London Lavender

CHAPTER VII

IN WHICH MR. DABNEY WARMS HIS HOUSE WITH A DISCUSSION AND I AM GLAD TO GET HOME

Mr. Dabney of The Balance having asked me to his housewarming, I found myself in his new rooms at about half-past nine, prepared for an unwonted night of it. He pretends that after my departure for the altar a period of decadence set in over Bemerton's and he had at last to leave. All inhabitants of rooms know these fluctuations. Everything will go smoothly for years and then suddenly comes a relaxation of energy on the part of the staff. It will come chez Packer without a doubt; but not just yet.

Dabney has moved from Westminster to the Temple, where a gentleman ought to live—to a noble suite in King's Bench Walk with a sidelong view of the river across the grass, on which in the cool of the evening the agile barristers disport themselves at lawn-tennis. He looks towards Lambeth and has a blessed glimpse over the trees and roofs of the giant gasometer of the Oval, and he can imagine on a summer's day all kinds of delectable occurrences in progress on the other side of it—Hitch at mid-off stopping express trains; Hobbs at the wicket, punishing and masterful; or whatever he most fancies.

The white wainscotted room when I entered it was full of smoke and noisy with talk. I contrived to find Dabney's hand in the fog and he pushed me into a chair. I gathered that public men were under discussion: the session was well advanced and the unexpected abilities which it had brought forth and the old abilities which it had tested and found wanting were being appraised, in the off-hand smoking-room way. Funny to one outside the machine to hear names which ought by their eminence to inspire respect—and among the simple and ignorant do so—tossed about so lightly and discussed so contemptuously. This man, it is true, was fifty per cent. stronger than last year; but most of them were disappointments, done.

These terrible fellows sized up everyone and everything, as they puffed and sipped. And there was nothing they did not know. They knew all the secrets of the Court as well as of Parliament. They knew why this man's name was not in the last list of honours and why that man's was. They knew everyone who drank too much and everyone who loved unwisely but too well.

Politics, I confess, do not interest me, except as warp and woof of the newspaper drama of life. I would not like to be a politician; nor indeed could I. Only a surgical operation would be able to effect that: some phlebotomizing process, to be followed by an injection of molten brass into the deplenished veins. But I like to watch the wire-pullers at work. There was one at Dabney's, the secretary to some organization: a bulky Rabelaisian cigar-smoker, or I might almost say cigar-eater, named Rudson-Wayte. Looking at him through the haze, as he absorbed his tobacco and drank his whisky, I found myself wondering if on that idle Sunday—the first week-end—the Creator, when He surveyed His six days' work, had exact foreknowledge of these two lenitives and the extent to which His children in the distant days to come would depend upon them. Rudson-Wayte more even than most men at an editor's housewarming leant upon both, and they seemed to agree with him, for his head was undoubtedly clear and hard. In a bout with the gloves or a hundred yards' sprint no doubt he would cut a poor enough figure on such a regimen; but then the highly specialized civilization under which he flourishes has eliminated both necessities. Perfectly easy nowadays for a London gentleman to live fifty years after leaving College and never accelerate his steps at all.

Not that Rudson-Wayte was a stranger to the strenuous life; but always from without. He had looked down amusedly from many a platform and watched ejections and free fights; but he had not taken part. His, to observe and make the best of the situation for his party. He told us of many such experiences and of the strategy which he had devised for the safety of his speakers. He referred to them as his men. "Of course, the only thing for me to think of was how to get my man out of it." And so forth.

"My man was a bit of a stick, not long married, and his precious skin was rather on his mind. The crowd was ugly too; began breaking the chair legs off for clubs. He hadn't any way with him at all, but there were reasons why he should have gone down there to speak, and he was sound enough on the principal question. Brought down his fist at the right moments, you know, and had quite a clever way with the word 'Mister'—for or against. But the game was up now, and things got worse when we heard that there was a gang outside waiting for us. There was only one thing to do and I did it. I got hold of four others of my lot and told them their roles. Then I turned up my collar, and smashed my hat in so as not to be recognized, grabbed my man, and we carried him forcibly out by the back door. As I feared, there were a thousand of them there waiting to duck the whole platform. The instant we emerged from the door supporting our burden, who was all collapsed into his clothes, I called out, 'A doctor! A doctor! Is there a doctor here?' They shut down at once and made a path for us. Bless you, the British public can't be trusted to carry anything through. They're always waiting to be diverted. It touched their old hearts, don't you see? 'Somebody hurt? Steady on, boys. Let them through first,' and so on. So we got through and were driving to the next town and the train for London in no time. London's the mother."

He seemed to me rather a hateful type, this cynical manipulator of candidates and passions; but Dabney tells me that he is really one of the best of men, with naturally very simple tastes, domesticated, musical, and devoted to ornithology. It is one of the bores of growing old, that one loses the power of dividing the sheep and the goats. When one is young, bad men are bad men and good men good men. As one gets older their boundaries begin to get confused and encroach each on the other; and I suppose that by the time I am seventy I shall not know any difference between them.

I asked Rudson-Wayte about bribery and corruption—were they extinct?

"As the dodo, I don't think," he replied. "The more you have to do with politics, the more you realize that human nature is human nature. Nothing ever changes. People tell you that Dickens was a caricaturist, an exaggerator. He may have been when he wrote about some things, but not when he described the Eatanswill election. That's as true as a Blue Book—every word of it—and always will be. Human nature doesn't get out of date. Bribery and corruption!—great Heavens, what else should there be? I don't say that money passes from hand to hand quite so crudely; but money's not the only medium of bribery. Every man has his price to-day, as ever, only he often prefers payment in kind. Why, you can bribe a man with virtue now and then. The big Nonconformist employers who carry a hatful of votes—lay preachers, you know—you can get at them by sitting under them one Sunday. They don't want money or promises: they want homage. Of course they do. Another man merely wants to be seen accepting a cigar from your own case; another to take your arm in public. It's after the election's over that this last type becomes such a nuisance."

"It's a low game," Dabney said, "and you're a low lot, and I don't really know why I like you and ask you to sit under a decent roof."

