Viola stood in the doorway looking at Jim thoughtfully. She was
wondering how she was going to talk for half an hour to a man who came
to dinner in a blue serge suit.
Mr. Egerton had warned her that Jim Barton would be early, and that he
wanted her to be particularly nice to him.
‘The fellow can do me a great deal of harm,’ he had explained, ‘That’s
why I’ve asked him to dinner.
‘He isn’t any class at all and your mother’s horrified. She never
understands business. He’s a tremendous speaker and does what he likes
with my men; if I could get him to go easy with them for a bit we might
avoid a strike—it’ll be extremely inconvenient if they strike before
Christmas. And very often a woman’s tact, you know——’
Mr. Egerton trailed away on this tribute to woman, leaving Viola to fill
out exactly what he meant by it.
Viola never pressed any of her father’s points. She had an uneasy
feeling that he wouldn’t like the pressure, and that if she pressed hard
enough she might not like the points.
Her father adored her, and she couldn’t bear to imagine herself ashamed
of him. Mr. Egerton was a man full of conscious superiority and the
habits of command, but he was too much of a gentleman not to cover these
qualities by an exaggerated air of deference as long as he wasn’t being
directly opposed. It would have been absurd to connect him with anything
at all shabby.
And yet Viola often felt that all he had was unsubstantial, and that
behind his safeties of possession and control ran a very small stream of
spirit.
She felt instinctively that it wasn’t quite fair to her, or even to a
common man, to make her coax him into being accommodating. But she was
going to do it. It would have been a more direct violence to Viola’s
sense of taste not to fall in with her father’s plans. He counted on her
to help him. So she kissed him with an irritated tenderness, and refused
to look her scruples in the face.
She guessed that what her father had meant by tact was that she should
look particularly nice, so that she took a placid, unhurried hour to
dress for the evening.
She wore a dress she had designed for herself; the bodice was a strip of
filmy old lace, as light as foam, and the skirt came out all round her
in the shape of a butterfly’s wings, pale yellow and dark orange.
She wore her lover’s emeralds, but with a sudden impulse she took them
off and put nothing in their place.
‘You’re Mr. Barton, I think,’ she said gently. ‘Won’t you sit down.’
The young man stood there staring at her with immense and curious blue
eyes. He seemed unconscious of the need for him to do anything else, but
at the sound of her voice he shook hands a little uncertainly and sat
down on an uncomfortable chair; he made it look more uncomfortable by
crossing his hands over his knees and leaning forward. It was a charming
room, and Jim had been admiring it greatly before Viola came in; but he
no longer saw it—the green brocade curtains, light as spring leaves
against the background of old oak, faded away from him—he ceased to
notice the shining splendour of the solid silver candle-sticks in their
old cut glass brackets, or the Venetian leather screen with its dim and
broken browns and golds.
Instead he saw, as his eyes met Viola’s, a Kingfisher darting its
jewelled flight across a sunny stream. Something as solid and as light
pierced suddenly into his heart and would not fly away.
‘I’m afraid I’m altogether too early,’ he said humbly after a pause. ‘I
came on after a meeting. My home is in Poplar; it was too far to go
back.’
‘Poplar,’ Viola repeated thoughtfully. She hadn’t any idea where Poplar
was—it might have been some little place in the north of Russia for all
she knew to the contrary. ‘Of course, much too far,’ she agreed with a
smile. ‘But I’m very glad you came early—I wanted to talk to you, and
I’m always shy when everybody is there and expecting me to behave
properly. My father tells me you’re like him—awfully interested in
working men. I want you to tell me all about them.’
Jim’s eyes grew veiled, his heavy chin, a trifle underhung, swung
forward, as he bent to answer her.
‘I’m one of the working men myself,’ he said; ‘I’m not a bit like your
father, and you ought to use a stronger word than interested. I’m
involved in all their interests.’
She flushed under the weight of his contradiction. It gave her the
braced, tingling feeling of a sudden plunge into cold water. It might,
when you got used to it, be nice, but it took your breath away.
She had never talked to a man who treated her less as if she were a
woman. Jim seemed to force her relentlessly away from her advantages of
beauty and of sex. But it was not because her beauty failed to move him.
The last ten years of his life had been a perpetual struggle between Jim
and the force of his passions; he was a man ridden by impulses and
attractions, and he had taught himself to let the strongest of them be
nothing but an incentive to put him on his guard.
‘I don’t know what you want to know about us,’ he said with a sudden,
keen, disarming smile, ‘but there’s no harm in your asking.’
Viola thought it a pity that a man with so nice a smile should speak as
if he belonged to a class which she had been brought up to think was
little better than criminal. She tried to cut him adrift from it.
‘But you’re educated,’ she protested. ‘You can’t really have anything in
common with people who don’t think and read?’
‘Oh, I’m on the other side of that barrier,’ said Jim with his curious,
twisted smile. ‘I daresay if I’d got culture I might have lost my soul,
but I stopped at education, and that only made me rather convinced to
stick to my class. All the thought and reading in the world, Miss
Egerton, aren’t confined to the few clever people who have time to do
them in. The rest of us pick up a thing or two!
‘If you were to go to a working men’s meeting you would discover that
I’m rather below the average.’
‘I don’t think I should discover that,’ said Viola. ‘But I thought
working men never read anything but newspapers and spent their evenings
in public houses?’
Jim groaned. ‘There,’ he said. ‘You would think _that_, and you think
we’re ignorant! Why the working man who says the archbishop is walking
about in boots paid for out of his pocket, doesn’t know _less_ what he’s
talking about! Of course we’ve none of us had much chance of education.
Do you know the State closes its normal benefits in that direction at
thirteen? But something can be done if you’ve a mind for it—and a good
many of us have nowadays. Only it’s hard not to get beaten out of the
race by too heavy a load to start with. And you’re right—drink’s a
curse! If public houses could only be made _more_ public, with food and
fun in them—but then the poor brewers would have to suffer, wouldn’t
they? And we all know about the widows and orphans who seem invariably
to put their savings into beer. But it’s just as much a mistake, even
while we’re keeping all the widows and orphans’ heads out of water, by
the drink monopoly, to suppose all working men drink as to suppose all
pretty girls flirt—they don’t, do they?’
Viola stiffened. This young man was not her equal, and he was behaving
as if he was, while quite rightly asserting that he wasn’t.
She put him in his place, but she did it gently. His eyes went on
laughing, even after this uncomfortable operation had been successfully
performed.
‘It seems such a pity,’ she said, ignoring what she thought he should
not have said, ‘that working men won’t understand what is good for
them.’ She was going on, but Jim interrupted her.
‘I suppose they’re like the rest of us,’ he said. ‘They prefer what’s
attractive. It’s not in me to blame them, Miss Egerton.’
Viola frowned a little.
‘My father is always arranging lectures,’ she went on steadily, ‘and
excellent classes for his men who want to come—but so few of them ever
do.’
‘Do you like lectures?’ Jim asked with apparent submission. ‘I always
think they’re rather like being told how to behave.’
The colour rose suddenly under Viola’s clear, pale skin. He was
literally the only man who had ever made her blush. But she decided it
was because he was the only man who had ever been rude to her.
‘Sometimes,’ she said coldly, ‘even that is necessary.’
‘Still,’ said Jim with unshakable good humour, ‘people won’t pay a penny
a night for it—or a shilling the course, I forget which. Wonderfully
little if you get what you like, but an awful lot if you don’t.’
Viola reminded herself that her mission was to conciliate, so she
dropped the subject of lectures.
‘I wonder,’ she said, ‘if you know, Mr. Barton, how much my father cares
about his dockers? I think he would do anything for their good—and it
seems such a mistake for you not to work together, doesn’t it? I always
think we lose so much force by our lack of unity.’
‘If good was jam,’ Jim answered, ‘and your father could keep it in a
cupboard and spoon it out regularly to the men, I believe he’d give them
quite a lot.
‘He’s a benevolent despot, as I expect you are really, and you won’t
mind my saying that from my point of view they’re the worst sort,
because it’s so hard to make up one’s mind to do them in!’
‘I don’t see why you should suppose that necessary,’ objected Viola, ‘if
you admit we’re benevolent.’
‘Oh, but good’s not jam,’ said Jim. ‘It’s something men ought to get for
themselves if their conditions enable them to do it, and if not, they’ve
got to alter the conditions, and while the conditions are being altered
benevolent despots will have to rip. Unfortunately the process of
ripping is extremely painful; and, naturally enough, the benevolent
despots think it awfully wrong. What they can’t understand is that the
sacredness of a good position is only felt by the people who have it.
‘Look at your father, for instance. It’s very difficult for him, because
he’s made the conditions, to see that they need altering. They fit him
all right, and while he’s kindly supplying his jam there we are trying
to pull the ground from under his feet! I’m afraid it isn’t likely that
we can act together, Miss Egerton.’
Viola tried to steady her mind to answer him, but her wits felt like
scattered birds, and all the while something in her answered him—his
eyes had the sparkle of a frosty morning, and the force behind them
invaded her like the drive of the sea.
She shifted her ground with a sense of a precarious foot-hold.
‘Think of what my father gives,’ she said eagerly. ‘His contribution is
not to be compared to the men’s—he gives his capital and his brains;
and he takes all the risks. A big shipping business with its cut-throat
competition, and its constant accidents, is an immense responsibility.
He knows better than the men under what conditions it can be profitably
run, and it is not fair to speak as if his perfectly reasonable returns
make the conditions of his men’s work harder. He has to study the trade
as a whole, and you forget, while they get their wages paid exactly the
same, he has the losses as well as the gains for his share of the
business.’
The laughter died out of Jim’s eyes. She saw for the first time the
hard, fighting look which made him a formidable and not too merciful
antagonist.
He did not answer her at once. Indeed for a moment he had forgotten her.
His eyes saw instead the row upon row of small gray houses, interminable
and monotonous, about the distant docks. The sunk, drab life of the men
he lived amongst, the pallor and ugliness of their youth, which had been
built for strength and beauty, shook his heart. The thought of the
neglected, tired children crying in the gutters and the dust, made
bitter lines come into his hard young face.
