My blood was hot at the thought. It was perhaps the first swelling of a patriotic emotion I had known; the first hint of any larger citizenship than that which claims and demands, without thought of giving. And, immediately, it was succeeded by a sharp chill, a chill that ushered me into one of the bitterest moments of humiliation that I can remember. The thought accompanying that chill was this:
"What can you do? What are you fit for? What boy's part, even, can you take, though the roof were being burned over your mother's head? What of Constance, or Beatrice? Could you strike a blow for either? Work for Englishmen, forsooth! Yes, for those of them who have ever learned a man's part in such work. But you—you have never had a gun in your hand. What have you done? You have poured out for your weekly wage so many thousands of words; words meaning—what? Why, they have meant what the roadside beggar means: 'Give! Give! Give!' They have urged men to demand more from the State, and give the State nothing; to rob the State of even its defences, for the sake of adding to their own immediate ease. And you have ridiculed, as a survival of barbarous times, the efforts of such men as the brave old Field Marshal who gave his declining years to the thankless task of urging England to make some effort of preparation to fend off just that very crisis which has now come upon her, and found her absolutely unprepared. That is how you have earned your right to live, a citizen of the freest country in the world, a subject of the greatest Empire the world has ever seen. And when you have had leisure and money to spend, you have devoted it to overeating and drinking, and helping to fill the tills of alien parasites in Soho. That has been your part. And now, now that the fatal crisis has arrived, you, whose qualification is that you can wield the pen of a begging letter-writer, who is also scurrilous and insolent—you lie in bed and clench your useless hands, and prate of work for Englishmen!"
That was the thought that came to me with a sudden chill that night; and I suppose I was one of the earliest among millions doomed to writhe under the impotent shame of such a thought. I shall never forget that night in my Bloomsbury lodging. It was my ordeal of self-revelation. I suppose I slept a little toward morning; but I rose early with a kind of vague longing to escape from the company of the personality my thought had shown me in the night.
It is natural that the awakening of an individual should be a more speedy process than the awakening of a people—a nation. I regard my early rising on that Monday morning as the beginning of my first real awakening to life as an Englishman. I had still far to go—I had not even crossed the threshold as yet.
XVII
ONE STEP FORWARD
Thy trust, thy honours, these were great; the greater now thy shame, for thou hast proved both unready and unfit, unworthy offspring of a noble sire!—Merrow's Country Tales.
Five minutes after Clement Blaine reached the office of The Mass that morning, he had lost the services of his assistant editor, and I felt that I had taken one step upward from a veritable quagmire of humiliation.
Blaine was almost too excited about the news of the day to pay much heed to my little speech of resignation. The morning paper to which he subscribed—a Radical journal of pronounced tone—had observed far less reticence than most of its contemporaries, and, in its desire to lend sensational interest to its columns, had not minimized in any way the startling character of such intelligence as it had received.