THEoffice ofUnitywas a room on the top floor of the Denisons’ publishing house. It looked out on Fleet Street, opposite Chancery Lane. Sitting there, Eddy, when not otherwise engaged (he and Arnold were joint editors ofUnity) watched the rushing tide far below, the people crowding by. There with the tide went the business men, the lawyers, the newspaper people, who made thought and ensued it, the sellers and the buyers. Each had his and her own interests, his and her own irons in the fire. They wanted none of other people’s; often they resented other people’s. Yet, looked at long enough ahead (one of the editors in his trite way mused) all interests must be the same in the end. No state, surely, could thrive, divided into factions, one faction spoiling another. They must needs have a common aim, find a heterogeneous city of peace. SoUnity, gaily flinging down barriers, cheerily bestriding walls, with one foot planted in each neighbouring and antagonistic garden—Unity, so sympathetic with all causes, so ably written, so versatile, must surely succeed.
Unityreally was rather well written, rather interesting. New magazines so often are. The co-operative contributors, being clever people, and fresh-minded, usually found some new, unstaled aspect of the topics they touched, and gave them life. The paper, except for a few stories and poems and drawings, was frankly political and social in trend; it dealt with current questions, not in the least impartially (which is so dull), but taking alternate and very definite points of view. Some of these articles were by the staff, others by specialists. Not afraid to aim high, they endeavoured to get (in a few cases succeeded, in most failed) articles by prominent supporters and opponents of the views they handled; as, for example, Lord Hugh Cecil and Dr. Clifford on Church Disestablishment; Mr. Harold Cox and Sir William Robertson Nicholl on Referendums, Dr. Cunningham and Mr. Strachey on Tariff Reform; Mr. Roger Fry and Sir William Richmond on Art; Lord Robert Cecil and the Sidney Webbs on the Minimum Wage; the Dean of Welchester and Mr. Hakluyt Egerton on Prayer Book Revision; Mr. Conrad Noel and Mr. Victor Grayson on Socialism as Synonymous with Christianity, an Employer, a Factory Hand, and Miss Constance Smith, on the Inspection of Factories; Mrs. Fawcett and Miss Violet Markham on Women as Political Creatures; Mr. J. M. Robertson and Monsignor R. H. Benson on the Church as an Agent for Good; land-owners, farmers, labourers, and Mr. F. E. Greene, on LandTenure. (The farmers’ and labourers’ articles were among the failures, and had to be editorially supplied.) A paper’s reach must exceed its grasp, or what are enterprising editors for? ButUnitydid actually grasp some writers of note, and some of unlettered ardour, and supplied, to fill the gaps in these, contributors of a certain originality and vividness of outlook. On the whole it was a readable production, as productions go. There were several advertisements on the last page; most, of course, were of books published by the Denisons, but there were also a few books published by other people, and, one proud week, “Darn No More,” “Why Drop Ink,” and “Dry Clean Your Dog.” “Dry Clean Your Dog” seemed to the editors particularly promising; dogs, though led, indeed, by some literary people about the book-shops of towns, suggest in the main a wider, more breezy, less bookish class of reader; the advertisement called up a pleasant picture ofUnitybeing perused in the country, perhaps even as far away as Weybridge; lying on hall tables along with theFieldandCountry Life, while its readers obediently repaired to the kennels with a dry shampoo.... It was an encouraging picture. For, though any new journal can get taken in (for a time) by the bookier cliques of cities, who read and write so much that they do not need to be very careful, in either case, what it is, how few shall force a difficult entrance into our fastidious country homes.
The editors ofUnitycould not, indeed, persuade themselves that they had a large circulation in thecountry as yet. Arnold said from the first, “We never shall have. That is very certain.”
Eddy said, “Why?” He hoped they would have. It was his hope thatUnitywould circulate all round the English-speaking world.
“Because we don’t stand for anything,” said Arnold, and Eddy returned, “We stand for everything. We stand for Truth. We are of Use.”
“We stand for a lot of lies, too,” Arnold pointed out, because he thought it was lies to say that Tariff Reform and Referendums and Democracies were good things, and that Everyone should Vote, and that Plays should be Censored, and the Prayer Book Revised, and lots of other things. Eddy, who knew that Arnold knew that he for his part thought these things true, did not trouble to say so again.
Arnold added, “Not, of course, that standing for lies is any check on circulation; quite the contrary; but it’s dangerous to mix them up with the truth; you confuse people’s minds. The fact that I do not approve of any existing form of government or constitution of society, and that you approve of all, makes us harmonious collaborators, but hardly gives us, as an editorial body, enough insight into the mind of the average potential reader, who as a rule prefers, quite definitely prefers, one party or one state of things to another; has, in fact, no patience with any other, and does not in the least wish to be told how admirable it is. And if he does—if a country squire, for instance, really does want tohear a eulogy of Free Trade—(there may be a few such squires, possibly, hidden in the home counties; I doubt it, but there may)—well, there is theSpectatorready to his hand. TheSpectator, which has the incidental advantage of not disgusting him on the next page with ‘A Word for a Free Drama,’ or ‘Socialism as Synonymous with Christianity.’ If, on the other hand, as might conceivably happen, he desired to hear the praises of Tariff Reform—well, there are theTimesand theMorning Post, both organs that he knows and trusts. And if, by any wild chance, in an undisciplined mood, he craved for an attack on the censorship, or other insubordinate sentiments, he might find at any rate a few to go on with in, say, theEnglish Review. Or, if it is Socialism he wants to hear about (and I never yet met the land-owner, did you, who hadn’t Socialism on the brain; it’s a class obsession), there is theNew Statesman, so bright, thorough, and reliable. Or, if he wants to learn the point of view and the grievances of his tenant farmers or his agricultural labourers, without asking them, he can read books on ‘The Tyranny of the Countryside,’ or take in theVineyard. Anyhow, where doesUnitycome in? I don’t see it, I’m afraid. It would be different if we were merely or mainly literary, but we’re frankly political. To be political without being partisan is savourless, like an egg without salt. It doesn’t go down. Liberals don’t like, while reading a paper, to be hit in the eye by long articles headed ‘Toryism as the only Basis.’Unionists don’t care to open at a page inscribed ‘The Need for Home Rule.’ Socialists object to being confronted by articles on ‘Liberty as an Ideal.’ No one wants to see exploited and held up for admiration the ideals of others antagonistic to their own. You yourself wouldn’t read an article—not a long article, anyhow—called ‘Party Warfare as the Ideal.’ At least you might, because you’re that kind of lunatic, but few would. That is why we shall not sell well, when people have got over buying us because we’re new.”
