The National Progressive League, under whose auspices the meeting at
Stepney had been held, had originated in the minds of certain members
of the extreme Parliamentary left, the most active of whom were the late
Sir Ephraim Phayre, the chief, and Mr. Aloysius Gleam, his henchman. Its
primary object was to form a strong wing of the Liberal party, in
which extremists, opportunists, and the waverers on the edge of
the Independent Labour Party might rally together around practical
Collectivist principles. It sought to embrace academic Radicalism
and the interests of the Labour Party in a broader scheme of imperial
policy.
When Goddard threw himself into the work of the League it had all the
promise and vitality of youth. Centres were being rapidly established
throughout the kingdom. Systems of lectures on social and political
subjects were being organised. Meetings, conferences, and demonstrations
were arranged under its auspices. Pamphlets were published from its
headquarters in London, as well as a vigorously written journal. Besides
thus working on its own account, the League was gradually gathering
influence enough to constitute itself a great agency. It sent speakers
to political gatherings, and canvassers to Parliamentary and municipal
elections. It gained the confidence of the great trades unions and
operatives’ associations, and provided helpers in labour conflicts.
It was in touch at all points with political life--a vast undertaking,
offering an unlimited field for the energies of its supporters. Its
Statistical Bureau alone was capable of almost infinite extension.
It was with a thrilling sense of pride that Goddard found himself in the
full stream of the new movement. Every day brought him an added sense of
power and responsibility. To qualify himself for the tasks that devolved
upon him, he read deeply and widely, setting himself resolutely to fill
in the gaps of his self-education. He studied French, German, Latin,
beginning the latter with _mensa_, like a child, and strove to train his
taste and judgment by extending his acquaintance with pure literature.
His vigorous intellect assimilated rapidly, both from books and men, and
gradually, as the months passed into years, his views became
clearer, his judgments more penetrating, and his grasp more sure and
far-reaching.
The League work, and afterwards his election to a political club,
brought him into frequent contact with Aloysius Gleam. The latter was
anxious to keep in touch with Goddard, not only because he foresaw
in him a valuable man for the party, but also because he took a keen
personal interest in the young man’s career. He had all a shrewd,
generous little man’s vanity in extending to a big man the patronage he
felt would soon not be needed. To his friends he prophesied great things
of Goddard. He introduced him to the chief shortly before Sir Ephraim’s
death.
“It is courageous of you to tackle that powerful-faced young giant,”
said Sir Ephraim, laughing.
“Yes,” replied Gleam, “I feel like a hen hatching an ostrich egg.”
And when the young ostrich stalked out of the shell, and in the course
of time took up its position in the world as a superior bird, Aloysius
Gleam looked on with undisguised satisfaction.
Once, in the early days of Goddard’s affluence, Gleam interrupted a warm
discussion.
“Why don’t you take elocution lessons?”
“I never thought of it,” Goddard replied. “I have no desire to become an
elegant orator.”
“It might be useful to you in your private speech,” said Gleam,
looking at him in his shrewd way. Goddard frowned perplexedly. Then he
understood and coloured slightly.
“I don’t want to pretend to be better than I am,” he said. “If my speech
shows I belong to the people, so much the better. No one will think the
worse of me.”
Gleam laid his hand kindly on the young democrat’s arm--they were
walking up and down the lobby of the House--and broke out into an
impetuous harangue. The young man’s argument was easily demolished.
The result was that in this, as in many other things, he took Gleam’s
advice. He was no fool for angry pride to furnish him with cap and
bells. He saw, when he came to consider the matter dispassionately, that
though London Doric might be sweet in the ears of the proletariat, it
grated on the finer susceptibilities of the House of Commons. Whereupon
he set to work upon elocution with the tireless energy of a Demosthenes.
So in seven years he had gained for himself an ever-growing reputation.
The great reviews had opened their pages to him. The League intrusted
him with responsible work. He was on the London County Council, and a
seat in Parliament awaited him at no distant future.
To please his wife, Daniel had not settled down in Sunington. He had
bidden farewell reluctantly, for it meant the sundering of many ties,
and the surrendering of many interests. But Lizzie had been insistent.
Visions of domestic harmony, disturbed by incursions of Captain Jenkyns
in an advanced state of profanity, had prompted earnest beseeching.
