XVII
Tucked into the frame of the Jacobean mirror (sham antique, but rather good-looking) over the mantelpiece of Bertram’s “study,” was the card given to him by Lady Ottery for her lecture on “The Religion of Revolution: Past and Present.” He had glanced at it several times from day to day with a sense of annoyance, as at the notification of an impending menace, such as a date with the dentist or any distant disagreeable and inevitable duty.
APRIL 10.
THE RELIGION OF REVOLUTION:
PAST AND PRESENT
BY
THE COUNTESS OF OTTERY
CHAIRMAN
HIS GRACE, THE DUKE OF BRAMSHAW, K.G.
Once or twice he had murmured, “Oh, Lord! I suppose I’ll have to go!” and then, as familiar objects lose their force of impression, he’d forgotten the lecture and its date. It was Joyce who reminded him one morning, at the breakfast table, to the music of an early piano organ in Holland Street,
“I suppose you’re going to Mother’s lecture?”
He said “Oh, Lord!” again and “When is it?”
It was on the following afternoon, and Joyce was naturally annoyed with him when he showed signs of shirking the engagement. She couldn’t understand, as she said, fretfully, why Bertram disparaged her Mother’s intellectual ability—Joyce always spoke of her Mother with a distinctly capital M—to say nothing of her historical knowledge. Lady Ottery had studied considerably more than Bertram, who was a desultory reader, and had read a good deal at the British Museum last winter, as well as belonging to the London Library, which allowed her to take out eleven books at a time on serious subjects.
“The amount of knowledge Mother has amassed is stupendous,” said Joyce. “Whether you agree with her or not, I think you ought to respect her research work.”
Bertram muttered something about not believing much in book-knowledge, but retreated on that line of argument as the author of a book which soon he hoped to present to Joyce with love and homage, as the first-fruits of his new-found gift. In the end, he capitulated, and agreed humbly to go to the lecture and behave himself with due deference to his exalted Mother-in-law. He tried to give a touch of humour to the surrender, and obtained the glimmer of a smile from Joyce. But she froze him by saying that she hoped her Mother’s lecture would convert him to more reasonable views, and make him see the frightful danger of the opinions held by his revolutionary friends at a time when England was threatened by mob-law.
“My dear Kid!” he said, making light again of her over-serious mood. “In the first place my friends aren’t revolutionary”—he had to make a mental reservation of Janet Rockingham Welford—“and in the second place, I don’t agree that England is threatened by mob-law.”
“Not by the coming strike?”
He hesitated for a moment, and then said: “The men call it a lock-out.”
She called that hair-splitting over words, and though he would not consent to that—it made all the difference to the argument—he agreed that there would be a serious situation in England, dangerous, even, if all the miners left their pits, and millions of unemployed and idle men were added to the two millions already without work. The stoppage of coal would gradually strangle all industry, and the railways, which were the vital arteries of the nation.
“There may be Civil War,” said Joyce, calmly, and Bertram answered sharply, “Nonsense! Who suggests that?”
“General Bellasis. As the Home Office man, he knows.”
“I wish to goodness he’d keep his precious knowledge to himself!” said Bertram angrily, “and not come round here mixing scaremonger politics with tea-table dalliance!”
Joyce’s colour rose slightly, as a hint that she was “vexed.”
“He’s one of the best. If you weren’t so unreasonably jealous, I’d ask you to make a friend of him.”
“Why?”
All Bertram’s nerves jangled at this suggestion of friendship with a man he detested as one of the professional warriors of Whitehall, with Prussian instincts and supercilious manners.
“Because he can put you in the way of a job. In fact, I think he’s going to offer you one.”
“Did you ask him?”
“More or less. Don’t you want a job? It’s time you began to keep your end up.”
Bertram rose from his chair, walked to the window, and tossed a blind tassel to and fro.
Presently he spoke, in a low, emotional voice.
“I was hoping you wouldn’t say that! I’ll pay you back for board and lodging when my book’s published.”
She followed him to the window, and put her hand on his shoulder, with a caressing touch, which surprised him. It was some time since she’d done that.
“Bertram, I’m not playing the spiteful cat. You know it’s not my style of play. I’m not flinging anything in your face, or any rot of that kind. But you know you want a good job. You’ve said so a hundred times! Now General Bellasis is ready to offer you one. Why get huffed?”
He was melted by her words, by the old comradely tone of them, by her hand on his shoulder. If she only knew how a touch from her could kill his temper!
