Marcella Part 79

CHAPTER X.

"My dear Ned, do be reasonable! Your sister is in despair, and so am I.

Why do you torment us by staying on here in the heat, and taking all these engagements, which you know you are no more fit for than--"

"A sick gra.s.shopper," laughed Hallin. "Healthy wretch! Did Heaven give you that sun-burn only that you might come home from Italy and twit us weaklings? Do you think I _want_ to look as rombustious as you? 'Nothing too much,' my good friend!"

Aldous looked down upon the speaker with an anxiety quite untouched by Hallin's "chaff."

"Miss Hallin tells me," he persisted, "that you are wearing yourself out with this lecturing campaign, that you don't sleep, and that she is more unhappy about you than she has been for months. Why not give it up now, rest, and begin again in the winter?"

Hallin smiled a little as he sat with the tips of his fingers lightly joined in front of him.

"I doubt whether I shall live through the winter," he said quietly.

Raeburn started. Hallin in general spoke of his health, when he allowed it to be mentioned at all, in the most cheerful terms.

"Why you should behave as though you _wished_ to make such a prophecy true I can't conceive!" he said in impatient pain.

Hallin offered no immediate answer, and Raeburn, who was standing in front of him, leaning against the wood-work of the open window, looked unhappily at the face and form of his friend. In youth that face had possessed a Greek serenity and blitheness, dependent perhaps on its clear aquiline feature, the steady transparent eyes--_coeli lucida templa_--the fresh fairness of the complexion, and the boyish brow under its arch of pale brown hair. And to stronger men there had always been something peculiarly winning in the fragile grace of figure and movements, suggesting, as they did, sad and perpetual compromise between the spirit's eagerness and the body's weakness.

"Don't make yourself unhappy, my dear boy," said Hallin at last, putting up a thin hand and touching his friend--"I _shall_ give up soon.

Moreover, it will give me up. Workmen want to do something else with their evenings in July than spend them in listening to stuffy lectures.

I shall go to the Lakes. But there are a few engagements still ahead, and--I confess I am more restless than I used to be. The night cometh when no man can work."

They fell into a certain amount of discursive talk--of the political situation, working-cla.s.s opinion, and the rest. Raeburn had been alive now for some time to a curious change of balance in his friend's mind.

Hallin's buoyant youth had concerned itself almost entirely with positive crusades and enthusiasms. Of late he seemed rather to have pa.s.sed into a period of negations, of strong opposition to certain current _isms_ and faiths; and the happy boyish tone of earlier years had become the "stormy note of men contention-tost," which belongs, indeed, as truly to such a character as the joy of young ideals.

He had always been to some extent divided from Raeburn and others of his early friends by his pa.s.sionate democracy--his belief in, and trust of, the mult.i.tude. For Hallin, the divine originating life was realised and manifested through the common humanity and its struggle, as a whole; for Raeburn, only in the best of it, morally or intellectually; the rest remaining an inscrutable problem, which did not, indeed, prevent faith, but hung upon it like a dead weight. Such divisions, however, are among the common divisions of thinking men, and had never interfered with the friendship of these two in the least.

But the developing alienation between Hallin and hundreds of his working-men friends was of an infinitely keener and sorer kind. Since he had begun his lecturing and propagandist life, Socialist ideas of all kinds had made great way in England. And, on the whole, as the prevailing type of them grew stronger, Hallin's sympathy with them had grown weaker and weaker. Property to him meant "self-realisation"; and the abuse of property was no more just ground for a crusade which logically aimed at doing away with it, than the abuse of other human powers or instincts would make it reasonable to try and do away with--say love, or religion. To give property, and therewith the fuller human opportunity, to those that have none, was the inmost desire of his life. And not merely common property--though like all true soldiers of the human cause he believed that common property will be in the future enormously extended--but in the first place, and above all, to distribute the discipline and the trust of personal and private possession among an infinitely greater number of hands than possess them already. And that not for wealth's sake--though a more equal distribution of property, and therewith of capacity, must inevitably tend to wealth--but for the soul's sake, and for the sake of that continuous appropriation by the race of its moral and spiritual heritage.

