The Socialist Part 25

For he did not know, being a young man with great possessions, but few experiences, that Love does not come upon the wings of light and laughter, but wears a sable mantle, shot through with fires from heaven.

He had never loved, and so he did not know that, when the divine blessing of love is vouchsafed, there is a catch in the throat and the tears start into the eyes.

He talked well and brilliantly, relating his experiences of that afternoon.

"So you see," he said, "I went into my great lonely house by a side door--the butler's door, I believe it is called as a matter of fact, and I found the library very warm and comfortable, and with the man I had appointed to be librarian gone. He apparently had just finished his day's work of cataloguing. He is a scholar of my own college and a very decent chap I have found him. He wanted some paid work during the vacations to help him on towards his career at the bar--he is going to be called as soon as he possibly can. I understand that he is certain for a double first. Already he has got his first in mods. and he will get a first in history, too."

"I know the man," Lord Hayle said. "Poor chap! He does not look too well provided with this world's goods."

"But I thought every one at Paul's," Lady Constance said, "was well-to-do. Is it not quite the nicest college in Oxford?"

"Oh, yes, Connie," Lord Hayle replied, "but don't you see, there are some scholarships upon the Foundation which make it possible for quite poor men to live at Paul's. They are very much out of it, naturally.

They cannot live with the other men, and so they form a little society of themselves. Still, it is a jolly good thing for them, I suppose," he concluded rather vaguely, and with the young patrician's slight contempt for, and lack of interest in people, of the cla.s.s to which Arthur Burnside belonged.

"Well, I like the man well enough--what I have seen of him," the duke continued. "But I made an extraordinary discovery to-day. Upon the writing-table where he had been working was some ma.n.u.script. It was obviously the last chapter of a book, and, by Jove! it was a book of the rankest Socialism!"

"Socialism?" said the bishop. "My dear Paddington get rid of the young man at once. Such people ought not to be encouraged!"

"Such people are very charming sometimes, bishop," the duke replied.

"You know that I probably owe my life to the chief Socialist of them all--Fabian Rose."

"Well, well," the bishop replied, "I suppose it would be unfair to deprive this young Mr. Burnside of his opportunity. At the same time, I must say it is extraordinary how these pernicious socialistic doctrines are getting abroad. Fabian Rose, and his friends, however personally charming and intellectual they may be--and, of course, I do not deny that some of them are very clever fellows--are doing an amount of harm to the country that is incalculable."

"They are clever," the duke returned, in a somewhat meditative voice; "they are, indeed, clever. This ma.n.u.script that I read was certainly a brilliant piece of special pleading, and, as a matter of fact, I don't quite understand what the answer to it can be."

"It does seem hard," Lady Constance said with a little sigh, "that we should have everything, and so many other people have nothing. After all, father, in the sight of G.o.d we are all equal, are we not?"

The bishop smiled. "In the sight of G.o.d, my dear," he answered, "we are certainly all equal. The soul of one man is as precious as the soul of another. But in this world G.o.d has ordained that certain cla.s.ses should exist, and we must not presume to question His ordinance. Our Lord said: 'Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's.'"

"But what I cannot see," the duke broke in, "is why, when wealth is produced by labour, the people who produce it should have no share in it. Don't think, Lord Camborne, that I am a Socialist, or infected in any way with socialistic doctrines." He spoke more rashly than he knew.

"But I should like to know the economic answer to the things which Mr.

Rose, and Mr. Conrad, and their friends told me when I was ill."

"The answer," replied the bishop, "is perfectly simple. It is intellect, and not labour, that is the creator of wealth. Let me give you a little example."

As he spoke he placed his elbows upon the table, joined the tips of his fingers together, and looked at his young audience with a suave smile.

"Let me instance the case of a saw!"

"A saw, father?" Lady Constance said. "What on earth has a saw to do with Socialism?"

"Listen," the bishop replied, "and I will tell you. If a saw had not been invented, planks, which are absolutely necessary for the construction of building, and, indeed, for almost all the conveniences of modern life, must be split up out of the trunks of trees by means of wedges, a most clumsy and wasteful method.

"Your labourer says that he produces wealth which the planks make. This, of course, is an absolute fallacy. Labour alone might rend the trunk of a tree into separate pieces, though, to be sure, it would be a difficult business enough. But only labour, working with tools, could split up the trunk of a tree with wedges, saw it with a saw, or cut it with a knife.

Don't you see, my dear Connie, labour makes the noise, but it is intellect which is responsible for the tune. Men move by labour, but they only move effectually and profitably by intellect. Labour is the wind, intellect the mill. Though there is as much wind blowing about now as there was three thousand years ago, some of it now grinds corn, saves time, and increases wealth. This difference is due, not to the wind, but to the wiser utilisation of the wind through intellect.

"And the same is true of labour. Without the inventions and the improvements of the few, labour would produce a bare subsistence for naked savages. It could not, however, produce wealth, because wealth is essentially something over and above a bare subsistence. A bare subsistence means consuming as fast as producing; and thus, all that labour does when not enabled to be efficient and profitable by the superior intelligence of the few.

