The Socialist

He went up to the largest fireplace of all, where logs were hissing in the hot enveloping flame. He turned his back upon it and surveyed the vast expanse before him. The books in the room were probably worth three hundred thousand pounds. There were the first four folios of Shakespeare, there was a great case which held the Vinegar Bible, the Breeches Bible, and the very earliest black-letter copy of the Scriptures, printed by Schwartz and Pannheim upon the heights of the Apennines in fear of their death should it become known… It was simply beyond statement, thirty or forty great collections were comprised in this one room. The young scholar's love of books and appreciation of their history thrilled at the sight of all this wealth, thrilled to know that fortune had given him the temporary control of it all.

Upon a great red leather-covered writing-table, set by the principal fireside, lay his papers and the calf-bound volumes in which, with scrupulous care and accurate knowledge, he was completing the work of cataloguing which the death of his predecessor had left unfinished. He went towards the table, looked at the records of his first fortnight's work for a moment or two, sighed a little, and then sat down and concentrated his mind upon what he had to do.

For several hours he worked steadily – it had been through his great capacity for steady, uninterrupted and concentrated work that this young man had risen from the ordinary Board school to the higher-grade school, and had won the most difficult and brilliant scholarship that the aristocratic college of St. Paul's at Oxford had in its gift.

Here was a young man determined to get on; nothing could stop him, nothing could stand in his way. In temperament he was like a steel drill that, driven by tireless energy, goes lower and lower through the granite rock, and through the quartz, until at last the desired strata is reached and won.

He worked the whole morning with hardly a pause. At one o'clock he took a paper of sandwiches from his pocket and made his simple meal. Then he worked onwards till three. At that time, feeling that he had done his duty, or rather more, by his employer the duke, whom, by the way, he had never seen since his appointment as librarian nor subsequently during the extraordinary ferment that his Grace's disappearance, reappearance, and return to health had occasioned in the Press, he put away the catalogue upon which he was engaged.

Then he opened a drawer in the great writing-table, a locked drawer, and pulled out a pile of manuscript. He turned it over until the last few pages were displayed. Then, with a puckered forehead and a mouth which was undecided only because it was critical, the shabby young man in the black clothes, surrounded by evidence of incalculable wealth read steadily at what he designed to be a key which should open modern political life to him.

He read on and on, now and again making an annotation with his fountain pen, sometimes waiting for two or three minutes before he scored through a passage or added a few words. Then at last a clock, a great clock which had been brought from Versailles, beat out the hour of four with deep sonorous notes like the voice of an old man.

Burnside pulled his nickel watch from his pocket, saw that it synchronised with the stately time given by the guardian of the library, and hurried away.

He crossed the hall, went down the passage which led to the side door, put on his hat and coat, and disappeared into Piccadilly, quite forgetting that he had left the last pages of his manuscript upon the writing-table.

* * * * * *

It was a fortnight since the duke had been allowed to listen to the reading of the play at the Park Lane Theatre.

When he had heard James Fabian Rose read the work to the company who sat and stood around upon the grey and empty stage the duke had not been very much impressed. He had not been impressed – that is to say – with the actual achievement of Rose's work. He had listened with some bewilderment to the tags, stage directions, and so forth, and now and then he had been caught up into a mental reverie by some biting, stinging paradox or epigram.

As he sat there the duke had been frankly watching Mary Marriott's face as she listened to the author's words. He saw her eyes light up and become intent, or flicker down into a strange gloom. He marked the sudden rigidity of her pose, the relaxation of it when something was afoot in which she was not particularly concerned, the whole careful attention and sympathetic watching of the girl. What all this play meant, he, sitting on a chair on the O.P. side of the stage, could hardly gather. He realised, nevertheless, by watching Mary, and by surveying the other members of the company, that the play was obviously something rather important and out of the usual run of such things.

