And then the accidental touch of her little hand would bring me back,

with pulses fluttering, and the warm blood in my veins insisting that

sweet Sylvia was adorable; that everything would be well lost in payment

for the touch of her lips. So, moth-like, I spent that pleasant Sabbath

day, attached to Sylvia by ties over which my mind had small control; by

bonds which, if the truth were known, were not wholly dissimilar, I

believe, from the ties which drew her daily to the heavy atmosphere of

the sanctuary rails of St. Jude's.

In the evening Mr. Wheeler asked me to come and smoke a cigar with him

in his private room, and the invitation was not one to be evaded. I was

subconsciously aware that it elicited a meaning exchange of glances

between Marjory and her mother.

"Well, Mordan, I hope things go well with you in Fleet Street," said Mr.

Wheeler, when his cigar was alight and we were both seated in his

luxurious little den.

"Oh, tolerably," I said. "Of course, I am quite an obscure person there

as yet; quite on the lowest rungs, you know."

"Quite so; quite so; and from all I hear, competition is as keen there

as in the City, though the rewards are--rather different, of course."

I nodded, and we were silent for a few moments. Then he flicked a little

cigar-ash into a tray and looked up sharply, with quite the Moorgate

Street expression, I remember thinking.

"I think you are a good deal attracted by my youngest girl, Mordan?" he

said; and his tone demanded a reply even more than his words.

"Yes, I certainly admire her greatly," I said, more than a little

puzzled by the wording of the question; more than a little fluttered, it

may be; for it seemed to me a welcoming sort of question, and I was

keenly aware of my ineligibility as a suitor.

"Exactly. That is no more than I expected to hear from you. Indeed, I

think anything less would--well, I shouldn't have been at all pleased

with anything less."

His complaisance quite startled me. Somehow, too, it reminded me of my

many baffled retirements of that day, before the elements in Sylvia's

character which chilled and repelled me. I was almost glad that I had

not committed myself to any warmer or more definite declaration. Mr.

Wheeler weighed his cigar with nice care.

"Yes," he continued. "If you had disputed the attraction--the

attachment, I should perhaps say--I should have found serious ground for

criticizing your--your behaviour to my girl. As it is, of course, the

thing is natural enough. You have been attracted; the child is

attractive; and you have paid her marked attentions--which is what any

young man might be expected to do."

"If he is going to suggest an engagement," I thought, "I must be very

clear about my financial position, or want of position." Mr. Wheeler

continued thoughtfully to eye his cigar.

"Yes, it is perfectly natural," he said; "and you will probably think,

therefore, that what I am going to say is very unnatural and unkind. But

you must just bear in mind that I am a good deal older than you, and,

also, I am Sylvia's father."

I nodded, with a new interest.

"Well, now, Mordan, let me say first that I know my girls pretty well,

and I am quite satisfied that Sylvia is not fitted to be a poor man's

wife. You would probably think her far better fitted for that part than

her sister, because Marjory is a lot more gay and frivolous. Well, you

would be wrong. They are neither of them really qualified for the post,

but Sylvia is far less so than Marjory. In point of fact she would be

wretched in it, she would fail in it; and--I may say that the fact would

not make matters easier for her husband."

There did not seem to me any need for a reply, but I nodded again; and

Mr. Wheeler resumed, after a long draw at his cigar. He smoked a very

excellent, rather rich Havana.

"Yes, girls are different now from the girls I sweethearted with; and

girls like mine must have money. I dare say you think Sylvia dresses

very prettily, in a simple way. My dear fellow, her laundry bill alone

would bankrupt a newspaper reporter."

I may have indicated before, that Mr. Wheeler was not a person of any

particular refinement. He had made the money which provided a tolerably

costly upbringing for his children, but his own education I gathered had

been of a much more exiguous character. There was, as I know, a good

deal of truth in what he said of the girl of the period.

"Well, now, I put it to you, Mordan, whether, admitting that what I say

about Sylvia is true--and you may take it from me that it is

true--whether it would be very kind or fair on my part to allow you to

go on paying attention to her at the rate of--say to-day's. Do you think

it would be wise or kind of me to allow it? I say nothing about your

side in the matter, because--well, because I still have some

recollection of how a young fellow feels in such a case. But would it be

wise of me to allow it?"

He was a shrewd man, this father of Sylvia, and of my old friend; and I

have no doubt that the tactics I found so disarming had served him well

before that day in the City. At the same time, instinct seemed to forbid

complete surrender on my side.

"It is just consideration of the present difficulties of my position

which has made me careful to avoid seeking to commit Sylvia in any way,"

I said.

It was probably an unwise remark. At all events, it struck the note of

opposition, of contumacy, which it seemed my host had been anticipating;

and he met it with a new inflection in his voice, as who should say:

"Well, now to be done with explanations and the velvet glove. Have at

you!" What he actually said was:

"Ah, there's a deal of mischief to be done without a declaration, my

friend. But, however, I don't expect that you should share my view. I

only suggested it on the off chance because--well, I suppose, because

that would be the easiest way out for me, as host. But I don't know that

I should have thought much of you if you had met me half-way. So now

let me do my part and get it over, for it's not very pleasant. I have

shown you my reasons, which, however they may seem to you, are

undeniable to me. Now for my wishes in the matter, as a father; I am

sure there is no need for me to say 'instructions,' so I say 'wishes.'

They are simply that for the time--for a year or two, anyhow--you should

not give me the pleasure of being your host, and that you should not

communicate in any way with Sylvia. There, now it's said, and done, and

I think we might leave it at that; for I don't think it's much more

pleasant for me than for you. I'm sure I hope we shall have many a

pleasant evening together--er--after a few years have passed. Now, what

do you say--shall we have another cigar, or go in to the ladies?"

I flatter myself that, with all my shortcomings, I was never a sulky

fellow. At all events, I elected to join the ladies; but my reward was

not immediately apparent, for it seemed that Sylvia had retired for the

night. At least, we did not meet again until breakfast-time next

morning, when departure was imminent, and the week's work had, so to

say, begun.

VIII

A STIRRING WEEK

Ay! we would each fain drive

At random, and not steer by rule.

Weakness! and worse, weakness bestows in vain.

Winds from our side the unsuiting consort rive.

We rush by coasts where we had lief remain;

Man cannot, though he would, live chance's fool.

. . . . .

Even so we leave behind,

As, charter'd by some unknown Powers,

We stem across the sea of life by night.

The joys which were not for our use design'd;

The friends to whom we had no natural right,

The homes that were not destined to be ours.

MATTHEW ARNOLD.

It goes without saying that Mr. Wheeler's attitude, and my being

practically forbidden the house at Weybridge, strengthened and sharpened

my interest in Sylvia. Nothing else so fans the flame of a young man's

fancy as being forbidden all access to its object. Accordingly, in the

weeks which followed that Sunday at Weybridge, I began an ardent

correspondence with Sylvia, after inducing her to arrange to call for

letters at a certain newspaper shop not far from the station.

It was a curious correspondence in many ways. Some of my long, wordy

epistles were indited from the reporters' room at the _Daily Gazette_

office, in the midst of noisy talk and the hurried production of "copy."

Others, again, were produced, long after--for my health's sake--I should

have been in bed; and these were written on a corner of my little chest

of drawers in the Bloomsbury lodging-house. I was a great reader of the

poet Swinburne at the time, and I doubt not my muse was sufficiently

passionate seeming. But, though I believe my phrases of endearment were

alliteratively emphatic, and even, as I afterwards learned, somewhat

alarming to their recipient, yet the real mainspring of my eloquence was

the difference between our respective views of life, Sylvia's and mine.

In short, before very long my letters resolved themselves into fiery and

vehement denunciation of Sylvia's particular and chosen _metier_ in

religion, and equally vehement special pleading on behalf of the claims

of humanity and social reform, as I saw them. I find the thing

provocative of smiles now, but I was terribly in earnest then, or

thought so, and had realized nothing of the absolute futility of pitting

temperament against temperament, reason against conviction, argument

against emotional belief.

We had some stolen meetings, too, in the evenings, I upon one side of a

low garden wall, Sylvia upon the other. Stolen meetings are apt to be

very sweet and stirring to young blood; but the sordid consideration of

the railway fare to Weybridge forbade frequent indulgence, and such was

my absorption in social questions, such my growing hatred of Sylvia's

anti-human form of religion, that even here I could not altogether

forbear from argument. Indeed, I believe I often left poor Sylvia weary

and bewildered by the apparently crushing force of my representations,

which, while quite capable of making her pretty head to ache, left her

mental and emotional attitude as completely untouched as though I had

never opened my lips.

Wrought up by means of my own eloquence, I would make my way back to

London in a hot tremor of exaltation, which I took to be love and desire

of Sylvia. And then, as like as not, I would receive a letter from my

lady-love the next day, the refrain of which would be:

"How strange you are. How you muddle me! Indeed, you don't understand;

and neither, perhaps, do I understand you. It seems to me you would drag

sacred matters down to the dusty level of your politics."

The dusty level of my politics! That was it. The affairs of the world,

of mortal men, they were as the affairs of ants to pretty Sylvia. A

lofty and soaring view, you say? Why, no; not that exactly, for what

remained of real and vital moment in her mind, to the exclusion of all

serious interest in humanity? There remained, as a source of much

gratification, what I called the daily dramatic performance at St.

Jude's; and there remained as the one study worthy of serious devotion

and interest--Sylvia Wheeler's own soul. She never sought to influence

the welfare of another person's soul. Indeed, as she so often said to

me, with a kind of plaintiveness which should have softened my

declamatory ardour but did not, she did not like speaking of such

matters at all; she regarded it as a kind of desecration.

No, it did not seem to me a lofty and inspiring view that Sylvia took.

On the contrary, it exercised a choking effect upon me, by reason of

what I regarded as its intense littleness and narrowness. The too often

bitter and sordid realities of the struggle of life, as I saw it in

London, had the effect upon me of making Sylvia's esoteric exclusiveness

of interest seem so petty as to be an insult to human intelligence. I

would stare out of the train windows, on my way back from Weybridge, at

the countless lights, the endless huddled roofs of London; and, seeing

in these a representation of the huge populace of the city, I would

stretch out my arms in an impotent embrace, muttering:

"Yes, indeed, you _are_ real; you _are_ more important than any other

consideration; you are _not_ the mere shadows she thinks you; your

service is of more moment than any miracle, or than any nursing of one's

own soul!"

And so I would make my way to Fleet Street, where I forced myself to

believe I served the people by teaching them to despise patriotism, to

give nothing, but to organize and demand, and keep on demanding and

obtaining, more and more, from a State whose business it was to give,

and to ask nothing in return. I was becoming known, and smiled at

mockingly, for my earnest devotion to the extreme of the _Daily

Gazette's_ policy, which, if it made for anything, made, I suppose, for

anti-nationalism, anti-militarism, anti-Imperialism, anti-loyalty, and

anti-everything else except State aid--by which was meant the

antithesis of aid of the State.

