He was reading Swift's "Tale of a Tub" eagerly, tasting with a palate
consciously fastidious and yet catholic, the fine savour of a
masterpiece. By his secret enthusiasm, which would escape from him at
rare intervals in a word to a friend, he was continuing the reputation
of the "Tale of a Tub" from one century towards the next. A classic
remains a classic only because a few hundred Edwins up and down England
enjoy it so heartily that their pleasure becomes religious. Edwin,
according to his programme, had no right to be amusing himself with
Swift at that hour. The portly Hallam, whom he found tedious, ought to
have been in his hands. But Swift had caught him and would not let him
go. Herein was one of the consequences of the pocketableness of
Cassell's new series. Edwin had been obliged to agree with Tom Orgreave
(now a married man) that the books were not volumes for a collector; but
they were so cheap, and they came from the press so often--once a week,
and they could be carried so comfortably over the heart, that he could
not resist most of them. His professed idea was that by their aid he
could read smaller works in odd moments, at any time, thus surpassing
his programme. He had not foreseen that Swift would make a breach in
his programme, which was already in a bad way.
But he went on reading tranquilly, despite the damage to it; for in the
immediate future shone the hope of the new life, when programmes would
never be neglected. In less than a month he would be thirty years of
age. At twenty, it had seemed a great age, an age of absolute maturity.
Now, he felt as young and as boyish as ever, especially before his
father, and he perceived that his vague early notion about the finality
of such an age as thirty had been infantile. Nevertheless, the entry
into another decade presented itself to him as solemn, and he meant to
signalise it by new and mightier resolutions to execute vaster
programmes. He was intermittently engaged, during these weeks, in the
delicious, the enchanting business of constructing the ideal programme
and scheming the spare hours to ensure its achievement. He lived in a
dream and illusion of ultimate perfection.
Several times, despite the spell of Swift, he glanced at his watch. The
hand went from nine to ten minutes past ten. And then he thought he
heard the sound for which he had been listening. He jumped up,
abandoned the book with its marker, opened the window wide, and lifting
the blind by its rod, put his head out. Yes, he could hear the yelling
afar off, over the hill, softened by distance into something gentle and
attractive.
"`Signal!' `Signal!' Special edition! `Signal!'" And then words
incomprehensible.
It came nearer in the night.
He drew down the window, and left the room. The mere distant sound of
the newsboys' voices had roused him to a pleasing excitement. He
fumbled in his pockets. He had neither a halfpenny nor a penny--it was
just like him--and those newsboys with their valuable tidings would not
care to halt and weigh out change with a balance.
"Got a halfpenny? Quick!" he cried, running into the kitchen, where
Maggie and Mrs Nixon were engaged in some calm and endless domestic
occupation amid linen that hung down whitely.
"What for?" Maggie mechanically asked, feeling the while under her
apron.
"Paper," he said.
"At this time of night? You'll never get one at this time of night!"
she said, in her simplicity.
"Come _on!_"
He stamped his foot with impatience. It was absolutely astonishing, the
ignorance in which Maggie lived, and lived efficiently and in content.
Edwin filled the house with newspapers, and she never looked at them,
never had the idea of looking at them, unless occasionally at the
`Signal' for an account of a wedding or a bazaar. In which case she
would glance at the world for an instant with mild _naivete_, shocked by
the horrible things that were apparently going on there, and in five
minutes would forget all about it again. Here the whole of England,
Ireland, and Scotland was at its front doors that night waiting for
newsboys, and to her the night was like any other night! Yet she read
many books.
"Here's a penny," she said. "Don't forget to give it me back."
He ran out bareheaded. At the corner of the street somebody else was
expectant. He could distinguish all the words now--
"`Signal!' Special edition! Mester Gladstone's Home Rule Bill. Full
report. Gladstone's speech. Special!"
The dark running figures approached, stopping at frequent gates, and
their hoarse voices split the night. The next moment they had gone by,
in a flying column, and Edwin and the other man found themselves with
fluttering paper in their hands, they knew not how! It was the most
unceremonious snatch-and-thrust transaction that could be imagined.
