At Holloway, yesterday afternoon, an inquest was held on the body of a man named Joseph Cartwright, who is said to have been a journalist. This man was found dead upon his bed, fullydressed, on Tuesday morning. The medical evidence showed death to be due to heart failure, and indicated alcoholism as the predisposing cause. A verdict was returned in accordance with the medical evidence.
At Holloway, yesterday afternoon, an inquest was held on the body of a man named Joseph Cartwright, who is said to have been a journalist. This man was found dead upon his bed, fullydressed, on Tuesday morning. The medical evidence showed death to be due to heart failure, and indicated alcoholism as the predisposing cause. A verdict was returned in accordance with the medical evidence.
"He was my assistant editor," said Clement Blaine, as I looked up from my perusal of this sorry tale.
"Really?" I said.
"Yes, a clever fellow; most accomplished journalist, but——" And Mr. Blaine raised his elbow with a significant gesture, by which he suggested the act of drinking.
Within the hour I had accepted an engagement as assistant editor ofThe Masswith the magnificent sum of two pounds a week by way of remuneration.
"It's poor pay," said Blaine. "And I only wish I could double it. But that's all it will run to at present, and—well, of course, it counts for something to be working for the cause as directly as we do inThe Mass."
I nodded, not without qualms. My education made it impossible for me to accept unreservedly the most scurrilous features of the journal. But the cause was good—I was assured of that; and I would introduce improvements, I thought. I was still very inexperienced. Meantime, I was not to know the carking anxiety of the out-of-work. I could still pay my way at the Bloomsbury lodging. This was something.
Beatrice expressed herself as delighted. I was to accumulate large sums in various vague ways, and enjoy innumerable "fluffy" evenings with her.
What a queer mad jumble of a shut-in world ourLondon was, and how blindly self-centred we all were in our pursuit of immediate gain, in our absolute indifference to the larger outside movements, the shaping of national destinies, the warring of national interests! I remember that we were quite triumphant, in our little owlish way, that year; for the weight of socialistic and anti-national, anti-responsible feeling had forced a time-serving Cabinet into cutting down our Navy by a quarter at one stroke. The hurried scramblers after money and pleasure were much gratified.
"We can make defensive alliances with other Powers," they said. "Meantime—retrench, reduce, cut down, and give us more freedom in our race. Freedom, freedom—that's the thing; and peace for the development of commerce."
Undoubtedly, as a people, we were fey.
Love thou thy land, with love far-broughtFrom out the storied Past, and usedWithin the Present, but transfusedThro' future time by power of thought.True love turned round on fixed poles,Love that endures not sordid ends,For English natures, freemen, friends,Thy brothers and immortal souls.But pamper not a hasty time,Nor feed with crude imaginingsThe herd, wild hearts and feeble wingsThat every sophister can lime.Deliver not the tasks of mightTo weakness, neither hide the rayFrom those, not blind, who wait for day,Tho' sitting girt with doubtful light.Tennyson.
Love thou thy land, with love far-broughtFrom out the storied Past, and usedWithin the Present, but transfusedThro' future time by power of thought.
True love turned round on fixed poles,Love that endures not sordid ends,For English natures, freemen, friends,Thy brothers and immortal souls.
But pamper not a hasty time,Nor feed with crude imaginingsThe herd, wild hearts and feeble wingsThat every sophister can lime.
Deliver not the tasks of mightTo weakness, neither hide the rayFrom those, not blind, who wait for day,Tho' sitting girt with doubtful light.
Tennyson.
Andnow, as assistant editor ofThe Mass, I entered a period of my life upon which I look back as one might who, by chance rather than by reason of any particular fitness for survival, had won safely through a whirlpool. The next few years were a troublous time, a stormy era of transition, for most English people. For many besides myselfthe period was a veritable maelstrom of confusion, of blind battling with unrecognized forces, of wasted effort, neglected duty, futile struggles, and slavish inertia.
At an early stage I learned to know Clement Blaine for a sweater of underpaid labour, a man as grossly self-indulgent as he was unprincipled, as much a charlatan as he was, in many ways, an ignoramus. Yet I see now, more clearly than then, that even Clement Blaine was not all bad. He was not even completely a charlatan. He believed he was justified in making all the money he could, in any way that was possible. It must be remembered, however, that at that time most people really thought, whatever they might say, that the first and most obvious duty in life was to make money for themselves.
Then, too, I think Blaine really believed that the sort of anti-national, socialistic theories he advocated would make for the happiness of the people; for the profit and benefit of the majority. He was blinded by lack of knowledge of history and of human nature. He was an extreme example, perhaps, but, after all, his mistaken idea that happiness depended upon personal possession of this and that, upon having and holding, was very generally accepted at that time. The old saving sense of duty, love of country, national responsibility, and pride of race, had faded and become unreal to a people feverishly bent upon personal gain only. Nelson's famous signal and watchword was kept alive, in inscriptions; in men's hearts and minds it no longer had any meaning; it made no appeal. This is to speak broadly, of course,and of the majority. We had some noble exceptions to the rule.
