Marcella Maxwell, however, had not been easily wooed by the man who now
filled all the horizon of her life. At the time when Aldous Raeburn, as
he then was--the grandson and heir of old Lord Maxwell--came across her
first she was a handsome, undeveloped girl, of a type not uncommon in our
modern world, belonging by birth to the country-squire class, and by the
chances of a few years of student life in London to the youth that takes
nothing on authority, and puts to fierce question whatever it finds
already on its path--Governments, Churches, the powers of family and
wealth--that takes, moreover, its social pity for the only standard, and
spends that pity only on one sort and type of existence. She accepted
Raeburn, then the best _parti_ in the county, without understanding or
loving him, simply that she might use his power and wealth for certain
social ends to which the crude philanthropy of her youth had pledged
itself. Naturally, they were no sooner engaged than Raeburn found himself
launched upon a long wrestle with the girl who had thus--in the
selfishness of her passionate idealist youth--opened her relation to him
with a deliberate affront to the heart offered her. The engagement had
stormy passages, and was for a time wholly broken off. Aldous was made
bitterly jealous, or miserably unhappy. Marcella left the old house in
the neighbourhood of the Maxwell property, where her lover had first seen
and courted her. She plunged into London life, and into nursing, that
common outlet for the woman at war with herself or society. She suffered
and struggled, and once or twice she came very near to throwing away all
her chances of happiness. But in the end, Maxwell tamed her; Maxwell
recovered her. The rise of love in the unruly, impetuous creature, when
the rise came, was like the sudden growth of some great forest flower. It
spread with transforming beauty over the whole nature, till at last the
girl who had once looked upon him as the mere tool of her own moral
ambitions threw herself upon Maxwell's heart with a self-abandoning
passion and penitence, which her developed powers and her adorable beauty
made a veritable intoxication.
And Maxwell was worthy that she should do this thing. When he and
Marcella first met, he was a man of thirty, very able, very reserved, and
often painfully diffident as to his own powers and future. He was the
only young representative of a famous stock, and had grown up from his
childhood under the shadow of great sorrows and heavy responsibilities.
The stuff of the poet and the thinker lay hidden behind his shy manners;
and he loved Marcella Boyce with all the delicacy, all the idealising
respect, that passion generates in natures so strong and so highly
tempered. At the same time, he had little buoyancy or gaiety; he had a
belief in his class, and a constitutional dislike of change, which were
always fighting in his mind with the energies of moral debate; and he
acquiesced very easily--perhaps indifferently--in many outward
conventions and prejudices.
The crisis through which Marcella put him developed and matured the man.
To the influences of love, moreover, were added the influences of
friendship--of such a friendship as our modern time but seldom rears to
perfection. In Raeburn's college days, a man of rare and delicate powers
had possessed himself of Raeburn's tenacious affection, and had
thenceforward played the leader to Raeburn's strength, physical and
moral, availing himself freely, wherever his own failed him, of the
powers and capacities of his friend. For he himself bore in him from his
youth up the seeds of physical failure and early death. It was partly the
marvellous struggle in him of soul with body that subdued to him the
homage of the stronger man. And it was clearly his influence that broke
up and fired Raeburn's slower and more distrustful temper, informing an
inbred Toryism, a natural passion for tradition, and the England of
tradition with that "repining restlessness" which is the best spur of
noble living.
Hallin was a lecturer and an economist; a man who lived in the perception
of the great paradox that in our modern world political power has gone to
the workman, while yet socially and intellectually he remains little less
weak, or starved, or subject than before. When he died he left to Raeburn
a legacy of feelings and ideas, all largely concerned with this contrast
between the huge and growing "tyranny" of the working class and the
individual helplessness or bareness of the working man. And it was these
feelings and ideas which from the beginning made a link between Raeburn
and the young revolts and compassions of Marcella Boyce. They were at one
in their love of Edward Hallin; and after Hallin's death, in their sore
and tender wish to make his thoughts tell upon the English world.
* * * * *
The Maxwells had now been married some five years, years of almost
incredible happiness. The equal comradeship of marriage at its best and
finest, all the daily disciplines, the profound and painless lessons of
love, the covetous bliss of parentage, the constant anxieties of power
nobly understood, had harmonised the stormy nature of the woman, and had
transformed the somewhat pessimist and scrupulous character of the man.
Not that life with Marcella Maxwell was always easy. Now as ever she
remained on the moral side a creature of strain and effort, tormented by
ideals not to be realised, and eager to drive herself and others in a
breathless pursuit of them.
