Marcella Part 70

He had come to the moment of difficulty, of tragedy, in a career which so far, in spite of all drawbacks of physical health and cramped activities, had been one of singular happiness and success. Ever since he had discovered his own gifts as a lecturer to working men, content, cheerfulness, nay, a pa.s.sionate interest in every hour, had been quite compatible for him with all the permanent limitations of his lot. The study of economical and historical questions; the expression through them of such a hunger for the building of a "city of G.o.d" among men, as few are capable of; the evidence not to be ignored even by his modesty, and perpetually forthcoming over a long period of time, that he had the power to be loved, the power to lead, among those toilers of the world on whom all his thoughts centred--these things had been his joy, and had led him easily through much self-denial to the careful husbanding of every hour of strength and time in the service of his ideal end.

And now he had come upon opposition--the first cooling of friendships, the first distrust of friends that he had ever known.

Early in the spring of this year a book called _To-morrow and the Land_ had appeared in London, written by a young London economist of great ability, and dealing with the nationalisation of the land. It did not offer much discussion of the general question, but it took up the question as it affected England specially and London in particular. It showed--or tried to show--in picturesque detail what might be the consequences for English rural or munic.i.p.al life of throwing all land into a common or national stock, of expropriating the landlords, and transferring all rent to the people, to the effacement of taxation and the indefinite enrichment of the common lot. The book differed from _Progress and Poverty_, which also powerfully and directly affected the English working cla.s.s, in that it suggested a financial scheme, of great apparent simplicity and ingenuity, for the compensation of the landlords; it was shorter, and more easily to be grasped by the average working man; and it was written in a singularly crisp and taking style, and--by the help of a number of telling ill.u.s.trations borrowed directly from the circ.u.mstances of the larger English towns, especially of London--treated with abundant humour.

The thing had an enormous success--in popular phrase, "caught on." Soon Hallin found, that all the more active and intelligent spirits in the working-cla.s.s centres where he was in vogue as a lecturer were touched--nay, possessed--by it. The crowd of more or less socialistic newspapers which had lately sprung up in London were full of it; the working men's clubs rang with it. It seemed to him a madness--an infection; and it spread like one. The book had soon reached an immense sale, and was in every one's hands.

To Hallin, a popular teacher, interested above all in the mingled problems of ethics and economics, such an incident was naturally of extreme importance. But he was himself opposed by deepest conviction, intellectual and moral, to the book and its conclusions. The more its success grew, the more eager and pa.s.sionate became his own desire to battle with it. His platform, of course, was secured to him; his openings many. Hundreds and thousands of men all over England were keen to know what he had to say about the new phenomenon.

And he had been saying his say--throwing into it all his energies, all his finest work. With the result that--for the first time in eleven years--he felt his position in the working-cla.s.s movement giving beneath his feet, and his influence beginning to drop from his hand. Coldness in place of enthusiasm; critical aloofness in place of affection; readiness to forget and omit him in matters where he had always. .h.i.therto belonged to the inner circle and the trusted few--these bitter ghosts, with their hard, unfamiliar looks, had risen of late in his world of idealist effort and joy, and had brought with them darkness and chill. He could not give way, for he had a singular unity of soul--it had been the source of his power--and every economical or social conviction was in some way bound up with the moral and religious pa.s.sion which was his being--his inmost nature. And his sensitive state of nerve and brain, his anchorite's way of life, did not allow him the distractions of other men. The spread of these and other similar ideas seemed to him a question of the future of England; and he had already begun to throw himself into the unequal struggle with a martyr's tenacity, and with some prescience of the martyr's fate.

Even Bennett! As he sat there alone in the dim lamp-light, his head bent over his knees, his hands hanging loosely before him, he thought bitterly of the defection of that old friend who had stood by him through so many lesser contests. It was _impossible_ that Bennett should think the schemes of that book feasible! Yet he was one of the honestest of men, and, within a certain range, one of the most clear-headed. As for the others, they had been all against him.

Intellectually, their opinion did not matter to him; but morally it was so strange to him to find himself on the side of doubt and dissent, while all his friends were talking language which was almost the language of a new faith!

He had various lecturing engagements ahead, connected with this great debate which was now surging throughout the Labour world of London. He had accepted them with eagerness; in these weary night hours he looked forward to them with terror, seeing before him perpetually thousands of hostile faces, living in a nightmare of lost sympathies and broken friendships. Oh, for _sleep_--for the power to rest--to escape this corrosion of an ever active thought, which settled and reconciled nothing!

"_The tragedy of life lies in the conflict between the creative will of man and the hidden wisdom of the world, which seems to thwart it_."

These words, written by one whose thought had penetrated deep into his own, rang in his ears as he sat brooding there. Not the hidden fate, or the hidden evil, but the hidden _wisdom_. Could one die and still believe it? Yet what else was the task of faith?

CHAPTER VI.

"So I understand you wish me to go down at once?" said Louis Craven.

"This is Friday--say Monday?"

Wharton nodded. He and Craven were sitting in Marcella's little sitting-room. Their hostess and Edith Craven had escaped through the door in the back kitchen communicating with the Hurds' tenement, so that the two men might be left alone a while. The interview between them had gone smoothly, and Louis Craven had accepted immediate employment on the _Labour Clarion_, as the paper's correspondent in the Midlands, with special reference to the important strike just pending. Wharton, whose tendency in matters of business was always to go rather further than he had meant to go, for the sake generally of making an impression on the man with whom he was dealing, had spoken of a two years' engagement, and had offered two hundred a year. So far as that went, Craven was abundantly satisfied.

