“From his saying to himself: ‘This is Flossie’s idea of a party. This is the sort of thing that, if I marry her, I am letting myself in for.’ If he hasn’t broken off the engagement already, we may be in time.”
He led the way to the piano. “Tell Madge I want her,” he whispered. He struck a few notes; and then in a voice that drowned every other sound in the room, struck up a comic song.
The effect was magical.
He followed it up with another. This one with a chorus, consisting chiefly of “Umpty Umpty Umpty Umpty Ay,” which was vociferously encored.
By the time it was done with, Madge had discovered a girl who could sing “Three Little Pigs;” and a sad, pale-faced gentleman who told stories. At the end of one of them Madge’s brother spoke to Joan in a tone more of sorrow than of anger.
“Hardly the sort of anecdote that a truly noble and high-minded young woman would have received with laughter,” he commented.
“Did I laugh?” said Joan.
“Your having done so unconsciously only makes the matter worse,” observed Mr. Singleton. “I had hoped it emanated from politeness, not enjoyment.”
“Don’t tease her,” said Madge. “She’s having an evening off.”
Joan and the Singletons were the last to go. They promised to show Mr. Halliday a short cut to his hotel in Holborn.
“Have you thanked Miss Lessing for a pleasant evening?” asked Mr. Singleton, turning to Mr. Halliday.
He laughed and put his arm round her. “Poor little woman,” he said. “You’re looking so tired. It was jolly at the end.” He kissed her.
He had passed through the swing doors; and they were standing on the pavement waiting for Joan’s bus.
“Why did we all like him?” asked Joan. “Even Miss Lavery. There’s nothing extraordinary about him.”
“Oh yes there is,” said Madge. “Love has lent him gilded armour. From his helmet waves her crest,” she quoted. “Most men look fine in that costume. Pity they can’t always wear it.”
The conductor seemed impatient. Joan sprang upon the step and waved her hand.
Joan was making herself a cup of tea when there came a tap at the door. It was Mrs. Phillips.
“I heard you come in,” she said. “You’re not busy, are you?”
“No,” answered Joan. “I hope you’re not. I’m generally in about this time; and it’s always nice to gossip over a dish of tea.”
“Why do you say ‘dish’ of tea!” asked Mrs. Phillips, as she lowered herself with evident satisfaction into the easy chair Joan placed for her.
“Oh, I don’t know,” laughed Joan. “Dr. Johnson always talked of a ‘dish’ of tea. Gives it a literary flavour.”
“I’ve heard of him,” said Mrs. Phillips. “He’s worth reading, isn’t he?”
“Well, he talked more amusingly than he wrote,” explained Joan. “Get Boswell’s Life of him. Or I’ll lend you mine,” she added, “if you’ll be careful of it. You’ll find all the passages marked that are best worth remembering. At least, I think so.”
“Thanks,” said Mrs. Phillips. “You see, as the wife of a public man, I get so little time for study.”
“Is it settled yet?” asked Joan. “Are they going to make room for him in the Cabinet?
“I’m afraid so,” answered Mrs. Phillips. “Oh, of course, I want him to,” she corrected herself. “And he must, of course, if the King insists upon it. But I wish it hadn’t all come with such a whirl. What shall I have to do, do you think?”
Joan was pouring out the tea. “Oh, nothing,” she answered, “but just be agreeable to the right people. He’ll tell you who they are. And take care of him.”
“I wish I’d taken more interest in politics when I was young,” said Mrs. Phillips. “Of course, when I was a girl, women weren’t supposed to.”
“Do you know, I shouldn’t worry about them, if I were you,” Joan advised her. “Let him forget them when he’s with you. A man can have too much of a good thing,” she laughed.
“I wonder if you’re right,” mused Mrs. Phillips. “He does often say that he’d just as soon I didn’t talk about them.”
Joan shot a glance from over her cup. The poor puzzled face was staring into the fire. Joan could almost hear him saying it.
“I’m sure I am,” she said. “Make home-coming a change to him. As you said yourself the other evening. It’s good for him to get away from it all, now and then.”
“I must try,” agreed Mrs. Phillips, looking up. “What sort of things ought I to talk to him about, do you think?”
Joan gave an inward sigh. Hadn’t the poor lady any friends of her own. “Oh, almost anything,” she answered vaguely: “so long as it’s cheerful and non-political. What used you to talk about before he became a great man?”
There came a wistful look into the worried eyes. “Oh, it was all so different then,” she said. “’E just liked to—you know. We didn’t seem to ’ave to talk. ’E was a rare one to tease. I didn’t know ’ow clever ’e was, then.”
It seemed a difficult case to advise upon. “How long have you been married?” Joan asked.
“Fifteen years,” she answered. “I was a bit older than ’im. But I’ve never looked my age, they tell me. Lord, what a boy ’e was! Swept you off your feet, like. ’E wasn’t the only one. I’d got a way with me, I suppose. Anyhow, the men seemed to think so. There was always a few ’anging about. Like flies round a ’oney-pot, Mother used to say.” She giggled. “But ’e wouldn’t take No for an answer. And I didn’t want to give it ’im, neither. I was gone on ’im, right enough. No use saying I wasn’t.”
“You must be glad you didn’t say No,” suggested Joan.
“Yes,” she answered, “’E’s got on. I always think of that little poem, ‘Lord Burleigh,’” she continued; “whenever I get worrying about myself. Ever read it?”
“Yes,” answered Joan. “He was a landscape painter, wasn’t he?”
“That’s the one,” said Mrs. Phillips. “I little thought I was letting myself in for being the wife of a big pot when Bob Phillips came along in ’is miner’s jacket.”
“You’ll soon get used to it,” Joan told her. “The great thing is not to be afraid of one’s fate, whatever it is; but just to do one’s best.” It was rather like talking to a child.
“You’re the right sort to put ’eart into a body. I’m glad I came up,” said Mrs. Phillips. “I get a bit down in the mouth sometimes when ’e goes off into one of ’is brown studies, and I don’t seem to know what ’e’s thinking about. But it don’t last long. I was always one of the light-’earted ones.”
They discussed life on two thousand a year; the problems it would present; and Mrs. Phillips became more cheerful. Joan laid herself out to be friendly. She hoped to establish an influence over Mrs. Phillips that should be for the poor lady’s good; and, as she felt instinctively, for poor Phillips’s also. It was not an unpleasing face. Underneath the paint, it was kind and womanly. Joan was sure he would like it better clean. A few months’ attention to diet would make a decent figure of her and improve her wind. Joan watched her spreading the butter a quarter of an inch thick upon her toast and restrained with difficulty the impulse to take it away from her. And her clothes! Joan had seen guys carried through the streets on the fifth of November that were less obtrusive.
She remembered, as she was taking her leave, what she had come for: which was to invite Joan to dinner on the following Friday.
“It’s just a homely affair,” she explained. She had recovered her form and was now quite the lady again. “Two other guests beside yourself: a Mr. Airlie—I am sure you will like him. He’s so dilletanty—and Mr. McKean. He’s the young man upstairs. Have you met him?”
