PIONEERS.
Before sitting down to breakfast, on this dim and dreary morning in
February, George Brand went to one of the windows of his sitting-room
and looked abroad on the busy world without. Busy indeed it seemed to
be--the steamers hurrying up and down the river, hansoms whirling along
the Embankment, heavily laden omnibuses chasing each other across
Waterloo Bridge, the underground railway from time to time rumbling
beneath those wintry-looking gardens, and always and everywhere the
ceaseless murmur of a great city. In the midst of all this eager
activity, he was only a spectator. Busy enough the world around him
seemed to be; he alone was idle.
Well, what had he to look forward to on this dull day, when once he had
finished his breakfast and his newspapers? It had already begun to
drizzle; there was to be no saunter up to the park. He would stroll
along to his club, and say "Good morning" to one or two acquaintances.
Perhaps he would glance at some more newspapers. Perhaps, tired of
reading news that did not interest, and forming opinions never to be
translated into action, he would take refuge in the library. Somehow,
anyhow, he would desperately tide over the morning till lunch-time.
Luncheon would be a break; but after--? He had not been long enough in
England to become familiar with the whist-set; similarly, he had been
too long abroad to be proficient in English billiards, even if he had
been willing to make either whist or pool the pursuit of his life. As
for afternoon calls and tea-drinking, that may be an interesting
occupation for young gentlemen in search of a wife, but it is too
ghastly a business for one who has no such views. What then? More
newspapers? More tedious lounging in the hushed library? Or how were the
"impracticable hours" to be disposed of before came night and sleep?
George Brand did not stay to consider that, when a man in the prime of
health and vigor, possessed of an ample fortune, unfettered by anybody's
will but his own, and burdened by neither remorse nor regret,
nevertheless begins to find life a thing too tedious to be borne, there
must be a cause for it. On the contrary, instead of asking himself any
questions, he set about getting through the daily programme with an
Englishman's determination to be prepared for the worst. He walked up to
his club, the Waldegrave, in Pall Mall. In the morning-room there were
only two or three old gentlemen, seated in easy-chairs near the fire,
and grumbling in a loud voice--for apparently one or two were rather
deaf--about the weather. Brand glanced at a few more newspapers. Then a
happy idea occurred to him; he would go up to the smoking-room and smoke
a cigarette.
In this vast hall of a place there were only two persons--one standing
with his back to the fire, the other lying back in an easy-chair. The
one was a florid, elderly gentleman, who was first cousin to a junior
Lord of the Treasury, and therefore claimed to be a profound authority
on politics, home and foreign. He was a harmless poor devil enough, from
whom a merciful Providence had concealed the fact that his brain-power
was of the smallest. His companion, reclining in the easy-chair, was a
youthful Fine Art Professor; a gelatinous creature, a bundle of languid
affectations, with the added and fluttering self-consciousness of a
school-miss. He was absently assenting to the propositions of the florid
gentleman; but it is probable that his soul was elsewhere.
These propositions were to the effect that leading articles in a
newspaper were a mere impertinence; that he himself never read such
things; that the business of a newspaper was to supply news; and that an
intelligent Englishman was better capable of forming a judgment on
public affairs than the hacks of a newspaper-office. The intelligent
Englishman then proceeded to deliver his own judgment on the question of
the day, which turned out to be--to Mr. Brand's great surprise--nothing
more nor less than a blundering and inaccurate _resume_ of the opinions
expressed in a leading article in that morning's _Times_. At length this
one-sided conversation between a jackanapes and a jackass became too
intolerable for Brand, who threw away his cigarette, and descended once
more into the hall.
"A gentleman wishes to see you, sir," said a boy; and at the same moment
he caught sight of Lord Evelyn.
"Thank God!" he exclaimed, hurrying forward to shake his friend by the
hand. "Come, Evelyn, what are you up to? I can't stand England any
longer; will you take a run with me?--Algiers, Egypt, anywhere you like.
Let us drop down to Dover in the afternoon, and settle it there. Or what
do you say to the Riviera? we should be sure to run against some people
at one or other of the towns. Upon my life, if you had not turned up, I
think I should have cut my throat before lunch-time."