Rudson-Wayte smiled joyously. "No worse than editing a paper," he said, "and suppressing the truth about everything."

"And who does that?" Dabney asked quiveringly.

"You do, of course, every week. You attack one side for its turpitude and cynicism and applaud the other side for its high ideals and self-sacrifice, when you know there's not a penny to choose between them. They're just the same men, with different views as to how a business should be managed. You know that: you must know, because directly one of the big men on the other side—one of your blackest bugbears—retires, or dies, or loses his wife, you have an article on his personal charm and private integrity, the whole thing really proving him an arrant humbug ready to support against his conscience any policy forced upon him by his party or venal circumstance. You can't deny it. And again, every now and then when some non-party question brings two conspicuous opponents on the same platform in agreement, with compliments to each other, you say how delightful are these amenities of English political life which permit private friendliness to exist alongside public hostility; whereas that is, when looked into a little deeper, really a cause for shame, because men should be all of a piece. Well, what I say is that if you can write calmly like that of party politicians, and defend it, there is no need lor me to be troubled by your condemnation of me for being concerned in the making of party politics."

Dabney really took it very well, and as a matter of fact I don't know that he could have made much of a defence even if he had not been our host. All he said was, "Well, damn the party system anyway."

A young man who had been interjecting remarks very freely here took the floor.

"Of course," he said, "damn the party system. The whole mischief is the party system. It's rotten to the core. What we want in Parliament is the best men, not the machine-made men. But that's all that the voter can be allowed to vote for. How many independent, thinking men are there in Parliament to-day? Not half a dozen, and the few that there are steadily being frozen out. The machine can't endure them, and the machine is on top. I got a ticket for the House the other day and saw the conspiracy in action. There was an old man in our village who used to say that 'very few persons are better than anyone else,' and I thought of these words as I sat there and watched all those blighters at work. It was a terrible eye-opener. I knew that they were obsolete and stupid and pledged to the swindle, but I had no notion how stupid they were. No candour anywhere. On the one side bland red-tapism, and on the other the insincere acrimony of the Jack-out-of-office. Their manners, too, are an outrage—they chatter while speeches are going on; they shout offensive criticisms; there is never a moment when some one is not walking about. It's got to be changed."

"All very well," said Rudson-Wayte; "but you'll never be without it. Men fall into parties as naturally as they fall into temptation. There must be pros and cons. If you want to know how deeply rooted the party system is you have only to read the papers that advocate its removal. Their objection to party is to the party that is in. I have observed that when a paper boasts of having no favour for one party or the other it makes up for it by having an increased hostility towards one party or the other. No; if you really wanted to lead a crusade you would call for a party pledged not to add another law to the Statute Book as long as it held office. That would be something like. Also it would automatically rid the party at any rate of the legal element. But this is shop. For Heaven's sake talk about something else."

"We will," said Dabney, "but it will be shop all the same."

Dabney was right. Everything came round to shop very quickly, and, tiring of the monotony, I slipped away.

Dabney apologized for the dullness of the evening. "You see, this time," he said, "I had to ask everyone. We have better talk at our smaller gatherings. Come when I entertain some novelists."

I said that perhaps I would, and walked homewards correcting my estimates of our public men by the light of the evening's revelations. But by the time I reached the Euston Road I had decided to let them all stand as they were a little longer. Those fellows were only talking, I said. Strike London dumb for a year and how we should get on! Progress then!

CHAPTER VIII

IN WHICH AN HONEST COUPLE WHO NEVER DID ANYONE ANY HARM ARE SEEN ON THE BRINK OF THE STRUGGLE WITH PROSPERITY

It was the next morning, I think, that Mrs. Wiles entered the room in a state of high tension and handed me a letter. It came, she said, after Wiles had left for the Zoo, and would I do her the great favour of conveying it to him? But, first of all, would I read it and give my opinion as to whether or not it was a "have"? With these words she asked permission to sit down, and sank into a chair with her hand on her heart in something very like collapse. While Naomi fetched a restorative I opened the letter and read as follows:

"MR. MORDECAI WILES.

"DEAR SIR,—It is our pleasure to inform you that in accordance with the terms of the will of the late Samuel Wiles of 18 Bonchurch Road, Melbourne, of which we enclose a copy, you are sole heir to his property. To what this amounts we cannot at present state, but not less than £50,000. We beg to enclose a cheque for £500 to meet any emergencies that may occur, and await your instructions as to our future action.—We are, yours obediently,

"MORGAN & RICE"

Who was this Mr. Wiles, I asked. Mrs. Wiles said that he was an uncle of her husband's, as indeed I instinctively knew, for is not Australia peopled by uncles who do this kind of thing?

"Do you know how much it is?" I asked her. "It's two thousand a year, without touching the capital at all. What are you going to do?"

"I don't know," she said. "Ask Wiles. It frightens me. We were so happy, too."

"But you needn't be any less happy," said Naomi.

"I don't know. It frightens me," the poor thing repeated. "It's too late. Wiles will get so fat."

"Oh no," said Naomi, "we must see to that. We must keep him busy."

"It isn't as if we had children," said Mrs. Wiles. "Then it might be a good thing. But we're all alone. We've never spent so much as two pounds a week in our lives. And the little nest-egg we'd been saving all these years—to buy a house with—it makes that look so foolish!" The good creature was actually in tears. "But perhaps it's all a mistake," she added more brightly.

"I don't think so," I said. "This cheque is too real for that, and the copy of the will, too. Your husband's name is Mordecai, isn't it?"

"I'm afraid so," she said.

I carried the momentous documents to the New Ape-House, not without trepidation and misgiving. They were, I could see, the death-warrant to Wiles as Barbara's keeper; and I felt resentment against fate for so brutally breaking this bond, apart altogether from other mischief which might ensue. It was not as if either Wiles or his wife had imagination or any breadth of view. They were the most ordinary, simple, faithful creatures, not in the least discontented with their lot, and not in the least fitted to receive a fortune. They were too good for it; they had done nothing to deserve such a chastisement. A hundred a year—that would have been sensible: a fund against illness, a security for old age, a sanction for certain little extras now; but two thousand a year was monstrous.