Eddy merely said, “We’re good. We’re interesting. Look at this drawing of Jane’s; and this thing of Le Moine’s. They by themselves should sell us, as mere art and literature. There are lots of people who’ll let us have any politics we like if we give them things as good as that with them.”
But Arnold jeered at the idea of there being enough readers who cared for good work to make a paper pay. “The majority care for bad, unfortunately.”
“Well, anyhow,” said Eddy, “the factory articles are making a stir among employers. Here’s a letter that came this morning.”
Arnold read it.
“He thinks it’s his factory we meant, apparently. Rather annoyed, he sounds. ‘Does not know if we purpose a series on the same subject’—nor if so what’s going to get put into it, I suppose. I imagine he suspects one of his own hands of being the author. It wasn’t, though, was it; it was a jam man. Andvery temperate in tone it was; most unreasonable of any employer to cavil at it. The remarks were quite general, too; mainly to the effect that all factories were unwholesome, and all days too long; statements that can hardly be disputed even by the proudest employer. I expect he’s more afraid of what’s coming than of what’s come already.”
“Anyhow,” said Eddy, “he’scoming. In about ten minutes, too. Shall I see him, or you?”
“Oh, you can. What does he want out of us?”
“I suppose he wants to know who wrote the article, and if we purpose a series. I shall tell him we do, and that I hope the next number of it will be an article by him on the Grievances of Employers. We need one, and it ought to sweeten him. Anyhow it will show him we’ve no prejudice in the matter. He can say all workers are pampered and all days too short, if he likes. I should think that would be him coming up now.”
It was not him, but a sturdy and sweet-faced young man with an article on the Irrelevance of the Churches to the World’s Moral Needs. The editors, always positive, never negative, altered the title to the Case for Secularism. It was to be set next to an article by a Church Socialist on Christianity the Only Remedy. The sweet-faced young man objected to this, but was over-ruled. In the middle of the discussion came the factory owner, and Eddy was left alone to deal with him. After that as many of the contributors as found it convenient met atlunch at the Town’s End Tavern, as they generally did on Fridays, to discuss the next week’s work.
This was at the end of January, whenUnityhad been running for two months. The first two months of a weekly paper may be significant, but are not conclusive. The third month is more so. Mr. Wilfred Denison, who publishedUnity, found the third month conclusive enough for him. He said so. At the Town’s End on a foggy Friday towards the end of February, Arnold and Eddy announced at lunch thatUnitywas going to stop. No one was surprised. Most of these people were journalists, and used to these catastrophic births and deaths, so radiant or so sad, and often so abrupt. It is better when they are abrupt. Some die a long and lingering death, with many recuperations, artificial galvanisations, desperate recoveries, and relapses. The end is the same in either case; better that it should come quickly. It was an expected moment in this case, even to the day, for the contract with the contributors had been that the paper should run on its preliminary trial trip for three months, and then consider its position.
Arnold, speaking for the publishers, announced the result of the consideration.
“It’s no good. We’ve got to stop. We’re not increasing. In fact, we’re dwindling. Now that people’s first interest in a new thing is over, they don’t buy us enough to pay our way.”
“The advertisements are waning, certainly,” said someone. “They’re nearly all books andauthor’s agencies and fountain pens now. That’s a bad sign.”
Arnold agreed. “We’re mainly bought now by intellectuals and non-political people. As a political paper, we can’t grow fat on that; there aren’t enough of them.... We’ve discussed whether we should change our aim and become purely literary; but after all, that’s not what we’re out for, and there are too many of such papers already. We’re essentially political and practical, and if we’re to succeed as that, we’ve got to be partisan too, there’s no doubt about it. Numbers of people have told us they don’t understand our line, and want to know precisely what we’re driving at politically. We reply we’re driving at a union of parties, a throwing down of barriers. No one cares for that; they think it silly, and so do I. So, probably, do most of us; perhaps all of us except Oliver. Ned Jackson, for instance, was objecting the other day to my anti-Union article on the Docks strike appearing side by side with his own remarks of an opposite tendency. He, very naturally, would likeUnitynot merely to sing the praise of the Unions, but to give no space to the other side. I quite understand it; I felt the same myself. I extremely disliked his article; but the principles of the paper compelled us to take it. Why, my own father dislikes his essays on the Monistic Basis to be balanced by Professor Wedgewood’s on Dualism as a Necessity of Thought. A philosophy, according to him, is either good or bad, true or false. So, to most people, areall systems of thought and principles of conduct. Very naturally, therefore, they prefer that the papers they read should eschew evil as well as seeking good. And so, since one can’t (fortunately) read everything, they read those which seem to them to do so. I should myself, if I could find one which seemed to me to do so, only I never have.... Well, I imagine that’s the sort of reasonUnity’sfailing; it’s too comprehensive.”