"I've got quite a good job for you this afternoon, Mordan--something

quite in your line," said Mr. Charles N. Pierce one morning. "A lot of

these South African firebrands are having a luncheon at the Westminster

Palace Hotel, and that fellow John Crondall is to give an address

afterwards on 'Imperial Interests and Imperial Duties.' I'll give you

your fling on this up to half a column--three-quarters if it's good

enough; but, be careful. A sort of contemptuous good humour will be the

best line to take. Make 'em ridiculous. And don't forget to convey the

idea of the whole business being plutocratic. You know the sort of

thing: Park Lane Israelites, scooping millions, at the expense of the

overtaxed proletariat in England. Jingoism, a sort of swell bucket-shop

business--you know the tone. None of your heroics, mind you. It's got to

be news; but you can work in the ridicule all right."

I always think of that luncheon as one of the stepping-stones in my

life. However crude and mistaken I had been up till then, I had always

been sincere. My report of that function went against my own

convictions. The writing of it was a painful business; I knew I was

being mean and dishonest. Not that what I heard there changed my views

materially. No; I still clung to my general convictions, which fitted

the policy of the _Daily Gazette_. But the fact remained that in

treating that gathering as I did, on the lines laid down by my

news-editor, I knew that I was being dishonest, that I was conveying an

untrue impression.

In this feeling, as in most of a young man's keen feelings, the personal

element played a considerable part. I was introduced to the speaker,

John Crondall, by a Cambridge man I knew, who came there on behalf of a

Conservative paper, which had recently taken a new lease of life in new

hands, and become the most powerful among the serious organs of the

Empire party. It is a curious thing, by the way, that overwhelming as

was the dominance of the anti-national party in politics, the

Imperialist party could still claim the support of the greatest and most

thoughtfully written newspapers.

John Crondall had no time to spare for more than a very few words with

so obscure a person as myself; but in two minutes he was able to produce

a deep impression upon me, as he did upon most people who met him. John

Crondall had a great deal of personal charm, but the thing about him

which bit right into my consciousness that afternoon was his earnest

sincerity. As Crewe, the man who introduced me to him, said afterwards:

"There isn't one particle of flummery in Crondall's whole body."

It was an obviously truthful criticism. You might agree with the man or

not, but no intelligent human being could doubt his honesty, the reality

of his convictions, the strength and sincerity of his devotion to the

cause of those convictions. It was perfectly well known then that

Crondall had played a capable third or fourth fiddle in the maintenance,

so far, of the Imperial interest in South Africa. His masterful leader,

the man who, according to report, had inspired all his fiery earnestness

in the Imperialist cause, was dead. But John Crondall had relinquished

nothing of his activity as a lieutenant, and continued to spend a good

share of his time in South Africa, while, wherever he was, continuing to

devote his energies to the same cause.

As for his material interests, Crewe assured me that Crondall knew no

more of business, South African or otherwise, than a schoolboy. He had

inherited property worth about a couple of thousand a year, and had

rather decreased than added to it. For, though he had acted as war

correspondent in the Russo-Japan war, and through one or two "little

wars," in outlying parts of the British Empire, circumstances had

prevented such work being of profit to him. In the South African war he

had served as an irregular, and achieved distinction in scouting and

guiding work.

John Crondall's life, I gathered, had been the very opposite of my own

sheltered progress from Dorset village to school, from school to

University, and thence to my present street-bound routine in London. His

views were clearly no less opposite to that vague tumult of resentment,

protest, and aspiration which represented my own outlook upon life.

Indeed, his speech that day was an epitome of the sentiment and opinions

which I had chosen to regard with the utmost abhorrence.

With Crondall, every other consideration hinged upon and was subservient

to the Imperialist idea of devotion to the bond which united all

British possessions under one rule. The maintenance and furtherance of

that tie, the absorption of all parts into that great whole, the

subordination of all other interests to this: that I took to be John

Crondall's great end in life. By association I had come to identify

myself, and my ideals of social reform, entirely with those to whom mere

mention of the rest of the Empire, or of the ties which made it an

Empire, was as a red rag to a bull.

I have tried to explain something of the causes for this extraordinary

attitude, but I am conscious that at the present time it cannot really

be explained. It was there, however. We might interest ourselves in talk

of Germany, we might enthusiastically admire and even model ourselves

upon the conduct of a foreign people; but mention of the outside places

of our own Empire filled us with anger, resentment, scorn, and contempt.

It amounted to this: that we regarded as an enemy the man who sought to

serve the Empire. He cannot do that without opposing us, we said in

effect; as one who should say: You cannot cultivate my garden, or repair

my fences, without injuring my house and showing yourself an enemy to my

family. A strange business; but so it was.

Therefore, John Crondall's speech that day found me full enough of

opposition, and not at all inclined to be sympathetic. But the thing of

it was, I knew him for an honest and disinterested man; a man alight

with high inspiration and lofty motive; a man immeasurably above sordid

or selfish ends. And it was my task, first, to ridicule him; and,

second, to attach sordidness and self-interest to him. That was the

thing which made the day eventful for me.

John Crondall talked of British rule and British justice, as he had

known them in the world's far places. He drew pictures of Oriental rule,

Boer rule, Russian rule, savage rule; and, again, of the methods and

customs of foreign Powers in their colonial administration. When he

claimed this and that for British rule, and the Imperial unity which

must back it, as such, sneers came naturally to me. The anti-British

sentiment covered that. My qualms began, when he based his plea upon the

value of British administration to all concerned, the danger to

civilization, to mankind, of its being allowed to weaken.

Remember, he spoke in pictures, and in the first person; not of

imaginings, but of what he had seen: how a single anti-British speech in

London, meant a month's prolongation of bloody strife in one country, or

an added weight of cruel oppression in another. Right or wrong, John

Crondall carried you with him; for he dealt with men and things as he

had brothered and known them, before ever he let loose, in a fiery

peroration, that abstract idea of Empire patriotism which ruled his

life.

But it was not all this that made my paltry journalistic task a hard

one. It was my certainty of Crondall's lofty sincerity. From that

afternoon I date the beginning of the end of my _Daily Gazette_

engagement. Some men in my shoes would have moved to success from this

point; gaining from it either complete unscrupulousness, or the bold

decision which would have made them important as friends or enemies.

For my part I was simply slackened by the episode. I met John Crondall

several times again. He chaffed me in the most generous fashion over my

abominably unfair report of the luncheon gathering. He influenced me

greatly, though my opinions remained untouched, so far as I knew.

I cannot explain just how John Crondall influenced me, but I am very

conscious that he had a broadening effect on me--he enlarged my horizon.

If he had remained in London things might have gone differently with me.

One cannot tell. Among other things, I know his influence mightily

reduced the number and length of my letters to Weybridge. In my mind I

was always fighting John Crondall. It was my crowded millions of England

against his lonely, sun-browned men and women outside--his world

interests. The war in my heart was real, unceasing. And then there was

pretty Sylvia and her little soul, and her meditations, and her daily

miracles. The pin-point, bright as it was, became too tiny for me to

concentrate upon it, when contrasted with these other tumultuous

concerns.

Then came a crowded, confused week, in which I saw John Crondall depart

by the South African boat-train from Waterloo. The first lieutenant of

his dead leader out there had cabled for Crondall to come and hold his

broad shoulders against the side of some political dam. My eyes pricked

when John Crondall wrung my hand.

"You're all right, sonny," he said. "Don't you suppose I have the

smallest doubt about you."

I had never given him anything but sneers and opposition--I, a little

unknown scrub of a reporter; he a man who helped to direct policies and

shape States. Here he was rushing off to the other side of the earth at

his own expense, sacrificing his own interests and engagements at home,

in the service of an Idea, an abstract Tie, a Flag. My philosophy had

seemed spacious beside, say, Sylvia's: to secure better things for those

about me, instead of for my own soul only. But what of Crondall? As I

say, my eyes pricked, even while I framed some sentence in my mind

expressing regret for his wrong-headedness. Ah, well!

The same week--the same day--brought me the gentlest little note of

dismissal from Sylvia. Her duty to her father, and--my ideas seemed too

much for her peace of mind; so bewildering. "I am no politician, you

know; and truth to tell, these matters which seem so much to you that

you would have them drive religion from me, they seem to me so

infinitely unimportant. Forgive me!"

No doubt my vanity was wounded, but I will not pretend that I was very

seriously hurt. Neither could I ponder long upon the matter, because

another letter, received by the same post, claimed my attention.

Sylvia's letter threw out a hint of better things for us in a year or

two's time. Her notion of a break between us was "for the present."

There were references to "later on, when you can come here again, and we

need not hide things." But my other letter made more instant claims. It

was type-written, and ran thus:

"DEAR MR. MORDAN:--Mr. Chas. N. Pierce directs me to inform you that

after the expiration of the present month your services will no

longer be required by the editor of the _Daily Gazette_.

"I am, Sir,

Yours faithfully,

JAMES MARTIN,

_Secretary_."

I pictured the little pale-eyed rabbit of a man typing the dictum of his

Napoleon, his hero, and wondering in his amiable way how "Mr. Mordan"

would be affected thereby, and how he had managed to displease the great

man. As for "the editor of the _Daily Gazette_," I had not seen him

since the day of my engagement. But I recalled now various recent signs

of chill disapproval of my work on Mr. Pierce's part. And, indeed, I was

aware myself of a slackness in my work, a kind of reckless,

windmill-tilting tendency in my general attitude.

Meantime, there was the fact that I had recently encroached twice upon

my tiny nest-egg; once to buy a wedding present for my sister Lucy, and

once for a piece of silly extravagance.

It was quite a notable week.

IX

A STEP DOWN

"Cosmopolitanism is nonsense; the cosmopolite is a cipher, worse

than a cipher; outside of nationality there is neither art, nor

truth, nor life; there is nothing."--IVAN TURGENIEFF.

I have mentioned a piece of reckless extravagance; it was reckless in

view of my straightened circumstances. And the reason I mention this

apparent trifle is that it and its attendant circumstances influenced me

in my conduct after the abrupt termination of the _Daily Gazette_

engagement.

One of my fellow knights of the reporters' room introduced me in a

certain Fleet Street wine-bar to one of the characters of that classic

highway--a man named Clement Blaine, who edited and owned a weekly

publication called _The Mass_. I hasten to add that this journal had

nothing whatever to do with any kind of religious observance. Its title

referred to the people, or rather, to the section of the public which,

at that time, we still described by the quaintly misleading phrase, "the

working classes," as though work were a monopoly in the hands of the

manual labourer.

_The Mass_ was a journal which had quite a vogue at that time. This was

brought about, I suppose, by the wave of anti-nationalism which, in

1906, established the notorious administration which subsequently became

known as "The Destroyers." It was maintained largely, I fancy, by

Clement Blaine's genius for getting himself quoted in other journals of

every sort and standing.

