CHAPTER II
CHAPTER III
CHAPTER IV
CHAPTER V
CHAPTER VI
CHAPTER VII
CHAPTER VIII
CHAPTER IX
CHAPTER X
CHAPTER XI
CHAPTER XII
CHAPTER XIII
CHAPTER XIV
CHAPTER XV
CHAPTER XVI
CHAPTER XVII
CHAPTER XVIII
CHAPTER XIX
CHAPTER XX
CHAPTER XXI
CHAPTER XXII
CHAPTER XXIII
CHAPTER XXIV
CHAPTER XXV
CHAPTER XXVI
CHAPTER XXVII
CHAPTER XXVIII
CHAPTER XXIX
CHAPTER XXX
CHAPTER XXXI
CHAPTER XXXII
CHAPTER XXXIII
CHAPTER XXXIV
CHAPTER XXXV
CHAPTER XXXVI
CHAPTER XXXVII
CHAPTER XXXVIII
“Liberty's a glorious feast.”—Burns.
PROLOGUE
One early April afternoon, in a Worcestershire field, the only field in
that immediate landscape which was not down in grass, a man moved slowly
athwart the furrows, sowing—a big man of heavy build, swinging his
hairy brown arm with the grace of strength. He wore no coat or hat; a
waistcoat, open over a blue-checked cotton shirt, flapped against belted
corduroys that were somewhat the color of his square, pale-brown face
and dusty hair. His eyes were sad, with the swimming yet fixed stare of
epileptics; his mouth heavy-lipped, so that, but for the yearning eyes,
the face would have been almost brutal. He looked as if he suffered from
silence. The elm-trees bordering the field, though only just in leaf,
showed dark against a white sky. A light wind blew, carrying already a
scent from the earth and growth pushing up, for the year was early.
The green Malvern hills rose in the west; and not far away, shrouded by
trees, a long country house of weathered brick faced to the south. Save
for the man sowing, and some rooks crossing from elm to elm, no life
was visible in all the green land. And it was quiet—with a strange, a
brooding tranquillity. The fields and hills seemed to mock the scars of
road and ditch and furrow scraped on them, to mock at barriers of
hedge and wall—between the green land and white sky was a conspiracy
to disregard those small activities. So lonely was it, so plunged in a
ground-bass of silence; so much too big and permanent for any figure of
man.
Across and across the brown loam the laborer doggedly finished out
his task; scattered the few last seeds into a corner, and stood still.
Thrushes and blackbirds were just beginning that even-song whose
blitheness, as nothing else on earth, seems to promise youth forever to
the land. He picked up his coat, slung it on, and, heaving a straw bag
over his shoulder, walked out on to the grass-bordered road between the
elms.
“Tryst! Bob Tryst!”
At the gate of a creepered cottage amongst fruit-trees, high above the
road, a youth with black hair and pale-brown face stood beside a girl
with frizzy brown hair and cheeks like poppies.
“Have you had that notice?”
The laborer answered slowly:
“Yes, Mr. Derek. If she don't go, I've got to.”
“What a d—d shame!”
The laborer moved his head, as though he would have spoken, but no words
came.
“Don't do anything, Bob. We'll see about that.”
“Evenin', Mr. Derek. Evenin', Miss Sheila,” and the laborer moved on.
The two at the wicket gate also turned away. A black-haired woman
dressed in blue came to the wicket gate in their place. There seemed no
purpose in her standing there; it was perhaps an evening custom, some
ceremony such as Moslems observe at the muezzin-call. And any one who
saw her would have wondered what on earth she might be seeing, gazing
out with her dark glowing eyes above the white, grass-bordered roads
stretching empty this way and that between the elm-trees and green
fields; while the blackbirds and thrushes shouted out their hearts,
calling all to witness how hopeful and young was life in this English
countryside....
