Tucked into the frame of the Jacobean mirror (sham antique, but rather
good-looking) over the mantelpiece of Bertram’s “study,” was the card
given to him by Lady Ottery for her lecture on “The Religion of
Revolution: Past and Present.” He had glanced at it several times from
day to day with a sense of annoyance, as at the notification of an
impending menace, such as a date with the dentist or any distant
disagreeable and inevitable duty.
APRIL 10.
THE RELIGION OF REVOLUTION:
PAST AND PRESENT
BY
THE COUNTESS OF OTTERY
CHAIRMAN
HIS GRACE, THE DUKE OF BRAMSHAW, K.G.
Once or twice he had murmured, “Oh, Lord! I suppose I’ll have to go!”
and then, as familiar objects lose their force of impression, he’d
forgotten the lecture and its date. It was Joyce who reminded him one
morning, at the breakfast table, to the music of an early piano organ in
Holland Street,
“I suppose you’re going to Mother’s lecture?”
He said “Oh, Lord!” again and “When is it?”
It was on the following afternoon, and Joyce was naturally annoyed with
him when he showed signs of shirking the engagement. She couldn’t
understand, as she said, fretfully, why Bertram disparaged her Mother’s
intellectual ability—Joyce always spoke of her Mother with a distinctly
capital M—to say nothing of her historical knowledge. Lady Ottery had
studied considerably more than Bertram, who was a desultory reader, and
had read a good deal at the British Museum last winter, as well as
belonging to the London Library, which allowed her to take out eleven
books at a time on serious subjects.
“The amount of knowledge Mother has amassed is stupendous,” said Joyce.
“Whether you agree with her or not, I think you ought to respect her
research work.”
Bertram muttered something about not believing much in book-knowledge,
but retreated on that line of argument as the author of a book which
soon he hoped to present to Joyce with love and homage, as the
first-fruits of his new-found gift. In the end, he capitulated, and
agreed humbly to go to the lecture and behave himself with due deference
to his exalted Mother-in-law. He tried to give a touch of humour to the
surrender, and obtained the glimmer of a smile from Joyce. But she froze
him by saying that she hoped her Mother’s lecture would convert him to
more reasonable views, and make him see the frightful danger of the
opinions held by his revolutionary friends at a time when England was
threatened by mob-law.
“My dear Kid!” he said, making light again of her over-serious mood. “In
the first place my friends aren’t revolutionary”—he had to make a
mental reservation of Janet Rockingham Welford—“and in the second
place, I don’t agree that England is threatened by mob-law.”
“Not by the coming strike?”
He hesitated for a moment, and then said: “The men call it a lock-out.”
She called that hair-splitting over words, and though he would not
consent to that—it made all the difference to the argument—he agreed
that there would be a serious situation in England, dangerous, even, if
all the miners left their pits, and millions of unemployed and idle men
were added to the two millions already without work. The stoppage of
coal would gradually strangle all industry, and the railways, which were
the vital arteries of the nation.
“There may be Civil War,” said Joyce, calmly, and Bertram answered
sharply, “Nonsense! Who suggests that?”
“General Bellasis. As the Home Office man, he knows.”
“I wish to goodness he’d keep his precious knowledge to himself!” said
Bertram angrily, “and not come round here mixing scaremonger politics
with tea-table dalliance!”
Joyce’s colour rose slightly, as a hint that she was “vexed.”
“He’s one of the best. If you weren’t so unreasonably jealous, I’d ask
you to make a friend of him.”
“Why?”
All Bertram’s nerves jangled at this suggestion of friendship with a man
he detested as one of the professional warriors of Whitehall, with
Prussian instincts and supercilious manners.
“Because he can put you in the way of a job. In fact, I think he’s going
to offer you one.”
“Did _you_ ask him?”
“More or less. Don’t you want a job? It’s time you began to keep your
end up.”
Bertram rose from his chair, walked to the window, and tossed a blind
tassel to and fro.
Presently he spoke, in a low, emotional voice.
“I was hoping you wouldn’t say that! I’ll pay you back for board and
lodging when my book’s published.”
She followed him to the window, and put her hand on his shoulder, with a
caressing touch, which surprised him. It was some time since she’d done
that.
“Bertram, I’m not playing the spiteful cat. You know it’s not my style
of play. I’m not flinging anything in your face, or any rot of that
kind. But you know you want a good job. You’ve said so a hundred times!
Now General Bellasis is ready to offer you one. Why get huffed?”
He was melted by her words, by the old comradely tone of them, by her
hand on his shoulder. If she only knew how a touch from her could kill
his temper!
