“In short, my Lords, ladies, and gentlemen, the lecture we are about to hear is a warning of the menace at our very doors. . . . Lady Ottery—”
With enormous melancholy he bowed to the applause of the ugly old ladies and the pretty young ones, and resigned his place on the platform to Bertram’s Mother-in-law.
“For Heaven’s sake!” said Bertram, aloud. Sheer rage was rising in his brain. What did all this mean? Did these people seriously believe all that dark and monstrous nonsense suggested by the Duke of Bramshaw? A sentence of Bill Huggett’s came into his brain. He repeated it to himself, over and over again, as Lady Ottery began her lecture, and went on with it.
“There’s no more sense in some of these so-called Toffs than in the long ears of a coster’s moke.”
And yet the Duke of Bramshaw was not a fool. He had been educated at Eton and Oxford. He had made many speeches in the House of Lords. He had held high office during the War. These people were not fools. They were highly educated. They helped to govern England. Good Heavens! They were, in their way, among the best types of English aristocracy. It was impossible for him to believe that such an audience could listen patiently to such a wild falsification of history and commonsense as that outlined by the Duke of Bramshaw, and elaborated by his mother-in-law.
Joyce had said, “Do behave, Bertram!” and he “behaved” while Lady Ottery read page after page of manuscript in a clear, hard, penetrating voice, perfectly self-possessed, strikingly handsome, utterly convinced of her own argument.
Bertram tried not to listen to her, but her words penetrated his brain.
With a kind of insane and dreadful logic she ranged through centuries of history, connecting the origin of all revolts, uprisings, passionate outbreaks of peasants—and peoples—from the Black Death to the French Revolution, from that to the Chartist Riots, from 1848 to the Liberation of Italy, from the Veto of the House of Lords to the Russian Revolution, and from Bolshevism in Russia to Trade Union strikes in England—to small groups of fanatical men and women, belonging, as the Duke had said, to a secret cult pledged to the overthrow of civilisation and religion.
She quoted old documents, newly discovered letters, ancient memoirs, journals, revolutionary pamphlets, political allegories and squibs, enormous tomes of German philosophers, French atheists, Italian free-thinkers, Russian anarchists. Her range of research, her immense industry, was wonderful, and she had hewn her pathway of argument with remarkable skill and clarity through a jungle of false evidence.
But she had entirely ignored the ordinary impulses of human nature—the savage instincts of men when they and their women folk are starving while others are fully fed, the passion of downtrodden peoples for the liberty of life, the long patience, breaking at last into impatience, of simple folk oppressed by corrupt and cruel tyrannies, the vision of a better human life in the minds of those who starve in garrets and languish over sweated labour, the righteous wrath of those who see their rulers growing rotten with luxury and vice, the divine rage at the heart of a people under the scourge of the knout, and the brutality of a secret police, the silent, ever-growing pressure of the Nobodies of the world for more joy in life, a wider margin of ease, a greater share of luck and opportunity, the claims of men who have done good service and expect a fair reward.