Christian, observing his celebrated cousin by daylight for the first time, perceived the necessity of revising some of the previous night’s impressions.
Under the illumination of the shaded lamp and the glowing bank of peat on the study hearth, Emanuel in his velvet jacket and slippered ease had seemed a delicately refined creature, of so ethereal a type that life for it outside the atmosphere of books, and of a library’s thought and talk, would be unnatural, or even impossible. With his back to the afternoon sunshine, however, and with rough, light clothes suggesting fresh-air exercise, Emanuel was a different person.
In stature he was a trifle taller than Christian; perhaps he was also something heavier, but what the newcomer noted most about the figure was the wiry vigor of muscular energy indicated in all its lines and movements. There was apparent no trace of any physical resemblance to his father, the massive Lord Julius, and Christian, as this fact occurred to him, remembered what he had heard about the race from which the mother had come. He could not say that Emanuel’s face was like anything which he had thought of as distinctively Jewish. The forehead was both broad and prominent, and at the top, where early baldness exposed the conformation of the skull, there were curious sutural irregularities of surface which attracted attention. The rest of the face was indefinably distinguished in effect, but not so remarkable. Christian thought now that it was a more virile countenance than he had imagined it to be. Vague suggestions of the scholarly dreamer flitted through its expressions now and again, but it was still above all things the face of a man of action.
Christian had said to himself, in that crowded instant of analysis, that he had never seen any Jewish face which at all resembled this of his cousin’s. Yet somewhere he had seen a face so like it!—the memory puzzled and absorbed his mind. The same crisping, silky black-brown hair; the same full line of brow and nose; the same wide-open dark eyes, intently comprehending in their steady gaze—how strangely familiar they were to him! He saw them again in his mind’s eye, and they had the same shadow-casting background of sunlight—only as he looked at the mental picture, this sunlight was fiercer and hotter, and there was a golden, hazy distance of purple-blue sea. Suddenly he laughed aloud, and his brain was alive with recollections.
“I never recognized you last night,” he declared. “Is it not strange that I should have been so blind? But seeing you in the sunlight—ah, I remember you well enough.”
Emanuel smiled too, a little awkwardly. “Of course I was not making any secret of it,” he said. “It would have come up naturally, sooner or later, in the course of talk.”
But Christian had turned to the lady, and was speaking with gay animation. “He it is whom I have so often thought of, for years now, as the ‘mysterious stranger’ of my poor little romance. How long is it ago? Oh, ten years perhaps, since I saw him first. It was at Toulon, and I was walking along the quai in the late afternoon, and he stopped me to ask some question, and we fell to walking together and talking—at first about the old town, then of myself, because he wished it so. A long time passed, and lo! I saw him again. This time he came into Salvator’s little shop at Cannes—it was in the Rue d’Oran—and I was alone, and we talked again—it seems to me for more than an hour. And I wondered always who he could be—because he made me feel that he had friendly thoughts about me. And then, once more—it was a year ago last summer—he met me again, and came and sat beside me on a seat in the Jardin Public, at Nice. It must have been in June, for the season was ended, and it surprised me that he should be there.”
“Oh, yes, I know all about it,” put in Kathleen. “He told me of his seeing you, and what he thought of you, almost as soon as your back was turned. But at that time, of course—things hadn’t happened.”
“Ah, but he wanted to be kind to me, even then,” the young man broke forth, with a glow in his eyes. “I felt that in his tone, the very first time, when I was the young boy at school. Oh, I puzzled my brain very often about this young English gentleman who liked to talk to me. And here is a curious thing, that when the Credit Lyonnais gave me my summons to come to England, it was of him that I thought first of all, and wondered if he had not some part in it. And then I was so dull—I come to his own house, and sit at his own table with him as my cousin, and do not know him at all! It is true that he had no beard then—but none the less I am ashamed.” He spread his hands out and smiled a deprecatory gesture at them both as he added: “But then everything has been upside down in my mind since I came to England. It has been as if I were going up the side of a straight cliff in a funicular railway—my heart throbbing in terror, my brain whirling—afraid to look down, or out, or to realize where I was. But to-day I am happily at the end of the journey, and the good safe ground is well under my feet—and so I am not confused any more, but only very, very glad.”
The elder couple exchanged a frankly delighted smile over the enthusiast’s head. “You take him for a stroll about the place,” said the wife. “Perhaps I will come and find you, later on.”
In obedience to the suggestion, the two men turned, and went off together across the lawn.
Emanuel began speaking at once. “My father,” he said, “has given me a rough outline of what you have seen and heard. In the nature of things, it could not all be pleasant.”
“Oh, I have quite forgotten the unhappy parts,” the young man declared. “I resolved to do that; it would be folly to remember them.”
“They have their uses, though,” persisted the other. “I wanted you to start out with just that impression of the family’s seamy side. We have an immense deal to make up to the people about us, and to humanity in general, have we Torrs. It seemed to me that you could not realize this too early in your experience here. What impressions did Caermere itself make upon you?”
Christian hesitated a little, to give form to his thoughts. “I am imagining it in my mind,” he said at last, slowly, and with extended hands to shape his meaning to the eye, “as a huge canvas, one of the very biggest. As it happens, there is an unpleasant picture on it now, but that can be wiped out, covered over, and then on the vast blank surface a new and splendid picture may be painted—if I have the skill to do it.” He paused, as his companion nodded comprehension of the figure, and then added abruptly: “I have not put the question direct before—but it is really the case that I am to succeed my grandfather—to be duke of Glastonbury, is it not?”
“Yes,” answered Emanuel, gravely. “That is the case.”