‘Oh, you don’t see,’ he said in a different tone. ‘You can’t see. You’re
not looking straight.
‘You talk of what men like your father put into their businesses—but
you don’t reckon what they take out of them!
‘All we want, we others, is to be in a position to put in as much. We’d
stand our chance of the losses; you don’t live on the edge of nothing
and fear losses. What we want is to have leisure enough, quiet enough,
comfort enough, to make our brains _tell_. You see, it’s waste for a man
to have his brain pinched out of him, by dirt and bad air, and the food
which comes from such conditions. You say, look what your father
gives—but have you thought what we do? We give toil. We don’t live far
off from the Godforsaken mud flats where the docks have to be, in a
house like this, to have our times off in comfort. We don’t start work
at ten after a breakfast as big as all our meals put together, and a
thousand times more nourishing, and we don’t go to a luxurious office in
a motor car, and sit for a few hours giving orders, with clean hands,
from a leather arm-chair.
‘A man’s toil is himself, and when we’ve used ourselves up for the day,
where’s the margin to be amiable and brilliant—or even to be
intelligent and decent, when we come home in the evening, though the
majority of work-people _are_ intelligent and decent?
‘I tell you what we want is margin, and we’ve got to have it!’
Jim did not raise his voice as he finished, but it had a peculiar
compelling quality, as if he added to the words he used the whole force
of his personality. He confronted you out of his arguments, as the angel
confronted the baffled Adam and Eve, with his righteous flaming sword.
Viola’s face grew set, and her charming arched brows ceased to look like
an inquiring flower. It was horrid of this man to talk as if tiresome
and painful things had anything to do with them, when they had invited
him to dinner. It was especially unfair to say that Viola didn’t see
straight, when she went on seeing straight even after it had made her
uncomfortable. She didn’t know any girls of her own age who danced
properly and were half as sorry for the poor.
She looked over Jim’s head and asked if he had noticed when he came in
if it was still raining?
And then he laughed at her. He deliberately laughed at her, as if she
was a naughty but engaging child.
‘Come,’ he said, ‘you mustn’t bear me malice for giving you my point of
view. You had me here to convert me to yours, didn’t you? Well—I’ll
have to show you first what to convert me from!’
Viola trembled with annoyance. How dared he speak as if he had been
lured into a trap? She, who was the cheese in the trap, rebelled more
against Jim’s audacity in discovering it than she had against the idea
of the deception.
Viola wanted some one to step in front of her and take her place, to
fight down the rising sense of excitement and alarm this strange man
gave her, and to make him look as cheap as she knew he wasn’t, and as,
for a moment, he had made her feel that she was. And as she looked
around her with desperate eyes for an intervention, the door opened and
they fell upon her chosen champion.
Reginald Ainley stood there fingering his effective monocle.
Viola gave a little sigh of relief. He was immaculately dressed, as
smooth as a peach, and as slender as a walking stick.
She thought for a moment that he had all the virtues and would be the
answer to the strange breathlessness at her heart.
Her eyes ran hurriedly from one man to the other, unconsciously
measuring them.
Jim was an inch shorter than Ainley, he was more heavily built, there
was a mixture of strength in his clumsiness and of clumsiness in his
strength. His rough-hewn, unfinished face had no attraction beyond the
beauty of his blue, steady eyes, and of those even he was unconscious,
for no one had ever pulled him together by appealing to his vanity.
There was no clumsiness at all in Ainley. He was straight-backed and as
supple as a racer. He looked like a classical Rodin, and Jim like one of
the sculptor’s later rough-hewn works, when he wished to arrive at the
confusion and grandeur of the soul and left the fine small finish of the
animal to look after itself.
‘I’ve had the pleasure,’ said Ainley after a quick, appreciative glance
at Viola, ‘of hearing you speak, Mr. Barton, mingled with the gall of
disagreeing with all you had to say—but I’m delighted to meet you for
the first time in private life.’
‘You’ve forgotten,’ said Jim. ‘We’ve met before, Mr. Ainley. I’m that
boy off a barge who was so out of place at Warren Manor.’
Ainley’s eyes narrowed; he was more disconcerted than he cared to show.
‘Now, that’s very odd,’ he said pleasantly; ‘two fellows from old
Bligh’s knocking against each other after all these years—ten, isn’t
it? I will say this for you, Barton: you’re uncommonly changed.’
‘No,’ said Jim. ‘I’ve had three hundred a year left me, and been to a
University, but I’m not changed—nor, from the look of you are you.’
The hostility behind Ainley’s smile deepened, and yet it was Jim who
looked the least at ease of the two men.
Ainley turned to Viola and told her an amusing anecdote of the Blighs.
It was a friendly anecdote and pleasantly included Jim.
Viola did not listen very carefully; she thought it was a pity Mr.
Barton hadn’t any manners. She wondered if Reggie could have convinced
him that he was wrong. She wondered, if Reggie had tried, whether she
herself would have been convinced that Mr. Barton was wrong?
He had been horrid, but to be horrid is not necessarily (though Viola
would have liked to think it was) to be wrong.