The existence of _The Mass_, and the popularity which it earned by

outraging every civic and national decency, stands in my mind as a

striking example of the extraordinary laxity and slackness of moral

which had grown out of our boasted tolerance, broad-mindedness, and

cosmopolitanism. We had waxed drunken upon the parrot-like asseveration

of "rights," which our fathers had won for us, and we had no time to

spare for their compensating duties. This misguided apotheosis of what

we considered freedom and broad-mindedness, produced the most startling

and anomalous situations in our national life, including the almost

incredible fact that, while nominally at peace with the world, the State

was being bitterly warred against by cliques and parties among its own

subjects.

For instance, in any other State than our own, my new acquaintance,

Clement Blaine, would have been safely disposed in a convenient prison

cell, and his flamingly seditious journal would have been promptly and

effectually squashed. In England the man was free as the Prime Minister,

and a Department of State, the Post Office, was engaged in the

distribution of the journal which he devoted exclusively to stirring up

animosity against that State, and traitorous opposition to its

constitution.

Further, Mr. Blaine's vitriolic outpourings, his unnatural defilement of

his own nest, were gravely quoted in every newspaper in the Kingdom,

without a hint of recognition of the fact that they were fundamentally

criminal and a public offence. The sacrosanct "liberty of the subject"

was involved; and though Mr. Blaine would have been forcibly restrained

if he had shown any tendency to injure lamp-posts, or to lay hands upon

his own worthless life, he was given every facility in his

self-appointed task of inciting the public to all sorts of offences

against the State, and to a variety of forms of national suicide.

It was the commonest thing for a Member of Parliament, a man solemnly

sworn and consecrated to the loyal service of the Crown and State, to

fill a signed column of Clement Blaine's paper, with an article or

letter the whole avowed end of which would be the championing of some

national enemy or rival, or the advocacy of means whereby a shrewd blow

might be struck against British rule or British prestige in some part of

the world.

I recall one long and scurrilous article by a Member of Parliament,

urging rebellious natives in South Africa to take heart of grace and

pursue with ever-increasing vigour their attacks upon the small and

isolated white populace which upheld British rule in that part of the

Continent. I remember a long and venomous letter from another Member of

Parliament (a strong advocate of the State payment of members) defending

in the most ardently sympathetic manner both the action and the

sentiments of a municipal official who had torn down and destroyed the

Union Jack upon an occasion of public ceremony.

We called this sort of thing British freedom in those chaotic days; and

when our Continental rivals were not jeering at the grotesqueness of it,

they were lauding this particular form of madness to the skies, as well

they might, seeing that our insensate profligacy and incontinence meant

their gain. The cause of a foreigner, good, bad, or indifferent--that

was the cause Clement Blaine most loved to champion in his journal. An

attack upon anything British, though the author of it might be the

basest creature ever outlawed from any community--that was certain of

ready and eager hospitality in the columns of _The Mass_.

I can conceive of no infamy which that journal was not ready to condone,

no offence it would not seek to justify--save and except the crime of

patriotism, loyalty, avowed love of Britain. And this obscene, mad-dog

policy, so difficult even to imagine at this time, was by curious

devious ways identified with Socialism. _The Mass_ was called a

Socialist organ. The fact may have been a libel upon Socialism, if not

upon Socialists; but so it was.

Be it said that at Cambridge I had rather surprised the evangelical

section of my college (Corpus Christi) by the part I played in founding

a short-lived institution called the Anonymous Society, the choicest

spirits in which affected canvas shirts and abstention from the use of

neckties. As Socialists, we invited the waiters of the college to a

soiree, at which a judicious blend of revolutionary economics and

bitter beer was relied upon to provide a flow of reasonable and

inexpensive entertainment. The society lapsed after a time, chiefly

owing, if I remember rightly, to an insufficiency of funds for

refreshments. But I had remained rather a person to be reckoned with at

the Union.

I regarded my meeting with Clement Blaine as something of an event, and

I very cheerfully and quite gratuitously contributed an article to his

journal dealing with some form of government subvention which I held to

be a State duty. (We wasted few words over the duties of the citizen in

those days.) It was as a result of that article that I was invited to a

Socialist soiree in which the moving spirit, at all events in the

refreshment-room, was Mr. Clement Blaine. Here I met a variety of queer

fish who called themselves Socialists. They were of both sexes, and upon

the whole they were a silly, inconsequent set. Their views rather

wearied me, despite my predisposition to favour them.

They were a kind of tepid, ineffectual anarchists, unconvinced and

wholly unconvincing. Broadly speaking, theirs was a policy of blind

reversal. They were not constructive, but they were opposed vaguely to

the existing order of things, and, particularly, to everything British.

They pinned their faith to the foreigner in all things, even though the

foreigner's whole energies might be devoted to the honest endeavour to

raise conditions in his country to a level approaching the British

standard. Any contention against the existing order, and, above all,

anything against Britain, appealed directly to these rather tawdry

people.

In this drab, ineffective gathering, I found one point of colour, like a

red rose on a dingy white tablecloth. This was Beatrice, the daughter of

Clement Blaine. I believe the man had a wife. One figures her as a worn

household drudge. In any case, she made no appearance in any of the

places in which I met Blaine, or his handsome daughter. Beatrice Blaine

was a new type to me. One had read of such girls, but I had never met

them. And I suppose novelty always has a certain charm for youth. One

felt that Beatrice had crossed the Rubicon. Mentally, at all events, one

gathered that she had thrown her bonnet over the windmill.

Physically, materially, I have no doubt that Beatrice was perfectly well

qualified to take care of herself. But here was a very handsome girl who

was entirely without reticence or reserve. With her, many things usually

treated with respect were--"all rot." Beatrice's aim in life was

pleasure, and she not merely admitted, but boasted of the fact. She did

not think much of her father's friends as individuals. She probably

objected to their dinginess. But she acclaimed herself a thoroughgoing

Socialist, I think because she believed that Socialism meant the

provision of plenty in money, dresses, pleasures, and so forth, for all

who were short of these commodities.

Perhaps I was a shade less dingy than the others. At all events,

Beatrice honoured me with her favour upon this occasion, and talked to

me of pleasure. So far as recollection serves me she connected pleasure

chiefly with theatres, restaurants, the habit of supping in public, and

the use of hansom cabs. At all events, within the week I squandered two

whole sovereigns out of my small hoard on giving this young pagan what

she called a "fluffy" evening. It reminded me more than a little of

certain rather frantic undergraduate excursions from Cambridge. But

Beatrice quoted luscious lines of minor poetry, and threw a certain

glamour over a quarter of the town which was a warren of tawdry

immorality; the hunting-ground of a pallid-faced battalion of alien

pimps and parasites.

England was then the one civilized country in the world which still

welcomed upon its shores the outcast, rejected, refuse of other lands;

and, as a matter of course, when foreign capitals became positively too

hot for irreclaimable characters, they flocked into Whitechapel and

Soho, there to indulge their natural bent for every kind of criminality

known to civilization, save those involving physical risk or physical

exertion for the criminal. There were then whole quarters of the

metropolis out of which every native resident had gradually been ousted,

in which the English language was rarely heard, except during a police

raid.

Tens of thousands of these unclassed, denationalized foreigners lived

and waxed fat by playing upon the foibles and pandering to the

weaknesses of the great city's native population. Others, of a higher

class, steadily ousted native labour in the various branches of

legitimate commerce. We know now, to our cost, something of the

malignant danger these foreigners represented. In indirect ways one

would have supposed their evil influence was sufficiently obvious then.

But I remember that the parties represented by such organs as the _Daily

Gazette_ prided themselves upon their furious opposition to any hint of

precautions making for the restriction of alien immigration.

England was the land of the free, they said. Yet, while boasting that

England was the refuge of the persecuted (as well as the rejected) of

all lands, we were so wonderfully broad-minded that we upheld anything

foreign against anything British, and were intolerant only of English

sentiment, English rule, English institutions. I believe Beatrice's

conviction of the superiority of the Continent and of foreigners

generally was based upon the belief that:

"On the Continent people can really enjoy themselves. There's none of

our ridiculous English puritanism, and early closing, and rubbish of

that sort there."

I am rather surprised that the crude hedonism of Beatrice should have

appealed to me, for my weaknesses had never really included mere fleshly

indulgence. But, as I have said, the girl had the charm of novelty for

me. I remember satirically assuring myself that, upon the whole, her

frank concentration upon worldly pleasure was more natural and pleasing

than Sylvia's rapt concentration upon other kinds of self-ministration.

Ours was a period of self-indulgence. Beatrice was, after all, only a

little more naive and outspoken than the majority in her thirst for

pleasure. And she was quite charming to look upon.

Almost the first man to whom I spoke regarding my dismissal from the

staff of the _Daily Gazette_ was Clement Blaine. I met him in Fleet

Street, and was asked in to his cupboard of an office.

"You are a man who knows every one in Fleet Street," I said. "I wish you

would keep an eye lifting for a journalistic billet for me."

And then I told him that I was leaving the _Daily Gazette_, and spoke of

the work I had done, and of my little journalistic experiences at

Cambridge.

He combed his glossy black beard with the fingers of one hand; a white

hand it was, save where cigarettes had browned the first and second

fingers; a hand that had never known physical toil, though its owner

always addressed "working" men as one of themselves. He wore a fiery red

necktie, and a fiery diamond on the little finger of the hand that

combed his beard. A self-indulgent life in the city was telling on him,

but Clement Blaine was still rather a fine figure of a man, in his

coarse, bold way. He had a varnished look, and, dressed for the part,

would have made a splendid stage pirate.

"It's odd you should have come to me to-day," he said. "Look here!"

He handed me a cutting from a daily paper.

At Holloway, yesterday afternoon, an inquest was held on the body of

a man named Joseph Cartwright, who is said to have been a

journalist. This man was found dead upon his bed, fully dressed, on

Tuesday morning. The medical evidence showed death to be due to

heart failure, and indicated alcoholism as the predisposing cause. A

verdict was returned in accordance with the medical evidence.

"He was my assistant editor," said Clement Blaine, as I looked up from

my perusal of this sorry tale.

"Really?" I said.

"Yes, a clever fellow; most accomplished journalist, but----" And Mr.

Blaine raised his elbow with a significant gesture, by which he

suggested the act of drinking.

Within the hour I had accepted an engagement as assistant editor of _The

Mass_ with the magnificent sum of two pounds a week by way of

remuneration.

"It's poor pay," said Blaine. "And I only wish I could double it. But

that's all it will run to at present, and--well, of course, it counts

for something to be working for the cause as directly as we do in _The

Mass_."

