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The Message, a novel by Alec John Dawson |
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Part 1. The Descent - Chapter 16. A Personal Revelation |
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_ PART I. THE DESCENT CHAPTER XVI. A PERSONAL REVELATION
That Sunday night was not one of London's black nights that have been so often described. The police began to be a little sharp with the people after nine or ten o'clock, and by midnight the streets were getting tolerably clear. For the great majority, I believe it had been a day of more or less pleasurable excitement and amusement. For the minority, who were better informed, it was a day and night of curious bewilderment and restless anxiety. I looked in at several newspaper offices on my way home from South Kensington, but found that subordinate members of the staffs had no information to give, and that their superiors maintained an attitude of strict reticence. As I passed the dark windows of my own office I thought of our "feature" for the coming week: the demand for disarmament, in order that naval and military expenditure might be diverted into labour reform channels; Herr Mitmann's voluble assurances of the friendliness of the German people; of the ability and will of the German Socialists to make German aggression impossible, for the sake of their brother workers in England. I thought of these things, and wished I could spurn under foot my connection with The Mass. Then, sitting at the window of my little bed-sitting-room in Bloomsbury, I looked into my petty finances. If I left Clement Blaine I had enough to subsist upon for six or eight weeks. It was a risky business. Then I pictured myself casually mentioning to Constance Grey that I was no longer connected with The Mass. I fancied that I saw the bright approval in her eyes. Before blowing my light out, I had composed the little speech to Blaine which, in the morning, should set a period to our connection. And then I thought of Beatrice. It was barely twenty-four hours since we had parted beside Battersea Park (though it seemed more like twenty-four days), and recollection showed me Beatrice in her rather rumpled finery, with the bleakness of the gray hour that follows such pleasures as most appealed to her, beginning to steal over her handsome face, sapping its warm colour, thinning and sharpening its ripe, smooth contours. Beatrice would pout when she heard of my leaving her father. The thought showed me her full red lips, and the little even white teeth they so often disclosed. The curves of Beatrice's mouth were of a kind that have twisted many men's lives awry; and those men have thought straightness well lost for such red lips. Yes, Beatrice was good to look upon. She had a way of throwing her head back, and showing the smooth, round whiteness of her throat when she laughed, that had thrilled me time and again. And how often, and how gaily she laughed. In the midst of a picture of Beatrice, laughing at me across a restaurant table with a raised glass in her hand, I had a shadowy vision of Constance Grey beside the foot of the stairs in South Kensington. There was no laughter in her face. I had gathered, when I dined there, that Constance did not care for wine. She had said: "I don't care for anything that makes me feel as though I couldn't work if I wanted to." How Beatrice would have scoffed at that! And then, how Constance would have smiled over Beatrice's ideals--her "fluffy" evenings--in a kind of regretful, wondering way; almost as she had smiled when she first called me "Dick," in asking what had become of our staid English reserve; as she watched the noisy crowd in Fleet Street, singing its silly doggerel about England's security and England's "dibs." And then, suddenly, my picture-making thoughts swept out across low Essex flats to the only part of East Anglia with which I was familiar, and gave me a vision of burning farmhouses, and terror-smitten country-folk fleeing blindly before a hail of bullets, and the pitiless advance of legions of fair-haired men in long coats of a kind of roan-gray, buttoned across the chest with bright buttons arranged to suggest the inward curve to an imaginary waist-line. The faces of the soldiers were all the same; they all had the face of Herr Mitmann of Stettin. And a hot wave of angry resentment and hatred of these machine-like invaders of a peaceful unprotected countryside pulsed through my veins. Could they dare--here on English soil? My fists clenched under the bed-clothes. If it was true, by heavens, there was work for Englishmen toward! My blood was hot at the thought. It was perhaps the first swelling of a patriotic emotion I had known; the first hint of any larger citizenship than that which claims and demands, without thought of giving. And, immediately, it was succeeded by a sharp chill, a chill that ushered me into one of the bitterest moments of humiliation that I can remember. The thought accompanying that chill was this: "What can you do? What are you fit for? What boy's part, even, can you take, though the roof were being burned over your mother's head? What of Constance, or Beatrice? Could you strike a blow for either? Work for Englishmen, forsooth! Yes, for those of them who have ever learned a man's part in such work. But you--you have never had a gun in your hand. What have you done? You have poured out for your weekly wage so many thousands of words; words meaning--what? Why, they have meant what the roadside beggar means: 'Give! Give! Give!' They have urged men to demand more from the State, and give the State nothing; to rob the State of even its defences, for the sake of adding to their own immediate ease. And you have ridiculed, as a survival of barbarous times, the efforts of such men as the brave old Field Marshal who gave his declining years to the thankless task of urging England to make some effort of preparation to fend off just that very crisis which has now come upon her, and found her absolutely unprepared. That is how you have earned your right to live, a citizen of the freest country in the world, a subject of the greatest Empire the world has ever seen. And when you have had leisure and money to spend, you have devoted it to overeating and drinking, and helping to fill the tills of alien parasites in Soho. That has been your part. And now, now that the fatal crisis has arrived, you, whose qualification is that you can wield the pen of a begging letter-writer, who is also scurrilous and insolent--you lie in bed and clench your useless hands, and prate of work for Englishmen!" That was the thought that came to me with a sudden chill that night; and I suppose I was one of the earliest among millions doomed to writhe under the impotent shame of such a thought. I shall never forget that night in my Bloomsbury lodging. It was my ordeal of self-revelation. I suppose I slept a little toward morning; but I rose early with a kind of vague longing to escape from the company of the personality my thought had shown me in the night. It is natural that the awakening of an individual should be a more speedy process than the awakening of a people--a nation. I regard my early rising on that Monday morning as the beginning of my first real awakening to life as an Englishman. I had still far to go--I had not even crossed the threshold as yet. _ |
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