Joan hadn’t: except once on the stairs when, to avoid having to pass her, he had gone down again and out into the street. From the doorstep she had caught sight of his disappearing coat-tails round the corner. Yielding to impishness, she had run after him, and his expression of blank horror when, glancing over his shoulder, he found her walking abstractedly three yards behind him, had gladdened all her evening.
Joan recounted the episode—so far as the doorstep.
“He tried to be shy with me,” said Mrs. Phillips, “but I wouldn’t let him. I chipped him out of it. If he’s going to write plays, as I told him, he will have to get over his fear of a petticoat.”
She offered her cheek, and Joan kissed it, somewhat gingerly.
“You won’t mind Robert not wearing evening dress,” she said. “He never will if he can help it. I shall just slip on a semi-toilette myself.”
Joan had difficulty in deciding on her own frock. Her four evening dresses, as she walked round them, spread out upon the bed, all looked too imposing, for what Mrs. Phillips had warned her would be a “homely affair.” She had one other, a greyish-fawn, with sleeves to the elbow, that she had had made expressly for public dinners and political At Homes. But that would be going to the opposite extreme, and might seem discourteous—to her hostess. Besides, “mousey” colours didn’t really suit her. They gave her a curious sense of being affected. In the end she decided to risk a black crêpe-de-chine, square cut, with a girdle of gold embroidery. There couldn’t be anything quieter than black, and the gold embroidery was of the simplest. She would wear it without any jewellery whatever: except just a star in her hair. The result, as she viewed the effect in the long glass, quite satisfied her. Perhaps the jewelled star did scintillate rather. It had belonged to her mother. But her hair was so full of shadows: it wanted something to relieve it. Also she approved the curved line of her bare arms. It was certainly very beautiful, a woman’s arm. She took her gloves in her hand and went down.
Mr. Phillips was not yet in the room. Mrs. Phillips, in apple-green with an ostrich feather in her hair, greeted her effusively, and introduced her to her fellow guests. Mr. Airlie was a slight, elegant gentleman of uncertain age, with sandy hair and beard cut Vandyke fashion. He asked Joan’s permission to continue his cigarette.
“You have chosen the better part,” he informed her, on her granting it. “When I’m not smoking, I’m talking.”
Mr. McKean shook her hand vigorously without looking at her.
“And this is Hilda,” concluded Mrs. Phillips. “She ought to be in bed if she hadn’t a naughty Daddy who spoils her.”
A lank, black-haired girl, with a pair of burning eyes looking out of a face that, but for the thin line of the lips, would have been absolutely colourless, rose suddenly from behind a bowl of artificial flowers. Joan could not suppress a slight start; she had not noticed her on entering. The girl came slowly forward, and Joan felt as if the uncanny eyes were eating her up. She made an effort and held out her hand with a smile, and the girl’s long thin fingers closed on it in a pressure that hurt. She did not speak.
“She only came back yesterday for the half-term,” explained Mrs. Phillips. “There’s no keeping her away from her books. ’Twas her own wish to be sent to boarding-school. How would you like to go to Girton and be a B.A. like Miss Allway?” she asked, turning to the child.
Phillips’s entrance saved the need of a reply. To the evident surprise of his wife he was in evening clothes.
“Hulloa. You’ve got ’em on,” she said.
He laughed. “I shall have to get used to them sooner or later,” he said.
Joan felt relieved—she hardly knew why—that he bore the test. It was a well-built, athletic frame, and he had gone to a good tailor. He looked taller in them; and the strong, clean-shaven face less rugged.
Joan sat next to him at the round dinner-table with the child the other side of him. She noticed that he ate as far as possible with his right hand—his hands were large, but smooth and well shaped—his left remaining under the cloth, beneath which the child’s right hand, when free, would likewise disappear. For a while the conversation consisted chiefly of anecdotes by Mr. Airlie. There were few public men and women about whom he did not know something to their disadvantage. Joan, listening, found herself repeating the experience of a night or two previous, when, during a performance ofHamlet, Niel Singleton, who was playing the grave-digger, had taken her behind the scenes. Hamlet, the King of Denmark and the Ghost were sharing a bottle of champagne in the Ghost’s dressing-room: it happened to be the Ghost’s birthday. On her return to the front of the house, her interest in the play was gone. It was absurd that it should be so; but the fact remained.
Mr. Airlie had lunched the day before with a leonine old gentleman who every Sunday morning thundered forth Social Democracy to enthusiastic multitudes on Tower Hill. Joan had once listened to him and had almost been converted: he was so tremendously in earnest. She now learnt that he lived in Curzon Street, Mayfair, and filled, in private life, the perfectly legitimate calling of a company promoter in partnership with a Dutch Jew. His latest prospectus dwelt upon the profits to be derived from an amalgamation of the leading tanning industries: by means of which the price of leather could be enormously increased.
It was utterly illogical; but her interest in the principles of Social Democracy was gone.
A very little while ago, Mr. Airlie, in his capacity of second cousin to one of the ladies concerned, a charming girl but impulsive, had been called upon to attend a family council of a painful nature. The gentleman’s name took Joan’s breath away: it was the name of one of her heroes, an eminent writer: one might almost say prophet. She had hitherto read his books with grateful reverence. They pictured for her the world made perfect; and explained to her just precisely how it was to be accomplished. But, as far as his own particular corner of it was concerned, he seemed to have made a sad mess of it. Human nature of quite an old-fashioned pattern had crept in and spoilt all his own theories.
Of course it was unreasonable. The sign-post may remain embedded in weeds: it notwithstanding points the way to the fair city. She told herself this, but it left her still short-tempered. She didn’t care which way it pointed. She didn’t believe there was any fair city.
There was a famous preacher. He lived the simple life in a small house in Battersea, and consecrated all his energies to the service of the poor. Almost, by his unselfish zeal, he had persuaded Joan of the usefulness of the church. Mr. Airlie frequently visited him. They interested one another. What struck Mr. Airlie most was the self-sacrificing devotion with which the reverend gentleman’s wife and family surrounded him. It was beautiful to see. The calls upon his moderate purse, necessitated by his wide-spread and much paragraphed activities, left but a narrow margin for domestic expenses: with the result that often the only fire in the house blazed brightly in the study where Mr. Airlie and the reverend gentleman sat talking: while mother and children warmed themselves with sense of duty in the cheerless kitchen. And often, as Mr. Airlie, who was of an inquiring turn of mind, had convinced himself, the only evening meal that resources would permit was the satisfying supper for one brought by the youngest daughter to her father where he sat alone in the small dining-room.
Mr. Airlie, picking daintily at his food, continued his stories: of philanthropists who paid starvation wages: of feminists who were a holy terror to their women folk: of socialists who travelled first-class and spent their winters in Egypt or Monaco: of stern critics of public morals who preferred the society of youthful affinities to the continued company of elderly wives: of poets who wrote divinely about babies’ feet and whose children hated them.
