But as night followed day, the same automatic process went on...But if it was automatic, he imagined his son saying, then why talk to me like this? — Ah, Jack would reply, but you have to be better, don't you see? You have to, otherwise it's all at an end, it's finished, can't you see that? Can't you see that this process where one generation springs, virginal and guiltless — or so it sees itself — out of its debased predecessors, with everything new to learn, makes it inevitable that there must soon be division, and self-righteousness, and vituperation? Can't you see that that has happened to your lot? There are a dozen small newspapers, a dozen because of their differences. But suppose there had been one or two? There are a dozen little groups, each jealously defending their differences of dogma on policy, sec, history. Suppose there had been just one?
But of course there could not be only one, history showed there could not — history showed this, clearly, to those who were prepared to study history. But the young did not study history, because history began with them. Exactly as history had begun with Jack and his friends.
But the world could no longer afford this... The fantasy did not culminate in satisfactory emotion, in an embrace, for instance, between father and son; it ended in a muddle of dull thoughts. Because the fantasy had become increasingly painful, Jack had recently developed it in a way which was less personal — less challenging, less real? He had been thinking that he could discuss all these thoughts with the Old Guard and afterwards there could perhaps be a conference? Yes, there might be a confrontation, or something of that kind, between the Old Guard and the New Young. Things could be said publicly which never seemed to get themselves said privately? It could all be thrashed out and then... meanwhile there was the funeral to get through.
That night, Friday, the one before the funeral, no sooner had he gone to sleep than he dreamed. It was not the same dream, that of the night in the hotel room, but it came as it were out of the same area. A corridor, long, dark, narrow, led to the place of the first dream, but at its entrance stood a female figure which at first he believed was his mother as a young woman. He believed this because of what he felt, which was an angry shame and inadequacy: these emotions were associated for him with some childhood experience which he supposed he must have suppressed; sometimes he thought he was on the point of remembering it. The figure wore a straight white dress with loose lacy sleeves. It had been his mothers dress, but both Elizabeth and Carrie had worn it 'for fun'. This monitor was at the same time his mother and his daughters, and she was directing him forward into the darkness of the tunnel.
His wife was switching on lights and looking at him with concern. He soothed her back to sleep, and for the second night running left his bed soon after he had got into it to read the night away and listen to radio stations from all over the world.
Next morning he travelled to the airport in light fog, to find the flight delayed. He had left himself half an hours free play, and in half an hour the flight was called and he was airborne, floating west inside grey cloud that was his inner state. He who had flown unmoved through the skies of most countries of the would, and in every kind of weather, was feeling claustrophobic, and had to suppress wanting to batter his way out of the plane to run away across the mists and fogs of this upper country. He made himself think of something else: returned to the fantasy about the Conference. He imagined the scene, the hall packed to the doors, the platform manned by the well-known among the various generations of socialists. He saw himself there, with Walter on one side and his son on the other. He imagined how he, or Walter, would speak, explaining to the young that the survival of the world depended on them, that they had the chance to break this cycle of having to repeat and repeat experience: they could be the first generation consciously to take a decision to look at history, to absorb it, and in one bound to transcend it. It would be like a willed mutation.
He imagined the enthusiasm of the Conference — a sober and intelligent enthusiasm of course. He imagined the ending of the Conference when... and here his experience took hold of him, and told him what would happen. In the first place, only some of the various socialist groups would be at the Conference. Rare people, indeed, would be prepared to give up the hegemony of their little groups to something designed to end little groups. The Conference would throw up some strong personalities who would energize and lead: but very soon these would disagree and become enemies and form rival movements. In no time at all, this movement to end schism would have added to it. As always happened. So, if this was what Jack knew was bound to happen, why did he... They were descending through heavy cloud. There was heavy rain in S_. The taxi crawled through slow traffic. By now he knew he would not be in time to reach the cemetery. If he had really wanted to make sure of being at the funeral he would have come down last night. Why hadn't he? He might as well go back now for all the good he was doing; but he went on. At the cemetery the funeral was over. Two young men were shovelling earth into the hole at the bottom of which lay his father: like the men in the street who continually dig up and rebury drains and pipes and wires. He took the same taxi back to the house in the church precincts, where he found Mrs Markham tidying the rooms ready to hold the last years of another man or woman, and his brother Cedric sorting out the old man's papers. Cedric was crisp: he quite understood the delay; he too would have been late for the funeral if he had not taken the precaution of booking rooms in the Royal Arms. But both he and Ellen had been there, with his wife and Ellen's husband. Also Ann. It would have been nice if Jack had been there, but it didn't matter.
It was now a warm day, all fog forgotten. Jack found a suitable flight back to London. High in sunlight he wondered if his father had felt as if he had not heir? He had been a lawyer: Cedric had succeeded him. In his youth he had defended labour agitators, conscientious objectors, taken on that kind of case: from religious conviction, not from social feeling. Well, did it make any difference why a thing was done, if it was done? This thought, seditious of everything Jack believed, lodged in his head — and did not show signs of leaving. It occurred to Jack that perhaps the old man had seen himself as his heir, and not Cedric, who had always been so cautious and respectable? Well, he would not know what his father had thought: he had missed his chance to find out.
Perhaps he could talk to Ann and find out what the old man had been thinking? The feebleness of this deepened the inadequacy which was undermining him — an inadequacy which seemed to come from the dream of the female in a white dress. Why had that dream fitted his two lovely daughters into that stern unforgiving figure? He dozed, but kept waking himself for fear of dreaming. That he was now in brilliant sunshine over a floor of shining white cloud so soon after the flight through fog, dislocated his sense of time, of continuity even more: it was four days ago that he had had that telegram from Mrs Markham?
They ran into fog again above Heathrow, and had to crawl around in the air fog half an hour before they could land. It was now four, and the Twenty-Four-Hour Fast had begun at two. He decided he would not join them, but he would drop in and explain why not.