Perhaps she was wise; for soon after her marriage the old reprobate,
to the exceeding great scandal of the neighbourhood, took to himself a
mistress-housekeeper in the shape of a flaunting, red-faced female of
pugnacious instincts, who had retained possession of the house after his
death. Their goings on, Emily and Sophie declared, had been something
awful.
Lizzie had been well out of it. Daniel would never have been able to
hold up his head for the disgrace; whereat Daniel had smiled somewhat
sardonically. His skin was a little too tough, he said, for vicarious
reprobation.
But Lizzie had other and more private reasons for wishing to migrate.
In the first flush of her dignity she had shrunk from the streets with
which she had been too grossly familiar during her early girlhood. She
had larked with the butcher’s boy, played kiss in the ring with the
greengrocer’s assistant, and kept very serious company with Joe Forster
the tobacconist. Such daily reminiscences are apt to prove embarrassing.
The translated Lizzie had felt out of her element in Sunington. So, to
please her, Daniel had come into London and taken a house in Notting
Hill, where they had remained during the seven years of their married
life.
*****
It was late when Goddard stood before the familiar door, on his return
from the Stepney meeting. An expression of impatience escaped his lips
as he noticed a light in the basement; otherwise, with the exception
of the faintly illuminated fanlight, the house was in darkness. He
let himself in with his latch-key, and walking the length of the dim
passage, descended the kitchen stairs, groping his way. He opened the
kitchen door softly, and found the housemaid asleep, with her head
on the deal table. Awakened by his presence, the girl started in some
confusion.
“Why haven’t you gone to bed, Jane?”
His tone was less one of reprimand than that of a man repeating a
disagreeable formula.
“Mistress was very poorly to-night, sir, and I thought I had better sit
up till you came.”
He nodded, looked at her sombrely from beneath his eyebrows.
“Did you see her to bed comfortably?”
“Oh yes, sir.”
“Hasn’t Miss Jenkyns been here?”
“No, sir. Miss Sophie came for an hour this afternoon.”
“Very well,” said Goddard, turning on his heel. “Go to bed now, there’s
a good girl. You must be tired.”
He went heavily up the stairs again, turned off the gas in the hall,
and continued his ascent. On the first floor he paused, leaned his ear
against the bedroom door, and listened. Satisfied with a sound of heavy
breathing within, he mounted the next flight and lit the gas in his own
study, stirred a blackening fire, and after warming his hands for a few
seconds, sat down at his writing-table.
It was a plainly furnished room, lined with books in sober bindings,
sloping and falling, with great gaps, untidily, in the shelves. A great
table, covered with a red baize cloth and piled with papers, pamphlets,
and odd volumes, occupied the centre. An old arm-chair, its seat filled
with a set of blue books, was drawn up near the fire. The mantelpiece
was bare, save for a few pipes and smoker’s odds and ends. Above was
pinned a broad-sheet almanac issued by some Reform organisation. Nowhere
appeared any attempt at adornment.
Goddard sat in his round-backed wooden chair, opened a couple of letters
that had come by the evening post, and then drummed with his fingers on
the table in a preoccupied way. The setting of his face was too stern to
express pain, and yet the deep vertical furrow between the brows and the
tightly compressed lips indicated thoughts far removed from joyousness.
At last he shook himself, brushed his hair from his forehead with a
hasty gesture, and drawing a great breath, which ended like a sigh,
separated some papers from the chaotic mass, and set to work on them,
pen in hand. He worked for half-an-hour, only pausing to fill and light
a pipe, and then with a yawn he rose and went through the communicating
door into the adjoining room. A camp bedstead and the bare bedroom
requisites were all that it contained. His seven years of affluence had
brought him no sense of the minor luxuries of life. His personal tastes
were as simple as when he lodged in the little top-floor-back in the
working folks’ street in Sunington.
With his watch he drew from his waistcoat pocket the card he had
received at Stepney: “Lady Phayre, 15 Queen’s Court Mansions.” He had
forgotten her existence. He glanced at the card rather contemptuously,
tore it across, and threw it into the grate. Then he undressed and slept
the sleep of the weary man.
The next morning he began his breakfast alone, although the table was
laid for two. As he ate, he ran through his correspondence, and jotted
down notes in his pocket-book. He was a busy man, particularly
occupied just now with heavy committee-work on the Council, and sundry
organisation schemes connected with the League, and every moment was of
value.