How is it to be done? Hallin, like many others, would have answered--"For England--mainly by a fresh distribution of the land."

Not, of course, by violence--which only means the worst form of waste known to history--but by the continuous pressure of an emanc.i.p.ating legislation, relieving land from shackles long since struck off other kinds of property--by the a.s.sertion, within a certain limited range, of communal initiative and control--and above all by the continuous private effort in all sorts of ways and spheres of "men of good will." For all sweeping uniform schemes he had the natural contempt of the student--or the moralist. To imagine that by nationalising sixty annual millions of rent for instance you could make England a city of G.o.d, was not only a vain dream, but a belittling of England's history and England's task. A nation is not saved so cheaply!--and to see those energies turned to land nationalisation or the scheming of a Collectivist millennium, which might have gone to the housing, educating, and refining of English men, women, and children of to-day, to moralising the employer's view of his profit, and the landlord's conception of his estate--filled him with a growing despair.

The relation of such a habit of life and mind to the Collectivist and Socialist ideas now coming to the front in England, as in every other European country, is obvious enough. To Hallin the social life, the community, was everything--yet to be a "Socialist" seemed to him more and more to be a traitor! He would have built his state on the purified will of the individual man, and could conceive no other foundation for a state worth having. But for purification there must be effort, and for effort there must be freedom. Socialism, as he read it, despised and decried freedom, and placed the good of man wholly in certain external conditions. It was aiming at a state of things under which the joys and pains, the teaching and the risks of true possession, were to be for ever shut off from the poor human will, which yet, according to him, could never do without them, if man was to be man.

So that he saw it all _sub specie aeternitatis_, as a matter not of economic theory, but rather of religion. Raeburn, as they talked, shrank in dismay from the burning intensity of mood underlying his controlled speech. He spoke, for instance, of Bennett's conversion to Harry Wharton's proposed bill, or of the land nationalising scheme he was spending all his slender stores of breath and strength in attacking, not with anger or contempt, but with, a pa.s.sionate sorrow which seemed to Raeburn preposterous! intolerable!--to be exhausting in him the very springs and sources of a too precarious life. There rose in Aldous at last an indignant protest which yet could hardly find itself words. What help to have softened the edge and fury of religious war, only to discover new antagonisms of opinion as capable of devastating heart and affections as any _h.o.m.oousion_ of old? Had they not already cost him love? Were they also, in another fashion, to cost him his friend?

"Ah, dear old fellow--enough!" said Hallin at last--"take me back to Italy! You have told me so little--such a n.i.g.g.ardly little!"

"I told you that we went and I came back in a water-spout," said Aldous; "the first rain in Northern Italy for four months--worse luck! 'Rain at Reggio, rain at Parma.--At Lodi rain, Piacenza rain!'--that might about stand for my diary, except for one radiant day when my aunt, Betty Macdonald, and I descended on Milan, and climbed the Duomo."

"Did Miss Betty amuse you?"

Aldous laughed.

"Well, at least she varied the programme. The greater part of our day in Milan Aunt Neta and I spent in rushing after her like its tail after a kite. First of all, she left us in the Duomo Square, running like a deer, and presently, to Aunt Neta's horror, we discovered that she was pursuing a young Italian officer in a blue cloak. When we came up with the pair she was inquiring, in her best Italian, where the 'Signor' got his cloak, because positively she must have one like it, and he, cap in hand, was explaining to the Signorina that if she would but follow him round the corner to his military tailor's, she could be supplied on the spot. So there we all went, Miss Betty insisting. You can imagine Aunt Neta. She bought a small shipload of stuff--and then positively skipped for joy in the street outside--the amazed officer looking on. And as for her career over the roof of the Duomo--the agitation of it nearly brought my aunt to destruction--and even I heaved a sigh of relief when I got them both down safe."

"Is the creature all tricks?" said Hallin, with a smile. "As you talk of her to me I get the notion of a little monkey just cut loose from a barrel organ."

"Oh! but the monkey has so much heart," said Aldous, laughing again, as every one was apt to laugh who talked about Betty Macdonald, "and it makes friends with every sick and sorry creature it comes across, especially with old maids! It amounts to genius, Betty's way with old maids. You should see her in the middle of them in the hotel _salon_ at night--a perfect ring of them--and the men outside, totally neglected, and out of temper. I have never seen Betty yet in a room with somebody she thought ill at ease, or put in the shade--a governess, or a schoolgirl, or a lumpish boy--that she did not devote herself to that somebody. It is a pretty instinct; I have often wondered whether it is nature or art."

He fell silent, still smiling. Hallin watched him closely. Perhaps the thought which had risen in his mind revealed itself by some subtle sign or other to Aldous. For suddenly Raeburn's expression changed; the over-strenuous, hara.s.sed look, which of late had somewhat taken the place of his old philosopher's quiet, reappeared.

"I did not tell you, Hallin," he began, in a low voice, raising his eyes to his friend, "that I had seen her again."

Hallin paused a moment. Then he said:

"No. I knew she went to the House to hear Wharton's speech, and that she dined there. I supposed she might just have come across you--but she said nothing."

"Of course, I had no idea," said Aldous; "suddenly Lady Winterbourne and I came across her on the terrace. Then I saw she was with that man's party. She spoke to me afterwards--I believe now--she meant to be kind"--his voice showed the difficulty he had in speaking at all--"but I saw him coming up to talk to her. I am ashamed to think of my own manner, but I could not help myself."

His face and eye took, as he spoke, a peculiar vividness and glow.

Raeburn had not for months mentioned to him the name of Marcella Boyce, but Hallin had all along held two faiths about the matter: first, that Aldous was still possessed by a pa.s.sion which had become part of his life; secondly, that the events of the preceding year had produced in him an exceedingly bitter sense of ill-usage, of a type which Hallin had not perhaps expected.

"Did you see anything to make you suppose," he asked quietly, after a pause, "that she is going to marry him?"

"No--no," Aldous repeated slowly; "but she is clearly on friendly, perhaps intimate, terms with him. And just now, of course, she is more likely to be influenced by him than ever. He made a great success--of a kind--in the House a fortnight ago. People seem to think he may come rapidly to the front."

"So I understand. I don't believe it. The jealousies that divide that group are too unmanageable. If he _were_ a Parnell! But he lacks just the qualities that matter--the reticence, the power of holding himself aloof from irrelevant things and interests, the hard self-concentration."

Aldous raised his shoulders.

"I don't imagine there is any lack of that! But certainly he holds himself aloof from nothing and n.o.body! I hear of him everywhere."

"What!--among the smart people?"

Aldous nodded.

"A change of policy by all accounts," said Hallin, musing. "He must do it with intention. He is not the man to let himself be be-Capua-ed all at once."

"Oh dear, no!" said Aldous, drily. "He does it with intention. n.o.body supposes him to be the mere toady. All the same I think he may very well overrate the importance of the cla.s.s he is trying to make use of, and its influence. Have you been following the strike 'leaders' in the _Clarion?_"

"No!" cried Hallin, flushing. "I would not read them for the world! I might not be able to go on giving to the strike."

Aldous fell silent, and Hallin presently saw that his mind had harked back to the one subject that really held the depths of it. The truest friendship, Hallin believed, would be never to speak to him of Marcella Boyce--never to encourage him to dwell upon her, or upon anything connected with her. But his yearning, sympathetic instinct would not let him follow his own conviction.

"Miss Boyce, you know, has been here two or three times while you have been away," he said quickly, as he got up to post a letter.

Aldous hesitated; then he said--

"Do you gather that her nursing life satisfies her?"

Hallin made a little face.