Lorne was thus an atom in the surge of London. The members of the
deputation, as their business progressed, began to feel less like atoms
and more like a body exerting an influence, however obscurely hid in
a temperance hotel, upon the tide of international affairs; but their
secretary had naturally no initiative that appeared, no importance that
was taken account of. In these respects, no less than in the others, he
justified Mr Cruickshank’s selection. He did his work as unobtrusively
as he did it admirably well; and for the rest he was just washed
about, carried, hither and thither, generally on the tops of omnibuses,
receptive, absorbent, mostly silent. He did try once or twice to talk to
the bus drivers--he had been told it was a thing to do if you wanted
to get hold of the point of view of a particular class; but the thick
London idiom defeated him, and he found they grew surly when he asked
them too often to repeat their replies. He felt a little surly himself
after a while, when they asked him, as they nearly always did, if he
wasn’t an American. “Yes,” he would say in the end, “but not the United
States kind,” resenting the necessity of explaining to the Briton beside
him that there were other kinds. The imperial idea goes so quickly from
the heart to the head. He felt compelled, nevertheless, to mitigate his
denial to the bus drivers.
“I expect it’s the next best thing.” he would say, “but it’s only the
next best.”
It was as if he felt charged to vindicate the race, the whole of
Anglo-Saxondom, there in his supreme moment, his splendid position, on
the top of an omnibus lumbering west out of Trafalgar Square.
One introduction of his own he had. Mrs Milburn had got it for him from
the rector, Mr Emmett, to his wife’s brother, Mr Charles Chafe, who
had interests in Chiswick and a house in Warwick Gardens. Lorne put off
presenting the letter--did not know, indeed, quite how to present it,
till his stay in London was half over. Finally he presented himself with
it, as the quickest way, at the office of Mr Chafe’s works at Chiswick.
He was cordially received, both there and in Warwick Gardens, where he
met Mrs Chafe and the family, when he also met Mr Alfred Hesketh. Lorne
went several times to the house in Warwick Gardens, and Hesketh--a
nephew--was there on the very first occasion. It was an encounter
interesting on both sides. He--Hesketh--was a young man with a good
public school and a university behind him, where his very moderate
degree, however, failed to represent the activity of his mind or the
capacity of his energy. He had a little money of his own, and no present
occupation; he belonged to the surplus. He was not content to belong to
it; he cast about him a good deal for something to do. There was always
the Bar, but only the best fellows get on there, and he was not quite
one of the best fellows; he knew that. He had not money enough for
politics or interest enough for the higher departments of the public
service, nor had he those ready arts of expression that lead naturally
into journalism. Anything involving further examinations he rejected
on that account; and the future of glassware, in view of what they were
doing in Germany, did not entice him to join his uncle in Chiswick.
Still he was aware of enterprise, convinced that he had loafed long
enough.
Lorne Murchison had never met anyone of Hesketh’s age in Hesketh’s
condition before. Affluence and age he knew, in honourable retirement;
poverty and youth he knew, embarked in the struggle; indolence and youth
he also knew, as it cumbered the ground; but youth and a competence,
equipped with education, industry, and vigour, searching vainly in
fields empty of opportunity, was to him a new spectacle. He himself had
intended to be a lawyer since he was fourteen. There never had been any
impediment to his intention, any qualification to his desire. He was
still under his father’s roof, but that was for the general happiness;
any time within the last eighteen months, if he had chosen to hurry
fate, he might have selected another. He was younger than Hesketh by
a year, yet we may say that he had arrived, while Hesketh was still
fidgeting at the starting-point.
“Why don’t you farm?” he asked once.
“Farming in England may pay in a quarter of a century, not before. I
can’t wait for it. Besides, why should I farm? Why didn’t you?”
“Well,” said Lorne, “in your case it seems about the only thing left. I?
Oh it doesn’t attract us over there. We’re getting away from it--leaving
it to the newcomers from this side. Curious circle, that: I wonder when
our place gets overcrowded, where we shall go to plough?”
Hesketh’s situation occupied them a good deal; but their great topic had
a wider drift, embracing nothing less than the Empire, pausing nowhere
short of the flag. The imperial idea was very much at the moment in the
public mind; it hung heavily, like a banner, in every newspaper, it
was filtering through the slow British consciousness, solidifying as it
travelled. In the end it might be expected to arrive at a shape in which
the British consciousness must either assimilate it or cast it forth.
They were saying in the suburbs that they wanted it explained; at
Hatfield they were saying, some of them, with folded arms, that it was
self evident; other members of that great house, swinging their arms,
called it blackness of darkness and ruin, so had a prophet divided it
against itself. Wallingham, still in the Cabinet, was going up and down
the country trying not to explain too much. There was division in
the Cabinet, sore travail among private members. The conception being
ministerial, the Opposition applied itself to the task of abortion,
fearing the worst if it should be presented to the country fully
formed and featured, the smiling offspring of progress and imagination.