To him it conveyed little or nothing, but he had become sufficiently mobile in mind to realise that probably this happening in the grey light of the afternoon and the shabby surroundings of the stage were yet instinct with potentiality, and would become – in their full fruition – something charged with purpose and an appeal to the general world.

After it was all over he had thanked Rose, Aubrey Flood, and Mary Marriott, had got into a cab and been driven back to Grosvenor Street. He was conscious himself at the moment that he had been a little unresponsive and chilly in his manner, but for the life of him he hadn't been able to express himself more pleasantly.

"Thank you so much, Miss Marriott," he had said, "for letting me come here this afternoon. Indeed, Mr. Rose, I think it is most sporting of you to ask me. For my part, I frankly confess I don't realise what it's all about! It's all so new to me, you know, to hear something read in this way, and I cannot grasp it as a whole. At the same time," he concluded with a weary smile, "at the same time, if this is your attack upon me, or, rather, upon people like me, then, my dear Mr. Rose, I think you ought to sharpen your sword."

As he had said this both Aubrey Flood and the great Socialist had chuckled, while the former remarked, "Wait and see, your Grace. Wait and see what we can eventually spin out of such dull ritual on such a grey afternoon as this."

"I will, Mr. Rose," the duke had answered rather shortly, and gone back to the cheery house in Grosvenor Street.

He had told Lord Hayle and Lady Constance all about his experience of the afternoon. Neither of them had been very interested, and Lady Constance remarked that all "excursions into les coulisses must surely be rather disappointing."

In fact, the Camborne family regarded the whole thing as a rather too amiable weakness on the part of their guest. The bishop, who was always running backwards and forwards at this time from his palace at Carlton to his house in Grosvenor Street, often made a genial jest upon the subject to the young man. "My dear Paddington," he would say, "how is the attack going? Ha, ha! Every day, when I open my newspapers, I find that the general public is being worked up to a perfect froth of excitement about this forthcoming theatrical enterprise. A peer in the pillory! The duke in the dock! How amusing it all is!"

Thus the bishop scoffed on more than one occasion, and his witticisms had no very exhilarating effect upon the duke.

His life in Grosvenor Street was happier with the younger members of the family. His dear friend Gerald was still as sympathetic and vivid as ever. Lord Hayle had passed the test of intimate human association, and come out of it very well. Lady Constance was as ever – beautiful, sweet, and sympathetic – but the duke was finding that in the very splendour of the girl's nature and appearance there was something a trifle cloying. He was deeply in love with her; he knew also that she cared for him, but for the first time in his guarded, shielded life he saw before him times of indecision and of trouble. Life, which had seemed so smooth and stately, so well ordered a thing, was not quite what it had been. The serene repose of his mind was disturbed by all he had gone through.

Sometimes he went and took tea with Mrs. Rose, and often her husband, Mr. Conrad, and Mary Marriott were there. He never attempted to argue with any of them. He took their shafts of wit with a quiet complaisance, but if they thought that their epigrams had not gone home they were very deeply mistaken.

One afternoon, tired and troubled, the duke bethought himself of his great house in Piccadilly. He walked there from Grosvenor Street, astonished the servants by ringing the bell, and, entering, he moodily surveyed some of his famous possessions.

Then he turned into the library. The three great fires were burning down. It was about six o'clock. He switched on the electric light himself and wandered through the maze of his treasures.

He came up to a table – a huge writing-table, covered with red leather – and saw upon it five or six sheets of manuscript in careful handwriting. Forgetting exactly what he was doing, thinking nothing of the man he had appointed to be librarian, the duke sat down and began to read.

CHAPTER XVI

ARTHUR BURNSIDE'S VIEWS

This was the document that the duke read with amazement and growing interest in the great empty library of his palace. It was obviously the peroration of an important work —

"Are we already in the position of ancient Rome? Are we moribund? No barbarians, indeed, stand with menace of conquering at our gates, but it was not the barbarians who overthrew the greatness of the Roman Empire. The greatness had already departed long before the Huns and Goths swept down upon its walls. In her early strength Rome, the capital of the world, would have rolled back her invaders, as a rock resists the onslaught of an angry wave; but Rome, when she fell, was no longer as she had been in her earlier days.

