"Marsham's got a lot of devil in him somewhere. I shouldn't wonder if this made him set his teeth."
Lankester opened the door of the ugly yet luxurious room which had been assigned him. He looked round it with fresh distaste, resenting its unnecessary size and its pretentious decoration, resenting also the very careful valeting which had evidently been bestowed on his shabby clothes and personal appointments, as though the magnificent young footman who looked after him had been doing his painful best with impossible materials.
"Why, the idiots have shut the windows!"
He strode vehemently across the floor, only to find the park outside, as he hung across the sill, even less to his liking than the room within.
Then, throwing himself into a chair, tired out with the canvassing, speaking, and multifarious business of the preceding days, he fell to wondering what on earth had made him--after the fatigues of his own election--come down to help Marsham with his. There were scores of men in the House he liked a great deal better, and requests for help had been showered upon him.
He had, no doubt, been anxious, as a keen member of the advanced group, that Marsham should finally commit himself to the programme of the Left Wing, with which he had been so long coquetting. Oliver had a considerable position in the House, and was, moreover, a rich man. Rich men had not, so far, been common in the advanced section of the party. Lankester, in whom the idealist and the wire-puller were shrewdly mixed, was well aware that the reforms he desired could only be got by extensive organization; and he knew precisely what the money cost of getting them would be. Rich men, therefore, were the indispensable tools of his ideas; and among his own group he who had never possessed a farthing of his own apart from the earnings of his brain and pen was generally set on to capture them.
Was that really why he had come down?--to make sure of this rich Laodicean? Lankester fell into a reverie.
He was a man of curious gifts and double personality. It was generally impossible to lure him, on any pretext, from the East End and the House of Commons. He lived in a block of model dwellings in a street opening out of the East India Dock Road, and his rooms, whenever he was at home, were overrun by children from the neighboring tenements. To them he was all gentleness and fun, while his command of invective in a public meeting was little short of terrible. Great ladies and the country-houses courted him because of a certain wit, a certain charm--above all, a certain spiritual power--which piqued the worldling. He flouted and refused the great ladies--with a smile, however, which gave no offence; and he knew, notwithstanding, everybody whom he wanted to know. Occasionally he made quiet spaces in his life, and disappeared from London for days or weeks. When he reappeared it was often with a battered and exhausted air, as of one from whom virtue had gone out. He was, in truth, a mystic of a secular kind: very difficult to class religiously, though he called himself a member of the Society of Friends. Lady Lucy, who was of Quaker extraction, recognized in his ways and phrases echoes from the meetings and influences of her youth. But, in reality, he was self-taught and self-formed, on the lines of an Evangelical tradition, which had owed something, a couple of generations back, among his Danish forebears, to the influence of Emanuel Swedenborg. This tradition had not only been conveyed to him by a beloved and saintly mother; it had been appropriated by the man's inmost forces. What he believed in, with all mystics, was prayer--an intimate and ineffable communion between the heart and God. Lying half asleep on the House of Commons benches, or strolling on the Terrace, he pursued often an inner existence, from which he could spring in a moment to full mundane life--arguing passionately for some Socialist proposal, scathing an opponent, or laughing and "ragging" with a group of friends, like a school-boy on an exeat. But whatever he did, an atmosphere went with him that made him beloved. He was extremely poor, and wrote for his living. His opinions won the scorn of moderate men; and every year his influence in Parliament--on both sides of the House and with the Labor party--increased. On his rare appearance in such houses as Tallyn Hall every servant in the house marked and befriended him. The tall footman, for instance, who had just been endeavoring to make the threadbare cuffs of Lankester's dress coat present a more decent appearance, had done it in no spirit of patronage, but simply in order that a gentleman who spoke to him as a man and a brother should not go at a disadvantage among "toffs" who did nothing of the kind.
But again--why had he come down?