Marcella Part 69

"Didn't he just? She told me they got regular close friends after that, and he told her everything--oh, well," said the lad, embarra.s.sed, and clutching at his usual formula--"of course, I didn't mean that. And she's fearfully flattered, you can see she is, and she tells me that she adores him--that he's the only great man she's ever known--that I'm not fit to black his boots, and ought to be grateful whenever he speaks to me--and all that sort of rot. And now she's going off with them. I shall have to shoot myself--I declare I shall!"

"Well, not yet," said Marcella, in a soothing voice; "the case isn't clear enough. Wait till they come back. Shall we move? I'm going over there to listen to that talk. But--first--come and see me whenever you like--3 to 4.30, Brown's Buildings, Maine Street--and tell me how this goes on?"

She spoke with a careless lightness, laughing at him with a half sisterly freedom. She had risen from her seat, and he, whose thoughts had been wrapped up for months in one of the smallest of the s.e.x, was suddenly struck with her height and stately gesture as she moved away from him.

"By Jove! Why didn't she stick to Aldous," he said to himself discontentedly as his eyes followed her. "It was only her cranks, and of course she'll get rid of _them_. Just like my luck!"

Meanwhile Marcella took a seat next to Miss Hallin, who looked up from her knitting to smile at her. The girl fell into the att.i.tude of listening; but for some minutes she was not listening at all. She was reflecting how little men knew of each other!--even the most intimate friends--and trying to imagine what Aldous Raeburn would be like, married to such a charmer as Frank had sketched. His friends.h.i.+p for her meant, of course, the attraction of contraries--one of the most promising of all possible beginnings. On the whole, she thought Frank's chances were poor.

Then, unexpectedly, her ear was caught by Wharton's name, and she discovered that what was going on beside her was a pa.s.sionate discussion of his present position and prospects in the Labour party--a discussion, however, mainly confined to Wilkins and the two workmen. Bennett had the air of the shrewd and kindly spectator who has his own reasons for treating a situation with reserve; and Hallin was lying back in his chair flushed and worn out. The previous debate, which had now merged in these questions of men and personalities, had made him miserable; he had no heart for anything more. Miss Hallin observed him anxiously, and made restless movements now and then, as though she had it in her mind to send all her guests away.

The two Socialist workmen were talking strongly in favour of an organised and distinct Labour party, and of Wharton's leaders.h.i.+p. They referred constantly to Parnell, and what he had clone for "those Irish fellows." The only way to make Labour formidable in the House was to learn the lesson of Unionism and of Parnellism, to act together and strike together, to make of the party a "two-handed engine," ready to smite Tory and Liberal impartially. To this end a separate organisation, separate place in the House, separate Whips--they were ready, nay clamorous, for them all. And they were equally determined on Harry Wharton as a leader. They spoke of the _Clarion_ with enthusiasm, and declared that its owner was already an independent power, and was, moreover, as "straight" as he was sharp.

The contention and the praise lashed Wilkins into fury. After making one or two visible efforts at a sarcastic self-control which came to nothing, he broke out into a flood of invective which left the rest of the room staring. Marcella found herself indignantly wondering who this big man, with his fierce eyes, long, puffy cheeks, coa.r.s.e black hair, and North-country accent, might be. Why did he talk in this way, with these epithets, this venom? It was intolerable!

Hallin roused himself from his fatigue to play the peace-maker. But some of the things Wilkins had been saying had put up the backs of the two workmen, and the talk flamed up unmanageably--Wilkins's dialect getting more p.r.o.nounced with each step of the argument.

"Well, if I'd ever ha' thowt that I war coomin' to Lunnon to put myself and my party oonder the heel o' Muster Harry Wharton, I'd ha' stayed at _home_, I tell tha," cried Wilkins, slapping his knee. "If it's to be the People's party, why, in the name o' G.o.d, must yo put a yoong ripst.i.tch like yon at the head of it? a man who'll just mak _use_ of us all, you an' me, and ivery man Jack of us, for his own advancement, an'

ull kick us down when he's done with us! Why shouldn't he? What is he?

Is he a man of _us_--bone of our bone? He's a _landlord_, and an aristocrat, I tell tha! What have the likes of him ever been but thorns in our side? When have the landlords ever gone with the people? Have they not been the blight and the curse of the country for hun'erds of years? And you're goin' to tell me that a man bred out o' _them_--living on his rent and interest--grinding the faces of the poor, I'll be bound if the truth were known, as all the rest of them do--is goin' to lead _me_, an' those as'll act with me to the pullin' down of the landlords!

Why are we to go lickspittlin' to any man of his sort to do our work for us? Let him go to his own cla.s.s--I'm told Mr. Wharton is mighty fond of countesses, and they of him!--or let him set up as the friend of the working man just as he likes--I'm quite agreeable!--I shan't make any bones about takin' his _vote_; but I'm not goin' to make him master over me, and give him the right to speak for my mates in the House of Commons. I'd cut my hand off fust!"

Leven grinned in the background. Bennett lay back in his chair with a worried look. Wilkins's crudities were very distasteful to him both in and out of the House. The younger of the Socialist workmen, a mason, with a strong square face, incongruously lit somehow with the eyes of the religious dreamer, looked at Wilkins contemptuously.

"There's none of you in the House will take orders," he said quickly, "and that's the ruin of us. We all know that. Where do you think we'd have been in the struggle with the employers, if we'd gone about our business as you're going about yours in the House of Commons?"