"And we must ask ourselves now whether our own civilisation, with all its wonders, is not tending to a like end? Are we not reproducing in faithful detail every cause which led to the downfall of the civilisations of other days? We are Imperialists, that is to say, we take tribute from conquered races. Great fortunes are constantly accumulated, to the defeat of individuals in our midst. An enormous population is with us, which owns no property, and lives always in grinding poverty. A great portion of the land of the country has gone out of cultivation. The physical deterioration of Englishmen is a well known and most alarming fact, which can be proved over and over again by the statistics of the medical schools. I am not concerned here to prove any statements I make in the last few lines of this book. They have been proved in the earlier portions. This is a summing up.

"And it is for these reasons that we who are socialists say that the system which is producing such appalling results shall not be allowed to continue. It is a system which has taken from religion much of its natural appeal and consoling power over the hearts and souls of the majority. It is a system which has destroyed, handicapped, and turned the protection of the useful and necessary things of life into a soulless progress of mechanism controlled by slaves. It is a system which awards the palm of success to the unscrupulous, corrupts the press, turns pure women on to the streets, and transforms upright men into mean-spirited time-servers.

"It cannot continue.

"In the end it is bound to work its own overthrow.

"Socialism, with its promise of freedom, its larger hope for humanity, its triumph of peace over war, its binding of the races of the earth into one all-embracing brotherhood, must in the end prevail. Capitalism is the creed of the dying present; Socialism throbs with the life of the days that are to be. Socialism has claimed its martyrs in the past, and to-day, also, it has claimed them. But before long the martyrs in the cause of humanity all will see – let us hope and believe from another and better ordered life – that their efforts have not been in vain.

"I write, perhaps, in these last words, from a somewhat academic standpoint. I do not think, however, that my readers who have followed me so far will accuse me of pure theorising in the earlier portions of this work. At the same time, experience is merely the lesson learnt by event, and I do not think I shall be unduly ponderous if I again, and finally, draw attention to those stupendous teachings which the student of history draws from the past and applies to the amelioration of the present.

"It cannot be too loudly proclaimed! Academic evolution necessarily goes hand-in-hand with a moral development strictly related to it. Nowadays, broken into the individualistic system, we regard with astonishment the fierce patriotism which inflamed the little cities and republics of antiquity, the States of Greece, the Kingdoms of Italy, and even the larger and less civilised hordes of the North. Yet, if we regard it for a moment, we shall see that this sentiment was merely inspired by the eradicable instinct of self-preservation. In the bosom of the clans, in the heart of the families, interests were consolidated and the fact was realised. And in those days, also, defeat might not only bring ruin and a total loss of comfort and worldly possession, but it would also mean slavery.

"In those days, indeed, the conqueror, whether barbarian or not, could not fail to appear. He intervened always wherever great wealth was amassed in the hands of a population incapable of defending it. And, taking these lessons of history to ourselves, we can see that, though the whole conditions of society have changed, a conqueror must still appear and throw down the existing system with all its horrors and anachronisms.

"Once more let me point out that England at present is dominated by certain economic facts.

"Although there is plenty of food, clothing, and shelter available in the country, an enormous population of these islands do not obtain enough of any of them to support life properly, or even in the simplest way possible, to secure ordinary health and ordinary enjoyment of existence.

"Again, then, the statistics quoted in the earlier part of this work inevitably show, with all the rigour of hard facts and unassailable statistics, that each year many people die from overwork or want.

"The producers of wealth are poor, miserable, and enslaved, while those who enjoy the wealth thus produced in misery are idle, corrupt, and enervated by their riches. There are more than a million men needing work and wages in England at the present moment, while, at the same time, we keep the land of the country less than one-quarter tilled.

"As Mr. John Kenworthy has written, in words which re-echo and reverberate in the ears of modern men: 'These accusations are facts as palpable and clear as heaven and earth above us and beneath us; not to be disputed by any person of ordinary sense. Surely we have enough of stupidity and wrong here to certify ourselves a nation not only "mostly fools" but largely knaves also.'

"In truth nobody disputes this state of affairs. You may prove the extremest horrors straight from Government Blue Books. Recently some very full particulars concerning mining industries were put into one of those Government coffins for burying disagreeable truths. One might expect that, after having such particulars of overwork underpaid and murderous housing thrust into their notice, a Parliament which served humanity and not the brood of Mammon would sit night and day until the law had done what law can do to right these wrongs. But no, the six hundred gentlemen of Parliament who play with the mouse-like people in a gentle, cat-like fashion, did – just nothing, as usual! No doubt members of Parliament are filled with good resolutions to do something for the people; but the intentions always go down before the hard fact that doing anything for the people is found to mean, in practice, giving up some right of property.

"Upon this one issue, the right of property, the whole social question centres. The man who has discovered what the right of property means now, and what it ought to mean, and would mean among good and honest people, may claim to have solved the problem of misery which baffles the nations of the world."

The duke put the manuscript down upon the huge, leather-covered table and looked at it thoughtfully. He saw the neat, careful writing – the writing of a man who had been accustomed to write Greek. He smiled to himself with a dreamy appreciation of the well-known fact that no scholar writes like an ordinary man, and that always the hand which, in youth at a public school, has been inured to the careful tracing of Greek script, betrays itself when writing English by a meticulous care in the forming of each individual word.

Then, quite suddenly, the duke sat down and leaned back in a high-cushioned chair. He had not been in his famous library for a very long time. He felt forlorn and alone in it, and he looked round upon its glories with a sort of wonder. "Does all this belong to me?" he thought. "Of course it does, and yet how little I see of it; how little I know of it! I pay a man merely to catalogue the treasures here."

The electric lights glowed softly all over the vast place and the young man looked round him with a sigh of perplexity. It did not interest him very much to know that on all sides were books and manuscripts that were absolutely priceless. He felt, as he sat there, that the world was a most perplexing place.

The great mahogany door at the end of the library opened, and the trusted servant in charge of the staff still maintained in the ducal house hurried in.

"Your Grace," he said, as he came up to the duke, "can I bring you anything? Can I do anything?"

The duke had not an idea of the man's name – all these details were arranged by Colonel Simpson for the young man.

"No, no," he said; "I thank you very much but I don't want anything. I shall be leaving the house very soon."

"But, your Grace," the man went on, "you will please allow me to make up the fires?"

"Oh, yes," the duke answered; "you may as well do that, and then you can leave me alone. I will let myself out."

"I thank your Grace," said the man. And, with noiseless footsteps he went away.

In two minutes three men were in the library and the dying fires were revived, until, as the dark came over London, a great red blaze threw odd contrasts of red light and shadow into the rich place.

The men went away, and when they had gone the duke walked up and down the room for a minute or two, and then discovered, near the door which led into the hall, the switches which controlled the electric lights.

He switched off the whole illumination, save only the one standard lamp upon the writing-table. Then he went back to his seat.

He sat down and looked about him. The ruddy, cheerful light was all around. Below his eyes upon the table the shaded electric-light lamp threw a brilliant circle of light upon the manuscripts which he had been reading. Beyond everything was mysterious.

The duke sighed, and once more took up the manuscript.

"Yes," he said to himself, "if every one was good. That is the whole point. Now I must finish this. But how extraordinary! I meet a man in my own college and make him librarian here, and he, too, turns out to be a Socialist, and to be writing a book upon Socialism. A book which, if I am not very much mistaken, will simply become the bible of all of them. Fabian Rose never told me that he knew Burnside! Of course, that is not very extraordinary, because it would not be in his way to tell me. It would not have occurred to him. But how strange it is! On all sides, on all occasions, Fate or Providence seems to have brought me among the ranks of the Socialists. Well, I'll just finish this."

The duke took up the manuscript once more. There was no rancour in his heart against the young man who, surrounded by the pomp and luxury of his employer's property, was nevertheless, and at the same moment, writing against people such as the duke was.

The duke did not take the attacks very seriously. The forthcoming play had seemed to him rather futile. All that Rose, Mr. Conrad, and the group of their friends who met at the house in Westminster, had said certainly had opened the young man's mind; but nevertheless he had not felt any of the real force of the attack as yet.

He took up the manuscript and read the remaining pages.

There was a cross-heading upon one, and it was this —

"THE REAL SOLUTION"

"The real solution, let me finally say, is indubitably this: I have hinted at it throughout the pages of this work. I have tried to lead the mind of the reader up towards the discovery of my own conviction. Now I state it.

"If human nature was naturally good, as Jean Jacques Rousseau believed it to be, then there would be no social problem. Human nature is not temperamentally good. It is temperamentally bad. Therefore, before we can reorganise Society we must reorganise character.

"And in what way is it possible to do this? Can it be done by Act of Parliament? Can it be done by articles in newspapers and reviews? Can it be done by the teaching of altruism at the hands of university settlements and propagandists? It cannot be done by any of these means.

"There is only one way in which the individual mind can be reached, touched, and influenced so strangely and so completely that the influence will be permanent, and the life of the individual will be changed.

"And that way is the Christian way.

"We must do again, if we are to realise the ideals which burn in our hearts, what the Christian Church did in the old days of the Roman Empire, and was meant to do in all ages, by means of the Old Faith 'once and for all delivered to the saints.' In those dim, far-off days the historian knows that Christianity succeeded actually in creating a new middle-class – just what was needed – of poor men made richer, and rich men made poorer in one common brotherhood. Its motto was: For all who want work, work! For those who won't work, hunger! But for the old and infirm, provision. And this the Church of Christ actually achieved, neither by denouncing nor inculcating dogma, but by insisting on and carrying out in practice its own remarkable dogmas. It is not the denial of the Real Presence at the altar, it is not its affirmation, it is not the question of the validity of the apostolic succession nor the denial of it, which will make it possible for an English world to save itself from the horrors of the present.

"It will be simply this: That those who believe in Christ as the most inspired Teacher the world has ever seen, as God-made-Man, come into this world on a great mission of regeneration, that we shall see our opportunity.

"Christianity and Socialism are inextricably entwined. Separate one from the other, as so many Socialists of nowadays are endeavouring to do, and one or the other – perhaps both – will fail of their high ideal, their splendid mission.

"Combine them, and success is real and assured. We shall all, in that happy day, begin to realise the kingdom of heaven; to re-echo in this world the dim echo of the heavenly harmonies which may then reach us from the new Jerusalem."

The duke put down the manuscript, and with slow, grave steps left his great library, crossed the famous marble hall, and went up through the enclosure of his gardens into the roar and surge of Piccadilly.

His face was curiously set and intent, as he walked to Lord Camborne's, in Grosvenor Street.

CHAPTER XVII

THE COMING OF LOVE

They were dining quite alone at the Cambornes' – the duke, the bishop, Lord Hayle, and Lady Constance.

When he had changed and came down-stairs the duke went into the drawing-room. There were still a few minutes before dinner would be served. He found himself alone, and walked up and down the beautiful room with a curious physical, as well as mental, restlessness. He felt out of tune, as it were. The tremendous upheaval in his life which he had lately experienced was not likely to be forgotten easily. He realised that, and he realised also – more poignantly perhaps at this moment than ever before – how rude a shock his life had experienced. All his ideas must be reconstructed, and the process was not a pleasant one. From the bottom of his heart he caught himself wishing that nothing had happened, that he was still without experience of the new sides of life, to which he had been introduced by such an extraordinary series of accidents.