Home > Authors Index > Alec John Dawson > Message > This page
The Message, a novel by Alec John Dawson |
||
Part 1. The Descent - Chapter 9. A Step Down |
||
| < Previous |
Table of content |
Next > |
|
________________________________________________
_ PART I. THE DESCENT CHAPTER IX. A STEP DOWN
I have mentioned a piece of reckless extravagance; it was reckless in view of my straightened circumstances. And the reason I mention this apparent trifle is that it and its attendant circumstances influenced me in my conduct after the abrupt termination of the Daily Gazette engagement. One of my fellow knights of the reporters' room introduced me in a certain Fleet Street wine-bar to one of the characters of that classic highway--a man named Clement Blaine, who edited and owned a weekly publication called The Mass. I hasten to add that this journal had nothing whatever to do with any kind of religious observance. Its title referred to the people, or rather, to the section of the public which, at that time, we still described by the quaintly misleading phrase, "the working classes," as though work were a monopoly in the hands of the manual labourer. The Mass was a journal which had quite a vogue at that time. This was brought about, I suppose, by the wave of anti-nationalism which, in 1906, established the notorious administration which subsequently became known as "The Destroyers." It was maintained largely, I fancy, by Clement Blaine's genius for getting himself quoted in other journals of every sort and standing. The existence of The Mass, and the popularity which it earned by outraging every civic and national decency, stands in my mind as a striking example of the extraordinary laxity and slackness of moral which had grown out of our boasted tolerance, broad-mindedness, and cosmopolitanism. We had waxed drunken upon the parrot-like asseveration of "rights," which our fathers had won for us, and we had no time to spare for their compensating duties. This misguided apotheosis of what we considered freedom and broad-mindedness, produced the most startling and anomalous situations in our national life, including the almost incredible fact that, while nominally at peace with the world, the State was being bitterly warred against by cliques and parties among its own subjects. For instance, in any other State than our own, my new acquaintance, Clement Blaine, would have been safely disposed in a convenient prison cell, and his flamingly seditious journal would have been promptly and effectually squashed. In England the man was free as the Prime Minister, and a Department of State, the Post Office, was engaged in the distribution of the journal which he devoted exclusively to stirring up animosity against that State, and traitorous opposition to its constitution. Further, Mr. Blaine's vitriolic outpourings, his unnatural defilement of his own nest, were gravely quoted in every newspaper in the Kingdom, without a hint of recognition of the fact that they were fundamentally criminal and a public offence. The sacrosanct "liberty of the subject" was involved; and though Mr. Blaine would have been forcibly restrained if he had shown any tendency to injure lamp-posts, or to lay hands upon his own worthless life, he was given every facility in his self-appointed task of inciting the public to all sorts of offences against the State, and to a variety of forms of national suicide. It was the commonest thing for a Member of Parliament, a man solemnly sworn and consecrated to the loyal service of the Crown and State, to fill a signed column of Clement Blaine's paper, with an article or letter the whole avowed end of which would be the championing of some national enemy or rival, or the advocacy of means whereby a shrewd blow might be struck against British rule or British prestige in some part of the world. I recall one long and scurrilous article by a Member of Parliament, urging rebellious natives in South Africa to take heart of grace and pursue with ever-increasing vigour their attacks upon the small and isolated white populace which upheld British rule in that part of the Continent. I remember a long and venomous letter from another Member of Parliament (a strong advocate of the State payment of members) defending in the most ardently sympathetic manner both the action and the sentiments of a municipal official who had torn down and destroyed the Union Jack upon an occasion of public ceremony. We called this sort of thing British freedom in those chaotic days; and when our Continental rivals were not jeering at the grotesqueness of it, they were lauding this particular form of madness to the skies, as well they might, seeing that our insensate profligacy and incontinence meant their gain. The cause of a foreigner, good, bad, or indifferent--that was the cause Clement Blaine most loved to champion in his journal. An attack upon anything British, though the author of it might be the basest creature ever outlawed from any community--that was certain of ready and eager hospitality in the columns of The Mass. I can conceive of no infamy which that journal was not ready to condone, no offence it would not seek to justify--save and except the crime of patriotism, loyalty, avowed love