Travellers to Greater Britain returned waving joyous torches in the
insular fog; they shed a brilliance and infectious enthusiasm, but there
were not enough to do more than make the fog visible. Many persons found
such torches irritating. They pointed out that as England had groped
to her present greatness she might be trusted to feel her way further.
“Free trade,” they said, “has made us what we are. Put out these
lights!”
Mr Chafe was one of these. He was a cautious, heavy fellow, full of
Burgundy and distrust. The basis of the imperial idea inspired him with
suspicion and hostility. He could accept the American tariff on English
manufactures; that was a plain position, simple damage, a blow full
in the face, not to be dodged. But the offer of better business in the
English colonies in exchange for a duty on the corn and meat of foreign
countries--he could see too deep for that. The colonials might or might
not be good customers; he knew how many decanters he sold in the United
States, in spite of the tariff. He saw that the tax on food-stuffs was
being commended to the working-man with the argument of higher wages.
Higher wages, with the competition of foreign labour, spelt only one
word to English manufacturers, and that was ruin. The bugbear of higher
wages, immediate, threatening, near, the terror of the last thirty
years, closed the prospect for Charles Chafe; he could see nothing
beyond. He did not say so, but to him the prosperity of the British
manufacturer was bound up in the indigence of the operative. Thriving
workmen, doing well, and looking to do better, rose before him in terms
of menace, though their prosperity might be rooted in his own. “Give
them cheap food and keep them poor,” was the sum of his advice. His
opinions had the emphasis of the unexpected, the unnatural: he was one
of the people whom Wallingham’s scheme in its legitimate development of
a tariff on foreign manufactures might be expected to enrich. This fact,
which he constantly insisted on, did give them weight; it made him look
like a cunning fellow not to be caught with chaff. He and his business
had survived free trade--though he would not say this either--and he
preferred to go on surviving it rather than take the chances of any
zollverein. The name of the thing was enough for him, a word made in
Germany, thick and mucky, like their tumblers. As to the colonies--Mr
Chafe had been told of a certain spider who devoured her young ones. He
reversed the figure and it stood, in the imperial connection, for all
the argument he wanted.
Alfred Hesketh had lived always in the hearing of such doctrine; it had
stood to him for political gospel by mere force of repetition. But he
was young, with the curiosity and enterprise and impatience of dogma
of youth; he belonged by temperament and situation to those plastic
thousands in whom Wallingham hoped to find the leaven that should leaven
the whole lump. His own blood stirred with the desire to accomplish, to
carry further; and as the scope of the philanthropist did not attract
him, he was vaguely conscious of having been born too late in England.
The new political appeal of the colonies, clashing suddenly upon old
insular harmonies, brought him a sense of wider fields and chances; his
own case he freely translated into his country’s, and offered an open
mind to politics that would help either of them. He looked at the new
countries with interest, an interest evoked by their sudden dramatic
leap into the forefront of public concern. He looked at them with what
nature intended to be the eye of a practical businessman. He looked
at Lorne Murchison, too, and listened to him, with steady critical
attention. Lorne seemed in a way to sum it all up in his person, all the
better opportunity a man had out there; and he handled large matters of
the future with a confidence and a grip that quickened the circulation.
Hesketh’s open mind gradually became filled with the imperial view as
he had the capacity to take it; and we need not be surprised if Lorne
Murchison, gazing in the same direction, supposed that they saw the same
thing.
Hesketh confessed, declared, that Murchison had brought him round; and
Lorne surveyed this achievement with a thrill of the happiest triumph.
Hesketh stood, to him, a product of that best which he was so occupied
in admiring and pursuing. Perhaps he more properly represented the
second best; but we must allow something for the confusion of early
impressions. Hesketh had lived always in the presence of ideals
disengaged in England as nowhere else in the world; in Oxford, Lorne
knew, they clustered thick. There is no doubt that his manners were
good, and his ideas unimpeachable in the letter; the young Canadian read
the rest into him and loved him for what he might have been.
“As an Englishman,” said Hesketh one evening as they walked together
back from the Chafes’ along Knightsbridge, talking of the policy urged
by the Colonial representatives at the last Conference, “I could wish
the idea were more our own--that we were pressing it on the colonies
instead of the colonies pressing it on us.”
