Mr. Fisk was a good son at home and a pleasant fellow among his friends.
Emma, who was liked by the students and went to their gatherings, had
often met him. He kept dormice in his bedroom and tended them with care,
but if the Communist society he belonged to had called him to do murder
in the cause of incomes for all he would have summoned his courage to
smite some bald-headed director of a company with a bloody axe. His
errand to the Principal that morning was, I am glad to say, of a most
peaceful nature, connected with the degree he hoped to take. He met Emma
and Teresa the same afternoon at a tea given by some of the students
after the meeting of the debating society. Teresa took the cup he
offered her, and became fascinated by his withered little face, his
immense spectacles and his Kropotkin hair. Her instinct scented
suffering and the cage, and she led him on to talk. It must be
understood that this was her first experience of his kind and she never
forgot it. He began explaining to her, earnestly at first, then
excitedly; he struck his knobbly little hands one against the other.
“Blood!” he concluded, “blood! there’s nothing else for it. We shall
give our blood when the time comes and we shall take it
ruthlessly—without remorse.” Teresa looked at him fixedly, questioning.
“I think that is very wicked,” she said, when she had made up her mind.
“You have no business at all to decide that one person shall live and
another shan’t; it is much too serious. Suppose that another lot of
people decided that you must be killed because you got a degree and they
didn’t?”
“I shan’t have been born into my degree when I get it,” he said proudly.
“I shall have earned it by my own endeavours. The rich have been born
into their property for generations. They come into the world nourished
on the blood of my fathers. Show me the signs of toil on your hands, if
you please,” he looked down with a bitter expression at her little hands
that held the cup.
“I know,” she said humbly, “I often think of it. You needn’t point it
out. But still you oughtn’t to murder anybody. It is not their fault;
and anyhow, suppose you burgled my father’s house, he would have no
right to kill you except in self-defence. I know that is so; a lawyer
told me.”
“What’s the law!” said Mr. Fisk contemptuously. “We’re going to alter
all that; we’re going to make new laws by which man will have the right
to live.”
“Yes, but not to stop others living,” said Teresa. “It’s silly; you know
you can’t make laws; and who is going to carry them out if you do? You
can’t make people do what you want just by telling them that you have
made a law. There’s the army and navy too—but what is the good of
arguing. You must know it is silly.”
“The army and navy are also learning to think, you’ll find,” said Mr.
Fisk. “But I don’t wish to offend you, Miss—er. You are yourself of
military stock, I believe?”
“Yes I am, but I don’t bother about that. It has got nothing to do with
what I think,” she replied. “Don’t you know——” she went on, with passion
beginning to rise in her as his words soaked in, “don’t you know, you
stupid (she shook him delicately by the sleeve), that all the decent
people in England—and English people are decent, not like the beastly
people you try to make your hair like—are working their very hardest,
day and night, to put things straight? And the fact that some of them
have got white hands is all the better, for it means they have money and
time to spend on it, and you have only the time to learn by heart what
someone else has written. It does make me so angry when I know what the
idle rich, as you call them, are doing.”
“Bah! charity!” said Mr. Fisk, and he spat some shreds of tobacco from
his cigarette neatly into the grate.
“Oh, you can’t have thought I was talking about charity,” said Teresa
with real distress. “Of course I wasn’t. It is the very thing I dislike
most, except your muddle and murder. And besides that, some of the
richest people boast of having been newsboys, and they are often the
rudest to their servants and their wives are horrid lazy snobs.” Mr.
Fisk’s little withered face twitched with his anxiety to collect some
clear dignified retort.
“Have you ever read much on your subject, may I ask?” he inquired at
last. “Have you studied economics? Perhaps you have attended Professor
Cranston’s lectures?”
“No, I haven’t,” she replied.
“Then, pardon me, but I think you are hardly qualified for the argument.
Capitalism is a highly intricate subject and should involve deep study.
To judge how far it is advisable to submit the control of wages to the
State, and also to consider to what extent the right of the individual
to determine the extent of his earning capacity should be carried,
requires a long training and arduous study. I should be pleased to
continue our talk at some other time if convenient to you, and I should
be happy to lend books if you are interested.”
“Yes,” said Teresa with a sigh of fatigue. “I want to know. And you are
part of the faces in the fog, I suppose,” she added absently, looking at
him.
“I beg pardon?”
“I said you were part of the faces in the fog. I used to wonder when we
came here what was behind the sort of brick-wall expression that people
in the streets and the trams had. When you go to speak in Hyde Park you
will see how different your audience is—quite merry in comparison.”