“Do you think it’s all true?” Joan whispered to her host.
He shrugged his shoulders. “No reason why it shouldn’t be,” he said. “I’ve generally found him right.”
“I’ve never been able myself,” he continued, “to understand the Lord’s enthusiasm for David. I suppose it was the Psalms that did it.”
Joan was about to offer comment, but was struck dumb with astonishment on hearing McKean’s voice: it seemed he could talk. He was telling of an old Scotch peasant farmer. A mean, cantankerous old cuss whose curious pride it was that he had never given anything away. Not a crust, nor a sixpence, nor a rag; and never would. Many had been the attempts to make him break his boast: some for the joke of the thing and some for the need; but none had ever succeeded. It was his one claim to distinction and he guarded it.
One evening it struck him that the milk-pail, standing just inside the window, had been tampered with. Next day he marked with a scratch the inside of the pan and, returning later, found the level of the milk had sunk half an inch. So he hid himself and waited; and at twilight the next day the window was stealthily pushed open, and two small, terror-haunted eyes peered round the room. They satisfied themselves that no one was about and a tiny hand clutching a cracked jug was thrust swiftly in and dipped into the pan; and the window softly closed.
He knew the thief, the grandchild of an old bedridden dame who lived some miles away on the edge of the moor. The old man stood long, watching the small cloaked figure till it was lost in the darkness. It was not till he lay upon his dying bed that he confessed it. But each evening, from that day, he would steal into the room and see to it himself that the window was left ajar.
After the coffee, Mrs. Phillips proposed their adjourning to the “drawing-room” the other side of the folding doors, which had been left open. Phillips asked her to leave Joan and himself where they were. He wanted to talk to her. He promised not to bore her for more than ten minutes.
The others rose and moved away. Hilda came and stood before Joan with her hands behind her.
“I am going to bed now,” she said. “I wanted to see you from what Papa told me. May I kiss you?”
It was spoken so gravely that Joan did not ask her, as in lighter mood she might have done, what it was that Phillips had said. She raised her face quietly, and the child bent forward and kissed her, and went out without looking back at either of them, leaving Joan more serious than there seemed any reason for. Phillips filled his pipe and lighted it.
“I wish I had your pen,” he said, suddenly breaking the silence. “I’m all right at talking; but I want to get at the others: the men and women who never come, thinking it has nothing to do with them. I’m shy and awkward when I try to write. There seems a barrier in front of me. You break through it. One hears your voice. Tell me,” he said, “are you getting your way? Do they answer you?”
“Yes,” said Joan. “Not any great number of them, not yet. But enough to show that I really am interesting them. It grows every week.”
“Tell them that,” he said. “Let them hear each other. It’s the same at a meeting. You wait ten minutes sometimes before one man will summon up courage to put a question; but once one or two have ventured they spring up all round you. I was wondering,” he added, “if you would help me; let me use you, now and again.”
“It is what I should love,” she answered. “Tell me what to do.” She was not conscious of the low, vibrating tone in which she spoke.
“I want to talk to them,” he said, “about their stomachs. I want them to see the need of concentrating upon the food problem: insisting that it shall be solved. The other things can follow.”
“There was an old Egyptian chap,” he said, “a governor of one of their provinces, thousands of years before the Pharaohs were ever heard of. They dug up his tomb a little while ago. It bore this inscription: ‘In my time no man went hungry.’ I’d rather have that carved upon my gravestone than the boastings of all the robbers and the butchers of history. Think what it must have meant in that land of drought and famine: only a narrow strip of river bank where a grain of corn would grow; and that only when old Nile was kind. If not, your nearest supplies five hundred miles away across the desert, your only means of transport the slow-moving camel. Your convoy must be guarded against attack, provided with provisions and water for a two months’ journey. Yet he never failed his people. Fat year and lean year: ‘In my time no man went hungry.’ And here, to-day, with our steamships and our railways, with the granaries of the world filled to overflowing, one third of our population lives on the border line of want. In India they die by the roadside. What’s the good of it all: your science and your art and your religion! How can you help men’s souls if their bodies are starving? A hungry man’s a hungry beast.
“I spent a week at Grimsby, some years ago, organizing a fisherman’s union. They used to throw the fish back into the sea, tons upon tons of it, that men had risked their lives to catch, that would have fed half London’s poor. There was a ‘glut’ of it, they said. The ‘market’ didn’t want it. Funny, isn’t it, a ‘glut’ of food: and the kiddies can’t learn their lessons for want of it. I was talking with a farmer down in Kent. The plums were rotting on his trees. There were too many of them: that was the trouble. The railway carriage alone would cost him more than he could get for them. They were too cheap. So nobody could have them. It’s the muddle of the thing that makes me mad—the ghastly muddle-headed way the chief business of the world is managed. There’s enough food could be grown in this country to feed all the people and then of the fragments each man might gather his ten basketsful. There’s no miracle needed. I went into the matter once with Dalroy of the Board of Agriculture. He’s the best man they’ve got, if they’d only listen to him. It’s never been organized: that’s all. It isn’t the fault of the individual. It ought not to be left to the individual. The man who makes a corner in wheat in Chicago and condemns millions to privation—likely enough, he’s a decent sort of fellow in himself: a kind husband and father—would be upset for the day if he saw a child crying for bread. My dog’s a decent enough little chap, as dogs go, but I don’t let him run my larder.
“It could be done with a little good will all round,” he continued, “and nine men out of every ten would be the better off. But they won’t even let you explain. Their newspapers shout you down. It’s such a damned fine world for the few: never mind the many. My father was a farm labourer: and all his life he never earned more than thirteen and sixpence a week. I left when I was twelve and went into the mines. There were six of us children; and my mother brought us up healthy and decent. She fed us and clothed us and sent us to school; and when she died we buried her with the money she had put by for the purpose; and never a penny of charity had ever soiled her hands. I can see them now. Talk of your Chancellors of the Exchequer and their problems! She worked herself to death, of course. Well, that’s all right. One doesn’t mind that where one loves. If they would only let you. She had no opposition to contend with—no thwarting and hampering at every turn—the very people you are working for hounded on against you. The difficulty of a man like myself, who wants to do something, who could do something, is that for the best part of his life he is fighting to be allowed to do it. By the time I’ve lived down their lies and got my chance, my energy will be gone.”
He knocked the ashes from his pipe and relit it.
“I’ve no quarrel with the rich,” he said. “I don’t care how many rich men there are, so long as there are no poor. Who does? I was riding on a bus the other day, and there was a man beside me with a bandaged head. He’d been hurt in that railway smash at Morpeth. He hadn’t claimed damages from the railway company and wasn’t going to. ‘Oh, it’s only a few scratches,’ he said. ‘They’ll be hit hard enough as it is.’ If he’d been a poor devil on eighteen shillings a week it would have been different. He was an engineer earning good wages; so he wasn’t feeling sore and bitter against half the world. Suppose you tried to run an army with your men half starved while your officers had more than they could eat. It’s been tried and what’s been the result? See that your soldiers have their proper rations, and the General can sit down to his six-course dinner, if he will. They are not begrudging it to him.
