They talked far into the grey afternoon. And she grew better. She grew so much better that she said to him suddenly, “You look tired to death, do you know. What have you been doing to yourself?”
With the question and her concerned eyes, the need came to him in his turn for sympathy.
“I’ve been doing nothing. Molly has. She has broken off our engagement.”
“Do you say so?” She was startled, sorry, pitiful. She forgot her own grief. “My dear—and I bothering you with my own things and never seeing how it was with you! How good you’ve been to me, Eddy. I wonder is there anyone else in the world would be so patient and so kind. Oh, but I’m sorry.”
She asked no questions, and he did not tell her much. But to talk of it was good for both of them. She tried to give him back some of the sympathy she had had of him; she was only partly successful, being still half numbed and bound by her own sorrow; but the effort a little loosened the bands. And part of him watched their loosening with interest, as a doctor watches a patient’s first motions of returning health, while the other part found relief in talking to her. It was a strange, half selfish, half unselfish afternoon they both had, and a little light crept in through the fogs that brooded about both of them. Eileen said as he went, “It’s been dear of you to come like this.... I’m going to spend next Sunday at Holmbury St. Mary. If you’re doing nothing else, I wish you’d come there too, and we’ll spend the day tramping.”
Her thought was to comfort both of them, and he accepted it gladly. The thought came to him that there was no one now to mind how he spent his Sundays. Molly would have minded. She would have thought it odd, not proper, hardly right. Having lost her partly on this very account, he threw himself with the more fervour into this mission of help and healing to another and himself. His loss did not thus seem such utter waste, the emptiness of the long days not so blank.
CHAPTER XIV.
UNITY.
THE office of Unity was a room on the top floor of the Denisons’ publishing house. It looked out on Fleet Street, opposite Chancery Lane. Sitting there, Eddy, when not otherwise engaged (he and Arnold were joint editors of Unity) watched the rushing tide far below, the people crowding by. There with the tide went the business men, the lawyers, the newspaper people, who made thought and ensued it, the sellers and the buyers. Each had his and her own interests, his and her own irons in the fire. They wanted none of other people’s; often they resented other people’s. Yet, looked at long enough ahead (one of the editors in his trite way mused) all interests must be the same in the end. No state, surely, could thrive, divided into factions, one faction spoiling another. They must needs have a common aim, find a heterogeneous city of peace. So Unity, gaily flinging down barriers, cheerily bestriding walls, with one foot planted in each neighbouring and antagonistic garden—Unity, so sympathetic with all causes, so ably written, so versatile, must surely succeed.
Unity really was rather well written, rather interesting. New magazines so often are. The co-operative contributors, being clever people, and fresh-minded, usually found some new, unstaled aspect of the topics they touched, and gave them life. The paper, except for a few stories and poems and drawings, was frankly political and social in trend; it dealt with current questions, not in the least impartially (which is so dull), but taking alternate and very definite points of view. Some of these articles were by the staff, others by specialists. Not afraid to aim high, they endeavoured to get (in a few cases succeeded, in most failed) articles by prominent supporters and opponents of the views they handled; as, for example, Lord Hugh Cecil and Dr. Clifford on Church Disestablishment; Mr. Harold Cox and Sir William Robertson Nicholl on Referendums, Dr. Cunningham and Mr. Strachey on Tariff Reform; Mr. Roger Fry and Sir William Richmond on Art; Lord Robert Cecil and the Sidney Webbs on the Minimum Wage; the Dean of Welchester and Mr. Hakluyt Egerton on Prayer Book Revision; Mr. Conrad Noel and Mr. Victor Grayson on Socialism as Synonymous with Christianity, an Employer, a Factory Hand, and Miss Constance Smith, on the Inspection of Factories; Mrs. Fawcett and Miss Violet Markham on Women as Political Creatures; Mr. J. M. Robertson and Monsignor R. H. Benson on the Church as an Agent for Good; land-owners, farmers, labourers, and Mr. F. E. Greene, on Land Tenure. (The farmers’ and labourers’ articles were among the failures, and had to be editorially supplied.) A paper’s reach must exceed its grasp, or what are enterprising editors for? But Unity did actually grasp some writers of note, and some of unlettered ardour, and supplied, to fill the gaps in these, contributors of a certain originality and vividness of outlook. On the whole it was a readable production, as productions go. There were several advertisements on the last page; most, of course, were of books published by the Denisons, but there were also a few books published by other people, and, one proud week, “Darn No More,” “Why Drop Ink,” and “Dry Clean Your Dog.” “Dry Clean Your Dog” seemed to the editors particularly promising; dogs, though led, indeed, by some literary people about the book-shops of towns, suggest in the main a wider, more breezy, less bookish class of reader; the advertisement called up a pleasant picture of Unity being perused in the country, perhaps even as far away as Weybridge; lying on hall tables along with the Field and Country Life, while its readers obediently repaired to the kennels with a dry shampoo.... It was an encouraging picture. For, though any new journal can get taken in (for a time) by the bookier cliques of cities, who read and write so much that they do not need to be very careful, in either case, what it is, how few shall force a difficult entrance into our fastidious country homes.
The editors of Unity could not, indeed, persuade themselves that they had a large circulation in the country as yet. Arnold said from the first, “We never shall have. That is very certain.”