“I say, Danford, it is far more dignified to go about as we do; there is
no shamming any more,” said Sinclair, as he linked his arm in that of
Lionel. The three men were coming down Bond Street. “No one stops me to
make irrelevant remarks on my matrimonial affairs.” His spirits were
buoyant, he felt himself master of the world, not merely the master over
men; neither did he enjoy that spurious sense of independence which made
him formerly, as a man of fashion, order his pleasures at such an hour,
his carriage at another; but he felt that noble freedom which
emancipated him from trifling bonds and conventional statutes.
“When you taught John Bull that happiness can exist without church fees
and Society’s sanction, and that sorrow is really ennobled by the
absence of funeral plumes and crocodile tears, you taught him an
everlasting lesson,” answered the little buffoon.
“Don’t you think,” suddenly exclaimed Lionel, “that the streets are
looking more rational than they used to?” They were crossing Piccadilly.
“See how these long arcades protect the pedestrians in bad weather; and
notice the spacious galleries opened out under the houses where the
shops used to be.”
“Yes, my lord, shop-land is no more. We owe that improvement to your
valet.”
“His plan turned out a real success,” said Lionel, “and the fellow is as
active in his present work of reform as he was lazy in his past career.”
“Idleness has disappeared with the injustice which separated classes;
the meanest urchin knows that there is a premium applied to brains, and
that premium is—universal happiness.”
“Now that we all work,” said Lionel, “you would not find a man or a
woman who would not willingly help in the construction of machinery to
liberate mankind from slavery. Look at these galleries running under the
arcades; in each arch there is a large board with electric bells which
communicate with edifices outside London, where all the necessaries of
life are fabricated. Each house has one of these boards, and thus meals
for invalids, the sweeping and washing up of rooms, in fact, all the
necessaries of life can be obtained by merely pressing one of these
electric bells.”
“Likewise—the dining-halls,” said Danford, “have been considerably
improved and simplified; cooking by electricity has given back freedom
to thousands of cooks and scullion-maids. Instead of personal
attendance, there are trays placed on electric trollies running along in
the middle of the dinner-tables, which stop at each guest, and which can
be started again on their course by touching a small bell. What a
transformation the City has undergone, to be sure. We all put our
shoulders to the wheel; at stated hours we work for the welfare of all,
and the labour seems light, for it is divided, and the aim is universal
contentment. No task is beneath us; no employment is too trivial, were
it even to fix a screw in the axle of a small wheel, providing that
wheel leads us swiftly to the goal.”
“The wrong labour,” broke in Lionel, “was that which toiled for the
luxuries of a few to the detriment of the many; but the labour
undertaken by all, for the greatest happiness of all, is as exhilarating
as the early morning’s breeze.”
“You would never know the people you elbow now from those with whom you
used to associate,” said Danford. “Could you recall in the man just
coming out of the ex-Atheneum Club the former frequenter of the past
race-course?”
“Ah! that’s the Duke of Norbury,” answered Sinclair. “The fellow looks
altogether normal. Certainly he is not so common in his plain—skin.”
“That is because his sporting grace has lost the label which directed
him to Newmarket,” answered Dan.
They had reached Trafalgar Square, and very soon faced Parliament
Street. Suddenly the little buffoon halted and, bursting out laughing,
exclaimed,—
“By Jove! are you aware that this day is the 24th of June? the day on
which the Coronation was to be held?” The three men paused; they looked
round in wonderment. Birds were singing merrily as they hopped on the
Landseer lions, the soft breeze wrinkled the surface of the water in
which lads and lassies were ducking, and splashing each other in merry
laughter.
“Do you not hear, in your mind’s ear,” sententiously spoke Danford, “the
distant rumble of drums and metallic strains of military bands? Does not
your mind’s eye perceive in the distance the glittering of swords in the
sunshine, and the variegated uniforms of Colonial and Indian armies?