“A nation works on its stomach. Underfeed your rank and file, and what sort of a fight are you going to put up against your rivals. I want to see England going ahead. I want to see her workers properly fed. I want to see the corn upon her unused acres, the cattle grazing on her wasted pastures. I object to the food being thrown into the sea—left to rot upon the ground while men are hungry—side-tracked in Chicago, while the children grow up stunted. I want the commissariat properly organized.”
He had been staring through her rather than at her, so it had seemed to Joan. Suddenly their eyes met, and he broke into a smile.
“I’m so awfully sorry,” he said. “I’ve been talking to you as if you were a public meeting. I’m afraid I’m more used to them than I am to women. Please forgive me.”
The whole man had changed. The eyes had a timid pleading in them.
Joan laughed. “I’ve been feeling as if I were the King of Bavaria,” she said.
“How did he feel?” he asked her, leaning forward.
“He had his own private theatre,” Joan explained, “where Wagner gave his operas. And the King was the sole audience.”
“I should have hated that,” he said, “if I had been Wagner.”
He looked at her, and a flush passed over his boyish face.
“All right,” he said, “if it had been a queen.”
Joan found herself tracing patterns with her spoon upon the tablecloth. “But you have won now,” she said, still absorbed apparently with her drawing, “you are going to get your chance.”
He gave a short laugh. “A trick,” he said, “to weaken me. They think to shave my locks; show me to the people bound by their red tape. To put it another way, a rat among the terriers.”
Joan laughed. “You don’t somehow suggest the rat,” she said: “rather another sort of beast.”
“What do you advise me?” he asked. “I haven’t decided yet.”
They were speaking in whispered tones. Through the open doors they could see into the other room. Mrs. Phillips, under Airlie’s instructions, was venturing upon a cigarette.
“To accept,” she answered. “They won’t influence you—the terriers, as you call them. You are too strong. It is you who will sway them. It isn’t as if you were a mere agitator. Take this opportunity of showing them that you can build, plan, organize; that you were meant to be a ruler. You can’t succeed without them, as things are. You’ve got to win them over. Prove to them that they can trust you.”
He sat for a minute tattooing with his fingers on the table, before speaking.
“It’s the frills and flummery part of it that frightens me,” he said. “You wouldn’t think that sensitiveness was my weak point. But it is. I’ve stood up to a Birmingham mob that was waiting to lynch me and enjoyed the experience; but I’d run ten miles rather than face a drawing-room of well-dressed people with their masked faces and ironic courtesies. It leaves me for days feeling like a lobster that has lost its shell.”
“I wouldn’t say it, if I didn’t mean it,” answered Joan; “but you haven’t got to trouble yourself about that . . . You’re quite passable.” She smiled. It seemed to her that most women would find him more than passable.
He shook his head. “With you,” he said. “There’s something about you that makes one ashamed of worrying about the little things. But the others: the sneering women and the men who wink over their shoulder while they talk to you, I shall never be able to get away from them, and, of course, wherever I go—”
He stopped abruptly with a sudden tightening of the lips. Joan followed his eyes. Mrs. Phillips had swallowed the smoke and was giggling and spluttering by turns. The yellow ostrich feather had worked itself loose and was rocking to and fro as if in a fit of laughter of its own.
He pushed back his chair and rose. “Shall we join the others?” he said.
He moved so that he was between her and the other room, his back to the open doors. “You think I ought to?” he said.
“Yes,” she answered firmly, as if she were giving a command. But he read pity also in her eyes.
“Well, have you two settled the affairs of the kingdom? Is it all decided?” asked Airlie.
“Yes,” he answered, laughing. “We are going to say to the people, ‘Eat, drink and be wise.’”
He rearranged his wife’s feather and smoothed her tumbled hair. She looked up at him and smiled.
Joan set herself to make McKean talk, and after a time succeeded. They had a mutual friend, a raw-boned youth she had met at Cambridge. He was engaged to McKean’s sister. His eyes lighted up when he spoke of his sister Jenny. The Little Mother, he called her.
“She’s the most beautiful body in all the world,” he said. “Though merely seeing her you mightn’t know it.”
He saw her “home”; and went on up the stairs to his own floor.
Joan stood for a while in front of the glass before undressing; but felt less satisfied with herself. She replaced the star in its case, and took off the regal-looking dress with the golden girdle and laid it carelessly aside. She seemed to be growing smaller.
In her white night dress, with her hair in two long plaits, she looked at herself once more. She seemed to be no one of any importance at all: just a long little girl going to bed. With no one to kiss her good night.
She blew out the candle and climbed into the big bed, feeling very lonesome as she used to when a child. It had not troubled her until to-night. Suddenly she sat up again. She needn’t be back in London before Tuesday evening, and to-day was only Friday. She would run down home and burst in upon her father. He would be so pleased to see her.
She would make him put his arms around her.
She reached home in the evening. She thought to find her father in his study. But they told her that, now, he usually sat alone in the great drawing-room. She opened the door softly. The room was dark save for a flicker of firelight; she could see nothing. Nor was there any sound.
“Dad,” she cried, “are you here?”
He rose slowly from a high-backed chair beside the fire.
“It is you,” he said. He seemed a little dazed.
She ran to him and, seizing his listless arms, put them round her.
“Give me a hug, Dad,” she commanded. “A real hug.”
He held her to him for what seemed a long while. There was strength in his arms, in spite of the bowed shoulders and white hair.
“I was afraid you had forgotten how to do it,” she laughed, when at last he released her. “Do you know, you haven’t hugged me, Dad, since I was five years old. That’s nineteen years ago. You do love me, don’t you?”
“Yes,” he answered. “I have always loved you.”
She would not let him light the gas. “I have dined—in the train,” she explained. “Let us talk by the firelight.”
She forced him gently back into his chair, and seated herself upon the floor between his knees. “What were you thinking of when I came in?” she asked. “You weren’t asleep, were you?”
“No,” he answered. “Not that sort of sleep.” She could not see his face. But she guessed his meaning.
“Am I very like her?” she asked.
“Yes,” he answered. “Marvellously like her as she used to be: except for just one thing. Perhaps that will come to you later. I thought, for the moment, as you stood there by the door . . . ” He did not finish the sentence.
“Tell me about her,” she said. “I never knew she had been an actress.”
He did not ask her how she had learnt it. “She gave it up when we were married,” he said. “The people she would have to live among would have looked askance at her if they had known. There seemed no reason why they should.”
“How did it all happen?” she persisted. “Was it very beautiful, in the beginning?” She wished she had not added that last. The words had slipped from her before she knew.
“Very beautiful,” he answered, “in the beginning.”