“It’s too uneven on the literary and artistic side,” suggested a contributor. “You can’t expect working-men, for instance, who may be interested in the more practical side of the paper, to read it if it’s liable to be weighted by Raymond’s verse, or Le Moine’s essays, or Miss Dawn’s drawings. On the other hand, the clever people are occasionally shocked by coming on verse and prose suitable for working men. I expect it’s that; you can’t rely on it; it’s not all of a piece, even on its literary side, likeTit-Bits, for instance. People like to know what to expect.”
Cecil Le Moine said wearily in his high sweet voice, “Considering how few things do pay, I can’t imagine why any of you ever imaginedUnitywould pay. I said from the first ... but no one listened to me; they never do. It’s notUnity’sfault; it’s the fault of all the other papers. There are hundreds too many already; millions too many. They want thinning, like dandelions in a garden, and instead, like dandelions, they spread like a disease. Something ought to be done about it. I hate Acts ofParliament, but this is really a case for one. It is surely Mr. McKenna’s business to see to it; but I suppose he is kept too busy with all these vulgar disturbances. Anyhow,wehave done our best now to stem the tide. There will be one paper less. Perhaps some of the others will follow our example. Perhaps theRecordwill. I met a woman in the train yesterday (between Hammersmith and Turnham Green it was), and I passed her my copy ofUnityto read. I thought she would like to read my Dramatic Criticism, so it was folded back at that, but she turned over the pages till she came to something about the Roman Catholic Church, by some Monsignor; then she handed it back to me and said she always took theRecord. She obviously supposedUnityto be a Popish organ. I hunted through it for some Dissenting sentiments, and found an article by a Welsh Calvinistic Methodist on Disestablishment, but it was too late; she had got out. But there it is, you see; she always took theRecord. They all always take something. There are too many.... Well, anyhow, can’t we all ask each other to dinner one night, to wind ourselves up? A sort of funeral feast. Or ought the editors to ask the rest of us? Perhaps I shouldn’t have spoken.”
“You should not,” Eddy said. “We were going to introduce that subject later on.”
The company, having arranged the date of the dinner, and of the final business meeting, dispersed and got back to their several jobs. No one mindedparticularly aboutUnity’sdeath, except Eddy. They were so used to that sort of thing, in the world of shifting fortunes in which writers for papers move.
But Eddy minded a good deal. For several months he had lived in and for this paper; he had loved it extraordinarily. He had loved it for itself, and for what, to him, it stood for. It had been his contribution to the cause that seemed to him increasingly of enormous importance; increasingly, as the failure of the world at large to appreciate it flung him from failure to failure, wrested opportunities one by one out of his grasp. People wouldn’t realise that they were all one; that, surely, was the root difficulty of this distressed world. They would think that one set of beliefs excluded another; they were blind, they were rigid, they were mad. So they wouldn’t readUnity, surely a good paper; soUnitymust perish for lack of being wanted, poor lonely waif. Eddy rebelled against the sinking of the little ship he had launched and loved; it might, it would, had it been given a chance, have done good work. But its chance was over; he must find some other way.
To cheer himself up when he left the office at six o’clock, he went eastward, to see some friends he had in Stepney. But it did not cheer him up, for they were miserable, and he could not comfort them. He found a wife alone, waiting for her husband and sons, who were still out at the docks where they worked, though they ought to have been back an hour since.And they were blacklegs, and had refused to come out with the strikers. The wife was white, and red-eyed.
“They watch for them,” she whimpered. “They lay and wait for them, and set on them, many to one, and do for them. There was someone ’eard a Union man say he meant to do for my men one day. I begged my man to come out, or anyhow to let the boys, but he wouldn’t, and he says the Union men may go to ’ell for ’im. I know what’ll be the end. There was a man drowned yesterday; they found ’im in the canal, ’is ’ands tied up; ’e wouldn’t come out, and so they did for ’im, the devils. And it’s just seven, and they stop at six.”
“They’ve very likely stopped at the public for a bit on the way home,” Eddy suggested gently, but she shook her head.
“They’ve not bin stoppin’ anywhere since the strike began. Them as won’t come out get no peace at the public.... The Union’s a cruel thing, that it is, and my man and lads that never do no ’urt to nobody, they’ll lay and wait for ’em till they can do for ’em.... There’s Mrs. Japhet, in Jubilee Street; she’s lost her young man; they knocked ’im down and kicked ’im to death on ’is way ’ome the other day. Of course ’e was a Jew, too, which made ’im more rightly disliked as it were; but it were because ’e wouldn’t come out they did it. And there was Mrs. Jim Turner; they laid for ’er and bashed ’er ’ead in at the corner of Salmon Lane, to spite Turner. And they’re so sly, the police can’t lay ’ands on them,scarcely ever.... And it’s gone seven, and as dark as ’ats.”
She opened the door and stood listening and crying. At the end of the squalid street the trams jangled by along Commercial Road, bringing men and women home from work.
“They’ll be all right if they come by tram,” said Eddy.
“There’s all up Jamaica Street to walk after they get out,” she wailed.
Eddy went down the street and met them at the corner, a small man and two big boys, slouching along the dark street, Fred Webb and his sons, Sid and Perce. He had known them well last year at Datcherd’s club; they were uncompromising individualists, and liberty was their watchword. They loathed the Union like poison.
