Goddard went away, after paying his first visit to Lady Phayre, with a wondering mind. His original intention had been to make it as short as he possibly could: he had remained nearly a couple of hours. He could scarcely believe his watch.
The delicate play of mind of a pretty and highly cultured woman was a novelty as rare to him as the bubbling of champagne in his apprentice days. He had gone expecting to endure the inane small-talk which his second-hand experience persuaded him was the inevitable adjunct of a lady’s tea-table; he had found conversation upon all the subjects dear to him invested with a charm such as he had never before imagined. Talk on social questions had ever been with him a deeply serious matter. Lady Phayre had brought into it an unknown lightness, a sparkle, a mental keenness, against which his own intellect sharpened itself, and at the same time a bewildering waywardness that never allowed him to forget she was a woman. In short, Lady Phayre was a revelation. He walked along with a buoyant step, like a man who has made a new discovery that promises to change the old order of things.
After a short interval a pretext arose for repeating the visit. He was careful to magnify its importance for the sake of self-justification. But on the third occasion he owned to himself that he had called out of sheer desire for Lady Phayre’s society.
As he stood, hat in hand, in the drawing-room waiting for her, he had a feeling of misgiving curiously like that of a boy who is fearful lest he is taking too great advantage of a kindly neighbour’s invitation to visit his fruit garden. Her smile of welcome, however, as she entered, reassured him.
“How good of you to come. I had a bit of a headache, and was beginning to mope by myself.”
“I too felt as if it would do me good to have a talk with you,” said Goddard, seating himself.
“Surely you don’t mope?” said Lady Phayre, lifting her eyebrows.
“O Lord, no!” he exclaimed with a laugh. “I have too much to do.”
“I wish I were a man,” sighed Lady Phayre.
“I don’t,” said Goddard. “If you were, I don’t think I should have wanted so much to come and see you.”
“Well, how am I to do you good? Will tea comfort you?”
“I think it would,” replied Goddard, smiling—“out of your gossamer tea-cups, and with imperceptible films of bread and butter. They seem outside of the uses of the weary, work-a-day world.”
“You shall have them, and until they come you shall tell me all the news. I have heard nothing for two days.”
He opened his budget. It was somewhat heavy. The lighter trifles of political gossip were beyond his range; but Lady Phayre listened attentively, adroitly brought him to his own part in current affairs. He had just been on a committee of the League, in the north of England, inquiring into the working of the Factory Act for women in certain trades. He had visited many white-lead works, where he had felt daunted by the inevitableness of the sacrifice of human health and happiness.
“But manufacturers are obliged to enforce precautions,” said Lady Phayre.
Goddard waved his hand impatiently.
“No precautions will ever prevent it. The poison gets in everywhere. The dust is in the air—impregnates the food, finds its way into the baths, creeps in through the tightest overalls. Women should not be allowed in it—and yet they must work. One feels paralysed before these deadly trades. I saw some women—young and vigorous—who had ‘got the lead,’ as they call it—death written on their faces, one going to have a child; that is one of the horrible parts of it—to be poisoned before one is born.”
“You take it to heart,” said Lady Phayre in a low voice. She was touched by his earnestness.
“I suppose I do,” replied Goddard. “If a man doesn’t, he had better leave Social Reform alone.”
Lady Phayre handed him his tea. The strong, heavily veined hand outstretched to receive the cup, conveyed to her a suggestion of strength which she could not help associating with the earnestness of his tone. For a moment Lady Phayre felt, not unpleasantly, the insignificance of her sex.
“Do you know, when I see men like you devoting your whole lives to the cause of others, I feel very small and petty,” she said, upon the impulse.
Daniel looked at her in some confusion. No one had ever paid him such a tribute before. Coming from Lady Phayre, it gratified more than a man’s vanity. He laughed awkwardly.
“I don’t know that I do so much good after all,” he said. “You are a far more important person, really. You are in the swim of everything—the pivot of the party.”
“Oh, the party!” cried Lady Phayre. “Sometimes I get so tired of it. It seems to be all concerned with means—the end lost sight of. Nothing day after day but little moves, and counter-moves, and intrigues, and this person’s speech, and that person’s vote. Oh, Mr. Goddard, when you get into Parliament you will never develop into the typical party-man—the lobbyist, and asker of questions, and mover of amendments. ‘You are so different from most of the other men who come here.”
She spoke sincerely for the moment. By the light of Goddard’s earnestness she glanced ashamedly at her own political dilettanteism. A momentary conception of nobler effort passed through her mind. Womanlike she projected these higher subjective workings into increased regard for the man. When Goddard took his leave, he was unaware how far he had advanced in Lady Phayre’s good favour; but he realised that something new and helpful had come into his own life.
After this he became a constant visitor at Queen’s Court Mansions. Usually he chose the times when Lady Phayre was alone. In the general society he now and then met in her drawing-room, he felt shy and constrained, blundered in his speech, and grew hot with anger at imaginary errors. A proud man, he was ashamed at himself for envying the ease of manner of other men. In a mixed assembly he was helpless.
“I am not coming to your omnium gatherums any more,” he said once to Lady Phayre. “I don’t know how to talk to these people. Their ways are natural to them. I have to put them on, and I put them on crooked.”