“It was my fault,” he went on, “that it was not beautiful all through. I ought to have let her take up her work again, as she wished to, when she found what giving it up meant to her. The world was narrower then than it is now; and I listened to the world. I thought it another voice.”
“It’s difficult to tell, isn’t it?” she said. “I wonder how one can?”
He did not answer; and they sat for a time in silence.
“Did you ever see her act?” asked Joan.
“Every evening for about six months,” he answered. A little flame shot up and showed a smile upon his face.
“I owe to her all the charity and tenderness I know. She taught it to me in those months. I might have learned more if I had let her go on teaching. It was the only way she knew.”
Joan watched her as gradually she shaped herself out of the shadows: the poor, thin, fretful lady of the ever restless hands, with her bursts of jealous passion, her long moods of sullen indifference: all her music turned to waste.
“How did she come to fall in love with you?” asked Joan. “I don’t mean to be uncomplimentary, Dad.” She laughed, taking his hand in hers and stroking it. “You must have been ridiculously handsome, when you were young. And you must always have been strong and brave and clever. I can see such a lot of women falling in love with you. But not the artistic woman.”
“It wasn’t so incongruous at the time,” he answered. “My father had sent me out to America to superintend a contract. It was the first time I had ever been away from home, though I was nearly thirty; and all my pent-up youth rushed out of me at once. It was a harum-scarum fellow, mad with the joy of life, that made love to her; not the man who went out, nor the man who came back. It was at San Francisco that I met her. She was touring the Western States; and I let everything go to the wind and followed her. It seemed to me that Heaven had opened up to me. I fought a duel in Colorado with a man who had insulted her. The law didn’t run there in those days; and three of his hired gunmen, as they called them, held us up that night in the train and gave her the alternative of going back with them and kissing him or seeing me dead at her feet. I didn’t give her time to answer, nor for them to finish. It seemed a fine death anyhow, that. And I’d have faced Hell itself for the chance of fighting for her. Though she told me afterwards that if I’d died she’d have gone back with them, and killed him.”
Joan did not speak for a time. She could see him grave—a little pompous, in his Sunday black, his footsteps creaking down the stone-flagged aisle, the silver-edged collecting bag held stiffly in his hand.
“Couldn’t you have saved a bit, Daddy?” she asked, “of all that wealth of youth—just enough to live on?”
“I might,” he answered, “if I had known the value of it. I found a cable waiting for me in New York. My father had been dead a month; and I had to return immediately.”
“And so you married her and took her drum away from her,” said Joan. “Oh, the thing God gives to some of us,” she explained, “to make a little noise with, and set the people marching.”
The little flame died out. She could feel his body trembling.
“But you still loved her, didn’t you, Dad?” she asked. “I was very little at the time, but I can just remember. You seemed so happy together. Till her illness came.”
“It was more than love,” he answered. “It was idolatry. God punished me for it. He was a hard God, my God.”
She raised herself, putting her hands upon his shoulders so that her face was very close to his. “What has become of Him, Dad?” she said. She spoke in a cold voice, as one does of a false friend.
“I do not know,” he answered her. “I don’t seem to care.”
“He must be somewhere,” she said: “the living God of love and hope: the God that Christ believed in.”
“They were His last words, too,” he answered: “‘My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken me?’”
“No, not His last,” said Joan: “‘Lo, I am with you always, even unto the end of the world.’ Love was Christ’s God. He will help us to find Him.”
Their arms were about one another. Joan felt that a new need had been born in her: the need of loving and of being loved. It was good to lay her head upon his breast and know that he was glad of her coming.
He asked her questions about herself. But she could see that he was tired; so she told him it was too important a matter to start upon so late. She would talk about herself to-morrow. It would be Sunday.
“Do you still go to the chapel?” she asked him a little hesitatingly.
“Yes,” he answered. “One lives by habit.”
“It is the only Temple I know,” he continued after a moment. “Perhaps God, one day, will find me there.”
He rose and lit the gas, and a letter on the mantelpiece caught his eye.
“Have you heard from Arthur?” he asked, suddenly turning to her.
“No. Not since about a month,” she answered. “Why?”
“He will be pleased to find you here, waiting for him,” he said with a smile, handing her the letter. “He will be here some time to-morrow.”
Arthur Allway was her cousin, the son of a Nonconformist Minister. Her father had taken him into the works and for the last three years he had been in Egypt, helping in the laying of a tramway line. He was in love with her: at least so they all told her; and his letters were certainly somewhat committal. Joan replied to them—when she did not forget to do so—in a studiously sisterly vein; and always reproved him for unnecessary extravagance whenever he sent her a present. The letter announced his arrival at Southampton. He would stop at Birmingham, where his parents lived, for a couple of days, and be in Liverpool on Sunday evening, so as to be able to get straight to business on Monday morning. Joan handed back the letter. It contained nothing else.
“It only came an hour or two ago,” her father explained. “If he wrote to you by the same post, you may have left before it arrived.”
“So long as he doesn’t think that I came down specially to see him, I don’t mind,” said Joan.
They both laughed. “He’s a good lad,” said her father.
They kissed good night, and Joan went up to her own room. She found it just as she had left it. A bunch of roses stood upon the dressing-table. Her father would never let anyone cut his roses but himself.
Young Allway arrived just as Joan and her father had sat down to supper. A place had been laid for him. He flushed with pleasure at seeing her; but was not surprised.
“I called at your diggings,” he said. “I had to go through London. They told me you had started. It is good of you.”
“No, it isn’t,” said Joan. “I came down to see Dad. I didn’t know you were back.” She spoke with some asperity; and his face fell.
“How are you?” she added, holding out her hand. “You’ve grown quite good-looking. I like your moustache.” And he flushed again with pleasure.
He had a sweet, almost girlish face, with delicate skin that the Egyptian sun had deepened into ruddiness; with soft, dreamy eyes and golden hair. He looked lithe and agile rather than strong. He was shy at first, but once set going, talked freely, and was interesting.
His work had taken him into the Desert, far from the beaten tracks. He described the life of the people, very little different from what it must have been in Noah’s time. For months he had been the only white man there, and had lived among them. What had struck him was how little he had missed all the paraphernalia of civilization, once he had got over the first shock. He had learnt their sports and games; wrestled and swum and hunted with them. Provided one was a little hungry and tired with toil, a stew of goat’s flesh with sweet cakes and fruits, washed down with wine out of a sheep’s skin, made a feast; and after, there was music and singing and dancing, or the travelling story-teller would gather round him his rapt audience. Paris had only robbed women of their grace and dignity. He preferred the young girls in their costume of the fourteenth dynasty. Progress, he thought, had tended only to complicate life and render it less enjoyable. All the essentials of happiness—love, courtship, marriage, the home, children, friendship, social intercourse, and play, were independent of it; had always been there for the asking.
Joan thought his mistake lay in regarding man’s happiness as more important to him than his self-development. It was not what we got out of civilization but what we put into it that was our gain. Its luxuries and ostentations were, in themselves, perhaps bad for us. But the pursuit of them was good. It called forth thought and effort, sharpened our wits, strengthened our brains. Primitive man, content with his necessities, would never have produced genius. Art, literature, science would have been stillborn.
