Potterism | Page 4

small and subordinate job with a firm of publishers, and
hopes also to contribute to an obscure weekly paper run by a friend of
his.'
'Oh,' said Mrs. Frank. 'Not one of your papers, pater? Can't be, if it's
obscure, can it?'
'No, not one of my papers. A periodical called, I believe, the _Weekly
Comment_, with which you may or may not be familiar.'
'Never heard of it, I'm afraid,' Mrs. Frank confessed, truly. 'Why don't
you go on to one of the family concerns, Johnny? You'd get on much
quicker there, with pater to shove you.'
'Probably,' Johnny agreed.
'My papers,' said Mr. Potter dryly, 'are not quite up to Johnny's
intellectual level. Nor Jane's. Neither do they accord with their political
sympathies.'
'Oh, I forgot you two were silly old Socialists. Never mind, that'll pass
when they grow up, won't it, Frank?'
Secretly, Mrs. Frank thought that the twins had the disease because the

Potter family, however respectable now, wasn't really 'top-drawer.'
Funny old pater had, every one knew, begun his career as a reporter on
a provincial paper. If funny old pater had been just a shade less clever
or enterprising, his family would have been educated at grammar
schools and gone into business in their teens. Of course, Mrs. Potter
had pulled the social level up a bit; but what, if you came to that, had
Mrs. Potter been? Only the daughter of a country doctor; only the
underpaid secretary of a lady novelist, for all she was so conceited now.
So naturally Socialism, that disease of the underbred, had taken hold of
the less careful of the Potter young.
'And are you going to write for this weekly what-d'you-call-it too,
Jane?' Mrs. Frank inquired.
'No. I've not got a job yet. I'm going to look round a little first.'
'Oh, that's sense. Have a good time at home for a bit. Well, it's time you
had a holiday, isn't it? I wish old Frank could. He's working like an old
horse. He may slave himself to death for those Pimlico pigs, for all any
of them care. It's never "thank you"; it's always "more, more, more,"
with them. That's your Socialism, Johnny.'
The twins got on very well with their sister-in-law, but thought her a
fool. When, as she was fond of doing, she mentioned Socialism, they,
rightly believing her grasp of that economic system to be even less
complete than that of most people, always changed the subject.
But on this occasion they did not have time to change it before Clare
said, 'Mother's writing a novel about Socialism. She shows it up like
anything.'
Mrs. Potter smiled.
'I confess I am trying my hand at the burning subject. But as for
showing it up--well, I am being fair to both sides, I think. I don't feel I
can quite condemn it wholesale, as Peggy does. I find it very difficult

to treat anything like that--I can't help seeing all round a thing. I'm told
it's a weakness, and that I should get on better if I saw everything in
black and white, as so many people do, but it's no use my trying to alter,
at my time of life. One has to write in one's own way or not at all.'
'Anyhow,' said Clare, 'it's going to be a ripping book, _Socialist Cecily_;
quite one of your best, mother.'
Clare had always been her mother's great stand-by in the matter of
literature. She was also useful as a touchstone, as what her mother did
not call a foolometer. If a book went with Clare, it went with Leila
Yorke's public beyond. Mr. Potter was a less satisfactory reader; he
regarded his wife's books as goods for sale, and his comments were,
'That should go all right. That's done it,' which attitude, though
commercially helpful, was less really satisfying to the creator than
Clare's uncritical absorption in the characters and the story. Clare was,
in fact, the public, while Mr. Potter was more the salesman.
And the twins were neither, but more like the less agreeable type of
reviewer, when they deigned to read or comment on their mother's
books at all, which was not always. Johnny's attitude towards his
mother suggested that he might say politely, if she mentioned her books,
'Oh, do you write? Why?' Mrs. Potter was rather sadly aware that she
made no appeal to the twins. But then, as Clare reminded her, the twins,
since they had gone to Oxford, never admitted that they cared for any
books that normal people cared for. They were like that; conceited and
contrary.
To change the subject (so many subjects are the better for being
changed, as all those who know family life will agree) Jane said,
'Johnny and I are going