“Give my book a chance,” he said. “I believe I can do something at the
writing game. Meanwhile, if Bellasis has anything to offer, I’ll think
of it, seriously. What sort of a job, do you think?”
“Organising,” she told him, and he liked the word. “Something to do with
the home defence of England—in case of trouble.”
“Trouble?” He looked at her vaguely.
“The strike.”
“Oh, Lord!”
“Why not?”
He didn’t tell her why not, and indeed, she couldn’t wait to hear why
not, for some friends called with a car to take her to Brighton for
lunch and tea. But his mind went quickly to recent conversations with
some of the people whom Joyce didn’t know and didn’t care to know—Bill
Huggett, down in Lambeth, Janet Welford, Luke Christy, Nat Verney, the
miners’ leader, Lawless, the economist, Bernard Hall, editor of _The New
World_. They also had been talking about the coming strike, which they
called a lock-out, and had seriously disturbed his mind on the subject.
Christy and his friends declared that the ultimatum issued to the miners
was the first challenge of Capital in a conflict which they intended to
wage with Labour, until the spirit of the workers was broken and they
were reduced again to the cheap standards of pre-war wages upon which
the prosperity of British industry had been developed—for the
employers.
While the Government was squandering millions of money on maintaining
overstaffed departments filled with “limpets” pouring more millions into
Imperialistic adventures in Mesopotamia, and the East, giving immense
financial support to any Russian ruffian of the old régime who gathered
together bands of bandits to invade the Republic, and generally ignoring
the realities of financial ruin in Europe, following the War, they were
engineering a systematic assault on Labour, in order to weaken its
political power and reduce it to economic subjection.
The heroes of the War, “our brave boys in the trenches,” were already
being branded as “Bolshevists” by Government spokesmen. The men who had
fought at Ypres, on the Somme, and across the Hindenburg line, and whose
patient courage in years of mud and misery and devouring death had won
the War, in spite of the stupidity of generals, and the personal
intrigues of politicians, were now to be denounced as revolutionary
rascals, unpatriotic “blighters,” who must be “taught a lesson,” and
forced back to a low standard of wages, and of life.
That was Christy’s way of thought about the ultimatum to the miners. It
was supported with facts and figures by Nat Verney, the Labour member.
He took the trouble to analyse the proposed scale of wages at a little
conference of writing men in Christy’s rooms, brought there by Bernard
Hall, of _The New World_. He seemed to prove that they were less than a
living wage, so grotesquely out of scale with the prevailing cost of
life that if the men accepted the ultimatum—hurled at them suddenly
without previous warning or discussion—they would surrender their very
birthright—the right to exist.
Verney spoke quietly, with a smouldering but masked passion.
“We shall fight them to the last ditch. The Government, in league with
the mine-owners—that’s certain—have forced an issue which we’re ready
to accept. We’re not afraid, for the judgment of the people will be on
our side.”
Bernard Hall admitted that, personally, he _was_ afraid. There was a
sense of bitterness among millions of men who had fought in the war and
now were disillusioned with the promises made and betrayed by
politicians. With so many men idle—lack of coal would shut down every
industry—there might be a violent conflict. The Government was prepared
to use force. He understood they were calling out the Army reserves.
Some act of hooliganism, some shot fired accidentally, or otherwise, by
any fool, and frightful things might happen.
“Supposing the soldiers refuse to fire on their own crowd?” asked
Verney, and something in his eyes showed his hope for that.
There was silence in Christy’s room, until Christy himself broke it.
“That means Revolution—and the end of England as a world power.”
“We’re not out for Revolution,” said Verney, in a low voice. “We’re out
for a decent rate of wage—nothing more than that.”
Then he raised his voice a little, and it had a thrill in it.
“If the Government asks for Revolution, if it arranges it, the blood
guilt will be on its head.”
Bertram spoke for the first time. He was irritable, because all this
grave discussion had come as a surprise to him, and suggested unpleasant
possibilities which he hadn’t imagined, and didn’t believe.
“Don’t you think we’d better drop all mention of the word Revolution?
It’s an ugly damn word, and oughtn’t to be in our English vocabulary. It
isn’t in our English character, if I know England.”
The company had been startled by Bertram’s intervention, all but
Christy, who understood his silences and his outbursts, and the working
of his mind.
“Do any of us know England?” asked Bernard Hall, after a slight pause.
“The men who went out to the war—to France, Palestine, Egypt, Salonica,
Russia—have come back again. We don’t understand what’s going on in
their minds. They don’t understand themselves. We’re dealing with
uncertain, unknown forces.”
“I know the men pretty well,” said Bertram. “I keep in touch with them.”