He hesitated before replying, glancing at her furtively while crumbling his bread. When he did, it was in the tone that one of her younger disciples might have ventured into a discussion with Hypatia. But he stuck to his guns.
How did she account for David and Solomon, Moses and the Prophets? They had sprung from a shepherd race. Yet surely there was genius, literature. Greece owed nothing to progress. She had preceded it. Her thinkers, her poets, her scientists had draws their inspiration from nature, not civilization. Her art had sprung full grown out of the soil. We had never surpassed it.
“But the Greek ideal could not have been the right one, or Greece would not so utterly have disappeared,” suggested Mr. Allway. “Unless you reject the law of the survival of the fittest.”
He had no qualms about arguing with his uncle.
“So did Archimedes disappear,” he answered with a smile. “The nameless Roman soldier remained. That was hardly the survival of the fittest.”
He thought it the tragedy of the world that Rome had conquered Greece, imposing her lower ideals upon the race. Rome should have been the servant of Greece: the hands directed by the brain. She would have made roads and harbours, conducted the traffic, reared the market place. She knew of the steam engine, employed it for pumping water in the age of the Antonines. Sooner or later, she would have placed it on rails, and in ships. Rome should have been the policeman, keeping the world in order, making it a fit habitation. Her mistake was in regarding these things as an end in themselves, dreaming of nothing beyond. From her we had inherited the fallacy that man was made for the world, not the world for man. Rome organized only for man’s body. Greece would have legislated for his soul.
They went into the drawing-room. Her father asked her to sing and Arthur opened the piano for her and lit the candles. She chose some ballads and a song of Herrick’s, playing her own accompaniment while Arthur turned the leaves. She had a good voice, a low contralto. The room was high and dimly lighted. It looked larger than it really was. Her father sat in his usual chair beside the fire and listened with half-closed eyes. Glancing now and then across at him, she was reminded of Orchardson’s picture. She was feeling sentimental, a novel sensation to her. She rather enjoyed it.
She finished with one of Burns’s lyrics; and then told Arthur that it was now his turn, and that she would play for him. He shook his head, pleading that he was out of practice.
“I wish it,” she said, speaking low. And it pleased her that he made no answer but to ask her what he should sing. He had a light tenor voice. It was wobbly at first, but improved as he went on. They ended with a duet.
The next morning she went into town with them. She never seemed to have any time in London, and wanted to do some shopping. They joined her again for lunch and afterwards, at her father’s suggestion, she and Arthur went for a walk. They took the tram out of the city and struck into the country. The leaves still lingered brown and red upon the trees. He carried her cloak and opened gates for her and held back brambles while she passed. She had always been indifferent to these small gallantries; but to-day she welcomed them. She wished to feel her power to attract and command. They avoided all subjects on which they could differ, even in words. They talked of people and places they had known together. They remembered their common love of animals and told of the comedies and tragedies that had befallen their pets. Joan’s regret was that she had not now even a dog, thinking it cruel to keep them in London. She hated the women she met, dragging the poor little depressed beasts about at the end of a string: savage with them, if they dared to stop for a moment to exchange a passing wag of the tail with some other little lonely sufferer. It was as bad as keeping a lark in a cage. She had tried a cat: but so often she did not get home till late and that was just the time when the cat wanted to be out; so that they seldom met. He suggested a parrot. His experience of them was that they had no regular hours and would willingly sit up all night, if encouraged, and talk all the time. Joan’s objection to running a parrot was that it stamped you as an old maid; and she wasn’t that, at least, not yet. She wondered if she could make an owl really happy. Minerva had an owl.
He told her how one spring, walking across a common, after a fire, he had found a mother thrush burnt to death upon her nest, her charred wings spread out in a vain endeavour to protect her brood. He had buried her there among the blackened thorn and furze, and placed a little cross of stones above her.
“I hope nobody saw me,” he said with a laugh. “But I couldn’t bear to leave her there, unhonoured.”
“It’s one of the things that make me less certain than I want to be of a future existence,” said Joan: “the thought that animals can have no part in it; that all their courage and love and faithfulness dies with them and is wasted.”
“Are you sure it is?” he answered. “It would be so unreasonable.”
They had tea at an old-fashioned inn beside a stream. It was a favourite resort in summer time, but now they had it to themselves. The wind had played pranks with her hair and he found a mirror and knelt before her, holding it.
She stood erect, looking down at him while seeming to be absorbed in the rearrangement of her hair, feeling a little ashamed of herself. She was “encouraging” him. There was no other word for it. She seemed to have developed a sudden penchant for this sort of thing. It would end in his proposing to her; and then she would have to tell him that she cared for him only in a cousinly sort of way—whatever that might mean—and that she could never marry him. She dared not ask herself why. She must manoeuvre to put it off as long as possible; and meanwhile some opening might occur to enlighten him. She would talk to him about her work; and explain to him how she had determined to devote her life to it to the exclusion of all other distractions. If, then, he chose to go on loving her—or if he couldn’t help it—that would not be her fault. After all, it did him no harm. She could always be gracious and kind to him. It was not as if she had tricked him. He had always loved her. Kneeling before her, serving her: it was evident it made him supremely happy. It would be cruel of her to end it.
The landlady entered unexpectedly with the tea; but he did not rise till Joan turned away, nor did he seem disconcerted. Neither did the landlady. She was an elderly, quiet-eyed woman, and had served more than one generation of young people with their teas.
They returned home by train. Joan insisted on travelling third class, and selected a compartment containing a stout woman and two children. Arthur had to be at the works. An important contract had got behindhand and they were working overtime. She and her father dined alone. He made her fulfil her promise to talk about herself, and she told him all she thought would interest him. She passed lightly over her acquaintanceship with Phillips. He would regard it as highly undesirable, she told herself, and it would trouble him. He was reading her articles in theSunday Post, as also her Letters from Clorinda: and of the two preferred the latter as being less subversive of law and order. Also he did not like seeing her photograph each week, displayed across two columns with her name beneath in one inch type. He supposed he was old-fashioned. She was getting rather tired of it herself.
“The Editor insisted upon it,” she explained. “It was worth it for the opportunity it gives me. I preach every Sunday to a congregation of over a million souls. It’s better than being a Bishop. Besides,” she added, “the men are just as bad. You see their silly faces everywhere.”
“That’s like you women,” he answered with a smile. “You pretend to be superior; and then you copy us.”
She laughed. But the next moment she was serious.
“No, we don’t,” she said, “not those of us who think. We know we shall never oust man from his place. He will always be the greater. We want to help him; that’s all.”
“But wasn’t that the Lord’s idea,” he said; “when He gave Eve to Adam to be his helpmeet?”
