CHAPTER V.
While she and Hallin were sitting thus, momentarily out of tune with each other, the silence was suddenly broken by a familiar voice.
"I say, Hallin—is this all right?"
The words came from a young man who, having knocked unheeded, opened the door, and cautiously put in a curly head.
"Frank!—is that you? Come in," cried Hallin, springing up.
Frank Leven came in, and at once perceived the lady sitting in the window.
"Well, I am glad!" he cried, striding across the room and shaking Hallin's hand by the way. "Miss Boyce! I thought none of your friends were ever going to get a sight of you again! Why, what—"
He drew back scanning her, a gay look of quizzing surprise on his fair boy's face.
"He expected me in cap and apron," said Marcella, laughing; "or means to pretend he did."
"I expected a sensation! And here you are, just as you were, only twice
as—I say, Hallin, doesn't she look well!"—this in a stage aside to
Hallin, while the speaker was drawing off his gloves, and still studying
Marcella.
"Well, I think she looks tired," said Hallin, with a little attempt at a smile, but turning away. Everybody felt a certain tension, a certain danger, even in the simplest words, and Miss Hallin's call to supper was very welcome.
The frugal meal went gaily. The chattering Christchurch boy brought to it a breath of happy, careless life, to which the three others—over-driven and over-pressed, all of them—responded with a kind of eagerness. Hallin especially delighted in him, and would have out all his budget—his peacock's pride at having been just put into the 'Varsity eleven, his cricket engagements for the summer, his rows with his dons, above all his lasting amazement that he should have just scraped through his Mods.
"I thought those Roman emperors would have done for me!" he declared, with a child's complacency. "Brutes! I couldn't remember them. I learnt them up and down, backwards and forwards—but it was no good; they nearly dished me!"
"Yet it comes back to me," said Hallin, slily, "that when a certain person was once asked to name the winner of the Derby in some obscure year, he began at the beginning, and gave us all of them, from first to last, without a hitch."
"The winner of the Derby!" said the lad, eagerly, bending forward with his hands on his knees; "why, I should rather think so! That isn't memory; that's knowledge!—Goodness! who's this?"
The last remark was addressed sotto voce to Marcella. Supper was just over, and the two guests, with Hallin, had returned to the window, while Miss Hallin, stoutly refusing their help, herself cleared the table and set all straight.
Hallin, hearing a knock, had gone to the door while Leven was speaking. Four men came crowding in, all of them apparently well known both to Hallin and his sister. The last two seemed to be workmen; the others were Bennett, Hallin's old and tried friend among the Labour-leaders, and Nehemiah Wilkins, M.P. Hallin introduced them all to Marcella and Leven; but the new-comers took little notice of any one but their host, and were soon seated about him discussing a matter already apparently familiar to them, and into which Hallin had thrown himself at once with that passionate directness which, in the social and speculative field, replaced his ordinary gentleness of manner. He seemed to be in strong disagreement with the rest—a disagreement which troubled himself and irritated them.
Marcella watched them with quick curiosity from the window where she was sitting, and would have liked to go forward to listen. But Frank Leven turned suddenly round upon her with sparkling eyes.
"Oh, I say! don't go. Do come and sit here with me a bit. Oh, isn't it rum! isn't it rum! Look at Hallin,—those are the people whom he cares to talk to. That's a shoemaker, that man to the left—really an awfully cute fellow—and this man in front, I think he told me he was a mason, a Socialist of course—would like to string me up to-morrow. Did you ever see such a countenance? Whenever that man begins, I think we must be precious near to shooting. And he's pious too, would pray over us first and shoot us afterwards—which isn't the case, I understand, with many of 'em. Then the others—you know them? That's Bennett—regular good fellow—always telling his pals not to make fools of themselves—for which of course they love him no more than they are obliged—And Wilkins—oh! Wilkins"—he chuckled—"they say it'll come to a beautiful row in the House before they've done, between him and my charming cousin, Harry Wharton. My father says he backs Wilkins."