In looking back now upon that period, it seems to me, as I suppose to all who lived through it, such a tragedy of confusion, of sordidness, and of futility, that one is driven to take too sweepingly pessimistic a view of the time. I have said a good deal of the anti-national sentiment, because it was undoubtedly in the ascendant then. As history shows us, this sentiment ruled; by it the ship of state was steered; by it the defences of the Empire were cut down and down to the ultimate breaking point. We call the administration of that period criminally unpatriotic. As such "The Destroyers" must always figure in history. But we must not forget that then, as now, we English people had as good a Government as we deserved. The spirit of selfish irresponsibility was not confined to Whitehall.
On the other hand, it must not be supposed that no patriotic party existed. There was a patriotic party, and the exigencies of the time inspired some of its leaders nobly. But the sheer weight of numbers, of indifference, and of selfishness to which this party was opposed was too much for it. The best method of realizing this nowadays is by the study of the newspaper files for the early years of the century. From these it will be seen that even the people and journals in whom devoted patriotism survived, even the leaders who gave up their time and energy (politics gave us such a man, the Army another, the Navy another, literature another, and journalism gave us an editor in whom the right fire burned brightly) to the task ofwarning and adjuring the public, and seeking to awaken the nation to the lost sense of its dangers, its duties, and its responsibilities; even these were forced by the weight of public selfishness into using an almost apologetic tone, with reference to the common calls of patriotism and Imperial unity.
People dismissed an obvious challenge of the national conscience with a hurried and impatient wave of the hand. They were tired of this; they had heard enough of the other; they were occupied with local interests of the moment, and could not be bothered with this or that consideration affecting the welfare of the world-wide shores of greater outside Britain. And, accordingly, we find that the most patriotic and public-spirited journal was obliged, for its life, to devote more attention to a football match at the Crystal Palace than to a change of public policy affecting the whole commercial future of a part of the Empire twenty times greater than Britain. There were other journals, organs of the self-centred majority, that would barely even mention an Imperial development of that sort, and then but casually, as a matter of no particular interest to their readers; as indeed it was.
I do not think that retrospection has coloured my view too darkly when I say that my brief experience in Fleet Street made me feel that theDaily Gazetteparty, the supporters of "The Destroyers" (as naval folk had named the Government of the day) consisted of a mass of smugly hypocritical self-seekers; and that the party I served under Clement Blaine were a mass of blatantly frank self-seekers.Such generalizations can never be quite just, however. There were earnest and devoted men in every section of the community. But, as a generalization, as indicating the typical characteristics of the parties, I fear that my view has been proved correct.
It would be quite a mistake to suppose that in the political world the shortcomings were all on one side. Writers like myself, even men like Clement Blaine, had only too much justification for the contempt they poured upon the Conservative party. Selfishness, indolence, and the worship of the fossilized party spirit, had eaten into the very vitals of this section of the political world. The form of madness we called party loyalty made the best men we had willing to sacrifice national to personal interests. So-and-so must retain his place; loyalty to the party demands our support there and there. We must give it, whatever the consequences. The thing is not easy to understand; but it was so, and the strongest and best men of the day were culpable in this.
The farther my London experiences took me, the greater became the mass of my shattered illusions, broken ideals, and lost hopes. I remember my reflections during a brief visit I paid to my mother in Dorset, when I had spent an evening talking with my sister Lucy's husband. Doctor Woodthrop was a good fellow enough, and my sister seemed happier with him than one would have expected, remembering that it was rather the desire for freedom, than love, which gave her to him.
Woodthrop was popular, honest, steady-going; a fine, typical Englishman of the period, I suppose.In politics he was as his father before him, though the name had changed from Tory to Conservative. He talked politics for a week at election time. I would not say that he ever thought politics. I know that he had no knowledge, and less interest, where the affairs of his country were concerned, when I met and talked with him during that visit. The country's defences were actually of far less importance in his eyes than the country's cricket averages. As for either social reform interests in England, or the affairs of the Empire outside England, he simply could not be induced to give them even conversational breathing space. They were as exotic to my sister's husband as the ethics of esoteric Buddhism. But he was a thick and thin Conservative. To be sure, he would have said, nothing would cause him to waver in that.
As for myself, I defended the anti-national party in its repudiation of Imperial responsibility by arguing that the domestic needs of the country were too urgent and great to admit of any kind of expenditure, in money or energy, upon outside affairs. We did not recognize that internal reform and content were absolutely incompatible with shameless neglect of fundamental duties.
