“And yet,” said Gorman, “I can’t persuade her to look at Tim’s new invention.”
Mrs. Ascher’s prejudice against cinematographs, improved or unimproved, was certainly strong. I found it hard to understand exactly how she felt. She found no difficulty in regarding Gorman, a devoted politician, as a hero. When she had no objection to the form of entertainment with which he provided the public, it was difficult to see why she kicked against moving pictures. I should have thought that the performances at Westminster were considerably more vulgar, certainly far less original and striking, than the things shown on the cinematograph.
Gorman and I dined at Scott’s, chiefly on lobsters, at seven o’clock, an uncomfortably early hour. We had a twenty-five-mile drive before us to reach the farm, somewhere in the depths of Hertfordshire, where Tim was making his experiments. The drive was a very pleasant one. The first part of it lay along one of the great artery roads which lead from the centre of London to the North. The evening was fine and warm without being stuffy, one of those evenings which are the peculiar glory of the early English summer. It seemed to me that many thousands of people were passing along that road towards the country. Parties of laughing boys and girls pedalled northwards on bicycles, swerving in and out through the traffic. Stout, middle-aged men, with fat, middle-aged women beside them, drove sturdy ponies, or lean, high-stepping horses, in curious old-fashioned gigs. Motor cyclists, young men with outstretched chins and set faces, sped by us, outstripping our car. Others we passed, riders who had side cars attached to their cycles, young men these, too, but soberer, weighted with responsibility. They had their wives in the side cars, wives who looked little more than girls, though many of them held babies in their arms, and one now and then had a well-grown child wrapped in rugs at her feet.
“Life!” said Gorman, waving his cigar comprehensively towards the moving crowds. “Wonderful thing life! Keeps going on. Don’t know why it should, but it does. Nothing seems to make any difference to it.”
“Not even your politics,” I said. “Curious thing, isn’t it, how little all that fuss of yours matters? It doesn’t make any difference which of your parties is in power. All this goes on just the same. That young fellow—there, the one who didn’t quite break his neck at the lamp post—would go down to his office to-morrow exactly as he always does, if every member of the House of Commons dies in the night. You see that girl with the baby—the one on our left—she’d have had that baby just the same if the Long Parliament were still sitting. None of your laws could have made her have that baby, or stopped her. You are simply fussing in an unimportant way, raising silly little clouds of dust which will settle down again at once. She’s keeping the world going and she probably doesn’t even know the name of the Prime Minister.”
“That’s all very well,” said Gorman, “but we’re seeing that these people get their rights, their fair share of what’s going. If it wasn’t for us and the laws we pass, the rich would grow richer and richer while these men and women would gradually sink into the position of slaves. I’m not a socialist. I don’t believe in that theory; but capitalists have had things far too much their own way in the past.”
“Ascher!”
“Oh, Ascher! I like Ascher, of course, personally; but speaking of him as a typical member of a class, he’s simply a parasite. All financiers are. He ought to be abolished, wiped out, done away with. He fulfils no useful function.”
Our motor sped along. A cycle with a side car just kept pace with us for a while. A nice, clean-shaven, honest-looking young fellow was in the saddle. His girl-wife sat beside him in the basket-work slipper which he dragged along. It was her baby which I had pointed out to Gorman a moment before.
“Perhaps,” I said, “they have had tinned peaches for tea.”