Fred Webb said that there had been a bit of a row down at the docks, which had kept them. “There was Ben Tillett speaking, stirring them up all. They began hustling about a bit—but we got clear. The missus wants me to come out, but I’m not having any.”
“Come out with that lot!” Sid added, in a rather unsteady voice. “I’d see them all damned first.Youwouldn’t say we ought to come out, Mr. Oliver, would you?”
Eddy said, “Well, not just now, of course. In a general way, I suppose there’s some sense in it.”
“Sense!” growled Webb. “Don’t you go talking to my boys like that, sir, if you please. You’renot going to come out, Sid, so you needn’t think about it. Good night, Mr. Oliver.”
Eddy, dismissed, went to see another Docks family he knew, and heard how the strike was being indefinitely dragged out and its success jeopardised by the blacklegs, who thought only for themselves.
“I hate a man not to have public spirit. The mean skunks. They’d let all the rest go to the devil just to get their own few shillings regular through the bad times.”
“They’ve a right to judge for themselves, I suppose,” said Eddy, and added a question as to the powers of the decent men to prevent intimidation and violence.
The man looked at him askance.
“Ain’t no ’timidation or violence, as I know of. ‘Course they say so; they’ll say anything. Whenever a man gets damaged in a private quarrel they blame it on the Union chaps now. It’s their opportunity. Pack o’ liars, they are. ‘Course a man may get hurt in a row sometimes; you can’t help rows; but that’s six of one and ’alf a dozen of the other, and it’s usually the blacklegs as begin it. We only picket them, quite peaceful.... Judge for themselves, did you say? No, dang them; that’s just what no man’s a right to do. It’s selfish; that’s what it is.... I’ve no patience with these ’ere individualists.”
Discovering that Eddy had, he shut up sullenly and suspiciously, and ceased to regard him as afriend, so Eddy left him. On the whole, it had not been a cheery evening.
He told Arnold about it when he got home.
“There’s such a frightful lot to be said on both sides,” he added.
Arnold said, “There certainly is. A frightful lot. If one goes down to the Docks any day one may hear a good deal of it being said; only that’s nearly all on one side, and the wrong side.... I loathe the Unions and their whole system; it’s revolting, the whole theory of the thing, quite apart from the bullying and coercion.”
“I should rather like,” said Eddy, “to go down to the Docks to-morrow and hear the men speaking. Will you come?”
“Well, I can’t answer for myself; I may murder someone; but I’ll come if you’ll take the risk of that.”
Eddy hadn’t known before that Arnold, the cynical and negligent, felt so strongly about anything. He was rather interested.
“You’ve got tohaveUnions, surely you’d admit that,” he argued. This began a discussion too familiar in outline to be retailed; the reasons for Unions and against them are both exceedingly obvious, and may be imagined as given. It lasted them till late at night.
They went down to the Docks next day, about six o’clock in the evening.
THEREwas a crowd outside the Docks gates. Some, under the eyes of vigilant policemen, were picketing the groups of workmen as they came sullenly, nervously, defiantly, or indifferently out from the Docks. Others were listening to a young man speaking from a cart. Arnold and Eddy stopped to listen, too. It was poor stuff; not at all interesting. But it was adapted to its object and its audience, and punctuated by vehement applause. At the cheering, Arnold looked disgustedly on the ground; no doubt he was ashamed of the human race. But Eddy thought, “The man’s a fool, but he’s got hold of something sound. The man’s a stupid man, but he’s got brains on his side, and strength, and organisation; all the forces that make for civilisation. They’re crude, they’re brutal, they’re revolting, these people, but they do look ahead, and that’s civilisation.” The Tory-Socialist side of him thus appreciated, while the Liberal-Individualist side applauded the blacklegs comingup from work. The human side applauded them, too; they were few among many, plucky men surrounded by murderous bullies, who would as likely as not track some of them home and bash their heads in on their own doorsteps, and perhaps their wives’ heads too.
Eddy caught sight of Fred Webb and his two sons walking in a group, surrounded by picketters. Suddenly the scene became a nightmare to him, impossibly dreadful. Somehow he knew that people were going to hurt and be hurt very soon. He looked at the few police, and wondered at the helplessness or indifference of the law, that lets such things be, that is powerless to guard citizens from assault and murder.
He heard Arnold give a short laugh at his side, and recalled his attention to what the man on the cart was saying.
“The poor lunatic can’t even make sense and logic out of his own case,” Arnold remarked. “I could do it better myself.”
Eddy listened. It was indeed pathetically stupid, pointless, sentimental.
After another minute of it, Arnold said, “Since they’re so ready to listen, why shouldn’t they listen to me for a change?” and scrambled up on to a cart full of barrels and stood for a moment looking round. The speaker went on speaking, but someone cried, “Here’s another chap with something to say. Let ’im say it, mate; go on, young feller.”
Arnold did go on. He had certainly got something to say, and he said it. For a minute or two the caustic quality of his utterances was missed; then it was slowly apprehended. Someone groaned, and someone else shouted, “Chuck it. Pull him down.”
Arnold had a knack of biting and disagreeable speech, and he was using it. He was commenting on the weak points in the other man’s speech. But if he had thought to persuade any, he was disillusioned. Like an audience of old, they cried out with a loud voice, metaphorically stopped their ears, and ran at him with one accord. Someone threw a brick at him. The next moment hands dragged him down and hustled him away. A voice Eddy recognised as Webb’s cried, “Fair play; let ’im speak, can’t you. ’E was talking sense, which is more than most here do.”