We were as sailors who should concentrate upon drying and cleaning their cabin, seeking at all hazards to make that comfortable, while refusing to spare time for the ship's pumps, though the water was rising in her hold from a score of external fissures. Our anti-nationalists and Little Englanders were little cabin-dwellers, shirkers from the open deck, careless of the ship's hull, and masts, and sails, busilybent only upon the enrichment of their particular divisions among her saloons.
In the early days of my engagement as assistant editor ofThe Mass, I think I may claim that I worked hard and with honest intent to make the paper represent truly what I conceived to be the good and helpful side of Socialism, of social progress and reform. But, if I am to be frank, I fear I must admit that within six months of my first engagement by Clement Blaine, I had ceased to entertain any sincere hope or ambition in this direction. And yet I remained assistant editor ofThe Mass.
The two statements doubtless redound to my discredit, and I have little excuse to offer. The work represented bread and butter for me, and that counted for something, of course. But I will admit that I think I could have found some more worthy employment, and should have done so but for Beatrice Blaine, my employer's daughter.
Time and time again my gorge rose at being obliged to play my part—very often, as a writer, the principal part—in what I knew to be an absolutely dishonest piece of journalism. Once I remember refusing to write a grossly malicious and untrue representation of certain actions of John Crondall's in the Transvaal. But I am ashamed to say I revised the proofs of the lying thing, and saw it to press, when a hireling of Clement Blaine's had prepared it. The man was a discharged servant of Crondall's, a convicted thief, as I afterwards learned, as well as a most abandoned liar. But his scurrilous fabrication, after publication inThe Mass, was quoted at lengthby theDaily Gazette, and by the journals of that persuasion throughout the country.
I hardly know how to explain my relations with Blaine's daughter. I suppose the main point is she was beautiful, in the sense that certain cats are beautiful. I rarely heard of my Weybridge friends now, and never, directly, of Sylvia. My life seemed infinitely remote from that of the luxurious Wheelerménage. When I chanced to earn a few guineas with my pen outside the littered office ofThe Mass(where the bulk of the editorial work fell to me), the money was almost invariably devoted to the entertainment of Beatrice. She was in several ways not unlike a kitten, or something feline, of larger growth: the panther, for example, in Balzac's thrilling story, "A Passion in the Desert."
I have never, before or since, met any woman so totally devoid of the moral sense as Beatrice. Yet she had a heart that was not bad; indeed it was a tender heart. But there was no moral sense to guide and balance her.
I think of Beatrice as very much a product of that time. Her own personal enjoyment, pleasure, indulgence; these formed alike the centre and the limit of her thoughts and aims. And the suggestion that serious thought or energy should be given to any other end, struck Beatrice as necessarily insincere and absurd. As for duty, the word had no more real application to her own life as Beatrice saw it than the counsels of old-time chivalry for the pursuit of the Holy Grail.
Soberly considered, this is doubtless very grievous.But it must be said that if Beatrice was singular in this, her singularity lay rather in her frank disclosure of her attitude than in the attitude itself. I am not sure that morally her absorption in such crude pleasures as she knew, was a whit more culpable than the equal absorption of nine people out of ten at that time, in money-getting, in sport, in society functions, or in sheer idleness. The same oblivion to the sense of duty was very generally characteristic; though in other matters, no doubt, the moral sense was more active. In Beatrice it simply was not present at all.
All this was tolerably clear to me even then; but I will not pretend that it interfered much with the physical and emotional attraction which Beatrice had for me. Apart from her my life was very drab in colour. I had no recreations. In my time at Rugby and at Cambridge we either practically ignored sport (so far, at all events, as actual participation in it went), or lived for it. I had very largely ignored it. Now, Beatrice Blaine represented, not exactly recreation, perhaps—no, not that I think—but gaiety. The hours I spent in her company were the only form of gaiety that entered into my life.
My feeling for Beatrice was not serious love, not at all a grand passion; but denying myself the occasional pleasure of ministering to her appetite for little outings would have been a harder task for me than the acceptation of Sylvia Wheeler's dismissal. My attentions to Beatrice were very much those of Balzac's Provençal to his panther, after he had overcome his first terrors.
There were times when her acceptance of gifts orcompliments from another man made me believe myself really in love with Beatrice. Then some peculiarly distasteful aspect of my journalistic work would be forced upon me; I would receive some striking illustration of the hopelessly sordid character of Blaine and his circle, of the policy ofThe Mass, of the general trend of my life; and, seeing Beatrice's indifferent acceptance of all this venality, I would turn from her with a certain sense of revulsion—for three days. After that, I would return to handsome Beatrice, with her feline graces and her warm colouring, as a chilly, tired man turns from his work to his fireside.