“Give my book a chance,” he said. “I believe I can do something at the writing game. Meanwhile, if Bellasis has anything to offer, I’ll think of it, seriously. What sort of a job, do you think?”
“Organising,” she told him, and he liked the word. “Something to do with the home defence of England—in case of trouble.”
“Trouble?” He looked at her vaguely.
“The strike.”
“Oh, Lord!”
“Why not?”
He didn’t tell her why not, and indeed, she couldn’t wait to hear why not, for some friends called with a car to take her to Brighton for lunch and tea. But his mind went quickly to recent conversations with some of the people whom Joyce didn’t know and didn’t care to know—Bill Huggett, down in Lambeth, Janet Welford, Luke Christy, Nat Verney, the miners’ leader, Lawless, the economist, Bernard Hall, editor of The New World. They also had been talking about the coming strike, which they called a lock-out, and had seriously disturbed his mind on the subject.
Christy and his friends declared that the ultimatum issued to the miners was the first challenge of Capital in a conflict which they intended to wage with Labour, until the spirit of the workers was broken and they were reduced again to the cheap standards of pre-war wages upon which the prosperity of British industry had been developed—for the employers.
While the Government was squandering millions of money on maintaining overstaffed departments filled with “limpets” pouring more millions into Imperialistic adventures in Mesopotamia, and the East, giving immense financial support to any Russian ruffian of the old régime who gathered together bands of bandits to invade the Republic, and generally ignoring the realities of financial ruin in Europe, following the War, they were engineering a systematic assault on Labour, in order to weaken its political power and reduce it to economic subjection.
The heroes of the War, “our brave boys in the trenches,” were already being branded as “Bolshevists” by Government spokesmen. The men who had fought at Ypres, on the Somme, and across the Hindenburg line, and whose patient courage in years of mud and misery and devouring death had won the War, in spite of the stupidity of generals, and the personal intrigues of politicians, were now to be denounced as revolutionary rascals, unpatriotic “blighters,” who must be “taught a lesson,” and forced back to a low standard of wages, and of life.
That was Christy’s way of thought about the ultimatum to the miners. It was supported with facts and figures by Nat Verney, the Labour member. He took the trouble to analyse the proposed scale of wages at a little conference of writing men in Christy’s rooms, brought there by Bernard Hall, of The New World. He seemed to prove that they were less than a living wage, so grotesquely out of scale with the prevailing cost of life that if the men accepted the ultimatum—hurled at them suddenly without previous warning or discussion—they would surrender their very birthright—the right to exist.
Verney spoke quietly, with a smouldering but masked passion.
“We shall fight them to the last ditch. The Government, in league with the mine-owners—that’s certain—have forced an issue which we’re ready to accept. We’re not afraid, for the judgment of the people will be on our side.”
Bernard Hall admitted that, personally, he was afraid. There was a sense of bitterness among millions of men who had fought in the war and now were disillusioned with the promises made and betrayed by politicians. With so many men idle—lack of coal would shut down every industry—there might be a violent conflict. The Government was prepared to use force. He understood they were calling out the Army reserves. Some act of hooliganism, some shot fired accidentally, or otherwise, by any fool, and frightful things might happen.
“Supposing the soldiers refuse to fire on their own crowd?” asked Verney, and something in his eyes showed his hope for that.
There was silence in Christy’s room, until Christy himself broke it.
“That means Revolution—and the end of England as a world power.”
“We’re not out for Revolution,” said Verney, in a low voice. “We’re out for a decent rate of wage—nothing more than that.”
Then he raised his voice a little, and it had a thrill in it.
“If the Government asks for Revolution, if it arranges it, the blood guilt will be on its head.”
Bertram spoke for the first time. He was irritable, because all this grave discussion had come as a surprise to him, and suggested unpleasant possibilities which he hadn’t imagined, and didn’t believe.
“Don’t you think we’d better drop all mention of the word Revolution? It’s an ugly damn word, and oughtn’t to be in our English vocabulary. It isn’t in our English character, if I know England.”
The company had been startled by Bertram’s intervention, all but Christy, who understood his silences and his outbursts, and the working of his mind.
“Do any of us know England?” asked Bernard Hall, after a slight pause. “The men who went out to the war—to France, Palestine, Egypt, Salonica, Russia—have come back again. We don’t understand what’s going on in their minds. They don’t understand themselves. We’re dealing with uncertain, unknown forces.”
“I know the men pretty well,” said Bertram. “I keep in touch with them.”