“Yes, that was all right,” she answered. “He fashioned Eve for Adam and saw that Adam got her. The ideal marriage might have been the ideal solution. If the Lord had intended that, he should have kept the match-making in His own hands: not have left it to man. Somewhere in Athens there must have been the helpmeet God had made for Socrates. When they met, it was Xanthippe that she kissed.”
A servant brought the coffee and went out again. Her father lighted a cigar and handed her the cigarettes.
“Will it shock you, Dad?” she asked.
“Rather late in the day for you to worry yourself about that, isn’t it?” he answered with a smile.
He struck a match and held it for her. Joan sat with her elbows on the table and smoked in silence. She was thinking.
Why had he never “brought her up,” never exacted obedience from her, never even tried to influence her? It could not have been mere weakness. She stole a sidelong glance at the tired, lined face with its steel-blue eyes. She had never seen them other than calm, but they must have been able to flash. Why had he always been so just and kind and patient with her? Why had he never scolded her and bullied her and teased her? Why had he let her go away, leaving him lonely in his empty, voiceless house? Why had he never made any claim upon her? The idea came to her as an inspiration. At least, it would ease her conscience. “Why don’t you let Arthur live here,” she said, “instead of going back to his lodgings? It would be company for you.”
He did not answer for some time. She had begun to wonder if he had heard.
“What do you think of him?” he said, without looking at her.
“Oh, he’s quite a nice lad,” she answered.
It was some while again before he spoke. “He will be the last of the Allways,” he said. “I should like to think of the name being continued; and he’s a good business man, in spite of his dreaminess. Perhaps he would get on better with the men.”
She seized at the chance of changing the subject.
“It was a foolish notion,” she said, “that of the Manchester school: that men and women could be treated as mere figures in a sum.”
To her surprise, he agreed with her. “The feudal system had a fine idea in it,” he said, “if it had been honestly carried out. A master should be the friend, the helper of his men. They should be one family.”
She looked at him a little incredulously, remembering the bitter periods of strikes and lock-outs.
“Did you ever try, Dad?” she asked.
“Oh, yes,” he answered. “But I tried the wrong way.” “The right way might be found,” he added, “by the right man, and woman.”
She felt that he was watching her through his half-closed eyes. “There are those cottages,” he continued, “just before you come to the bridge. They might be repaired and a club house added. The idea is catching on, they tell me. Garden villages, they call them now. It gets the men and women away from the dirty streets; and gives the children a chance.”
She knew the place. A sad group of dilapidated little houses forming three sides of a paved quadrangle, with a shattered fountain and withered trees in the centre. Ever since she could remember, they had stood there empty, ghostly, with creaking doors and broken windows, their gardens overgrown with weeds.
“Are they yours?” she asked. She had never connected them with the works, some half a mile away. Though had she been curious, she might have learnt that they were known as “Allway’s Folly.”
“Your mother’s,” he answered. “I built them the year I came back from America and gave them to her. I thought it would interest her. Perhaps it would, if I had left her to her own ways.”
“Why didn’t they want them?” she asked.
“They did, at first,” he answered. “The time-servers and the hypocrites among them. I made it a condition that they should be teetotallers, and chapel goers, and everything else that I thought good for them. I thought that I could save their souls by bribing them with cheap rents and share of profits. And then the Union came, and that of course finished it.”
So he, too, had thought to build Jerusalem.
“Yes,” he said. “I’ll sound him about giving up his lodgings.”
Joan lay awake for a long while that night. The moon looked in at the window. It seemed to have got itself entangled in the tops of the tall pines. Would it not be her duty to come back—make her father happy, to say nothing of the other. He was a dear, sweet, lovable lad. Together, they might realize her father’s dream: repair the blunders, plant gardens where the weeds now grew, drive out the old sad ghosts with living voices. It had been a fine thought, a “King’s thought.” Others had followed, profiting by his mistakes. But might it not be carried further than even they had gone, shaped into some noble venture that should serve the future.
Was not her America here? Why seek it further? What was this unknown Force, that, against all sense and reason, seemed driving her out into the wilderness to preach. Might it not be mere vanity, mere egoism. Almost she had convinced herself.
And then there flashed remembrance of her mother. She, too, had laid aside herself; had thought that love and duty could teach one to be other than one was. The Ego was the all important thing, entrusted to us as the talents of silver to the faithful servant: to be developed, not for our own purposes, but for the service of the Master.
One did no good by suppressing one’s nature. In the end it proved too strong. Marriage with Arthur would be only repeating the mistake. To be worshipped, to be served. It would be very pleasant, when one was in the mood. But it would not satisfy her. There was something strong and fierce and primitive in her nature—something that had come down to her through the generations from some harness-girded ancestress—something impelling her instinctively to choose the fighter; to share with him the joy of battle, healing his wounds, giving him of her courage, exulting with him in the victory.
The moon had risen clear of the entangling pines. It rode serene and free.
Her father came to the station with her in the morning. The train was not in: and they walked up and down and talked. Suddenly she remembered: it had slipped her mind.
“Could I, as a child, have known an old clergyman?” she asked him. “At least he wouldn’t have been old then. I dropped into Chelsea Church one evening and heard him preach; and on the way home I passed him again in the street. It seemed to me that I had seen his face before. But not for many years. I meant to write you about it, but forgot.”
He had to turn aside for a moment to speak to an acquaintance about business.
“Oh, it’s possible,” he answered on rejoining her. “What was his name?”
“I do not know,” she answered. “He was not the regular Incumbent. But it was someone that I seemed to know quite well—that I must have been familiar with.”
“It may have been,” he answered carelessly, “though the gulf was wider then than it is now. I’ll try and think. Perhaps it is only your fancy.”
The train drew in, and he found her a corner seat, and stood talking by the window, about common things.
“What did he preach about?” he asked her unexpectedly.
She was puzzled for the moment. “Oh, the old clergyman,” she answered, recollecting. “Oh, Calvary. All roads lead to Calvary, he thought. It was rather interesting.”
She looked back at the end of the platform. He had not moved.
A pile of correspondence was awaiting her and, standing by the desk, she began to open and read it. Suddenly she paused, conscious that someone had entered the room and, turning, she saw Hilda. She must have left the door ajar, for she had heard no sound. The child closed the door noiselessly and came across, holding out a letter.
“Papa told me to give you this the moment you came in,” she said. Joan had not yet taken off her things. The child must have been keeping a close watch. Save for the signature it contained but one line: “I have accepted.”
Joan replaced the letter in its envelope, and laid it down upon the desk. Unconsciously a smile played about her lips.
The child was watching her. “I’m glad you persuaded him,” she said.
Joan felt a flush mount to her face. She had forgotten Hilda for the instant.
She forced a laugh. “Oh, I only persuaded him to do what he had made up his mind to do,” she explained. “It was all settled.”
“No, it wasn’t,” answered the child. “Most of them were against it. And then there was Mama,” she added in a lower tone.
“What do you mean,” asked Joan. “Didn’t she wish it?”