In short, as time went on, I became as indifferent to ends and aims as the most callous among those at whose indifference to matters of real moment I had once girded so vehemently. And I lacked their excuse. I cut no figure at all in the race for money and pleasure; unless my clinging to Beatrice be accounted pursuit of pleasure. Certainly it lacked the rapt absorption which characterized the multitude really in the race. I fear I was rapidly degenerating into a common type of Fleet Street hack; into nothing more than Clement Blaine's assistant. And then a quite new influence came into my life.
A woman mixed of such fine elementsThat were all virtue and religion deadShe'd make them newly, being what she was.George Eliot.
A woman mixed of such fine elementsThat were all virtue and religion deadShe'd make them newly, being what she was.
George Eliot.
A sandy-hairedyouth-of-all-work, named Rivers, spent his days in the box we called the front office; a kind of lobby really, by which one entered the tolerably large and desperately untidy room in which Blaine and myself compiled each issue ofThe Mass. Blaine spent a good slice of all his days in keeping appointments, usually in Fleet Street bars.
My days were spent in the main office of the paper, among the files, the scissors and paste, the books of reference, and the three Gargantuan waste-paper baskets. Here at different times I interviewed men of every European nationality and every known calling, besides innumerable followers of no recognized trade or profession. Among them all I cannot call to mind more than two or three who, by the most charitable stretch of imagination, could have been called gentlemen.
Most of them were obviously, and in all ways seedy, shady characters—furtive, wordy creatures, full ofvague, involved grievances. The greater proportion were foreigners; scallywags from the mean streets of every Continental capital; men familiar with prisons; men who talked of the fraternity of labour, and never did any work; men full of windy plans for the enrichment of humanity, who themselves must always borrow and never repay—money, food, shelter, and the other things for which honest folk give their labour.
If an English Cabinet Minister had offered us an explanation of any political development we should have had small use for his contribution inThe Mass, unless as an advertisement of our importance. For their teaching, for the text they gave us in our fulminations, we greatly preferred the rancorous and generally scurrilous vapourings of some unknown alien dumped upon our shores for the relief and benefit of his own country.
We wanted no information from Admiralty Lords about the Navy, from commanding officers about the Army, from pro-Consuls about the Colonies, or from the Foreign Office about foreign relations. But a deserter or a man dismissed from either of the Services, a broker ne'er-do-well rejected as unfit by one of the Colonies, or a foreign agitator with stories to tell of Britain's duplicity abroad; these were all welcome fish for our net, and folk whom it was my duty to receive with respectful attention. From their perjured lips it became my mechanical duty to extract and publish wisdom for the use of our readers in the guidance of their lives and the exercise of their rights as citizens and ratepayers. I became adept at thework, and in the end accomplished it daily without interest, and with only occasional qualms of conscience. It was my living.
On a sunshiny morning in June, which I remember very well, the sandy-haired Rivers brought me a visiting-card upon which I read the name of "Miss Constance Grey." In one corner of the card the words "Cape Town" had been crossed out and a London address written over them.
I was engaged at the time with a large, pale, fat man from Stettin, whose mission it was to show me that the socialist working men of the Fatherland dearly loved their comrades in England, and that the paying of taxes for the defence of these islands was a preposterously absurd thing, for the reason that the Socialists would never allow Germany to go to war with England or with any other country. "The Destroyers," in their truckling to Demos, had already cut down Naval and Army estimates by more than one-half since their rise to power, and our Stettin ambassador was priming me regarding a demand for further reductions, prior to actual disarmament, to provide funds for the fixing of a minimum day's pay and a maximum day's work.
"Rivers ushered in Miss Constance Grey"
The gentleman from Stettin was to provide us with material for a special article and a leading article. His proposals were to be made a "feature." However, I thought I had gone far enough with him at this time; and so, looking from his pendulous jowl to the card in my hand, I told Rivers to ask the lady to wait for two minutes, and to say that I would see her then. I remember Herr Mitmann found the occasionopportune for the airing of what I suppose he would have called his sense of humour. His English and his front teeth were equally badly broken, and his taste in jokes was almost as swinishly gross as his appearance. But I was able to be quit of him at length, and then Rivers ushered in Miss Constance Grey.
As I rose to provide my visitor with a chair, I received the impression that she was a young and quietly well-dressed woman, with a notable pair of dark eyes. I thought of her as being no more than five-and-twenty years of age and pleasant to look upon. But her eyes were the feature that seized one's attention. They produced an impression of light and brilliancy, of vigour, intelligence, and charm.
"I called to see you at the office of theDaily Gazette, Mr. Mordan, and this was the only address of yours they could give me, or I should have hesitated about intruding on you in working hours. I bring you an introduction from John Crondall."
And with that she handed me a letter in Crondall's writing, and nodded in a friendly way when I asked permission to read it at once.
"Please do," she said.
