HE brought great news. Not only had his publishers thought well of the
novel and offered him good terms, including a substantial advance, but
they professed themselves able to place it serially in England for a
goodly sum. They had also shown him the figures of the half-yearly
returns on American sales of _Through Blood and Snow_ which transcended
his dreams of opulence.
“I had forgotten America,” he said naïvely.
“You’re nothing, if not original,” she laughed. “That’s what I like
about you.”
He insisted on the wild extravagance of a taxi to the garden city. All
that money he declared had gone to his head. He felt the glorious
intoxication of wealth. When they were about to turn off the safe
highway into devious garden-city paths, he said:
“Let us change our minds and go straight on to John o’ Groats.”
“All right. Let us. We’re on the right road.”
He swerved towards her. “Would you? Really?”
She opened her bag and took out her purse.
“I’ve got fifteen and sevenpence. How much have you?”
“About three pounds ten.”
She sighed. “This unromantic taxi man would charge us at least five
pounds to take us there.”
“We can turn back and fill our pockets at the bank.”
“It’s Sunday.”
“I never before realized the blight of the British Sabbath.”
“So we’re condemned to Fielder’s Park.”
“But one of these days we’ll go, you and I together, to John o’
Groats—as far as we can and then——”
“And then?”
“And then we’ll take a ship and sail and sail until we come to the
Fortunate Isles.”
“You’ll let Myra come too?” said Olivia, deliciously anxious to keep to
the playful side of an inevitable road.
“Of course. We’ll find her a husband. The cabin-boy. _Pour mousse un
chérubin._”
“And when we get to the Fortunate Isles, what should we do there?”
“We shall fill our souls with sunlight, so that we could use it when we
came back to our work in this dark and threatening modern world.”
The girl’s heart leapt at the reply.
“I’ll go up to John o’ Groats with you whenever you like,” she said.
But the taxi, at that moment drawing up before the detached toy villa,
whose “Everdene” painted on the green garden gate proclaimed the home of
the Blenkirons, inhibited Triona’s reply.
They found within an unbeautiful assemblage of humans inextricably
mingled with crumbling cake and sloppy cups of tea and cigarette smoke.
Agnes, shining with heat and hospitality, gave them effusive welcome
and, extricating her brother from a distant welter, introduced him to
the newcomers. He was a flabby-faced young man with a back-thatch of
short rufous hair surmounting a bald forehead. By his ears grew little
patches of side whiskers. He wore an old unbuttoned Norfolk jacket and a
red tie in a soft collar without an under pin. He greeted them with an
enveloping clammy hand.
“So good of you to come, Miss Gale. So glad to meet you, Mr. Triona. We
have heard so much about you. You will find us here all very earnest in
our endeavour to find a Solution—for never has human problem been so
intricate that a Solution has not been discovered.”
“What’s the problem?” asked Olivia.
“Why, my dear lady, there’s only one. The Way Out—or, if you have
faith—The Way In.” He caught a lean, thin-bearded man by the arm.
“Dawkins, let me introduce you to Miss Gale. Mr. Dawkins is our
_rapporteur_.”
“You haven’t any tea,” said Dawkins rebukingly, as though bidden to a
marriage feast she had no wedding garment. “Come with me.”
He frayed her a passage through the chattering swarm that over-filled
the little bow-windowed sitting-room and provided her with what seemed
to be the tepid symbols of the brotherhood.
“What did you think of Roger’s article in this week’s _Signal_?”
“Who is Roger, and what is _The Signal_?” Olivia asked simply.
Dawkins stared at her for a second and then, deliberately turning,
wormed his path away.
Olivia’s gasp of surprise was followed by a gurgle of laughter which
shook her lifted cup so that it spilled. The sight of a stained skirt
drew from her a sharp exclamation of dismay. Agnes Blenkiron disengaging
herself from the cluster round the tea-table came to the rescue. What
was the matter? Olivia explained.
“Oh, my dear,” said Agnes, “I ought to have told you. It’s my fault.
Dawkins is such a touchy old thing. Roger, of course, is my
brother—didn’t you know? And _The Signal_ is our weekly. Dawkins is the
editor.”
“I’m awfully sorry,” said Olivia, “but ought I to read _The Signal_?”
“Why, of course,” replied Agnes Blenkiron intensely. “Everybody ought to
read it. It’s the only periodical that matters in London.”
Olivia felt the remorse of those convicted of an unpardonable crime.
“I’ll get a copy to-morrow at the bookstall at Victoria Station.”