“I don’t propose to do so at present,” said Kropotkin-Fisk, highly
offended. “We leave that to the executive. Our body here is concerned at
the moment exclusively with study and propaganda.” Emma came to look for
Teresa and heard the end of the discussion.
“Aren’t you paving the way for a new set of class distinctions, Mr.
Fisk?” she asked. “What you said just now sounded like it. I hope you
will take a lesson from the present evil system and pay yourself
properly if you are going to keep to the higher activities.”
“I don’t quite follow,” said Mr. Fisk, “but if you’ll favour us at the
next debate and hear my paper, perhaps you will put your question then,
and I shall do my best to parry your thrust.”
“I don’t know what Mrs. Potter would do if Fisk were made Chancellor of
the Exchequer under the new régime,” said Emma, as she and Teresa walked
back together.
“Yes, she would loathe it,” Teresa agreed. “But I don’t exactly know
why. Why do they so often hate their own class in office?”
“Well,” said Emma, “I suppose if Eddie Fisk is Chancellor of the
Exchequer there’s no reason why Albert Potter shouldn’t go one better
and be King. Mrs. Potter ‘never would ’ave ’eld with them Fisks,’ you’d
find, ‘—settin’ themselves up!’”
“But Communists don’t have a King; isn’t that the whole point?” Teresa
objected.
“They don’t until one of them wants to be it,” said Emma. “They would
call him something else, but some of them would develope an aptitude for
ruling. Even apes do.”
“But then, I suppose the others could depose him if he wasn’t
hereditary,” said Teresa.
“No, ‘Gawd save the Prince o’ Wales, bless ’is dear ’eart!’ is Mrs.
Potter’s motto. ‘That there Fisk is never going to come it over our
Albert, you’ll find, Miss,’ is what she would say. Ask her the next time
you see her.”
“Mr. Jorkins doesn’t agree with that,” Teresa pursued. “When he is out
of work the first thing he blames is Parliament. He’s dead against it.”
“Well, there will always be two opinions about everything in a country,”
said Emma. “You had much better leave them all alone to mess about and
let us get on with what we are doing. At present Mr. Fisk is rather like
the mouse that dipped its tail in the beer and sucked it. He is looking
for the cat, that’s all.”
“Are you sure?” her friend asked anxiously.
“I am only sure after a party like the Prices’ last night,” Emma
answered. “It will wear off to-morrow, and I shall get cross with Father
for talking Conservative intellectualism. I can’t see any use in the
Prices to-day. They give money when there is a list of donations, and
Papa Price just hugs himself when someone comes round for a
subscription. He keeps them waiting in his office, and then when he has
succeeded in beating them down to less than they asked for and yet finds
he is still in the top batch of subscriptions he does think he has been
clever. And Mrs. Price and the family! I would really enjoy seeing the
girls working in the fur trade instead of wearing coats of it, and I
wouldn’t wish that to many people. I would like to see them stop
cackling and find out how witty they would be on two pennyworth of
refuse. Then the next day, perhaps, I meet Lady Varens, whom I don’t
grudge anything to, because she keeps a lot of people happily employed
and really cares for them and buys beautiful things with her money. And
after that the Starks turn up—you know—the schoolmistress at St.
Angelus’ school—you met her at the Dispensary. Mrs. Potter’s life is a
screaming farce compared to hers, and the Jorkinses are wallowing in
wealth, for at least they enjoy themselves at the pictures and the pub
when so disposed.”
“Well, let us add it up,” said Teresa. “Under Mr. Fisk’s scheme, Mrs.
Potter and Mrs. Stark will benefit; Mrs. Price will be altogether
wrecked and mangled—she and her family; Lady Varens will live as she
would probably be quite content to live now—she never seems to want
much—and she would upset the apple carts of a lot of happy dependants.
But then there are lots of Potters, lots of Starks, comparatively few
Prices, a good many Varenses and not a great many happy dependants, so
how does the proportion of benefits work out? I shall have to ask David
to unravel it.”
“I beg your pardon—David?” asked Emma.
“David Varens,” said Teresa. “What’s the matter?”
“Nothing. I only wondered for a moment. Do you go much by what he says?”
“Yes, more than anybody.”
“Why, may I ask?”
“Oh, because he is so simple,” she answered readily. “I can never tangle
him up in a problem. He lays it all out and sorts it into heaps, and
then generally sums up by saying there is nothing in it. It is so
restful. And then he tells me about phosphates and the habits of the
teal. But it is only for the rest to my muddled head that I like it so
much. It would never put me off my work.”
“Sure?” asked Emma, and she was obliged to accept the assurance when it
was given a second time.
