"SCHEDULE B"
On the following day Sir John Hampden returned from Paris. A week later
and he had again left London. At the office of the League it was
impossible to learn where he had gone; perhaps fishing, it was
suggested. In any case he was taking a well-earned holiday and did not
want to be troubled with business, so that nothing was being forwarded.
A little later any one might know for the asking that he was in
Berlin--and returning the next day. There was never any secret made of
Sir John's movements if the office knew them, only he occasionally liked
to cut himself completely off from communication in order to ensure a
perfect rest. As soon as the office knew where he was, every one else
could know too; only it invariably happened that he was on his way back
by that time. The incident was repeated. Callers at Trafalgar Chambers
found all the heads communicative and very leisured. It came out that
nothing much was being done just then; it was not the time of the year
for politics. For all the good they were doing three-quarters of the
offices might be closed for the next few months and three-quarters of
the staff take a holiday. In fact, that was what they were doing to a
large extent. It was Mr Salt's turn as soon as Sir John got back.
That time it was St. Petersburg.
For a man who had been a sailor George Salt displayed a curious taste
when he came to take his holiday. The sea had no call for him, nor the
coast-line any charm. The inland resorts, the golf centres, moors,
lakes, mountains and rivers, all were passed by. It was not even to an
"undiscovered" village or some secluded country house that he turned his
footsteps in hope of perfect change. On the contrary, where the
ceaseless din of industry made rest impossible; where the puny but
irresistible hands of generations of mankind had scarred the face of
earth like a corroding growth, where the sky was shut out by smoke,
vegetation stifled beneath a cloak of grime, day and night turned into
one lurid vulcanian twilight, in which by bands and companies, by trains
and outposts, dwarfish men toiled in the unlovely rhythm of hopeless,
endless labour: the lupus-spots of nature; there Salt spent his holiday.
Coal was the loadstone that drew him on, and in a vast contour his
journey through that month defined the limits of the coal-fields of the
land.
In the subsequent histories of this period no mention of Salt's
significant appearance in the provinces finds a place. Yet in presenting
a dispassionate review of the succeeding events it is impossible to
ignore its influence; although, to adopt a just proportion, it is not
necessary to deal with it at length. It was not a vital detail of the
scheme on which the League had staked its cause; it was less momentous
than any of Hampden's three Continental missions; but by disarming
opposition in certain influential quarters when the crisis came, it
removed a possible cause of dissension from the first. That is its
place.
It was an indication of the extreme care with which the operations had
been developed, that even at this point there were still only two men
who had any real knowledge of what the plan of campaign would be. There
were those who did not hesitate to declare that a hostile demonstration
was being arranged by a foreign power with whom Hampden had come to an
understanding. At a favourable moment a pretext for a quarrel would be
found, relations would be broken off immediately, ambassadors recalled,
and within three days England would be threatened with war. If
necessary, an actual invasion would take place, and in view of the
sweeping reductions in the army and navy no one thought it worth while
to express a doubt that an actual invasion could take place. After
arranging for a suitable indemnity the invaders would withdraw, leaving
a provisional government in power, with Hampden at its head. This was
the extremists' view, and the majority, feeling at heart that however
England might be internally riven and their liberties assailed, nothing
could ever justify so unpatriotic a course, held that Hampden was
incapable of the step. Others suggested civil war; passive resistance to
the payment of rates and taxes on so organised a scale as to embarrass
the Government for supplies; an alliance, on a basis not readily
discernible, with the rank and file of the Socialist party; the secret
importation of a sufficient number of aliens to turn an election; and a
variety of other ingenious devices, easy to suggest but difficult to
maintain. Those who, like Miss Lisle, observed the most, talked the
least.
Among the working men of the country--the class that the League had come
into being to control--it had passed into the category of a second
Buttercup League and was ignored. A few, better informed, accepted the
conclusions that Mr Hammet and his associates had arrived at, and
laughed quietly in their sleeves at the thought of the coming
humiliation of the confiding members. Last of all there remained a
scattered few here and there, who, through natural suspicion or a
shrewder wisdom than their fellows, had of late begun to detect in the
existence of the League a real menace to themselves, and to urge the
powers, and Mr Tubes in particular, to counteract its aims. It might
have been a race, a desperate race, but for one simple thing. Hampden
had asked for three years in which to complete his plans, and both
friends and foes, deducing from every experience of the past, ranging
from the opening of an exhibition to the closing of a war, had conceded
that this meant four at least. But Hampden and the man who had been a
sailor had no intention of being embarrassed by a race. Not three years
meaning four, but three years meaning two, had underlain the boast, and
at the end of two years, although there was still much to be gained by
time and an unfettered choice of the moment of attack, there was no
probability of being forestalled on any important point.