Wiles was just showing out some impatient F.Z.S. when I arrived, and I watched the transfer of a shilling from hand to hand. Looking the F.Z.S. over, I doubted if he had more than £1800 a year, and smiled to myself. Wiles led me in, and for a time I did nothing but caress Barbara and feed her with grapes.

Then I said, "Mr. Wiles, how would you like to be rich?"

"Rich," he said. "How rich?"

"Well, rich enough to spend as many days as you liked at Lord's or the Oval?"

"But what about my apes?" he asked.

"I mean so rich that you couldn't very well go on looking after them," I said.

"I shouldn't like that," he replied.

"But don't you ever want a holiday?"

"Not more than a day or so. I can't trust my mate enough for more than that."

"But surely if you had to leave the Zoo owing to a fortune you could get accustomed to it?"

Wiles became suspicious. "May I ask who and what you're getting at?" he said.

I handed him the letter. He read it and the will several times.

"Well, I'm jiggered," he said at last. "Well, I'm jiggered."

"Your wife asked me to bring it," I told him.

"So I supposed," he said. "And she, what does she think of it all?"

"She's jiggered too," I said.

"Poor old girl," he said. "How much a year do you reckon it comes to?" he asked.

"About two thousand pounds."

He whistled. "And here have I been looking in a pawnbroker's window in Camden Town High Street for the past three months, wondering if I could treat myself to a meerschaum pipe he's got there, at twelve-and-six, to smoke on Sundays. I can have a bushel of them now, and there's no fun in it."

I walked back by way of the sea-lions' enclosure to refresh my eyes with the King Penguin's perfect ecclesiastical tailoring. He was pacing moodily about as usual, in what one felt to be the interval between a marriage ceremony and a funeral service. Much better, I thought, to have left the £2000 a year to him. No harm would then be done, and what perfect episcopal garden-parties he could give with it!

The Misses Packers' attitude to Mrs. Wiles, Naomi tells me, underwent an extraordinary change on hearing the news. That they were losing an excellent and inexpensive assistant they could not forget; and they overwhelmed her with attentions, led her downstairs with the tenderest solicitude, and plied her with tea. This was not, I am convinced, the rather ugly homage of the poor to the rich, but merely paying success its due. For the Misses Packer belong to that large branch of the human family which worships success. Mrs. Wiles had succeeded: she was worth £2000 a year; and they recognized her merit accordingly. They did not want any of her money or envy her her position at the top of the tree: they merely lit a votive lamp before her.

The next day Mrs. Wiles was able to tell us more. Wiles had been thinking it over and had decided to do nothing until the estate was wound up and all the money his. He had, however, mentioned the matter to two or three of his mates in confidence; but this turned out to be one of the secrets that apparently no one ever pretends to try to keep, for by night everyone knew of it: Wiles was a millionaire; and fourteen men that he didn't like first asked him to drink and then tried to borrow five shillings.

"I shall go on here too," said Mrs. Wiles. "That is, as long as they'll let me. But they do treat me so ladylike it makes me nervous, and that Miss Cole wants to find a house for me and introduce me to some of her friends. The idea! Still, it would be a nice thing to give up the place and then find the whole affair was a noax. Oh, and please, Wiles says, would you be so kind as to take care of this cheque for him—put it in your bank?"

As it happened, it was no hoax, and, circumstances quickly proving too much for them, the Wiles had to become gentlefolk. The result is that Wiles has left the Zoo and wears black clothes. These are not out of respect for the avuncular gander who laid the golden eggs, but because black clothes signify a holiday, and all life is now a holiday for him. Mrs. Wiles has left us and wears a hat ten years too young for her, with cherries. They have moved to a new house in a quiet street off the Camden Town Road, where they keep a small servant; but this is a waste of money, for, in the first place, Mrs. Wiles does everything in the end, and, in the second place, their old neighbours would gladly club together to pay the girl's wages themselves, just to be kept informed at first hand of how the millionaires are going on.

Naomi and I called, by invitation, to take tea with them, and we were all polite and uncomfortable, and I saw poor Wiles's eyes and thoughts wandering towards the kitchen, where he could have taken off his coat and been at his ease. I found that he had spent the morning, as I expected, at the Zoo, talking to old friends, and in fact he usually drops in for an hour every day.

"Yes," said his wife, rather acidly, "can't keep away from his Barbara."

Mrs. Wiles admitted that she had been cleaning up a little; unoccupied rooms do get that dirty in London. In the afternoon Wiles reads the paper or takes a walk, and sometimes Mrs. Wiles accompanies him to a picture palace. In the evening he becomes more normal again and drops into a public-house and perhaps plays a game of billiards; but even in these blessed hours, when bed is approaching and another day dies, things are not the same, for he can no longer frequent his old haunt, the Cross Keys. He went there for a little while, but had to give it up, partly on account of chaff, but chiefly because he found that he was expected to pay for everything for everybody. So now he spends his evenings in finding new houses of call, where his history is unknown, in continual fear of an old acquaintance coming in and giving him away.

"Then wealth isn't an unmixed blessing?" I asked.

"I wouldn't say that, sir, not yet; but it's a terrible change. What worries me more than anything else—even more than finding how many friends I've got that I'd never dreamed were friends at all—is the way that when you have money you're afraid of spending it. When I had my wages and a little over in tips I knew where I was. Now I don't know anything. As I've told the missis time and again, it's going to make a miser of me."

"If you'll take my advice," I said to Wiles, "you will buy a share in some small business that will give you an interest and an occupation. You are too young to be doing nothing: you'll go to seed and get ill. Don't let money injure you: make it a useful servant and friend."

"Yes; but what can I do?" he asked.

"Well, we must make inquiries," I said. "There must be such things going."

"And if you'll take my advice," said Naomi to Mrs. Wiles, '"you'll adopt a child; not so small as to be an anxiety, but just big enough to be a companion and a nice responsibility."