But if in some sort she seemed to be always dragging those that loved her
through the heart of a tempest, the tempest had such golden moments! No
wife had ever more capacity for all the delicacies and depths of passion
towards the man of her choice. All the anxieties she brought with her,
all the perplexities and difficulties she imposed, had never yet seemed
to Maxwell anything but divinely worth while. So far, indeed, he had
never even remotely allowed himself to put the question. Her faults were
her; and she was his light of life.
For some time after their marriage, which took place about a year after
his accession to the title and estates, they had lived at the stately
house in Brookshire belonging to the Maxwells, and Marcella had thrown
herself into the management of a large household and property with
characteristic energy and originality. She had tried new ways of choosing
and governing her servants; new ways of entertaining the poor, and of
making Maxwell Court the centre, not of one class, but of all. She ran up
a fair score of blunders, but not one of them was the blunder of meanness
or vulgarity. Her nature was inventive and poetic, and the rich
fulfilment that had overtaken her own personal desires did but sting her
eager passion to give and to serve.
Meanwhile the family house in town was sold, and what with the birth of
her son, and the multiplicity of the rural interests to which she had set
her hand, Marcella felt no need of London. But towards the end of the
second year she perceived--though he said little about it--that there was
in her husband's mind a strong and persistent drawing towards his former
political interests and associations. The late Lord Maxwell had sat in
several Conservative cabinets, and his grandson, after a distinguished
career in the House as a private member, had accepted a subordinate place
in the Government only a few months before his grandfather's death
transferred him to the Lords. After that event, a scrupulous conscience
had forced him to take landowning as a profession and an arduous one. The
Premier made him flattering advances, and his friends remonstrated, but
he had none the less relinquished office, and buried himself on his land.
Now, however, after some three years' hard and unremitting work, the
estate was in excellent condition; the "new ways" of the new owners had
been well started; and both Maxwell and Marcella had fitting lieutenants
who could be left in charge. Moreover, matters were being agitated at
the moment in politics which had special significance for the man's
idealist and reflective mind. His country friends and neighbours hardly
understood why.
For it was merely a question of certain further measures of factory
reform. A group of labour leaders were pressing upon the public and the
Government a proposal to pass a special Factory Act for certain
districts and trades of East London. In spite of Commissions, in spite
of recent laws, "sweating," so it was urged, was as bad as ever--nay, in
certain localities and industries was more frightful and more oppressive
than ever. The waste of life and health involved in the great clothing
industries of East London, for instance, which had provoked law after
law, inquiry after inquiry, still went--so it was maintained--its
hideous way.
"Have courage!" cried the reformers. "Take, at last, the only effectual
step. Make it penal to practise certain trades in the houses of the
people--drive them all into factories of a certain size, where alone
these degraded industries can be humanised and controlled. Above all,
make up your mind to a legal working day for East London men as well as
East London women. Try the great experiment first of all in this
omnivorous, inarticulate London, this dustbin for the rubbish of all
nations. Here the problem is worst--here the victims are weakest and
most manageable. London will bear what would stir a riot in Birmingham or
Leeds. Make the experiment as partial and as tentative as you
please--give the Home Office power to extend or revoke it at will--but
_try it_!"
The change proposed was itself of vast importance, and was, moreover, but
a prelude to things still more far-reaching. But, critical as it was,
Maxwell was prepared for it. During the later years of his friend
Hallin's life the two men had constantly discussed the industrial
consequences of democracy with unflagging eagerness and intelligence. To
both it seemed not only inevitable, but the object of the citizen's
dearest hopes, that the rule of the people should bring with it, in
ever-ascending degree, the ordering and moralising of the worker's toil.
Yet neither had the smallest belief that any of the great civilised
communities would ever see the State the sole landlord and the sole
capitalist; or that Collectivism as a system has, or deserves to have,
any serious prospects in the world. To both, possession--private and
personal possession--from the child's first toy, or the tiny garden where
it sows its passionately watched seeds, to the great business or the
great estate, is one of the first and chiefest elements of human
training, not to be escaped by human effort, or only at such a cost of
impoverishment and disaster that mankind would but take the
step--supposing it conceivable that it should take it--to retrace it
instantly.
