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A People's Man, a novel by E. Phillips Oppenheim |
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Chapter 22 |
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_ CHAPTER XXII Between three and four o'clock, half a dozen people, on different devices, tried to draw Elisabeth from her retirement. Her particular friend called to suggest a round of the picture galleries, tea at the club, and a motor ride to Ranelagh. Lord Carton repeated his invitation to a game of golf. Two people invited her out into the country on various pretexts. Her dressmaker rang up and begged for her presence without delay. To all of these importunities Elisabeth remained deaf. She sat in her room in an easy-chair drawn up to the open window, with a book in her hand at which she scarcely glanced. Her thoughts were with the five men downstairs. Every now and then she glanced at the clock. She heard the conference break up. She sat quite still, listening. Presently there was the sound of a firm tread upon the stairs. She closed her book and breathed a little sigh. A servant ushered in Maraton. "You have not forgotten, then," she said softly. "Come and sit in my favourite chair and rest for a few moments. I am sure that you must be tired." He sank down with an air of content. She sat upon the end of the sofa, close to him, her head resting upon her hands. "Well," she asked, "have you converted Sir William?" "Up to a certain extent, I believe," he answered, after a momentary hesitation. "I don't think that he trusts me. Lawyers have a habit of not trusting people, you know. On the other hand, I don't think he means to give any trouble. Of course, they don't like what they have to face. No one does. It isn't every one who has the sagacity of your uncle." "I am glad," she said, "that you appreciate him. Tell me now what is going to happen?" "Mr. Foley will have his own way," Maraton declared. "The Manchester strike will be over in a few days. The Sheffield strike will be dealt with in the same manner. People will talk about the great loss of trade, the shocking depreciation of profits, the lowered incomes of the people, and all that sort of thing. What will really happen will be that the investor and the manufacturer are going to pay, and Labour is going to get just about a tithe of its own in these two cases. The country will be none the poorer. The money will be still there, only its distribution will be saner." "And the end of it?" she murmured. "What will the end of it be?" "We can none of us tell that;" he answered gravely. "There are some, like Sir William, who insist that when Labour has once started, as it will have started after Sheffield, there will be no holding it. I can not answer for it. I only say that the course Mr. Foley has adopted is distinctly the best for the country. If an obstinate man had been in his place to-day, nothing could have saved you from civil war first and possibly from foreign conquest later." "A month ago," she observed, "you seemed fully prepared for these things." "I was," he admitted. "But you are an Englishman, are you not?" "I am English. I daresay that under other considerations I might even have called myself a patriotic Englishman. As it is, I have very little feeling of that sort. There has been too much self-glorification, and it's the wrong class of people who've revelled in it and enjoyed it. It's a fine thing to die for one's country. It's a shameful thing that that country should grind the life and brains and blood out of a hundred of her children, day by day." A servant brought in tea, delightfully served. There were small yellow china cups, pale tea with a faint, aromatic odour, thick cream, strawberries and cakes. "If only you would appreciate it," she declared, "you are really rather a privileged person. No one has tea with me here." "I do appreciate it," he assured her, "perhaps more than you think." There was a moment's silence. As he was taking his cup from her fingers, their eyes met, and she looked away again almost immediately. "I wish," she said, "that you would tell me more about yourself--what you did in America, what your life has been? You are rather a mysterious person, aren't you?" "In a sense, perhaps, I must seem so," he admitted. "You see, I was an orphan very early. There wasn't any one who cared how I grew up, and I wandered a good deal. The earlier part of my life I was over here--I was at Heidelberg University, bye the bye--and in Paris for two years studying art, of all things! Then something--I don't know what it was--called me to America, and I found it hard to come back. It's a big country, you know, Lady Elisabeth. It gets hold of you. If it hadn't driven me out, I doubt whether I should ever have left it." "But what was it first inspired you with this--well, wouldn't you call it a passion--for championing the cause of the people?" He shook his head. "Born in me, I suppose. I have watched them, lived with them, and then I have been through the whole gamut of Socialistic literature. It is not worth reading, most of it. The essential facts are there to look at, half-a-dozen phrases, a single field of view. It's all very simple." "Now I am going to ask you something else," she went on. "That first night when we talked together, you seemed so full of hope, so dauntless. Since then, is it my fancy--since you came back from Manchester--are you a little disappointed 'with life? Don't you know in your heart that you've done what's best?" "I wish I did," he answered simply. "My common sense tells me that I have chosen well, and then sometimes, in the nights, or when I am alone, other thoughts come to me, and I feel almost as though I had been faithless, as though I had simply chosen the easier way. Look how pleasant it is all being made for me! I am no longer an outcast; I bask in the sun of your uncle's patronage; people ask me to dinner, seek my friendship, people whom I feel ought to hate me. I am not sure about it all." "Listen," she said, "if you had indeed pulled down those pillars, don't you think that day by day and night by night you would have been haunted by the faces of those whom you had destroyed? Think of the children who would have died of starvation, the women who would have been torn from their husbands, the ruined homes, the sorrow and the misery all through the land. Yours would have been the hand which had dealt this blow. You would not have lived to have seen into the future. Would it have been enough for you to have believed that you had done it for the best--that that unborn generation of which you spoke would have unfitted? Oh, I do not think so! I believe that when you realise it, you must be glad." "It is at any rate consoling to hear you say so," he remarked. "Yet, when you have made up your mind to play the martyr, it is a little hard," he added, helping himself to strawberries, "to be treated