I nodded, not without qualms. My education made it impossible for me to

accept unreservedly the most scurrilous features of the journal. But the

cause was good--I was assured of that; and I would introduce

improvements, I thought. I was still very inexperienced. Meantime, I was

not to know the carking anxiety of the out-of-work. I could still pay my

way at the Bloomsbury lodging. This was something.

Beatrice expressed herself as delighted. I was to accumulate large sums

in various vague ways, and enjoy innumerable "fluffy" evenings with her.

What a queer mad jumble of a shut-in world our London was, and how

blindly self-centred we all were in our pursuit of immediate gain, in

our absolute indifference to the larger outside movements, the shaping

of national destinies, the warring of national interests! I remember

that we were quite triumphant, in our little owlish way, that year; for

the weight of socialistic and anti-national, anti-responsible feeling

had forced a time-serving Cabinet into cutting down our Navy by a

quarter at one stroke. The hurried scramblers after money and pleasure

were much gratified.

"We can make defensive alliances with other Powers," they said.

"Meantime--retrench, reduce, cut down, and give us more freedom in our

race. Freedom, freedom--that's the thing; and peace for the development

of commerce."

Undoubtedly, as a people, we were fey.

X

FACILIS DESCENSUS AVERNI

Love thou thy land, with love far-brought

From out the storied Past, and used

Within the Present, but transfused

Thro' future time by power of thought.

True love turned round on fixed poles,

Love that endures not sordid ends,

For English natures, freemen, friends,

Thy brothers and immortal souls.

But pamper not a hasty time,

Nor feed with crude imaginings

The herd, wild hearts and feeble wings

That every sophister can lime.

Deliver not the tasks of might

To weakness, neither hide the ray

From those, not blind, who wait for day,

Tho' sitting girt with doubtful light.

TENNYSON.

And now, as assistant editor of _The Mass_, I entered a period of my

life upon which I look back as one might who, by chance rather than by

reason of any particular fitness for survival, had won safely through a

whirlpool. The next few years were a troublous time, a stormy era of

transition, for most English people. For many besides myself the period

was a veritable maelstrom of confusion, of blind battling with

unrecognized forces, of wasted effort, neglected duty, futile struggles,

and slavish inertia.

At an early stage I learned to know Clement Blaine for a sweater of

underpaid labour, a man as grossly self-indulgent as he was

unprincipled, as much a charlatan as he was, in many ways, an ignoramus.

Yet I see now, more clearly than then, that even Clement Blaine was not

all bad. He was not even completely a charlatan. He believed he was

justified in making all the money he could, in any way that was

possible. It must be remembered, however, that at that time most people

really thought, whatever they might say, that the first and most obvious

duty in life was to make money for themselves.

Then, too, I think Blaine really believed that the sort of

anti-national, socialistic theories he advocated would make for the

happiness of the people; for the profit and benefit of the majority. He

was blinded by lack of knowledge of history and of human nature. He was

an extreme example, perhaps, but, after all, his mistaken idea that

happiness depended upon personal possession of this and that, upon

having and holding, was very generally accepted at that time. The old

saving sense of duty, love of country, national responsibility, and

pride of race, had faded and become unreal to a people feverishly bent

upon personal gain only. Nelson's famous signal and watchword was kept

alive, in inscriptions; in men's hearts and minds it no longer had any

meaning; it made no appeal. This is to speak broadly, of course, and of

the majority. We had some noble exceptions to the rule.

In looking back now upon that period, it seems to me, as I suppose to

all who lived through it, such a tragedy of confusion, of sordidness,

and of futility, that one is driven to take too sweepingly pessimistic a

view of the time. I have said a good deal of the anti-national

sentiment, because it was undoubtedly in the ascendant then. As history

shows us, this sentiment ruled; by it the ship of state was steered; by

it the defences of the Empire were cut down and down to the ultimate

breaking point. We call the administration of that period criminally

unpatriotic. As such "The Destroyers" must always figure in history. But

we must not forget that then, as now, we English people had as good a

Government as we deserved. The spirit of selfish irresponsibility was

not confined to Whitehall.

On the other hand, it must not be supposed that no patriotic party

existed. There was a patriotic party, and the exigencies of the time

inspired some of its leaders nobly. But the sheer weight of numbers, of

indifference, and of selfishness to which this party was opposed was too

much for it. The best method of realizing this nowadays is by the study

of the newspaper files for the early years of the century. From these it

will be seen that even the people and journals in whom devoted

patriotism survived, even the leaders who gave up their time and energy

(politics gave us such a man, the Army another, the Navy another,

literature another, and journalism gave us an editor in whom the right

fire burned brightly) to the task of warning and adjuring the public,

and seeking to awaken the nation to the lost sense of its dangers, its

duties, and its responsibilities; even these were forced by the weight

of public selfishness into using an almost apologetic tone, with

reference to the common calls of patriotism and Imperial unity.

People dismissed an obvious challenge of the national conscience with a

hurried and impatient wave of the hand. They were tired of this; they

had heard enough of the other; they were occupied with local interests

of the moment, and could not be bothered with this or that consideration

affecting the welfare of the world-wide shores of greater outside

Britain. And, accordingly, we find that the most patriotic and

public-spirited journal was obliged, for its life, to devote more

attention to a football match at the Crystal Palace than to a change of

public policy affecting the whole commercial future of a part of the

Empire twenty times greater than Britain. There were other journals,

organs of the self-centred majority, that would barely even mention an

Imperial development of that sort, and then but casually, as a matter of

no particular interest to their readers; as indeed it was.

I do not think that retrospection has coloured my view too darkly when I

say that my brief experience in Fleet Street made me feel that the

_Daily Gazette_ party, the supporters of "The Destroyers" (as naval folk

had named the Government of the day) consisted of a mass of smugly

hypocritical self-seekers; and that the party I served under Clement

Blaine were a mass of blatantly frank self-seekers. Such

generalizations can never be quite just, however. There were earnest and

devoted men in every section of the community. But, as a generalization,

as indicating the typical characteristics of the parties, I fear that my

view has been proved correct.

It would be quite a mistake to suppose that in the political world the

shortcomings were all on one side. Writers like myself, even men like

Clement Blaine, had only too much justification for the contempt they

poured upon the Conservative party. Selfishness, indolence, and the

worship of the fossilized party spirit, had eaten into the very vitals

of this section of the political world. The form of madness we called

party loyalty made the best men we had willing to sacrifice national to

personal interests. So-and-so must retain his place; loyalty to the

party demands our support there and there. We must give it, whatever the

consequences. The thing is not easy to understand; but it was so, and

the strongest and best men of the day were culpable in this.

The farther my London experiences took me, the greater became the mass

of my shattered illusions, broken ideals, and lost hopes. I remember my

reflections during a brief visit I paid to my mother in Dorset, when I

had spent an evening talking with my sister Lucy's husband. Doctor

Woodthrop was a good fellow enough, and my sister seemed happier with

him than one would have expected, remembering that it was rather the

desire for freedom, than love, which gave her to him.

Woodthrop was popular, honest, steady-going; a fine, typical Englishman

of the period, I suppose. In politics he was as his father before him,

though the name had changed from Tory to Conservative. He talked

politics for a week at election time. I would not say that he ever

thought politics. I know that he had no knowledge, and less interest,

where the affairs of his country were concerned, when I met and talked

with him during that visit. The country's defences were actually of far

less importance in his eyes than the country's cricket averages. As for

either social reform interests in England, or the affairs of the Empire

outside England, he simply could not be induced to give them even

conversational breathing space. They were as exotic to my sister's

husband as the ethics of esoteric Buddhism. But he was a thick and thin

Conservative. To be sure, he would have said, nothing would cause him to

waver in that.

As for myself, I defended the anti-national party in its repudiation of

Imperial responsibility by arguing that the domestic needs of the

country were too urgent and great to admit of any kind of expenditure,

in money or energy, upon outside affairs. We did not recognize that

internal reform and content were absolutely incompatible with shameless

neglect of fundamental duties.

We were as sailors who should concentrate upon drying and cleaning their

cabin, seeking at all hazards to make that comfortable, while refusing

to spare time for the ship's pumps, though the water was rising in her

hold from a score of external fissures. Our anti-nationalists and Little

Englanders were little cabin-dwellers, shirkers from the open deck,

careless of the ship's hull, and masts, and sails, busily bent only

upon the enrichment of their particular divisions among her saloons.

In the early days of my engagement as assistant editor of _The Mass_, I

think I may claim that I worked hard and with honest intent to make the

paper represent truly what I conceived to be the good and helpful side

of Socialism, of social progress and reform. But, if I am to be frank, I

fear I must admit that within six months of my first engagement by

Clement Blaine, I had ceased to entertain any sincere hope or ambition

in this direction. And yet I remained assistant editor of _The Mass_.

The two statements doubtless redound to my discredit, and I have little

excuse to offer. The work represented bread and butter for me, and that

counted for something, of course. But I will admit that I think I could

have found some more worthy employment, and should have done so but for

Beatrice Blaine, my employer's daughter.

Time and time again my gorge rose at being obliged to play my part--very

often, as a writer, the principal part--in what I knew to be an

absolutely dishonest piece of journalism. Once I remember refusing to

write a grossly malicious and untrue representation of certain actions

of John Crondall's in the Transvaal. But I am ashamed to say I revised

the proofs of the lying thing, and saw it to press, when a hireling of

Clement Blaine's had prepared it. The man was a discharged servant of

Crondall's, a convicted thief, as I afterwards learned, as well as a

most abandoned liar. But his scurrilous fabrication, after publication

in _The Mass_, was quoted at length by the _Daily Gazette_, and by the

journals of that persuasion throughout the country.

I hardly know how to explain my relations with Blaine's daughter. I

suppose the main point is she was beautiful, in the sense that certain

cats are beautiful. I rarely heard of my Weybridge friends now, and

never, directly, of Sylvia. My life seemed infinitely remote from that

of the luxurious Wheeler _menage_. When I chanced to earn a few guineas

with my pen outside the littered office of _The Mass_ (where the bulk of

the editorial work fell to me), the money was almost invariably devoted

to the entertainment of Beatrice. She was in several ways not unlike a

kitten, or something feline, of larger growth: the panther, for example,

in Balzac's thrilling story, "A Passion in the Desert."

I have never, before or since, met any woman so totally devoid of the

moral sense as Beatrice. Yet she had a heart that was not bad; indeed it

was a tender heart. But there was no moral sense to guide and balance

her.

I think of Beatrice as very much a product of that time. Her own

personal enjoyment, pleasure, indulgence; these formed alike the centre

and the limit of her thoughts and aims. And the suggestion that serious

thought or energy should be given to any other end, struck Beatrice as

necessarily insincere and absurd. As for duty, the word had no more real

application to her own life as Beatrice saw it than the counsels of

old-time chivalry for the pursuit of the Holy Grail.