"So that the real truth is that wealth, as such, is something over and above a mere subsistence, and, so far from being due to labour, is rather due to that diminution of toil which enables things to be produced more quickly than they are consumed. But such diminution is due to the time-shortening processes, methods, and inventions of the few.

The fact is that the general ma.s.s of men are of far too dull and clownish a character to do much for real advancement.

"Any forward step which produces wealth is taken by somebody in particular, and not by everybody in general.

"Of course it is easy enough to copy and profit by inventions and improvements after somebody else has made them."

The bishop stopped, and sipped his gla.s.s of Contrexeville, looking with a pleased smile at the young people before him.

No one could talk with a more accurate and sustained flow of English than Lord Camborne. He knew it. The public knew it, and he knew that the public knew it.

From some men such a sustained monologue would have been excessively tedious, even though the people to whom it was addressed were, like Miss Rose Dartle, "anxious for information." In the bishop, however, there was such a blandness and suavity--he was such a handsome old man, and had cultivated the grand manner to such perfection--that he really was able, on all occasions, to indulge in his favourite amus.e.m.e.nt without boring anybody at all. He was, in short, one of the few men in Europe who could enjoy the pleasure of hearing himself talk at considerable length without an uneasy feeling that, in giving way to his ruling pa.s.sion, he was not alienating friends.

"I see, father!" Lady Constance said as the stately old gentleman concluded his rounded periods. But there was a slight note of indifference in her voice. The bishop did not hear it, Lord Hayle did not hear it, but the duke detected it with a slight sensation of surprise. His senses were sharpened to apprehend every inflection in the voice of the girl he loved. And he wondered that she, apparently, was a little bored by the bishop's explanation.

He did not realise, being a young man, and one who had enjoyed a long minority, and had known but little of his parents, that, even though a prophet may sometimes have honour in his own country, his children do not always pay him his due meed of recognition when he is, so to speak, "unb.u.t.toned and at home."

The duke had never heard the story of the angry old gentleman who was threatening two little boys, who had thrown some orange peel at him, with the imminent arrival of a policeman upon the other side of the road. "Garn!" said the little boys in chorus. "Why, that's farver!"

The duke himself was intensely interested in the bishop's logical and singularly powerful exposition of socialistic fallacies.

He had been uneasy for a long time now. He had had an alarming suspicion that the arguments of Fabian Rose and his companions were unanswerable, and, on that very afternoon, he had been specially struck by the vigour and force of the concluding chapter of Arthur Burnside's book.

Now he was reinstated in all his old ideas. His mental trouble seemed to pa.s.s away like a dream. The world was as it had been before! The remainder of the dinner pa.s.sed off as brightly and merrily as it had begun. Lord Camborne was a charming host. He could tell stories of the great people of the Victorian Era, for he had been upon intimate terms with all of them. As a young man he had sat with Lord Tennyson in a Fleet Street chop-house in the first days of the _Sat.u.r.day Review_. He had been in Venice when Browning wrote that beautiful poem beginning--

"Oh, to be in England, now that April's there!"

and had been cynically amused at the poet's steadfast determination to remain in the City of Palaces until the cold weather of his native land was definitely over.

He had been an honoured guest at the wedding of the Prince and Princess of Wales, and many years afterwards he had sat at the hospitable table of Sandringham, and had reminded the King and Queen of the scene of their marriage.

It was very fascinating to the duke to hear these stories told with a delicate point and wit, and with the air which reminded the young man pleasantly of the fact that he, too, all his life, had been of these people, and was, indeed, a leader in England.

Since his a.s.sociation with Fabian Rose--an a.s.sociation which pleased and interested him, he had, nevertheless, found a great diminution of his own importance. That sense had been so carefully cultivated from his very earliest years that the loss of it had occasioned him much uneasiness. Now it all seemed restored to him. He was in his own proper _milieu_, and as he looked constantly at Lady Constance Camborne, more and more he felt that here, indeed, was his destined bride.

Lord Camborne, himself one of the astutest and shrewdest readers of character in England, gathered something of what was pa.s.sing in the young man's mind. He wanted the duke for a son-in-law. It was all so eminently suitable. The two young people were both exactly the two young people who ought to marry each other. The news of their engagement would, the bishop knew, be very welcome at Court, and society would acclaim it as the most fitting arrangement that could be made.

"If I am not very much mistaken," the old gentleman thought to himself, "the dear boy will ask Connie to marry him to-night. I must see if an opportunity cannot be arranged."

Lord Hayle, as it happened, was going to a bridge-party of young men, which was to be held in one of the card-rooms at the Cocoa Tree Club. He had asked the duke to accompany him, but the duke had already refused.

"I hate cards, my dear Gerald, as you know; and, really, I am not feeling too fit to-night."

"Very well, then," the bishop said, "we will smoke a cigar and have a chat, Paddington, and perhaps Connie will make some music for us? Sir William expressly asked me to see that you did not do too much, and went early to bed, after your terrible experiences, and I am not going to let you spoil your recovery."

"What a pompous old bore Sir William is," the duke said, laughing. "But I suppose he really does know about what he says."

"The greatest doctor alive at present," said the bishop.

Lady Constance did not leave the table after dessert, as they were all so intimate and at home. The young men were allowed to light their cigarettes, the bishop preferring to go to the library before he smoked.