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.