As they passed the Vachells’ house, which was not far from the
Gainsboroughs’, Mrs. Vachell was just going in. “Come and have tea with
me?” she suggested. Emma explained that they had had tea and that she
had work to do at home, but Teresa accepted. She was inclined, like
Alice in Wonderland, to taste and nibble whatever new thing came her
way; she had never been inside the Vachells’ house, nor felt that she
understood what lay behind the self-possession of the small, graceful
lady whom it was said the Professor had found fanning herself by
moonlight under an obelisk and brought home. Mrs. Vachell’s face was
beautiful and full of character but the character was of the reversible
kind, of which it is impossible to decide whether it is intended to be
good or bad. Such faces seem not, like most faces, to alter gradually
with their owner’s mind, but to hold always in themselves two distinct
characters between which the soul has never chosen a habitation. At
death, opinion is generally divided as to which character has been the
true one, as in life it was never decided which it would prove to be.
“Very like a curious death-mask my father was once given for his study,”
Susie had described her on first acquaintance. “Dante, or somebody, I
think it was, who wrote the ‘Inferno.’”
Teresa followed the small gliding figure into the hall and up the
stairs, where photographs of Byzantine art and reproductions of drawings
from Egyptian tombs were hung right up to the high window that lighted
the stairs with a cold north light. The back yards and chimneys of young
Millport mixed disagreeably in her mind with the impression of endless
centuries of life that she gathered from the procession of antiquity on
the walls. There is something alarming to youth in the idea of the early
days of a very old person.
The drawing-room was more cheerful, but Mr. Vachell’s study, which his
wife showed her as they passed, made her shiver again. There were
objects of stone, of clay, of mildewed bronze; tiny domestic
possessions, gifts of love, weapons, tokens of mourning for the dead,
provision even for an eternity of wandering beyond the grave. Everywhere
were glass cases to preserve the imperishable; the penetrating dust of a
new city defiling them notwithstanding. If Teresa had seen Life and
Death supping together in the silent room, pledging one another from the
old vessels that stood upon the Professor’s table, she could not have
felt more discomfort than she did.
“Do you like these things?” Mrs. Vachell asked her.
“Perhaps I might if I got to know them,” she admitted, “but they scare
me rather.”
“Come into the drawing-room and have tea then.” Mrs. Vachell led the way
into the next room and rang the bell. “It is only half-past five; you
have lots of time to recover. What have you been doing?”
Teresa told her about the Debating Society and Mr. Fisk. “A horrible
young man,” said Mrs. Vachell. “He isn’t one of my husband’s students,
luckily, or I should have to ask him to tea. They all get brought here
at intervals. They sit about in corners and balance cups on their knees
and spill tea into the saucer. I wish you would come and help me next
time I have to ask some of them. I believe you would be good to them and
teach me not to dislike them so much.”
“Very well,” said Teresa, “though I am not benevolent. If people won’t
talk I can’t make conversation. Why don’t you ask Emma? She knows them
all.”
“That is just why she is no good,” Mrs. Vachell explained while she made
tea. “It is like a mother and her children in society. They can’t talk
their own nonsense before an audience, and they can’t do the polite to
each other. I want you to extract something from the students. They must
have interests of the sort that one does not air in the family circle,
and strangers are the ideal safety valve for that sort of thing.”
“Are many of them like Fisk; wanting blood and new governments and
things?” Teresa asked.
“That is one of the things I want to know,” Mrs. Vachell answered. “Emma
could tell us so far as statistics go, but I want to hear for myself.
You know I sit on Committees with Mrs. Carpenter and her lot because I
love organisation, and so many of those women who are always talking and
ordering and doing the Nosey Parker everywhere are just tools for
anybody in the show who has an axe to grind. Do you understand about
Boards of Guardians and Select Vestries and all that part?” Teresa
answered quickly, “Oh, no—nothing whatever. Of course I get inspectors
and visitors on my track and I have to help Emma with her reports. But a
Board of Guardians means nothing to me except a firm eye and questions
that I can’t answer. Mother has them to lunch sometimes.”
“Can she answer their questions?” asked Mrs. Vachell.
“Surely you know that Mother never answers any questions?” said Teresa
very much surprised. “She always tells you something that she thinks
instead, and makes it seem as if she had answered. But I never know
whether it is because she can’t or won’t.”
“I do loathe poverty,” Mrs. Vachell said, as if to herself.
Teresa went home very little the wiser for her visit, but she felt
greatly discouraged by the extreme age of civilisation as it had been
shown to her at the Vachells’. It seemed to have accomplished so little
in the time at its disposal.