CHAPTER I
Mayday afternoon in Oxford Street, and Felix Freeland, a little late,
on his way from Hampstead to his brother John's house in Porchester
Gardens. Felix Freeland, author, wearing the very first gray top hat of
the season. A compromise, that—like many other things in his life
and works—between individuality and the accepted view of things,
aestheticism and fashion, the critical sense and authority. After the
meeting at John's, to discuss the doings of the family of his brother
Morton Freeland—better known as Tod—he would perhaps look in on the
caricatures at the English Gallery, and visit one duchess in Mayfair,
concerning the George Richard Memorial. And so, not the soft felt hat
which really suited authorship, nor the black top hat which obliterated
personality to the point of pain, but this gray thing with narrowish
black band, very suitable, in truth, to a face of a pale buff color, to
a moustache of a deep buff color streaked with a few gray hairs, to a
black braided coat cut away from a buff-colored waistcoat, to his neat
boots—not patent leather—faintly buffed with May-day dust. Even his
eyes, Freeland gray, were a little buffed over by sedentary habit, and
the number of things that he was conscious of. For instance, that the
people passing him were distressingly plain, both men and women; plain
with the particular plainness of those quite unaware of it. It struck
him forcibly, while he went along, how very queer it was that with so
many plain people in the country, the population managed to keep up even
as well as it did. To his wonderfully keen sense of defect, it seemed
little short of marvellous. A shambling, shoddy crew, this crowd
of shoppers and labor demonstrators! A conglomeration of hopelessly
mediocre visages! What was to be done about it? Ah! what indeed!—since
they were evidently not aware of their own dismal mediocrity. Hardly
a beautiful or a vivid face, hardly a wicked one, never anything
transfigured, passionate, terrible, or grand. Nothing Greek, early
Italian, Elizabethan, not even beefy, beery, broad old Georgian.
Something clutched-in, and squashed-out about it all—on that collective
face something of the look of a man almost comfortably and warmly
wrapped round by a snake at the very beginning of its squeeze. It gave
Felix Freeland a sort of faint excitement and pleasure to notice this.
For it was his business to notice things, and embalm them afterward
in ink. And he believed that not many people noticed it, so that it
contributed in his mind to his own distinction, which was precious to
him. Precious, and encouraged to be so by the press, which—as he well
knew—must print his name several thousand times a year. And yet, as a
man of culture and of principle, how he despised that kind of fame, and
theoretically believed that a man's real distinction lay in his oblivion
of the world's opinion, particularly as expressed by that flighty
creature, the Fourth Estate. But here again, as in the matter of the
gray top hat, he had instinctively compromised, taking in press cuttings
which described himself and his works, while he never failed to describe
those descriptions—good, bad, and indifferent—as 'that stuff,' and their
writers as 'those fellows.'
Not that it was new to him to feel that the country was in a bad way.
On the contrary, it was his established belief, and one for which he was
prepared to furnish due and proper reasons. In the first place he traced
it to the horrible hold Industrialism had in the last hundred years laid
on the nation, draining the peasantry from 'the Land'; and in the second
place to the influence of a narrow and insidious Officialism, sapping
the independence of the People.
This was why, in going to a conclave with his brother John, high in
Government employ, and his brother Stanley, a captain of industry,
possessor of the Morton Plough Works, he was conscious of a certain
superiority in that he, at all events, had no hand in this paralysis
which was creeping on the country.
And getting more buff-colored every minute, he threaded his way on,
till, past the Marble Arch, he secured the elbow-room of Hyde Park.
Here groups of young men, with chivalrous idealism, were jeering at
and chivying the broken remnants of a suffrage meeting. Felix debated
whether he should oppose his body to their bodies, his tongue to theirs,
or whether he should avert his consciousness and hurry on; but, that
instinct which moved him to wear the gray top hat prevailing, he did
neither, and stood instead, looking at them in silent anger, which
quickly provoked endearments—such as: “Take it off,” or “Keep it on,” or
“What cheer, Toppy!” but nothing more acute. And he meditated: Culture!
