Roger Michael never had large dinner-parties, and the talk was oftenest general. The fare that she spread was very simple; it was enough and good; it gained that recognition, and then the attention went elsewhere. The eight at the round table were, through a long range, harmoniously minded; half, at least, were old friends and comrades, and the other half came easily to a meeting-place. Thought, become articulate with less difficulty than usual, wove with ductileness across and across the table. There sounded a fair deal of laughter. They were all workers here, and, necessarily, toward many issues, serious-minded enough. But they could talk shop, and one another's shop, and shop of the world at large, with humour and quick appreciation of the merrier aspects of the workroom. At first, naturally, in a time of public excitement, they talked the war in Africa, and the sick longing the country now felt for peace, and the general public foreboding, undefined but very real, that had taken the place of the old, too-mellow complacency; but then, as naturally in this company, the talk went to underlying, slow, hesitant movements, evolutionary forces just "a-borning"; roads that people such as these were blazing, and athwart which each reactionary swing of the pendulum brought landslides and floods enough, mountains of obstruction, gulfs of not-yet-ness. But the roadmakers, the pioneers, had the pioneer temper; they were spinning ropes, shouldering picks, stating to themselves and one another that gulfs had been crossed before and mountains removed, and that, on the whole, it was healthful exercise. They were incurably hopeful, though at quite long range, as reformers have to be.
The Fabian told a mirth-provoking anecdote of a Tory candidate. The scientific man, who possessed an imagination and was a member of the Society for Psychical Research, gave a brief account of Thomson's new Theory of Corpuscles, and hazarded the prediction that the next quarter-century would see remarkable things. "We'll know more about radiation—gravity—the infinitely little and the infinitely big. And then—my hobby. There's a curious increase of interest in the question of a Fourth Dimension. It's a strange age, and it's going to be stranger still—or merely beautifully simple and homecoming, I don't know which. Science and mysticism are fairly within hailing distance of each other." The talk went to Christopher's investigation, and then to mountain-climbing, and Cecil Rhodes's Will, and Marconi's astonishing feat of receiving in Newfoundland wireless signals from a station on the English coast, and M. Santos-Dumont's flight in a veritable airship. The writer of essays, who was a woman and an earnest and loving one, had recently published a paper upon a term that had hardly as yet come into general use—Eugenics; an article as earnest and loving as herself. Roger Michael had liked it greatly, and so had others at the table. Now they made the writer go over a point or two, which she did quietly, elaborating what she had first said.
Only the writer of plays—his last one being at the moment in the hands of the censor—chose to be strangely, deeply, desperately pessimistic. "I am going," he said, "to quote Huxley—not that I couldn't say it as well myself. Says Huxley, 'I know of no study which is so unutterably saddening as that of the evolution of humanity.... Out of the darkness of prehistoric ages man emerges with the mark of his lowly origin strong upon him. He is a brute, more intelligent than other brutes; a blind prey to impulses which, as often as not, lead him to destruction; a victim to endless illusions which make his mental existence a terror and a burthen and fill his physical life with barren toil and battle. He attains a certain degree of comfort and develops a more or less workable theory of life ... and then for thousands of years struggles with varying fortunes, attended by infinite wickedness, bloodshed, and misery, to maintain himself at that point against the greed and ambition of his fellow-men. He makes a point of killing and otherwise persecuting all those who first try to get him to move on; and when he has moved a step farther, foolishly confers post-mortem deification on his victims. He exactly repeats the process with all who want him to move a step yet farther.'—That," said the writer of plays, "is what happens to brains, aspiration, and altruism in combination—rack and thumbscrews and auto-da-fés, and maybe in five hundred years or a thousand a picture skied by the Royal Academy—'Giordano Bruno going to the Stake,' 'Galileo Recanting,' 'Joan of Arc before her Judges.' My own theory of the world is that it is standing on its head. Naturally it resents the presence of people whose heads are in the clouds. Naturally it finds them rather ridiculous and contrary to all the proprieties, and violently to be pulled down. Moral: keep your brains close to safety and the creeping herb."
"I think that you worry," said the Fabian, "much too much about that play. I don't believe there's the slightest prospect that he'll think it fit to be produced."
The woman reformer was talking with Molly. "Yes; it's a long struggle. We've been at it since the 'fifties—just as you have been in America. A long, long time. The Movement in both countries is a grey-haired woman of almost sixty years. We've needed what they say we have—patience. Sometimes I think we've been too patient. You younger women have got to come in and take hold and give what perhaps the older type couldn't give—organization and wider knowledge and modern courage. We've given the old-time courage all right, and you'll have to have the patience and staying qualities, too;—but there's needed now a higher heart and a freer step than we could give in that world that we're coming out of."
"I think that I've always thought it right," said Molly, "but I've never really come out and said so, or become identified in any way.—Of course, it isn't thinking so very positively if you haven't done that—"
"It is like that with almost every one. Diffused thought—and then, suddenly one day, something happens or another mind touches yours, and out of the mist there gathers form, determination, action. You're all right, my dear! Only, I hope when you go home you will speak out, join some organization—That is the simple, right thing that every one can do. Concerted effort is the effort that tells to-day."