“But you know how to talk to me,” she replied with a smile.
“You are different,” he said. “You know who and what I am. You are good enough to take me just as birth and circumstances have made me.”
She bent forward and looked him sweetly in the face.
“Be to others just as you are to me.”
“That’s an utter impossibility!” he exclaimed quickly, with a flash in his eye, at which her face flushed.
“Well, perhaps not quite the same,” she said. “But I like you to come occasionally and show yourself at my little receptions. It completes them, you know.”
So Goddard withdrew his decision and strove to adapt himself to society ways. But it went sorely against the grain. The hour’s discomfort over, he hurried home, threw his dress-coat on a chair, and smoked a pipe in his shirt-sleeves with feelings of intense relief. Other invitations, which Lady Phayre’s patronage necessarily procured for him, he refused with obstinate persistence.
“I do far more good, both to myself and others, if I put in a spare evening at a working-man’s club,” he said to Gleam, who was persuading him to take advantage of social opportunities.
The months went by. Goddard worked with a zest which even he had not known before. In the little comedy of their lives Lady Phayre played Egeria with nice discrimination. Daniel imperceptibly acquired the habit of setting forth all his schemes and ambitions for her approval. His strenuous life had been so single-purposed that he had retained many simplicities, and his nature came fresh to receive her sympathy. The first time he handed her the manuscript of a review article he blushed like a schoolboy. It was a pleasant time. He was too ingenuous to suspect pitfalls in his path.
His domestic life continued its usual course. Lizzie had spells of soberness and quasi-repentance, alternating with periods of outbreak. These latter, however, were growing more frequent. To Daniel the asperities of everyday existence became more and more external. A dogged, almost Philistine sense of duty kept him uniformly kind and considerate; but he had long since ceased to regard her as one fulfilling any of a wife’s functions.
A bond of union between Lady Phayre and himself was formed by the increasing rumours of trade disturbances at Ecclesby, and the consequent complications introduced into the choice of a Parliamentary candidate for the Hough division, in which it was situated. The sitting member was daily expected to accept the Chiltern Hundreds. The Conservatives had secured a strong candidate. The Liberal organisation was divided. The influential local man desired by the moderate section would be opposed by the Labour vote in favour of an Independent candidate. To save a three-cornered contest, the advanced section had approached Goddard. All through the summer, things had remained at a deadlock. Lady Phayre, with feminine love of intrigue, had stimulated her friends at Ecclesby to exert their influence in Goddard’s favour.
“I am going down there in the autumn,” she told him one day, “and I shall open the campaign in person.”
But before she could fulfil her promise, the trade storm burst in Ecclesby. A general strike and lock-out declared itself. Attempts at compromise failed hopelessly. Terms of agreement, suggested by a board of arbitration, were indignantly rejected by both sides. A long, bitter struggle seemed inevitable. Daniel watched its progress with intense interest. Principles of relation between Labour and Capital were at stake, in whose cause he had fought from those far-off days when he had carried a three-legged stool to Hyde Park on Sunday afternoons, and harangued his casual and apathetic audience. It was a small strike when compared with the great contests that have convulsed industry of late years; but its result would have far-reaching consequences. He thirsted to join in the battle, but the delicacy of his position as regards the constituency kept his tongue silent. And as the days went on, and he saw that the Trades Union was less and less able to hold its own, he chafed in London, and poured out his heart to Lady Phayre.
At last, one memorable day, he found himself in a cab speeding to her, all too slowly. A great delight was thrilling through his veins. Visions of fierce conflict, victory, fulfilled ambition danced before his eyes. He sprang up the steps of Queen’s Court Mansions, tingling with the news he was carrying to his—to his what? He did not know. An impulse, whose sanity he never questioned, brought him hither irresistibly. During the long interview with the strike leaders, from which he had freshly come, his thoughts had turned to her, had identified the anticipation of telling her with the pride of the moment. The gift of feminine sympathy was still so new to him that he rushed to it with a child’s indubitative eagerness.
The door of the flat opened as he reached the landing, and Lady Phayre appeared, dressed for walking, in a dark fawn costume trimmed with fur and a toque to match.
“You look pleased,” she said, smiling at his dark, flushed face and shining eyes. “Whatever has happened?”
“I am going down to Ecclesby to lead the strike,” he said, panting a little. “The Trades Union people have just been to me, and I have come to tell you at once.”
The news pleased her, the homage flattered her. She beamed gracious appreciation upon him, invited him to enter and acquaint her with the details. They both remained standing in the drawing-room.
“It’s very simple,” he said. “The union is badly organised, is gradually losing hold on the men. No one seems able to take the lead. They are making a mess of it. I was afraid they would. I was only telling you so lately. So they have begged me to come and help them.”
“I see,” said Lady Phayre, with kindling cheeks, “they want a strong man with a strong will; a leader of men.” She put out her hand impulsively. “I am so proud.”
The words and the touch of her hand quivered deliciously through Goddard’s frame.