Agnes smiled in her haggard way. “My dear, an organ like _The Signal_
doesn’t lie on the bookstalls, like _Comic Cuts_ or _The Fortnightly
Review_. It’s posted to private subscribers, or it’s given away at
meetings.”
“Who pays for the printing of it?” asked the practical Olivia, who had
learned from Triona something of the wild leap in cost of printed
matter.
“Aubrey Dawkins finds the money. He gets it in the City. He has given up
his heart and soul to _The Signal_.”
“I’ve made an enemy for life,” said Olivia penitently.
Miss Blenkiron reassured her. “Oh, no you haven’t. We haven’t time for
enemy making here. Our business is too important.”
Olivia in a maze asked:
“What is your business?”
“Why, my dear child, the Social Revolution. Didn’t you know?”
“Not a bit,” said Olivia.
She learned many astonishing things that afternoon, as she was swayed
about from introduction to introduction among the eagerly disputing
groups. Hitherto she had thought, with little comprehension, of the
world-spread social unrest. Strikes angered her because they interfered
with necessary reconstruction and only set the working classes in a
vicious circle chasing high wages and being chased in their turn by high
prices. At other demands she shuddered, dimly dreading the advent of
Bolshevism. And there she left it. She had imagined that revolutionary
doctrines were preached to factory hands either secretly by rat-faced
agents, or by brass-throated, bull-necked demagogues. That they should
be accepted as a common faith by a crowd of people much resembling a
fairly well-to-do suburban church congregation stirred her surprise and
even dismay.
“I don’t see how intelligent folk can hold such views,” she said to
Roger Blenkiron, who had been defending the Russian Soviet system as a
philosophic experiment in government.
He smiled indulgently. “Doesn’t the fault lie rather in you, dear lady,
than in the intelligent folk?”
“Would that argument stand,” she replied, “if you had been maintaining
that the earth was flat and stood still in space?”
“No. The roundness and motion of the earth are ascertained physical
facts. But—I speak with the greatest deference—can you assert it to be
a scientific fact that a community of human beings are _a priori_
incapable of managing their own affairs on a basis of social equality?”
“Of course I can,” Olivia declared, to the gentle amusement of
standers-by. “Human nature won’t allow it. With inequalities of brain
and character social equality is impossible.”
“Dear Lady”—she hated the apostrophe as he said it and the lift of the
eyebrows which caused an upward ripple that was lost in the far reaches
of his bald forehead. “Dear Lady,” said he, “in the Royal Enclosure at
Ascot you can find every grade of human intellect, from the inbred young
aristocrat who is that much removed”—he flicked a finger nail—“from a
congenital idiot to the acute-brained statesman; every grade of human
character from the lowest of moral defectives to the highest that the
present civilization can produce. And yet they are all on a social
equality. And why? They started life on a common plane. The same
phenomenon exists in a mass-meeting of working-men—in any assemblage of
human beings of a particular class who have started life on a common
plane. Now, don’t you see, that if we abolished all these series of
planes and established only one plane, social equality would be
inevitable?”
“I don’t see how you’re going to do it.”
“Ah! That’s another question. Think of what the task is. To make a clean
sweep of false principles to which mankind has subscribed for—what do I
know—say—eight thousand years. It can’t be done in a day. Not even in
a generation. If you wish to render a pestilence-stricken area
habitable, you must destroy and burn for miles around before you can
rebuild. Extend the area to a country—to the surface of the civilized
globe. That’s the philosophic theory of what is vulgarly called
Bolshevism. Let us lay waste the whole plague-stricken fabric of our
civilization, so that the world may arise, a new Phœnix, under our
children’s hands.”
“You have put the matter to Miss Gale with your usual cogency, my dear
Roger,” said Dawkins, who had joined the group. “Perhaps now she may
take a less flippant view of our activities.”
He smiled, evidently meaning to include the neophyte in the sphere of
his kind indulgence. But Olivia flushed at the rudeness of his words.
Triona who, hidden from Olivia by the standing group, had been stuffed
into a sedentary and penitential corner with two assertive women and an
earnest young Marxian gasfitter, and had, nevertheless, kept an alert
ear on the neighbouring conversation, suddenly appeared once more to her
rescue.
“Pardon me, sir,” said he, “but to one who has gone through, as I have
done, the Bolshevist horrors which you advocate so complacently, it’s
your view that hardly seems serious.”
“Atrocities, my dear friend,” said the seer-like Dawkins, “are
proverbially exaggerated.”
