Sir George Tressady Volume Ii Part 3

"I should imagine that Ancoats was acting through the greater part of that. He had said to himself that such a scene would be effective--and would be new."

"Good heavens!--why, that makes it ten thousand times more abominable than before!"

"I daresay," said George, coolly. "But it also makes the future, perhaps, a little more hopeful--throws some light on the pa.s.sion or pose alternative. My impression is, that if we can only find an effective exit for Ancoats,--a last act that he would consider worthy of him,--he will bow himself out of the business willingly enough."

Fontenoy smiled rather gloomily, and the two walked on in silence.

Once or twice, as they paced the Terrace, George glanced sidelong at his leader. A corner of Fontenoy's nightly letter to Mrs. Allison was, he saw, sticking out of the great man's coat-pocket. Every night he wrote a crowded sheet upon his knee, under the shelter of a Blue Book, and on one or two nights George's quick eyes had not been able to escape from the pencilled address on the envelope to which it was ultimately consigned.

The sheet was written with the regularity and devotion of a Prime Minister reporting to the Sovereign.

Well! it was all very touching and very remarkable. But George had some sympathy with Ancoats. To be virtually saddled with a stepfather, with whom your minutest affairs are confidentially discussed, and yet to have it said by all the world that your poor mother is too unselfish and too devoted to her son to marry again--the situation is not without its p.r.i.c.ks. And that Ancoats was acutely conscious of them George had good reason to know.

"I say, Tressady, will you pair till eleven?" cried a man, swinging bareheaded along the Terrace with his hat in his hand. "I want an hour or two off badly, and there will be no big guns on till eleven or so."

George exchanged a word or two with Fontenoy, then stood still, and thought a moment. A sudden animation flushed into his face. Why not?

"All right!" he said; "till eleven."

Then he and Fontenoy went back to dine. As they mounted the dark staircase leading from the Terrace another man caught Tressady by the arm.

"The strike notices are out," he said. "I have just had a wire. Everyone leaves work to-night."

George shrugged his shoulders. He had been expecting the news at any moment, and was glad that the long shilly-shallying on both sides was at last over.

"Good luck to them!" he said. "I'm glad. The fight had to come."

"Oh! we shall be in the middle of arbitration before a fortnight's up.

The men won't stand."

George shook his head. He himself believed that the struggle would last on through the autumn.

"Well, to be sure, there's Burrows," said his informant, himself a large coal-owner in the Ferth district; "if Burrows keeps sober, and if somebody doesn't buy him, Burrows will do his worst."

"That we always knew," said George, laughing, and pa.s.sed on. He had but just time to catch his train.

He walked across to the Underground station, and by the time he reached it he had clean forgotten his pits and the strike, though as he pa.s.sed the post-office in the House a sheaf of letters and telegrams had been put into his hands. Rather, he was full of a boy's eagerness and exultation. He had never supposed he could be let off to-night, till the offer of Dudley's pair tempted him. And now, in half an hour he would be in that queer Mile End room, watching her--quarrelling with her.

A little later, however, as he was sitting quietly in the train, quick composite thoughts of Letty, of his miners, and his money difficulties began to clutch at him again. Perhaps, now that the strike was a reality, it might even be a help to him and a bridle to his wife. Preposterous, what she was doing and planning at Perth! His face flushed and hardened as he thought of their many wrangles during the past fortnight, her constant drag upon his purse, his own weakness, the annoyance and contempt that made him yield rather than argue.

What was that fellow, Harding Watton, doing in the house at all hours, and beguiling Letty, by his collector's airs, into a hundred foolish wants and whims? And that brute Cathedine! Was it decent, was it bearable, that a bride of three months should take no more notice of her husband's wishes and dislikes in such a matter than Letty had shown with regard to her growing friendship with that disreputable person? It seemed to George that he called most afternoons. Letty laughed, excused herself, or abused her visitor as soon as he had departed; but the rebuff which George's pride would not let him ask of her directly, while yet his whole manner demanded it, was never given.

He sat solitary in his brilliantly lit carriage, staring at the advertis.e.m.e.nts opposite, his long chin thrust forward, his head, with its fair curls, thrown moodily back. And all the time his mind was working with an appalling clearness. This cold light, in which he was beginning to see his wife and all she did--it was already a tragedy.

What was he flying to, what was he in search of--there in the East End?

His whole being flung the answer. A little sympathy, a little heart, a little tenderness and delicacy of soul!--nothing else. He had once taken it for granted that every woman possessed them in some degree. Or, was it only since he had found them in this unexampled fulness and wealth that he had begun to thirst for them in this way? He made himself face the question. "One needn't lie to oneself!"

At Aldgate, as he was making his way out of the station, he stumbled upon Edward Watton.

"Hullo! You bound for No. 20, too?"

"No; there is no function to-night. Lady Maxwell is at a meeting. It has grown rather suddenly from small beginnings, and two days ago they made her promise to speak. I came down because I am afraid of a row. Things are beginning to look ugly down here, and I don't think she has much idea of it. Will you come?"

"Of course."

Watton looked at him with an amused and friendly eye.

It was another instance of her power--that she had been able to bind even this young enemy to her chariot-wheels. He hoped Letty had the sense to approve! As a matter of fact, Watton had never, by his own choice, become well acquainted with his cousin Letty, and had always secretly marvelled at Tressady's sudden marriage.

CHAPTER XIV

The two men were soon on the top of the Mile End Road tramcar, on their way eastward. It was a hot, dull evening. The setting sun behind them was already swallowed up in mist, and the heavy air held down and made palpable all the unsavoury odours of street and shop. Before them stretched the wide, interminable road which was once the highway from the great city to Colchester and East Anglia. A broad and comely thoroughfare on the whole, save that from end to end it has now the dyed and patched look that an old village street inevitably puts on when it has been swallowed up by the bricks and mortar of an overtaking town.

Tressady looked round him in a reverie, interested in the place and the streets because _she_ cared for them, and had struck one of her roots here. Strange medley everywhere--in this main street, at all events--of old and new! Here were the Trinity almshouses, with their Jacobean gables and their low, spreading quadrangle behind the fine ironwork that shelters them from the street--a poetic fragment from the days of Wren and Dryden, sore threatened now by an ever-advancing London, hungry for ground and s.p.a.ce. Here was a vast mission-hall, there a still vaster brewery; on the right, the quiet entrance to the oldworld quiet of Stepney-Green; and to the left a huge flame-ringed gin-palace, with shops on either side, hung to the roof with carpets, or brooms, or umbrellas, plastered with advertis.e.m.e.nts, and blazing with gas. While in the street between streamed the ever-moving crowd of East London folk, jostling, chattering, loafing, doing their business or their pleasure, and made perpetually interesting, partly by their frank preoccupation with the simplest realities of life: with eating, drinking, earning, marrying, child-rearing; still more, perhaps, by the constant presence among them of that "leisured cla.s.s" which, alike at the bottom and the top of things, has time to be gay, curious, and witty.

As he rolled along, watching the scene, Tressady thought to himself, as he had often thought before, that the East End, in many of its aspects, is a very decentish sort of place, about which many people talk much nonsense. He made the remark, carelessly, to Watton.

Watton shrugged his shoulders, and pointed silently to the entrances, right and left, of two side-streets, the typical streets of the East End: long lines of low houses,--two storeys always, or two storeys and a bas.e.m.e.nt,--all of the same yellowish brick, all begrimed by the same smoke, every door-knocker of the same pattern, every window-blind hung in the same way, and the same corner "public" on either side, flaming in the hazy distance.

Watton hardly put his comment into words; but Tressady, who knew him well, understood, and nodded over his cigarette. Watton meant, of course, to suggest the old commonplace of the mean and dull monotony that weighs like a nightmare upon this vast East London and its human hive, which hums and toils, drones and feeds, by night and day, in these numberless featureless boxes of wood and stone, on this flat, interminable earth that stretches eastward to Ess.e.x marshes and southward to the river, and bears yellow brick and cemeteries for corn. Well! Tressady knew that the thought of this monotony, and of the thousands under its yoke, was to Watton a constant sting and oppression; he knew, too, or guessed, the religious effects it produced in him. For Watton was a religious man, and the action of the dream within showed itself in him and all he did. But why should everyone make a grief of East London? He was in the mood again to-night to feel it a kind of impertinence, this endless, peering anxiety about a world you never planned and cannot mend. Whose duty is it to cry for the moon?

"Better get down here, I think," said Watton, signalling to the tram-conductor, "and find out whether they have really gone, or not."

They stopped, half-way down the Mile End Road, before a piece of wall with a door in it. A trim maiden of fifteen in a spotless cotton frock and white ap.r.o.n opened to them.

Inside was a small flagged courtyard and the old-fashioned house that Marcella Maxwell, a year before,--some time after their first lodging had been given up,--had rescued from demolition and the builder, to make an East End home out of it. Somewhere about 1750 some City tradesman had built it among fields, and taken his rest there; while somewhat later, in a time of Evangelical revival, a pious widow had thrown out a low room to one side for cla.s.s-meetings. In this room Marietta now held her gatherings, and both Tressady and Watton knew it well.

The little handmaid bubbled over with willing talk. Oh, yes, there was a meeting up Manx Road, and her Ladyship had gone with Lord Naseby, and Lady Madeleine, and Mr. Everard, the inspector, and, she thought, one or two besides. She expected the ladies back about ten, and they were to stay the night.

"An they do say, sir," she said eagerly, looking up at Watton, whom she knew, "as there'll be a lot o' rough people at the meetin."

"Oh! I daresay," said Watton. "Well, we're going up, too, to look after her."

As they walked on they talked over the general situation in the district, and Watton explained what he knew of this particular meeting. In the first place, he repeated, he could not see that Lady Maxwell understood as yet the sort of opposition that the Bill was rousing, especially in these East End districts. The middle-cla.s.s and parliamentary resistance she had always appreciated; but the sort of rage that might be awakened among a degraded cla.s.s of workers by proposals that seemed to threaten their immediate means of living, he believed she had not yet realised, in anything like its full measure and degree. And he feared that this meeting might be a disagreeable experience.

For it was the direct fruit of an agitation that, as Tressady knew, was in particular Fontenoy's agitation. The Free Workers' League, which had called upon the trade-unionist of Mile End to summon the meeting, and to hear therein what both sides had to say, was, in fact, Fontenoy's creation. It had succeeded especially in organising the women home-workers of Mile End and Poplar. Two or three lady-speakers employed by the League had been active to the point of frenzy in denouncing the Bill and shrieking "Liberty!" in the frightened ear of Mile End. Watton could not find a good word for any of them--was sure that what mostly attracted them was the notoriety of the position, involving, as it did, a sort of personal antagonism to Lady Maxwell, who had, so to speak, made Mile End her own. And to be Lady Maxwell's enemy was, Watton opined, the next best thing, from the point of view of advertis.e.m.e.nt, to being her friend.

"Excellent women, I daresay," said Tressady, laughing--"talking excellent sense. But, tell me, what is this about Naseby--why Naseby?--on all these occasions?"

"Why not, indeed?" said Watton. "Ah! you don't know? It seems to be Naseby that's going to get the egg out of the hat for us."

And he plunged eagerly into the description of certain schemes wherewith Naseby had lately astonished the Maxwell circle. Tressady listened, languidly at first, then with a kind of jealous annoyance that scandalised himself. How well he could understand the attraction of such things for her quick mind! Life was made too easy for these "golden lads." People attributed too much importance to their fancies.

Naseby, in fact,--but so much George already knew,--had been for some months now the comrade and helper of both the Maxwells. His friends still supposed him to be merely the agreeable and fashionable idler. In reality, Naseby for some years past had been spending all the varied leisure that his commission in the Life Guards allowed him upon the work of a social and economic student. He had joined the staff of a well-known sociologist, who was at the time engaged in an inquiry into certain typical East London trades. The inquiry had made a noise, and the evidence collected under it had already been largely used in the debates on the Maxwell Bill. Tressady, for instance, had much of it by heart, although he never knew, until he became a haunter of Lady Maxwell's circle, that Naseby had played any part in the gathering of it.