She had no particular accent, but yet her speech differed slightly from that of the conventional Englishwoman of her class—the refined and well-educated Englishwoman, that is. I suppose the difference was rather one of expression, tone, and choice of phrase than a matter of accent. I doubt if one could easily find an example of it nowadays, increased communication having so much broadened our own colloquialdiction that many of its conventional peculiarities have disappeared. But it existed then, and after a time I learned to place it as characteristic of the speech of Greater Britain, as distinguished from the English of those of us who lived always in this capital centre of the Empire.
Miss Grey had the Colonial directness and vividness of speech; a larger, freer diction upon the whole than that of the Londoner born and bred; more racy, less clipped and formal, but, in certain ways, more correct. The societycliche, and the society fads of abbreviation and accent, were missing; and in their place was an easy, idiomatic directness, distinctly noticeable to a man like myself who had actually never been out of England. This it was that first struck me about Miss Grey; this and the warm brilliance of her eyes: a graphic, moving speech, a frank, compelling gaze; both indicative, as it seemed to me, of broadly sympathetic understanding.
I read John Crondall's kindly letter with a good deal of interest, moved by the fact that his terse, friendly phrases recalled to me a phase of my own life which, though no more than a couple of years past, seemed to me wonderfully remote. I had been new to London and to Fleet Street then, full of aspirations, of earnestness, of independent aims and hopes; fresh from the University and the more leisured days of my life as the son of the rector of Tarn Regis. I had had glimpses of much that was sordid and squalid in London life, at the period John Crondall's letter recalled, but as yet there had been no sordidness in my own life. All that was far otherwisenow, I felt. Cambridge and Dorset were a long way from the office ofThe Mass. I thought of the greasy Teuton nondescript for whom I had kept Miss Grey waiting, and I felt colour rise in my face as I read John Crondall's letter:
"I expect you have been burgeoning mightily since I left London, and I should not be surprised to learn that you have put theDaily Gazetteand its kind definitely behind you. You remember our talks? Tut, my dear fellow, Liberalism, Conservatism, Radicalism—it's of not the slightest consequence, and they're all much of a muchness. The thing is to stand to one's duty as a citizen of the Empire, not as a member of this or that little tin coterie; and if we stick honourably to that, nothing else matters. You will like Constance Grey; that is why I have asked her to look you up. She's sterling all through; her father's daughter to the backbone. And he was the man of whom Talbot said: 'Give me two Greys, and'—and a couple of other men he mentioned—'and a free hand, and Whitehall could go to sleep with its head on South Africa, and never be disturbed again.'"—When Crondall quoted his dead chief, the man whose personality had dominated British South Africa, one felt he had said his utmost.—"The principal thing that takes her to London now, I believe, is detail connected with a special series she has been engaged upon forThe Times; fine stuff, from what I have seen of it. It is marvellous the grip this one little bit of a girl has of South African affairs."
"Yes," I thought, now the fact was mentioned, "I suppose she is small."
"I hope the articles will be well read, for there's a heap of the vitals of South Africa in them; and even if they are to cut us adrift altogether, it's as well 'The Destroyers' should know a little about us, and the country. Constance Grey's name and introductions will take her anywhere in London, or I would have asked your help in that way."
I thought of Clement Blaine's friends, my own Fleet Street circle, and shifted uncomfortably in my chair.
"As it is, the boot may be rather on the other leg, and she may be of some service to you. But in any case, I want you to know each other, because you are a good chap, and will interest her, I know; and because she is of the bigger Britain and will interest you. Things political are, of course, looking pretty blue for us all, and your particular friends—I rather hope perhaps they're not so much your friends by now—are certainly doing their level best to cut all moorings. But one must keep pegging away. The more cutting for them, the more splicing for us. But I do wish we could blindfold Europe until these 'Destroyers' had got enough rope, and satisfactorily hanged themselves; for if they go much farther, their hanging will come too late to save the situation. Well, salue!"
I allowed my eyes to linger over the tail-end of the letter, while I thought. I was sensible of a very real embarrassment. There seemed a kind of treachery to John Crondall, a kind of unfairness to Miss Grey, in my receiving her there at all. By this time one had no illusions left regarding Clement Blaine and hiscircle, nor aboutThe Mass. I knew that, at heart, I was ashamed, and with good reason, of my connection with both. Still, there I was; it was my living; and—I suppose my eyes must have wandered from the letter. At all events, evidently seeing that I had finished reading it, my visitor spoke.
"I had an introduction to the editor of theDaily Gazette, so I took advantage of being there this afternoon to see him. A nice man, I thought, though I don't care for his paper. He remembered you as soon as I mentioned your name, and told me you—you were here. He seemed quite sorry you had left his paper; but I am sure I can understand the attraction of a position in which the whole concern is more or less in one's own hands. Mr. Delaney found me a copy ofThe Mass; so I have been studying you before calling. Perhaps you have inadvertently done so much by me, throughThe Times—a rather high and dry old institution, isn't it?"