Then suddenly the lad recollected himself and his clear cheek coloured a little after a hasty glance at his companion. He fell to silence and looking at his boots. Marcella wondered what was the matter with him. Since her flight from Mellor she had lived, so to speak, with her head in the sand. She herself had never talked directly of her own affairs to anybody. Her sensitive pride did not let her realise that, notwithstanding, all the world was aware of them.
"I don't suppose you know much about your cousin!" she said to him with a little scorn.
"Well, I don't want to!" said the lad, "that's one comfort! But I don't know anything about anything!—Miss Boyce!"
He plunged his head in his hands, and Marcella, looking at him, saw at once that she was meant to understand she had woe and lamentation beside her.
Her black eyes danced with laughter. At Mellor she had been several times his confidante. The handsome lad was not apparently very fond of his sisters and had taken to her from the beginning. To-night she recognised the old symptoms.
"What, you have been getting into scrapes again?" she said—"how many since we met last?"
"There! you make fun of it!" he said indignantly from behind his fingers—"you're like all the rest."
Marcella teased him a little more till at last she was astonished by a flash of genuine wrath from the hastily uncovered eyes.
"If you're only going to chaff a fellow let's go over there and talk! And yet I did want to tell you about it—you were awfully kind to me down at home. I want to tell you—and I don't want to tell you—perhaps I oughtn't to tell you—you'll think me a brute, I dare say, an ungentlemanly brute for speaking of it at all—and yet somehow—"
The boy, crimson, bit his lips. Marcella, arrested and puzzled, laid a hand on his arm. She had been used to these motherly ways with him at Mellor, on the strength of her seniority, so inadequately measured by its two years or so of time!
"I won't laugh," she said, "tell me."
"No—really?—shall I?"
Whereupon there burst forth a history precisely similar it seemed to some half dozen others she had already heard from the same lips. A pretty girl—or rather "an exquisite creature!" met at the house of some relation in Scotland, met again at the "Boats" at Oxford, and yet again at Commemoration balls, Nuneham picnics, and the rest; adored and adorable; yet, of course, a sphinx born for the torment of men, taking her haughty way over a prostrate sex, kind to-day, cruel to-morrow; not to be won by money, yet, naturally, not to be won without it; possessed like Rose Aylmer of "every virtue, every grace," whether of form or family; yet making nothing but a devastating and death-dealing use of them—how familiar it all was!—and how many more of them there seemed to be in the world, on a man's reckoning, than on a woman's!
"And you know," said the lad, eagerly, "though she's so frightfully pretty—well, frightfully fetching, rather—and well dressed and all the rest of it, she isn't a bit silly, not one of your empty-headed girls—not she. She's read a lot of things—a lot! I'm sure, Miss Boyce"—he looked at her confidently,—"if you were to see her you'd think her awfully clever. And yet she's so little—and so dainty—and she dances—my goodness! you should see her dance, skirt-dance I mean—Letty Lind isn't in it! She's good too, awfully good. I think her mother's a most dreadful old bore—well, no, I didn't mean that—of course I didn't mean that!—but she's fussy, you know, and invalidy, and has to be wrapped up in shawls, and dragged about in bath chairs, and Betty's an angel to her—she is really—though her mother's always snapping her head off. And as to the poor—"
Something in his tone, in the way he had of fishing for her approval, sent Marcella into a sudden fit of laughter. Then she put out a hand to restrain this plunging lover.
"Look here—do come to the point—have you proposed to her?"
"I should rather think I have!" said the boy, fervently. "About once a week since Christmas. Of course she's played with me—that sort always does—but I think I might really have a chance with her, if it weren't for her mother—horrible old—no, of course I don't mean that! But now it comes in—what I oughtn't to tell you—I know I oughtn't to tell you! I'm always making a beastly mess of it. It's because I can't help talking of it!"
And shaking his curly head in despair, he once more plunged his red cheeks into his hands and fell abruptly silent.