“Doesn’t there come a time in the history of most families,” Lorne
replied, “when the old folks look to the sons and daughters to keep them
in touch with the times? Why shouldn’t a vigorous policy of Empire be
conceived by its younger nations--who have the ultimate resources to
carry it out? We’ve got them and we know it--the iron and the coal
and the gold, and the wheat-bearing areas. I dare say it makes us seem
cheeky, but I tell you the last argument lies in the soil and what you
can get out of it. What has this country got in comparison? A market of
forty million people, whom she can’t feed and is less and less able to
find work for. Do you call that a resource? I call it an impediment--a
penalty. It’s something to exploit, for the immediate profit in it,
something to bargain with; but even as a market it can’t preponderate
always, and I can’t see why it should make such tremendous claims.”
“England isn’t superannuated yet, Murchison.”
“Not yet. Please God she never will be. But she isn’t as young as she
was, and it does seem to me--”
“What seems to you?”
“Well, I’m no economist, and I don’t know how far to trust my
impressions, and you needn’t tell me I’m a rank outsider, for I know
that; but coming here as an outsider, it does seem to me that it’s from
the outside that any sort of helpful change in the conditions of this
country has got to come. England still has military initiative, though
it’s hard to see how she’s going to keep that unless she does something
to stop the degeneration of the class she draws her army from; but
what other kind do we hear about? Company-promoting, bee-keeping,
asparagus-growing, poultry-farming for ladies, the opening of a new
Oriental Tea-Pot in Regent Street, with samisen-players between four
and six, and Japanese attendants who take the change on their hands and
knees. London’s one great stomach--how many eating places have we passed
in the last ten minutes? The place seems all taken up with inventing new
ways of making rich people more comfortable and better-amused--I’m fed
up with the sight of shiny carriages with cockaded flunkeys on ‘em,
wooden-smart, rolling about with an elderly woman and a parasol and a
dog. England seems to have fallen back on itself, got content to spend
the money there is in the country already; and about the only line
of commercial activity the stranger sees is the onslaught on that
accumulation. London isn’t the headquarters for big new developing
enterprises any more. If you take out Westminster and Wallingham, London
is a collection of traditions and great houses, and newspaper offices,
and shops. That sort of thing can’t go on for ever. Already capital
is drawing away to conditions it can find a profit in--steel works in
Canada, woollen factories in Australia, jute mills in India. Do you
know where the boots came from that shod the troops in South Africa?
Cawnpore. The money will go, you know, and that’s a fact; the money will
go, and the people will go, anyhow. It’s only a case of whether England
sends them with blessing and profit and greater glory, or whether she
lets them slip away in spite of her.”
“I dare say it will,” replied Hesketh; “I’ve got precious little, but
what there is I’d take out fast enough, if I saw a decent chance of
investing it. I sometimes think of trying my luck in the States. Two or
three fellows in my year went over there and aren’t making half a bad
thing of it.”
“Oh, come,” said Lorne, half-swinging round upon the other, with his
hands in his pockets, “it isn’t exactly the time, is it, to talk about
chucking the Empire?”
“Well, no, it isn’t,” Hesketh admitted. “One might do better to wait,
I dare say. At all events, till we see what the country says to
Wallingham.”
They walked on for a moment or two in silence; then Lorne broke out
again.
“I suppose it’s unreasonable, but there’s nothing I hate so much as to
hear Englishmen talk of settling in the United States.”
“It’s risky, I admit. And I’ve never heard anybody yet say it was
comfortable.”
“In a few years, fifty maybe, it won’t matter. Things will have taken
their direction by then; but now it’s a question of the lead. The
Americans think they’ve got it, and unless we get imperial federation
of course they have. It’s their plain intention to capture England
commercially.”
“We’re a long way from that,” said Hesketh.
“Yes, but it’s in the line of fate. Industrial energy is deserting this
country; and you have no large movement, no counter-advance, to make
against the increasing forces that are driving this way from over
there--nothing to oppose to assault. England is in a state of siege, and
doesn’t seem to know it. She’s so great--Hesketh, it’s pathetic!--she
offers an undefended shore to attack, and a stupid confidence, a kindly
blindness, above all to Americans, whom she patronizes in the gate.”
“I believe we do patronize them,” said Hesketh. “It’s rotten bad form.”
“Oh, form! I may be mad, but one seems to see in politics over here a
lack of definition and purpose, a tendency to cling to the abstract and
to precedent--‘the mainstay of the mandarin’ one of the papers calls
it; that’s a good word--that give one the feeling that this kingdom is
beginning to be aware of some influence stronger than its own. It lies,
of course, in the great West, where the corn and the cattle grow; and
between Winnipeg and Chicago choose quickly, England!”
His companion laughed. “Oh, I’m with you,” he said, “but you take a
pessimistic view of this country, Murchison.”
“It depends on what you call pessimism,” Lorne rejoined. “I see England
down the future the heart of the Empire, the conscience of the world.
and the Mecca of the race.”