They paid some heed to that, and admitted his claim to give evidence,
acknowledging their own distance from the labouring classes, their
theoretical guesses.
“You don’t think they’re out for trouble?” asked Hall. His dark, Celtic
face, with its brooding eyes, was heavily overcast by the shadow of
anxiety.
“They want peace,” said Bertram, “and enough to eat, decent house-room,
and a little pocket-money for the fun of things.”
It was Bill Huggett who had given him that view of the situation. He
used Huggett as a guide to the mind of the London crowds, the average
mind of the dreary processions of men, marching with trained step
through London with banners saying, “We want work, not charity,” and the
point of view of the seedy-looking groups lounging about the Labour
Exchanges, and of other assemblies of men listening on Sunday afternoons
to political orators in Hyde Park. Bill Huggett was his interpreter.
The man had succeeded in getting back some of his work as “French
polisher.” He was earning about two pounds ten a week, out of which he
paid eighteen shillings for two miserable rooms in the slums of
Walworth. With the rest he could manage to get food for himself and his
four children, in spite of high prices. Getting back to work had changed
his whole aspect. He was more alert, and less inclined to “grouse,” and
he’d regained some of the old Cockney humour which had made him popular
as a company sergeant in France and Flanders.
Bertram spent half an hour with him, now and again, in his lodgings, or
in a public-house round the corner, and Hugget, though always
embarrassed by this comradeship of his former officer, and somewhat
suspicious of its motives, was not ungrateful or unfriendly.
It amazed him that Bertram seemed pleased to sit in his dirty little
room for a few minutes, not bothering when the youngest “brat” began a
howl in the next room, and dozens of other children, sickly, ailing,
underfed some of them, joined in a chorus of wailing in this block of
“workmen’s dwellings.”
Women railed through open or broken windows, looking into a courtyard
filled with “washing”—and threatened to break the jaws of small
children, if they didn’t “be’ave,” or insulted each other for certain
grievances connected with the water supply on the common stairways.
Doors banged, cheap gramophones blared out jazz tunes. Somewhere a
violin was being scraped like the crying of a soul in agony, by a
diligent practiser of finger-exercises. Shrill laughter of coarse-voiced
girls rang out in the passages. Oaths floated up from the courtyard. The
noise of distant domestic quarrels came vaguely into Huggett’s room,
where he sat in his shirtsleeves, smoking Woodbine cigarettes and
answering Bertram’s questions with a queer, nervous grin.
“’Omes for ’Eroes!” he remarked once when the strange medley of noises
in the Workmen’s Dwellings became more than usually discordant.
The “silver slipper” story upon which Bertram questioned him, excited
his sense of humour.
“Silver my foot!” he said; “white metal at sixpence the gross! A
Bolshevist emblem? Well, if that ain’t the funniest yarn! Strikes me
there’s no more sense in some of them so-called Toffs than in the long
ears of a coster’s moke.”
He had a realistic mind, and was something of a philosopher, like others
Bertram knew, who had risked their lives in the war, and escaped by a
hairsbreadth chance of luck. In their billets behind the line, in
dug-outs, in shell-holes where they had lain wounded, these men, or some
of them, had thought starkly of the meaning of things, had talked with
each other in a kind of short-cut language, incoherent, yet
understanding. Now they thought of the Peace they’d helped to make, and
the life they’d come back to find.
“It’s like this, Major. We’re fed up with lies. The blarsted lies of
newspapers. The muck them politicians say. The rotten stuff some of our
own leaders say. In the old days we used to believe what we was told or
what we read. Now we’ve found out. We’ve been kidded, all along! That’s
made us think. We know a bit of truth ourselves. We know what ’appened
to us. The things we did. The things we’ve seen. We can’t be kidded any
more. That makes a lot of difference!”
“What do the men want?” asked Bertram. “What are they looking for?”
“Not over much,” said Huggett. “There’s some that talk a lot. I did a
bit myself before I found my job again. Communism. Bolshevism. Bunkum.
More kidding! Most others are out for peace—no more bloody war, not at
no cost—decent ’ouse-room—not this dog ’ole for eighteen bob a week—a
bit of pocket money for the fun of things. See?”
Bertram thought he saw. He believed that Huggett knew the truth of
things about the spirit of the men. He marvelled at this fellow’s
commonsense, his soundness of judgment, his sense of humour, his
patience. Those had been the qualities of the men in the war. They were
still there. If all the men were like Huggett, or most of them, England
was safe. The menace was only in the minds of men like Bernard Hall of
_The New World_—intellectually morbid—and in the minds of Joyce’s
crowd, who were obsessed by the bogey of Bolshevism—that strange
foreign growth, so alien to English ideas.