Marcella coloured for sympathy. "I really wish you wouldn't talk in riddles," she said. "What is the matter with you?—of course you must tell me."
"Well, I know you won't mind!" cried the lad, emerging. "As if you could mind! But it sounds like my impudence to be talking to you about—about—You see," he blurted out, "she's going to Italy with the Raeburns. She's a connection of theirs, somehow, and Miss Raeburn's taken a fancy to her lately—and her mother's treated me like dirt ever since they asked her to go to Italy—and naturally a fellow sees what that means—and what her mother's after. I don't believe Betty would; he's too old for her, isn't he? Oh, my goodness!"—this time he smote his knee in real desperation—"now I have done it. I'm simply bursting always with the thing I'd rather cut my head off than say. Why they make 'em like me I don't know!"
"You mean," said Marcella, with impatience—"that her mother wants her to marry Mr. Raeburn?"
He looked round at his companion. She was lying back in a deep chair, her hands lightly clasped on her knee. Something in her attitude, in the pose of the tragic head, in the expression of the face stamped to-night with a fatigue which was also a dignity, struck a real compunction into his mood of vanity and excitement. He had simply not been able to resist the temptation to talk to her. She reminded him of the Raeburns, and the Raeburns were in his mind at the present moment by day and by night. He knew that he was probably doing an indelicate and indiscreet thing, but all the same his boyish egotism would not be restrained from the headlong pursuit of his own emotions. There was in him too such a burning curiosity as to how she would take it—what she would say.
Now however he felt a genuine shrinking. His look changed. Drawing his chair close up to her he began a series of penitent and self-contradictory excuses which Marcella soon broke in upon.
"I don't know why you talk like that," she said, looking at him steadily. "Do you suppose I can go on all my life without hearing Mr. Raeburn's name mentioned? And don't apologise so much! It really doesn't matter what I suppose—that you think—about my present state of mind. It is very simple. I ought never to have accepted Mr. Raeburn. I behaved badly. I know it—and everybody knows it. Still one has to go on living one's life somehow. The point is that I am rather the wrong person for you to come to just now, for if there is one thing I ardently wish about Mr. Raeburn, it is that he should get himself married."
Frank Leven looked at her in bewildered dismay.
"I never thought of that," he said.
"Well, you might, mightn't you?"
For another short space there was silence between them, while the rush of talk in the centre of the room was still loud and unspent.
Then she rated herself for want of sympathy. Frank sat beside her shy and uncomfortable, his confidence chilled away.
"So you think Miss Raeburn has views?" she asked him, smiling, and in her most ordinary voice.
The boy's eye brightened again with the implied permission to go on chattering.
"I know she has! Betty's brother as good as told me that she and Mrs. Macdonald—that's Betty's mother—she hasn't got a father—had talked it over. And now Betty's going with them to Italy, and Aldous is going too for ten days—and when I go to the Macdonalds Mrs. Macdonald treats me as if I were a little chap in jackets, and Betty worries me to death. It's sickening!"
"And how about Mr. Raeburn?"
"Oh, Aldous seems to like her very much," he said despondently. "She's always teasing and amusing him. When she's there she never lets him alone. She harries him out. She makes him read to her and ride with her. She makes him discuss all sorts of things with her you'd never think Aldous would discuss—her lovers and her love affairs, and being in love!—it's extraordinary the way she drives him round. At Easter she and her mother were staying at the Court, and one night Betty told me she was bored to death. It was a very smart party, but everything was so flat and everybody was so dull. So she suddenly got up and ran across to Aldous. 'Now look here, Mr. Aldous,' she said; 'this'll never do! you've got to come and dance with me, and push those chairs and tables aside'—I can fancy the little stamp she'd give—'and make those other people dance too.' And she made him—she positively made him. Aldous declared he didn't dance, and she wouldn't have a word of it. And presently she got to all her tricks, skirt-dancing and the rest of it—and of course the evening went like smoke."
