And now there came a wondrous week of perfect weather. All the lovely Somersetshire coast lay under the warmth and brilliance of a dazzling sun,—the sea was smooth,—and small sailing skiffs danced merrily up and down from Minehead to Weircombe and back again with the ease and security of seabirds, whose happiest resting-place is on the waves. A lovely calm environed the little village,—it was not a haunt of cheap "trippers,"—and summer-time was not only a working-time, but a playing time too with all the inhabitants, both young and old. The shore, with its fine golden sand, warm with the warmth of the cloudless sky, was a popular resort, and Helmsley, though his physical weakness perceptibly increased, was often able to go down there, assisted by Mary and Angus, one on each side supporting him and guarding his movements. It pleased him to sit under the shelter of the rocks and watch the long shining ripples of ocean roll forwards and backwards on the shore in silvery lines, edged with delicate, lace-like fringes of foam,—and the slow, monotonous murmur of the gathering and dispersing water soothed his nerves and hushed a certain inward fretfulness of spirit which teased him now and then, but to which he bravely strove not to give way. Sometimes—but only sometimes—he felt that it was hard to die. Hard to be old just as he was beginning to learn how to live,—hard to pass out of the beauty and wonder of this present life with all its best joys scarcely experienced, and exchange the consciousness of what little he knew for something concerning which no one could honestly give him any authentic information.
"Yet I might have said the same, had I been conscious, before I was born!" he thought. "In a former state of existence I might have said, 'Why send me from this that I know and enjoy, to something which I have not seen and therefore cannot believe in?' Perhaps, for all I can tell, I did say it. And yet God had His way with me and placed me here—for what? Only to learn a lesson! That is truly all I have done. For the making of money is as nothing in the sight of Eternal Law,—it is merely man's accumulation of perishable matter, which, like all perishable things, is swept away in due course, while he who accumulated it is of no more account as a mere corpse than his poverty-stricken brother. What a foolish striving it all is! What envyings, spites, meannesses and miserable pettinesses arise from this greed of money! Yes, I have learned my lesson! I wonder whether I shall now be permitted to pass into a higher standard, and begin again!"
These inner musings sometimes comforted and sometimes perplexed him, and often he was made suddenly aware of a strange and exhilarating impression of returning youthfulness—a buoyancy of feeling and a delightful ease, such as a man in full vigour experiences when, after ascending some glorious mountain summit, he sees the panorama of a world below him. His brain was very clear and active—and whenever he chose to talk, there were plenty of his humble friends ready to listen. One day the morning papers were full of great headlines announcing the assassination of one of the world's throned rulers, and the Weircombe fishermen, discussing the news, sought the opinion of "old David" concerning the matter. "Old David" was, however, somewhat slow to be drawn on so questionable a subject, but Angus Reay was not so reticent.
"Why should kings spend money recklessly on their often filthy vices and pleasures," he demanded, "while thousands, ay, millions of their subjects starve? As long as such a wretched state of things exists, so long will there be Anarchy. But I know the head and front of the offending! I know the Chief of all the Anarchists!"
"Lord bless us!" exclaimed Mrs. Twitt, who happened to be standing by. "Ye don't say so! Wot's' 'ee like?"
"He's all shapes and sizes—all colours too!" laughed Angus. "He's simply the Irresponsible Journalist!"
"As you were once!" suggested Helmsley, with a smile.
"No, I was never 'irresponsible,'" declared Reay, emphatically. "I may have been faulty in the following of my profession, but I never wrote a line that I thought might cause uneasiness in the minds of the million. What I mean is, that the Irresponsible Journalist who gives more prominence to the doings of kings and queens and stupid 'society' folk, than to the actual work, thought, and progress of the nation at large, is making a forcing-bed for the growth of Anarchy. Consider the feelings of a starving man who reads in a newspaper that certain people in London give dinners to their friends at a cost of Two Guineas a head! Consider the frenzied passion of a father who sees his children dying of want, when he reads that the mistress of a king wears diamonds worth forty thousand pounds round her throat! If the balance of material things is for the present thus set awry, and such vile and criminal anachronisms exist, the proprietors of newspapers should have better sense than to flaunt them before the public eye as though they deserved admiration. The Anarchist at any rate has an ideal. It may be a mistaken ideal, but whatever it is, it is a desperate effort to break down a system which anarchists imagine is at the root of all the bribery, corruption, flunkeyism and money-grubbing of the world. Moreover, the Anarchist carries his own life in his hand, and the risk he runs can scarcely be for his pleasure. Yet he braves everything for the 'ideal,' which he fancies, if realised, will release others from the yoke of injustice and tyranny. Few people have any 'ideals' at all nowadays;—what they want to do is to spend as much as they like, and eat as much as they can. And the newspapers that persist in chronicling the amount of their expenditure and the extent of their appetites, are the real breeders and encouragers of every form of anarchy under the sun!"
"You may be right," said Helmsley, slowly. "Indeed I fear you are! If one is to judge by old-time records, it was a kinder, simpler world when there was no daily press."
"Man is an imitative animal," continued Reay. "The deeds he hears of, whether good or bad, he seeks to emulate. In bygone ages crime existed, of course, but it was not blazoned in headlines to the public. Good and brave deeds were praised and recorded, and as a consequence—perhaps as a result of imitation—there were many heroes. In our times a good or brave deed is squeezed into an obscure paragraph,—while intellect and brilliant talent receive scarcely any acknowledgment—the silly doings of 'society' and the Court are the chief matter,—hence, possibly, the preponderance of dunces and flunkeys, again produced by sheer 'imitativeness.' Is it pleasant for a man with starvation at his door, to read that a king pays two thousand a year to his cook? That same two thousand comes out of the pockets of the nation—and the starving man thinks some of it ought to fall in his way instead of providing for a cooker of royal victuals! There is no end to the mischief generated by the publication of such snobbish statements, whether true or false. This was the kind of irresponsible talk that set Jean-Jacques Rousseau thinking and writing, and kindling the first spark of the fire of the French Revolution. 'Royal-Flunkey' methods of journalism provoke deep resentment in the public mind,—for a king after all is only the paid servant of the people—he is not an idol or a deity to which an independent nation should for ever crook the knee. And from the smouldering anger of the million at what they conceive to be injustice and hypocrisy, springs Anarchy."