Naturally I had punctuated these remarks of hers, here and there. She had a very bright, alert way in talking, and now she added, easily, a sentence or two to the effect that it would be a dull world if we all held precisely the same views. She did the thing well, and in a few minutes I found myself chatting away with her in the most friendly manner. She managed with the utmost deftness to remove all ground for my embarrassment regarding my position. She talked for a while of South Africa, and the life she had lived there prior to her father's death; but she touched no topic which contained any controversialelement. It seemed her aunt, a sister of her father's, had accompanied her to England, and she said:
"I promised my aunt, Mrs. Van Homrey, that I would induce you to spare us an evening soon. She loves meeting friends of John Crondall. We dine at eight, but would fix any other hour if it suited you better."
The end of it was I promised to dine with Miss Grey and her aunt in South Kensington on the following evening, and, after a quarter of an hour's very pleasant chat (twice interrupted by Rivers, who had people in his cupboard waiting to see me) my visitor rose to take her departure, with apologies for having trespassed upon a busy man's time. I told her with some warmth that the loss of my time was of no importance, and, with a thought as to the nature of my petty routine, I repeated the assurance. She smiled:
"Ah, that's just the masculine insincerity of your gallantry," she said, "unworn, I see, by working with women. John Crondall would have sent me packing."
"No doubt his time is of more value—better occupied."
I had a mental vision of Clement Blaine (who grew stouter and slacker day by day) sitting drinking with Herr Mitmann of Stettin, in a favourite bar, within fifty yards of the office.
"Still the insincerity of politeness," she laughed. "You forget I have readThe Mass. I find you a terribly earnest partisan; very keenly occupied, I should say. Till to-morrow evening, then!"
And she was gone, and Rivers was leading in, like a bear on a cord, a tousled Polish Jew named Kraunski, who was teaching us how the Metropolitan Police Force should be run, and how tyrannically its wicked myrmidons oppressed worthy citizens of Houndsditch, like Mr. Kraunski—quite a goodMassfeature.
So I stepped back again, feeling as though Constance Grey had carried away the pale London sunlight with her when she left my littered den.
"Corrupted freemen are the worst of slaves."—David Garrick.
"Corrupted freemen are the worst of slaves."—David Garrick.
I rememberthat the evening of the day following my dinner engagement with Miss Grey and her aunt was consecrate, by previous arrangement, to Beatrice Blaine. I had received seven guineas a couple of days before for a rather silly and sensational descriptive article, the subject of which had been suggested by Beatrice. Indeed, she had made me write it, and liked the thing when it appeared in print. It described certain aspects of the quarter of London which stood for pleasure in her eyes; the quarter bounded by Charing Cross and Oxford Street, Leicester Square and Hyde Park Corner.
I think I would gladly have escaped the evening with Beatrice if I could have done so fairly. Seeing that I could not do this, and that my mood seemed chilly, I plunged with more than usual extravagance, and sought to work up all the gaiety I could. I had a vague feeling that I owed so much to Beatrice; that the occasion in some way marked a crisis in our relations. I did not mentally call it a last extravagance,but yet I fancy that must have been the notion at the back of my mind; from which one may assume, I think, that Constance Grey had already begun to exercise some influence over me.
With the seven guineas clinking in the pockets of my evening clothes—here, at all events, was a link with University days, for these seldom-worn garments bore the name of a Cambridge tailor—I drove to the corner of the road beside Battersea Park in which the Blaines lived, and there picked up Beatrice, in all her vivid finery, by appointment. She loved bright colours and daring devices in dress. That I should come in a cab to fetch her was an integral part of her pleasure, and, if funds could possibly be stretched to permit it, she liked to retain the services of the same cab until I brought her back to her own door.
We drove to a famous showy restaurant close to Piccadilly Circus, where Beatrice accomplished the kind of entrance which delighted her heart, with attendants fluttering about her, and a messenger posting back to the cab for a forgotten fan, and a deal of bustle and rustle of one sort and another. A quarter of an hour was devoted to the choice of a menu in a dining-room which resembled the more ornate type of music-hall, and was of about the same size. The flashing garishness of it all delighted Beatrice, and the heat of its atmosphere suited both her mood and her extremelydécolletétoilette.
I remember beginning to speak of my previous evening's engagement while Beatrice sipped the rather sticky champagne, which was the first item of themeal to reach us. But a certain sense of unfitness or disinclination stopped me after a few sentences, and I did not again refer to my new friends; though I had been thinking a good deal of Constance Grey and her plain-faced, plain-spoken aunt. I felt strangely out of key with my environment in that glaring place, and the strains of an overloud orchestra, when they came crashing through the buzz of talk and laughter, and the clatter of glass and silver, were rather a relief to me as a substitute for conversation. I drank a great deal of champagne, and resented the fact that it seemed to have no stimulating effect upon me. But Beatrice was in a purring stage of contentment, her colour high, her passionate eyes sparkling, and low laughter ever atremble behind her full, red lips.