Marcella's eyes, unusually wide open, were somewhat intently fixed on the speaker.
"And Mr. Raeburn liked it?" she asked in a tone that sounded incredulous.
"Didn't he just? She told me they got regular close friends after that, and he told her everything—oh, well," said the lad, embarrassed, and clutching at his usual formula—"of course, I didn't mean that. And she's fearfully flattered, you can see she is, and she tells me that she adores him—that he's the only great man she's ever known—that I'm not fit to black his boots, and ought to be grateful whenever he speaks to me—and all that sort of rot. And now she's going off with them. I shall have to shoot myself—I declare I shall!"
"Well, not yet," said Marcella, in a soothing voice; "the case isn't clear enough. Wait till they come back. Shall we move? I'm going over there to listen to that talk. But—first—come and see me whenever you like—3 to 4.30, Brown's Buildings, Maine Street—and tell me how this goes on?"
She spoke with a careless lightness, laughing at him with a half sisterly freedom. She had risen from her seat, and he, whose thoughts had been wrapped up for months in one of the smallest of the sex, was suddenly struck with her height and stately gesture as she moved away from him.
"By Jove! Why didn't she stick to Aldous," he said to himself discontentedly as his eyes followed her. "It was only her cranks, and of course she'll get rid of them. Just like my luck!"
* * * * *
Meanwhile Marcella took a seat next to Miss Hallin, who looked up from her knitting to smile at her. The girl fell into the attitude of listening; but for some minutes she was not listening at all. She was reflecting how little men knew of each other!—even the most intimate friends—and trying to imagine what Aldous Raeburn would be like, married to such a charmer as Frank had sketched. His friendship for her meant, of course, the attraction of contraries—one of the most promising of all possible beginnings. On the whole, she thought Frank's chances were poor.
Then, unexpectedly, her ear was caught by Wharton's name, and she discovered that what was going on beside her was a passionate discussion of his present position and prospects in the Labour party—a discussion, however, mainly confined to Wilkins and the two workmen. Bennett had the air of the shrewd and kindly spectator who has his own reasons for treating a situation with reserve; and Hallin was lying back in his chair flushed and worn out. The previous debate, which had now merged in these questions of men and personalities, had made him miserable; he had no heart for anything more. Miss Hallin observed him anxiously, and made restless movements now and then, as though she had it in her mind to send all her guests away.
The two Socialist workmen were talking strongly in favour of an organised and distinct Labour party, and of Wharton's leadership. They referred constantly to Parnell, and what he had clone for "those Irish fellows." The only way to make Labour formidable in the House was to learn the lesson of Unionism and of Parnellism, to act together and strike together, to make of the party a "two-handed engine," ready to smite Tory and Liberal impartially. To this end a separate organisation, separate place in the House, separate Whips—they were ready, nay clamorous, for them all. And they were equally determined on Harry Wharton as a leader. They spoke of the Clarion with enthusiasm, and declared that its owner was already an independent power, and was, moreover, as "straight" as he was sharp.
The contention and the praise lashed Wilkins into fury. After making one or two visible efforts at a sarcastic self-control which came to nothing, he broke out into a flood of invective which left the rest of the room staring. Marcella found herself indignantly wondering who this big man, with his fierce eyes, long, puffy cheeks, coarse black hair, and North-country accent, might be. Why did he talk in this way, with these epithets, this venom? It was intolerable!
Hallin roused himself from his fatigue to play the peace-maker. But some of the things Wilkins had been saying had put up the backs of the two workmen, and the talk flamed up unmanageably—Wilkins's dialect getting more pronounced with each step of the argument.