of Britain. And this obscene, mad-dog policy, so difficult even to imagine at this time, was by curious devious ways identified with Socialism. The Mass was called a Socialist organ. The fact may have been a libel upon Socialism, if not upon Socialists; but so it was. Be it said that at Cambridge I had rather surprised the evangelical section of my college (Corpus Christi) by the part I played in founding a short-lived institution called the Anonymous Society, the choicest spirits in which affected canvas shirts and abstention from the use of neckties. As Socialists, we invited the waiters of the college to a soiree, at which a judicious blend of revolutionary economics and bitter beer was relied upon to provide a flow of reasonable and inexpensive entertainment. The society lapsed after a time, chiefly owing, if I remember rightly, to an insufficiency of funds for refreshments. But I had remained rather a person to be reckoned with at the Union. I regarded my meeting with Clement Blaine as something of an event, and I very cheerfully and quite gratuitously contributed an article to his journal dealing with some form of government subvention which I held to be a State duty. (We wasted few words over the duties of the citizen in those days.) It was as a result of that article that I was invited to a Socialist soiree in which the moving spirit, at all events in the refreshment-room, was Mr. Clement Blaine. Here I met a variety of queer fish who called themselves Socialists. They were of both sexes, and upon the whole they were a silly, inconsequent set. Their views rather wearied me, despite my predisposition to favour them. They were a kind of tepid, ineffectual anarchists, unconvinced and wholly unconvincing. Broadly speaking, theirs was a policy of blind reversal. They were not constructive, but they were opposed vaguely to the existing order of things, and, particularly, to everything British. They pinned their faith to the foreigner in all things, even though the foreigner's whole energies might be devoted to the honest endeavour to raise conditions in his country to a level approaching the British standard. Any contention against the existing order, and, above all, anything against Britain, appealed directly to these rather tawdry people. In this drab, ineffective gathering, I found one point of colour, like a red rose on a dingy white tablecloth. This was Beatrice, the daughter of Clement Blaine. I believe the man had a wife. One figures her as a worn household drudge. In any case, she made no appearance in any of the places in which I met Blaine, or his handsome daughter. Beatrice Blaine was a new type to me. One had read of such girls, but I had never met them. And I suppose novelty always has a certain charm for youth. One felt that Beatrice had crossed the Rubicon. Mentally, at all events, one gathered that she had thrown her bonnet over the windmill. Physically, materially, I have no doubt that Beatrice was perfectly well qualified to take care of herself. But here was a very handsome girl who was entirely without reticence or reserve. With her, many things usually treated with respect were--"all rot." Beatrice's aim in life was pleasure, and she not merely admitted, but boasted of the fact. She did not think much of her father's friends as individuals. She probably objected to their dinginess. But she acclaimed herself a thoroughgoing Socialist, I think because she believed that Socialism meant the provision of plenty in money, dresses, pleasures, and so forth, for all who were short of these commodities. Perhaps I was a shade less dingy than the others. At all events, Beatrice honoured me with her favour upon this occasion, and talked to me of pleasure. So far as recollection serves me she connected pleasure chiefly with theatres, restaurants, the habit of supping in public, and the use of hansom cabs. At all events, within the week I squandered two whole sovereigns out of my small hoard on giving this young pagan what she called a "fluffy" evening. It reminded me more than a little of certain rather frantic undergraduate excursions from Cambridge. But Beatrice quoted luscious lines of minor poetry, and threw a certain glamour over a quarter of the town which was a warren of tawdry immorality; the hunting-ground of a pallid-faced battalion of alien pimps and parasites. England was then the one civilized country in the world which still welcomed upon its shores the outcast, rejected, refuse of other lands; and, as a matter of course, when foreign capitals became positively too hot for irreclaimable characters, they flocked into Whitechapel and Soho, there to indulge their natural bent for every kind of criminality known to civilization, save those involving physical risk or physical exertion for the criminal. There were then whole quarters of the metropolis out of which every native resident had gradually been ousted, in which the English language was rarely heard, except during a police raid. Tens of thousands of these unclassed, denationalized foreigners lived and waxed fat by playing upon the foibles and pandering to the weaknesses of the great city's native population. Others, of a higher class, steadily ousted native labour in the various