Personally I wish this Australian uncle had been a decent bankrupt, for his money has done no one any good. The Zoo has lost a capable keeper; the Misses Packer and ourselves have lost a good servant; and the Wiles have lost peace of mind and any real reason for existence.

CHAPTER IX

IN WHICH THE TOP-FLOOR-BACK TURNS OUT TO BE AN ACQUAINTANCE AND SCHEMES ARE UNFOLDED FOR THE SALVATION OF OF AN EFFETE RACE

We had at school a literature master who, in the course of many hundreds of discourses, made two remarks which have never left me; or would it not be fairer to say that of the hundreds of lectures which I heard from a certain literature master I have succeeded in retaining two injunctions? One was the comment (which he had from Dr. Johnson) that repetition is a fault rarely committed by bad writers, and the other, that what we call coincidences should never be noticed. This being so, I cannot describe as a coincidence the fact that the young Socialist at Dabney's turns out to be our own Socialist of the top floor of whose profounder sincerities Mrs. Wiles is so sceptical. I saw him the next day both enter the house and leave it, banging the door with a vehemence that would break up any delicately organized communistic home; and since then we have met in mutual recognition and have conversed.

Spanton seems to be very much in earnest—a boyish figure of about twenty-six, clean shaven, but without the soft brown clothes, costly Jaegerisms, and other external insignia of his kind. On the contrary, he is a bit of a dandy, uses quite superlative soap, and has a manicure set. It has been said that nothing is more annoying than to be agreed with when one is indulging a mood of self-depreciation. Well, Spanton will never be annoyed that way.

"They're a foolish lot," he said, referring to the company at Dabney's. "They go there every week just to cackle, and none of them ever lives at all. Except possibly that blackguard, Rudson-Wayte, and he ought to be in gaol. But the whole world's like that. All my friends and acquaintances are either writing or talking or vegetating. Dabney kindles to excitability every day over something said in the House, or something said by other journalists about something said in the House, and that's how he will go on spending this boon of life to the end—never travelling, never suffering, never being hungry or thirsty or wicked. What a way to live! And your novelists and dramatists too"—like so many of the world's reformers this young man has the most exasperating way of saying "you" and "your"—"your novelists and dramatists trafficking in the sham emotions of their puppets, how they are wasting this boon of life! And all their myriad audiences in the theatres, or readers reclining on sofas, how they are wasting it!—lulling themselves with the stories of fictitious mannikins, instead of doing something, almost no matter what. And this enemy of society who lives under our very roof, the cinema man, what an account there will be to settle with him one day! He's one of the worst lullers.

"It infuriates me. Something has got to be done, and I'm going to do it. England's got to look herself in the face. She's been dodging the mirror for years, but she's got to do it. I'm out to see that she does."

Asked what he did towards that end, Spanton said that at the moment he was delivering a series of lectures at such boys' schools as permitted treason to be talked. They were addresses on Socialism; not pure Socialism, but a brand of his own.

"Because, of course," he said, "we must get hold of the younger generation. The middle-aged and the elderly are no good; young men, youths, and boys are the best material. I show them as vividly as I can how dependent all of them are on labour not only for their comfort, but for the necessities of life. I have slides illustrating all the chief industries and some of the minor ones, even to cricket-bat making. I take them down coal-mines and show them what kind of a life a miner has to lead before our eggs and bacon can be cooked. I draw comparisons between their own pocket-money and the earnings of many kinds of labourers. In short I do all I can to make them think vividly of what the underworld of toil is like, and to realize how the spectacle of the upper world of wealth, as reflected in the halfpenny papers, must strike the toiler. If once they can be brought to understand this—to put themselves in the place of those others—things will be easier. Because it is a realization which they will never forget. I don't draw any moral. I don't suggest that there shall be an equal division of property or anything like that. For one thing, the schoolmasters wouldn't let me, and for another, I don't believe in equality. But I do drop a hint now and then that cricket and football are not all, and that the possession of riches carries with it a responsibility to the State."

"I should guess," I said, "that not the least of your difficulties in preparing your addresses is softening the adjectives. You must want to say so much more than you dare."

"O Heavens, yes!" he replied fervently. "I have the very deuce of a time with the blue pencil. And there are other troubles too. Some little while ago, for example, I was just rabid about a freak dinner that had been given in one of the big London restaurants, where some dancing girl was throned on a solid bank of roses that cost eight hundred pounds, and the musicians were seated in a barca that glided about a lake made for that evening only. There was a strike on at the time, and the contrast between this lavish rotten luxury on the one side and the destitution of the strikers' wives and children on the other was too extreme. In the old days when the poor couldn't read, or papers were too expensive, such dinners had a chance of being missed; but to-day everything is made public and reaches even the poorest, and helps very properly to inflame them. That is one of the principal reasons why nothing is ever going to be the same any more.

"Well, anyhow, I found something to say about this, and said it with a certain amount of unambiguity. And what happened? The schoolmaster seemed at the time quite satisfied, but I received a letter from him later asking me not to come again. It appears, as I afterwards found out, that one of the givers of the feast was a notoriously rich Jew whose son was at the school. The son wrote home about it and the father threatened to take him away if any more such lectures were delivered. So there you are!

"But what I really want to see in force more than anything else," Spanton went on, "and these lectures of mine are really a kind of gentle preamble to the campaign, is compulsory manual labour for everybody. A kind of pacific conscription. Ruskin, you remember, set his undergraduates to make a road. They did it perhaps rather too much as a lark and not steadily or sweatily enough. I would catch the boys earlier and put them for one or two years to mining, building, engineering, digging, whatever it is, at the time when they would naturally be at the Universities or just entering office. That would enlarge their sympathies and give them the practical insight which is the next best thing to imagination. But the time for such a scheme is not yet."

"It seems to me," I said, "that your scheme might go farther with enormously beneficial results. If to know all is to understand all, a system of interchange of employment and positions, carried out fully, would get into every section of society an understanding of the others. If the lady took a turn in the kitchen she would understand her cook's difficulties, while the cook in the dining-room would know for the first time what it felt like when the dishes were cold, underdone, or late. A bond would thus grow. Again, if the impatient patron of the restaurant had to take the waiter's napkin for a while, he would learn not only the reason of delay, but what it feels like to be spoken to like dirt, and the waiter, if he came in equally hungry and pressed for time, would appreciate the provocation to be sarcastic and rasping. And so on, right through society, until we all knew."