Soberly considered, this is doubtless very grievous. But it must be

said that if Beatrice was singular in this, her singularity lay rather

in her frank disclosure of her attitude than in the attitude itself. I

am not sure that morally her absorption in such crude pleasures as she

knew, was a whit more culpable than the equal absorption of nine people

out of ten at that time, in money-getting, in sport, in society

functions, or in sheer idleness. The same oblivion to the sense of duty

was very generally characteristic; though in other matters, no doubt,

the moral sense was more active. In Beatrice it simply was not present

at all.

All this was tolerably clear to me even then; but I will not pretend

that it interfered much with the physical and emotional attraction which

Beatrice had for me. Apart from her my life was very drab in colour. I

had no recreations. In my time at Rugby and at Cambridge we either

practically ignored sport (so far, at all events, as actual

participation in it went), or lived for it. I had very largely ignored

it. Now, Beatrice Blaine represented, not exactly recreation,

perhaps--no, not that I think--but gaiety. The hours I spent in her

company were the only form of gaiety that entered into my life.

My feeling for Beatrice was not serious love, not at all a grand

passion; but denying myself the occasional pleasure of ministering to

her appetite for little outings would have been a harder task for me

than the acceptation of Sylvia Wheeler's dismissal. My attentions to

Beatrice were very much those of Balzac's Provencal to his panther,

after he had overcome his first terrors.

There were times when her acceptance of gifts or compliments from

another man made me believe myself really in love with Beatrice. Then

some peculiarly distasteful aspect of my journalistic work would be

forced upon me; I would receive some striking illustration of the

hopelessly sordid character of Blaine and his circle, of the policy of

_The Mass_, of the general trend of my life; and, seeing Beatrice's

indifferent acceptance of all this venality, I would turn from her with

a certain sense of revulsion--for three days. After that, I would return

to handsome Beatrice, with her feline graces and her warm colouring, as

a chilly, tired man turns from his work to his fireside.

In short, as time went on, I became as indifferent to ends and aims as

the most callous among those at whose indifference to matters of real

moment I had once girded so vehemently. And I lacked their excuse. I cut

no figure at all in the race for money and pleasure; unless my clinging

to Beatrice be accounted pursuit of pleasure. Certainly it lacked the

rapt absorption which characterized the multitude really in the race. I

fear I was rapidly degenerating into a common type of Fleet Street hack;

into nothing more than Clement Blaine's assistant. And then a quite new

influence came into my life.

XI

MORNING CALLERS

A woman mixed of such fine elements

That were all virtue and religion dead

She'd make them newly, being what she was.

GEORGE ELIOT.

A sandy-haired youth-of-all-work, named Rivers, spent his days in the

box we called the front office; a kind of lobby really, by which one

entered the tolerably large and desperately untidy room in which Blaine

and myself compiled each issue of _The Mass_. Blaine spent a good slice

of all his days in keeping appointments, usually in Fleet Street bars.

My days were spent in the main office of the paper, among the files, the

scissors and paste, the books of reference, and the three Gargantuan

waste-paper baskets. Here at different times I interviewed men of every

European nationality and every known calling, besides innumerable

followers of no recognized trade or profession. Among them all I cannot

call to mind more than two or three who, by the most charitable stretch

of imagination, could have been called gentlemen.

Most of them were obviously, and in all ways seedy, shady

characters--furtive, wordy creatures, full of vague, involved

grievances. The greater proportion were foreigners; scallywags from the

mean streets of every Continental capital; men familiar with prisons;

men who talked of the fraternity of labour, and never did any work; men

full of windy plans for the enrichment of humanity, who themselves must

always borrow and never repay--money, food, shelter, and the other

things for which honest folk give their labour.

If an English Cabinet Minister had offered us an explanation of any

political development we should have had small use for his contribution

in _The Mass_, unless as an advertisement of our importance. For their

teaching, for the text they gave us in our fulminations, we greatly

preferred the rancorous and generally scurrilous vapourings of some

unknown alien dumped upon our shores for the relief and benefit of his

own country.

We wanted no information from Admiralty Lords about the Navy, from

commanding officers about the Army, from pro-Consuls about the Colonies,

or from the Foreign Office about foreign relations. But a deserter or a

man dismissed from either of the Services, a broker ne'er-do-well

rejected as unfit by one of the Colonies, or a foreign agitator with

stories to tell of Britain's duplicity abroad; these were all welcome

fish for our net, and folk whom it was my duty to receive with

respectful attention. From their perjured lips it became my mechanical

duty to extract and publish wisdom for the use of our readers in the

guidance of their lives and the exercise of their rights as citizens and

ratepayers. I became adept at the work, and in the end accomplished it

daily without interest, and with only occasional qualms of conscience.

It was my living.

On a sunshiny morning in June, which I remember very well, the

sandy-haired Rivers brought me a visiting-card upon which I read the

name of "Miss Constance Grey." In one corner of the card the words "Cape

Town" had been crossed out and a London address written over them.

I was engaged at the time with a large, pale, fat man from Stettin,

whose mission it was to show me that the socialist working men of the

Fatherland dearly loved their comrades in England, and that the paying

of taxes for the defence of these islands was a preposterously absurd

thing, for the reason that the Socialists would never allow Germany to

go to war with England or with any other country. "The Destroyers," in

their truckling to Demos, had already cut down Naval and Army estimates

by more than one-half since their rise to power, and our Stettin

ambassador was priming me regarding a demand for further reductions,

prior to actual disarmament, to provide funds for the fixing of a

minimum day's pay and a maximum day's work.

The gentleman from Stettin was to provide us with material for a special

article and a leading article. His proposals were to be made a

"feature." However, I thought I had gone far enough with him at this

time; and so, looking from his pendulous jowl to the card in my hand, I

told Rivers to ask the lady to wait for two minutes, and to say that I

would see her then. I remember Herr Mitmann found the occasion

opportune for the airing of what I suppose he would have called his

sense of humour. His English and his front teeth were equally badly

broken, and his taste in jokes was almost as swinishly gross as his

appearance. But I was able to be quit of him at length, and then Rivers

ushered in Miss Constance Grey.

As I rose to provide my visitor with a chair, I received the impression

that she was a young and quietly well-dressed woman, with a notable pair

of dark eyes. I thought of her as being no more than five-and-twenty

years of age and pleasant to look upon. But her eyes were the feature

that seized one's attention. They produced an impression of light and

brilliancy, of vigour, intelligence, and charm.

"I called to see you at the office of the _Daily Gazette_, Mr. Mordan,

and this was the only address of yours they could give me, or I should

have hesitated about intruding on you in working hours. I bring you an

introduction from John Crondall."

And with that she handed me a letter in Crondall's writing, and nodded

in a friendly way when I asked permission to read it at once.

"Please do," she said.

She had no particular accent, but yet her speech differed slightly from

that of the conventional Englishwoman of her class--the refined and

well-educated Englishwoman, that is. I suppose the difference was rather

one of expression, tone, and choice of phrase than a matter of accent. I

doubt if one could easily find an example of it nowadays, increased

communication having so much broadened our own colloquial diction that

many of its conventional peculiarities have disappeared. But it existed

then, and after a time I learned to place it as characteristic of the

speech of Greater Britain, as distinguished from the English of those of

us who lived always in this capital centre of the Empire.

[Illustration: "RIVERS USHERED IN MISS CONSTANCE GREY"]

Miss Grey had the Colonial directness and vividness of speech; a larger,

freer diction upon the whole than that of the Londoner born and bred;

more racy, less clipped and formal, but, in certain ways, more correct.

The society _cliche_, and the society fads of abbreviation and accent,

were missing; and in their place was an easy, idiomatic directness,

distinctly noticeable to a man like myself who had actually never been

out of England. This it was that first struck me about Miss Grey; this

and the warm brilliance of her eyes: a graphic, moving speech, a frank,

compelling gaze; both indicative, as it seemed to me, of broadly

sympathetic understanding.

I read John Crondall's kindly letter with a good deal of interest, moved

by the fact that his terse, friendly phrases recalled to me a phase of

my own life which, though no more than a couple of years past, seemed to

me wonderfully remote. I had been new to London and to Fleet Street

then, full of aspirations, of earnestness, of independent aims and

hopes; fresh from the University and the more leisured days of my life

as the son of the rector of Tarn Regis. I had had glimpses of much that

was sordid and squalid in London life, at the period John Crondall's

letter recalled, but as yet there had been no sordidness in my own life.

All that was far otherwise now, I felt. Cambridge and Dorset were a

long way from the office of _The Mass_. I thought of the greasy Teuton

nondescript for whom I had kept Miss Grey waiting, and I felt colour

rise in my face as I read John Crondall's letter:

"I expect you have been burgeoning mightily since I left London, and I

should not be surprised to learn that you have put the _Daily Gazette_

and its kind definitely behind you. You remember our talks? Tut, my dear

fellow, Liberalism, Conservatism, Radicalism--it's of not the slightest

consequence, and they're all much of a muchness. The thing is to stand

to one's duty as a citizen of the Empire, not as a member of this or

that little tin coterie; and if we stick honourably to that, nothing

else matters. You will like Constance Grey; that is why I have asked her

to look you up. She's sterling all through; her father's daughter to the

backbone. And he was the man of whom Talbot said: 'Give me two Greys,

and'--and a couple of other men he mentioned--'and a free hand, and

Whitehall could go to sleep with its head on South Africa, and never be

disturbed again.'"--When Crondall quoted his dead chief, the man whose

personality had dominated British South Africa, one felt he had said his

utmost.--"The principal thing that takes her to London now, I believe,

is detail connected with a special series she has been engaged upon for

_The Times_; fine stuff, from what I have seen of it. It is marvellous

the grip this one little bit of a girl has of South African affairs."

"Yes," I thought, now the fact was mentioned, "I suppose she is small."

"I hope the articles will be well read, for there's a heap of the vitals

of South Africa in them; and even if they are to cut us adrift

altogether, it's as well 'The Destroyers' should know a little about us,

and the country. Constance Grey's name and introductions will take her

anywhere in London, or I would have asked your help in that way."

I thought of Clement Blaine's friends, my own Fleet Street circle, and

shifted uncomfortably in my chair.

"As it is, the boot may be rather on the other leg, and she may be of

some service to you. But in any case, I want you to know each other,

because you are a good chap, and will interest her, I know; and because

she is of the bigger Britain and will interest you. Things political

are, of course, looking pretty blue for us all, and your particular

friends--I rather hope perhaps they're not so much your friends by

now--are certainly doing their level best to cut all moorings. But one

must keep pegging away. The more cutting for them, the more splicing for

us. But I do wish we could blindfold Europe until these 'Destroyers' had

got enough rope, and satisfactorily hanged themselves; for if they go

much farther, their hanging will come too late to save the situation.

Well, salue!"