The scuffling and hustling became excited and violent. It was becoming a free fight. Blacklegs were surrounded threateningly by strikers; the police drew nearer. Eddy pushed through shoving, angry men to get to Arnold. They recognised him as Arnold’s companion, and hustled him about. Arnold was using his fists. Eddy saw him hit a man on the mouth. Someone kicked Eddy on the shin. He shot out his fist mechanically, and hit the man in the face, and thought, “I must have hurt him a lot, what a lot of right he’s got on his side,” before the blow was returned, cutting his lip open.
He saw Arnold disappear, borne down by an angry group; he pushed towards him, jostling through the men in his way, who were confusedly giving now before the mounted police. He could not reach Arnold; he lost sight of where he was; he was carried back by the swaying crowd. He heard a whimpering boy’s voice behind him, “Mr. Oliver, sir,” and looked round into young Sid Webb’s sick, frightened face.
“They’ve downed dad.... And I think they’ve done for him.... They kicked him on the head.... They’re after me now——”
Eddy said, “Stick near me,” and the next moment Sid gave an angry squeal, because someone was twisting his arm back. Eddy turned round and hit a man under the chin, sending him staggering back under the feet of a plunging horse. The sight of the trampling hoofs so near the man’s head turned Eddy sick; he swore and caught at the rein, and dragged the horse sharply sideways. The policeman riding it brought down his truncheon violently on his arm, which dropped nerveless and heavy at his side. Hands caught at his knees from below; he was dragged suddenly to the ground, and saw, looking up, the bleeding face of the man he had knocked down close to his own. The next moment the man was up, trampling him, pushing out of the way of the plunging horse. Eddy struggled to his knees, tried to get up, and could not. He was beaten down by a writhing forest of legs and heavy boots. He gave it up, and fell over on his side intothe slimy, trodden mud. Everything hurt desperately—other people’s feet, his own arm, his face, his body. The forest smelt of mud and human clothes, and suddenly became quite dark.
Someone was lifting his head, and trying to make him drink brandy. He opened his eyes and said, moving his cut lips stiffly and painfully, “Their principles are right, but their methods are rotten.” Someone else said, “He’s coming round,” and he came.
He could breathe and see now, for the forest had gone. There were people still, and gas-lamps, and stars, but all remote. There were policemen, and he remembered how they had hurt him. It seemed, indeed, that everyone had hurt him. All their principles were no doubt right; but all their methods were certainly rotten.
“I’m going to get up,” he said, and lay still.
“Where do you live?” asked someone. “Perhaps he’d better be taken to hospital.”
Eddy said, “Oh, no. I live somewhere all right. Besides, I’m not hurt,” but he could not talk well, because his mouth was so swollen. In another moment he remembered where he did live. “22A, Old Compton Street, of course.” That reminded him of Arnold. Things were coming back to him.
“Where’s my friend?” he mumbled. “He was knocked down, too.”
They said, “Don’t you worry about him; he’ll be looked after all right,” and Eddy sat up and said,“I suppose you mean he’s dead,” quietly, and with conviction.
Since that was what they did mean, they hushed him and told him not to worry, and he lay back in the mud and was quiet.
EDDYlay for some days in bed, battered and bruised, and slightly broken. He was not seriously damaged; not irreparably like Arnold; Arnold, who was beyond piecing together.
Through the queer, dim, sad days and nights, Eddy’s weakened thoughts were of Arnold; Arnold the cynical, the sceptical, the supercilious, the scornful; Arnold, who had believed in nothing, and had yet been murdered for believing in something, and saying so. Arnold had hated democratic tyranny, and his hatred had given his words and his blows a force that had recoiled on himself and killed him. Eddy’s blows on that chaotic, surprising evening had lacked this energy; his own consciousness of hating nothing had unnerved him; so he hadn’t died. He had merely been buffeted about and knocked out of the way like so much rubbish by both combatant sides in turn. He bore the scars of the strikers’ fists and boots, and of the heavy truncheon of the law. Both sides had struck him as an enemy, because he was not whole-heartedly for them. It was, surely, anironical epitome, a brief summing-up in terms of blows, of the story of his life. What chaos, what confusion, what unheroic shipwreck of plans and work and career dogged those who fought under many colours! One died for believing in something; one didn’t die for believing in everything; one lived on incoherently, from hand to mouth, despised of all, accepted of none, fruitful of nothing. For these the world has no use; the piteous, travailing world that needs all the helpers, all the workers it can get. The dim shadows of his room through the long, strange nights seemed to be walls pressing round, pressing in closer and closer, pushed by the insistent weight of the unredressed evil without. Here he saw himself lying, shut by the shadow walls into a little secluded place, allowed to do nothing, because he was no use. The evil without haunted his nightmares; it must have bitten more deeply into his active waking moments than he had known. It seemed hideous to lie and do nothing. And when he wanted to get up at once and go out and do something to help, they would not let him. He was no use. He never would be any use.