Spanton was pleased to say that my amendment was sensible; but it would not be very practicable, he thought. He has little humour, and no respect for it.

"And meanwhile," I asked, "what trade have you learned?"

He said he had learned none. He had been to Paris to learn painting; had given it up and become a convinced Socialist, and was now devoting himself to propaganda.

"But surely," I said, "it would be well, if only to strengthen your case, to put the plan into execution yourself. You are so young and you lay yourself open to the charge of inconsistency."

"I don't care about that," he said. "All Socialists are inconsistent: that is the first thing to get into your head in any dealings with us. But we are not more inconsistent than Christians—that is, if Christ was a Christian, which one often doubts. My special line is clear thinking and persuasiveness, and one must do what one can do best."

"And meanwhile what of the great boon of life?" I said. "Is it not in danger, like unpopular bills, of being 'talked out'?"

He was silent. "Oh, well," he said at last, "perhaps I like talking best. I wonder. But it's constructive talk. You can't deny that."

CHAPTER X

IN WHICH WE FIND OURSELVES IN THE BOSOM OF AN ENGLISH FAMILY AND WATCH A UTOPIAN IN LOVE

For some obscure reason Spanton has taken a fancy to me, and I must admit in return that I find something rather likeable in the scientific coolness of his mind and his dominating desire to see straight. Having taken a fancy to me, it follows that he wanted me to meet his betrothed, for although it naturally goes against his grain to do anything so conventional and banal as to be engaged, with the prospect of a legalized union in the future, human nature has been too much for him, and rather than lose his Nancy he has agreed to her father's very moderate wishes as regards an engagement and a registrar. But I need hardly say that he has given her no ring. In fact, his only presents to her so far, I understand, are a typewrriter and a pair of sandals.

Nancy is a Miss Freeland, one of a family of girls who live a few miles out of London in a roomy Georgian house, with a large untidy garden, near Richmond.

The first words that I heard on entering the Freelands' hall told me instantly that I was among a twentieth-century household: "Oh, father, don't be such an ass!"

The speaker—Jocelyn, a pretty girl in a soft Liberty dress—at once broke away to welcome her prospective brother-in-law, who was there humanized to Bob, and his friend; and Mr. Freeland laid his hard case before us.

"Tell me," he said, "is a man and a father an ass because he thinks that one visit to the theatre a week is enough for a growing girl of fifteen?"

I was hesitating in my reply when another of the daughters came to the rescue.

"I know what Mr. Falconer will say," she said: "he will say that he has always made it a point never to interfere in disputes between relations. But Bob's not like that. Bob's never so happy as when he can set relatives disputing; aren't you, Bob?"

Nancy here entered the room, bringing the number of the unmarried sisters to seven. She is the only one who is engaged, and is twenty-two. Jocelyn is older; the rest younger. Nancy is pretty too, but less pretty than Jocelyn. The married daughter is a Mrs. Gosling, of whom Jocelyn wickedly says that her husband is the only one of her suitors who has not married well.

At lunch-time Mrs. Freeland appeared, an easy-going, smiling lady, and we all sat down to a vast table covered with food and noisy with chatter. The great joke of the day—and in such families as these, where chaff is the grain of life (if I may so express it), each day produces its new joke—was their father's recent cleverness in the matter of the garden-party costume.

"Have you heard," Jocelyn asked me, "father's absolutely topping idea?" and entered upon the history; but beneath the Freeland roof no narrator is permitted to get to the end of anything unaided. Every story is composite. This one ran something like this.

"You see," Jocelyn began, "we all had an invitation to Lady Sydney's garden-party; and father wanted to go, but didn't know what to wear."

"Because," Mona explained, "it wasn't an ordinary garden-party. It was in connection with father's great educational scheme."

"Yes," said Mr. Freeland, "if there had been a nice little word like Tennis in the corner I should have had no qualms, but have gone in flannels, swinging a racket. But there wasn't, and a number of influential people were going to be there, largely to talk to me."

"Swank!" whispered Joan.

"So father turned on his wisdom-of-the-serpent tap," said Jocelyn, "with a vengeance. He began by dressing in tweeds with a straw hat."

"Don't forget the white slip and spats," said Phillida.

"Yes, and white spats. They're so white that beetles and other creeping things are blinded. It's like flashes of lightning down there."

"Oh, get on!" said Mona. "Let me tell Mr. Falconer."

"I assure you," said Mr. Freeland to me, "it's the tamest story you ever heard. The only chance of its being made attractive is for me to tell it."

"Well," said Jocelyn, "that was what he wore. But he also put into the car a complete suit of the tail-coat and top-hat variety, and then Harris and he drove off. The rest of us had to get there as best we could in a fleet of cabs. Well, Harris and he drove off and pulled up outside the party gates to see the others go in and count the straw hats and the top hats."

"It was very awkward," Mr. Freeland put in, "at first, because they came out equal. But then the toppers began to make the running, and when they were about six lengths ahead I decided that that was good enough, and so we turned into a narrow lane close by——"

"Where"—Jocelyn took it up again—"father changed."

"You see," Mona explained, "he'd started with his tweeds and straw hat."

"Mr. Falconer knows that," said Jocelyn.

"You can't make it too clear," Mona replied. "The whole story depends on that."

"Well," Jocelyn went on, her face kindling with excitement, "he had no sooner changed and got nicely into his tail coat and things—and he really can look quite decent, although to-day you wouldn't think it—"

"My dear," said Mrs. Freeland, "you mustn't say things like that. Your father always looks nice."

"Not in his green jodelling hat, anyway," said Mona. "No one can defend that honestly."

"I like it very much," said Mrs. Freeland.

"Of course," said Janet, "but then you're his wife. We're not."

"Anyway," Jocelyn went on, "father and Harris——"

"Harris is the chauffeur," said Joan.

