"Julia!" Maraton exclaimed.
"Aaron was run over just as he was starting," she explained quickly.
"He is not hurt badly, but he wasn't able to catch the train. He had an
important letter from Manchester and one from the committee for you. We
thought it best that I should bring them. I hope we decided rightly."
She was standing out of the circle of the lamplight, in the shadows of
the room. There was a queer nervousness about her manner, a strained
anxiety in the way her eyes scarcely left his face, which puzzled him.
"It is very kind of you," he said, as he took the letters. "Please sit
down while I look at them."
The first was dated from the House of Commons:
"_Dear Mr. Maraton:_
"At a committee meeting held this afternoon here, it was resolved that I
should write to you to the following effect.
"We understood that you were coming over here entirely in the interests
of the great cause of labour, of which we, the undersigned, are the
accredited representatives in this country. Since your arrival,
however, you have preserved an independent attitude which has given
cause to much anxiety on our part. After declining to attend a meeting
at the Clarion Hall, we find you there amongst the audience, and you
address them in direct opposition to the advice which we were giving
them authoritatively. We specially invited you to be present at a
meeting of this committee to-day, in order that a definite plan of
campaign might be formulated before your visit to Manchester. You have
not accepted our invitation, and we understand that you are now staying
at the private house of the Prime Minister, notwithstanding our request
that you should not interview, or be interviewed by any representative
of the Government without one of our committee being present.
"We wish to express our dissatisfaction with the state of affairs, and
to say that should you be still intending to address the meeting at
Manchester on Monday night, we demand an explanation with you before you
go on to the platform. We understand that the residence of Mr. Foley
is only sixty miles from London. If you are still desirous of acting
with us, we beg you, upon receipt of this letter, to ask for a motor car
and to return here to London. We shall all be at number 17, Notting
Hill, until midnight or later, telephone number 178, so that you can
telephone that you are on the way. Failing your coming, some of us will
be at the Midland Hotel, Manchester, from mid-day on Monday.
"I am,
"Faithfully yours,
"RICHARD GRAVELING,
"Secretary.
"For
PETER DALE, Chairman,
ABRAHAM WEAVEL,
SAMUEL BORDEN,
HENRY CULVAIN.
The second one was from Manchester:
"Dear Sir:
"We understand that you will be arriving in Manchester about mid-day on
Monday. We think it would be best if you were to descend from the train
either at Derby or any adjacent station, as no police force which could
possibly be raised in the county, will be sufficient to control the
crowds of people who will gather in the streets to welcome you.
"We beg that you will send us a telegram, informing us by what, train
you are travelling, and we will send a messenger to Derby, who will
confer with you as to the best means of reaching the rooms which we are
providing for you.
"Anticipating your visit,
"I am,
"Faithfully yours,
"WILLIAM PRESTON,
"Secretary Manchester Labour Party."
Maraton replaced the letters in their envelopes and turned with them in
his hand, towards Julia. She had moved a little towards the open French
windows. Every one seemed to have made their way out on to the lawn.
Chinese lanterns were hanging from some of the trees and along the
straight box hedge that led to the rose gardens. The women were
strolling about in their evening gowns, without wraps or covering, and
the men had joined them. Servants were passing coffee around, served
from a table on which stood a little row of bottles, filled with various
liqueurs. Some one in the drawing-room was singing, but the voice was
suddenly silenced. Every one turned their heads. A little further back
in the woods, a nightingale had commenced to sing.
"You are tired," Maraton whispered.
She shook her head. The strained, anxious look was still in her face.
"No," she replied in a low tone, "I am not tired."
"There is something the matter," he insisted, "something, I am sure.
Won't you sit down, and may I not order some refreshment for you? The
people here are very hospitable."
Her gesture of dissent was almost peremptory.
"No!"
The monosyllable had a sting which surprised him.
"Tell me what it is?" he begged.
She opened her lips and closed them again. He saw then the rising and
falling of her bosom underneath that black stuff gown. She stretched
out her hand towards the gardens. Somehow or other, she seemed to grow
taller.
"I do not understand this," she said. "I do not understand your being
here, one of them, dressed like them, speaking their language, sharing
their luxuries. It is a great blow to me. It is perhaps because I am
foolish, but it tortures me!"
"But isn't that a little unreasonable?" he asked her quietly. "To
accomplish anything in this world, it is necessary to know more than one
side of life."
"But this--this," she cried hysterically, "is the side which has made
our blood boil for generations! These women in silk and laces, these
idle, pleasure-loving men, this eating and drinking, this luxury in
beautiful surroundings, with ears deafened to all the mad, sobbing cries
of the world! This is their life day by day. You have been in the
wilderness, you have seen the life of those others, you have the feeling
for them in your heart. Can you sit at table with these people and wear
their clothes, and not feel like a hypocrite?"
"I assure you," Maraton replied, "that I can."
She was trembling slightly. She had never seemed to him so tall. Her
eyes now were ablaze. She had indeed the air of a prophetess.
"They are ignorant men, they who sent you that letter," she continued,
pointing to it, "but they have the truth. Do you know what they are
saying?"
Maraton inclined his head gravely. He felt that he knew very well what
they were saying. She did not give him time, however, to interrupt.
"They are saying that you are to be bought, that that is why you are
here, that Mr. Foley will pay a great price for you. They are saying
that all those hopes we had built upon your coming, are to be dashed
away. They say that you are for the flesh-pots. I daren't breathe a
word of this to Aaron," she added hurriedly, "or I think that he would
go mad. He is blind with passionate love for you. He does not see the
danger, he will not believe that you are not as a god."
Maraton looked past her into the gardens, away into the violet sky. The
nightingale was singing now clearly and wonderfully. Perhaps, for a
moment, his thoughts strayed from the great battle of life. Perhaps his
innate sense and worship of beauty, the artist in the man, which was the
real thing making him great in his daily work, triumphed apart from any
other consideration. The music of life was in his veins. Soft and
stately, Elisabeth, standing a little apart, was looking in upon them,
an exquisite figure with a background of dark green trees.
"When you faced death in Chicago," Julia went on, her voice quivering
with the effort she was making to keep it low, "when you offered your
body to the law and preached fire and murder with your lips, you did it
for the sake of the people. There was nothing in life so glorious to
you, then, as the one great cause. That was the man we hoped to see.
Are you that man?"
Maraton's thoughts came back. He moved a little towards her. Her hand
shot out as though to keep him at a distance.
"Are you that man?" she repeated.
Her thin form was shaken with stifled sobs.
"I hope so," he answered gravely. "My ways are not the ways to which
you have been accustomed. In my heart I believe that I see further into
the real truth than some of those very ignorant friends of yours who
have been sent into Parliament by the operatives they represent; further
even than you, Julia, handicapped by your sex, with your eyes fixed, day
by day, only upon the misery of life. You blame me because I am here
amongst these people as an equal. Listen. Is one responsible for their
birth and instincts? I tell you now what I have told to no one, for no
one has ever ventured to ask me twice of my parentage. I was born, in a
sense, as these people were born. I cannot help it if, finding it
advisable to come amongst them, I find their ways easy. That is all. I
came here to keep a promise to a man who is, in his way, a great
statesman. He is Prime Minister of our country. He has, without a
doubt, so far as it is possible for such a man to have it there at all,
the cause of the people at his heart. Is it for me to ignore him, to
leave what he would say to me unsaid, to pull down the pillars which
have kept this a proud country for many hundreds of years, without even
listening? Remember that if I speak at Manchester the things that are
in my heart, this country, for your time and mine, must perish. Of that
I am sure. That has been made clear to me. Do you wonder, Julia, that,
before I take that last step, I lift every stone, I turn over every
page, I listen to every word which may be spoken by those who have the
right to speak? That is why I am here. On Monday morning I leave. On
Monday night I speak to the people in Manchester."
She listened to him very much as a prisoner at the bar might listen to a
judge who reasons before he pronounces sentence, and her face became as
the face of that prisoner might become, who detects some leniency of
tone, some softening of manner, on the part of the arbiter of his fate.
She ceased to tremble, her lips relaxed, her eyes grew softer and
softer. She came a step nearer, resting her finger-tips upon a little
table, her body leaning towards him. He had a queer vision of her for a
moment--no longer the prophetess, a touch of the Delilah in the soft
sweetness of her eyes.
"Oh, forgive me!" she begged. "I was foolish. Forgive me!"
He smiled at her reassuringly.
"There is nothing to forgive," he insisted. "You asked for an
explanation to which you had a right. I have tried to give it to you.
Indeed, Julia, you need have no fear. Whatever I decide in life will be
what I think best for our cause."
The shadow of fear once more trembled in her tone.
"Whatever you decide," she repeated. "You will not--you will not let
them call you a deserter? You couldn't do that."
"There isn't anything in the world," he told her quietly, "which has the
power to tempt me from doing the thing which I think best. I cannot
promise that it will be always the thing which seems right to this
committee of men," he added, touching the envelope with his forefinger.
"I cannot promise you that, but it should not worry you. You yourself
are different. It is my hope that soon you will understand me better.
I think that when that time comes you will cease to fear."
The light in her face was wonderful.
"Oh, I want to!" she murmured. "I want to understand you better. There
hasn't been anything in life to me like the sound of your name, like the
thought of you, since first I understood. Perhaps I am as bad as
Aaron," she sighed. "I, too, alas! am your hopeless slave."
He moved a step nearer. This time she made no effort to retreat. Once
more she was trembling a little, but her face was soft and sweet. All
the pallor, the hard lines, the suffering seemed to have passed
miraculously out of it. A soul--a woman's soul--was shining at him out
of her eyes. It wasn't her physical self that spoke--in a way he knew
that. Yet she was calling to him, calling to him with all she
possessed, calling to him as to her master.
He succeeded in persuading her to eat and drink, and she departed, a
little grim and unpleased, in the motor car which Mr. Foley had
insisted upon ordering round. Then Maraton strolled into the garden to
take his delayed coffee. Elisabeth came noiselessly across the turf to
his side.
"I hope there was nothing disturbing in your letters?" she said.
"Not very," he replied. "It is only what I expected."
"Every one," she continued, "has been admiring your secretary. We all
thought that she had such a beautiful face."
"She is not my secretary," he explained. "She came in place of her
brother, who met with a slight accident just as he was starting."
Somehow or other, he fancied that Elisabeth was pleased.
"I didn't think that it was like you to have a woman secretary," she
remarked.
He smiled as he replied:
"Miss Thurnbrein is a very earnest worker and a real humanitarian. She
has written articles about woman labour in London."
"Julia Thurnbrein!" Elisabeth exclaimed. "Yes, I have read them. If
only I had known that that was she! I should have liked so much to have
talked to her. Do you think that she would come and see me, or let me
come and see her? We really do want to understand these things, and it
seems to me, somehow, that people like Julia Thurnbrein, and all those
who really understand, keep away from us wilfully. They won't exchange
thoughts. They believe that we are their natural enemies. And we
aren't, you know. There isn't any one I'd like to meet and talk with so
much as Julia Thurnbrein."
He nodded sympathetically.
"They are prejudiced," he admitted. "All of them are disgusted with me
for being down here. They look with grave suspicion upon my ability to
wear a dress suit. It is just that narrowness which has set back the
clock a hundred years. . . . How I like your idea of an open-air
drawing-room! Mr. Foley hasn't been looking for me, has he? I am due
in his study in three minutes."
Her finger touched his arm.
"Come with me for one moment," she insisted, a little abruptly.
She led him down one of the walks--a narrow turf path, leading through
great clumps of rhododendrons. At the bottom was the wood where the
nightingale had his home. After a few paces she stopped.
"Mr. Maraton," she said, "this may be our last serious word together,
for when you have talked with my uncle you will have made your decision.
Look at me, please."
He looked at her. Just then the nightingale began to sing again, and
curiously enough it seemed to him that a different note had crept into
the bird's song. It was a cry for life, an absolutely pagan note, which
came to him through the velvety darkness.
"Isn't it your theory," she whispered, "to destroy for the sake of the
future? Don't do it. Theory sometimes sounds so sublime, but the
present is actually here. Be content to work piecemeal, to creep
upwards inch by inch. Life is something, you know. Life is something
for all of us. No man has the right to destroy it for others. He has
not even the right to destroy it for himself."
Maraton was suddenly almost giddy. For a moment he had relaxed and that
moment was illuminating. Perhaps she saw the fire which leapt into his
eyes. If she did, she never quailed. Her head was within a few inches
of his, his arms almost touching her. She saw but she never moved. If
anything, she drew a little nearer.
"Speak to me," she begged. "Give me some promise, some hope."
He was absolutely speechless. A wave of reminiscence had carried him
back into the study, face to face with an accuser. He read meaning in
Julia's words now, a meaning which at the time they had not possessed.
It was true that he was being tempted. It was true that there was such
a thing in the world as temptation, a live thing to the strong as well
as to the weak.
"You could be great," she murmured. "You could be a statesman of whom
we should all be proud. In years to come, people would understand, they
would know that you had chosen the nobler part. And then for
yourself--"
"For myself," he interrupted, "for myself--what?"
Her lips parted and closed again. She looked at him very steadily.
"Don't you think," she asked quietly, "that you are, more than most men,
the builder of your own life, the master of your own fate, the
conqueror--if, indeed, you desired to possess?"
She was gone, disappearing through a winding path amongst the bushes
which he had never noticed. He heard the trailing of her skirts; the
air around him was empty save for a breath of the perfume shaken from
her gown, and the song of the bird. Then he heard her call to him.
"This way, Mr. Maraton--just a little to your left. The path leads
right out on to the lawn."
"Is it a maze?" he asked.
"A very ordinary one," she called back gaily. "Follow me and I will
lead you out."