"Well, if I'd ever ha' thowt that I war coomin' to Lunnon to put myself and my party oonder the heel o' Muster Harry Wharton, I'd ha' stayed at home, I tell tha," cried Wilkins, slapping his knee. "If it's to be the People's party, why, in the name o' God, must yo put a yoong ripstitch like yon at the head of it? a man who'll just mak use of us all, you an' me, and ivery man Jack of us, for his own advancement, an' ull kick us down when he's done with us! Why shouldn't he? What is he? Is he a man of us—bone of our bone? He's a landlord, and an aristocrat, I tell tha! What have the likes of him ever been but thorns in our side? When have the landlords ever gone with the people? Have they not been the blight and the curse of the country for hun'erds of years? And you're goin' to tell me that a man bred out o' them—living on his rent and interest—grinding the faces of the poor, I'll be bound if the truth were known, as all the rest of them do—is goin' to lead me, an' those as'll act with me to the pullin' down of the landlords! Why are we to go lickspittlin' to any man of his sort to do our work for us? Let him go to his own class—I'm told Mr. Wharton is mighty fond of countesses, and they of him!—or let him set up as the friend of the working man just as he likes—I'm quite agreeable!—I shan't make any bones about takin' his vote; but I'm not goin' to make him master over me, and give him the right to speak for my mates in the House of Commons. I'd cut my hand off fust!"
Leven grinned in the background. Bennett lay back in his chair with a worried look. Wilkins's crudities were very distasteful to him both in and out of the House. The younger of the Socialist workmen, a mason, with a strong square face, incongruously lit somehow with the eyes of the religious dreamer, looked at Wilkins contemptuously.
"There's none of you in the House will take orders," he said quickly, "and that's the ruin of us. We all know that. Where do you think we'd have been in the struggle with the employers, if we'd gone about our business as you're going about yours in the House of Commons?"
"I'm not saying we shouldn't organise," said Wilkins, fiercely. "What I'm sayin' is, get a man of the working class—a man who has the wants of the working class—a man whom the working class can get a hold on—to do your business for you, and not any bloodsucking landlord or capitalist. It's a slap i' the face to ivery honest working man i' the coontry, to mak' a Labour party and put Harry Wharton at t' head of it!"
The young Socialist looked at him askance. "Of course you'd like it yourself!" was what he was thinking. "But they'll take a man as can hold his own with the swells—and quite right too!"
"And if Mr. Wharton is a landlord he's a good sort!" exclaimed the shoemaker—a tall, lean man in a well-brushed frock coat. "There's many on us knows as have been to hear him speak, what he's tried to do about the land, and the co-operative farming. E's straight is Mr. Wharton. We 'aven't got Socialism yet—an' it isn't 'is fault bein' a landlord. Ee was born it."
"I tell tha he's playin' for his own hand!" said Wilkins, doggedly, the red spot deepening on his swarthy cheek—"he's runnin' that paper for his own hand—Haven't I had experience of him? I know it—And I'll prove it some day! He's one for featherin' his own nest is Mr. Wharton—and when he's doon it by makkin' fools of us, he'll leave us to whistle for any good we're iver likely to get out o' him. He go agen the landlords when it coom to the real toossle,—I know 'em—I tell tha—I know 'em!"
A woman's voice, clear and scornful, broke into the talk.
"It's a little strange to think, isn't it, that while we in London go on groaning and moaning about insanitary houses, and making our small attempts here and there, half of the country poor of England have been re-housed in our generation by these same landlords—no fuss about it—and rents for five-roomed cottages, somewhere about one and fourpence a week!"
Hallin swung his chair round and looked at the speaker—amazed!
Wilkins also stared at her under his eyebrows. He did not like women—least of all, ladies.
He gruffly replied that if they had done anything like as much as she said—which, he begged her pardon, but he didn't believe—it was done for the landlords' own purposes, either to buy off public opinion, or just for show and aggrandisement. People who had prize pigs and prize cattle must have prize cottages of course—"with a race of slaves inside 'em!"
Marcella, bright-eyed, erect, her thin right hand hanging over her knee, went avengingly into facts—the difference between landlords' villages and "open" villages; the agrarian experiments made by different great landlords; the advantage to the community, even from the Socialist point of view of a system which had preserved the land in great blocks, for the ultimate use of the State, as compared with a system like the French, which had for ever made Socialism impossible.
