IN WHICH THE TOP-FLOOR-BACK TURNS OUT TO BE AN ACQUAINTANCE AND
SCHEMES ARE UNFOLDED FOR THE SALVATION OF OF AN EFFETE RACE
We had at school a literature master who, in the course of many
hundreds of discourses, made two remarks which have never left me; or
would it not be fairer to say that of the hundreds of lectures which
I heard from a certain literature master I have succeeded in
retaining two injunctions? One was the comment (which he had from
Dr. Johnson) that repetition is a fault rarely committed by bad
writers, and the other, that what we call coincidences should never
be noticed. This being so, I cannot describe as a coincidence the
fact that the young Socialist at Dabney's turns out to be our own
Socialist of the top floor of whose profounder sincerities Mrs. Wiles
is so sceptical. I saw him the next day both enter the house and
leave it, banging the door with a vehemence that would break up any
delicately organized communistic home; and since then we have met in
mutual recognition and have conversed.
Spanton seems to be very much in earnest--a boyish figure of about
twenty-six, clean shaven, but without the soft brown clothes, costly
Jaegerisms, and other external insignia of his kind. On the
contrary, he is a bit of a dandy, uses quite superlative soap, and
has a manicure set. It has been said that nothing is more annoying
than to be agreed with when one is indulging a mood of
self-depreciation. Well, Spanton will never be annoyed that way.
"They're a foolish lot," he said, referring to the company at
Dabney's. "They go there every week just to cackle, and none of them
ever lives at all. Except possibly that blackguard, Rudson-Wayte,
and he ought to be in gaol. But the whole world's like that. All my
friends and acquaintances are either writing or talking or
vegetating. Dabney kindles to excitability every day over something
said in the House, or something said by other journalists about
something said in the House, and that's how he will go on spending
this boon of life to the end--never travelling, never suffering,
never being hungry or thirsty or wicked. What a way to live! And
your novelists and dramatists too"--like so many of the world's
reformers this young man has the most exasperating way of saying
"you" and "your"--"your novelists and dramatists trafficking in the
sham emotions of their puppets, how they are wasting this boon of
life! And all their myriad audiences in the theatres, or readers
reclining on sofas, how they are wasting it!--lulling themselves with
the stories of fictitious mannikins, instead of doing something,
almost no matter what. And this enemy of society who lives under our
very roof, the cinema man, what an account there will be to settle
with him one day! He's one of the worst lullers.
"It infuriates me. Something has got to be done, and I'm going to do
it. England's got to look herself in the face. She's been dodging
the mirror for years, but she's got to do it. I'm out to see that
she does."
Asked what he did towards that end, Spanton said that at the moment
he was delivering a series of lectures at such boys' schools as
permitted treason to be talked. They were addresses on Socialism;
not pure Socialism, but a brand of his own.
"Because, of course," he said, "we must get hold of the younger
generation. The middle-aged and the elderly are no good; young men,
youths, and boys are the best material. I show them as vividly as I
can how dependent all of them are on labour not only for their
comfort, but for the necessities of life. I have slides illustrating
all the chief industries and some of the minor ones, even to
cricket-bat making. I take them down coal-mines and show them what
kind of a life a miner has to lead before our eggs and bacon can be
cooked. I draw comparisons between their own pocket-money and the
earnings of many kinds of labourers. In short I do all I can to make
them think vividly of what the underworld of toil is like, and to
realize how the spectacle of the upper world of wealth, as reflected
in the halfpenny papers, must strike the toiler. If once they can be
brought to understand this--to put themselves in the place of those
others--things will be easier. Because it is a realization which
they will never forget. I don't draw any moral. I don't suggest
that there shall be an equal division of property or anything like
that. For one thing, the schoolmasters wouldn't let me, and for
another, I don't believe in equality. But I do drop a hint now and
then that cricket and football are not all, and that the possession
of riches carries with it a responsibility to the State."
"I should guess," I said, "that not the least of your difficulties in
preparing your addresses is softening the adjectives. You must want
to say so much more than you dare."
"O Heavens, yes!" he replied fervently. "I have the very deuce of a
time with the blue pencil. And there are other troubles too. Some
little while ago, for example, I was just rabid about a freak dinner
that had been given in one of the big London restaurants, where some
dancing girl was throned on a solid bank of roses that cost eight
hundred pounds, and the musicians were seated in a barca that glided
about a lake made for that evening only. There was a strike on at
the time, and the contrast between this lavish rotten luxury on the
one side and the destitution of the strikers' wives and children on
the other was too extreme. In the old days when the poor couldn't
read, or papers were too expensive, such dinners had a chance of
being missed; but to-day everything is made public and reaches even
the poorest, and helps very properly to inflame them. That is one of
the principal reasons why nothing is ever going to be the same any
more.
"Well, anyhow, I found something to say about this, and said it with
a certain amount of unambiguity. And what happened? The
schoolmaster seemed at the time quite satisfied, but I received a
letter from him later asking me not to come again. It appears, as I
afterwards found out, that one of the givers of the feast was a
notoriously rich Jew whose son was at the school. The son wrote home
about it and the father threatened to take him away if any more such
lectures were delivered. So there you are!
"But what I really want to see in force more than anything else,"
Spanton went on, "and these lectures of mine are really a kind of
gentle preamble to the campaign, is compulsory manual labour for
everybody. A kind of pacific conscription. Ruskin, you remember,
set his undergraduates to make a road. They did it perhaps rather
too much as a lark and not steadily or sweatily enough. I would
catch the boys earlier and put them for one or two years to mining,
building, engineering, digging, whatever it is, at the time when they
would naturally be at the Universities or just entering office. That
would enlarge their sympathies and give them the practical insight
which is the next best thing to imagination. But the time for such a
scheme is not yet."
"It seems to me," I said, "that your scheme might go farther with
enormously beneficial results. If to know all is to understand all,
a system of interchange of employment and positions, carried out
fully, would get into every section of society an understanding of
the others. If the lady took a turn in the kitchen she would
understand her cook's difficulties, while the cook in the dining-room
would know for the first time what it felt like when the dishes were
cold, underdone, or late. A bond would thus grow. Again, if the
impatient patron of the restaurant had to take the waiter's napkin
for a while, he would learn not only the reason of delay, but what it
feels like to be spoken to like dirt, and the waiter, if he came in
equally hungry and pressed for time, would appreciate the provocation
to be sarcastic and rasping. And so on, right through society, until
we all knew."
Spanton was pleased to say that my amendment was sensible; but it
would not be very practicable, he thought. He has little humour, and
no respect for it.
"And meanwhile," I asked, "what trade have you learned?"
He said he had learned none. He had been to Paris to learn painting;
had given it up and become a convinced Socialist, and was now
devoting himself to propaganda.
"But surely," I said, "it would be well, if only to strengthen your
case, to put the plan into execution yourself. You are so young and
you lay yourself open to the charge of inconsistency."
"I don't care about that," he said. "All Socialists are
inconsistent: that is the first thing to get into your head in any
dealings with us. But we are not more inconsistent than
Christians--that is, if Christ was a Christian, which one often
doubts. My special line is clear thinking and persuasiveness, and
one must do what one can do best."
"And meanwhile what of the great boon of life?" I said. "Is it not
in danger, like unpopular bills, of being 'talked out'?"
He was silent. "Oh, well," he said at last, "perhaps I like talking
best. I wonder. But it's constructive talk. You can't deny that."