"—were patting each other on the back for being so jolly artful, when what do you think happened?"

"Father, you tell," said Nancy, who has an eye for drama.

Mr. Freeland at once struck in. "This is what happened," he said. "Another car turned into the same lane and pulled up just round the corner, and, peeping through the trees, to our horror we observed a gentleman in a tall hat and morning coat stand up in it and begin changing into a straw hat and tweeds. I pass over the extraordinary coincidence that two guests should have hit upon an identical device to find out the correct thing to do——"

"And we pass over too," said Jocelyn, "father's terrible discovery that the neighbourhood contained another man as brilliant as himself."

"—and simply ask you to conceive of Harris's and my feelings. For if this other man was right we were wrong."

"Yes," said Mona; "but if he was wrong you were right."

"Exactly," I said.

"Very well, then," continued Mr. Freeland, "I instantly made up my mind."

"Napoleon at six stone," said Janet.

"'There is only one thing to do,' I said. 'I can't change again. We're too late as it is. We must therefore get there first. To follow this man in, in his vulgar clothes, would be a serious blunder.' So with infinite difficulty and the most perfect tact—carefully turning our heads from his quaint occupation (as though the lanes of England were meant to be dressing-rooms!)—we scraped past him, taking, I am pleased to say, a little varnish off his mudguard, and were away before his braces were properly fastened."

"There," said Jocelyn, "don't you think that a masterly move?"

"I do," I said.

"All brain work," said Mona.

"And when you were among the people," I said, "did you find that tall hats prevailed?"

"Absolutely," said Mr. Freeland.

"I counted them," said Jocelyn. "There were eighty-five straws, with tweeds or flannels; a hundred and ten tall hats; and forty-three Homburgs. Some of the Homburgs were worn with tail coats, so father could have taken his instead of his topper if he had liked."

"Thank Heaven he didn't!" said Janet.

"My dear Janet," said Mrs. Freeland, "how can you?"

There was also, I need hardly say, a joke against Mrs. Freeland. Herself the most temperate of women, she had lately been presented with an Aberdeen terrier named Whisky. Like all Aberdeens, he was just a mass of original sin, and naturally the last thing he would do on a walk was to keep near his mistress. The result was, as Jocelyn informed me with the keenest zest, that the neighbourhood had suddenly become painfully aware of Mrs. Freeland's repeated calls for whisky, ranging from the pathetic to the urgent, and was drawing its conclusions accordingly.

"Yes," said Joan, "poor father, the dipsomaniac's husband!"

I hope to see more of the Freelands, for life goes very easily among them, and it is amusing to be among so many fresh, unsophisticated young things, growing like grass upon the weir. It is one of those families where the skeleton seems never to leave the cupboard, and it is tonic to visit these now and then. Very different from the houses where it is the family that lives in the cupboard and one meets only the skeleton.

Spanton as a lover differs radically from Dollie Heathcote. Dollie lets his Ann go her own way and rather admires her for it; but Spanton is the influencing moulding type. The last infirmity of modern man, some one has said, is to force women to give up their sex; and Spanton is indulging it. His one idea is to make his Nancy not only a man, but another Spanton. He controls her. He arranges both her clothes and her reading. Being only an ordinary English girl, with no experience and a great joy and pride in being engaged, she has fallen in with his every suggestion, to the great disgust of her sisters. Gradually and surely she is ceasing to have any common ground with them; which is of course very foolish, for Spanton is not making her better, but merely different. Her Spantonisms are only veneer; the sound Freeland stock remains, and will remain underneath, although for the time being it is invisible.

"When half-gods go the gods arrive," says the poet. But it isn't generally true. More accurate would it be to say, "When gods arrive the half-gods go." That is a phenomenon which most families have witnessed and the Freeland family are witnessing now. Before the advent of the god Spanton, Nancy had been loyal to her sisters' and their friends' enthusiasms. She had had local heroes too—this cricketer, that tennis-player. But Spanton, although he may not be so proficient, has the only right way of behaving at these games, or else he despises them; while when it comes to the arts, he leads by lengths. Nancy used, for example, to be rather keen on musical comedy; but Spanton being all for Shaw, farewell to Gertie Millar. Nancy used to go to the Academy every May and revel in it; but Spanton believing only in the New Englishmen, farewell to the Hon. John Collier. And so it is, all over this little island.

CHAPTER XI

IN WHICH THERE IS TROUBLE IN THE HOUSE OF WILES OWING TO A HUSBAND ONCE AGAIN GETTING HIS OWN WAY

Naomi has had a letter from Mrs. Wiles saying that she was in trouble and badly in need of advice, and would Mrs. Falconer be so kind as to call. We therefore went round in the afternoon and found the millionairess in tears.

"Wiles will be here directly," she said. "He's just gone out for some medicine."

"No one's seriously ill, I hope?" I said.

"Well, I don't know," she replied. "But you remember, ma'am, what you said about adopting a child. We talked that over and over, and Wiles didn't seem to care about it at first, and then all of a sudden he got brighter and thought it was a good idea. Only, 'Leave it to me,' he kept saying; 'I'll do it.' Well, I know Wiles has his wits about him most times, but when it comes to adopting a child, why, there I think that the choice ought to have been mine. It's woman's work, anyway, especially as it's me who would have to look after it, or so I thought. But Wiles, he only laughed, funny like, and wouldn't hear of it. 'Leave it to me,' he kep' on saying. And what do you think? Yesterday the baby came; and what do you think it is? Why, not a Christian at all, but a baby chimpanzee. I'll admit it's not a monkey; that's something gained; but I don't know how to hold me head up, all the same. Look at the degrasion of it! What can the neighbours say? Because of course they'll think it's just a monkey. And in our position! Here we are, come into money and moving into a nice house, with a servant, and getting rid of the Zoo and all its fleas once and for ever, as I thought, and now to have it all beginning again and another of those creatures brought into the very house where we eat and sleep: that is if ever I, for one, will sleep again! Never did I think to see my own back-kitchen a menagerie."