Hallin's astonishment almost swept away his weariness.
"Where in the world did she get it all from, and is she standing on her head or am I?"
After an animated little debate, in which Bennett and the two workmen joined, while Wilkins sat for the most part in moody, contemptuous silence, and Marcella, her obstinacy roused, carried through her defence of the landlords with all a woman's love of emphasis and paradox, everybody rose simultaneously to say good-night.
"You ought to come and lead a debate down at our Limehouse club," said Bennett pleasantly to Marcella, as she held out her hand to him; "you'd take a lot of beating."
"Yet I'm a Venturist, you know," she said, laughing; "I am."
He shook his head, laughed too, and departed.
When the four had gone, Marcella turned upon Hallin.
"Are there many of these Labour members like that?"
Her tone was still vibrating and sarcastic.
"He's not much of a talker, our Nehemiah," said Hallin, smiling; "but he has the most extraordinary power as a speaker over a large popular audience that I have ever seen. The man's honesty is amazing,—it's his tempers and his jealousies get in his way. You astonished him; but, for the matter of that, you astonished Frank and me still more!"
And as he fell back into his chair, Marcella caught a flash of expression, a tone that somehow put her on her defence.
"I was not going to listen to such unjust stuff without a word. Politics is one thing—slanderous abuse is another!" she said, throwing back her head with a gesture which instantly brought back to Hallin the scene in the Mellor drawing-room, when she had denounced the game-laws and Wharton had scored his first point.
He was silent, feeling a certain inner exasperation with women and their ways.
"'She only did it to annoy,'" cried Frank Leven; "'because she knows it teases.' We know very well what she thinks of us. But where did you get it all from, Miss Boyce? I just wish you'd tell me. There's a horrid Radical in the House I'm always having rows with—and upon my word I didn't know there was half so much to be said for us!"
Marcella flushed.
"Never mind where I got it!" she said.
In reality, of course, it was from those Agricultural Reports she had worked through the year before under Wharton's teaching, with so much angry zest, and to such different purpose.
* * * * *
When the door closed upon her and upon Frank Leven, who was to escort her home, Hallin walked quickly over to the table, and stood looking for a moment in a sort of bitter reverie at Raeburn's photograph.
His sister followed him, and laid her hand on his shoulder.
"Do go to bed, Edward! I am afraid that talk has tired you dreadfully."
"It would be no good going to bed, dear," he said, with a sigh of exhaustion. "I will sit and read a bit, and see if I can get myself into sleeping trim. But you go, Alice—good-night."
When she had gone he threw himself into his chair again with the thought—"She must contradict here as she contradicted there! She—and justice! If she could have been just to a landlord for one hour last year—"
He spent himself for a while in endless chains of recollection, oppressed by the clearness of his own brain, and thirsting for sleep. Then from the affairs of Raeburn and Marcella, he passed with a fresh sense of strain and effort to his own. That discussion with those four men which had filled the first part of the evening weighed upon him in his weakness of nerve, so that suddenly in the phantom silence of the night, all life became an oppression and a terror, and rest, either to-night or in the future, a thing never to be his.
He had come to the moment of difficulty, of tragedy, in a career which so far, in spite of all drawbacks of physical health and cramped activities, had been one of singular happiness and success. Ever since he had discovered his own gifts as a lecturer to working men, content, cheerfulness, nay, a passionate interest in every hour, had been quite compatible for him with all the permanent limitations of his lot. The study of economical and historical questions; the expression through them of such a hunger for the building of a "city of God" among men, as few are capable of; the evidence not to be ignored even by his modesty, and perpetually forthcoming over a long period of time, that he had the power to be loved, the power to lead, among those toilers of the world on whom all his thoughts centred—these things had been his joy, and had led him easily through much self-denial to the careful husbanding of every hour of strength and time in the service of his ideal end.
