She shook her head. He was probably, her apprehensive look said, going to do something that would take him out of the pretty paradise where she longed to set him galloping on the road to things men ought to have.
"I am going in to tear up the stuff I'm writing about that man I knew there in the prison. What does God Almighty care about him? I'm going to write a book and call it 'Prisoners,' and show how I was a prisoner myself, to money, and luxury, and the game and—" he would not mention Esther, but Lydia knew where his mind stumbled over the thought of her—"and how I got my medicine. And how other fellows will have to take theirs, these fellows Weedie's gulling and Addington, because it's a fool wrapped up in its own conceit and stroking the lion's cub till it's grown big enough to eat us."
He got up and Lydia called to him:
"What is the lion's cub?"
"Why, it's the people. And Weedon Moore is showing it how hungry it is by chucking the raw meat at it and the saucers of blood. And pretty soon it'll eat us and eat Weedie too."
He went in and up the stairs and Lydia fancied she heard the tearing of papers in his room.
XXIV
The dry branch has come alive. The young Jeff Lydia had known through Farvie was here, miraculously full of hope and laughter. Jeff was as different after that day as a man could be if he had been buried and revived and cast his grave-clothes off. He measured everything by his new idea and the answers came out pat. The creative impulse shot up in him and grew. He knew what it was to be a prisoner under penalty, every cruel phase of it; and now that he saw everybody else in bonds, one to an unbalanced law of life we call our destiny, one to cant, one to greed, one to untended impulse, he was afire to let the prisoners out. If they knew they were bound they could throw off these besetments of mortality and walk in beauty. Old Addington, the beloved, must free herself. Too long had she been held by the traditions she had erected into forms of worship. The traditions lasted still, though now nobody truly believed in them. She was beating her shawms and cymbals in the old way, but to a new tune, and the tune was not the song of liberty, he believed, but a child's lullaby. In that older time she had decently covered discomfiting facts, asserted that she believed revealed religion, and blessed God, in an ingenuous candour, for setting her feet in paths where she could walk decorously. But now that she was really considering new gods he wanted her to take herself in hand and find out what she really worshipped. What was God and what was Baal? Had she the nerve to burn her sacrifices and see? He began to understand her better every day he lived with her. Poor old Addington! she had been suddenly assaulted by the clamour of the times; it told her shameful things were happening, and she had, with her old duteous responsiveness, snatched at remedies. The rich, she found, had robbed the poor. Therefore let there be no more poverty, though not on that account less riches. And here the demagogue arose and bade her shirk no issue, even the red flag. God Himself, the demagogue informed her, gives in His march of time spectacular illustration of temporal vanity. The earthquake ruins us, the flood engulfs us, fire and water are His ministers to level the pomp of power. Therefore, said the demagogue, forget the sweet abidingness of home, the brooding peace of edifices, the symbolic uses of matter to show us, though we live but in tents of a night, that therein is a sign of the Eternal City. Down with property. Addington had learned to distrust one sort of individual, and she instantly believed she could trust the other individual who was as unlike him as possible. Because Dives had been numb to human needs, Lazarus was the new-discovered leader. And the pitiful part of it all was that though Addington used the alphabet and spoke the language of "social unrest", it did it merely with the relish of playing with a new thing. It didn't make a jot of difference in its daily living. It didn't exert itself over its local government, it didn't see the Weedon Moores were honeycombing the soil with sedition. It talked, and talked, and knew the earth would last its time.
When Jeffrey tore up the life of his fellow prisoner he did it as if he tore his own past with it. He sat down to write his new book which was, in a way, an autobiography. He had read the enduring ones. He used to think they were crudely honest, and he meant now to tell the truth as brutally as the older men: how, in his seething youth, when he scarcely knew the face of evil in his arrogant confidence that he was strong enough to ride it bareback without falling off, if it would bring him to his ends, he leaped into the money game. And at that point, he owned ingenuously, he would have to be briefly insincere. He could unroll his own past, but not Esther's. The minute the stage needed her he realised he could never summon her. He might betray himself, not her. It was she, the voice incarnate of greed and sensuous delight, that had whipped him along his breathless course, and now he had to conceal her behind a wilful lie and say they were his own delights that lured him.