At this moment Wiles came in, looking a little self-conscious, but important too. "Ah," he said, "I can see what the missis has been saying, but don't you take any notice of her. She'll be all right. Come and see my Lou," and he led us to the back-kitchen, where a timid and distrustful chimpanzee huddled in a corner. "That's her, that's my Lou," he said. "That's our adopted child, ma'am. She's got a touch of bronchitis, I'm afraid, and I've been getting some medicine. But she ought to be all right here, with me to look after her. Why, I feel another man already. Something to do again."

Lou was a picture of melancholy and suspicion as her new father poured out a spoonful of the linctus; but it was syrupy and she took it with pleasure. "There," he said, as she finished the dose, "my little girl isn't going to die of pneumonia. She's going to get strong and learn some good tricks, isn't she?"

"Tricks!" said Mrs. Wiles. "You know what that means: shaking hands, eating with a spoon, pretending to read the paper. Nothing worth doing. Nothing like a nice little orphan girl who would be a companion and a pleasure to us and go to a cinema now and then. I'm so disappointed."

"Well," I said, "there's time. It's only Wiles having his adopted child first. Your turn next. That's fair, isn't it, Wiles?"

"We'll leave it at that for the present," said Wiles, pointing to an illuminated card on the wall. "That's our motto," he added.

I am always attracted by stories of what might be called beneficent error, and this gesture of Wiles's gave me a perfect example. To my eyes and to ninety-nine observers out of a hundred the device, which ran thus,

represented nothing in the world but the text, "No Cross, no Crown." Judge, then, of my astonishment when Mrs. Wiles supplemented her husband's remark by saying: "Yes, we've had a lot of comfort out of those words in our day. 'Not now.' Later, it'll be all right. There's a better time coming. But it isn't quite ripe yet, so pull yourselves together and wait cheerfully. Wiles had it given him by an aunt of his, who was a very pious body, and it always puzzled us why she shouldn't have sent something more religious. But, as it happens, nothing religious could have helped us more, could it, Wiles? 'Not now.'"

Naturally I said nothing to them about it, but I have been wondering since what difference it would have made had they known all along that "No Cross, no Crown" was the true reading. Once they accepted the full meaning of the phrase, none, I suppose; for "No Cross, no Crown" and "Not now" come to mean the same thing in the end. But it is an amusing confusion, and not the least amusing part of it is the circumstance that two poets at any rate have toiled to combine words that would convey the same ideas, while all the time such a commonplace and terse locution as "Not now" could have done it all. For what more does Pope's famous couplet say:

Hope springs eternal in the human breast,
Man never is, but always to be, blest?

or "Rabbi Ben Ezra's" beautiful line:

Grow old along with me: the best is yet to be?

CHAPTER XII

IN WHICH THE FIRST-FLOOR-FRONT UNFOLDS AND SOME OF THE SECRETS OF A REMARKABLE INDUSTRY ARE LAID BARE

Mr. Lacey has now introduced me to Mr. Furley, with whom he divides the first floor, and whom we hear moving restlessly about overhead at all hours. On my mentioning this habit to him he said that he always walked when he was inventing. Asked what he was inventing, he said film stories. For Mr. Furley not only makes pictures of real events, which is the staple of his odd business, but devises dramas too. He has bought an estate near London, in Essex, where walled gardens with fine trees in them are so plentiful and cheap, and here he has erected a huge crystal palace for indoor photography as well as having natural surroundings for open-air episodes. Here, too, he has formed a stock company of actors and actresses to perform his plays.

Mr. Furley sent a message in one fine morning to say that he had a drama in the making that day, and would I like to see it. I said I would, and we were soon dashing off to his suburb in his motor-car.

We turned into the gateway of his estate, and there among the trees was a Red Indian encampment with a number of tethered horses—only a few yards from a busy High Street with electric trams in it. Cowboys on ponies waited near by, and an excited manager was shouting through a megaphone while the camera clicked off its myriad impressions. The whole effect was strangely bizarre, and I must admit it struck me as desperately silly. At least it seemed desperately silly that in a few days' time thousands of my countrymen all over England, and later, thousands of people all over the rest of the world, were going to pay to have their feelings worked up by such cynically manufactured heroics.

"I had no idea," I said, "that these cowboy dramas were made in England."

"Bless your heart, why not?" said Mr. Furley. "Nearly everything can be done in England. A background of trees in Essex is enough like a background of trees in Texas to satisfy most people. It's the movement and the humanity that they look at; they don't criticize. As a matter of fact, the cinema won't let them—it's too hypnotic. It lulls you."

The cowboys having done their scene, a cardboard room was quickly erected and the unhappy heroine sat in it to receive a visit from a drunken lover whom she was to reclaim from whisky. There were but three walls, and the two side ones were set at an obtuse angle to the back.

"You wouldn't think when you see these things on the screen," said Mr. Furley, "that the fourth wall is the world itself, with the camera in the midst. We build up the three walls in the open air for the most part, and keep the actors in focus by means of those long strips of wood on the ground, over which they mustn't step. When they are ready we take them, but they have been rehearsing a long time. Some words, you notice, are being spoken or the time would be wrong and the actions wouldn't fit; we don't ask them to learn anything by heart, but merely get the sense. No actor need ever retire into private life any more because his memory or voice has gone: the cinema will employ him.

"There's nothing you can't do with the cinema," he said. "For instance, suppose I want to show you run over by a steam-roller. I could do it so thoroughly as to make your wife shriek. First of all, I place you here and then the roller advances on you. I take photographs until the roller touches you. Then I stop the camera, lay on the floor a dummy figure, and take the roller advancing over that. I stop the camera again and place on the floor a brown-paper shape like a pressed-out man and I take the roller just passing off that. Then a lot of people crowd in, and I stop it while you take your place on the ground in the middle of them, and then I turn the wheel again and we see you restored to life. When the picture is exhibited it runs straight on as if there had been no breaks at all; but the breaks do it. It's the art of leaving out. The camera's good for anything; it's the new ideas that we want.