And now he had come upon opposition—the first cooling of friendships, the first distrust of friends that he had ever known.
Early in the spring of this year a book called To-morrow and the Land had appeared in London, written by a young London economist of great ability, and dealing with the nationalisation of the land. It did not offer much discussion of the general question, but it took up the question as it affected England specially and London in particular. It showed—or tried to show—in picturesque detail what might be the consequences for English rural or municipal life of throwing all land into a common or national stock, of expropriating the landlords, and transferring all rent to the people, to the effacement of taxation and the indefinite enrichment of the common lot. The book differed from Progress and Poverty, which also powerfully and directly affected the English working class, in that it suggested a financial scheme, of great apparent simplicity and ingenuity, for the compensation of the landlords; it was shorter, and more easily to be grasped by the average working man; and it was written in a singularly crisp and taking style, and—by the help of a number of telling illustrations borrowed directly from the circumstances of the larger English towns, especially of London—treated with abundant humour.
The thing had an enormous success—in popular phrase, "caught on." Soon Hallin found, that all the more active and intelligent spirits in the working-class centres where he was in vogue as a lecturer were touched—nay, possessed—by it. The crowd of more or less socialistic newspapers which had lately sprung up in London were full of it; the working men's clubs rang with it. It seemed to him a madness—an infection; and it spread like one. The book had soon reached an immense sale, and was in every one's hands.
To Hallin, a popular teacher, interested above all in the mingled problems of ethics and economics, such an incident was naturally of extreme importance. But he was himself opposed by deepest conviction, intellectual and moral, to the book and its conclusions. The more its success grew, the more eager and passionate became his own desire to battle with it. His platform, of course, was secured to him; his openings many. Hundreds and thousands of men all over England were keen to know what he had to say about the new phenomenon.
And he had been saying his say—throwing into it all his energies, all his finest work. With the result that—for the first time in eleven years—he felt his position in the working-class movement giving beneath his feet, and his influence beginning to drop from his hand. Coldness in place of enthusiasm; critical aloofness in place of affection; readiness to forget and omit him in matters where he had always hitherto belonged to the inner circle and the trusted few—these bitter ghosts, with their hard, unfamiliar looks, had risen of late in his world of idealist effort and joy, and had brought with them darkness and chill. He could not give way, for he had a singular unity of soul—it had been the source of his power—and every economical or social conviction was in some way bound up with the moral and religious passion which was his being—his inmost nature. And his sensitive state of nerve and brain, his anchorite's way of life, did not allow him the distractions of other men. The spread of these and other similar ideas seemed to him a question of the future of England; and he had already begun to throw himself into the unequal struggle with a martyr's tenacity, and with some prescience of the martyr's fate.
Even Bennett! As he sat there alone in the dim lamp-light, his head bent over his knees, his hands hanging loosely before him, he thought bitterly of the defection of that old friend who had stood by him through so many lesser contests. It was impossible that Bennett should think the schemes of that book feasible! Yet he was one of the honestest of men, and, within a certain range, one of the most clear-headed. As for the others, they had been all against him. Intellectually, their opinion did not matter to him; but morally it was so strange to him to find himself on the side of doubt and dissent, while all his friends were talking language which was almost the language of a new faith!
He had various lecturing engagements ahead, connected with this great debate which was now surging throughout the Labour world of London. He had accepted them with eagerness; in these weary night hours he looked forward to them with terror, seeing before him perpetually thousands of hostile faces, living in a nightmare of lost sympathies and broken friendships. Oh, for sleep—for the power to rest—to escape this corrosion of an ever active thought, which settled and reconciled nothing!
"The tragedy of life lies in the conflict between the creative will of man and the hidden wisdom of the world, which seems to thwart it." These words, written by one whose thought had penetrated deep into his own, rang in his ears as he sat brooding there. Not the hidden fate, or the hidden evil, but the hidden wisdom. Could one die and still believe it? Yet what else was the task of faith?