They paid some heed to that, and admitted his claim to give evidence, acknowledging their own distance from the labouring classes, their theoretical guesses.
“You don’t think they’re out for trouble?” asked Hall. His dark, Celtic face, with its brooding eyes, was heavily overcast by the shadow of anxiety.
“They want peace,” said Bertram, “and enough to eat, decent house-room, and a little pocket-money for the fun of things.”
It was Bill Huggett who had given him that view of the situation. He used Huggett as a guide to the mind of the London crowds, the average mind of the dreary processions of men, marching with trained step through London with banners saying, “We want work, not charity,” and the point of view of the seedy-looking groups lounging about the Labour Exchanges, and of other assemblies of men listening on Sunday afternoons to political orators in Hyde Park. Bill Huggett was his interpreter.
The man had succeeded in getting back some of his work as “French polisher.” He was earning about two pounds ten a week, out of which he paid eighteen shillings for two miserable rooms in the slums of Walworth. With the rest he could manage to get food for himself and his four children, in spite of high prices. Getting back to work had changed his whole aspect. He was more alert, and less inclined to “grouse,” and he’d regained some of the old Cockney humour which had made him popular as a company sergeant in France and Flanders.
Bertram spent half an hour with him, now and again, in his lodgings, or in a public-house round the corner, and Hugget, though always embarrassed by this comradeship of his former officer, and somewhat suspicious of its motives, was not ungrateful or unfriendly.
It amazed him that Bertram seemed pleased to sit in his dirty little room for a few minutes, not bothering when the youngest “brat” began a howl in the next room, and dozens of other children, sickly, ailing, underfed some of them, joined in a chorus of wailing in this block of “workmen’s dwellings.”
Women railed through open or broken windows, looking into a courtyard filled with “washing”—and threatened to break the jaws of small children, if they didn’t “be’ave,” or insulted each other for certain grievances connected with the water supply on the common stairways. Doors banged, cheap gramophones blared out jazz tunes. Somewhere a violin was being scraped like the crying of a soul in agony, by a diligent practiser of finger-exercises. Shrill laughter of coarse-voiced girls rang out in the passages. Oaths floated up from the courtyard. The noise of distant domestic quarrels came vaguely into Huggett’s room, where he sat in his shirtsleeves, smoking Woodbine cigarettes and answering Bertram’s questions with a queer, nervous grin.
“ ’Omes for ’Eroes!” he remarked once when the strange medley of noises in the Workmen’s Dwellings became more than usually discordant.
The “silver slipper” story upon which Bertram questioned him, excited his sense of humour.
“Silver my foot!” he said; “white metal at sixpence the gross! A Bolshevist emblem? Well, if that ain’t the funniest yarn! Strikes me there’s no more sense in some of them so-called Toffs than in the long ears of a coster’s moke.”
He had a realistic mind, and was something of a philosopher, like others Bertram knew, who had risked their lives in the war, and escaped by a hairsbreadth chance of luck. In their billets behind the line, in dug-outs, in shell-holes where they had lain wounded, these men, or some of them, had thought starkly of the meaning of things, had talked with each other in a kind of short-cut language, incoherent, yet understanding. Now they thought of the Peace they’d helped to make, and the life they’d come back to find.
“It’s like this, Major. We’re fed up with lies. The blarsted lies of newspapers. The muck them politicians say. The rotten stuff some of our own leaders say. In the old days we used to believe what we was told or what we read. Now we’ve found out. We’ve been kidded, all along! That’s made us think. We know a bit of truth ourselves. We know what ’appened to us. The things we did. The things we’ve seen. We can’t be kidded any more. That makes a lot of difference!”
“What do the men want?” asked Bertram. “What are they looking for?”
“Not over much,” said Huggett. “There’s some that talk a lot. I did a bit myself before I found my job again. Communism. Bolshevism. Bunkum. More kidding! Most others are out for peace—no more bloody war, not at no cost—decent ’ouse-room—not this dog ’ole for eighteen bob a week—a bit of pocket money for the fun of things. See?”
Bertram thought he saw. He believed that Huggett knew the truth of things about the spirit of the men. He marvelled at this fellow’s commonsense, his soundness of judgment, his sense of humour, his patience. Those had been the qualities of the men in the war. They were still there. If all the men were like Huggett, or most of them, England was safe. The menace was only in the minds of men like Bernard Hall of The New World—intellectually morbid—and in the minds of Joyce’s crowd, who were obsessed by the bogey of Bolshevism—that strange foreign growth, so alien to English ideas.