I allowed my eyes to linger over the tail-end of the letter, while I

thought. I was sensible of a very real embarrassment. There seemed a

kind of treachery to John Crondall, a kind of unfairness to Miss Grey,

in my receiving her there at all. By this time one had no illusions left

regarding Clement Blaine and his circle, nor about _The Mass_. I knew

that, at heart, I was ashamed, and with good reason, of my connection

with both. Still, there I was; it was my living; and--I suppose my eyes

must have wandered from the letter. At all events, evidently seeing that

I had finished reading it, my visitor spoke.

"I had an introduction to the editor of the _Daily Gazette_, so I took

advantage of being there this afternoon to see him. A nice man, I

thought, though I don't care for his paper. He remembered you as soon as

I mentioned your name, and told me you--you were here. He seemed quite

sorry you had left his paper; but I am sure I can understand the

attraction of a position in which the whole concern is more or less in

one's own hands. Mr. Delaney found me a copy of _The Mass_; so I have

been studying you before calling. Perhaps you have inadvertently done so

much by me, through _The Times_--a rather high and dry old institution,

isn't it?"

Naturally I had punctuated these remarks of hers, here and there. She

had a very bright, alert way in talking, and now she added, easily, a

sentence or two to the effect that it would be a dull world if we all

held precisely the same views. She did the thing well, and in a few

minutes I found myself chatting away with her in the most friendly

manner. She managed with the utmost deftness to remove all ground for my

embarrassment regarding my position. She talked for a while of South

Africa, and the life she had lived there prior to her father's death;

but she touched no topic which contained any controversial element. It

seemed her aunt, a sister of her father's, had accompanied her to

England, and she said:

"I promised my aunt, Mrs. Van Homrey, that I would induce you to spare

us an evening soon. She loves meeting friends of John Crondall. We dine

at eight, but would fix any other hour if it suited you better."

The end of it was I promised to dine with Miss Grey and her aunt in

South Kensington on the following evening, and, after a quarter of an

hour's very pleasant chat (twice interrupted by Rivers, who had people

in his cupboard waiting to see me) my visitor rose to take her

departure, with apologies for having trespassed upon a busy man's time.

I told her with some warmth that the loss of my time was of no

importance, and, with a thought as to the nature of my petty routine, I

repeated the assurance. She smiled:

"Ah, that's just the masculine insincerity of your gallantry," she said,

"unworn, I see, by working with women. John Crondall would have sent me

packing."

"No doubt his time is of more value--better occupied."

I had a mental vision of Clement Blaine (who grew stouter and slacker

day by day) sitting drinking with Herr Mitmann of Stettin, in a

favourite bar, within fifty yards of the office.

"Still the insincerity of politeness," she laughed. "You forget I have

read _The Mass_. I find you a terribly earnest partisan; very keenly

occupied, I should say. Till to-morrow evening, then!"

And she was gone, and Rivers was leading in, like a bear on a cord, a

tousled Polish Jew named Kraunski, who was teaching us how the

Metropolitan Police Force should be run, and how tyrannically its wicked

myrmidons oppressed worthy citizens of Houndsditch, like Mr.

Kraunski--quite a good _Mass_ feature.

So I stepped back again, feeling as though Constance Grey had carried

away the pale London sunlight with her when she left my littered den.

XII

SATURDAY NIGHT IN LONDON

"Corrupted freemen are the worst of slaves."--DAVID GARRICK.

I remember that the evening of the day following my dinner engagement

with Miss Grey and her aunt was consecrate, by previous arrangement, to

Beatrice Blaine. I had received seven guineas a couple of days before

for a rather silly and sensational descriptive article, the subject of

which had been suggested by Beatrice. Indeed, she had made me write it,

and liked the thing when it appeared in print. It described certain

aspects of the quarter of London which stood for pleasure in her eyes;

the quarter bounded by Charing Cross and Oxford Street, Leicester Square

and Hyde Park Corner.

I think I would gladly have escaped the evening with Beatrice if I could

have done so fairly. Seeing that I could not do this, and that my mood

seemed chilly, I plunged with more than usual extravagance, and sought

to work up all the gaiety I could. I had a vague feeling that I owed so

much to Beatrice; that the occasion in some way marked a crisis in our

relations. I did not mentally call it a last extravagance, but yet I

fancy that must have been the notion at the back of my mind; from which

one may assume, I think, that Constance Grey had already begun to

exercise some influence over me.

With the seven guineas clinking in the pockets of my evening

clothes--here, at all events, was a link with University days, for these

seldom-worn garments bore the name of a Cambridge tailor--I drove to the

corner of the road beside Battersea Park in which the Blaines lived, and

there picked up Beatrice, in all her vivid finery, by appointment. She

loved bright colours and daring devices in dress. That I should come in

a cab to fetch her was an integral part of her pleasure, and, if funds

could possibly be stretched to permit it, she liked to retain the

services of the same cab until I brought her back to her own door.

We drove to a famous showy restaurant close to Piccadilly Circus, where

Beatrice accomplished the kind of entrance which delighted her heart,

with attendants fluttering about her, and a messenger posting back to

the cab for a forgotten fan, and a deal of bustle and rustle of one sort

and another. A quarter of an hour was devoted to the choice of a menu in

a dining-room which resembled the more ornate type of music-hall, and

was of about the same size. The flashing garishness of it all delighted

Beatrice, and the heat of its atmosphere suited both her mood and her

extremely _decollete_ toilette.

I remember beginning to speak of my previous evening's engagement while

Beatrice sipped the rather sticky champagne, which was the first item of

the meal to reach us. But a certain sense of unfitness or

disinclination stopped me after a few sentences, and I did not again

refer to my new friends; though I had been thinking a good deal of

Constance Grey and her plain-faced, plain-spoken aunt. I felt strangely

out of key with my environment in that glaring place, and the strains of

an overloud orchestra, when they came crashing through the buzz of talk

and laughter, and the clatter of glass and silver, were rather a relief

to me as a substitute for conversation. I drank a great deal of

champagne, and resented the fact that it seemed to have no stimulating

effect upon me. But Beatrice was in a purring stage of contentment, her

colour high, her passionate eyes sparkling, and low laughter ever

atremble behind her full, red lips.

After the dinner we drove to another place exactly like the restaurant,

all gilding and crimson plush, and there watched a performance, which

for dulness and banality it would be difficult to equal anywhere. It was

more silly than a peep-show at a country fair, but it was all set in a

most gorgeous and costly frame. The man who did crude and ancient

conjuring tricks was elaborately finely dressed, and attended by

monstrous footmen in liveries of Oriental splendour. What he did was

absurdly tame; the things he did it with, his accessories, were

barbarously gorgeous.

This was not one of the great "Middle Class Halls," as they were called

during their first year of existence, but an old-established haunt of

those who aimed at "seeing life"--a great resort of ambitious young

bloods about town. Not very long before this time, a powerful trust had

been formed to confer the stuffy and inane delights of the "Hall" upon

that sturdily respectable suburban middle class--the backbone of London

society--which had hitherto, to a great extent, eschewed this particular

form of dissipation. The trust amassed wealth by striking a shrewd blow

at our national character. Its entertainments were to be all

refinement--"fun without vulgarity"; the oily announcements were

nauseating. But they answered their purpose only too well. The great and

still religious bourgeois class was securely hooked; and then the name

of "Middle Class Halls" was dropped, and the programme provided in these

garish palaces became simply an inexpensive and rather amateurish

imitation of those of the older halls, plus a kind of prudish,

sentimental, and even quasi-religious lubricity, which made them

altogether revolting, and infinitely deleterious.

But our choice upon this occasion had fallen upon the most famous of the

old halls. Of the performance I remember a topical song which evoked

enthusiastic applause. It was an incredibly stupid piece of doggerel

about England's position in the world; and the shiny-faced exquisite who

declaimed it strutted to and fro like a bantam cock at each fresh roar

of applause from the heated house. When he used the word "fight" he

waved an imaginary sword and assumed a ridiculous posture, which he

evidently connected with warlike exercises of some kind. The song

praised the Government--"A Government er business men; men that's got

sense"--and told how this wonderful Government had stopped the pouring

out of poor folks' money upon flag-waving, to devote it to poor folks'

needs. It alluded to the title that Administration had earned: "The

Destroyers"; and acclaimed it a proud title, because it meant the

destruction of "gold-laced bunkcombe," and of "vampires that were

preying on the British working man."

But the chorus was the thing, and the perspiring singer played conductor

with all the airs and graces of a spangled showman in a booth, while the

huge audience yelled itself hoarse over this. I can only recall two

lines of it, and these were to the effect that: "They"--meaning the

other Powers of civilization--"will never go for England, because

England's got the dibs."

It was rather a startling spectacle; that vast auditorium, in which one

saw countless flushed faces, tier on tier, gleaming through a haze of

tobacco smoke; their mouths agape as they roared out the vapid lines of

this song. I remember thinking that the doggerel might have been the

creation of my fat contributor from Stettin, Herr Mitmann, and that if

the music-hall public had reached this stage, I must have been

oversensitive in my somewhat hostile and critical attitude toward the

writings of that ponderous Teuton. I thought that for once _The Mass_

would almost lag behind its readers; though in the beginning I had

regarded Herr Mitmann's proposals as going beyond even our limits.

We left the hall while its roof echoed the jingling tail-piece of

another popular ditty, which tickled Beatrice's fancy hugely. In it the

singer expressed, without exaggeration and without flattery, a good

deal of the popular London attitude toward the pursuit of pleasure and

the love of pleasure resorts. I recall phrases like: "Give my regards to

Leicester Square--Greet the girls in Regent Street--Tell them in Bond

Street we'll soon meet"--and, "Give them my love in the Strand."

The atmosphere reeked now of spirits, smoke, and overheated humanity.

The voice of the great audience was hoarse and rather bestial in

suggestion. The unescorted women began to make their invitations

dreadfully pressing. Doubtless my mood coloured the whole tawdry

business, but I remember finding those last few minutes distinctly

revolting, and experiencing a genuine relief when we stepped into the

outer air.

But the lights were just as brilliant outside, the pavements as thronged

as the carpeted promenade, its faces almost as thickly painted as those

of the lady who wished her "regards" given to Leicester Square, or the

gentleman who had assured us that nobody wanted to fight England,

because England had the "dibs."

Beatrice was now in feverishly high spirits. She no longer purred

contentment; rather it seemed to me she panted in avid excitement, while

pouring out a running fire of comment upon the dress and appearance of

passers-by, as we drove to another palace of gilt and plush--a sort of

magnified Pullman car, with decorations that made one's eyes ache. Here

we partook of quite a complicated champagne supper. I dare say fifty

pounds was spent in that room after the gorgeously uniformed attendants

had begun their chant of "Time, gentlemen, please; time!" which

signified that the closing hour had arrived.