Maxwell's _heart_, however, was much less concerned with this belief,
tenaciously as he held it, than with its relative--the limitation of
private possession by the authority of the common conscience. That "we
are not our own" has not, indeed, been left to Lassalle or Marx to
discover. But if you could have moved this quiet Englishman to speak, he
would have said--his strong, brooding face all kindled and alive--that
the enormous industrial development of the past century has shown us the
forces at work in the evolution of human societies on a gigantic scale,
and by thus magnifying them has given us a new understanding of them. The
vast extension of the individual will and power which science has brought
to humanity during the last hundred years was always present to him as
food for a natural exultation--a kind of pledge of the boundless
prospects of the race. On the other hand the struggle of society brought
face to face with this huge increment of the individual power, forced to
deal with it for its own higher and mysterious ends, to moralise and
socialise it lest it should destroy itself and the State together; the
slow steps by which the modern community has succeeded in asserting
itself against the individual, in protecting the weak from his weakness,
the poor from his poverty, in defending the woman and child from the
fierce claims of capital, in forcing upon trade after trade the axiom
that no man may lawfully build his wealth upon the exhaustion and
degradation of his fellow--these things stirred in him the far deeper
enthusiasms of the moral nature. Nay more! Together with all the other
main facts which mark the long travail of man's ethical and social life,
they were among the only "evidences" of religion a critical mind allowed
itself--the most striking signs of something "greater than we know"
working among the dust and ugliness of our common day. Attack wealth as
wealth, possession as possession, and civilisation is undone. But bring
the force of the social conscience to bear as keenly and ardently as you
may, upon the separate activities of factory and household, farm and
office; and from the results you will only get a richer individual
freedom, one more illustration of the divinest law man serves--that he
must "die to live," must surrender to obtain.
Such at least was Maxwell's persuasion; though as a practical man he
admitted, of course, many limitations of time, occasion, and degree. And
long companionship with him had impressed the same faith also on
Marcella. With the natural conceit of the shrewd woman, she would
probably have maintained that her social creed came entirely of
mother-wit and her own exertions--her experiences in London, reading,
and the rest. In reality it was in her the pure birth of a pure passion.
She had learnt it while she was learning to love Aldous Raeburn; and it
need astonish no one that the more dependent all her various
philosophies of life had become on the mere personal influence and joy
of marriage, the more agile had she grown in all that concerned the mere
intellectual defence of them. She could argue better and think better;
but at bottom, if the truth were told, they were Maxwell's arguments and
Maxwell's thoughts.
So that when this particular agitation began, and he grew restless in his
silent way, she grew restless too. They took down the old worn
portfolios of Hallin's papers and letters, and looked through them, night
after night, as they sat alone together in the great library of the
Court. Both Marcella and Aldous could remember the writing of many of
these innumerable drafts of Acts, these endless memoranda on special
points, and must needs try, for love's sake, to forget the terrible
strain and effort with which a dying man had put them together. She was
led by them to think of the many workmen friends she had made during the
year of her nursing life; while he had remembrances of much personal work
and investigation of his own, undertaken during the time of his
under-secretaryship, to add to hers. Another Liberal government was
slipping to its fall--if a Conservative government came in, with a
possible opening in it for Aldous Maxwell, what then? Was the chance to
be seized?
One May twilight, just before dinner, as the two were strolling up and
down the great terrace just in front of the Court, Aldous paused and
looked at the majestic house beside them.
"What's the good of talking about these things while we live _there_?" he
said, with a gesture towards the house, half impatient, half humorous.
Marcella laughed. Then she sprang away from him, considering, a sudden
brightness in her eye. She had an idea.
The idea after all was a very simple one. But the probability is that,
had she not been there to carry him through, Maxwell would have neither
found it nor followed it. However that may be, in a very few days she had
clothed it with fact, and made so real a thing of it that she was amazed
at her own success. She and Maxwell had settled themselves in a small
furnished house in the Mile End Road, and Maxwell was once more studying
the problems of his measure that was to be in the midst of the
populations to whom it applied. The house had been recently let in
"apartments" by a young tradesman and his wife, well known to Marcella.
In his artisan days the man had been her friend, and for a time her
patient. She knew how to put her hand on him at once.
They spent five months in the little house, while the London that knew
them in St. James's Square looked on, and made the comments--half amused,
half inquisitive--that the act seemed to invite. There was of course no
surprise. Nothing surprises the London of to-day. Or if there were any,
it was all Marcella's. In spite of her passionate sympathy with the
multitude who live in disagreeable homes on about a pound a week, she
herself was very sensitive to the neighbourhood of beautiful things, to
the charm of old homes, cool woods, green lawns, and the rise and fall of
Brookshire hills. Against her wish, she had thought of sacrifice in
thinking of the Mile End Road in August.
