Labrador (N.L.) -- Fiction; London (England) -- Fiction; Love stories, English
"Oh," said Trafford, "haven't you heard that before? He's the person who
gets excited by any deliberate discussion and gets up wringing his hands
and screaming, 'For Gawd's sake, let's _do_ something _now!_' I think
they used it first for Pethick Lawrence, that man who did so much to run
the old militant suffragettes and burke the proper discussion of woman's
future. You know. You used to have 'em in Chelsea--with their hats. Oh!
'Gawdsaking' is the curse of all progress, the hectic consumption that
kills a thousand good beginnings. You see it in small things and in
great. You see it in my life; Gawdsaking turned my life-work to cash and
promotions, Gawdsaking----Look at the way the aviators took to flying
for prizes and gate-money, the way pure research is swamped by
endowments for technical applications! Then that poor ghost-giant of an
idea the socialists have;--it's been treated like one of those unborn
lambs they kill for the fine skin of it, made into results before ever
it was alive. Was there anything more pitiful? The first great dream and
then the last phase! when your Aunt Plessington and the district
visitors took and used it as a synonym for Payment in Kind.... It's
natural, I suppose, for people to be eager for results, personal and
immediate results--the last lesson of life is patience. Naturally they
want reality, naturally! They want the individual life, something to
handle and feel and use and live by, something of their very own before
they die, and they want it now. But the thing that matters for the race,
Marjorie, is a very different thing; it is to get the emerging thought
process clear and to keep it clear--and to let those other hungers go.
We've got to go back to England on the side of that delay, that arrest
of interruption, that detached, observant, synthesizing process of the
mind, that solvent of difficulties and obsolescent institutions, which
is the reality of collective human life. We've got to go back on the
side of pure science--literature untrammeled by the preconceptions of
the social schemers--art free from the urgency of immediate utility--and
a new, a regal, a god-like sincerity in philosophy. And, above all,
we've got to stop this Jackdaw buying of yours, my dear, which is the
essence of all that is wrong with the world, this snatching at
everything, which loses everything worth having in life, this greedy
confused realization of our accumulated resources! You're going to be a
non-shopping woman now. You're to come out of Bond Street, you and your
kind, like Israel leaving the Egyptian flesh-pots. You're going to be
my wife and my mate.... Less of this service of things. Investments in
comfort, in security, in experience, yes; but not just spending any
more...."
He broke off abruptly with: "I want to go back and begin."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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