The Prophet's Mantle

by E. Nesbit; Hubert Bland

The majority of the ladies gave a business-like aspect to the evening by severely retaining their outdoor garments. Some of these were of peculiar shape and make, a fact which Mrs Quaid explained in a whisper to be the result of their employment of inexperienced dressmakers, on the highest moral grounds.

By the time Clare had noticed all this the room was pretty full, and as everyone talked at once, and very loud, one might, by shutting one's eyes, have fancied oneself at an ordinary 'at home,' instead of at a serious gathering, whose note was earnestness, and whose motif was social regeneration.

She was just thinking something like this when Mrs Quaid touched her on the shoulder.

'Clare, my love,' she said, 'you must let me introduce dear Mr Petrovitch to you. You know he has been so exceedingly good as to consent to read us a paper to-night.'

Clare knew by experience that all her hostess's male friends were 'dear,' and her female ones 'sweet,' for at least three weeks after their first introduction, but when she turned to receive Petrovitch's bow, it did strike her that the epithet was more than usually incongruous. He was about the last person, she thought, to whom terms of indiscriminate endearment could be applied.

After the Continental manner, he had put on evening dress. The wide shirt-front showed off the splendid breadth of a chest that would not have disgraced a Life Guardsman in uniform. Miss Stanley, as she looked at him, admitted to herself that on some people the claw-hammer coat was not without its æsthetic attraction.

As the people settled down into chairs he took a seat beside her, but in such a position that she could see his face without turning her own.

Then, after a few business preliminaries, Petrovitch began to speak. He did not read, as had been announced, but spoke from notes, with a little hesitation, caused, perhaps, by his speaking in a foreign language. To most of his hearers what he had to say was well-known, no doubt; but to Clare all he said came as a revelation. She had come to be amused, to criticise, to 'make fun,' perhaps; but what she heard from this man beside her was not in the least amusing or funny. It seemed to her more like the gospel of a new religion. She listened intently, and after a while, unconsciously influenced by the interest and light in her face, he began to feel less and less as though he were talking to the room, and more and more as though he were speaking solely to the girl beside him. If he saw comprehension in her eyes, he did not trouble to explain a point further; if he saw a question there, he answered it; a doubt, he solved it. Some eyes are easy to read, and Petrovitch was a master of that art.

The girl was no fool, and though the whole theory of Socialism was new to her, she was able to follow the rigorous train of logic with which he led up to his conclusions. He attacked all the stock ideas which she had been brought up to respect. It somehow did not seem like blasphemy. He flung scorn and derision on the social ideals which she had heard lauded from her cradle. Some things which she had been taught to consider admirable and desirable, grew, as he spoke of them, to seem mean and paltry. Life, as she listened, took new meanings, and became of deeper significance. Even the affairs of every day, the chance stories of misery, and the 'painful' paragraphs of the newspapers, which she felt, and shuddered as she felt, had hitherto seemed only occasions for the sprinkling of a little Radical rose-water—little stings of passing horror, which heightened rather than detracted from the pleasures of existence—seemed now to be worth considering in some other light.

This was not the first time that Clare's heart had been stirred and her sympathies quickened by a spoken discourse. More than once she remembered having left the doors of parish church or cathedral in a tumult of emotion when some specially earnest and eloquent preacher had succeeded in casting a new and fierce light into the inmost depths of her soul; but, she remembered, those feelings had been transient, and strong though the new convictions and resolutions had been when she left the sacred portals, the small things of life—the duties of school, the light worries of home, the social bagatelles, things trivial and tenuous enough in themselves—had soon settled down upon her like a thick atmosphere, and by their aggregate weight had crushed, not out of existence, but back to her soul's remoter recesses, the new-born life.