Such was the position when Salt set out on his provincial holiday.
He had nothing to learn; elementary detail of that kind belonged to
another journey, when, more than two years ago, he had made the
self-same tour. He did not go to offer peace or war; that die had been
cast blindly--who shall say how many years before?--in Northampton boot
factories, Lancashire mills, Durham coal-pits, in Radical clubs and
Labour cabinets. But in war, and in civil war most of all, every blow
aimed at the foe must spend its expiring force upon a friend--and
therefore Salt went to the coal-fields.
At each centre he was met by a high official of the League who had local
knowledge. The man made his report; it concerned a list he brought, a
list of names. Sometimes it contained only three or four names,
sometimes as many dozens. If to each name there stood the word
"Content," Salt passed on to his next centre. If some were reported to
be holding out or dissatisfied, Salt remained. When he resumed his
methodical way the word "Content" had been added to every name.
Only once did failure threaten to mar his record. A Lancashire colliery
proprietor, a man who had risen from the lowest grade of labour, as men
more often did in the hard, healthy days of emulous rivalry than in the
later piping times of union-imposed collective indolence, did not wish
to listen. Positive, narrow, over-bearing, he was permeated with the
dogmatic egotism of his successful life. He had never asked another
man's advice; he had never made a mistake. As hard as the ground out of
which he had carved his fortune, he hated and despised his men; they
knew it, and hated and respected him in return. His own brother worked
as a miner in his "1500 deep" and received a miner's wage. He hated his
master with the rest. Lomas was the "closest" employer in the north
central coal-field, and the richest. But there were fewer widows and
orphans in Halghcroft than in any other pit village of its size, and
Lomas spent nothing in insurance. Under his immediate eye cage cables
did not snap, tram shackles part, nor did unexpected falls of shoring
occur. His men did not smoke at their work, and no mysterious explosion
had ever engaged the attention of a Board of Trade enquiry.
Salt found him sitting in his shirt sleeves in a noble room, furnished
in the taste and profusion of a crowded pantechnicon with the most
costly specimens of seventeen periods of decorative art. He received him
with his usual manner, and that was the manner of a bellicose curmudgeon
towards an unwelcome deputation of suppliants. For emphasis, between the
frank didactic aphorisms which formed his arguments and his rules of
life, he banged with his fist a _lapis lazuli_ table, and lowered his
voice in a confidential aside to inform his visitor that three thousand
pounds was the figure that the little piece of furniture had cost him,
and that in matters of taste he stuck at nothing--an unnecessary piece
of information after one had cast an astonished glance around that
bizarre room.
In Lomas's future there loomed a knighthood--the consummation in his
mind of all earthly ambition and the possible fruit of a lavish charity
of the kind that is scarcely the greatest of the three, and his policy
was wholly dictated by a fear of endangering his chances. He would have
resented the suggestion, in the face of several munificent donations
that he had recently made to certain funds, and a gracious
acknowledgment which he had received, that the King was not following
his career with a personal interest. What, then, was the King's attitude
towards the Unity League and its plan of campaign? Had Salt anything to
show? It was useless to protest the inviolability of royal neutrality;
Lomas only banged the _lapis lazuli_. That was good enough for
outsiders, he retorted: now, between themselves? The strong man who was
restrained by diplomatic conventions could make no headway with the
strong man who was frankly primitive in his selfishness, and Salt
withdrew, baffled, but unperturbed. But the sequel was that before he
left his hotel the following day Lomas had waited upon him with full
acquiescence to the terms, and the central coal-field was "Content."