Could culture ever make headway among the blind partisanships, the
hand-to-mouth mentality, the cheap excitements of this town life? The
faces of these youths, the tone of their voices, the very look of their
bowler hats, said: No! You could not culturalize the impermeable texture
of their vulgarity. And they were the coming manhood of the nation—this
inexpressibly distasteful lot of youths! The country had indeed got too
far away from 'the Land.' And this essential towny commonness was not
confined to the classes from which these youths were drawn. He had even
remarked it among his own son's school and college friends—an impatience
of discipline, an insensibility to everything but excitement and having
a good time, a permanent mental indigestion due to a permanent diet of
tit-bits. What aspiration they possessed seemed devoted to securing for
themselves the plums of official or industrial life. His boy Alan, even,
was infected, in spite of home influences and the atmosphere of art in
which he had been so sedulously soaked. He wished to enter his Uncle
Stanley's plough works, seeing in it a 'soft thing.'
But the last of the woman-baiters had passed by now, and, conscious that
he was really behind time, Felix hurried on....
In his study—a pleasant room, if rather tidy—John Freeland was standing
before the fire smoking a pipe and looking thoughtfully at nothing. He
was, in fact, thinking, with that continuity characteristic of a man who
at fifty has won for himself a place of permanent importance in the
Home Office. Starting life in the Royal Engineers, he still preserved
something of a military look about his figure, and grave visage with
steady eyes and drooping moustache (both a shade grayer than those of
Felix), and a forehead bald from justness and knowing where to lay
his hand on papers. His face was thinner, his head narrower, than his
brother's, and he had acquired a way of making those he looked at doubt
themselves and feel the sudden instability of all their facts. He
was—as has been said—thinking. His brother Stanley had wired to him that
morning: “Am motoring up to-day on business; can you get Felix to come
at six o'clock and talk over the position at Tod's?” What position at
Tod's? He had indeed heard something vague—of those youngsters of Tod's,
and some fuss they were making about the laborers down there. He had
not liked it. Too much of a piece with the general unrest, and these new
democratic ideas that were playing old Harry with the country! For in
his opinion the country was in a bad way, partly owing to Industrialism,
with its rotting effect upon physique; partly to this modern analytic
Intellectualism, with its destructive and anarchic influence on morals.
It was difficult to overestimate the mischief of those two factors; and
in the approaching conference with his brothers, one of whom was the
head of an industrial undertaking, and the other a writer, whose books,
extremely modern, he never read, he was perhaps vaguely conscious of his
own cleaner hands. Hearing a car come to a halt outside, he went to the
window and looked out. Yes, it was Stanley!...
Stanley Freeland, who had motored up from Becket—his country place,
close to his plough works in Worcestershire—stood a moment on the
pavement, stretching his long legs and giving directions to his
chauffeur. He had been stopped twice on the road for not-exceeding the
limit as he believed, and was still a little ruffled. Was it not his
invariable principle to be moderate in speed as in all other things? And
his feeling at the moment was stronger even than usual, that the country
was in a bad way, eaten up by officialism, with its absurd limitations
of speed and the liberty of the subject, and the advanced ideas of
these new writers and intellectuals, always talking about the rights
and sufferings of the poor. There was no progress along either of those
roads. He had it in his heart, as he stood there on the pavement, to say
something pretty definite to John about interference with the liberty
of the subject, and he wouldn't mind giving old Felix a rap about his
precious destructive doctrines, and continual girding at the upper
classes, vested interests, and all the rest of it. If he had something
to put in their place that would be another matter. Capital and those
who controlled it were the backbone of the country—what there was left
of the country, apart from these d—d officials and aesthetic fellows!
And with a contraction of his straight eyebrows above his straight gray
eyes, straight blunt nose, blunter moustaches, and blunt chin, he kept a
tight rein on his blunt tongue, not choosing to give way even to his own
anger.
Then, perceiving Felix coming—'in a white topper, by Jove!'—he crossed
the pavement to the door; and, tall, square, personable, rang the bell.