More and more it seemed to him clear that the one way to be of use in this odd world—of the oddity of the world he was becoming increasingly convinced, comparing it with the many worlds he could more easily have imagined—the one way, it seemed, to be of use was to take a definite line and stick to it and reject all others; to be single-minded and ardent, and exclusive; to be, in brief, a partisan,if necessary a bigot. In procession there moved before him the fine, strong, ardent people he had known, who had spent themselves for an idea, and for its inherent negations, and he saw them all as martyrs; Eileen, living on broken and dead because so utter had been her caring for one person that no one else was any good; Molly, cutting two lives apart for a difference of principle; Billy Raymond, Jane Dawn, all the company of craftsmen and artists, fining words and lines to their utmost, fastidiously rejecting, laying down insuperable barriers between good and bad, so that never the twain should meet; priests and all moral reformers, working against odds for these same barriers in a different sphere; all workers, all artists, all healers of evil, all makers of good; even Daphne and Nevill, parted for principles that could not join; and Arnold, dead for a cause. Only the aimless drifters, the ineptitudes, content to slope through the world on thoughts, were left outside the workshop unused.
In these dark hours of self-disgust, Eddy half thought of becoming a novelist, that last resource of the spiritually destitute. For novels are not life, that immeasurably important thing that has to be so sternly approached; in novels one may take as many points of view as one likes, all at the same time; instead of working for life, one may sit and survey it from all angles simultaneously. It is only when one starts walking on a road that one finds it excludes the other roads. Yes; probably hewould end a novelist. An ignoble, perhaps even a fatuous career; but it is, after all, one way through this queer, shifting chaos of unanswerable riddles. When solutions are proved unattainable, some spend themselves and their all on a rough-and-ready shot at truth, on doing what they can with the little they know; others give it up and talk about it. It was as a refuge for such as these that the novelist’s trade was presented to man, we will not speculate from whence or by whom....
Breaking into these dark reflections came friends to see him, dropping in one by one. The first was Professor Denison, the morning after the accident. A telegram had brought him up from Cambridge, late last night. Seeing his grey, stricken face, Eddy felt miserably disloyal, to have come out of it alive. Dr. Denison patted him on the shoulder and said, “Poor boy, poor boy. It is hard for you,” and it was Eddy who had tears in his eyes.
“I took him there,” he muttered; but Dr. Denison took no notice of that.
Eddy said next, “He spoke so splendidly,” then remembered that Arnold had spoken on the wrong side, and that that, too, must be bitter to his father.
Professor Denison made a queer, hopeless, deprecatory gesture with his hands.
“He was murdered by a cruel system,” he said, in his remote, toneless voice. “Don’t think I blame those ignorant men who did him to death. What killed him was the system that made those men what they are—the cruel oppression, theeconomic grinding—what can you expect....” He broke off, and turned helplessly away, remembering only that he had lost his son.
Every day as long as he stayed in London he came into Eddy’s room after visiting Arnold’s, and sat with him, infinitely gentle, silent, and sad.
Mrs. Oliver said, “Poor man, one’s too dreadfully sorry for him to suggest it, but it’s not the best thing for you to have him, dear.”
The other visitors who came were probably better for Eddy, but Mrs. Oliver thought he had too many. All his friends seemed to come all day.
And once Eileen Le Moine came, and that was not as it should be. Mrs. Oliver, when the message was sent up, turned to Eddy doubtfully; but he said at once, “Ask her if she’ll come up,” and she had to bear it.
Mrs. Le Moine came in. Mrs. Oliver slightly touched her hand. For a moment her look hung startled on the changed, dimmed brilliance she scarcely recognised. Mrs. Le Moine, whatever her sins, had, it seemed, been through desperate times since they had parted at Welchester fourteen months ago. There was an absent look about her, as if she scarcely took in Eddy’s mother. But for Eddy himself, stretched shattered on the couch by the fire, her look was pitiful and soft.
Mrs. Oliver’s eyes wavered from her to Eddy. Being a lady of kind habits, she usually left Eddy alone with his friends for a little. In this instance she was doubtful; but Eddy’s eyes, unconsciouslywistful, decided her, and she yielded. After all, a three-cornered interview between them would have been a painful absurdity. If Eddy must have such friends, he must have them to himself....
When they were alone, Eileen sat down by him, still a little absent and thoughtful, though, bending compassionate eyes on him, she said softly, of him and Arnold, “You poor boys....” Then she was broodingly silent, and seemed to be casting about how to begin.
Suddenly she pulled herself together.
“We’ve not much time, have we? I must be quick. I’ve something I want to say to you, Eddy.... Do you know Mrs. Crawford came to see me the other day?”
Eddy shook his head, languidly, moved only with a faint surprise at Mrs. Crawford’s unexpectedness.
Eileen went on, “I just wondered had she told you. But I thought perhaps not.... I like her, Eddy. She was nice to me. I don’t know why, because I supposed—but never mind. What she came for was to tell me some things. Things I think I ought to have guessed for myself. I think I’ve been very stupid and very selfish, and I complaining to you about my troubles all this long while, and never thinking how it might be doing you harm. I ought to have known why Molly broke your engagement.”
“There were a number of reasons,” said Eddy. “She thought we didn’t agree about things and couldn’t pull together.”
Eileen shook her head. “She may have. ButI think there was only one reason that mattered very much. She didn’t approve of me, and didn’t like it that you were my friend. And she was surely right. A man shouldn’t have friends his wife can’t be friends with too; it spoils it all. And of course she knew she couldn’t be friends with me; she thinks me bad. Molly would find it impossible even if it wasn’t wrong, to be friends with a bad person. So of course she had the engagement ended; there was no other way.... And you never told me it was that.... You should have told me, you foolish boy. Instead, you went on seeing me and being good to me, and letting me talk about my own things, and—and being just the one comfort I had, (for you have been that; it’s the way you understand things, I suppose)—and I all the time spoiling your life. When Mrs. Crawford told me how it was I was angry with you. You had a right to have told me. And now I’ve come to tellyousomething. You’re to go to Molly and mend what’s broken, and tell her you and I aren’t going to be friends any more. That will be the plain truth. We are not. Not friends to matter, I mean. We won’t be seeing each other alone and meeting the way we’ve been doing. If we meet it will be by chance, and with other people; that won’t hurt.”