The inference might be that at last the intentions of the League must
have been disclosed. The reality was nothing of the kind. What had been
revealed to these men, then--the largest employers of labour of any
class throughout the country--to which they had signified their consent?
it may be asked. And the truth was that nothing had been revealed; that
even the officers of the League who sounded them were in the dark. In
the past, industrial struggles had always been between capital and
labour. That vaster encounter, upon which the League was now
concentrating its energies, was not to be on such clearly defined lines,
and in the strife capital might suffer side by side with labour. Against
that contingency the coal influence had now been indemnified in the name
of the Unity League and the future Government, and the guarantee had
been accepted. It was a far-reaching precaution in the end; it narrowed
the issue, and it secured more than neutrality in a quarter where open
hostility might have otherwise been proclaimed. It just tended to
realise that perfection of detail and completeness of preparation that
mark the successful campaign.
But if there was nothing more to learn in the sense that the data upon
which the League had based its plans had long since been complete, it
was impossible for a thoughtful observer to pass through the land
without learning much. Even two years of increasing privilege had left a
deeper mark. A lavish policy of "Bread and Circuses" was again depleting
the countryside, choking the towns, and destroying the instinct of
citizenship, just as it had speeded the decline of another world-power
two thousand years before. While wages had remained practically
stationary, the leisure of the working man had been appreciably
increased, and it was now being discovered that the working man had no
way of passing his leisure except in spending money. Betting and
drunkenness had increased in direct ratio to the lengthened hours of
enforced idleness, and other disquieting indications of how the time was
being spent, were brought home to those who moved among the poor. Where
the money came from, the books of the great thrift societies at once
revealed. There was no longer any necessity for the working man to save;
his wages were guaranteed, his risks of sickness and every other
adversity were insured against, his old age was pensioned, his children
were, if necessary, State-adopted.
Even the Trades Unions had abolished their subscriptions and dissipated
their reserves. There was no need of thrift now, for the Government was
the working man's savings bank, and had cut out the debit pages of his
pass-book. It was almost the Millennium. The only drawback was that,
with all this affluence around, the working man found himself very much
in the condition of a financial Ancient Mariner. There was a great deal
of money being spent on him, and for him, and by him, but he never had
any in his pocket. And the working man's wife was even worse off.
Other classes there were which found themselves in the same position,
but not by the same process. The rich were taxed up to the eyes, but the
rich had obvious means of retrenchment. But the great mass of the middle
class had no elastic extravagances upon which they could economise. Even
under favourable conditions they were for the most part fulfilling
Disraeli's pessimistic dictum: to the generality, manhood had been a
struggle. It had passed into a failure. It stood face to face with the
certainty of becoming a disaster. Inevitably there were tragedies.... So
it happened that the one vivid haunting picture that George Salt carried
down into later years from this period was not a lurid impression of
some blackened earth-gnarled scene of Dantesque desolation, not even a
memory of any of the incidents of his own personal triumph, but the
sharp details of an episode that lay quite off the high-road of his
work.
He was walking along a pretty country lane one evening (for it is a
characteristic of many of these unhappy regions that almost to the edge
of man's squalid usurpation Nature spreads her most gracious charms)
when a sudden thunderstorm drove him to seek the hospitality of a
labourer's cottage.
The man who opened the door was not a labourer, although he was shabbily
dressed. He looked sombrely at his visitor. "What is it?" he asked,
standing in the doorway with no sign of invitation.
"It is raining very heavily," replied Salt. "I should like to shelter,
if you will permit me."
The man seemed to notice the downpour, which had now become a continuous
stream, for the first time. "I'm very busy," he said churlishly.
"If I might stand just inside your doorway?" suggested Salt.
"No, come in," said the host with an air of sudden resolution. "After
all----" He led the way out of the tiny entrance-hall into a room. Salt
could not refrain from noticing that although the furniture was meagre,
the walls were covered with paintings.
"I am an artist," said the brusque tenant of the cottage, noticing the
involuntary glance around. "Come--in return for shelter you shall tell
me what you think of these things."
"I am not a critic," replied Salt, stepping from picture to picture,
"and it would be presumptuous, therefore, for me to give an opinion on
works that I do not understand, although I can recognise them as
striking and unconventional."
"Ah," commented the artist. "And that?"
He indicated a portrait with a nod. It was in an earlier, a smoother,
and less characteristic style. To the man who was no artist it was a
very beautiful painting of a very beautiful girl.