“Lord Julius told me to ask you everything,” Christian went on in defense of his curiosity. “But, grand Dieu! there is so much to ask! Shall I be a rich man, also? There are dukes in France who can scarcely give a dinner to a friend—and in Italy who are often in doubt about even their own dinners. I understand that English dukes are different—but it has been said to me that my grandfather, for example, is not a rich man. He would be rich, no doubt, in some other station, but as a duke he is poor. Shall I also be poor?”
Emanuel smiled, more, it seemed, to himself than for the benefit of the young man. With amusing deliberation he took from his pocket a little oblong book with flexible covers. “Have you ever owned a checkbook?” he asked drily.
Christian shook his head.
“Well, this is yours. It came from London this morning. I have written here on the back of the first check, on the part that remains in the book, these figures. They show what the bank holds at your disposal at the present moment.”
Christian took the book, and stared with awe at the figures indicated. “Three thousand pounds! That is to say, seventy-five thousand francs! But—I do not understand. What portion is this of my entire fortune? There is more besides—to come at some future period—n’est ce pas?”
The sum itself had seemed at first glance to be of bewildering dimensions. Soberer second thoughts, however, told him that he had been lifted into a social stratum where such an amount might easily come and go a number of times during one’s life.
“Well,” Emanuel began, hesitating in turn over his phrases, “strictly speaking, you have no fortune at all. This money has been placed to your credit by my father—or if you like, by us both—to put you in a position of independence for the time being. You are quite free to spend it as you like. But—this is a somewhat delicate matter to explain—but we look to you in turn to be more or less guided by us in, say, your mode of life, your choice of associates and—and so on. Don’t think that we wish in the least to hamper your individual freedom. I am sure you will feel that that is not our way. But we have formed very high hopes indeed for your career and—how shall I make you understand?—it rests a good deal with us to say how far the realization of these hopes warrants us in going on. That isn’t plain to you, I see. Well, to put it frankly, you have nothing of your own, but we turn our money over to you because we believe in you. If unhappily—let us suppose the very improbable case—we should find ourselves no longer believing in you, why then we should feel free to reconsider our financial responsibilities towards you. That is stating it very baldly—not at all as I should like to have put it—but it gives you the essence of the situation.”
They had paused, and Christian regarded him with a troubled face. “Then if you come not to like me, or if I make mistakes, you take everything away from me again? I have never heard of a system like that. It seems to place me in a very strange position.”
The youth’s mobile countenance expressed such wistful dejection, as he faltered out these words, that Emanuel hastened to reassure him.
“No, no,” he urged, putting a brotherly hand on his shoulder, “it is the fault entirely of the way I explained it. No one will ever take anything away from you. In all human probability you will live and die a wealthy and powerful nobleman—and perhaps something a good deal more than that. But let me show you the situation in another way. You have seen your grandfather—so I need say little about him. When he had reached the age of fifty or thereabouts he had come to the end of his resources. Since the estates were entailed, nothing could be sold or mortgaged, and debts of all sorts were crowding in upon him and his eldest son, Lord Porlock. They were at their wits’ end to keep going at all; Porlock could not hold his head up in London, much less marry, as he was expected to do. If it had not been for the invention of life insurance, they could hardly have found money to live from week to week. That was in 1858 or ’9, when I was two or three years old. It was then that my father adopted his policy toward the older branch of the family. As you perhaps know, he was a very rich man. He came forward at this juncture, and saved the duke and his household from ruin.”
“That was very noble of him. It is what I should have thought he would do,” interposed Christian. They had begun walking again.
“Oh, I don’t know that noble is quite the word,” said Emanuel. “The element of generosity was not very conspicuous in the transaction. The truth is that the duke and his son were not people that one could be generous to. They had to be bound to a hard-and-fast bargain. They agreed between them to break the entail, so that all the estates could be dealt with as was deemed best, and bound themselves to sell or mortgage nothing except to my father, unless with his consent. He on his side settled seventy thousand pounds on Porlock and his heirs, thus enabling him to marry, and he not only purchased from the duke the Somerset properties, of which this is a part, but he bought up his debts at the sacrifice of a good many thousands of pounds, so that in practice he became his brother’s only creditor. No doubt therewasgenerosity in that—since he cut down the rate of interest to something almost nominal by comparison with the usury that had been going on—but his motive was practical enough. It was to get complete financial mastery of the family estates. Nearly forty years have passed since he began; to-day he holds mortgages on practically every acre. If it were not for the mine near Coalbrook, which latterly yields the duke a certain surplus over the outlay at Caermere, my father would probably own it all outright. Well, you have followed it so far, haven’t you?”
Christian thoughtfully nodded his head. “These are not affairs that I have been brought up to understand,” he commented, “but I think I comprehend. Only this—you speak of your father’s adopted policy; that means he has a purpose—an aim. The lady at the castle—Lady Cressage—spoke to me about this, and I wish—”
“Ah, yes, you met her,” interposed
Emanuel. “I am not sure she was the best fitted to expound our policy to you.”
“Oh, she was very sympathetic,” the young man hastened to insist. “She had the warmest praises for both you and your father. And I could not but feel she wished me well, too.”
Emanuel made no immediate reply, but walked slowly along, revolving silent thoughts, with a far-away, deliberative look in his eyes. When he spoke at last, it was to revert with abruptness to the earlier topic. “The policy, as we are calling it,” he said, “can be put in a nutshell. We take that kind of pride in the family which impels us to resolve that, if we cannot induce it to do great things, we will at least prevent it doing base things. The position which your grandfather inherited was one of remarkable opportunities, and also of exceptional responsibilities. He was unfit to do anything with the opportunities, and as for the responsibilities, he regarded them with only ignorant contempt. His immediate heirs were very little better. It became a problem with us, therefore, how best to limit their power for harm. Money was the one force they could understand and respect, and we have used it accordingly. I say ‘we’ because as the situation has gradually developed itself, it is hard to say which part of it is my father’s and which mine—and still more impossible to imagine what either of us would have done independently of my mother. I will tell you more about her sometime. It was she, of course, who brought the money to us, but she brought much else besides. However, we will not enter upon that at the moment. Well, suddenly, last summer, the deaths changed everything. Up to that time, what we had been doing had had, so to speak, only a negative purpose. We had been keeping unfit people from parading their unfitness in too scandalously public a fashion. But all at once the possibility of doing something positive—something which might be very fine indeed—was opened up before us. As you know now, we were aware of your existence, but there were inquiries to be made as to—well, as to the formal validity of your claim. After that, there was some slight delay in tracing your whereabouts—but now you are here, at last.”
“Now I am here, at last!” Christian repeated softly. He looked up into the sky; somewhere from the blue an invisible lark filled the air with its bubbling song. He drew a long breath of amazed content, then turned to his companion.
“That men like you and your father should be making plans and sacrifices for one like myself,” he said—“it is hard for me to realize it. There is nothing for me to say but this—that I will spare no thought or labor to be what you want me to be. And you will make it all clear to me, will you not? in every detail what it is I am to do?”
“Oh, hardly to that length,” said Emanuel. He smiled once more—that grave, sweet, introspective smile of his, which suggested humor as little as it did flippancy—and spoke more freely, as if conscious that the irksome part of his task lay behind him. “We dream a great dream of you, but it would be folly to attempt to dictate to you at every stage of its realization. That would do you more harm than good, and it would be unfair to both parties, into the bargain. No, what I desire is to show you the practical workings of a system, and to fill you with the principles and spirit of that system. I think it will interest you deeply, and I hope you will see your way to making it, in its essentials at least, your own. It has taken me many years to build it up, and I can’t pretend to suppose that you will grasp it in a week or a year. But you will see at least the aim I have in view, and you will get a notion of how I progress toward it. I shall be satisfied, for the time being, merely to commend it to your judgment as the aim which you might do well to set before you. It occurs to me to ask you: have you decided opinions in politics?”
Christian shrugged his shoulders diffidently. “In France my friends were of many parties, but since I thought never of myself as a Frenchman, I did not take sides with any of them. My brother Salvator is very advanced indeed; he is a Free Mason, and his friends are Carbonari in Italy and Socialists in France. But to me, these things had not much meaning. I said always to myself that I was English, and I read journals from London when I could, to learn about English parties. But it was not easy to learn. I stood in the streets often at Cannes in the early spring to see Mr. Gladstone when he passed, and to take off my hat to him, because I read that he was the greatest Englishman. But then I talked with English people on the Riviera about him, and they all cursed and ridiculed him, and told me that in England no respectable people would so much as speak to him. So it is very hard to know the truth—when you are born and bred in another country.”
“Even those who are born here do not invariably agree upon definitions of the truth,” commented Emanuel. “But I was not speaking of parties or politicians, so called. Politics, in its bigger sense, means the housekeeping of humanity—the whole mass of interests that the individuals of the human race have in common. But I don’t want to generalize to you. Let us stop here for a few minutes; I have brought you to this point that you may get the view.”
Their leisurely stroll through pastures and meadows, and latterly across a strip of grassy common dotted with sheep, had brought them by a gradual ascent to the summit of a knoll, crowned by a group of picturesquely gnarled and twisted old trees, the boughs of which were all pointed backward in the direction whence the men had come. Christian, coming to the ridge and halting, confronted the unexpected breeze, steady and sustained as an ocean swell, which he could hear murmuring through the land-ward bent branches overhead. In front of him, at the distance of a stone’s throw, the sloping heath abruptly ended in what for the instant he supposed was the sky-line—and then saw to be a vast glittering expanse of water, stretching off to an illimitable horizon.
“Oh, the sea!” he cried out, in surprised delight. “I had never dreamed that we were near it.”
He could distinguish now the faint intermittent rustle of the waves on the hidden beach far below. Perhaps a mile out the profile of a craft under full sail shone magically white in the sunlight. He knew it to be a yacht, and began watching it with an intuitive appreciation of its beauty of line and carriage. Then in a sudden impulse he swung around and faced his companion. “I do not like to look at it,” he broke out nervously. “I am afraid to see the ghosts of those cousins who were drowned—killed to make room for me. Where their yacht went down on the rocks—was that close by here?”
“At least sixty miles away—in that direction,” and Emanuel gave an indifferent nod towards the west. “I wouldn’t encourage ghosts of any sort, if I were you, but theirs would be least of all worth while. I wanted you to look about you from here—not specially seaward, but in all directions. There is a small village at the water’s edge, almost directly under our feet, which can’t be seen from above—we will get round to it, perhaps to-morrow—but look in other directions. As far as you can see along the coast to right and left—and inland, too—the system I spoke of is in operation. It is all my land. Get the scope of it into your mind. Roughly speaking, you can see over some nine or ten thousand acres. Imagine that multiplied by seven or eight, and you will have, an idea of the territory that your grandfather still owns—at least nominally.”
Christian kept a rapt gaze upon the prospect, and strove in silence to grasp the meaning of the words.
“On the land that you see before you,” Emanuel went on, “in one capacity or another, nearly two thousand human beings have homes. On your grandfather’s estates there must be nearly if not quite ten times that number. Think what this means. You will be in a position to affect the prosperity, the happiness, the well-being, body and soul, of fifteen or twenty thousand people. It is a little nation—a small kingdom—of which you will be the head.”
The young man turned slowly and forced himself to look out upon the deep, but still said nothing.
“This position you may make much of, or little, or worse than nothing at all,” the other continued. “It is a simple enough matter to put the work and the responsibility upon other shoulders, if you choose to do it. Many very respectable men born to such positions do wash their hands of the worry and labor in just that fashion. They lead idle lives, they amuse themselves, they take all that is yielded to them and give nothing in return—and because they avoid open grossness and scandal their behavior attracts no particular attention. In fact, it is quite taken for granted that they have done the natural thing. Being born to leisure, why should they toil? Possessing the title to wealth and dominion and the deference of those about them, why should they be expected to go to work and earn these things which they already own? That is the public view. Mine is very different. I hold that a man who has been born to a position of power among his fellows, and neglects the duties of that position while he accepts its rewards, is disgraced. It is as dishonest as any action for which less fortunate persons go to prison.”
“Yes, that is my feeling, also,” said Christian in low, earnest tones. “It’s all true—but—”
“Ah, yes, the ‘But,’” commented Emanuel, with his perceptive smile. “Now let me explain to you that I have met this ‘But,’ and done battle with it, and put it under my feet. I began planning for this struggle when I was very young. All the good people I knew admitted frankly the evils I speak of; they saw them quite clearly, and talked with eloquence and fine feeling about them, and at the finish they said ‘But!’—and changed the subject, and everything went on as before. It became apparent to me that this eternal ‘But’ is the enemy of the human race. There it stood forever in the path, blocking every attempt of benevolent and right-minded people to advance in real progress. So I said: at least one life shall be given to the task of proving that there need be no ‘But.’ I have been working here now for years, upon lines which were carefully thought out during other years of preparation. The results are in most respects better than I could have expected; they are certainly many-fold better than any one who had not my faith could have believed possible. Sundry limitations in the system I have, no doubt, discovered. Some things which seemed axiomatic on paper do not work themselves out the same way in practice—but as a whole the system is recognized now as having justified itself. There was an article in the ‘Fortnightly’ on it last November which I will give you to read. I have written some chapters upon certain phases of it, myself, which you might also look at. But the principal thing is that you should see the system itself in full operation.”
“I am eager to begin,” declared the young man, with fervor.
They had turned by tacit consent, and were sauntering back again over the short, soft grass of the heath.
Emanuel paused and picked from a furze-bush a belated spray of bright yellow blossoms. As he continued his walk, he pulled one of these flowers to pieces, and attentively examined the fragments.
“I gather that you are much interested in flowers,” said Christian, to make conversation.
The other laughed briefly, as he threw the stuff aside, then sighed a little. “Too much so,” he answered. “I wish I had the courage to give it up altogether. It murders my work. I spend sometimes whole hours in my greenhouses when I ought to be doing other things. The worst of it is that I realize perfectly the criminal waste of time—and still I persist in it. There is something quite mysterious in plants—especially if you have grown them yourself. You can go and stand among them by the hour, and look from one to another, with your mind entirely closed to thoughts of any description. I used to assume that this mental rest had a recuperative value, but as I get older I suspect that it is a kind of lethargy instead—a mere blankness that can grow upon one. I find myself, for example, going incessantly to see certain pans of my own hybridized seedlings—and staring aimlessly at them till I get quite empty-headed. Now, I am too busy a man to be able to afford that.”
“But if you get pleasure from it,” expostulated Christian, gently.
“We have no right to think of our pleasure,” Emanuel asserted with decision, “while any duty remains unperformed. And rightly considered, dutyispleasure, the very highest and noblest pleasure. The trouble is that even while our minds quite recognize this, our senses play us tricks. For example, when I saw how much time I was wasting on flowers, I tried to turn the impulse into a useful channel. The blossoms of fruit trees, for instance; the growth and flowering and seeding processes of melons and broad-beans and potatoes and so on, are just as interesting and worthy of study, and they mean value to humanity into the bargain. So I said I would concentrate my attention upon them, instead—but there was some perverse element in me somewhere; I couldn’t do it. The mere knowledge that these excellent vegetables were of practical utility threw me off altogether. They bored me—so I went shamefacedly back to the roses and fuchsias and dahlias.”
“They have wonderful dahlias at Caermere,” interposed Christian. “I walked for a long time among them with Lady Cressage, and she told me all their names. Poor lady, she is very sad, in spite of the flowers. I—I think I should like to say it to you—I find myself very sorry for her. And—such a bewildering number of things are to be done for me—is there not something that can be done for her?”
Emanuel walked slowly on in silence for some moments, regarding his companion’s profile out of the corner of his eye, his own face showing signs of preoccupation meantime. When at last he spoke, the question seemed to have lost itself in convolution of his thoughts.
“Considering their northern exposure,” he said meditatively, “they grow an extraordinary amount of fruit at Caermere.”
At the end of a fortnight Christian found himself able to confront the system, and even look it in the face, with a certain degree of mental composure. He was far from imagining that he had comprehended it all, but the thought of it no longer made his brain whirl by the magnitude of its scope, or frightened him by its daring. The implication that he was expected to do still more with it than Emanuel, its inventor and evangel, had done, possessed its terrors, no doubt, but one is not young for nothing. The buoyancy of youth, expanding genially amid these delightful surroundings, thrust these shadows off into the indefinite future, whenever they approached.
This system need not detain us long, or unnerve us at all. Lord Julius had spoken figuratively of it as the Pursuit of Happiness; perhaps that remains its best definition.
Like other systems, it was capable of explanation by means of formulas; but the most lucid and painstaking presentation of these could not hope to convey complete meaning to the mind. Stated in words, Emanuel’s plan hardly appealed to the imagination. Save for a few innovations, not of primary importance, it proceeded by arguments entirely familiar to everybody, and which indeed none disputes. Most of its propositions were the commonplaces of human speech and thought. The value of purity, of cheerfulness, of loyalty, of mercy—this is not gainsaid by any one. The conception of duty as the mainspring of human action is very old indeed. For this reason, doubtless, Emanuel’s efforts to expound his System by means of books had failed to rivet public attention. He could only insist afresh upon what was universally conceded, and Mr. Tupper before him had done enough of this to last several generations.
Viewed in operation, however, the System was another matter. Our immemorial platitudes, once clothed in flesh and blood, informed with life, and set in motion under the sympathetic control of a master mind, became unrecognizable.
Emanuel as a lad had thought much of the fact that he was of the blood of the Spinozas. When he learned Latin in his early boyhood, the task was sweetened and ennobled to his mind by the knowledge that it would bring him into communion with the actual words of the great man, his kinsman. Later, when he approached with veneration the study of these words, the discovery that they meant little or nothing to him was almost crushing in its effects. Eventually it dawned upon his brain that the philosopher’s abstractions and speculations were as froth on the top of the water; the great fact was the man himself—the serene, lofty, beautiful character which shines out at us from its squalid setting like a flawless gem. To be like Spinoza, but to give his mind to the real rather than the unreal, shaped itself as the goal of his ambitions.
It was at this period that he became impressed by the thought that he was also of the blood of the Torrs. On the one side the poor lens-grinder with the soul of an archangel; on the other the line of dull-browed, heavy-handed dukes, with a soul of any sort discoverable among them nowhere. Slowly the significance of the conjunction revealed itself to him. To take up the long-neglected burden of responsibilities and possibilities of the Torrs, with the courage and pure spirit of a Spinoza—there lay the duty of his life, plainly marked before him.
Ensuing years of reading, travel and reflection gave him the frame, so to speak, in which to put this picture. He had from his childhood been greatly attracted by the glimpses which his father’s library gave him of what is called the Mediaeval period. As he grew older, this taste became a passion. Where predilection ended and persuasion began, it would be hard to say, but when he had arrived at man’s estate, and stood upon the threshold of his life-work, it was with the deeply rooted conviction that the feudal stage had offered mankind its greatest opportunities for happiness and the higher life. That the opportunities had been misunderstood, wasted, thrown away, proved nothing against the soundness of his theory. He had masses of statistics as to wages, rent-rolls, endowments and the like at his fingers’ ends, to show that even on its reverse side, the medieval shield was not so black as it was painted. As for the other side—it was the age of the cathedrals, of the Book of Kells, of the great mendicant orders, of the saintly and knightly ideals. It was in its flowering time that craftsmanship attained its highest point, and the great artisan guilds, proud of their talents and afraid of nothing but the reproach of work ill-done, gave the world its magnificent possessions among the applied arts. Sovereigns and princes vied with one another to do honor to the noblest forms of art, and to bow to the intellect of an Erasmus, who had not even the name of a father to bear. Class caste was the rule of the earth, yet the son of a peasant like Luther could force himself to the top, and compel emperors to listen to him, more readily then than now. The bishop-princes of feudal England were as often as not the sons of swineherds or starveling clerks, whereas now no such thing could conceivably happen to the hierarchy. Above all things, it was the age of human character. Men like Thomas More, with their bewildering circle of attainments and their extraordinary individual force, were familiar products. In a thousand other directions, Emanuel saw convincing proofs that mankind then and there had come closest to the possibilities of a golden age. True, it had wandered off miserably again, into all manner of blind lanes and morasses, until it floundered now in a veritable Dismal Swamp of individualism, menaced on the one side by the millionaire slave-hunter, on the other by the spectral anarchist, and still the fools in its ranks cried out ceaselessly for further progress. Oh, blind leaders of the blind!
No. Emanuel saw clearly that humanity could right itself by retracing its steps, and going back to the scene of its mistaken choice of roads. It had taken the wrong turning when it forsook the path of coherent and interdependent organization—that marvelously intricate yet perfectly logical system called feudalism, in which everybody from king to serf had service to render and service to receive, and mutual duty was the law of the entire mechanism.
Though Christian heard much more than this, enough has been said to indicate the spirit in which Emanuel had embarked upon the realization of his plan. The results, as Christian wonderingly observed them, were remarkable.
The estate over which the System reigned was compact in shape, and enjoyed the advantage of natural boundaries, either of waste moorland or estuaries, which shut it off from the outside world, and simplified the problem of developing its individual character. In area it comprised nearly fifteen square miles, and upon it, as has been said, lived some two thousand people. About half of these were employed in, or dependent upon, the industrial occupations Emanuel had introduced; the others were more directly connected with the soil. Whether artisans or farmers, however, they lived almost without exception in some one of the six little villages on the property.
In each of these hamlets there were conserved one or more old timbered houses; the newer cottages had been built, not in servile imitation of these, but after equally old models, no two quite alike. As the “Fortnightly Review” article said, if the System had done nothing else it had “gathered for the instruction and delight of the intelligent observer almost a complete collection of examples of early English domestic architecture of the humbler sort.” The numerous roads upon the estate were kept in perfect order, and were for the most part lined with trees; where they passed through the villages they were of great width, with broad expanses of turf, shaded by big oaks or elms, some of which had been moved from other spots only a few years before, to the admiring surprise of the neighborhood. Each village had a small church edifice of its own, quaintly towered and beautiful in form, and either possessing or simulating skillfully the graces of antiquity as well. Beside the church was a building presenting some one or another type of the tolsey-house of old English towns, devoted to the communal uses of the villagers. About the church and the tolsey was the public garden and common, with a playground with swings and bars for the children at the back—and there was no grave or tombstone in sight anywhere. A hospitable, ivy-clad, low-gabled inn, with its long side to the street, was a conspicuous feature on each village green.
Christian retained a vivid recollection of entering one of these taverns with Emanuel, very early in his tour of observation. Above the broad, open door, as they went in, swung the cumbrous, brightly painted sign of “The Torr Arms.” Two or three laborers in corduroys were seated on benches at the table, with tankards before them; they dragged their heavily shod feet together on the sanded floor, and stood up, when they saw Emanuel, touching their hats with an air of affectionate humility as he smiled and nodded to them. There was a seemingly intelligent and capable landlady in the bar, who drew the two glasses of beer which Emanuel asked for, and answered cheerfully the questions he put to her. Two brightfaced young women, very neatly dressed, were seated sewing in this commodious bar, and they joined in the conversation which Emanuel raised. Christian gathered from what he heard and saw that his cousin took an active interest in the fortunes of this tavern and of both its inmates and its patrons, and that the interest and liking were warmly reciprocated. The discovery gave him a more genial conception of Emanuel’s character than he had hitherto entertained.
“That is one of my most satisfactory enterprises,” Emanuel had said when they came out. “We brew our own beer, as well as the few cordials which take the place of spirits, and I really feel sure it’s the best beer obtainable in England. I am very proud of it—but I am proud of these taverns of ours too. That was one of the hardest problems to be solved—but the solution satisfies me better, perhaps, than anything else I have done. Nobody ever dreams of getting drunk in these ‘pubs’ of ours. Nobody dreams of being ashamed to be seen going into them or coming out. The women and children enter them just as freely, if they have occasion to do so, as they would a dairy or grocer’s shop. They are the village clubs, so to speak, and they are constantly open to the whole village, as much as the church or the tolsey. But here is one of my parsons. I want you to take note of him—and I will tell you about his part in the System afterward. He is as interesting a figure in it as my publican.”
A tall, fresh-faced, fair young man approached them as Emanuel spoke, and was presented to the stranger as Father William. Christian observed him narrowly, as he had been bidden, but beyond the fact that he was clad in a somewhat outlandish fashion, and seemed a merry-hearted fellow, there was nothing noteworthy in the impression he produced. He stood talking for a few minutes, and then, with affable adieux, passed on.
“That is wholly my invention,” commented Emanuel, as they resumed their walk. “There is one of them in each of the six villages, and a seventh who has a kind of general function—and really I have been extraordinarily fortunate with them all. They come from my college at Oxford—Swithin’s—and when you think that twenty years ago it was the most bigoted hole in England, the change is most miraculous. These young men fell in with my ideas like magic. I don’t suppose you know much about the Church of England. Well, it drives with an extremely loose rein. You can do almost anything you like inside it, if you go about the thing decorously. I didn’t even have the trouble with the bishop which might have been expected. These young men—my curates, we may call them—have among themselves a kind of guild or confraternity. They are called Father William, or Father Alfred; they wear the sort of habit you have seen; they are quite agreed upon an irreducible minimum of dogmatic theology, and an artistic elaboration of the ritual, and, above all, upon an active life consecrated to good works. They have their own central chapter-house, where they live when they choose and feel like enjoying one another’s society, but each has his own village, for the moral and intellectual health of which he feels responsible. Without their constant and very capable oversight, the System would have a good many ragged edges, I’m afraid. But what they do is wonderful. They have made a study of all the different temperaments and natures among the people. They know just how to smooth away possible friction here, to encourage dormant energy there, to keep the whole thing tight and clean and sound. They specially watch the development of the children, and make careful notes of their qualities and capacities. They decide which are to be fully educated, and which are to be taught only to read and do sums.”
“I am not sure that I understand,” put in Christian. “Is not universal education a part of your plan?”
Emanuel smiled indulgently. “There was never grosser nonsense talked in this world,” he said, with the placid air of one long since familiar with the highest truths, “or more mischievous rubbish into the bargain, than this babble about universal education. The thing we call modern civilization is wrong at so many points that it is hard to say where it sins most, but often I think this is its worst offense. The race has gone fairly mad over this craze for stuffing unfit brains with encumbering and harmful twaddle. In the Middle Ages they knew better. The monks of a locality picked out the children whose minds would repay cultivation, and they taught these as much as it was useful for them to know. If the system was in honest operation, it mattered nothing whether these children belonged to the lord of the manor or the poorest peasant. Assume, for example, that there was a nobleman and one of his lowest dependents, and that each of them had a clever son and a dull one. The monks would take the two clever ones, and educate them side by side—and if in the end the base born boy had the finer mind of the two, and the stronger character, he would become the bishop or the abbot or the judge in preference to his noble school-fellow. On the other hand, the two dull boys were not wearied by schooling from which they could get no profit. The thick-headed young-noble, very often without even learning his alphabet, was put on a horse, and given a suit of armor and a sword; the heavy-witted young churl was given a leathern shirt and a pike or a bow, and bidden to follow behind that horse’s tail—and off the two happy dunces went, to fulfill in a healthful and intelligent fashion their manifest destiny. Those were the rational days when human institutions were made to fit human beings—instead of this modern lunacy of either shaving down and mangling the human being, or else blowing him up like a bladder, to make him appear to fit the institutions. Of course, you must understand, I don’t say that this medieval system worked uniformly, or perfectly, even at its best—and, of course, for a variety of reasons, it eventually failed to work altogether. But its principle, its spirit, was the right one—and it is only by getting back to it, and making another start with the light of experience to guide us this time, that we can achieve real progress. Fortunately, my parsons entered fully, and quite joyfully, into my feelings on this point. They couldn’t have labored harder, or better, to make the System a success if it had been of their own invention.”
“I have seen English parsons often,” said Christian, vaguely. “They are always married, n’est ce pas?”
“Oh, no—no!” answered Emanuel, with impatient emphasis. “That would never do here. It is difficult enough to find men fit to carry on the task we have undertaken. It would be asking too much of the miracle to expect also unique women who would bring help rather than confusion to such men. Oh, no—we take no risks of that sort. Celibacy is the very basis of their guild. It is very lucky that their own tastes run in that direction—because in any case it would have had to be insisted upon.”
Christian wondered if he ought to put into words the comment which rose in his mind. “But you, and your father,” he ventured—“you personally—”
“Ah,” interposed Emanuel, with a rapt softening of expression in face and tone, “when women like my mother and my wife appear—that lifts us away from the earth and things earthly, altogether. But they are as rare as a great poem—or a comet. If they were plentiful there would be no need of any System. The human race would never have fallen into the mud. We should all be angels.”
After a little pause he added: “The woman question here has been a very hard nut to crack. We have made some progress with it—but it is still one of the embarrassments. Of course there are others. The restless young men who leave the estate, for example, and having made a failure of it elsewhere, come back to make mischief here: That is an awkward subject to deal with. The whole problem of our relations to outsiders is full of perplexities. To prevent intercourse with them is out of the question. They come and go as they like—and of course my own people are equally free. I can’t see my way to any restrictions which wouldn’t do more harm than good—if indeed they could be enforced at all. I have to rely entirely upon the good sense and good feeling of my people, to show them how much better off they are in every way than any other community they know of, and how important it is for them to keep themselves to themselves, and continue to benefit by their good fortune. If they fail to understand this, I am quite powerless to coerce them. And that is where the women give us trouble. It is the rarest thing for us to have any difficulty with the men. They comprehend their advantages, they take a warm interest in their work, and we have developed among them a really fine communal spirit. They are proud of the System, and fond of it, and I can trust them to defend it and stand by it. But this isn’t true of all the women. You have always the depressing consciousness that there are treacherous malcontents among them, who smile to your face but are planning disturbance behind your back. It is not so much a matter of evil natures as of inferior brains. Let a soldier in a red coat come along, for example—an utterly ignorant and vulgar clown from heaven knows what gutter or pigsty—and we have girls here who would secretly value his knowledge of the world, and his advice upon things in general, abovemine!Howcanyou deal with that sort of mind?”
Christian smiled drolly, and disclaimed responsibility with a playful outward gesture of his hands. “It is not my subject,” he declared.
“But it has to be faced,” insisted Emanuel. “My wife has devoted incredible labor and pains to it—and on the surface of things she has succeeded wonderfully. I say the surface, because that is the sinister peculiarity of the affair; you can never be sure what is underneath. When you go up to London, you must do as I have done since I was a youth: take a walk of a bright afternoon along Regent Street and Oxford Street, where the great millinery and drapers’ and jewelers’ shops are, and study the faces of the thousands of well-dressed and well-connected women whom you will see passing from one show-window to another. There will be many beautiful faces, and many more which are deeply interesting. But one note you will catch in them all—or at least in the vast majority—the note of furtiveness. Once you learn to recognize it you will find it everywhere—the suggestion of something hidden, something artfully wrapped up out of sight. God knows, I don’t suggest they all have guilty secrets—or for that matter secrets of any sort. But they have the trained facial capacity for concealment; it is their commonest accomplishment; their mothers’ fingers have been busy kneading their features into this mask of pretense from their earliest girlhood.”
“Would you not find it also on the men’s faces?” demanded Christian, with a dissolving mental vision of sly masculine visages before him as he spoke. “That is to say, when once you had learned to detect the male variation of the mask? And even if it is so, then is not the reason of it this—that men have long been their own masters, making their own laws, doing freely what they choose, and there is no one before whom they must dissemble?”
Emanuel had not the temperament which is attracted by contradiction. He listened to his cousin’s eager words, seemed to ponder them for a space, and then began talking of something else.
Those whom Emanuel called “his people” were for the most part descendants of families who had been on the soil for centuries—since before the Torrs came into possession of it. In a few cases, their stock had been transplanted from the Shropshire estates of the same house. Emanuel had discerned it to be an essential part of the System that its benefits should be reaped by those to whom his family had historic responsibilities. The reflection that the Torrs in Somerset only went back at the farthest to Henry VIII.‘s time, and became large landlords there so recently as Charles II.‘s reign, saddened him when he dwelt upon it. He would have given much to have been able to establish the System at Caermere instead, where the relations between lord and retainer had subsisted from the dawn of tribal history. He dwelt a good deal upon this aspect of the matter in his talks with Christian. “If you take up the idea,” he would say, “you will have the enormous advantage of really ancient ties between you and your people. Here in Somerset we are, relatively speaking, new-comers—merely lucky bridegrooms or confiscating interlopers of a few generations’ standing. I have had to create my feudal spirit here out of whole cloth. But you at Caermere—you will find it ready-made to your hand.”
Emanuel had created much more besides.
The villages hummed with the exotic industries he had brought into being. The estate produced most of its raw material—food, wool, hides, peat for domestic fuel, stone in several varieties for building, and numerous products of the sea. It drew coal, wood and iron across the channel from the Caermere properties. The effort of the System had been from the outset to expand its self-sufficiency. Christian saw now the remarkable results of this effort on both sides. One village had its leather workers, beginning with the tanners at one end and finishing with the most skillful artificers—glovers, saddlers and shoemakers—at the other. A second village possessed its colony of builders—masons and carpenters alike—and with them guiding architects and designers of furniture and carving. Here also were the coopers, who served not only the brewery, but the butter-makers. These latter formed in turn a link with the great dairy establishment, which had for its flank the farming lands. The gardens, nurseries, orchards and long glasshouses were nearest to Emanuel’s residence, and their workers made up the largest of the hamlets. This was in other senses the metropolis of the state, for here were the printing-press, the bindery, the chemical laboratory, the electric-light plant, the photographic and drawing departments, the clergy house and the estate office. The smallest of the villages was in the center of the stock farm, where scientific breeding and experimental acclimatization had attained results of which the staid “Field” spoke in almost excited terms.
But to Christian’s mind by far the most interesting village was that nestled on the sea-shore, under the protection of the cliffs. When he had once seen this place, his cousin found if difficult to get him away from it, or to enlist his attention for other branches of the System. There was a small but sufficient wharf here, to which colliers of a fair burden could have access; shelter was secured for the home-built fishing craft in the little harbor by means of a breakwater. The red-roofed, gray-stone cottages clustered along the winding roadway which climbed the cliff made a picture fascinating to the young man’s eye, but his greater delight was in something not at first visible. Around a bend in the cove, out of sight of the village, was a factory for the manufacture of glass, and beyond this were pointed out to him other buildings, near the water’s edge, which he was told were used for curing, pickling and otherwise preserving fish. “We make our own glass for the gardens and forcing houses, ‘and for all the dwellings on the estate,” Emanuel had told him, “and for another use as well.”
The statement had not aroused his curiosity at the moment, but a little later, when he confronted the embodiment of its meaning, he murmured aloud in his astonishment. He found himself walking in a spacious corridor, beneath a roof of semi-opaque, greenish glass, and between walls that seemed of solid crystal, stretching onward as far as the eye could reach. A bar of sunlight, striking through aslant from somewhere outside, painted a central glowing prismatic patch of color, which reflected itself in countless wavering gleams of orange and purple all about him. A curious moving glitter, as of fountains noiselessly at play, traversed the upper surface of these glass walls, and flashed confusion at his first scrutiny. Then he gave a schoolboy’s shout of joy and rushed forward to the nearest side. He was in a giant aquarium—and these were actual fishes of the sea swimming placidly before him! Even as he stared in bewildered pleasure, with his nose flattened against the glass, there lounged toward him, across the domed back of a king-crab, the biggest conger he had ever imagined to himself. He put up a hand instinctively to ward off the advance of the impassive eel—then laughed aloud for glee.
“Oh, this is worth all the rest!” he cried to Emanuel.
“Yes, good idea, isn’t it?” said the other. “It was my wife who suggested it. We had started making our own glass—and really this was a most intelligent way of using it. In time I think it will be of great value, too. We have some clever men down here, from time to time, to study the specimens. I’m sorry no one is here for the moment. I thought at first of building a residence for them, and putting it all at their disposal in a regular way as a kind of marine observatory, like that at Naples. But after all, it would hardly be fair to the system. My first duty is to my own people, and we’ve got some young men of our own who are making good use of it. There are a hundred or more of these tanks, and we are fitting up electrical machinery to get automatic control of the water supply, and to regulate the temperature more exactly. But beyond the spectacle of the fishes themselves—our people make holiday excursions here every fortnight or so—and certain things we learn about food and fecundation and so on, I don’t know that there’s much to be said for the practical utility of this department. Further on you will see the oyster and mussel beds, and the lobsters and crabs. I attach much more importance to the experiments we are making out there. There seems almost no limit to what can be done in those fields, now that we have learned how to go to work. It is as simple a matter to rear lobsters as it is to rear chickens.”
“But it is all wonderful!” cried Christian, once more. “But tell me—this costs a great sum of money. I am afraid to think how much. Is it your hope—shall you ever get a profit from it?”
Emanuel smiled. “There is no question of profits,” he explained, gently. “The System as a whole supports itself—or rather is entirely capable of doing so. The capital that I have spent in putting the System upon its feet, so to speak, I count as nothing. It belonged to the people who had been with us all these centuries and I have merely restored it to them. In the eyes of the law it is all mine, and from that point of view I am a much richer man than I was before the System began. But in practice it belongs to all my people. I take enough to live as befits my station; each of the others has enough to maintain him inhisstation, comfortably and honorably. Whatever the surplus may be, that is devoted to the objects which we all have in common. You see it is simplicity itself.”
“But that is like my brother Salvator’s doctrine,” said Christian. “It is socialism, is it not?” Emanuel’s fine brows drew together in an impatient frown. “Please do not use that word,” he said, with a shade of annoyance in his tone. “The very sound of it affronts my ears. Nothing vexes me more than to have my work unthinkingly coupled with that monstrous imposture. If you will think of it, I am more opposed to what is called socialism than anybody else on earth. I have elaborated the one satisfactory system, on lines absolutely opposed to it. I furnish the best weapon for fighting and slaying that pernicious delusion that the whole world offers. So you see, I have a right to protest when people confuse me with my bitterest antagonist.”
“Pardon!” said Christian, with humility. “I am so badly informed upon all these matters!”
“Ah, well, you will understand them perfectly, all in good time,” his cousin reassured him in a kindly way.
Christian drew a furtive sigh as they moved along. To his fancy the large fishes in the tanks regarded him with a sympathetic eye.