After the dinner we drove to another place exactly like the restaurant, all gilding and crimson plush, and there watched a performance, which for dulness and banality it would be difficult to equal anywhere. It was more silly than a peep-show at a country fair, but it was all set in a most gorgeous and costly frame. The man who did crude and ancient conjuring tricks was elaborately finely dressed, and attended by monstrous footmen in liveries of Oriental splendour. What he did was absurdly tame; the things he did it with, his accessories, were barbarously gorgeous.
This was not one of the great "Middle Class Halls," as they were called during their first year of existence, but an old-established haunt of those who aimed at "seeing life"—a great resort of ambitious young bloods about town. Not very longbefore this time, a powerful trust had been formed to confer the stuffy and inane delights of the "Hall" upon that sturdily respectable suburban middle class—the backbone of London society—which had hitherto, to a great extent, eschewed this particular form of dissipation. The trust amassed wealth by striking a shrewd blow at our national character. Its entertainments were to be all refinement—"fun without vulgarity"; the oily announcements were nauseating. But they answered their purpose only too well. The great and still religious bourgeois class was securely hooked; and then the name of "Middle Class Halls" was dropped, and the programme provided in these garish palaces became simply an inexpensive and rather amateurish imitation of those of the older halls, plus a kind of prudish, sentimental, and even quasi-religious lubricity, which made them altogether revolting, and infinitely deleterious.
But our choice upon this occasion had fallen upon the most famous of the old halls. Of the performance I remember a topical song which evoked enthusiastic applause. It was an incredibly stupid piece of doggerel about England's position in the world; and the shiny-faced exquisite who declaimed it strutted to and fro like a bantam cock at each fresh roar of applause from the heated house. When he used the word "fight" he waved an imaginary sword and assumed a ridiculous posture, which he evidently connected with warlike exercises of some kind. The song praised the Government—"A Government er business men; men that's got sense"—and told how this wonderful Government had stopped the pouringout of poor folks' money upon flag-waving, to devote it to poor folks' needs. It alluded to the title that Administration had earned: "The Destroyers"; and acclaimed it a proud title, because it meant the destruction of "gold-laced bunkcombe," and of "vampires that were preying on the British working man."
But the chorus was the thing, and the perspiring singer played conductor with all the airs and graces of a spangled showman in a booth, while the huge audience yelled itself hoarse over this. I can only recall two lines of it, and these were to the effect that: "They"—meaning the other Powers of civilization—"will never go for England, because England's got the dibs."
It was rather a startling spectacle; that vast auditorium, in which one saw countless flushed faces, tier on tier, gleaming through a haze of tobacco smoke; their mouths agape as they roared out the vapid lines of this song. I remember thinking that the doggerel might have been the creation of my fat contributor from Stettin, Herr Mitmann, and that if the music-hall public had reached this stage, I must have been oversensitive in my somewhat hostile and critical attitude toward the writings of that ponderous Teuton. I thought that for onceThe Masswould almost lag behind its readers; though in the beginning I had regarded Herr Mitmann's proposals as going beyond even our limits.
We left the hall while its roof echoed the jingling tail-piece of another popular ditty, which tickled Beatrice's fancy hugely. In it the singer expressed,without exaggeration and without flattery, a good deal of the popular London attitude toward the pursuit of pleasure and the love of pleasure resorts. I recall phrases like: "Give my regards to Leicester Square—Greet the girls in Regent Street—Tell them in Bond Street we'll soon meet"—and, "Give them my love in the Strand."
The atmosphere reeked now of spirits, smoke, and overheated humanity. The voice of the great audience was hoarse and rather bestial in suggestion. The unescorted women began to make their invitations dreadfully pressing. Doubtless my mood coloured the whole tawdry business, but I remember finding those last few minutes distinctly revolting, and experiencing a genuine relief when we stepped into the outer air.
But the lights were just as brilliant outside, the pavements as thronged as the carpeted promenade, its faces almost as thickly painted as those of the lady who wished her "regards" given to Leicester Square, or the gentleman who had assured us that nobody wanted to fight England, because England had the "dibs."
Beatrice was now in feverishly high spirits. She no longer purred contentment; rather it seemed to me she panted in avid excitement, while pouring out a running fire of comment upon the dress and appearance of passers-by, as we drove to another palace of gilt and plush—a sort of magnified Pullman car, with decorations that made one's eyes ache. Here we partook of quite a complicated champagne supper. I dare say fifty pounds was spent in that roomafter the gorgeously uniformed attendants had begun their chant of "Time, gentlemen, please; time!" which signified that the closing hour had arrived.