Slowly comes the procession up Parliament Street, furrowing its way
through an ebbing and flowing wave of humanity. The great of the land
are all there, labelled with their uniforms. There, look, comes a gilded
coach. In that coach I can see two figures, systematically bowing on
either side of the carriage. What is the meaning of these two figures
got up like dolls for the occasion?”
“My poor Dan, there is no meaning in them. They are the symbol of past
inconsistency,” replied Sinclair.
“How was it,” asked Lionel, “that with all that science was doing for
the progress of the modern world, and with all that art was creating to
make life beautiful, how was it we never came any nearer to happiness?”
“My dear Lionel,” answered Sinclair, “because we wanted to reconcile our
modern world with the old one. Steering our way back into the past
against the current which carried us on to the future was hard work,
very often a perilous expedition; we travestied barbarous passions with
new garments, to make them more presentable to our modern world; and the
thirst for conquest and wealth was disguised under the mask of political
philanthropy. Vice had its fur-lined overcoat; ruthless money-diggers
and empire-makers stalked through the town as modern Aladdins; sometimes
even, they raised their own eyes to the exalted position of God’s A.D.C.
Prostitution left street corners to mount the marble steps of palaces,
where the hand of the clergy helped it to enter the precincts of social
Paradise—”
“Listen, my lord,” interrupted Danford. “Do you hear the tramping of
horses’ hoofs? Conquering heroes, whose glory is written on the sands of
life, are coming.”
“Posterity with her broom and shovel will clear away the dust of their
rubbish,” said Lionel. “It will collect in its dust-pan some strange
manifestations: Cæsar, Napoleon, Marlborough—”
“Leave out the more recent names,” broke in Sinclair; “they are too near
to us.”
“You are right,” said Lionel. “Still, posterity, in her impartial
summing up, will be more lenient towards those whose crimes were the
results of unpolished ignorance, than towards those whose lust was
cleverly screened by Pharisaism. It will not be hard on Edward III. and
Philippe le Bel for haggling over France like two butcher’s dogs over a
bone; but I am afraid it will judge unmercifully our modern
civilisations which masqueraded and played parts unsuited to them. Has
the Hundred Years’ War given the supremacy to either France or England?
What has the Inquisition and the Spanish ascendency over the Dutch
Republic done for Spain’s prosperity?”
“And what would the annexation of the South African Provinces have done
for England’s glory, had not the storm put a sudden stop to his
country’s hysterical fits?” inquired Danford.
“Our old world has gone through a good deal of alteration,” remarked
Sinclair. “Maps have always impressed me as the saddest annals of
history. As a boy, I used to turn the pages of atlas books with the
keenest interest; they spoke to me of human struggles, of longings and
morbid regrets.”
“Yes,” added Danford, “maps are the medical charts of the intermittent
fevers from which countries suffer.”
“Thank God for the blessings His water-spout has conferred on us!” burst
out Lionel. “I shudder when I think that we might, on this very day,
have witnessed this fantastic pageantry. The opium-eater, in his
weirdest delirium, could not have pictured a more uncanny parade, than
the one we should have beheld at the dawn of the twentieth century:
London—a huge pawnbroker’s shop—turning out into the streets all its
pandemonium! the properties of our modern world thrown together,
higgledy-piggledy, with the paraphernalia of a Cinderella pantomime! The
incongruous was then the order of the day, and our brains, before the
storm, were the receptacles of untidy ideas.”
“My lord, do you hear in the distance the bells of St Paul’s ringing
their peals?”
“Yes, they are ringing for the sacred union of clericalism with worldly
wisdom.”
“How could we reconcile the symbolic ceremony of a crowned monarch with
the limitations of our constitution?” asked Danford. “How was it
possible to adapt obsolete palliaments to the democratic innovation of
the coat and skirt? For I think we may truly call this revolution in
feminine dress the 1789 of Histology.”