“It is the biggest thing I have been called upon to do yet,” he said. “Of course I have no official position in the matter; I cannot approach the masters in any way. But the Union has guaranteed free action; placed itself unreservedly in my hands. All the responsibility is practically mine. I shall win,” he added, after a pause, during which he took three or four strides backwards and forwards in the room. “Somehow I feel it. I have eternal justice on my side. Oh, to think what success will mean for all these people!”
“And for you, my friend,” said Lady Phayre. “Win, and there’s Parliament for you with a triumphant majority.”
He looked at her for a moment open-mouthed. She saw a new intelligence dawn in his glance.
“Do you mean to tell me you never thought of that?” she asked quickly.
“No,” he said simply; “it had not struck me.” Lady Phayre turned her face from him, and buttoned her glove. There are some feelings which rush into a woman’s eyes that it is not advisable to show to the man who evokes them. When she had slipped the last button she looked up at him smilingly.
“I think you’re the only man in England who could have said that. When do you commence operations?”
“The day after to-morrow. There will be a big open-air demonstration. Then I’ll settle down to regular work—visiting, picketing, speechifying, overhauling the books, agitating for help from cognate trades. I shall have my hands full.”
He prepared to take his departure, seeing that she was going out.
“You can walk part of the way with me, if you like,” she said graciously.
It was an undreamed-of honour. Save his mother and his wife, he did not remember to have walked in the street with any woman. He strode by her side proud and happy. Their way lay through Hyde Park. The October leaves shimmered like golden scales in the afternoon sun, shedding a glory around him. The few passers-by seemed non-existent. The great stretch of lawn rolled on either side towards the just visible white house-tops. In front, the chequered path of the burnished avenue. From time to time his companion raised her delicate face to him. A slanting beam caught the light of her eyes and the gold tints of her hair under her dainty toque. A strange, unknown feeling stole upon his heart.
A great silence and splendour had fallen over life.
It was Lady Phayre who broke the silence at last. Her voice was sweetly silvery.
“If I came to Ecclesby, could I be of any use to you?”
“You would only have to look as you look now,” he answered, “and there is nothing you couldn’t help me to do.”
Lady Phayre began, stopped abruptly as a little tremor shook her shoulders delicately, then recovering herself, broke into a laugh.
“I shall look ever so much more businesslike, I assure you. I’ll go and make friends with the wives. It will be useful against canvassing time. I am an old campaigner in electioneering, you know. But I have never taken an active part in a strike. It will be a new thing for the political woman to do. I am always seeking after something new. I must have been an Athenian in past ages—an Athenian of the Athenians—and my soul got so impregnated that it has never been able to free itself. I wonder if they would let me make a speech, Mr. Goddard?”
“We will ask the Union,” he laughed, following her unwittingly into the lighter track she had started upon. “But will you really come and help?”
“Of course.”
“How can I thank you?” said Goddard.
“Post me up in all the ins and outs and technicalities,” she replied brightly.
He took up his parable, and told her of shifts and piece-work, and the intricacies of sliding-scales of wages, and the complications of the trade. And, in truth, it was a parable. For the idyllic hour of Goddard’s life had come, and air, and trees, and sun, and words all lost their outer sense, and became informed with hidden meaning.
The outskirts of Ecclesby, where the “quality” live in villas decorously withdrawn from the roadway, and screened from public view by the garden-trees, are as pleasant as those of any idle town given up to homing the Great Retired. The traveller by road might fancy he was entering a Midland Cheltenham or Leamington, so soothingly genteel are its approaches. But a few minutes’ walk, past smaller villas, then semidetached villas, then villas clustered together like reeds in a pan-pipe, then unpretending red-brick jerry-built cottages, would bring on a gradual disillusion, preparing him for the hopeless disenchantment of the town itself. A long black street, untidy with little shops and public-houses standing here and there amid a row of poor, dirty dwelling-houses, mounts in an undecided curve from the railway station, and suddenly, at the top of the hill, twists sharply round into the High Street, where brand-new hotels and brand-new shops try to look smugly unconscious of the world below the corner. But the shops have to supply that world’s wants, and all the bravery of window fronts cannot give the illusion of refined and luxurious patronage. There is not much pleasure to be got out of Ecclesby. Even its theatre is up a dingy side-street, and has a threepenny gallery and sixpenny pit. The fair follies and vain amenities of existence find no place there. It is given over to labour grim, absorbing, inevitable. At certain periods of the day the High Street, Market Square, and Union Street, which cuts laterally through its heart, at the top of the rise, are quite deserted. The great bells ring, and the gaunt countless-windowed factories situated all around in labyrinthine tangle of mean streets disgorge into the main thoroughfare the pale work-grimed population they had swallowed up. The town becomes a swarming hive. The shops are thronged. From the ever-swinging doors of public-houses comes the roar of voices, borne upon gusts of air saturated with alcohol and shag-tobacco. There is little diversity of type or costume. The town exists for one industry. The population drifts from the grim Board School inevitably, unquestioningly into the grim factory. If the next transition is not into the grimmer workhouse by the railway station, they account themselves happy. Each man acts, dresses, eats, hopes, thinks, and, at last, looks like his neighbour. And the girls and women work in the factories too. The streets are alive with them. They march along in knots of three or four, bareheaded, bare-armed, red-shawled, shrill, nonreticent of speech. The doorways of hundreds of dwellings in squalid by-streets are dissonant with the clamour and picturesque with the dirt-encrusted chubbiness of children.