Presently the door opened, and Lizzie entered. She did not meet his
following glance, but came forward with sullen, downcast eyes, and
silently took her place at the table. The seven years had pressed upon
her with the weight of fourteen. The devil had walked off with his own
beauty. Although she was barely thirty, the plump freshness of youth
had gone. The pink cheeks had paled and grown flabby; round contours
had fallen into puffiness; the pout of the soft lips had relaxed
into unlovely looseness of mouth marked by marring lines. A common,
slatternly woman, with loose untidy hair and swollen eyelids, and
dressed in an old morning wrapper, she was as unlike the rosebud
bride of Sunington as the light is unlike the darkness; and yet by the
inexorable law of development she was the same woman.
She poured herself out a cup of tea and broke some dry bread on her
plate. Neither had spoken. Goddard’s brow darkened a little as he went
on with his breakfast and his papers. She stole from time to time a
shifting glance at him. The expression of absorbed interest on his dark
face irritated her. The dead silence became unbearable. Suddenly she
thrust back her chair a few inches, and struck the table sharply with
her fingers.
“For God’s sake say something, can’t you,” she cried half-hysterically.
Goddard looked up gravely and laid down his pencil.
“What can I say to you, Lizzie?”
“Anything. Curse me, nag at me--anything; only don’t sit there as if I
was the scum of the earth and you God Almighty.”
“Well, you have broken your promise once more. What else can I tell
you? You can’t expect me to be pleased, and I see no good in cursing and
nagging. So I hold my tongue.”
“I wish I was dead,” said Lizzie bitterly.
Goddard shrugged his shoulders. He had done his best according to his
lights, and he had failed. Sometimes his heart echoed her wish.
“You have only yourself to thank,” he said.
“Have I? I’ve not got you to thank for anything. Oh dear, no! You know
you hate me. You never did care for me. Even when we was first married
you cared for your dirty old politics more than you did for me. Oh, why
didn’t I marry Joe Forster? He has three big shops now, and can hold up
his head as much as you can, for all you’re a County Councillor and have
your name in the newspapers. And what good does that do to me, I’d like
to know? It’s all your fault, every bit your fault, and you drive me to
it; you know you do, and you’d be glad if I dropped down dead now.”
It was not a new story. Her words had no longer power to move him to
anger. He accepted her grimly as a burden he had to bear through life.
“We made a mistake in marrying, Lizzie,” he said. “We both found it out
long ago. I was not the sort of man you wanted, and perhaps I ought to
have remained single. But I have done my duty by you honestly, and--so
help me, God--I always shall. What is it you want that I do not try to
give you?”
Many and many a woman, when she has been asked that question, the
helpless question across the league-sundering gulf, has answered, aloud
or dumbly, in a great yearning: “Love, a breath of passion, a touch of
tenderness.” But in Lizzie that craving had never been deeper than
the bloom on her cheek, and with the bloom it had perished. There are
natures too common for the need of love, which is an instinct upwards of
the soul. Instead, she answered querulously: “Why don’t you give me some
money, and let me live away, somewhere?”
“To do God knows what with yourself? Not I, unless you would like this
sort of thing.” He took from among the circulars with which he was daily
deluged a chance-sent prospectus of a Home, and put it before her. She
glanced at it, and then crumpled it up fiercely, and threw it into the
fire.
“If you’re going to do that with me, you’d better look sharp, I can tell
you,” she cried, trembling with sudden rage. “How long have you been
making that little plan?”
“It is no plan. You could only go in there of your own free will. My
only plan is to shelter you here, and make life as happy for you as you
will let me.”
Lizzie sniffed contemptuously.
“What did you send for that thing for?”
“It came quite by chance.”
“That’s a damn lie!”
He bent forward, took her wrist, and looked at her sternly between the
eyes, which lowered, abashed.
“You know I never tell lies,” he said. “I tell you that you shall never
go to such a place unless you wish to. But you shall stay in my house.
And listen to me. If this goes on much longer, I shall have to engage a
special attendant to live here, who will watch you like a cat. It will
be a disgrace for you that you can well spare yourself. So be warned,
and turn over a new leaf.”
He rose, opened the morning paper, and skimmed through the news summary.
Lizzie rubbed the wrist that he had held in an unconsciously tight grip,
and then she began to whimper. But her tears had lost their effect upon
Daniel. They came with maudlin frequency.
At last she broke into a great spluttering sob. “I have been miserable
ever since little Jacky died. I wish I had died with him.”
The name of the child, dead three years before, touched the man’s heart.