"My dead wife," said the artist, as Salt stood in silent admiration. "I
have buried her this afternoon."
The man who had never known or even seen her felt a stab as he looked up
at the lovely, smiling face.
"Well," said the painter roughly, "why don't you say how sorry you are,
or some platitude of that sort?"
Salt turned away, to leave the other alone meeting the sweet eyes.
"Because I cannot say how sorry I am," he replied with gentle pity.
"Oh, my beloved!" he heard the whisper. "Not long, not long."
"You are packing," Salt continued a minute later. "Let me help you--with
some."
A heap of straw and shavings littered the floor; boxes and cases stood
ready at hand.
"No," replied the man, looking moodily at his preparations. "I have
changed my mind. I have to go on a journey to-night, but I shall leave
this place as it is and secure the doors and windows instead."
He brought tools, and together they nailed across the cottage windows
the stout old-fashioned shutters that secured them. Neither spoke much.
"Come," said the artist, when the melancholy work was complete; "the
storm is over. Our roads lie together for a little way." He locked the
outer door, and stood lingering reluctantly with his hand upon the key.
"A moment," he said, unlocking the door again, and entering. "Only a
moment. Wait for me at the gate."
Salt waited as he was directed beside a dripping linden. The storm had
indeed passed over, but the sky was low and grey. Little rivulets
meandered in changing currents down the garden path; from beneath the
narrow lane came the continuous sobbing rush of some unseen swollen
water-course. The hand of despair lay heavy across the scene; it seemed
as though Nature had wept herself out, but was uncomforted. Salt
pictured the lonely man standing before the soulless, smiling creation
of his own hand.
The door opened, the lock again creaked mournfully as its rusty bolt was
driven home, and without a backward glance the artist came slowly down
the walk, twisting the clumsy key aimlessly upon his finger. He stopped
at a tangled patch where the anemone struggled vainly among the choking
bindweed, and the hyacinths and lupines had been beaten down to earth.
"Her garden!" he said aloud, and a spasm crossed his face. "But now how
overgrown." On a thought he dropped the key gently among the luxuriant
growth and turned away.
"I will tell you why my wife died," said the artist suddenly, after they
had passed round a bend of the road that hid the cottage from their
sight. "It should point a moral, and it will not take long."
"It may plead a cause," replied Salt.
"Ah!" exclaimed his companion, looking at him sharply. "Who are you,
then?"
"You do not know me, but you may know my business. I am Salt of the
Unity League."
"Strange," murmured the other. "Well, then, Mr Salt, my name is Leslie
Garnet, and, as I have told you, I am an artist. Ten years ago, at the
age of thirty, I came into a small legacy--three hundred pounds a year,
to be precise. Up to that time I had been making a somewhat precarious
living by illustration; on the strength of my fortune--which, of course,
to a successful man in any walk of life would be the merest pittance--I
rearranged my plans.
"Black and white work was drudgery to me, and it would never be anything
else, because it was not my medium, but it was the only form of
pictorial art that earned a livelihood. Pictures had ceased to sell. At
the same time I had encouragement for thinking that I could do something
worthy of existence in the higher branch of art.
"I don't want to trouble you with views. I made my choice. I determined
to live frugally on my income, give up hack work, to the incidental
advantage of some other poor struggler, and devote myself wholly to
pictures which might possibly bring me some recognition at the end of a
lifetime--more probably not--but pictures which would certainly never
enrich me. I do not think that the choice was an ignoble one--but, of
course, it was purely a personal matter.
"It was very soon afterwards that I got married. Had I thought of that
step earlier I might have acted differently. As it was, Hilda would not
hear of it. There seemed no need; we were very comfortable on our small
income in a tiny way.
"Nine years ago that. You know the course of events. My income was
derived from a prudently invested capital, so disposed as to give the
highest safe return. Not many years had passed before the Government
then in power fixed seven per cent. as the highest rate of interest
compatible with commercial morality, and confiscated all above. My fixed
system of living was embarrassed by a deduction of fifty pounds a year.
The next year an open-minded Chancellor, in need of a few millions to
spend on free amusements for the working class, was converted to the
principle that two per cent. of immorality still remained, so five was
made the maximum, and my small income was thus permanently reduced to
two hundred pounds.
"We received this second blow rather blankly, but Hilda would not hear
of surrender. As a matter of fact, I soon found out that there was
practically no chance of it, and that in throwing up all connections
when I did, I had burned my boats. Artists of every kind were turning to
illustration work, but half of the magazines were dead. We gave up the
flat that had been made pretty and home-like with inexpensive taste, and
moved into three dreary rooms.
"You know what the next development would be, perhaps? Yes, the Unearned
Incomes Act. And you will understand how it affected me.
"I was assessed in the same class as the Duke of Belgravia and Mr
Dives-Keeps, the millionaire, as a gentleman of private income, capable
of earning a living, but electing to live in idleness on invested
capital not of my own creating. I was married, could not plead
'encumbrances' in any form, well-educated, strong and healthy, and in
the prime of life. So I came under 'Schedule B,' and must pay a tax of
ten shillings and sixpence in the pound. It was nothing that I might
actually work twelve hours every day. Officially I must be living in
voluptuous idleness, because the work of my hands did not bring me in an
income bearing any appreciable proportion to my private means. The
Government that denounced Riches in every form and had come in on the
mandate of the poor and needy, recognised no other standard of
attainment but Money. Therefore 'Schedule B.'
"Of course the effect of that was overwhelming. I could not afford a
studio, I could not afford a model. I could scarcely afford materials.
My wife, who had long been delicate, was now really ill, between anxiety
and the unaccustomed daily work to which she bound herself. One of the
companies from which I derived a portion of my income failed at this
time: ruined by foreign competition and home restrictions. In a panic I
endeavoured to get work of any kind. I had not the experience necessary
for the lowest rungs of commerce; I was unknown in art. Who would employ
a broken-down man beginning life at thirty-eight? I was too old.
"I was warned that appeal was useless, but I did appeal before the
Commission. It was useless. I learned that mine was a thoroughly bad
case from every official point of view, with no redeeming feature: that
I was, in fact, a parasite upon the social system; and I narrowly
escaped having the assessment raised.
"It was then that we left London and came to this cottage. My wife's
health was permanently undermined, and change of air was necessary even
to prolong her life. Her native county was recommended; that is why we
chose this spot. When I reviewed affairs I found that I had a clear
fifty pounds a year. And there, a few miles to the west, where you see
that tracery of wheels and scaffolding against the sun, and there, a few
miles to the north, where you see that pall of smoke upon the air, there
lie hundreds and hundreds of cottages where gross luxury is rampant,
where beneath one roof family incomes of ten times mine are free from
any tax at all.
"That is enough for you to fill in the detail," continued Garnet
bitterly, as he revived the memory of the closing scenes. "Doctors,
things that had to be bought, bare existence. What remained of the
investments sold for what a forced sale would bring--you know what that
means to-day. The end you have seen. And there, Mr Salt, is the story to
your hand. Here is the churchyard.... Killed, to make a Labour holiday!"
He opened the rustic gate of the hillside churchyard and led the way to
a newly-turned mound, where the perfume hung stagnantly from the
rain-lashed petals of a great sheaf of Bermuda lilies.
"I remain here," he said quietly, after a few minutes' silence by the
grave-side. "Your road lies straight on, along the field path. You can
even see the smoke of Thornley from here, lying to your right."
Salt did not reply. Looking intently in the opposite direction, he was
locating with a seaman's eye another cloud of smoke that rose above the
tree-tops in the valley they had left.
"Your house!" he exclaimed, pointing. "Man!" he cried suddenly, with a
flash of intuition, "what are you doing? You fired the straw before we
left!"
A sharp report was the only answer. Salt turned too late to arrest his
arm, only in time to catch him as he fell. He lowered him--there was
nothing else to do--lowered him on to the wet sods that flanked the
mound, and knelt by his side so that he might support him somewhat. To
one who had been on battle-fields there was no need to wonder what to
do. It was a matter not of minutes but of seconds. The mute eyes met his
dimly; he heard the single whisper, "Hilda," and then, without a tremor,
Garnet, self-murdered, pressed a little more heavily against his arm and
lay across the yet unfinished grave of his State-murdered wife.