This is Ecclesby when the factories are working, and the hum of strange machinery strikes the ear on passing by the yawning gateways. But when Goddard went there a blight had fallen on the town. The factories for the most part were silent, the streets depressing with unjoyous idleness. The fact that the strikers had gone in procession the day before with a brass band that played the Dead March in “Saul” before the employers’ villas had not produced lasting exhilaration. The very deadly boredom of leisure, apart from anxiety as to issues, was wearing down the adult population. To lean against a street corner, pipe in mouth, hands in pockets, in taciturn converse with one’s mates, is pleasant enough for a few hours on Saturday afternoons; but to persist in it all day long, and day after day, induces considerable lassitude of the flesh and infinite weariness of the spirit. What the deputation had told Goddard was true. The men were growing sick of the struggle. Whispers of submission already floated in the air. The Trades Union officials were steadily losing their influence. The employers’ agents had been busy among them, spreading nerve-shaking reports as to the impregnable position of the firms. The Union was small, poor, badly organised. The strike pay was scanty. Much of it was spent, almost unwillingly, in drink.
Severe distress already began to make itself felt.
Goddard brought a practised intelligence to grasp the situation, and realised how fully his were victory, if it were gained; also how great a responsibility rested upon his shoulders in urging the continuance of the strike. It meant the extravagant love or execration of a teeming town.
“If you advise us to give in, we’ll do so,” said the secretary of the Union, a careworn man with iron-grey hair and lantern-face. They had been discussing affairs in the office. The fire had gone out in the tiny grate, and the dimness of a gathering wet evening crept in through the uncleaned panes. Goddard was silent a moment. The man’s tone was so hopeless.
Then the joy of battle rose within him, and was mingled strangely with the radiance of Lady Phayre—a thrilling sense of his own strength, trebled by the wine of her influence—and he leapt from his chair and brought his two great hands down on the secretary’s timorous shoulders.
“We’ll win this, mate. We’ll carry it through, and have the firms on their knees. Ruin is staring them in the face. They will have to climb down. Man, we are not fighting machinery. If we were, I would say ‘throw it up.’ Man has never bested a machine yet, and never will. It’s mere brute force—who can hold out longest. And they can’t hold out longer than we. I’ll stake my soul upon it.”
“But the capital behind them,” murmured the secretary.
“That’s a pack of damned lies!” cried Goddard. “You can take it from me!”
A glow appeared on the grey face as Goddard’s splendid assurance gained upon him.
“We’ll follow your lead past starvation, sir,” he said in a voice hoarse with new-born hope.
The knowledge of Goddard’s arrival had quickened the general apathy. His visible presence in the streets was a draught of strength. The brave words he spoke to casual knots of men turned their sullenness to hope, and were passed from lip to lip after he had gone by. Before the great meeting in the afternoon, he had already lifted the tone of the strikers. They were conscious of a new force among them.
When he mounted the platform in the densely packed market-place, a spontaneous cheer arose to greet him. When he retired, after a long, vigorous speech, he knew that he had accomplished the first and all-important part of his task—the winning of the men’s confidence.
And then began a period of intense, unremitting work. For beyond the commonplaces of strike organisation, picketing, fund-distribution, speech-making, and the like, the continuous maintenance of the moral strength of a whole community by sheer force of will involved infinite devotion. He had to carry things with a high hand. The Employers’ Federation invited a conference. For a while he had high hopes. The hour came, and the whole town awaited the issue in breathless suspense. Goddard sat alone in the little office of the Union, chafing at his necessary exclusion from the discussion. At last the representatives of the Union returned, the secretary bearing a paper in his hand.
“Shall we agree?” he asked, giving it to Goddard.
He glanced over it, and his face darkened.
“Can I make this public?”
“Certainly, if you think it best,” replied the secretary, with a sigh.
“Thank God, it’s over, any way,” said one of the representatives.
But Goddard did not hear. He flung open the window and brandished the paper before the crowd assembled in the street.
“Men! listen to the result of the conference.”
He read the document in a loud, even voice. The employers had offered a few trivial concessions, a slight rise in skilled wages; but the principles were untouched. He hurried through the last clause; and before there was time for a cry to come from below, he tore the paper across and across with a passionate gesture, and scattered the pieces on the heads of the crowd. The men, who had listened in silent submission to what they thought were the final terms agreed upon, burst into a great cheer. The dramatic touch had quickened the revulsion of feeling.
“There, gentlemen,” said Goddard, turning round to the representatives. “I have burned your ships for you.”
A day or two afterwards Lady Phayre appeared upon the scene. She was coming on business—not pleasure, she had informed her friends, and accordingly laid house, carriages, and servants under requisition. Mr. Christopher Wentworth, her host, was the leading member of the Progressive League in the neighbourhood, and a humble vassal of Lady Phayre. His wife’s interests in life extended from her husband’s throat, which was delicate, to his digestive organs, which were dainty.
“So long as you don’t take Christopher to open-air meetings, Rhodanthe,” she said to Lady Phayre, “and give him bronchitis, or make him late for dinner, you can do exactly what you like.”
“Oh, I don’t want Christopher. He would be sadly in the way,” said Lady Phayre, reassuringly. “I’ll make him stay at home and write letters and collect funds.”
She summoned Goddard to wait upon her. He had already received two or three daintily penned letters from London, and had been eagerly looking forward to this one from Ecclesby itself.
He found her alone in the bright morning-room, radiant as Romney’s Bacchante head of Lady Hamilton that hung on the wall, and wearing the simplest of elegantly-cut blue serge costumes. Her sunniness almost dazed his eyes, accustomed lately to the gloom of sordid homes and pinched faces. She was eager to hear all the details of the situation; drew from him an exhaustive report. Her presence lifted him into a sanguine mood, filled him with a vague sweet sense of the triumph of life.
“Now let me tell you something,” she said when he had finished. “Don’t say I am not a woman of character. I have been bursting with it since you came into the room, and I have waited patiently. I have arranged a surprise for you. I am going to institute at once a children’s halfpenny tea-house. Haven’t you heard anything about it?”
“Not a word.”
“I am so glad.” She laughed, and clapped her hands. “It has all been going on under your very nose. My own idea. It is the children that suffer so. They don’t know why they should bear with hunger. So I am going to give them a great breakfast or tea, with as much bread and butter as they can eat, for a halfpenny.”
“But the funds?” asked Goddard.
“That is the greatest stroke of all,” replied Lady Phayre enthusiastically. “I have inveigled a grant out of the League, and the Evening Chronicle has promised me to start a subscription list to-night. I am negotiating for the use of the Salvation Army Barracks, and Evans and Williams are going to contract for the meals. Haven’t I been industrious?”
“You have,” said Goddard. “It will be a tremendous help to us.”
“You don’t mind my having kept it a secret from you?” she asked after some further discussion; “I wanted it to come as a surprise to you—to cheer you with a little unexpected help.”
She put her hands in her lap, and bent forward with a pretty air of humility. A faint note of wistfulness in her voice increased its charm.
All Goddard could say was that the scheme had been perfect. He tried to say more, but his unaccustomed brain refused to formulate in words subtleties of emotion. But before leaving he had a sudden inspiration.
“I feel a different man since I have seen you,” he said abruptly; “I was inclined to be harassed and despondent. Now—— ‘Strange how a smile of God can change the world.’ That’s what you seem to be.”
Lady Phayre turned away her head and blushed. She knew it was like a school-girl, but she could not help it. No one had ever told her quite that before. The glimpse into spiritual things rather frightened her. She did not know whether to be angry or pleased at being enraptured. Like a wise woman, she decided upon indefiniteness. But she could not hide a certain softness in her eyes as she bade him good-bye.
“I shall be in the Salvation Army Barracks at nine this evening. If you could help me just a little—unless you are too busy?”
He promised, delighted, and went away on house-to-house visits in the dark byways of the town, spreading everywhere, with great voice and hearty gestures, the overflow of his happiness. He felt himself filled with the spirit of victory. One man refused to be comforted.
“Strikes never did no good,” he said.
Goddard drew himself up, towered over him, and rated him for pusillanimity. If he could have spoken his inmost heart, he would have shouted—
“Man, don’t you see that I am unconquerable!”
And so for the next few days the men were held together and lifted by the one man’s happiness.
Meanwhile the Children’s Tavern was a great success. Lady Phayre worked indefatigably, serving herself, with other helpers, behind the trestles ranged round the great bare hall and creaking beneath the load of great tea-ums, mountains of bread and butter, and, in the morning, steaming pans of porridge. Goddard loved to make his way through the crowd of clamorous unwashed children to the place where Lady Phayre, deliciously fresh in white bib-apron and turned-back cuffs, was busily dispensing viands, receiving pence and halfpence from grubby little hands, and paying for countless moneyless urchins from a great private store of coppers by her side. And after the press was over, she would emerge from behind the trestles and walk up and down the hall with him discussing affairs.
Never had she seemed so near to him as now when a common interest united them. But in Goddard’s fresh, newly-awakened idealism, it was not her arm that brushed his on a common level, but it was her wings that touched his head.
Sometimes he would meet her in the streets, on a round of visits among such homes as she knew; sometimes he would see her sitting in the dog-cart, with her host, on the outskirts of a crowd he was addressing. Once she even persuaded him to accept a dinner invitation at the Wentworths’. She grew more into his life daily.
The strain of his position, as arbiter of the struggle, grew more intense. Rumours of the larger firms being backed up by the great capitalist Rosenthal were gaining hopeless credence. At another fruitless conference, one of the employers boasted that they could maintain a lockout for a couple of years. Goddard summoned a great mass-meeting of operatives, and gave the manufacturer the lie with passionate vehemence. Once more he imposed his will upon them.
He was fighting this battle as he had never fought before. Every aim of his life seemed to be merged in the issue. Not only were the great principles of the rights of labour at stake, not only the present and future happiness of this great community, but his own career seemed to hang in the balance, and, in a strange, uncomprehended way, his credit with Lady Phayre.
At last the London world began to clamour for Lady Phayre. A rift was threatening to appear in the Progressive lute. “You only can put things straight,” wrote Aloysius Gleam. “Fenton and Hendrick have bumped each other’s heads in the dark, and they are angry with one another, and we are all taking sides. You must bring them to kiss and make friends over your dinner-table.” So Lady Phayre deliberated. She had one very good reason for remaining at Ecclesby; but, on the other hand, she had fifty little feminine ones for leaving it. The work she had taken in hand, the Children’s Tavern, was in capital going order. She had already found her own services, as attendant, superfluous. She was free to resign the charge of it into competent hands. Why should she stay? It was not often that Lady Phayre did not know her own mind. At last she compromised. She would pay a visit to London, to effect the desired reconciliation, and then return to Ecclesby.
“I don’t like leaving you at all,” she said to Goddard, the evening before her departure. “It seems as if I am deserting you. But I shall make haste back.”
“Ah, do!” said Goddard pleadingly. “The people have grown so fond of you. And you are such a help to me.”
To atone for her defection, she had dismissed the carriage, and allowed him to see her home after the tea at the Salvation Army Barracks. It was already night, but the moon had risen, and lent a tenderness to things. Lady Phayre was glad of its aid, for it was on her conscience to leave Goddard with comfortable impressions.
“I have done very little,” she replied.
“You have advised me at every turn,” said Goddard.
“You have advised yourself while talking to me.”
“Anyhow, I could not have got on without you.”
“Believe it then, if it pleases you,” she said softly. “You can write me a daily account of things, if you like—and I will go on ‘advising’ you. Will that do?”
“You are too good to me,” he said fervently.
They walked on a little in silence. Then she asked him how much longer he thought the strike would last.
“Another fortnight must see the end of the employers’ resources,” he said with conviction. “The game of bluff can’t last longer.”
“And are you sure that the Rosenthal story is a myth?”
“As sure as I am that the moon is shining on your face.”
Upon the word, the moon disappeared behind a cloud. Lady Phayre started, and touched his sleeve.
“Oh, what a bad omen!”
But Daniel laughed. Omens had no place in his downright philosophy.
“Well, Juliet calls the moon inconstant,” said Lady Phayre gaily. “So we won’t believe it.”
“I only have to keep the men up till then,” said Goddard.
“And you will do it, Mr. Goddard,” she replied. “It will be a great victory, and we shall all be so proud of you.”
So Goddard went to sleep that night with hope thrilling through his dreams. And he woke up the next morning and went about his work, and longed for Lady Phayre. She might be back in five days.
But before the five days were up, Rosenthal’s support of the Employers’ Association became a matter of public certainty.
“I will not believe it,” shouted Goddard to the grey-faced secretary. “Nothing but the sight of Rosenthal’s cheque would convince me. If you give in now, you’ll be throwing up the most glorious victory labour ever won in this country. You are fools—wretched, cowardly, credulous fools.”
But the tide of conviction had set in. He was powerless against it. He strove with the passionate rage of his nature, exhausted himself in wild, furious effort. The end came with overwhelming rapidity. Goddard felt that he had lost his Waterloo.
Goddard mounted the stairs of Queen’s Court Mansions with a heavy tread. He was physically tired, and his heart was sullenly sore. He had felt himself irresistibly drawn hither, though his pride hated the ordeal of confessing his failure to a woman, especially to Lady Phayre. The old, fierce class feeling was ineradicable. She was above him. Success, brilliance alone could keep him on her level. Failure brought him down. A glimmering realisation of this had come to him in the train, and he had pulled up his coat-collar angrily, and doggedly resolved to swallow his humble-pie to the last mouthful. But it did not occur to do otherwise than drive straight to her from the railway station.
He deposited his bag and ulster in the hall, and followed the servant into the drawing-room. The first glimpse of it cheered him. The subdued light, the dancing fire, the warm tones of carpet and curtains, the cosy atmosphere, the charm of perfectly harmonised surroundings, struck gratefully upon his sense.
Lady Phayre dropped on the hearthrug the book she was reading, and rising quickly, made a step or two to meet him. Her eyes were wide, in great concern.
“Oh, how tired you are looking. Come and sit down, in the big chair by the fire. It was good of you to come. See, I have been waiting for you—with Monmouth.”
She smiled, and directed her glance downwards to the white cat which had stalked up and was rubbing itself, with arched back and outstanding fur, against Goddard’s legs. He stooped and patted the beast.
“I am just done-up,” he said, sitting down wearily in the chair, and throwing back his head.
He was looking exhausted. A pallor appeared beneath his dark skin; his eyes were rather sunken, thus bringing into strange relief his somewhat massively hewn features. A strand of black straight hair fell from the side-parting across his forehead. Lady Phayre, standing with one hand on the back of her chair, regarded him pityingly.
“Have you had anything to eat?”
“Oh, yes; I think so.”
“Tell me when. Ah! I see you haven’t. I’ll order you something in the dining-room.”
“I couldn’t think——” he began; but she interrupted him.
