The relation of such a habit of life and mind to the Collectivist and Socialist ideas now coming to the front in England, as in every other European country, is obvious enough. To Hallin the social life, the community, was everything—yet to be a "Socialist" seemed to him more and more to be a traitor! He would have built his state on the purified will of the individual man, and could conceive no other foundation for a state worth having. But for purification there must be effort, and for effort there must be freedom. Socialism, as he read it, despised and decried freedom, and placed the good of man wholly in certain external conditions. It was aiming at a state of things under which the joys and pains, the teaching and the risks of true possession, were to be for ever shut off from the poor human will, which yet, according to him, could never do without them, if man was to be man.
So that he saw it all sub specie aeternitatis, as a matter not of economic theory, but rather of religion. Raeburn, as they talked, shrank in dismay from the burning intensity of mood underlying his controlled speech. He spoke, for instance, of Bennett's conversion to Harry Wharton's proposed bill, or of the land nationalising scheme he was spending all his slender stores of breath and strength in attacking, not with anger or contempt, but with, a passionate sorrow which seemed to Raeburn preposterous! intolerable!—to be exhausting in him the very springs and sources of a too precarious life. There rose in Aldous at last an indignant protest which yet could hardly find itself words. What help to have softened the edge and fury of religious war, only to discover new antagonisms of opinion as capable of devastating heart and affections as any homoousion of old? Had they not already cost him love? Were they also, in another fashion, to cost him his friend?
* * * * *
"Ah, dear old fellow—enough!" said Hallin at last—"take me back to
Italy! You have told me so little—such a niggardly little!"
"I told you that we went and I came back in a water-spout," said Aldous; "the first rain in Northern Italy for four months—worse luck! 'Rain at Reggio, rain at Parma.—At Lodi rain, Piacenza rain!'—that might about stand for my diary, except for one radiant day when my aunt, Betty Macdonald, and I descended on Milan, and climbed the Duomo."
"Did Miss Betty amuse you?"
Aldous laughed.
"Well, at least she varied the programme. The greater part of our day in Milan Aunt Neta and I spent in rushing after her like its tail after a kite. First of all, she left us in the Duomo Square, running like a deer, and presently, to Aunt Neta's horror, we discovered that she was pursuing a young Italian officer in a blue cloak. When we came up with the pair she was inquiring, in her best Italian, where the 'Signor' got his cloak, because positively she must have one like it, and he, cap in hand, was explaining to the Signorina that if she would but follow him round the corner to his military tailor's, she could be supplied on the spot. So there we all went, Miss Betty insisting. You can imagine Aunt Neta. She bought a small shipload of stuff—and then positively skipped for joy in the street outside—the amazed officer looking on. And as for her career over the roof of the Duomo—the agitation of it nearly brought my aunt to destruction—and even I heaved a sigh of relief when I got them both down safe."
"Is the creature all tricks?" said Hallin, with a smile. "As you talk of her to me I get the notion of a little monkey just cut loose from a barrel organ."
"Oh! but the monkey has so much heart," said Aldous, laughing again, as every one was apt to laugh who talked about Betty Macdonald, "and it makes friends with every sick and sorry creature it comes across, especially with old maids! It amounts to genius, Betty's way with old maids. You should see her in the middle of them in the hotel salon at night—a perfect ring of them—and the men outside, totally neglected, and out of temper. I have never seen Betty yet in a room with somebody she thought ill at ease, or put in the shade—a governess, or a schoolgirl, or a lumpish boy—that she did not devote herself to that somebody. It is a pretty instinct; I have often wondered whether it is nature or art."