“There’s a fellow like you mentioned in the Bible,” retorted Triona.
“I have always admired Didymus for his scientific mind,” said Dawkins.
Triona pulled up his trouser leg and exposed his ankle. “That’s the mark
of fetters. There was a chain and a twelve pound shot at the end of it.”
“Doubtless you displeased the authorities,” said Dawkins blandly. “Oh,
I’ve read your book, Mr. Triona. But before judging I should like to
hear the other side.”
“I’m afraid, Mr. Blenkiron,” said Triona, growing white about the
nostrils, to his host who stood by in a detached sort of manner, with
his hands on his hips, “I’ve unconsciously abused your hospitality.”
Blenkiron protested cheerfully. “Not a bit, my dear fellow. We pride
ourselves on our broad mindedness. If you preached reactionary
Anglicanism here you would be listened to with respect and interest. On
the other hand, we expect the same consideration to be shown to the
apostles—if you will pardon the word—of our advanced thought. Your
experiences were, beyond doubt, very terrible. But we admit the
necessity of a reign of terror. We shall have it in this country within
the next ten years. Possibly—probably—all of us here and all the
little gods we cling to will be swept away like the late Russian
aristocracy and _intelligentsia_. But suppose we are all—Dawkins, my
sister, and myself—prepared to suffer martyrdom for the sake of
humanity, what would you have to say against us? Nay—you can be quite
frank. Words cannot hurt us.”
“I should say you ought to be tied up in Bedlam,” said Triona.
“Do you agree with that, Miss Gale?” said Roger Blenkiron, turning on
her suddenly.
She reflected for a moment. Then she replied: “If you can prove beyond
question that in fifty years’ time you will create a more beautiful
world, there’s something in your theories. If you can’t, you all ought
to be shot.”
He laughed and held out his hand. “That’s straight from the shoulder.
That’s what we like to hear. Shake hands on it.” He drew a little book
from his pocket and scribbled a memorandum. “You’re on the free-list of
_The Signal_. I think Agnes has your address. You’ll find in it
overwhelming proof. Perhaps, Mr. Triona, too, would like——”
But Triona shook his head. “As a technical alien perhaps it would be
inadvisable for me to be in receipt of revolutionary literature.”
“I quite understand,” smiled Blenkiron, returning the book to his
pocket.
Dawkins melted away. Other guests took leave of their host. Triona and
Olivia, making a suffocating course towards the door, were checked by
Agnes Blenkiron who was eager to introduce them to Tom Pyefinch who,
during the war had suffered, at the hands of a capitalist government,
the tortures of the hero too brave to fight.
“Oh, no, no,” cried Olivia horrified.
Agnes did not hear. But Pyefinch, a pallid young man with a scrubby
black moustache, was too greatly occupied with his immediate circle to
catch his hostess’s eye. From his profane lips Olivia learned that
patriotism was the most blatant of superstitions: that the attitude of
the fly preening itself over its cesspool was that of the depraved and
mindless being who could take pride in being an Englishman. He was not
peculiarly hard on England. All other countries were the mere sewerages
of the nationalities that inhabited them. The high ideals supposed to
crystallize a nation’s life were but factitious and illusory, propagated
by poets and other decadents in the pay of capitalists: in reality,
patriotism only meant the common cause of the peoples floundering each
in its separate sewer. . . .
Mere rats, he declared, changing his metaphor. That was why he and every
other intelligent man in the country refused to join in the rat fight
which was the late war.
Olivia clutched Triona’s arm. “For God’s sake, Alexis, let us get out of
this. It makes me sick.”
They drew deep breaths when they escaped into the fresh air. To Olivia,
the little overcrowded drawing-room, deafening with loud voices, sour
with the smell of milky tea and Virginian tobacco, reeking almost
physically with the madness of anarchy, seemed a miniature of the
bottomless pit. The irony of the man’s talk—the need to purify by flame
a plague-stricken area! God once destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah. Why did
He not blast with fire from heaven this House of Pestilence?
Alexis Triona laughed sympathetically at her outburst.
“I confess they’re rather trying,” he remarked. “Whenever you hear
English people say they belong to the _intelligentsia_, you may be sure
they’re frightened at common sense as not being intellectual enough.
Blenkiron and Dawkins are fools of the first water; but Pyefinch is
dangerous. I am afraid I lost my temper,” he added after a few steps.
“You were splendid,” said Olivia.