"I have got something better for you to do than that," said the other;
"I want you to see O'Halloran. Come along; I have a hansom here. We
shall just catch him at Atkinson's, the book-shop, you know."
"Very well; all right," Brand said, briskly: this seemed to be rather a
more cheerful business than cutting one's throat.
"He's at his telegraph-wire all night," Lord Evelyn said, in the hansom.
"Then he lies down for a few hours' sleep on a sofa. Then he goes along
to his rooms in Pimlico for breakfast; but at Atkinson's he generally
stops for awhile on his way, to have his morning drink."
"Oh, is that the sort of person?"
"Don't make any mistake. O'Halloran may be eccentric in his ways of
living, but he is one of the most remarkable men I have ever run
against. His knowledge, his reading--politics, philosophy, everything,
in short--the brilliancy of his talking when he gets excited, even the
extraordinary variety of his personal acquaintance--why, there is
nothing going on that he does not know about."
"But why has this Hibernian genius done nothing at all?"
"Why? You might as well try to kindle a fire with a flash of lightning.
He has more political knowledge and more power of brilliant writing than
half the editors in London put together; but he would ruin any paper in
twenty-four hours. His first object would probably be to frighten his
readers out of their wits by some monstrous paradox; his next to show
them what fools they had been. I don't know how he has been kept on so
long where he is, unless it be that he deals with news only. I believe
he had to be withdrawn from the gallery of the House; he was very
impatient over the prosy members and his remarks about them began to
reach the Speaker's ear too frequently."
"I gather, then, that he is merely a clever, idle, Irish vagabond, who
drinks."
"He does not drink. And as for his Irish name I suppose he must be Irish
either by descent or birth; but he is continually abusing Ireland and
the Irish. Probably, however, he would not let anybody else do so."
Mr. Atkinson's book-shop in the Strand was a somewhat dingy-looking
place, filled with publications mostly of an exceedingly advanced
character. Mr. Atkinson himself claimed to be a bit of a reformer; and
had indeed brought himself, on one or two occasions, within reach of the
law by issuing pamphlets of a somewhat too fearless aim. On this
occasion he was not in the shop; so the two friends passed through,
ascended a dark little stair, and entered a room which smelled strongly
of tobacco-smoke.
The solitary occupant of this chamber, to whom Brand was immediately
introduced, was a man of about fifty, carelessly if not even shabbily
dressed, with large masses of unkempt hair, and eyes, dark gray,
deep-set, that had very markedly the look of the eyes of a lion. The
face was worn and pallid, but when lit up with excitement it was capable
of much expression; and Mr. O'Halloran, when he did become excited, got
very much excited indeed. He had laid aside his pipe, and was just
finishing his gin and soda-water, taken from Mr. Atkinson's private
store.
However, the lion so seldom roars when it is expected to roar. Instead
of the extraordinary creature whom Lord Evelyn had been describing,
Brand found merely an Irish newspaper-reporter, who was either tired, or
indifferent, or sleepy. They talked about some current topic of the hour
for a few minutes; and then Mr. O'Halloran, with a yawn, rose and said
he must go home for breakfast.
"Stay a bit, O'Halloran," Lord Evelyn said, in despair; "I--I
wanted--the fact is, Mr. Brand has been asking me about Ferdinand
Lind--"
"Oh," said the bushy-headed man, with a quick glance of scrutiny at the
tall Englishman. "No, no," he added, with a smile, addressing himself
directly to Brand, "it is no use your touching anything of that kind.
You would want to know too much. You would want to have the earth dug
away from over the catacombs before you went below to follow a solitary
guide with a bit of candle. You could never be brought to understand
that the cardinal principle of all secret societies has been that
obedience is an end and aim in itself, and faith the chiefest of all the
virtues. You wouldn't take anything on trust; you have the pure English
temperament."
Brand laughed, and said nothing. But O'Halloran sat down again, and
began to talk in an idle, hap-hazard sort of fashion of the various
secret societies, religious, social, political that had become known to
the world; and of their aims, and their working, and how they had so
often fallen away into the mere preservation of mummeries, or declared
themselves only by the commission of useless deeds of revenge.