“You must, to please me. I can’t bear to see you so tired. You will feel quite a different man. And a small bottle of champagne.”
Man has not been born of a woman who could have refused Lady Phayre, when she spoke with that coaxing charm.
Goddard’s face softened into assent, and he followed her with his eyes, in a dumb, wondering way, as she went to give the necessary directions.
He had never quite familiarised himself with his surroundings in that room. It always seemed a corner of Paradise that had somehow got left behind upon the unlovely earth. The feeling had never been so strong as at present. With his brain throbbing from the painful emotions of the day, his eyes still dazed by the various scenes—the mean, squalid streets, the grim, closed factories, the poverty-stricken homes, the idle, sullen men lounging at street-corners, the crowd of gaunt, unresponsive faces at the meeting—and with his body exhausted with fatigue and hunger, this warm nest of exquisite peace and comfort was deliciously unreal. Even Moumouth, luxuriously coiled on his velvet cushion, seemed a creature of a different sphere from that of the lean grey cats he had seen darting from doorways across alleys, preceding the appearance of red-shawled women. And the voice of Lady Phayre hummed like far-away music in his ears, and her delicate womanly sympathy was like soft hands against his cheek. It was almost a dream. He leaned forward, elbows on knees, his fingers through his hair. He longed for her to come back, so that he could tell her of the failure. Somehow, it no longer struck him as an ordeal. The magic of her presence had charmed away his repugnance.
She returned, knelt down on the long fender-stool, and spread out her hands before the blaze.
“They won’t be long.”
She turned her head sideways towards him as she spoke. Her attitude was alive with feminine grace and charm.
“You are as good as you are beautiful,” he said, in reply to her hospitable remark.
She met his full glance, and smiled contentedly. The blunt sincerity of the tribute compensated for its lack of the finer imaginative shades. There was a moment’s silence. Then she raised her eyes again, but this time with sad expectancy.
“Well?”
He broke out in a kind of groan.
“It’s all over. I needn’t tell you that. You got my letter this morning, and you must have guessed from my wire this afternoon. We give in to-morrow unconditionally—after all these weeks of struggle and sacrifice. It is the most crushing blow labour has ever had. And I’ll stake my existence another week would have seen them through. Rosenthal is no more going to finance these firms than he is going to finance me. It has been cruel. I have been working at it since six o’clock this morning. It has been like trying to fly a kite with a cannon-ball at its tail. At the meeting this afternoon I did all I knew. I have never lost my head with passion before. They were all like dead men; went away dragging their boots. Some of them cursed me. Managers came round me afterwards. ‘Didn’t I know? The strike fund was exhausted.’ As if I was ignorant of it! ‘Two more days would see the end of it.’ I said, ‘In God’s name, see the two days out.’ They shook their heads; were going to announce surrender then and there; but I managed to make them put it off till the morning. And then I came away—eating my heart out.”
He set his teeth and glowered at the fire. The story of the defeat had brought back the bitterness in all its intensity. Lady Phayre did not speak, instinctively knowing that, with him, silence was the truest sympathy.
“The bitter part to me,” he continued, with note of passion that vibrated through the woman, “is, that if I could have had a hundredth part of the grip on them to-day that I had a week ago, I should have brought them through. I know it as I know water goes down hill. I have failed. It is my failure. I have been responsible for all these poor creatures’ sacrifices during the past weeks; and now all the poverty, hunger, despair, for nothing. You saw what it was a few days ago. You should have been there this morning. I saw a man seize a bit of bread and treacle out of a child’s hand and begin to devour it—like a wolf—I couldn’t stand it.”
Lady Phayre looked at him quickly, and then for the first time noticed a slight bruise and an abrasion on his forehead. She drew her own conclusions.
“Oh, the awful misery of it all,” said Goddard between his teeth.
“I am sorry,” said Lady Phayre in a low voice, “sorry to my inmost heart; but I am sorrier for you.”
“Ah! you mustn’t say that,” cried Goddard passionately. “Think—you couldn’t mean it. It would be inhuman!”
“It is only too human,” murmured Lady Phayre.
He was about to speak, when the maid-servant announced that the supper was ready; so, instead of replying to Lady Phayre’s murmur, he remained silently wondering.
She led the way into the dining-room, where a dainty but substantial meal was spread—a piece of salmon with crisp salad, a truffled pie, a cold fruit-tart. Only one place was laid. It had seemed to Lady Phayre she could give him kinder welcome if she sat by him as he ate than if she went through the formal pretence of joining him at the meal. Then she wondered, in the feminine way, whether he was cognisant of it. The servant uncorked the champagne and retired. Lady Phayre sat down near him, resting her elbow on the table. At first he leaned back in his chair, looked at his plate, then at her.
“I feel too sick at heart to eat. The thought of those poor starving women and children!”
“Your going without food will not fill their mouths, you know,” said Lady Phayre in sympathetic remonstrance.
“I suppose I feel my own personal humiliation too,” he said ungraciously, as if forcing out the admission. “One may as well be honest. It’s the biggest thing I’ve set my hand to as yet, with everything depending upon it. And to have to throw it up when victory was staring one in the face! It is maddening!”
He bent forward impatiently and took up his fork. He laid it on his plate, and turned to Lady Phayre.
“You are the only person in the world I could say that to.”
“Do you know why?”
The words were half whispered, but she looked at him full and clearly.
“Because you are yourself, I suppose—your good opinion dear to me, your sympathy a necessity.”
“And all that because you know I believe in you.”
Her eyes fell beneath his gaze, which was stern and yet half pleading. Then she raised them again slowly, with the delicious upward sweep of her lashes, and repeated—
“I believe in you.”
A thrill ran through the man; his dark, powerful face lit up. Lady Phayre shifted her attitude, and broke into a silvery laugh.
“And all this time you are not eating. If you don’t begin at once I shall go away.”
Goddard laughed shamefacedly, with a vague consciousness that he had been ungracious in not having commenced before. He helped himself to the salmon. After the first mouthful or two his aversion to food disappeared, and he went on eating with the appetite of a bigframed, very hungry man. With the exception of a sandwich and a glass of beer at the station bar before starting, he had eaten nothing since his early breakfast. The food and the wine restored his physical well-being. Lady Phayre looked on, pleased, she could scarcely tell why. These big, earnest men were sometimes like babies—so helpless, if left to themselves. She tended on him now and then in a pretty way without leaving her seat, passed his plate, handed him the little silver jug of cream, and, when the meal was over, fetched from a cupboard a box of cigarettes. Like a man unaccustomed to delicate feminine ministrations, Goddard accepted them rather tongue-tied, with a certain tremulous bashfulness. The little hospitable actions, so homely and therefore charming to a man of gentler nurture, were to him full of a rare exotic sweetness. All through the meal she exerted herself to talk to him brightly of little things, incidents that had brought them into pleasant contact during the late struggle. He finished his cigarette, and they returned to the drawingroom.
Goddard stood before the fire, with his hands in his jacket pockets. The sense of personal humiliation still smouldered within him, but the raging of the flame had been subdued. He felt that he could hold up his head again. And it was the loyal tender sympathy of that woman in the low arm-chair before him who had brought it about. He had never known before how a woman could be a necessity in a man’s life. Till then he even had not realised how imperious were the cravings for her, in spite of the revolt of his galled pride, during that weary journey back to town. She looked so fair and exquisite. His eyes met hers. But something more than her beauty stirred the eternal masculine within him, and when he spoke his voice vibrated.
“Will you always treat me like this, Lady Phayre?”
She smiled.
“Is it much to do for you?”
“It is growing to mean everything in the world to me. I have lived a rough life away from women—ladies—women like you. Hitherto it has never occurred to me that I was not self-sufficing—that I could ever look to a woman for help. A year ago I should have laughed at it—thought it a sickly fancy of the hyper-sensitive semi-men in novels. But I have needed you this day, and I came to you because something stronger than I impelled me. And you have given me new life to-night. Do you know that?”
“You were looking so worn out and sad when you came in, that it pained me,” said Lady Phayre, non-committally.
But Goddard’s ear detected a soft note in her voice. He came near to her, sat down on the fender-stool, almost by her knees.
“Why are all women not like you? What a great beautiful world it would be.”
“Any woman would have done the same; given you of her best to cheer you. Besides, I was grieved—you have worked so nobly. Everybody has been talking about you—of nothing else. I felt so proud I had been working with you in my poor way—and I had set my heart upon your winning.”
“And I have failed miserably,” said Goddard. “Therefore you ought to feel I was unworthy of your trust.”
“You don’t mean that. It hurts me,” she cried quickly, really wounded.
Goddard’s heart came into his eyes. The goddess had come down from the far-off pedestal where he had worshipped her, and was by his side, throbbing woman. He had a strange intoxicating sense of her nearness. He raised his hand and touched the edges of the feather firescreen she was holding in her lap.
“Forgive me,” he said. “It is hard to believe that my success or my failure is of concern to you.”
“Why is it hard?” she asked in a low voice, looking down.
“Because it means more than my wildest dreams could ever bid me hope,” he replied, with a sudden rush of passion.
There was a long silence. Lady Phayre could find no words to answer, conscious that her muteness was an expectation of fuller avowal.
But Goddard’s brain was whirling with wonder and strange joy. His hand sunk a hair’s-breadth, and touched her knee. The contact was electric to him. He drew his hand away quickly, and, rising to his feet, stretched himself, as if he had awakened out of a dream. He could scarcely realise what had happened. His enthusiastic practical life had not been fertile in psychological moments. Lady Phayre looked up at him with angelic sweetness. Generally more graceful than seductive, she was bewilderingly woman at this moment. Suddenly, with an instinct of self-preservation, she rose too, and laughed.
“I told you I believed in you, you know. Our little faiths are of moment to us.”
Her light tone saved the situation. Talk was resumed, but it did not flow so spontaneously as before. At last Goddard rose to leave. She was solicitous as to his rest. Had he any more work to-night?
“I am going straight home,” he answered, with a laugh.
He held her hand for a long time and looked her in the eyes.
“You will sleep happier than if you had not come to me?” she asked.
“Ah! God bless you,” he said, rather huskily.
And then he squeezed her hand, and went hurriedly from the room.