branches of legitimate commerce. We know now, to our cost, something of the malignant danger these foreigners represented. In indirect ways one would have supposed their evil influence was sufficiently obvious then. But I remember that the parties represented by such organs as the Daily Gazette prided themselves upon their furious opposition to any hint of precautions making for the restriction of alien immigration. England was the land of the free, they said. Yet, while boasting that England was the refuge of the persecuted (as well as the rejected) of all lands, we were so wonderfully broad-minded that we upheld anything foreign against anything British, and were intolerant only of English sentiment, English rule, English institutions. I believe Beatrice's conviction of the superiority of the Continent and of foreigners generally was based upon the belief that: "On the Continent people can really enjoy themselves. There's none of our ridiculous English puritanism, and early closing, and rubbish of that sort there." I am rather surprised that the crude hedonism of Beatrice should have appealed to me, for my weaknesses had never really included mere fleshly indulgence. But, as I have said, the girl had the charm of novelty for me. I remember satirically assuring myself that, upon the whole, her frank concentration upon worldly pleasure was more natural and pleasing than Sylvia's rapt concentration upon other kinds of self-ministration. Ours was a period of self-indulgence. Beatrice was, after all, only a little more naive and outspoken than the majority in her thirst for pleasure. And she was quite charming to look upon. Almost the first man to whom I spoke regarding my dismissal from the staff of the Daily Gazette was Clement Blaine. I met him in Fleet Street, and was asked in to his cupboard of an office. "You are a man who knows every one in Fleet Street," I said. "I wish you would keep an eye lifting for a journalistic billet for me." And then I told him that I was leaving the Daily Gazette, and spoke of the work I had done, and of my little journalistic experiences at Cambridge. He combed his glossy black beard with the fingers of one hand; a white hand it was, save where cigarettes had browned the first and second fingers; a hand that had never known physical toil, though its owner always addressed "working" men as one of themselves. He wore a fiery red necktie, and a fiery diamond on the little finger of the hand that combed his beard. A self-indulgent life in the city was telling on him, but Clement Blaine was still rather a fine figure of a man, in his coarse, bold way. He had a varnished look, and, dressed for the part, would have made a splendid stage pirate. "It's odd you should have come to me to-day," he said. "Look here!" He handed me a cutting from a daily paper. At Holloway, yesterday afternoon, an inquest was held on the body of a man named Joseph Cartwright, who is said to have been a journalist. This man was found dead upon his bed, fully dressed, on Tuesday morning. The medical evidence showed death to be due to heart failure, and indicated alcoholism as the predisposing cause. A verdict was returned in accordance with the medical evidence. "He was my assistant editor," said Clement Blaine, as I looked up from my perusal of this sorry tale. "Really?" I said. "Yes, a clever fellow; most accomplished journalist, but----" And Mr. Blaine raised his elbow with a significant gesture, by which he suggested the act of drinking. Within the hour I had accepted an engagement as assistant editor of The Mass with the magnificent sum of two pounds a week by way of remuneration. "It's poor pay," said Blaine. "And I only wish I could double it. But that's all it will run to at present, and--well, of course, it counts for something to be working for the cause as directly as we do in The Mass." I nodded, not without qualms. My education made it impossible for me to accept unreservedly the most scurrilous features of the journal. But the cause was good--I was assured of that; and I would introduce improvements, I thought. I was still very inexperienced. Meantime, I was not to know the carking anxiety of the out-of-work. I could still pay my way at the Bloomsbury lodging. This was something. Beatrice expressed herself as delighted. I was to accumulate large sums in various vague ways, and enjoy innumerable "fluffy" evenings with her. What a queer mad jumble of a shut-in world our London was, and how blindly self-centred we all were in our pursuit of immediate gain, in our absolute indifference to the larger outside movements, the shaping of national destinies, the warring of national interests! I remember that we were quite triumphant, in our little owlish way, that year; for the weight of socialistic and anti-national, anti-responsible feeling had forced a time-serving Cabinet into cutting down our Navy by a quarter at one stroke. The hurried scramblers after money and pleasure were much gratified. "We can make defensive alliances with other Powers," they said. "Meantime--retrench, reduce, cut down, and give us more freedom in our race. Freedom, freedom--that's the thing; and peace for the development of commerce." Undoubtedly, as a people, we were fey. _ |
||