Simon the Jester Part 40

"You can have a cold supper," he roared, "like the rest of us."

I yielded. Campion dragged me helpless to a tram at the top of Vauxhall Bridge Road.

"It will do Your Mightiness good to mingle with the proletariat," he grinned.

I did not tell him that I had been mingling with it in this manner for some time past or that I repudiated the suggestion of its benign influence. I entered the tram meekly. As soon as we were seated, he began:

"I bet you won't guess what I've done with your thousand pounds. I'll give you a million guesses."

As I am a poor conjecturer, I put on a blank expression and shook my head. He waited for an instant, and then shouted with an air of triumph:

"I've founded a prize, my boy--a stroke of genius. I've called it by your name. 'The de Gex Prize for Housewives.' I didn't bother you about it as I knew you were in a world of worry. But just think of it.

An annual prize of thirty pounds--practically the interest--for housewives!"

His eyes flashed in his enthusiasm; he brought his heavy hand down on my knee.

"Well?" I asked, not electrified by this announcement.

"Don't you see?" he exclaimed. "I throw the compet.i.tion open to the women in the district, with certain qualifications, you know--I look after all that. They enter their names by a given date and then they start fair. The woman who keeps her home tidiest and her children cleanest collars the prize. Isn't it splendid?"

I agreed. "How many compet.i.tors?"

"Forty-three. And there they are working away, sweeping their floors and putting up clean curtains and scrubbing their children's noses till they s.h.i.+ne like rubies and making their homes like little Dutch pictures. You see, thirty pounds is a devil of a lot of money for poor people. As one mother of a large family said to me, 'With that one could bury them all quite beautiful.'"

"You're a wonderful fellow," said I, somewhat enviously.

He gave an awkward laugh and tugged at his beard.

"I've only happened to find my job, and am doing it as well as I can,"

he said. "'Tisn't very much, after all. Sometimes one gets discouraged; people are such ungrateful pigs, but now and again one does help a lame dog over a stile which bucks one up, you know. Why don't you come down and have a look at us one of these days? You've been promising to do so for years."

"I will," said I with sudden interest.

"You can have a peep at one or two of the competing homes. We pop into them unexpectedly at all hours. That's a part of the game. We've a complicated system of marks which I'll show you. Of course, no woman knows how she's getting on, otherwise many would lose heart."

"How do the men like this disconcerting ubiquity of soap and water?"

"They love it!" he cried. "They're keen on the prize too. Some think they'll grab the lot and have the devil's own drunk when the year's up.

But I'll look after that. Besides, when a chap has been living in the pride of cleanliness for a year he'll get into the way of it and be less likely to make a beast of himself. Anyway, I hope for the best. My G.o.d, de Gex, if I didn't hope and hope and hope," he cried earnestly, "I don't know how I should get through anything without hope and a faith in the ultimate good of things."

"The same inconvincible optimist?" said I.

"Yes. Thank heaven. And you?"

I paused. There came a self-revelatory flash. "At the present moment," I said, "I'm a perfectly convincible vacuist."

We left the tram and the main thoroughfare, and turned into frowsy streets, peopled with frowsy men and women and raucous with the bickering play of frowsy children. It was still daylight. Over London the spring had fluttered its golden pinions, and I knew that in more blessed quarters--in the great parks, in Piccadilly, in Old Palace Yard, half a mile away--its fragrance lingered, quickening blood already quickened by hope, and making happier hearts already happy. But here the ray of spring had never penetrated either that day or the days of former springs; so there was no lingering fragrance. Here no one heeded the aspects of the changing year save when suffocated by sweltering heat, or frozen in the bitter cold, or drenched by the pouring rain. Otherwise in these gray, frowsy streets spring, summer, autumn, winter were all the same to the grey, frowsy people. It is true that youth laughed--pale, animal boys, and pale, flat-chested girls. But it laughed chiefly at inane obscenity.

One of these days, when phonography is as practicable as photography, some one will make accurate records in these frowsy streets, and then, after the manner of the elegant writers of Bucolics and Pastorals, publish such a series of Urbanics and Pavimentals, phonographic dialogues between the Colins and Dulcibellas of the pavement and the gutter as will freeze up h.e.l.l with horror.

An anemic, flirtatious group pa.s.sed us, the girls in front, the boys behind.

"Good G.o.d, Campion, what _can_ you do?" I asked.