Eddy, red-faced and indignant, said weakly, “It will hurt. It will hurt me. Haven’t I lost enough friends, then, that I must lose you, too?”
A queer little smile touched her lips.
“You have not. Not enough friends yet. Eddy,what’s the best thing of all in this world of good things? Don’t you and I both know it? Isn’t it love, no less? And isn’t love good enough to pay a price for? And if the price must be paid in coin you value—in friendship, and in some other good things—still, isn’t it worth it? Ah, you know, and I know, that it is!”
The firelight, flickering across her white face, lit it swiftly to passion. She, who had paid so heavy a price herself, was saying what she knew.
“So you’ll pay it, Eddy. You’ll pay it. You’ll have to pay more than you know, before you’ve done with love. I wonder will you have to pay your very soul away? Many people have to do that; pay away their own inmost selves, the things in them they care for most, their secret dreams. ‘I have laid my dreams under your feet. Tread softly, because you tread on my dreams.’... It’s like that so often; and then she—or he—doesn’t always tread softly; they may tread heavily, the way the dreams break and die. Still, it’s worth it....”
She fell into silence, brooding with bent head and locked hands. Then she roused herself, and said cheerfully, “You may say just what you like, Eddy, but I’m not going to spoil your life any more. That’s gone on too long already. If it was only by way of saying thank you, I would stop it now. For you’ve been a lot of use to me, you know. I don’t think I could easily tell you how much. I’m not going to try; only Iamgoing to do what I can to help you patch up your affairs that you’ve muddled so. Soyou go to Molly directly you get home, and make her marry you. And you’ll pay the price she asks, and you’ll go on, both of you, paying it and paying it, more and more of it, as long as you both live.”
“She won’t have me,” said Eddy. “No one would have me, I should think. Why should they? I’m nothing. Everyone else is something; but I’m nothing. I can do nothing, and be nothing. I am a mere muddle. Why should Molly, who is straight and simple and direct, marry a muddle?”
“Because,” said Eileen, “she cares for it. And she’ll probably straighten it out a bit; that’s what I mean, partly, by the price ... you’ll have to become straight and simple and direct too, I wouldn’t wonder, in the end. You may die a Tory country gentleman, no less, saying, ‘To hell with these Socialist thieves’—no, that’s the horrid language we use in Ireland alone isn’t it, but I wouldn’t wonder if the English squires meant the same. Or you might become equally simple and direct in another direction, and say, ‘Down with the landed tyrants,’ only Molly wouldn’t like that so well. But it’ll be a wonder if you don’t, once you’re married to Molly, have to throw overboard a few creeds, as well as a few people. Anyhow, that’s not your business now. What you’ve got to do now is to get your health again and go down to Welchester and talk to Molly the way she’ll see reason.... And now I must go. Your mother doesn’t care for me to be here, but I had to come this once; it’s never again, you can tell her that.”
Eddy sat up and frowned. “Don’t go on like that, Eileen. I’ve not the least intention of having my friendships broken for me like this. If Molly ever marries me—only she won’t—it will be to take my friends; that is certain.”
She shook her head and smiled down on him as she rose.
“You’ll have to let your friends settle whether they want to be taken or not, Eddy.... Dear, kind, absurd boy, that’s been so good to me, I’m going now. Goodbye, and get well.”
Her fingers lightly touched his forehead, and she left him; left him alone in a world become poor and thin and ordinary, shorn of some beauty, of certain dreams and laughter and surprises.
Into it came his mother.
“Is Mrs. Le Moine gone, then, dear?”
“Yes,” he said. “She is gone.”
So flatly he spoke, so apathetically, that she looked at him in anxiety.
“She has tired you. You have been talking too much. Really, this mustn’t happen again....”
He moved restlessly over on to his side.
“It won’t happen again, mother. Never again.”
ONMidsummer Eve, which was the day before his marriage, Eddy had a number of his friends to dinner at the Moulin d’Or. It had amused him to ask a great many, and to select them from many different quarters and sets, and to watch how they all got on together. For many of them were not in the habit of meeting one another. The Vicar of St. Gregory’s, for instance, did not, in the normal course of his days, as a rule come across Billy Raymond, or Cecil Le Moine, with whom he was conversing courteously across the table; Bob Traherne, his curate, seldom chatted affably with Conservative young members of Parliament such as Nevill Bellairs; Mrs. Crawford had long since irrevocably decided against social intercourse with Eileen Le Moine, to whom she was talking this evening as if she was rather pleased to have the opportunity; Bridget Hogan was wont to avoid militant desirers of votes, but to-night she was garrulously holding forth to a lady novelist of these habits who residedin a garden city; Eddy’s friend, the young Irish Unionist, was confronted and probably outraged by Blake Connolly, Eileen’s father, the Nationalist editor of theHibernian, a vehement-tongued, hot-tempered, rather witty person, with deep blue eyes like Eileen’s, and a flexible, persuasive voice. At the same table with Bob Traherne and Jane Dawn was a beautiful young man in a soft frilly shirt, an evangelical young man who at Cambridge had belonged to the C.I.C.C.U., and had preached in the Market Place. If he had known enough about them, he would have thought Jane Dawn’s attitude towards religion and life a pity, and Bob Traherne’s a bad mistake. But on this harmonious occasion they all met as friends. Even James Peters, sturdy and truthful, forbore to show Cecil Le Moine that he did not like him. Even Hillier, though it was pain and grief to him, kept silence from good words, and did not denounce Eileen Le Moine.