Bleakridge was silent again, and its gates closed, and the shouts were
descending violently into Bursley.
"Where's father?" Maggie called out when she heard Edwin in the hall.
"Hasn't he come in yet?" Edwin replied negligently, as he mounted the
stairs with his desire.
In his room he settled himself once more under the gas, and opened the
flimsy newspaper with joy. Yes, there it was--columns, columns, in
small type! An hour or two previously Gladstone had been speaking in
Parliament, and by magic the whole of his speech, with all the little
convolutions of his intricate sentences, had got into Edwin's bedroom.
Edwin began to read, as it were voluptuously. Not that he had a
peculiar interest in Irish politics! What he had was a passion for
great news, for news long expected. He could thrill responsively to a
fine event. I say that his pleasure had the voluptuousness of an
artistic sensation.
Moreover, the attraction of politics in general was increasing for him.
Politics occupied his mind, often obsessing it. And this was so in
spite of the fact that he had done almost nothing in the last election,
and that the pillars of the Liberal Club were beginning to suspect him
of being a weakling who might follow his father into the wilderness
between two frontiers.
As he read the speech, slowly disengaging its significance from the
thicket of words, it seemed incredible. A parliament in Dublin! The
Irish taxing themselves according to their own caprices! The Irish
controlling the Royal Irish Constabulary! The Irish members withdrawn
from Westminster! A separate nation! Surely Gladstone could not mean
it! The project had the same air of unreality as that of his marriage
with Hilda. It did not convince. It was too good to be true. It could
not materialise itself. And yet, as his glance, flitting from left to
right and right to left, eagerly, reached the bottom of one column and
jumped with a crinkling of paper to the top of the next, and then to the
next after that, the sense of unreality did depart. He agreed with the
principles of the Bill, and with all its details. Whatever Gladstone
had proposed would have received his sympathy. He was persuaded in
advance; he concurred in advance. All he lacked was faith. And those
sentences, helped by his image of the aged legislator dominating the
House, and by the wondrous legend of the orator's divine power--those
long stretching, majestic, misty sentences gave him faith. Henceforward
he was an ardent Home Ruler. Reason might or might not have entered
into the affair had the circumstances of it been other; but in fact
reason did not. Faith alone sufficed. For ever afterwards argument
about Home Rule was merely tedious to him, and he had difficulty in
crediting that opponents of it were neither stupid nor insincere. Home
Rule was part of his religion, beyond and above argument.
He wondered what they were saying at the Liberal Club, and smiled
disdainfully at the thought of the unseemly language that would animate
the luxurious heaviness of the Conservative Club, where prominent
publicans gathered after eleven o'clock to uphold the State and arrange
a few bets with sporting clients. He admitted, as the supreme
importance of the night leaped out at him from the printed page, that,
if only for form's sake, he ought to have been at the Liberal Club that
evening. He had been requested to go, but had refused, because on
Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays, he always spent the evening in study
or in the semblance of study. He would not break that rule even in
honour of the culmination of the dazzling career of his political idol.
Perhaps another proof of the justice of Maggie's assertion that he was a
regular old maid!
He knew what his father would say. His father would be furious. His
father in his uncontrolled fury would destroy Gladstone. And such was
his father's empire over him that he was almost ready on Gladstone's
behalf to adopt an apologetic and slightly shamed attitude to his father
concerning this madness of Home Rule--to admit by his self-conscious
blushes that it was madness. He well knew that at breakfast the next
morning, in spite of any effort to the contrary, he would have a guilty
air when his father began to storm. The conception of a separate
parliament in Dublin, and of separate taxation, could not stand before
his father's anger...
Beneath his window, in the garden, he suddenly heard a faint sound as of
somebody in distress.
"What the deuce--!" he exclaimed. "If that isn't the old man I'm--"
Startled, he looked at his watch. It was after midnight.
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