like a pampered being." "In other words," she laughed, "you are discontented because you have been successful?" "I suppose human nature never meant to let us rest satisfied." "Don't you ever think of yourself," she asked, "what your own life is going to be? You've settled down now. You will be a Member of Parliament in a few weeks, a Cabinet Minister before long. I know what my uncle thinks of you. He believes in you. To tell you the truth, so do I." "I am glad." "I believe," she went on, "that you will do the work that you came here to do. There is no reason why you should not do it from the Cabinet. But there is the rest--your own life. Are you never going to amuse yourself, to take holiday, to draw some of the outside things into your scheme of being?" He sat quite silent for a little time. He was inclined to struggle against the charm of her soft voice, the easy intimacy with which she treated him. In a sense he felt as though he were losing control of himself. "I don't know," he said. "I think one ought to find one's work sufficient for a time. It is engrossing, isn't it? And that reminds me--I must go." He rose almost abruptly to his feet. She was quick to appreciate his slight confusion of thought, his nervous self-impatience, and she smiled quietly. She was content to let him escape. She held out her hand, though, and his fingers seemed conscious of the firm, delicate warmth of her clasp. "Come and talk to me again soon," she begged. "Come either as a politician or a friend, or however you like. It gives me so much pleasure to talk with you. Uncle will tell you that every one spoils me. Even Sir William comes and tells me about his troubles with the Irish Members. Will you come?" He made a half promise. His departure was a little hasty--almost abrupt; he was conscious of a distinct turmoil of feeling. He hurried away, as though anxious to rid himself of the influence of the place. At the corner of the street he was about to hail a taxicab when a man gripped him by the arm. He turned quickly around. The face was somehow familiar to him--the grey, untidy beard, long hairy eyebrows, sunken eyes, the shabby clothes. It was David Ross. "Can I speak a word with you, Mr. Maraton?" Maraton nodded. "Of course. I don't remember your name. You were at Manchester, weren't you, and at my house with the others?" "Ross, my name is," the man answered. "I'd no call to be at Manchester, for I'm not one of the delegates. I'm not an M.P. but I've done a lot of speaking for them lately, and Peter Dale, he said if I paid my own expenses I could come along. I borrowed the money. I had to come. I had to hear you speak. I wanted to know your message." "Were you satisfied with it?" Maraton enquired. "I don't know," was the doubtful reply. "You ask me a question I can't answer myself. I thought so at the time, but since then I've spent many sleepless nights and many tired hours, asking myself that question. Now I am here to ask you one. Did you speak that night what you had in your mind when you left America?--what you thought of on the steamer coming over--what you meant to say when first you set foot in this country?" Maraton was interested. He walked slowly along by the side of his companion. "I did not," he admitted. "I came with other views. "I knew it!" Ross exclaimed, almost fiercely. "I felt it, man. You came to preach redemption, even though the means were sharp and short and sudden, means of blood, means of death. Before you ever came here, I seemed to hear your voice crying across that great continent, crying even across the ocean. It was a terrible cry, but it seemed as though it must reach up into heaven and down into hell, for it was aflame with truth. It seemed to me that I could see the revolution upon us, the death that is like sleep, the looking down once more from some undiscovered place upon the new morning. You never uttered that cry over here." Maraton glanced at his companion curiously. "Mine was an immense responsibility," he said. "Granted that I had the power, do you think that I had the right to stir up a civil war here in the face of the help I was promised for our people?" David Ross sighed. "I don't know," he confessed. "I only know that many years ago, Peter Dale, when he was a young man, spoke as though the word of truth were burning in his heart. He was for a revolution. He would be content with nothing less. And Borden was like that, and Graveling, and others whom you don't know. And then the people gave them their mandate, knocked a bit of money together, and sent them to Parliament. There, somehow or other, they seemed to fall into the easier ways. They worked stolidly and honestly, no doubt, but something had gone, something we've all missed, something that by this time might have helped. When they told me--it was Aaron who came and told me--rode his bicycle like a madman, all the way from Soho. 'Maraton is come!' he shouted. Then it seemed to me that freedom was here; no more compromises, but battle--the naked sword, battle with the wrongs of generations to requite. Is the sword sheathed?" Maraton passed his arm through his companion's. "It is not sheathed," he declared, "nor while I have life will it be sheathed. If I have chosen the quieter methods, it is because for the present I have come to believe that they are the best. Six hundred thousand people in Lancashire are going to start life next Monday with an increase of between fifteen and twenty per cent to their weekly wage. Isn't that something to the good? And then, in a few weeks, every forge and furnace in Sheffield will be cold until the men's demands are granted there. And when that is over, we go for every industry, one by one, throughout the country. Before a year is past, I reckon that many millions will have passed from the pockets of the middle classes into the pockets of the labouring man. I am going to set that stream running faster and faster, and then I am going to begin all over again. With prosperity, the labouring classes will gain strength. You will have more time for thought, for education, for self-knowledge. And as they gain strength, once more we raise our hands. Do they seem slow to you, our methods, David Ross? Believe me, they did to me. Yet in my heart I know that I have chosen the right." The man drew a little sigh. There may have been disappointment mingled with it, yet there was a certain amount of relief. "I was afraid for you, Maraton," he said. "I thought of those others when they stumbled upon the easy ways, and I was afraid. With you it may be different. Hold on your way, then. It is not for me to criticise. But if you slacken, if your hand droops, then I shall come again." He turned abruptly away and disappeared, walking with quick, shambling footsteps. Maraton looked after him thoughtfully for several moments, then he continued on his way homewards. _ |
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