Of the two, perhaps he had felt the loss the more. Standing behind her,
he laid a hand upon her shoulder, and said in a rough, tenderer tone--
“It was hard, my girl. But you are not the only one. Other women have
been left desolate.”
“And other women have wished they were dead. I expect most of ’em do.
It’s beastly to be a woman.”
“Well, you can’t help that,” he said grimly, resuming his newspaper.
“You had better try and make the best of it.”
The servant entered with his boots, which she placed on the hearthrug.
When he had laced them up he stamped them into ease and looked more
cheerful. A man’s moral tone always undergoes a subtle change with the
donning of the morning boot or the evening slipper.
“I shall be back for supper early this evening,” he said, “so you won’t
be lonely. Now be a good girl. Do.”
She made no reply, although he had spoken kindly and forgivingly, and
she knew from past experience that the subject of the last night’s slip
would not be alluded to again. As soon as he had gone, she drew from her
dressing-gown pocket a soiled penny novelette, and settled down to her
idle morning by the fireside. In the afternoon Emily came, a weary,
shrivelled woman, to remain with her for a few hours. For some time past
Daniel had made the sisters a secret allowance, as compensation for loss
of time in their dressmaking business, on the condition of their keeping
Lizzie company. Society in the ordinary sense she had none. It was the
loneliness and idleness that had crushed her. At first it had seemed a
grand thing to wear pretty dresses, and keep her hands white, and give
over all the work of the house to the servants. Now the habit of sloth
was ingrained. She had no occupation, no interests. Even her girlish
fondness for finery was gone. The costume that gave her least trouble to
put on was the one she selected. Like the once free-swimming sea-anemone
she had grown encrusted to her rock, stretching out lazy tentacles. When
her cousin arrived she was still attired in the old dressing-gown and
down-at-heel slippers she had thrust on as she got out of her bed.
Emily, who was precise and businesslike, hurried her off with an
indignation not staled by custom, to dress herself decently. During her
toilet she made the usual confession to Emily with pleas in mitigation,
and the usual indictment of Daniel. But Emily was not sympathetic. She
banged in the drawer, where she had been arranging Lizzie’s slovenly
kept under-linen, and pulled out another viciously.
“You should have married a man like father,” she said. “That’s the sort
of husband you should have had, who would have pulled you out of bed by
your hair and given you a good sound hiding. Daniel’s thousands of miles
too good for you.”
Lizzie turned round and faced her passionately, straining at the ends of
her stay-lace.
“I wish sometimes he would beat me. There! I’ll make him do it one of
these days.”
“Dan’s not the man to treat his wife like a dog.”
“No. He treats me like a tabby-cat--beneath his notice. He has always
done it. I may be a silly fool, but it doesn’t require much intellec’ to
know when folks look upon you as the dirt beneath their feet.”
“Well, the dirt ought to be grateful when a man like Daniel condescends
to put his foot upon it,” replied Emily with conviction.
“Why didn’t you marry him yourself?” said Lizzie witheringly.
“Elizabeth Goddard, you’re no better than a fool,” returned Emily. “And
if you’ve nothing pleasanter to say, I’ll go back home.”
As on many previous occasions, the threat moved Lizzie to tears, then
to reproaches, finally to entreaties and submission. When peace was made
they went off on a shopping expedition to Kensington High Street, where
Lizzie, to make amends, bought her cousin a bonnet, and interested
herself in a discussed readjustment of trimming. But outside a
newsvendor’s Emily pointed with her umbrella to an item in the contents
bill of a Radical evening paper: “Dan Goddard at Stepney--Enthusiastic
Reception.”
“Oh yes, I see,” said Lizzie petulantly. “I suppose you think I ought to
fall down and worship him when he comes back.”
Her ill-humour returned, and she regretted the bonnet--an additional
grievance.
“If it wasn’t for him I’m blessed if I’d ever come near you,” said Emily
in the discussion that followed.
And so it happened that when Goddard came home he found his wife in a
fit of sulks. The experiment of a domestic evening failed, as it had
done so many times before. She replied monosyllabically to his attempts
at conversation, refused point-blank his offer to put her into a cab and
drive her to a theatre--a wild delight of past years--and retired to bed
at nine o’clock.
Goddard mounted to his own den, and plunged into his work with the zest
of a man who has conscientiously acquitted himself of an irksome
duty, and is free to apply himself without scruple to more congenial
occupations.