More than ever did he seem the one clear-brained, purposeful man of her
acquaintance in the confused London world. Rapidly she passed them in
review as she walked. Of the others Mauregard was the best; but he was
spending his life on fribbles, his highest heaven being a smile on the
lips of a depraved dancing-woman. Then, Sydney Rooke, Mavenna, and, even
worse now than Mavenna, the unspeakable Bobby Quinton. So much for the
Lydian set of professed materialists and pleasure-seekers. In accepting
Agnes Blenkiron’s invitation she had pleasurable anticipation of
entering a sphere of earnest thinkers and social workers who might guide
her stumbling footsteps into the path of duty to herself and her kind.
And to her dismay she had met Dawkins and Blenkiron and Pyefinch,
earnest, indeed, in their sophistry and mad in their theories of
destruction. Her brain was in a whirl with the doctrines to which she
had listened. She felt terrified at she knew not what. Even Lydia’s
cynical world was better than this. Yet between these two extremes there
must be a world of high endeavour, of science, art, philanthropy,
thought; that in which, she vaguely imagined, Blaise Olifant must have
his being; even that of the women at the club dinner. But her mind shook
off women as alien to its subconscious argument. In this conjectural
London world one man alone stood out typical—the man striding loosely
by her side. A young careless angel, he had delivered her from Mavenna.
A man, he had exorcised her horror of Bobby Quinton. And now, once more,
she saw him, in her girlish fancy, a heroic figure, sane, calm, and
scornful, facing a horde of madmen.
They walked, occasionally losing their way and being put on it by chance
encounters, through the maze of new and distressingly decorous avenues,
some finished, others petering out, after a few houses, into placarded
building lots or waste land; a wilderness not of the smug villa-dom of
old-established suburbs, but of a queer bungalow-dom assertive, in its
distinctive architecture, of unreal pursuit of Aspirations in capital
letters. Most of the avenues abutted on a main street of shops with
pseudo-artistic frontages giving the impression that the inhabitants of
the City could only be induced to satisfy the vulgar needs of their
bodies by the lure of the æsthetic.
“Don’t let us judge our late friends too harshly,” said Triona waving an
arm. “All this is the Land of Self-Consciousness.”
At last they made their way through the solider, stolider fringes of the
main road, and emerged on the great thoroughfare itself, wide and
unbusied on this late summer Sunday afternoon. Prosaically they
lingered, waiting for an infrequent omnibus.
“Thank goodness, we’re out of the Land of Self-Consciousness,” said
Olivia. “The Great North Road is too big a thing.”
Their eyes met in a smile.
“I don’t forget your love of big things,” said he. “It’s inspiring. Yes.
It’s a big thing. And it doesn’t really begin in London. It starts from
Land’s End—and it goes on and on through the heart of England and
through the heart of Scotland carrying two nations’ history on its
flanks, caring for nothing but its appointed task, until it sighs at
John o’ Groats and says: ‘My duty’s done.’ There’s nothing that stirs
one’s imagination more than a great road or a great river. Somehow I
prefer the road.”
“You’re nearer to it because it was made by man.”
“How our minds work together!” he cried admiringly “I only have to say
half a thing and you complete it. More than that—you give my
meaningless ideas meaning. Yes. God’s works are great. But we can’t
measure them. We have no scale for God, But we have for Man, and so
Man’s big works thrill us and compel us.”
“What big thing could we do?” asked Olivia.
“Do you mean humanity—or you and I together?”
“Two human beings thinking alike, and free and honest.” Instinctively
she took his arm and her step danced in time with his. “Oh, you don’t
know how good it is to feel real. Let us do something big in the world.
What can we do?”
“You can help me to the very biggest thing in all the universe—for me,”
he cried, pressing her arm tight against him.
Her pulses throbbed. She knew that further argument on her part would be
but exquisite playing with words. The hour which, in her maidenly
uncertainty she had dreaded, had now come, and all fear had passed away.
Yes; now she was real; now she was certain that her love was real. Real
man, real woman. Her heart leaped to him with almost the shock of
physical pain. Again in a flash she swept the Lydian and the Blenkiron
firmament and exulted. Yet in her happiness she said with very foolish
and with very feminine guile:
“Ah, my dear Alexis, that’s what I’ve longed for. If only I could be of
some little help to you!”
“Help?” He laughed shortly and halted and swung her round. “Have you
ever tried to think what you are to me? Would you like me to tell you?”
She disengaged herself and walked delicately on.
“It may pass the time till the bus comes,” she said.
He began to tell her. And three minutes afterwards the noisy, infrequent
motor-bus passed them by, unheeded and even unperceived.