“You are right, my dear Dan, but I want to know what our epoch was
aiming at?” asked Sinclair, sitting down on one of the steps. “Was it
playing a practical joke on democracy, or was it acting a monarchical
burlesque? What had our fashionable metropolis to do with the customs of
a London which began at the Strand, and whose centre was the Tower?
Doubtless, the auditory faculty of a Plantagenet would have suffered
from the bustling London of Edward VII., and the clamouring noise of a
railway station would have certainly upset the nerves of even that
bloodthirsty Richard III.”
“The fact is, my dear fellow,” said Lionel, who sat down near Sinclair,
“we had, before the storm, arrived at the cross-roads, and had to choose
which turning we should take. Were we to go straight ahead, regardless
of past traditions, on a motor car; or should we have chosen a shady
road and ambled back to Canterbury on a Chaucerian cob, escorting that
gentle dame yclept “Madam Eglantine”? The twentieth century was the
sphinx confronting us. Were we going to meet it with an old adage, or
were we at last to be Œdipus and solve the question?”
“As long as we dragged at our heels the worthless baggage of the past,
we could not proceed on our road.” Danford stood in front of the two
men. “We went to our political business in fairy coaches, and could not
make out why we arrived too late for Parliamentary tit-bits. We were
playing the fool on the brink of a precipice, and spent our time and
energy in staging a sort of ‘Alice in Wonderland’ in a graveyard. It was
as tragic as it was flippant, and if posterity will laugh at our
inconsistency, how much more must Mediævalism grin at our lack of
adaptability. I should like to know what King Alfred or Queen Bess have
to say about us?”
“Poor Alfred,” sighed Lionel, “I feel for him, for he must be mortified
at having given the first impulse to English language to produce—Marian
Crivelli!”
“Ha! ha! ha! As to dear old Bess,” remarked Sinclair; “with all her
cunning, and the improbity of her politics, she was essentially
modern—of her times modernity, naturally, for of course, Conservatism
and Radicalism are relative. Had she seen the development of science;
had she crossed the Channel in one hour, and the Atlantic in a week; and
had she been able to send a wireless message to a distant continent, she
would have jumped with delight!—she would have twigged in an instant
that the curtain had dropped upon the old world, and she would have
advised her successor to throw unscrupulously overboard, crown, sceptre,
regal goods and chattels—in fact, all royal overweight—to save the
crew!”
“That reminds me,” suddenly said Lionel, “that I had a telephonic
_causerie_ this morning with Victor de Laumel, in Paris. He said that at
the clubs everyone was discussing the latest. The Sovereigns of Europe
are going to meet in congress at the Hague to confabulate on what they
had better do in face of this strange event in England.”
“When the Sovereigns themselves are aware of the inconsistency of their
condition, and the futility of their prerogatives, then their eyes will
be open as to what their future conduct has to be.”
“That is just what Victor says. They are as excited about this congress,
in Paris, as they were about Fashoda and Dreyfus, and, naturally, they
blame us for it; all the smart clubs are dead nuts against England for
playing into the hands of Jove.”
“Oh! that does not astonish me in the least,” said Danford. “But about
this congress, Lord Somerville, I think we have already taught the world
a lesson, and that sooner than I ever expected. At this rate the storm
of London will rank as the greatest event in the history of nations. If
you look at history impartially, you will find that every reform carried
in its breast the seed of another excess. A wrong was abolished, by
what, at the time, appeared a right principle, until another standpoint
was reached, which showed us the wrong side of the right principle.”
“If this strange condition of ours,” broke in Sinclair, “does, after
all, lead to the reform of the governing classes from within, then,
indeed, it was worth losing one’s shirt!” And the three men laughed
heartily.
“Look round, my lord,” and Danford pointed to the National Gallery. “You
have given the first impetus to true art.”
“No, no, Danford,” interrupted Lionel. “It was the public who gave me
the hint.”
“Never mind, my lord, the thing is done, and you have awakened the
consciousness of our English artists. Look down Parliament Street, where
your mind’s eye saw, a minute ago, the pantomime of Government; you can
see our ancient seat of Parliament transformed into the sanctuary of
technical education. The old lobbies are swarming with efficient
teachers. Public education, as it was to be found in our old haunts of
Eton, Rugby, etc., etc., was the proper training for privileged classes;
but the present education, which is not compulsory, is the training of
the child and adult without social barriers; and the only religious
dogma which he must live up to is this: that the welfare of all is the
welfare of each.”
“And yet,” sadly remarked Sinclair, “science is still but empiric, as it
has not yet revealed to us the mystery of the human heart; that remains
a sealed letter. Some writer has named that mysterious recess of
individuality, ‘the hidden garden’; but how ignorant we still are of its
vegetation. Do we know what causes, in that hidden garden of the soul, a
lovely rose to grow where the soil was barren; or a toadstool to sprout
where the seed of a robust plant had been sown?”
“No, we know no more of each other’s inner souls than the early Britons
knew of steam and electricity,” said Lionel. “As long as we have not
reached complete consciousness we shall never triumph over the
inconsistencies which place men on different platforms, and spur them on
to fight unfair battles.”
“Ah, my lord, you have a receptive mind, and I knew, from the beginning,
that the day would come when you would open your eyes to the gulf which
separates man from man. Yesterday morning the Committee of Music Hall
Artists introduced at our meeting a queer sort of man, who struck me as
visionary in his ideas, and matter-of-fact in the carrying out of his
plans.”
“Surely, Dan, he was an American,” remarked Sinclair, “for the gift of
bottling the ocean, or of cramming into a nutshell all the contradictory
philosophical theories, belongs to that race which unites the creative
power of a Jupiter to the jugglery of a mountebank.”
“What that man, be he god or charlatan, suggests is too grave to be
spoken of lightly or to be taken up in a minute,” continued Danford,
“and I implore your lordship not to jump too quickly at a conclusion.
But, to come to facts, this man avers that he has discovered the means
of reading human thoughts and secret motives just as clearly as one sees
the hidden structure of a body by means of the X-rays. He says that we
have, owing to our normal hygiene and purity of life, arrived at the
time when this invention will be necessary to bring perfect happiness to
human beings; and that our past weeks of paradisaical existence have
changed John Bull and made him thirst for a complete knowledge of his
fellow-creatures. This is a serious matter, gentlemen, and, for God’s
sake, do not let us wreck the future bliss of the world through our
incautiousness. You have done much for John Bull, my lord, but you have
done it chiefly by being tactful with him, and by not ruffling his
susceptibilities. After all, man is a strange being: he clings to the
prejudices which makes his life a living purgatory; and you must first
see John Bull develop a craving to investigate the ‘hidden garden’
before the final reform of man by man can be effected from within.”
“Let us curb our enthusiasm for the sake of John Bull,” buoyantly
exclaimed Lionel, “and let us turn back, Danford. It is getting late,
and I have to be at the old War Office to meet ex-Field-Marshal Burlow,
to discuss with him what is to be done with the old offices.”
“My lord!” and Danford put his hand on Lionel’s shoulder, “an idea has
just struck me! You can do a good turn to the American Seer, by giving
over to him the War Office for his scientific experiments. What could be
more fitted to the science which is devoted to the extension of
sympathy, than the dwelling in which was planned the extermination of
races?”
“My dear man, the Seer shall have the old rookery, if I have a voice in
the matter, although I fear the shadows of past victims and the
remembrance of foregone civilised warfare will lurk at every corner, and
interfere with his humanising studies.”
“Quite the contrary,” said Sinclair. “The Seer, if he is what we think,
is sure to be stimulated by the ghosts of barbaric civilisations, and
his sense of humour will make him chuckle at the irony of fate, which
selected him to metamorphose Janus’s eyrie into a temple of love and
peace.”