"Another thing we want is English actors and actresses with a sense of gesture. The idiots, they stand there and deliver their speeches as if they were posts, and how do you suppose that comes out on the film? The result is that we have to get foreigners for all the best plays—Italians first of all—because they move their hands while they are speaking and convey their meaning. Our own actors can do certain things all right, but not the best emotional things, and the result is I'm now writing a series of purely English plays where only English stolidity is needed. Then they'll be at home."

Mr. Furley showed me how some of the trick films are made. For example, one in which a box of bricks opened automatically, the bricks came out and built themselves into a house, and then unbuilt themselves and returned to the box.

"It's on the single picture principle," he said. "One picture at a time and then they're reeled off as if they were taken continuously, like views of the opening of Parliament and so forth. Suppose this is the box of bricks and you want that brick to come out of it by itself and stand itself on end. You take a piece of thread so fine as to be invisible and fasten it to the brick. Then you lift the brick an infinitesimal way and that is photographed; a little more, and another photograph; a little more, and another; and so on. Perhaps before that brick is on end sixty separate pictures have had to be made, and so on with the others. The film may take five minutes to exhibit; and it has required two weeks of ten-hour days to make.

"Historical scenes are still popular in some places," he said. "But you have to be careful how you do them. The public doesn't want them exact, but exact in the way it has always thought of them. For instance, I wanted to do an execution of Mary Queen of Scots, so I went to the British Museum to see contemporary pictures. But do you think I could use them? Not a bit of it. The public, accustomed to think of Mary as they have seen her in so many modern paintings, wouldn't have stood it. So I went to the modern painters instead and got some good ideas. But it isn't the real thing. Executions are always popular. The women like it. And a sad story—Jane Shore, Amy Robsart, the Princes in the Tower, Charles the First—you can't go wrong with those.

"But as a matter of fact, I hold that whatever you give the public now will do, because they've got the cinema habit. The films change every Monday and Thursday in most halls. Well, every Monday and every Thursday you see the same people roll up. If it's a good set, they tell their friends it's good and perhaps come again themselves. If it's a bad set they say nothing but hope for better luck next time. The one thing they can't do is to stay away. The cinema's got them."

As I looked over this strange place and heard Mr. Furley's explanations, ideas as to the further possibilities of the cinema crowded into my mind. Its educational advantages, for example, are remarkable, and a day will certainly come when most schools will have a machine for exhibiting films. The most delicate physiological processes can be recorded: the evolution of the butterfly from the egg; the hatching of chickens; and so forth—all making a biology lesson as fascinating as a romance. Every science can in fact be humanized by this invention, and school children actually see the world in the act of growing. My own particular hobby just now, too—folk dancing—how easily the cinema could help that, by reproducing the steps and movements so exactly as to make teachers almost unnecessary.

Geography again—how vastly more entertaining a lesson would be if the scholar was taken for a short trip through the country that was under examination. London in the early days of the cinema had several halls where only scenery was shown; and they were very popular. To-day the taste has declined and everyone wants melodrama. But those old topographical films are not lost and they would be priceless for quickening the imagination of the young at school.

I made some of these suggestions to Mr. Furley, but he was not enthusiastic. He is a serious man with taste, but he does not let that interfere with his business. "In our trade," he said, "you must give the public what they want. People like you come to me and say, 'Why don't you raise the tone of the films and make them more instructive?' But I want to retire, and in order to do that I must make money. I used to have a notion once that I would be ahead of the time, but I've given that up. The fact is, the cinema managers who buy my films won't let me. They decide what the public want, or the public want what they decide: I'm not sure which it is, but whichever it is, there's no chance for much that isn't vulgar. After the real events, and now and then a landscape film, everything has to be either passionate or comic.'

"Well," I said, "the time must surely come, and soon, when the cinema will begin to need brains. All this sham stuff will fatigue and the real thing will have a chance. If you take my advice you will try to be in the van. As it is, I feel sure that London could stand one hall at any rate where something better was given. There are such possibilities. Satire, for example, never had such an ally. Think how deadly at political meetings could a film be which depicted the rival candidate in ridiculous situations! Think of what Socialism might gain from a series of views of the stately homes of England and their idle plutocratic owners at play! Think of the way in which the cinema could fortify and supplement the work of the illustrated papers! No, you are only just beginning, and it is absurd for you to talk of retiring yet. For every ten camera films you make, to satisfy the stupid public, you ought to make one good one for your conscience's sake."

But Mr. Furley only laughed. "You don't know the ignorant buyers I have to deal with," he said.

"Then open theatres of your own," I urged.

"Not for anything," he replied. "No, I want to get out of it all. It's getting on my nerves. I can't sleep. My eyes have turned into lenses and my brain into a camera, and I see everything like that. Nothing but farming will do me any good, and I want to get to my farm as soon as I can and stop there. When I'm talking to people—as it might be you now—I find myself all ready to swear at them for not being more animated. I search the papers for the death of kings, because there's nothing so popular as royal funerals. I'm a lost soul."

No one who has not gone into the matter has any notion of what an industry has sprung up around the cinema. There is first of all the photographer, who must be supplied with materials, not the least of which is, annually, many miles of celluloid film. This film has to be made, and factories came into being to do nothing but make it. Passing over the other photographic accessories, we come to the buildings, where the dramas are enacted, the actors who perform, the costumes, horses, motor-cars, and scenery which they require, and the managers who rehearse them—often day after day for hours before the few minutes occupied by the final photography. Then the development and reproduction of the film, its sale to various syndicates that control the cinema shows of the world, and its exhibition in the theatres themselves, all day long, for three days only, in each, for the delectation of the thousands of spectators. And the whole thing isn't more than fourteen years old.

I made some remark to this effect.

"Oh," said Mr. Furley, "the cinema industry's nothing here compared with America. There they take it seriously. Expensive actors and actresses are retained, large tracts of country are rented, and the activity is prodigious. In Italy and France too they pay immense salaries to their funny men and huge fees to dramatists to devise scenarios. Here we pay next to nothing, and if possible nothing at all. One can get all the plots we want out of our heads or old novelettes. I have a man always at work reading old novelettes for plots."

England, my England!