Beatrice kept up her excitement—or perhaps the champagne did this for her—until our cab was half-way across Chelsea Bridge. Then she lay back in her corner, and, I suppose, began to feel the grayness of the as yet unseen dawn of a new day. But as I helped her out of the cab in Battersea, she said she had thoroughly enjoyed her "fluffy" evening, and thanked me very prettily. I returned in the cab as far as Westminster, and there dismissed the man with the last of my seven guineas, having decided to walk from there to my Bloomsbury lodging.
For a Socialist, my conduct was certainly peculiar. There were two of us. We had had two meals, one of which was as totally unnecessary as the other was overelaborate. And we had spent an hour or two in watching an incredibly stupid and vulgar performance. And over this I had spent a sum upon which an entire family could have been kept going for a couple of months. But there were scores of people in London that night—some of them passed me in cabs and carriages, as I walked from the Abbey toward Fleet Street—who had been through a similar programme and spent twice as much over it as I had. It was an extraordinarily extravagant period; and it seemed that the less folk did in the discharge of their national obligations as citizens, the more they demanded, and the more they spent, in the name of pleasure.
The people who passed me, as I made my way eastward,were mostly in evening dress, pale and raffish-looking. Many, particularly among the couples in hansoms, were intoxicated, and making a painful muddle of such melodies as those we had listened to at the music hall. Overeaten, overdrunken, overexcited, overextravagant, in all ways figures of incontinence, these noisy Londoners made their way homeward, pursued by the advancing gray light of a Sabbath dawn in midsummer.
And Beatrice loved everything foreign, because the foreigners had none of our stupid British Puritanism! And the British public was mightily pleased with its Government, "The Destroyers," because they were cutting down to vanishing point expenditure upon such superfluous vanities as national defence, in order to devote the money to improving the conditions in which the public lived, and to the reducing of their heavy burdens as citizens of a great Empire. Money could not possibly be spared for such ornamentation as ships and guns and bodies of trained men. We could not afford it!
As I passed the corner of Agar Street a drunken cabdriver, driving two noisily intoxicated men in evening dress, brought his cab into collision with a gaunt, wolf-eyed man who had been scouring the gutter for scraps of food. He was one of an army prowling London's gutters at that moment: human wolves, questing for scraps of refuse meat. The space between each prowler was no more than a few yards. This particular wretch was knocked down by the cab, but not hurt. Cabby and his fares roared out drunken laughter. The horse was never checked.But in the midst of their laughter one of the passengers threw out a coin, upon which the human wolf pounced like a bird of prey. I saw the glint of the coin. It was a sovereign; very likely the twentieth those men had spent that night. For that sum, four hundred of the gaunt, gutter-prowling wolves might have been fed and sheltered.
Entering Holborn I ran against a man I knew, named Wardle, one of the sub-editors of a Sunday newspaper, then on his way home from Fleet Street. Wardle was tired and sleepy, but stopped to exchange a few words of journalistic gossip.
"Rather sickening about the wind-up of the East Anglian Pageant," he said, "isn't it? Did you hear of it?"
I explained that I had not been in Fleet Street that night, and had heard nothing.
"Why, there was to be no end of a tumashi for the Saturday evening wind-up, you know, and we were featuring it. We sent a special man up yesterday to help the local fellow. Well, just as we'd got in about a couple of hundred words of his introductory stuff, word came through that the wires were interrupted, and not another blessed line did we get. I tell you there was some tall cursing done, and some flying around in the editorial 'fill-up' drawers. We were giving it first place—three columns. One blessing, we found the stoppage was general. No one else has got a line of East Anglian stuff to-night. Ours was the last word from the submerged city of Ipswich. But it really is rather an odd breakdown. No sign of rough weather; and, mind you there area number of different lines of communication. But they're all blocked, telegraph and telephone. Our chief tried to get through viâ the Continent, just to give us something to go on. But it was no go. Odd, isn't it?"
"Very," I agreed, as we turned; and I added, rather inanely: "One hears a lot about East Anglian coast erosion."
Wardle yawned and grinned.
"Yes, to be sure. Perhaps East Anglia is cruising down Channel by now. Or perhaps the Kaiser's landed an army corps and taken possession. That Mediterranean business on Tuesday was pretty pronounced cheek, you know, and, by all accounts, the result of direct orders from Potsdam. Only the Kaiser's bluff, I suppose, but I'm told it's taken most of the Channel Fleet down into Spanish waters."
I smiled at the activity of Wardle's journalistic imagination, and thought of the music-hall crowd.
"Ah, well," I said, "'They'll never go for England, because England's got the dibs'!"
"What ho!" remarked Wardle, with another yawn. And this time he was really off.
And so I walked home alone to my lodgings, and climbed into bed, thinking vaguely of Constance Grey, and what she would have thought of my night's work; this, as the long, palely glinting arms of the Sabbath dawn thrust aside the mantle of summer night from Bloomsbury.