"And I understand from you," he said, "that the paper _goes in_ for the strike, that you will fight it through?"

He fixed his penetrating greenish eyes on his companion. Louis Craven was now a tall man with narrow shoulders, a fine oval head and face, delicate features, and a nervous look of short sight, producing in appearance and manner a general impression of thin grace and of a courtesy which was apt to pa.s.s unaccountably into sarcasm. Wharton had never felt himself personally at ease with him, either now, or in the old days of Venturist debates.

"Certainly, we shall fight it through," Wharton replied, with emphasis--"I have gone through the secretary's statement, which I now hand over to you, and I never saw a clearer case. The poor wretches have been skinned too long; it is high time the public backed them up. There are two of the masters in the House. Denny, I should say, belonged quite to the worst type of employer going."

He spoke with light venom, b.u.t.toning his coat as he spoke with the air of the busy public man who must not linger over an appointment.

"Oh! Denny!" said Craven, musing; "yes, Denny is a hard man, but a just one according to his lights. There are plenty worse than he."

Wharton was disagreeably reminded of the Venturist habit of never accepting anything that was said quite as it stood--of not, even in small things, "swearing to the words" of anybody. He was conscious of the quick pa.s.sing feeling that his judgment, with regard to Denny, ought to have been enough for Craven.

"One thing more," said Craven suddenly, as Wharton looked for his stick--"you see there is talk of arbitration."

"Oh yes, I know!" said Wharton impatiently; "a mere blind. The men have been done by it twice before. They get some big-wig from the neighbourhood--not in the trade, indeed, but next door to it--and, of course, the award goes against the men."

"Then the paper will not back arbitration?"

Craven took out a note-book.

"No!--The quarrel itself is as plain as a pikestaff. The men are asking for a mere pittance, and must get it if they are to live. It's like all these home industries, abominably ground down. We must go for them! I mean to go for them hot and strong. Poor devils! did you read the evidence in that Bluebook last year? Arbitration? no, indeed! let them live first!"

Craven looked up absently.

"And I think," he said, "you gave me Mr. Thorpe's address?" Mr. Thorpe was the secretary.

Again Wharton gulped down his annoyance. If he chose to be expansive, it was not for Craven to take no notice.

Craven, however, except in print, where he could be as vehement as anybody else, never spoke but in the driest way of those workman's grievances, which in reality burnt at the man's heart. A deep disdain for what had always seemed to him the cheapest form of self-advertis.e.m.e.nt, held him back. It was this dryness, combined with an amazing disinterestedness, which had so far stood in his way.

Wharton repeated the address, following it up by some rather curt directions as to the length and date of articles, to which Craven gave the minutest attention.

"May we come in?" said Marcella's voice.

"By all means," said Wharton, with a complete change of tone. "Business is up and I am off!"

He took up his hat as he spoke.

"Not at all! Tea is just coming, without which no guest departs," said Marcella, taking as she spoke a little tray from the red-haired Daisy who followed her, and motioning to the child to bring the tea-table.

Wharton looked at her irresolute. He had spent half an hour with her _tete-a-tete_ before Louis Craven arrived, and he was really due at the House. But now that she was on the scene again, he did not find it so easy to go away. How astonishingly beautiful she was, even in this disguise! She wore her nurse's dress; for her second daily round began at half-past four, and her cloak, bonnet, and bag were lying ready on a chair beside her. The dress was plain brown holland, with collar and armlets of white linen; but, to Wharton's eye, the dark Italian head, and the long slenderness of form had never shown more finely. He hesitated and stayed.

"All well?" said Marcella, in a half whisper, as she pa.s.sed Louis Craven on her way to get some cake.

He nodded and smiled, and she went back to the tea-table with an eye all gaiety, pleased with herself and everybody else.

The quarter of an hour that followed went agreeably enough. Wharton sat among the little group, far too clever to patronise a cat, let alone a Venturist, but none the less master and conscious master of the occasion, because it suited him to take the airs of equality. Craven said little, but as he lounged in Marcella's long cane chair with his arms behind his head, his serene and hazy air showed him contented; and Marcella talked and laughed with the animation that belongs to one whose plots for improving the universe have at least temporarily succeeded.

Or did it betray, perhaps, a woman's secret consciousness of some presence beside her, more troubling and magnetic to her than others?

"Well then, Friday," said Wharton at last, when his time was more than spent.--"You must be there early, for there will be a crush. Miss Craven comes too? Excellent! I will tell the doorkeeper to look out for you.

Good-bye!--good-bye!"

And with a hasty shake of the hand to the Cravens, and one more keen glance, first at Marcella and then round the little workman's room in which they had been sitting, he went.

He had hardly departed before Anthony Craven, the lame elder brother, who must have pa.s.sed him on the stairs, appeared.

"Well--any news?" he said, as Marcella found him a chair.

"All right!" said Louis, whose manner had entirely changed since Wharton had left the room. "I am to go down on Monday to report the Damesley strike that is to be. A month's trial, and then a salary--two hundred a year. Oh! it'll do."

He fidgeted and looked away from his brother, as though trying to hide his pleasure. But in spite of him it transformed every line of the pinched and worn face.

"And you and Anna will walk to the Registry Office next week?" said Anthony, sourly, as he took his tea.

"It can't be next week," said Edith Craven's quiet voice, interposing.

"Anna's got to work out her shirt-making time. She only left the tailoresses and began this new business ten days ago. And she was to have a month at each."

Marcella's lifted eyebrows asked for explanations. She had not yet seen Louis's betrothed, but she was understood to be a character, and a better authority on many Labour questions than he.