A People's Man Part 42

"It can build," Maraton declared. "It can build, generation by generation. It can produce a saner race, and as the light comes, so the truth will flow in upon the minds of all."

"An illusion!" Selingman interrupted, with a sudden fierceness in his tone. "Once, Maraton, you looked at life sanely enough. Are you sure that to-day you have not put on the poisoned spectacles? Don't you know the end of these spasmodic reforms? You pa.s.s, your influence pa.s.ses, your mantle is buried in your grave, and the country slips back, and the people suffer, and the great wheel grinds them into bone and powder just as surely a century hence as a century ago. Man, you don't start right.

If you would restore a ruined and neglected garden, you must first destroy, make a bonfire of the weeds prepare your soil. Then, in the springtime, fresh flowers will blossom, the trees will give leaf, the birds who have deserted a ruined and fruitless waste will return and sing once more the song of life. But there must be destruction, Maraton. You yourself preached it once, preached fire and the sword.

Something has gone from you since those days. Compromise--the spirit of compromise you call it. How one hates the sound of it! Bah! Man, you are on a lower level, when you talk the smug talk of to-day. I am disappointed in you. Maxendorf is disappointed in you. You are riding down the easy way on to the sandbanks of failure."

"Your garden," Maraton rejoined, with an answering note of pa.s.sion in his tone, "would never have blossomed again if you had driven the plough across it, ripped up its fruit trees, torn up its neglected plants by ruthless force. You must plant fresh seed and grow new trees. Then there's another nation, another world. What about your responsibilities to the present one? Isn't it great to save what is, rather than to destroy for the sake of those who have neither toiled nor suffered? I thought as you once. The philosopher thinks like that in his study.

Stand before those people, look into their white, labour-worn faces, feel with them, sorrow with them for a little time, and I tell you that your hand will falter before it drives the plough. You will raise your eyes to heaven and pray that you may see some way of bringing help to them--to them who live--the help for which they crave. Haven't they a right to their lives? Who gives us a mandate to sweep them away for the sake of the unborn?"

"You have become a sentimentalist, Maraton," Maxendorf declared grimly.

"The soft places in your heart have led you to forget for a moment the inexorable laws. Let us pa.s.s from these generalities. Let us speak of things such as you had at first intended. I know what was in your heart. You meant to pa.s.s from Birmingham to Glasgow, to preach the holy war of Labour, a giant crusade. You meant to close the mills, to stop the wheels, to blank the forges and rake out the furnaces of the country. You meant to place your finger upon its arteries and stop their beating. You meant to turn the people loose upon their oppressors. Though they must perish in their thousands, yet you meant to show them the naked truth, to show them of what they are being deprived, to show them the irresistible laws of justice, so that for very shame they must drop their tools and stand for their rights. Why didn't you do it?"

"I have told you," Maraton answered.

"Yes, you have told us," Maxendorf continued. "Supposing there were still a way by which even this present generation could reap the benefit? Are you great enough, Maraton, to listen to me, I wonder?

That is what I ask myself since you have become a Party politician, a friend of Ministers, since you have joined in the puppet dance of the world. See to what I have brought my people. In ten years' time I tell you that nearly every industry in my country will be conducted upon a profit-sharing basis."

"You have brought them to this," Maraton reminded him swiftly, "by peaceful methods."

"For me there were no other needed," Maxendorf urged. "For you the case is different. If you are one of those who love to strut about and boast of your nationality, if you are one of those in whom lingers the smallest particle of the falsest sentiment which the age of romance has ever handed down to us--what they call patriotism--then my words will be wasted. But here is the message which I have brought to you and to your people. This is the dream of my life which he, Selingman, alone has known of--the fusion of our races."

"Magnificent!" Selingman cried, springing to his feet. "The dream of a G.o.d! Listen to it, Maraton. My brain has realised it. I, too, have seen it. Your country is bound in the everlasting shackles.

Generations must pa.s.s before you can even weaken the hold of your bourgeoisie upon the soul and spirit of your land. You are tied hard and fast, and withal you are on the downward grade. The work which you do to-day, the next generation will undo. Give up this foolish legislation. Listen to Maxendorf. He will show you the way."

"When you speak of fusion," Maraton asked, "you mean conquest?"

"There is no such word," Maxendorf insisted. "The hearts of our people are close together. Put aside all these artificial ententes and alliances. There are no two people whose ideals and whose aims and whose destiny are so close together as your country's and mine. It is for that very reason that these periods of distrust and suspicion continually occur, suspicions which impoverish two countries with the millions we spend on senseless schemes of defence. Away with them all.

Stop the pendulum of your country. Declare your coal strike, your railway strike, your ironfounders' strike. Let the revolution come. I tell you then that we shall appear not as invaders, but as friends and liberators. Your industries shall start again on a new basis, the basis which you and I know of, the basis which gives to the toilers their just and legitimate share of what they produce. Your trade shall flourish just as it flourished before, but away to dust and powder with your streets of pig-sties, the rat-holes into which your weary labourers creep after their hours of senseless slavery. You and I, Maraton, know how industries should be conducted. You and I know the just share which Capital should claim. You and I together will make the laws. Oh, what does it matter whether you are English or Icelanders, Fins or Turks!

Humanity is so much greater than nationality. Your men shall work side by side with mine, and what each produces, each shall have. What is being done for my country shall surely be done for yours. Can't you see, Maraton--can't you see, my prophet who gropes in the darkness, that I am showing you the only way?"

Maraton rose to his feet. He came and stood by Maxendorf's side.

"Maxendorf," he said, "you may be speaking to me from your heart. Yes, I will admit that you are speaking to me from your heart. But you ask me to take an awful risk. You stand first in your country to-day, but in your country there are other powerful influences at work. So much of what you say is true. If I believed, Maxendorf--if I believed that this fusion, as you call it, of our people could come about in the way you suggest, if I believed that the building up of our prosperity could start again on the real and rational basis of many of your inst.i.tutions, if I believed this, Maxendorf, no false sentiment would stand in my way.

I would risk the eternal shame of the historians. So far as I could do it, I would give you this country. But there is always the doubt, the awful doubt. You have a ruler whose ideas are not your ideas. You have a people behind you who are strange to me. I have not travelled in your country, I know little of it. What if your people should a.s.sume the guise of conquerors, should garrison our towns with foreign soldiers, demand a huge indemnity, and then, withdrawing, leave us to our fate?

You have no guarantees to offer me, Maxendorf."

"None but my word," Maxendorf confessed quietly.

"You bargain like a politician!" Selingman cried. "Man, can't you see the glory of it?"

"I can see the glory," Maraton answered, turning around, "but I can see also the ineffaceable ignominy of it. Is your country great enough, Maxendorf, to follow where your finger points? I do not know."

"Yet you, too," Maxendorf persisted, "must sometimes have looked into futurity. You must have seen the slow decay of national pride, the nations of the world growing closer and closer together. Can't you bear to strike a blow for the great things? You and I see so well the utter barbarism of warfare, the hideous waste of our mighty armaments, draining the money like blood from our countries, and all for senselessness, all just to keep alive that strange spirit which belongs to the days of romance, and the days of romance only. It's a workaday world now, Maraton. We draw nearer to the last bend in the world's history. Oh, this is the truth! I have seen it for so long. It's my religion, Maraton. The time may not have come to preach it broadcast, but it's there in my heart."

Selingman struck the table with the palm of his hand.

"Enough!" he said. "The words have been spoken. To-morrow or the next day we meet again. Go to your study, Maraton, and think. Lock the door. Turn out the Julia I shall some day rob you of. Hold your head, look into the future. Think! Think! No more words now. They do no good. Come. I stay with Maxendorf. I go with you to the lift."

Maxendorf held out his hand.

"Selingman is, as usual, right," he confessed. "We are speaking in a great language, Maraton. It is enough for to-night, perhaps. Come back to me when you will within the next forty-eight hours."

They left him there, a curious figure, straight and motionless, standing upon the threshold of his room. Selingman gripped Maraton by the arm as he hurried him along the corridor.

"You've doubts, Maraton," he muttered. "Doubts! Curse them! They are not worthy. You should see the truth. You're big enough. You will see it to-morrow. Get out of the fog. Maxendorf is the most profound thinker of these days. He is over here with that scheme of his deep in his heart. It's become a pa.s.sion with him. We have talked of it by the hour, spoken of you, prayed for some prophet on your side with eyes to see the truth. Into the lift with you, man. Look for me to-morrow.

Farewell!"

CHAPTER x.x.xI

Maraton was more than ever conscious, as he climbed the stairs of the house in Downing Street an hour or so later, of a certain fragility of appearance in Mr. Foley, markedly apparent during these last few weeks.

He was standing talking to Lord Armley, who was one of the late arrivals, as Maraton entered, talking in a low tone and with an obviously serious manner. At the sound of Maraton's name, however, he turned swiftly around. His face seemed to lighten. He held out his hand with an air almost of relief.

"So you have come!" he exclaimed. "I am glad."

Maraton shook hands and would have pa.s.sed on, but Mr. Foley detained him.

"Armley and I were talking about this after noon's decision," he continued. "There will be no secret about it to-morrow. It has been decided to carry out our autumn manoeuvred as usual in South em waters."

Maraton nodded.

"I am afraid that is one of the things the significance of which fails to reach me," he remarked. "You were against it, were you not?"

Mr. Foley groaned softly.

"My friend," he said, "there is only one fault with the Members of my Government, only one fault with this country. We are all foolishly and blindly sanguine. We are optimistic by persuasion and self-persuasion.

We like the comfortable creed. I suppose that the bogey of war has strutted with us for so long that we have grown used to it."

Maraton looked at his companion thoughtfully.

"Do you seriously believe, Mr. Foley," he asked in an undertone, "in the possibility, in the imminent possibility of war?"

Mr. Foley half-closed his eyes and sighed.

"Oh, my dear Maraton," he murmured, "it isn't a question of belief!

It's like asking me whether I believe I can see from here into my own drawing-room. The figures in there are real enough, aren't they? So is the cloud I can see gathering all the time over our heads. It is a question only of the propitious moment--of that there is no manner of doubt."

"You speak of affairs," Maraton admitted, "of which I know nothing. I do not even understand the balance of power. I always thought, though, that every great nation, our own included, paid a certain amount of insurance in the shape of huge contributions towards a navy and army; that we paid such insurance as was necessary and were rewarded with adequate results."

Mr. Foley forgot his depression for an instant, and smiled.

"What a theorist you are! It all depends upon the amount of insurance you take up, whether the risk is covered. We've under-insured for many years, thanks to that little kink in our disposition. We got a nasty knock in South Africa and we had to pay our own loss. It did us good for a year or two. Now the pendulum has just reached the other extreme.

We've swung back once more into our silly dream. Oh, Maraton, it's true enough that we have great problems to face sociologically! Don't think that I underrate them. You know I don't. But every time I sit and talk to you, I have always at the back of my mind that other fear. . . .

Have you seen Maxendorf to-night?"

"I have just left him," Maraton replied.

"An interesting interview?"