And Eddy, looking round the room at all of them, thought how well they all got on for one evening, because they were wanting to, and because one evening did not matter, and how they would not, many of them, get on at all, and would not even want to, if they were put to a longer test. And once again, at this, that he told himself was not the last, gathering of the heterogeneous crowd of his friends together, he saw how right they all were, in their different ways and yet at odds. He remembered how someone had said, “The interesting quarrels of the worldare never between truth and falsehood, but between different truths.” Ah, but must there be quarrels? More and more clearly he had come to see lately that there must; that through the fighting of extremes something is beaten out....
Someone thumped the table for silence, and Billy Raymond was on his feet, proposing their host’s health and happiness. Billy was rather a charming speaker, in his unselfconscious, unfluent, amused, quietly allusive way, that was rather talk than speechifying. After him came Nevill Bellairs, Eddy’s brother-in-law to be, who said the right things in his pleasant, cordial, well-bred, young member’s manner. Then they drank Eddy’s health, and after that Eddy got on to his feet to return thanks. But all he said was “Thanks very much. It was very nice of all of you to come. I hope you’ve all enjoyed this evening as much as I have, and I hope we shall have many more like it in future, after....” When he paused someone broke in with “He’s a jolly good fellow,” and they shouted it till the passers by in the Soho streets took it up and sang and whistled in chorus. That was the answer they unanimously gave to the hope he had expressed. It was an answer so cheerful and so friendly that it covered the fact that no one had echoed the hope, or even admitted it as a possibility. After all, it was an absurd thing to hope, for one dinner-party never is exactly like another; how should it be, with so much of life and death between?
When the singing and the cheering and the toasting was over, they all sat on and talked and smoked till late. Eddy talked too. And under his talking his perceptions were keenly working. The vivid, alive personalities of all these people, these widely differing men and women, boys and girls, struck sharply on his consciousness. There were vast differences between them, yet in nearly all was a certain fine, vigorous effectiveness, a power of achieving, getting something done. They all had their weapons, and used them in the battles of the world. They all, artists and philosophers, journalists and politicians, poets and priests, workers among the poor, players among the rich, knew what they would be at, where they thought they were going and how, and what they were up against. They made their choices; they selected, preferred, rejected ... hated.... The sharp, hard word brought him up. That was it; they hated. They all, probably, hated something or other. Even the tolerant, large-minded Billy, even the gentle Jane, hated what they considered bad literature, bad art. They not only sought good, but eschewed evil; if they had not realised the bad, the word “good” would have been meaningless to them.
With everyone in the room it was the same. Blake Connolly hated the Union—that was why he could be the force for Nationalism that he was; John Macleod, the Ulsterman, hated Nationalists and Papists—that was why he spoke so well on platforms for the Union; Bob Traherne hatedcapitalism—that was why he could fight so effectively for the economic betterment that he believed in; Nevill Bellairs hated Liberalism—that was why he got in at elections; the vicar of St. Gregory’s hated disregard of moral laws—that was why he was a potent force for their observance among his parishioners; Hillier hated agnosticism—that was why he could tell his people without flinching that they would go to hell if they didn’t belong to the Church; (he also, Eddy remembered, hated some writers of plays—and that, no doubt, was why he looked at Cecil Le Moine as he did;) Cecil Le Moine hated the commonplace and the stupid—that was why he never lapsed into either in his plays; Mrs. Crawford hated errors of breeding (such as discordant clothes, elopements, incendiarism, and other vulgar violence)—that was why her house was so select; Bridget Hogan hated being bored—that was why she succeeded in finding life consistently amusing; James Peters hated men of his own class without collars, men of any class without backbones, as well as lies, unwholesomeness, and all morbid rot—that was probably why his short, unsubtle, boyish sermons had a force, a driving-power, that made them tell, and why the men and boys he worked and played with loved him.
And Arnold, who was not there but ought to have been, had hated many things, and that was why he wasn’t there.
Yes, they all hated something; they all rejected; all recognised without shirking the implied negationsin what they loved. That was how and why they got things done, these vivid, living people. That was how and why anyone ever got anything done, in this perplexing, unfinished, rough-hewn world, with so much to do to it, and for it. An imperfect world, of course; if it were not, hate and rejections would not be necessary; a rough and ready, stupid muddle of a world, an incoherent, astonishing chaos of contradictions—but, after all, the world one has to live in and work in and fight in, using the weapons ready to hand. If one does not use them, if one rejects them as too blunt, too rough and ready, too inaccurate, for one’s fine sense of truth, one is left weaponless, a non-combatant, a useless drifter from company to company, cast out of all in turn.... Better than that, surely, is any absurdity of party and creed, dogma and system. After all, when all is said in their despite, it is these that do the work.
Such were Eddy’s broken and detached reflections in the course of this cheerful evening. The various pieces of counsel offered him by others were to the same effect. Blake Connolly, who, meeting him to-night for the first time, had taken a strong fancy to him, said confidentially and regretfully, “I hear the bride’s a Tory; that’s a pity, now. Don’t let her have you corrupted. You’ve some fine Liberal sentiments; I used to read them in that queer paper of yours.” (He ignored the fine Unionist sentiments he had also read in the queer paper.) “Don’t let them run to waste. You should go onwriting; you’ve a gift. Go on writing for the right things, sticking up for the right side. Be practical; get something done. As they used to say in the old days: