The accusing finger of Dowd followed Trafford into his dreams.
Behind it was his grey-toned, intelligent, resentful face, his
smouldering eyes, his slightly frayed collar and vivid, ill-chosen tie.
At times Trafford could almost hear his flat insistent voice, his
measured h-less speech. Dowd was so penetratingly right,--and so
ignorant of certain essentials, so wrong in his forecasts and ultimates.
It was true beyond disputing that Trafford as compared with Dowd had
opportunity, power of a sort, the prospect and possibility of leisure.
He admitted the liability that followed on that advantage. It expressed
so entirely the spirit of his training that with Trafford the noble
maxim of the older socialists; "from each according to his ability, to
each according to his need," received an intuitive acquiescence. He had
no more doubt than Dowd that Dowd was the victim of a subtle evasive
injustice, innocently and helplessly underbred, underfed, cramped and
crippled, and that all his own surplus made him in a sense Dowd's
debtor.
But Dowd's remedies!
Trafford made himself familiar with the socialist and labor newspapers,
and he was as much impressed by their honest resentments and their
enthusiastic hopefulness as he was repelled by their haste and
ignorance, their cocksure confidence in untried reforms and impudent
teachers, their indiscriminating progressiveness, their impulsive lapses
into hatred, misrepresentation and vehement personal abuse. He was in no
mood for the humours of human character, and he found the ill-masked
feuds and jealousies of the leaders, the sham statecraft of G. B.
Magdeberg, M.P., the sham Machiavellism of Dorvil, the sham persistent
good-heartedness of Will Pipes, discouraging and irritating. Altogether
it seemed to him the conscious popular movement in politics, both in and
out of Parliament, was a mere formless and indeterminate aspiration. It
was a confused part of the general confusion, symptomatic perhaps, but
exercising no controls and no direction.
His attention passed from the consideration of this completely
revolutionary party to the general field of social reform. With the
naive directness of a scientific man, he got together the published
literature of half a dozen flourishing agitations and philanthropies,
interviewed prominent and rather embarrassed personages, attended
meetings, and when he found the speeches too tiresome to follow watched
the audience about him. He even looked up Aunt Plessington's Movement,
and filled her with wild hopes and premature boastings about a
promising convert. "Marjorie's brought him round at last!" said Aunt
Plessington. "I knew I could trust my little Madge!" His impression was
not the cynic's impression of these wide shallows of activity. Progress
and social reform are not, he saw, mere cloaks of hypocrisy; a wealth of
good intention lies behind them in spite of their manifest futility.
There is much dishonesty due to the blundering desire for consistency in
people of hasty intention, much artless and a little calculated
self-seeking, but far more vanity and amiable feebleness of mind in
their general attainment of failure. The Plessingtons struck him as
being after all very typical of the publicist at large, quite devoted,
very industrious, extremely presumptuous and essentially thin-witted.
They would cheat like ill-bred children for example, on some petty point
of reputation, but they could be trusted to expend, ineffectually
indeed, but with the extremest technical integrity, whatever sums of
money their adherents could get together....
He emerged from this inquiry into the proposed remedies and palliatives
for Dowd's wrongs with a better opinion of people's hearts and a worse
one of their heads than he had hitherto entertained.
Pursuing this line of thought he passed from the politicians and
practical workers to the economists and sociologists. He spent the
entire leisure of the second summer after the establishment of the
factory upon sociological and economic literature. At the end of that
bout of reading he attained a vivid realization of the garrulous badness
that rules in this field of work, and the prevailing slovenliness and
negligence in regard to it. He chanced one day to look up the article on
Socialism in the new Encyclopaedia Britannica, and found in its entire
failure to state the case for or against modern Socialism, to trace its
origins, or to indicate any rational development in the movement, a
symptom of the universal laxity of interest in these matters. Indeed,
the writer did not appear to have heard of modern Socialism at all; he
discussed collective and individualist methods very much as a rather
ill-read schoolgirl in a hurry for her college debating society might
have done. Compared with the treatment of engineering or biological
science in the same compilation, this article became almost symbolical
of the prevailing habitual incompetence with which all this system of
questions is still handled. The sciences were done scantily and
carelessly enough, but they admitted at any rate the possibility of
completeness; this did not even pretend to thoroughness.
One might think such things had no practical significance. And at the
back of it all was Dowd, remarkably more impatient each year, confessing
the failure of parliamentary methods, of trades unionism, hinting more
and more plainly at the advent of a permanent guerilla war against
capital, at the general strike and sabotage.
"It's coming to that," said Dowd; "it's coming to that."
"_What's the good of it?_" he said, echoing Trafford's words. "It's a
sort of relief to the feelings. Why shouldn't we?"