The child raised her eyes. There was a dull anger in them. “Oh, what’s the good of pretending,” she said. “He’s so great. He could be the Prime Minister of England if he chose. But then he would have to visit kings and nobles, and receive them at his house, and Mama—” She broke off with a passionate gesture of the small thin hands.
Joan was puzzled what to say. She knew exactly what she ought to say: what she would have said to any ordinary child. But to say it to this uncannily knowing little creature did not promise much good.
“Who told you I persuaded him?” she asked.
“Nobody,” answered the child. “I knew.”
Joan seated herself, and drew the child towards her.
“It isn’t as terrible as you think,” she said. “Many men who have risen and taken a high place in the world were married to kind, good women unable to share their greatness. There was Shakespeare, you know, who married Anne Hathaway and had a clever daughter. She was just a nice, homely body a few years older than himself. And he seems to have been very fond of her; and was always running down to Stratford to be with her.”
“Yes, but he didn’t bring her up to London,” answered the child. “Mama would have wanted to come; and Papa would have let her, and wouldn’t have gone to see Queen Elizabeth unless she had been invited too.”
Joan wished she had not mentioned Shakespeare. There had surely been others; men who had climbed up and carried their impossible wives with them. But she couldn’t think of one, just then.
“We must help her,” she answered somewhat lamely. “She’s anxious to learn, I know.”
The child shook her head. “She doesn’t understand,” she said. “And Papa won’t tell her. He says it would only hurt her and do no good.” The small hands were clenched. “I shall hate her if she spoils his life.”
The atmosphere was becoming tragic. Joan felt the need of escaping from it. She sprang up.
“Oh, don’t be nonsensical,” she said. “Your father isn’t the only man married to a woman not as clever as himself. He isn’t going to let that stop him. And your mother’s going to learn to be the wife of a great man and do the best she can. And if they don’t like her they’ve got to put up with her. I shall talk to the both of them.” A wave of motherliness towards the entire Phillips family passed over her. It included Hilda. She caught the child to her and gave her a hug. “You go back to school,” she said, “and get on as fast as you can, so that you’ll be able to be useful to him.”
The child flung her arms about her. “You’re so beautiful and wonderful,” she said. “You can do anything. I’m so glad you came.”
Joan laughed. It was surprising how easily the problem had been solved. She would take Mrs. Phillips in hand at once. At all events she should be wholesome and unobtrusive. It would be a delicate mission, but Joan felt sure of her own tact. She could see his boyish eyes turned upon her with wonder and gratitude.
“I was so afraid you would not be back before I went,” said the child. “I ought to have gone this afternoon, but Papa let me stay till the evening.”
“You will help?” she added, fixing on Joan her great, grave eyes.
Joan promised, and the child went out. She looked pretty when she smiled. She closed the door behind her noiselessly.
It occurred to Joan that she would like to talk matters over with Greyson. There was “Clorinda’s” attitude to be decided upon; and she was interested to know what view he himself would take. Of course he would be on P---’s side. TheEvening Gazettehad always supported the “gas and water school” of socialism; and to include the people’s food was surely only an extension of the principle. She rang him up and Miss Greyson answered, asking her to come round to dinner: they would be alone. And she agreed.
The Greysons lived in a small house squeezed into an angle of the Outer Circle, overlooking Regent’s Park. It was charmingly furnished, chiefly with old Chippendale. The drawing-room made quite a picture. It was home-like and restful with its faded colouring, and absence of all show and overcrowding. They sat there after dinner and discussed Joan’s news. Miss Greyson was repairing a piece of old embroidery she had brought back with her from Italy; and Greyson sat smoking, with his hands behind his head, and his long legs stretched out towards the fire.
“Carleton will want him to make his food policy include Tariff Reform,” he said. “If he prove pliable, and is willing to throw over his free trade principles, all well and good.”
“What’s Carleton got to do with it?” demanded Joan with a note of indignation.
He turned his head towards her with an amused raising of the eyebrows. “Carleton owns two London dailies,” he answered, “and is in treaty for a third: together with a dozen others scattered about the provinces. Most politicians find themselves, sooner or later, convinced by his arguments. Phillips may prove the exception.”
“It would be rather interesting, a fight between them,” said Joan. “Myself I should back Phillips.”
“He might win through,” mused Greyson. “He’s the man to do it, if anybody could. But the odds will be against him.”
“I don’t see it,” said Joan, with decision.
“I’m afraid you haven’t yet grasped the power of the Press,” he answered with a smile. “Phillips speaks occasionally to five thousand people. Carleton addresses every day a circle of five million readers.”
“Yes, but when Phillips does speak, he speaks to the whole country,” retorted Joan.
“Through the medium of Carleton and his like; and just so far as they allow his influence to permeate beyond the platform,” answered Greyson.
“But they report his speeches. They are bound to,” explained Joan.
“It doesn’t read quite the same,” he answered. “Phillips goes home under the impression that he has made a great success and has roused the country. He and millions of other readers learn from the next morning’s headlines that it was ‘A Tame Speech’ that he made. What sounded to him ‘Loud Cheers’ have sunk to mild ‘Hear, Hears.’ That five minutes’ hurricane of applause, during which wildly excited men and women leapt upon the benches and roared themselves hoarse, and which he felt had settled the whole question, he searches for in vain. A few silly interjections, probably pre-arranged by Carleton’s young lions, become ‘renewed interruptions.’ The report is strictly truthful; but the impression produced is that Robert Phillips has failed to carry even his own people with him. And then follow leaders in fourteen widely-circulated Dailies, stretching from the Clyde to the Severn, foretelling how Mr. Robert Phillips could regain his waning popularity by the simple process of adopting Tariff Reform: or whatever the pet panacea of Carleton and Co. may, at the moment, happen to be.”
“Don’t make us out all alike,” pleaded his sister with a laugh. “There are still a few old-fashioned papers that do give their opponents fair play.”
“They are not increasing in numbers,” he answered, “and the Carleton group is. There is no reason why in another ten years he should not control the entire popular press of the country. He’s got the genius and he’s got the means.”
“The cleverest thing he has done,” he continued, turning to Joan, “is yourSunday Post. Up till then, the working classes had escaped him. With theSunday Post, he has solved the problem. They open their mouths; and he gives them their politics wrapped up in pictures and gossipy pars.”
Miss Greyson rose and put away her embroidery. “But what’s his object?” she said. “He must have more money than he can spend; and he works like a horse. I could understand it, if he had any beliefs.”
“Oh, we can all persuade ourselves that we are the Heaven-ordained dictator of the human race,” he answered. “Love of power is at the bottom of it. Why do our Rockefellers and our Carnegies condemn themselves to the existence of galley slaves, ruining their digestions so that they never can enjoy a square meal. It isn’t the money; it’s the trouble of their lives how to get rid of that. It is the notoriety, the power that they are out for. In Carleton’s case, it is to feel himself the power behind the throne; to know that he can make and unmake statesmen; has the keys of peace and war in his pocket; is able to exclaim: Public opinion? It is I.”