"Ah," said Brand, eagerly, "that is precisely what I have been urging on
Lord Evelyn. How can you know, in joining such an association, that you
are not becoming the accomplices of men who are merely planning
assassination? And what good can come of that? How are you likely to
gain anything by the dagger? The great social and political changes of
the world come in tides; you can neither retard them nor help them by
sticking pins in the sand."
"I am not so sure," said the other, doubtfully. "A little wholesome
terrorism has sometimes played its part. The 1868 amnesty to the Poles
in Siberia was not so long after--not more than a year after, I
think--that little business of Berezowski. Faith, what a chance that man
had!"
"Who?"
"Berezowski," said he, with an air of contemplation. "The two biggest
scoundrels in the world in one carriage; and he had two shots at them.
Well, well, Orsini succeeded better."
"Succeeded?" said George Brand. "Do you call that success? He had the
reward that he richly merited, at all events."
"You do not think he was successful?" he said, calmly. "Then you do not
know how the kingdom of Italy came by its liberty. Who do you think was
the founder of that kingdom of Italy?--which God preserve till it become
something better than a kingdom! Not Cavour, with all his wiliness; not
your Galantuomo, the warrior who wrote up Aspromonte in the face of all
the world as the synonyme for the gratitude of kings; not Garibaldi,
who, in spite of Aspromonte, has become now merely the _concierge_ to
the House of Savoy. The founder of the kingdom of Italy was Felix
Orsini--and whether heaven or hell contains him, I drink his health!"
He suited the action to the word. Brand looked on, not much impressed.
"That is all nonsense, O'Halloran!" Lord Evelyn said, bluntly.
"I tell you," O'Halloran said, with some vehemence, "that the 14th of
January, 1858, kept Louis Napoleon in such a state of tremor, that he
would have done a good deal more than lend his army to Sardinia to sweep
the Austrians out rather than abandon himself to the fate that Cavour
plainly and distinctly indicated. But for the threat of another dose of
Orsini pills, do you think you would ever have heard of Magenta and
Solferino?"
He seemed to rouse himself a bit now.
"No," he said, "I do not approve of assassination as a political weapon.
It seldom answers. But it has always been the policy of absolute
governments, and of their allies the priests and the police, to
attribute any murders that might occur to the secret societies, and so
to terrify stupid people. It is one of the commonest slanders in
history. Why, everybody knows how Fouche humbugged the First Napoleon,
and got up vague plots to prove that he, and he alone, knew what was
going on. When Karl Sand killed Kotzebue--oh, of course, that was a fine
excuse for the German kings and princes to have another raid against
free speech, though Sand declared he had nothing in the world to do with
either the Tugendbund or any such society. Who now believes that Young
Italy killed Count Rossi? Rossi was murdered by the agents of the
clericals; it was distinctly proved. But any stick is good enough to
beat a dog with. No matter what the slander is, so long as you can get
up a charge, either for the imprisoning of a dangerous enemy or for
terrifying the public mind. You yourself, Mr. Brand--I can see that your
only notion of the innumerable secret societies now in Europe is that
they will probably assassinate people. That's what they said about the
Carbonari too. The objects of the Carbonari were plain as plain could
be; but no sooner had General Pepe kicked out Ferdinand and put in a
constitutional monarch, than Austria must needs attribute every murder
that was committed, to those detestable Carbonari, so that she should
call upon Prussia and Russia to join her in strangling the infant
liberties of Europe. You see, we can't get at those Royal slanderers. We
can get at a man like Sir James Graham, when we force him to apologize
in the House of Commons for having said that Mazzini instigated the
assassination of the spies Emiliani and Lazzareschi."'
"But, good heavens!" exclaimed Brand, "does anybody doubt that that was
a political double murder?"
O'Halloran shrugged his shoulders, and smiled.
"You may call it murder if you like; others might call it a fitting
punishment. But all I was asking you to do was to remove from your mind
that bugbear that the autocratic governments of Europe have created for
their own uses. No secret society--if you except those Nihilists, who
appear to have gone mad altogether--I say, no secret society of the
present day recognizes political assassination as a normal or desirable
weapon; though it may have to be resorted to in extreme cases. You, as
an individual, might, in certain circumstances, lawfully kill a man; but
that is neither the custom, nor the object, nor the chief thought of
your life."
