddenly how difficult it had grown to him to answer Jane’s letters—­or, indeed, any one else’s.  He could not flatter himself that he was already contracting the inarticulate habit, because he could pour forth fluently enough about his own experiences; but to Jane’s news of London he had nothing to say.  A new paper had been started; another paper had died; some one they knew had deserted from one literary coterie to another; some one else had turned from a dowdy into a nut; Jane had been seeing a lot of bad plays; her novel—­’my confused mass of self-expression,’ she called it to him—­was coming out next week.  All the familiar personal, literary, political, and social gossip, which he too had dealt in once; Jane was in the thick of it still, and he was turning stupid, like a man living in the country; he could not answer her.  Or, perhaps, would not; because the thing that absorbed him at present was how people lived and thought, and what could be made of them—­not the conscious, intellectual, writing, discussing, semi-civilised people (semi-civilised—­what an absurd word!  What is complete civilisation, that we should bisect it and say we have half, or any other exact fraction?  Partly civilised, Gideon amended it to), but the great unconscious masses, hardly civilised at all, who shape things, for good or evil, in the long run.

Gideon folded up Jane’s letter and put it away, and to his own added nothing but his love.

6

Jane got that letter in Easter week.  It was a fine warm day, and she, walking across Green Park, met Juke, who had been lunching with a bishop to meet an elderly princess who had read his book.

‘She said, “I’m afraid you’re sadly satirical, Mr. Juke,’” he told Jane.  ’She did really.  And I’m to preach at Sandringham one Sunday.  Yes, to the Family.  Tell Gideon that, will you.  He’ll be so disgusted.  But what a chance!  Life at St. Anne’s is going to be full of chances of slanging the rich, that’s one thing about it.’

‘Oh, you’re going to take it, then?’

‘Probably.  I’ve not written to accept yet, so don’t pass it on.’

’I’m glad.  It’s much more amusing to accept things, even livings.  It’ll be lovely:  you’ll be all among the clubs and theatres and the idle rich; much gayer than Covent Garden.’

‘Oh, gayer,’ said Juke.

They came out into Birdcage Walk, and there was a man selling the Evening Hustle, Lord Pinkerton’s evening paper.

‘Bloody massacres,’ he was observing with a kind of absent-minded happiness.  ’Bloody massacres in Russia, Ireland, Armenia, and the Punjab....  British journalist assassinated near Odessa.’

And there it was, too, in big black letters on the Evening Hustle placard:—­