Beatrice kept up her excitement--or perhaps the champagne did this for

her--until our cab was half-way across Chelsea Bridge. Then she lay back

in her corner, and, I suppose, began to feel the grayness of the as yet

unseen dawn of a new day. But as I helped her out of the cab in

Battersea, she said she had thoroughly enjoyed her "fluffy" evening, and

thanked me very prettily. I returned in the cab as far as Westminster,

and there dismissed the man with the last of my seven guineas, having

decided to walk from there to my Bloomsbury lodging.

For a Socialist, my conduct was certainly peculiar. There were two of

us. We had had two meals, one of which was as totally unnecessary as the

other was overelaborate. And we had spent an hour or two in watching an

incredibly stupid and vulgar performance. And over this I had spent a

sum upon which an entire family could have been kept going for a couple

of months. But there were scores of people in London that night--some of

them passed me in cabs and carriages, as I walked from the Abbey toward

Fleet Street--who had been through a similar programme and spent twice

as much over it as I had. It was an extraordinarily extravagant period;

and it seemed that the less folk did in the discharge of their national

obligations as citizens, the more they demanded, and the more they

spent, in the name of pleasure.

The people who passed me, as I made my way eastward, were mostly in

evening dress, pale and raffish-looking. Many, particularly among the

couples in hansoms, were intoxicated, and making a painful muddle of

such melodies as those we had listened to at the music hall. Overeaten,

overdrunken, overexcited, overextravagant, in all ways figures of

incontinence, these noisy Londoners made their way homeward, pursued by

the advancing gray light of a Sabbath dawn in midsummer.

And Beatrice loved everything foreign, because the foreigners had none

of our stupid British Puritanism! And the British public was mightily

pleased with its Government, "The Destroyers," because they were cutting

down to vanishing point expenditure upon such superfluous vanities as

national defence, in order to devote the money to improving the

conditions in which the public lived, and to the reducing of their heavy

burdens as citizens of a great Empire. Money could not possibly be

spared for such ornamentation as ships and guns and bodies of trained

men. We could not afford it!

As I passed the corner of Agar Street a drunken cabdriver, driving two

noisily intoxicated men in evening dress, brought his cab into collision

with a gaunt, wolf-eyed man who had been scouring the gutter for scraps

of food. He was one of an army prowling London's gutters at that moment:

human wolves, questing for scraps of refuse meat. The space between each

prowler was no more than a few yards. This particular wretch was knocked

down by the cab, but not hurt. Cabby and his fares roared out drunken

laughter. The horse was never checked. But in the midst of their

laughter one of the passengers threw out a coin, upon which the human

wolf pounced like a bird of prey. I saw the glint of the coin. It was a

sovereign; very likely the twentieth those men had spent that night. For

that sum, four hundred of the gaunt, gutter-prowling wolves might have

been fed and sheltered.

Entering Holborn I ran against a man I knew, named Wardle, one of the

sub-editors of a Sunday newspaper, then on his way home from Fleet

Street. Wardle was tired and sleepy, but stopped to exchange a few words

of journalistic gossip.

"Rather sickening about the wind-up of the East Anglian Pageant," he

said, "isn't it? Did you hear of it?"

I explained that I had not been in Fleet Street that night, and had

heard nothing.

"Why, there was to be no end of a tumashi for the Saturday evening

wind-up, you know, and we were featuring it. We sent a special man up

yesterday to help the local fellow. Well, just as we'd got in about a

couple of hundred words of his introductory stuff, word came through

that the wires were interrupted, and not another blessed line did we

get. I tell you there was some tall cursing done, and some flying around

in the editorial 'fill-up' drawers. We were giving it first place--three

columns. One blessing, we found the stoppage was general. No one else

has got a line of East Anglian stuff to-night. Ours was the last word

from the submerged city of Ipswich. But it really is rather an odd

breakdown. No sign of rough weather; and, mind you there are a number

of different lines of communication. But they're all blocked, telegraph

and telephone. Our chief tried to get through via the Continent, just to

give us something to go on. But it was no go. Odd, isn't it?"

"Very," I agreed, as we turned; and I added, rather inanely: "One hears

a lot about East Anglian coast erosion."

Wardle yawned and grinned.

"Yes, to be sure. Perhaps East Anglia is cruising down Channel by now.

Or perhaps the Kaiser's landed an army corps and taken possession. That

Mediterranean business on Tuesday was pretty pronounced cheek, you know,

and, by all accounts, the result of direct orders from Potsdam. Only the

Kaiser's bluff, I suppose, but I'm told it's taken most of the Channel

Fleet down into Spanish waters."

I smiled at the activity of Wardle's journalistic imagination, and

thought of the music-hall crowd.

"Ah, well," I said, "'They'll never go for England, because England's

got the dibs'!"

"What ho!" remarked Wardle, with another yawn. And this time he was

really off.

And so I walked home alone to my lodgings, and climbed into bed,

thinking vaguely of Constance Grey, and what she would have thought of

my night's work; this, as the long, palely glinting arms of the Sabbath

dawn thrust aside the mantle of summer night from Bloomsbury.

XIII

THE DEMONSTRATION IN HYDE PARK

Winds of the World give answer! They are whimpering to and fro--

And what should they know of England who only England know?--

The poor little street-bred people that vapour and fume and brag,

They are lifting their heads in the stillness to yelp at the

English flag.

RUDYARD KIPLING.

As was usually the case on the day following one of Beatrice's "fluffy"

evenings, I descended to my never very tempting lodging-house breakfast

on that Sunday morning feeling the reverse of cheerful, and much

inclined to take the gloomiest view of everything life had to offer me.

Sunday was generally a melancholy day for me. It was my only day out of

Fleet Street, and, though I had long since taken such steps as I thought

I could afford toward transforming my bedroom into a sitting-room, there

was nothing very comfortable or homelike about it. I had dropped the

habit of churchgoing after the first few months of my London life,

without any particular thought or intention, but rather, I think, as one

kind of reflex action--a subconscious reflection of the views and habits

of those among whom I lived and worked.

Hearing a newsboy crying a "special" edition of some paper, I threw up

the window and bought a copy, across the area railings. It was the paper

for which Wardle worked. I found in it no particular justification for

any special issue, and, as a fact, the probability is the appearance of

this edition was merely a device to increase circulation, suggested

mainly by the fact that the ordinary issue had been delayed by the East

Anglian telegraphic breakdown. Regarding this, I found the following

item of editorial commentary:

"As is explained elsewhere, a serious breakdown of telegraphic

communication has occurred between London and Harwich, Ipswich and East

Anglia generally, as a result of which our readers are robbed of special

despatches regarding last night's conclusion of the East Anglian

Pageant. It is thought that the breakdown is due to some electrical

disturbance of the atmosphere resulting in a fusion of wires.

"But as an example of the ridiculous lengths to which the national

defence cranks will go in their hatching of alarmist reports, a rumour

was actually spread in Fleet Street at an early hour this morning that

this commonplace accident to the telegraph wires was caused by an

invading German army. This ridiculous _canard_ is reminiscent of some of

the foolish scares which frightened our forefathers a little more than a

century ago, when the Corsican terrorized Europe. But our rumour-mongers

are too far out of date for this age. It is unfortunate that the

advocates of militarism should receive parliamentary support of any

kind. The Opposition is weakly and insignificant enough in all

conscience, without courting further unpopularity by floating British

public feeling in this way, and encouraging the cranks among its

following to bring ridicule upon the country.

"The absurd _canard_ to which we have referred is maliciously ill-timed.

It will doubtless be reported on the Continent, and may injure us there.

But we trust our friends in Germany will do us the justice of

recognizing at once that this is merely the work of an irresponsible and

totally unrepresentative clique, and in no sort a reflection of any

aspect of public feeling in this country. We are able to state with

certainty that last Tuesday's regrettable incident in the Mediterranean

has been satisfactorily and definitely closed. Admiral Blennerhaustein

displayed characteristic German courtesy and generosity in his frank

acceptance of the apology sent to him from Whitehall; and the report

that our Channel Fleet had entered the Straits of Gibraltar is

incorrect. A portion of the Channel Fleet had been cruising off the

coast of the Peninsula, and is now on its way back to home waters. Our

relations with His Imperial Majesty's Government in Berlin were never

more harmonious, and such a _canard_ as this morning's rumour of

invasion is only worthy of mention for the sake of a demonstration of

its complete absurdity. If, as was stated, the author of this puerile

invention is a Navy League supporter, who reached London in a motor-car

from Harwich soon after daylight this morning, our advice to him is to

devote the rest of the day to sleeping off the effects of an

injudicious evening in East Anglia."

Failing the East Anglian Pageant, the paper's "first feature," I

noticed, consisted of a lot of generously headed particulars regarding

the big Disarmament Demonstration to be held in Hyde Park that

afternoon. It seemed that this was to be a really big thing, and I

decided to attend in the interests of _The Mass_. The President of the

Local Government Board and three well-known members on the Government

side of the House were to speak. The Demonstration had been organized by

the National Peace Association for Disarmament and Social Reform, of

which the Prime Minister had lately been elected President. Delegates,

both German and English, of the Anglo-German Union had promised to

deliver addresses. Among other well-known bodies who were sending

representatives I saw mention of the Anti-Imperial and Free Tariff

Society, the Independent English Guild, the Home Rule Association, the

Free Trade League, and various Republican and Socialist bodies. The

paper said some amusement was anticipated from a suggested counter

demonstration proposed by a few Navy League enthusiasts; but that the

police would take good care that no serious interruptions were allowed.

As the Demonstration was fixed for three o'clock in the afternoon, I

decided to go up the river by steamboat to Kew after my late breakfast.

It was a gloriously fine morning, and on the river I began to feel a

little more cheerful. As we passed Battersea Park I thought of Beatrice,

who always suffered from severe depressions after her little outings.

Her spirits were affected; in my case, restaurant food, inferior wine,

and the breathing of vitiated air was paid for by nothing worse than a

headache and a morning's discomfort.

(One of the curses of the time, which seemed to grow more acute as the

habit of extravagance and the thirst for pleasure increased, was the

outrageous adulteration of all food-stuffs, and more particularly of all

alcoholic liquors, which prevailed not alone in the West End of London,

but in every city. Home products could only be obtained in clubs and in

the houses of the rich. Their quantity was insufficient to admit of

their reaching the open markets. In the cities we lived entirely upon

foreign products, and their adulteration had reached a most amazing

limit of badness.)

My thought of Beatrice was brief that morning, but I continued during

most of my little excursion to dwell upon my new friends in South

Kensington. I wondered how Constance Grey spent Sunday in London, and

whether the confinement of the town oppressed her after the spacious

freedom of the South African life she had described to me. I remembered

that I had promised to call upon her and her aunt very soon, and

wondered whether that afternoon, after the Demonstration, would be too

soon. I mentally decided that it would, but that I would go all the

same.

And then, suddenly, as the steamer passed under Hammersmith Bridge, a

thought went through me like cold steel:

"She will very soon return to that freer, wider life out there in South

Africa."