But there was no sacrifice. Frankly, these five months were among the
happiest of her life. She and Maxwell were constantly together, from
morning till night, doing the things that were congenial to them, and
seeing the things that interested them. They went in and out of every
factory and workshop in which certain trades were practised, within a
three-mile radius; they became the intimate friends of every factory
inspector and every trade-union official in the place. Luckily, Maxwell's
shyness--at least in Mile End--was not of the sort that can be readily
mistaken for a haughty mind. He was always ready to be informed; his
diffident kindness asked to be set at ease; while in any real ardour of
debate his trained capacity and his stores of knowledge would put even
the expert on his mettle.
As for Marcella, it was her idiosyncrasy that these tailors, furriers,
machinists, shirtmakers, by whom she was surrounded in East London,
stirred her imagination far more readily than the dwellers in great
houses and the wearers of fine raiment had ever stirred it. And
Marcella, in the kindled sympathetic state, was always delightful to
herself and others. She revelled in the little house and its ugly,
druggetted rooms; in the absence of all the usual paraphernalia of their
life; in her undisturbed possession of the husband who was at once her
lover and the best company she knew or could desire. On the few days
when he left her for the day on some errand in which she could not
share, to meet him at the train in the evening like any small clerk's
wife, to help him carry the books and papers with which he was generally
laden along the hot and dingy street, to make him tea from her little
spirit kettle, and then to hear the news of the day in the shade of the
little smutty back-garden, while the German charwoman who cooked for
them had her way with the dinner--there was not an incident in the whole
trivial procession that did not amuse and delight her. She renewed her
youth; she escaped from the burdensome "glories of our birth, and
state"; from that teasing "duty to our equals" on which only the wisest
preachers have ever laid sufficient stress; and her one trouble was that
the little masquerade must end.
One other drawback indeed, one more blight upon a golden time, there was.
Not even Marcella could make up her mind to transplant little Hallin, her
only child, from Maxwell Court to East London. It was springtime, and the
woods about the Court were breaking into sheets of white and blue.
Marcella must needs leave the boy to his flowers and his "grandame
earth," sadly warned thereto by the cheeks of other little boys in and
about the Mile End Road. But every Friday night she and Maxwell said
good-bye to the two little workhouse girls, and the German charwoman, and
the village boy from Mellor, who supplied them with all the service they
wanted in Mile End, took with them the ancient maid who had been
Marcella's mother's maid, and fled home to Brookshire. So on Saturday
mornings it generally happened that little Hallin went out to inform his
particular friend among the garden boys, that "Mummy had tum ome," and
that he was not therefore so much his own master as usual. He explained
that he had to show mummy "_eaps_ of things"--the two new kittens, the
"edge-sparrer's nest," and the "ump they'd made in the churchyard over
old Tom Collins from the parish ouses," the sore place on the pony's
shoulder, the "ole that mummy's orse had kicked in the stable door," and
a host of other curiosities. By way of linking the child with the soil
and its people, Marcella had taken care to give him nursemaids from the
village. And the village being only some thirty miles from London, talked
in the main the language of London, a language which it soon communicated
to the tongue of Maxwell's heir. Marcella tried to school her boy in
vain. Hallin chattered, laughed, broadened his a's and dropped all his
h's into a bottomless limbo none the less.
What days of joy those Saturdays were for mother and child! All the
morning and till about four o'clock, he and she would be inseparable,
trailing about together over field and wood, she one of the handsomest
of women, he one of the plainest of children--a little square-faced
chubby fellow, with eyes monstrously black and big, fat cheeks that
hung a little over the firm chin, a sallow complexion, and a large
humorous mouth.
But in the late afternoon, alas! Hallin was apt to find the world grow
tiresome. For against all his advice "mummy" would allow herself to be
clad by Annette, the maid, in a frock of state; carriages would drive up
from the 5.10 train; and presently in the lengthening evening the great
lawns of the Court would be dotted with strolling groups, or the red
drawing-room, with its Romneys and Gainsboroughs, would be filled with
talk and laughter circling round mummy at the tea-table; so that all that
was left to Hallin was that seat on mummy's knee--his big, dark head
pressed disconsolately against her breast, his thumb in his mouth for
comfort--which no boy of any spirit would ever consent to occupy, so long
as there was any chance of goading a slack companion into things better
worth while.
