William—An Englishman

by Cicely Hamilton

There, afraid of her curious sympathy and questions, he shut and locked himself in; with the poignant loneliness of the brand-new furniture that he and Griselda had chosen and lovingly admired; with the poignant company of Griselda's photograph, smiling self-consciously from the centre of the mantelpiece and set in an ornate silver frame that was one of her wedding presents. He held it in his hands till the tears blinded him, kissed it sobbing and laid it face downwards.

The "general," burning with inquisitive sympathy, induced him, after one or two unsuccessful attempts, to open the door to her knocking; pressed on him, in spite of denials, a scratch meal of tea and poached eggs, and hovered round while he ate it. As befitted the occasion she held her apron to her eyes while she extracted as much as she could in the way of information. Later, as she washed up in the kitchen, she heard him moving from one tiny room to another—consumed with a restless misery and a restless wonder as to what he should do with his life. Still later she heard him go out again; though he had hidden away the self-conscious photograph, thrusting it out of sight into a drawer, the brand-new furniture was always there and always waiting for Griselda. The moment came when he could no longer suffer its company and went out into the street to avoid it. Other purpose in walking he had none—and thus it happened that, mechanically and without intent, he drifted into the Bloomsbury side-street where Faraday held his meeting.

The important doorkeeper would have greeted him with more than a nod—would gladly, in fact, have detained him after his four weeks' absence to exchange comments and views on the European situation; but William, in entering, made no response to his "Hallo, back again!" which it may be he did not even hear. He walked straight past the sentinel and into the bare familiar room—where everything, from the seats to their occupants, was just as it had been and where every face was known to him. Time, for a moment, turned back in its traces and yesterday unrolled before his eyes. He gazed at it and sat down slowly—by himself in the last row of chairs.... Edwardes, the Central London secretary, was hugging his ankle as he always hugged it, and Mrs. Jay-Blenkinsop, the formidable treasurer of the Golder's Green branch, frowned through her pince-nez at the speaker with her chin uplifted as of old, wore the same capacious sandals—her crossed knees showed them—and the same cold-gravy-coloured robe. And her son, young Jay-Blenkinsop, as his habit was, sprawled sideways on one chair and curled his long limbs round another. It was all as it had been; and Faraday, on the platform, was speaking with the accents of yesterday.

The important doorkeeper was not the only comrade who had noticed William's return: one or two heads were turned as he came in, but for the most part the audience was intent on the words of the speaker. The heads that turned made some sign of pleased recognition to which William responded automatically, unknowing that he did so. From his seat near the door his eyes wandered slowly over the platform, the hall and its occupants—slowly and with a dull and detached curiosity. What he saw there and heard was unreal, like a scene in an unconvincing play; he had a sense of looking at these people from a great way off, of hearing their voices from a distance. Something separated and held him removed from them.... He had great difficulty in giving his attention to what the speaker was saying; yet in the old days Faraday had always stirred him and to-night he was speaking well.

From thirty to forty convinced adherents assembled at a private conference are not the material upon which a public orator usually throws away his best endeavours; but Faraday that night was speaking not so much to his audience as to himself. Unadmitted, even to his secret soul, he had great and fierce need of conviction; it was with his own doubts that he wrestled, at his own head that he flung both his jeers and his arguments. He was of a finer because more intelligent mould than the Edwardeses and Jay-Blenkinsops who heard him and who were still thinking of the European tragedy as a red herring drawn by the cunning politician across the path of progress. Not for him was their happy imperviousness to the new idea, and, looking down from his platform on their assembled faces, it may have struck him, not pleasantly, that these people were in part of his making; they were, at any rate, the product of a system of which he, in common with politicians of every creed, had not scrupled to make full use.

Be that as it may, he spoke feelingly and well that night; far better and more feelingly than was needed by the numbers, the attitude and calibre of his audience, which was comfortably and stubbornly determined to agree with him before he opened his mouth. He had not come to the meeting with intent to be so lengthy and urgent; he had planned to be nothing more than brief and business-like, to give and invite suggestions for a vigorous prosecution of the anti-war campaign; but when he rose to open the discussion he was carried away by his own doubts and emotions; and the "few remarks" he had thought to make flared out into a veritable speech. He fought with and poured scorn on himself in the name of others, rallying his feebleness with argument and sneering at his own hesitations. Thus he spoke eloquently and deserved the applause which greeted him when he sat down.

Edwardes followed him, in response to the invitation for suggestions: a little be-spectacled Labour man whose ideal was a world of committees. There had been something alive about Faraday's outpouring; it was the speech of a man who, however resentfully, understood that the world had moved. But as Edwardes quacked earnestly about branch propaganda as an antidote to militarism and a means of diffusing the international idea, the sense of unreality descended again upon William. Branch propaganda—little leaflets and meetings—when guns made a pulp of flesh and blood, and men were being shot against walls! Resolutions in minute-books against wrongs like Griselda's and his own! For the first time for many days he felt a desire to laugh, and, if it had not been for his sense of the distant unreality of the proceedings, perhaps he would have been moved to actual expression of perverted and unmirthful mirth.

It was young Jay-Blenkinsop who made the proceedings real to him; and, but for his intervention at the end of the discussion, it is probable that William himself would have taken no part in it. He would have listened for a little, perhaps to the end, and then crept out to his loneliness; but Jay-Blenkinsop roused him and swept him out of himself ... Edwardes quacked earnestly for ten minutes or so: the aggrieved outpourings of a soul to which the really serious fact of the war was that it had caused a certain amount of backsliding and even desertion amongst the weaker brethren of his branch; and when he sat down, after a moment of silence, Jay-Blenkinsop rose to his feet. (In the dark ages that had ended a week ago William thought highly of Edgar Jay-Blenkinsop, esteeming him a youth of great promise.) With his hands in his pockets, his broad shoulders lolled against the wall and his hair, as usual, drooped over an eyebrow, he drawled out fine scorn upon the leaders of the Labour Party for their treachery to the cause of the People and their lack of the sense of Brotherhood. There was no particular purport in his vaguely scathing remarks, which (the meeting being nominally for business purposes) might well have been ruled out of order; but he was enjoying the sound of his own full voice and his mother gazed up at him admiringly.

It was more himself than his vague remarks that made William flare and see red—his six feet of conceited boyhood propped sprawlingly against the wall. As he listened he was gripped with a sudden hatred of Jay-Blenkinsop, a hatred that had its roots in envy of his physical perfections; it was for lack of that broad deep chest and those long strong limbs that the recruiting officer would have none of him ... and a muscular boy, a potential soldier, lolled hands in pockets and cracked ignorant jests at men who knew better than he did, at the agony of such as himself. As the young man drawled onward William breathed fast and thickly and clutched at the chair in front of him: till Jay-Blenkinsop, having sufficiently scarified the official representatives of Labour, went on to some smartly turned gibes at the recruiting campaign and the gulls who were caught by its appeals. One of his sarcasms brought him the ready laugh he had counted on—and something on which he had not counted; at the tail of the laugh came, imperative and raucous, the order, "Sit down, you young fool!"

Every head in the room went round with indignation to William—whom most of the gathering, Faraday included, now noticed for the first time. He was on his feet, stiffened and pallid with passion; but after the cry that had cut short Jay-Blenkinsop he stood silent, with his lips apart and his hands clutching at a chair-back. His fingers knotted and worked as they clutched and his mouth was twisted and quivering; he stood like an animal backed into a corner, defying the astounded eyes and the open incredulous mouths of those who had once been his comrades ... Most incredulous of all was the mouth of Mrs. Jay-Blenkinsop, who gaped in amazement at the unprovoked attack on her son.