How I hated the place. South Africa! I had always associated it with

Imperialism, militarism--"empireism," as I called it in my own mind: the

strange, outside interests, which one regarded as opposing home

interests, social reform, and the like. Though I did not know that any

political party considerations influenced me one atom, I was in reality,

like nearly every one else at that time, mentally the slave and creature

of party feeling, party tradition, party prejudice. But now I had a new

cause for hating those remote uplands of Empire, those outside places.

Sitting under a tree in Kew Gardens, I had leisure in which to browse

over the matter, and, upon reflection, I was astonished that this sudden

thought of mine should have struck so shrewdly, so violently, into my

peace of mind. I tried to neutralize its effect by reminding myself that

I had met Constance Grey only twice; that she was in many ways outside

my purview; that she was the intimate friend of people who had helped to

make history, the special contributor to _The Times_, with her

introductions to ex-Cabinet Ministers in England and her other relations

with great people; that such a woman could never play an intimate part

in my life. Her friendliness could not be the prelude to friendship with

the assistant editor of _The Mass_; it probably meant no more than a

courteous deference to John Crondall's whim, I told myself. But I would

call at the South Kensington flat, certainly; it would be boorish to

refrain, and--there was no denying I should have been mightily

perturbed if any valid reason had appeared against my going to see

Constance Grey after doing my duty by the Demonstration.

The newsboys were putting a good deal of feeling into their crying of

special editions when I reached the streets again; but I was not

inclined to waste further pence upon the _Sunday News'_ moralizings over

the evolution of _canards_. I took a mess of some adulterated pottage at

a foreign restaurant in Notting Hill, as I had no wish to return to

Bloomsbury before the Demonstration. The waiter--either a Swiss or a

German--asked me:

"Vad you sink, sare, of ze news from ze country?"

I asked him what it was, and he handed me a fresh copy of the _Sunday

News_, headed: "Special Edition. Noon."

"By Jove!" I thought; "no Sunday dinner for Wardle! They couldn't have

printed this in the small hours."

But the only new matter in this issue was a short announcement, headed

in poster type, as follows:

"EAST ANGLIA'S ISOLATION

RAILWAY COMMUNICATION STOPPED

STRANGE SUPPORT OF INVASION CANARD

_IS THIS A TORY HOAX?_

(SPECIAL)

"The preposterous rumour of a German invasion of England is receiving

mysterious support. We hear from a reliable source that some Imperialist

and Navy League cranks have organized a gigantic hoax by way of

opposition to the Disarmament Demonstration. If the curious breakdown of

communication with the east coast does prove to be the work of political

fanatics, we think, and hope, that these gentry may shortly be

convinced, in a manner they are never likely to forget, that, even in

this land of liberty, the crank is not allowed to interfere with the

transaction of public business.

"No trains have reached Liverpool Street from the northeast this

morning, and communication cannot be established beyond Chelmsford.

Whatever the cause of this singular breakdown may be, our readers will

soon know it, for, in order finally to dispel any hint of credence which

may be attached in some quarters to the absurd invasion report, we have

already despatched two representatives in two powerful motor-cars,

northeastward from Brentwood, with instructions to return to that point

and telegraph full particulars directly they can discover the cause of

the stoppage of communication.

"Further special editions will be issued when news is received from East

Anglia."

"Yes," I said to the waiter; "it's a curious affair."

"You believe him, sare--zat Shermany do it?"

"Eh? No; certainly not. Do you?"

"Me? Oh, sare, I don' know nozzing. Vaire shstrong, sare, ze Sherman

Armay."

The fellow's face annoyed me in some way. It, and his grins and

gesticulations, had a sinister seeming. My trade brought me into contact

with so many low-class aliens. I told myself I was getting insular and

prejudiced, and resumed my meal with more thought for myself and my

tendencies and affairs than for the East Anglian business. I have

wondered since what the waiter thought about while I ate; whether he

thought of England, Germany, and of myself, as representing the British

citizen. But, to be sure, for aught I know, his thoughts may have been

ordered for him from Berlin.

The Demonstration drew an enormous concourse of people to Hyde Park. The

weather being perfect, a number of people made an outing of the

occasion, and one saw whole groups of people who clearly came from

beyond Whitechapel, the Borough, Shepherd's Bush, and Islington. As had

been anticipated, a few well-dressed people endeavoured to run a

counter-demonstration under a Navy League banner; but their following

was absurdly small, and the crowd gave them nothing but ridicule and

contempt.

The President of the Local Government Board received a tremendous

ovation. For some minutes after his first appearance that enormous crowd

sang, "He's a jolly good fellow!" with great enthusiasm. Then, when this

member of the Government at last succeeded in getting as far as: "Mr.

Chairman, ladies and gentlemen," some one started the song with the

chorus containing the words: "They'll never go for England, because

England's got the dibs." This spread like a line of fire in dry grass,

and in a moment the vast crowd was rocking to the jingling rhythm of the

song, the summer air quivering to the volume of its thousand-throated

voice.

The President of the Local Government Board had been rather suspected of

tuft-hunting recently, and his appearance in the stump orator's role,

and in the cause of disarmament, was wonderfully popular. In his long

career as Labour agitator, Socialist, and Radical, he had learned to

know the popular pulse remarkably well; and now he responded cleverly to

the call of the moment. His vein was that of the heavy, broad

bludgeoning sarcasm which tickles a crowd, and his theme was not the

wickedness, but the stupidity and futility of all "Jingoism,"

"spread-eagleism," "tall-talk," and "gold-lace bunkcombe."

"I am told my honourable friends of the opposition," he said, with an

ironical bow in the direction of the now folded Navy League banner,

"have played some kind of a practical joke in the eastern counties

to-day. Well, children will be children; but I am afraid there will have

to be spankings if half that I hear is true. They have tried to frighten

you into abandoning this Demonstration with a pretended invasion of

England. Well, my friends, it does not look to me as though their

invasion had affected this Demonstration very seriously. I seem to fancy

I see quite a number of people gathered together here. (It is estimated

that over sixty thousand people were trying to hear his words.) But all

I have to say on this invasion question is just this: If our friends

from Germany have invaded East Anglia, let us be grateful for their

enterprise, and, as a nation of shopkeepers should, let us make as much

as we can out of 'em. But don't let us forget our hospitality. If our

neighbours have dropped in in a friendly way, why, let's be sure we've

something hot for supper. Perhaps a few sausages wouldn't be taken

amiss. (The laughter and applause was so continuous here that for some

moments nothing further could be heard.) No, my friends, this invasion

hoax should now be placed finally upon the retired list. It has been on

active service now since the year 1800, and I really think it's time our

spread-eagle friends gave us a change. Let me for one moment address you

in my official capacity, as your servant and a member of the Government.

This England of ours is about as much in danger of being invaded as I am

of becoming a millionaire, and those of you----"

The speaker's next words never reached me, being drowned by a great roar

of laughter and applause. Just then I turned round to remonstrate with a

man who was supporting himself upon my right shoulder. I was on the edge

of the one narrow part of the crowd, against some iron railings. As I

turned I noticed a number of boys tearing along in fan-shaped formation,

and racing toward the crowd from the direction of Marble Arch. My eyes

followed the approaching boys, and I forgot the fellow who had been

plaguing me. The lads were all carrying bundles of papers, and now, as

they drew nearer, I could see and hear that they were yelling as they

ran.

"Another special edition," I thought. "No sort of a Sunday for poor

Wardle."

The President of the Local Government Board had resumed his speech, and

I could hear his clean-cut words distinctly. He had a good incisive

delivery. Across his words now the hoarse yell of an approaching

newsboy smote upon my ears:

"Extry speshul! Sixpence! German Army Corps in England! Speshul!

Invashen er Sufferk! Speshul--sixpence! German Army Corps--sixpence!

Invashen!"

"By Jove!" I thought. "That's rough on our disarmament feature from Herr

Mitmann!"

I very well remember that that precisely was my thought.

XIV

THE NEWS

He could not hear Death's rattle at the door,

He was so busy with his sottishness.

TURNER.

The chance of my position on the edge of the crowd nearest to Marble

Arch caused me to be among those who secured a paper, and at the

comparatively modest price of sixpence. Two minutes later, I saw a

member of the committee of the Demonstration hand over half-a-crown for

one of the same limp sheets, all warm and smeary from the press. And in

two more minutes the newsboys (there must have been fifty of them) were

racing back to Marble Arch, feverishly questing further supplies, and, I

suppose, reckoning as they ran their unaccustomed gains.

The news, mostly in poster type, was only a matter of a few lines of

comment, and a few more lines of telegraphic despatch from Brentwood:

"Telegraphic communication with Chelmsford has now been cut off, but one

of our special representatives, who succeeded in obtaining a powerful

six-cylinder motor-car, has reached Brentwood, after a racing tour to

the northeastward. We publish his despatch under all possible reserve.

He is a journalist of high repute, but we venture to say with

confidence that he has evidently been imposed upon by the promoters of

the most abominably wicked hoax and fraud ever perpetrated by criminal

fanatics upon a trusting public. We have very little doubt that a number

of these rabid advocates of that spirit of militarism to which the

British public will never for one moment submit, will be cooling their

heated brains in prison cells before the night is out."

And then followed the despatch from Brentwood, which said:

"Roads, railways, communication of all kinds absolutely blocked. Coastal

regions of Suffolk and South Norfolk, and possibly Essex, are occupied

by German soldiers. A cyclist from near Harwich says the landing was

effected last evening, the most elaborate preparations and arrangements

having been made beforehand. My car was fired at near Colchester.

Chelmsford is now occupied by German cavalry, cyclist and motor corps.

Have not heard of any loss of life, but whole country is panic-stricken.

Cannot send further news. Telegraph office closed to public, being

occupied in official business."

That was all. As my eyes rose from the blurred surface of the news-sheet

the picture of the crowd absorbed me, like a stage-spectacle. There were

from forty to sixty thousand people assembled, of all ages and classes.

Among them were perhaps one thousand, perhaps two thousand, copies of

the newspaper. Some ten thousand people were craning necks and straining

eyes to read those papers. The rest were making short, hoarse,

frequently meaningless ejaculations.

I saw one middle-aged man, who might have been a grocer, and a deacon in

his place of worship, fold up his paper after reading it and thrust it,

for future reference, in the tail-pocket of his sombre Sunday coat. But

his neighbours in the crowd would not have that. A number of

outstretched hands suddenly surrounded him. I saw his face pale. "Give

us a look!" was all the sense I grasped from a score of exclamations.

The grocer's paper was in fragments on the grass ten seconds later, and

its destroyers were reaching out in other directions.

"It's abominable," I heard the grocer muttering to himself; and his

hands shook as though he had the palsy.

But in other cases the papers passed whole from hand to hand, and their

holders read the news aloud. I think the entire crowd had grasped the

gist of it inside of four minutes; and their exclamatory comments were

extraordinary, grotesque.