"Pay them, old chap," he returned quickly.

"What's the good of that?"

"Good? Oh, I see!" He laughed, with a touch of scorn. "It's a question of definition. When you see a fellow creature suffering and it shocks your refined susceptibilities and you say 'poor devil' and pa.s.s on, you think you have pitied him. But you haven't. You think pity's a pa.s.sive virtue. It isn't. If you really pity anybody, you go mad to help him--you don't stand by with tears of sensibility running down your cheeks. You stretch out your hand, because you've d.a.m.n well got to. If he won't take it, or wipes you over the head, that's his look-out. You can't work miracles. But once in a way he does take it, and then--well, you work like h.e.l.l to pull him through. And if you do, what bigger thing is there in the world than the salvation of a human soul?"

"It's worth living for," said I.

"It's worth doing any confounded old thing for," he declared.

I envied Campion as I had envied no man before. He was alive in heart and soul and brain; I was not quite alive even yet. But I felt better for meeting him. I told him so. He tugged his beard again and laughed.

"I am a happy old crank. Perhaps that's the reason."

At the door of the hall of the Lambeth Ethical Society he stopped short and turned on me; his jaw dropped and he regarded me in dismay.

"I'm the flightiest and feather-headedest a.s.s that ever brayed," he informed me. "I just remember I sent Miss Faversham a ticket for this meeting about a fortnight ago. I had clean forgotten it, though something uncomfortable has been tickling the back of my head all the time. I'm miserably sorry."

I hastened to rea.s.sure him. "Miss Faversham and I are still good friends. I don't think she'll mind my nodding to her from the other side of the room." Indeed, she had written me one or two letters since my recovery perfect in tact and sympathy, and had put her loyal friends.h.i.+p at my service.

"Even if we meet," I smiled, "nothing tragic will happen."

He expressed his relief.

"But what," I asked, "is Miss Faversham doing in this galley?"

"I suppose she is displaying an intelligent interest in modern thought,"

he said, with boyish delight at the chance I had offered him.

"_Touche_," said I, with a bow, and we entered the hall.

It was crowded. The audience consisted of the better cla.s.s of artisans, tradesmen, and foremen in factories: there was a sprinkling of black-coated clerks and unskilled labouring men. A few women's hats sprouted here and there among the men's heads like weeds in a desert.

There were women, too, in proportionately greater numbers, on the platform at the end of the hall, and among them I was quick to notice Eleanor Faversham. As Campion disliked platforms and high places in synagogues, we sat on one of the benches near the door. He explained it was also out of consideration for me.

"If Milligan is too strong for your proud, aristocratic stomach," he whispered, "you can cut and run without attracting attention."

Milligan had evidently just began his discourse. I had not listened to him for five minutes when I found myself caught in the grip which he was famous for fastening on his audience. With his subject--Nationalisation of the Land--and his arguments I had been perfectly familiar for years.

As a boy I had read Henry George's "Progress and Poverty" with the superciliousness of the young believer in the divine right of Britain's landed gentry, and before the Eton Debating Society I had demolished the whole theory to my own and every one else's satisfaction. Later, as a practical politician, I had kept myself abreast of the Socialist movement. I did not need Mr. John Milligan, whom my lingering flippancy had called a son of thunder, to teach me the elements of the matter. But at this peculiar crisis of my life I felt that, in a queer, unknown way, Milligan had a message for me. It was uncanny. I sat and listened to the exposition of Utopia with the rapt intensity of any cheesemonger's a.s.sistant there before whose captured spirit floated the vision of days to come when the land should so flow with milk and money that golden cheeses would be like b.u.t.tercups for the plucking. It was not the man's gospel that fascinated me nor his illuminated prophecy of the millennium that produced the vibrations in my soul, but the surging pa.s.sion of his faith, the tempest of his enthusiasm. I had enough experience of public speaking to distinguish between the theatrical and the genuine in oratory. Here was no tub-thumping soothsayer, but an inspired zealot. He lived his impa.s.sioned creed in every fibre of his frame and faculties.

He was t.i.tanic, this rough miner, in his unconquerable hope, divine in his yearning love of humanity.

When he ended there was a dead silence for a second, and then a roar of applause from the pale, earnest, city-stamped faces. A lump rose in my throat. Campion clutched my knee. A light burned in his eyes.

"Well? What about Boanerges?"