"I'm not saying we shouldn't _organise_," said Wilkins, fiercely. "What I'm sayin' is, get a man of the working cla.s.s--a man who has the _wants_ of the working cla.s.s--a man whom the working cla.s.s can get a hold on--to do your business for you, and not any bloodsucking landlord or capitalist. It's a slap i' the face to ivery honest working man i' the c.o.o.ntry, to mak' a Labour party and put Harry Wharton at t' head of it!"

The young Socialist looked at him askance. "Of course you'd like it yourself!" was what he was thinking. "But they'll take a man as can hold his own with the swells--and quite right too!"

"And if Mr. Wharton _is_ a landlord he's a good sort!" exclaimed the shoemaker--a tall, lean man in a well-brushed frock coat. "There's many on us knows as have been to hear him speak, what he's tried to do about the land, and the co-operative farming. E's _straight_ is Mr. Wharton.

We 'aven't got Socialism yet--an' it isn't 'is fault bein' a landlord.

Ee was born it."

"I tell tha he's playin' for his own hand!" said Wilkins, doggedly, the red spot deepening on his swarthy cheek--"he's runnin' that paper for his own hand--Haven't I had experience of him? I know it--And I'll prove it some day! He's one for featherin' his own nest is Mr. Wharton--and when he's doon it by makkin' fools of us, he'll leave us to whistle for any good we're iver likely to get out o' _him. He_ go agen the landlords when it coom to the real toossle,--I know 'em--I tell tha--I know 'em!"

A woman's voice, clear and scornful, broke into the talk.

"It's a little strange to think, isn't it, that while we in London go on groaning and moaning about insanitary houses, and making our small attempts here and there, half of the country poor of England have been re-housed in our generation by these same landlords--no fuss about it--and rents for five-roomed cottages, somewhere about one and fourpence a week!"

Hallin swung his chair round and looked at the speaker--amazed!

Wilkins also stared at her under his eyebrows. He did not like women--least of all, ladies.

He gruffly replied that if they had done anything like as much as she said--which, he begged her pardon, but he didn't believe--it was done for the landlords' own purposes, either to buy off public opinion, or just for show and aggrandis.e.m.e.nt. People who had prize pigs and prize cattle must have prize cottages of course--"with a race of slaves inside 'em!"

Marcella, bright-eyed, erect, her thin right hand hanging over her knee, went avengingly into facts--the difference between landlords' villages and "open" villages; the agrarian experiments made by different great landlords; the advantage to the community, even from the Socialist point of view of a system which had preserved the land in great blocks, for the ultimate use of the State, as compared with a system like the French, which had for ever made Socialism impossible.

Hallin's astonishment almost swept away his weariness.

"Where in the world did she get it all from, and is she standing on her head or am I?"

After an animated little debate, in which Bennett and the two workmen joined, while Wilkins sat for the most part in moody, contemptuous silence, and Marcella, her obstinacy roused, carried through her defence of the landlords with all a woman's love of emphasis and paradox, everybody rose simultaneously to say good-night.

"You ought to come and lead a debate down at our Limehouse club," said Bennett pleasantly to Marcella, as she held out her hand to him; "you'd take a lot of beating."

"Yet I'm a Venturist, you know," she said, laughing; "I _am_."

He shook his head, laughed too, and departed.

When the four had gone, Marcella turned upon Hallin.

"Are there many of these Labour members like _that_?"

Her tone was still vibrating and sarcastic.

"He's not much of a talker, our Nehemiah," said Hallin, smiling; "but he has the most extraordinary power as a speaker over a large popular audience that I have ever seen. The man's honesty is amazing,--it's his tempers and his jealousies get in his way. You astonished him; but, for the matter of that, you astonished Frank and me still more!"

And as he fell back into his chair, Marcella caught a flash of expression, a tone that somehow put her on her defence.

"I was not going to listen to such unjust stuff without a word. Politics is one thing--slanderous abuse is another!" she said, throwing back her head with a gesture which instantly brought back to Hallin the scene in the Mellor drawing-room, when she had denounced the game-laws and Wharton had scored his first point.

He was silent, feeling a certain inner exasperation with women and their ways.

"'She only did it to annoy,'" cried Frank Leven; "'because she knows it teases.' _We_ know very well what she thinks of us. But where did you get it all from, Miss Boyce? I just wish you'd tell me. There's a horrid Radical in the House I'm always having rows with--and upon my word I didn't know there was half so much to be said for us!"

Marcella flushed.

"Never mind where I got it!" she said.

In reality, of course, it was from those Agricultural Reports she had worked through the year before under Wharton's teaching, with so much angry zest, and to such different purpose.

When the door closed upon her and upon Frank Leven, who was to escort her home, Hallin walked quickly over to the table, and stood looking for a moment in a sort of bitter reverie at Raeburn's photograph.

His sister followed him, and laid her hand on his shoulder.

"Do go to bed, Edward! I am afraid that talk has tired you dreadfully."

"It would be no good going to bed, dear," he said, with a sigh of exhaustion. "I will sit and read a bit, and see if I can get myself into sleeping trim. But you go, Alice--good-night."

When she had gone he threw himself into his chair again with the thought--"She must contradict here as she contradicted there! _She_--and justice! If she could have been just to a landlord for one hour last year--"

He spent himself for a while in endless chains of recollection, oppressed by the clearness of his own brain, and thirsting for sleep.

Then from the affairs of Raeburn and Marcella, he pa.s.sed with a fresh sense of strain and effort to his own. That discussion with those four men which had filled the first part of the evening weighed upon him in his weakness of nerve, so that suddenly in the phantom silence of the night, all life became an oppression and a terror, and rest, either to-night or in the future, a thing never to be his.