Marcella herself was no less rebellious at heart, and would have asked
nothing better than to be left free to spend her weekly holiday in
roaming an April world with Hallin. But our country being what it is, the
plans that are made in Mile End or Shoreditch have to be adopted by
Mayfair or Mayfair's equivalent; otherwise they are apt to find an
inglorious tomb in the portfolios that bred them. We have still, it
seems, a "ruling class"; and in spite of democracy it is still this
"ruling class" that matters. Maxwell was perfectly aware of it; and these
Sundays to him were the mere complements of the Mile End weekdays.
Marcella ruefully admitted that English life was so, and she did her
best. But on Monday mornings she was generally left protesting in her
inmost soul against half the women whom these peers and politicians,
these administrators and journalists, brought with them, or wondering
anxiously whether her particular share in the social effort just over
might not have done Aldous more harm than good. She understood vaguely,
without vanity, that she was a power in this English society, that she
had many warm friends, especially among men of the finer and abler sort.
But when a woman loved her, and insisted, as it were, on making her know
it--and, after all, the experience was not a rare one--Marcella received
the overture with a kind of grateful surprise. She was accustomed,
without knowing why, to feel herself ill at ease with certain types of
women; even in her own house she was often aware of being furtively
watched by hostile eyes; or she found herself suddenly the goal of some
sharp little pleasantry that pricked like a stiletto. She supposed that
she was often forgetful and indiscreet. Perhaps the large court she held
so easily on these occasions beneath the trees or in the great
drawing-rooms of the old house had more to do with the matter. If so, she
never guessed the riddle. In society she was conscious of one aim, and
one aim only. Its very simplicity made other women incredulous, while it
kept herself in the dark.
However, by dint of great pains, she had not yet done Aldous any harm
that counted. During all the time of their East End sojourn, a Liberal
government, embarrassed by large schemes it had not force enough to
carry, was sinking towards inevitable collapse. When the crash came, a
weak Conservative government, in which Aldous Maxwell occupied a
prominent post, accepted office for a time without a dissolution. They
came in on a cry of "industrial reform," and, by way of testing their own
party and the country, adopted the Factory Bill for East London, which
had now, by the common consent of all the workers upon it, passed into
Maxwell's hands. The Bill rent the party in twain; but the Ministry had
the courage to go to the country with a programme in which the Maxwell
Bill held a prominent place. Trade-unionism rallied to their support; the
forces both of reaction and of progress fought for them, in strangely
mingled ways; and they were returned with a sufficient, though not large,
majority. Lord Ardagh, the veteran leader of the party, became Premier.
Maxwell was made President of the Council, while his old friend and
associate, Henry Dowson, became Home Secretary, and thereby responsible
for the conduct of the long-expected Bill through the Commons.
When Maxwell came back to her on the afternoon of his decisive interview
with Lord Ardagh, she was waiting for him in that same inner room where
Tressady paid his first visit. At the sound of her husband's step
outside, she sprang up, and they met half-way, her hands clasped in his,
against his breast, her face looking up at him.
"Dear wife! at last we have our chance--our real chance," he said to her.
She clung to him, and there was a moment of high emotion, in which
thoughts of the past and of the dead mingled with the natural ambition of
two people in the prime of life and power. Then Maxwell laughed and drew
a long breath.
"The eggs have been all put into my basket in the most generous manner.
We stand or fall by the Bill. But it will be a hard fight."
And, in his acute, deliberate way, he began to sum up the forces against
him--to speculate on the action of this group and that--Fontenoy's group
first and foremost.
Marcella listened, her beautiful hand pensive against her cheek, her
eyes on his. Half trembling, she realised what failure, if after all
failure should come, would mean to him. Something infinitely tender and
maternal spoke in her, pledging her to the utmost help that love and a
woman could give.
* * * * *
Such for Maxwell and his wife had been the antecedents of a
memorable session.
And now the session was here--was in full stream, indeed, rushing
towards the main battle still to come. On the second night of Fontenoy's
debate, George Tressady duly caught the Speaker's eye, and made a very
fair maiden speech, which earned him a good deal more praise, both from
his party and the press, than he--in a disgusted mood--thought at all
reasonable. He had misplaced half his notes, and, in his own opinion,
made a mess of his main argument. He remarked to Fontenoy afterwards that
he had better hang himself, and stalked home after the division pleased
with one thing only--that he had not allowed Letty to come.
In reality he had done nothing to mar the reputation that was beginning
to attach to him. Fontenoy was content; and the scantiness of the
majority by which the Resolution was defeated served at once to make the
prospects of the Maxwell Bill, which was to be brought in after Easter,
more doubtful, and to sharpen the temper of its foes.