"And are there many of these societies?" Brand asked.
O'Halloran had carelessly lit himself another pipe.
"Europe is honey-combed with them. They are growing in secret as rapidly
as some kindred societies are growing in the open. Look at the German
socialists--in 1871 they polled only 120,000 votes; in 1874 they polled
340,000: I imagine that Herr Furst von Bismarck will find some
difficulty in suppressing that Frankenstein monster he coquetted so long
with. Then the Knights of Labor in America: you will hear something of
them by-and-by, or I am mistaken. In secret and in the open alike there
is a vast power growing and growing, increasing in volume and bulk from
hour to hour, from year to year, God only knows in what fashion it will
reveal itself. But you may depend on it that when the spark does spring
out of the cloud--when the clearance of the atmosphere is due--people
will look back on 1688, and 1798, and 1848 as mere playthings. The Great
Revolution is still to come; it may be nearer than some imagine."
He had grown more earnest, both in his manner and his speech.
"Well," George Brand said, "timid people may reassure themselves. Where
there are so many societiets, there will be as many different aims.
Some, like the wilder German socialists, will want a general
participation of property; others a demolition of the churches and
crucifixion of the priests; others the establishment of a Universal
Republic. There may be a great deal of powder stored up, but it will all
go off in different directions, in little fireworks."
A quick light gleamed in those deep-set, lion-like eyes.
"Very well said!" was the scornful comment. "The Czar himself could not
have expressed his belief, or at least his hope, more neatly. But let me
tell you, sir, that the masses of mankind are not such hopeless idiots
as are some of the feather-headed orators and writers who speak for
them; and that you will appeal to them in vain if you do not appeal to
their sense of justice, and their belief in right, and in the eternal
laws of God. You may have a particular crowd go mad, or a particular
city go mad; but the heart of the people beats true, and if you desire a
great political change, you must appeal to their love of fair and honest
dealing as between man and man. And even if the aims of these societies
are diverse, what then? What would you think, now, if it were possible
to construct a common platform, where certain aims at least could be
accepted by all, and become bonds to unite those who are hoping for
better things all over the earth? That did not occur to you as a
possible thing, perhaps? You have only studied the ways of kings and
governments--each one for itself. 'Come over my boundary, and I will
cleave your head; or, rather, I will send my common people to do it, for
a little blood-letting from time to time is good for that vile and
ignorant body.' But the vile and ignorant body may begin to tire of that
recurrent blood-letting, and might perhaps even say, 'Brother across the
boundary, I have no quarrel with you. You are poor and ignorant like
myself; the travail of the earth lies hard on you; I would rather give
you my hand. If I have any quarrel, surely it is with the tyrants of the
earth, who have kept both you and me enslaved; who have taken away our
children from us; who have left us scarcely bread. How long, O Lord, how
long? We are tired of the reign of Cæsar; we are beaten down with it;
who will help us now to establish the reign of Christ?"
He rose. Despite the unkempt hair, this man looked quite handsome now,
while this serious look was in his face. Brand began to perceive whence
his friend Evelyn had derived at least some of his inspiration.
"Meanwhile," O'Halloran said, with a light, scornful laugh,
"Christianity has been of excellent service to Cæsar; it has been the
big policeman of Europe. Do you think these poor wretches would have
been so patient if they had not believed there was some compensation
reserved for them beyond the grave? They would have had Cæsar by the
throat by this time."
"Then that scheme of co-operation you mentioned," Brand said, somewhat
hastily--for he saw that O'Halloran was about to leave--"that is what
Ferdinand Lind is working at?"
The other started.
"I cannot give you any information on that point," said O'Halloran,
gravely. "And I do not think you are likely to get much anywhere if you
are only moved by curiosity, however sympathetic and well-wishing."
He took up his hat and stick.
"Good-bye, Mr. Brand," said he; and he looked at him with a kindly look.
"As far as I can judge, you are now in the position of a man at a partly
opened door, half afraid to enter, and too curious to draw back. Well,
my advice to you is--Draw back. Or at least remember this: that before
you enter that room you must be without doubt--_and without fear_."