Demos

‘I have come to ask your advice and help,’ began Mutimer with directness. He was conscious of the necessity of subduing his voice, and had a certain pleasure in the ease with which he achieved this feat. It would not have been so easy a day or two ago.

‘Ah, about this awkward affair of yours,’ observed Mr. Westlake with reference to Richard’s loss of his employment, of which, as editor of the Union’s weekly paper, he had of course at once been apprised.

‘No, not about that. Since then a very unexpected thing has happened to me.’

The story was once more related, vastly to Mr. Westlake’s satisfaction. Cheerful news concerning his friends always put him in the best of spirits.

He shook his head, laughing.

‘Come, come, Mutimer, this’ll never do! I’m not sure that we shall not have to consider your expulsion from the Union.’

Richard went on to mention the matters of legal routine in which he hoped Mr. Westlake would serve him. These having been settled—

‘I wish to speak of something more important,’ he said. ‘You take it for granted, I hope, that I’m not going to make the ordinary use of this fortune. As yet I’ve only been able to hit on a few general ideas; I’m clear as to the objects I shall keep before me, but how best to serve them wants more reflection. I thought if I talked it over with you in the first place—’

The door opened, and a lady half entered the room.

‘Oh, I thought you were alone,’ she remarked to Mr. Westlake. ‘Forgive me!’

‘Come in! Here’s our friend Mutimer. You know Mrs. Westlake?’

A few words had passed between this lady and Richard in the lecture-room a few weeks before. She was not frequently present at such meetings, but had chanced, on the occasion referred to, to hear Mutimer deliver an harangue.

‘You have no objection to talk of your plans? Join our council, will you?’ he added to his wife. ‘Our friend brings interesting news.’

Mrs. Westlake walked across the room to the curved window-seat. Her age could scarcely be more than three- or four-and-twenty; she was very dark, and her face grave almost to melancholy. Black hair, cut short at its thickest behind her neck, gave exquisite relief to features of the purest Greek type. In listening to anything that held her attention her eyes grew large, and their dark orbs seemed to dream passionately. The white swan’s down at her throat—she was perfectly attired—made the skin above resemble rich-hued marble, and indeed to gaze at her long was to be impressed as by the sad loveliness of a supreme work of art. As Mutimer talked she leaned forward, her elbow on her knee, the back of her hand supporting her chin.

Her husband recounted what Richard had told him, and the latter proceeded to sketch the projects he had in view.

‘My idea is,’ he said, ‘to make the mines at Wanley the basis of great industrial undertakings, just as any capitalist might, but to conduct these undertakings in a way consistent with our views. I would begin by building furnaces, and in time add engineering works on a large scale. I would build houses for the men, and in fact make that valley an industrial settlement conducted on Socialist principles. Practically I can devote the whole of my income; my personal expenses will not be worth taking into account. The men must be paid on a just scheme, and the margin of profit that remains, all that we can spare from the extension of the works, shall be devoted to the Socialist propaganda. In fact, I should like to make the executive committee of the Union a sort of board of directors—and in a very different sense from the usual—for the Wanley estate. My personal expenditure deducted, I should like such a committee to have the practical control of funds. All this wealth was made by plunder of the labouring class, and I shall hold it as trustee for them. Do these ideas seem to you of a practical colour?’

Mr. Westlake nodded slowly twice. His wife kept her listening attitude unchanged; her eyes ‘dreamed against a distant goal.’

‘As I see the scheme,’ pursued Richard, who spoke all along somewhat in the lecture-room tone, the result of a certain embarrassment, ‘it will differ considerably from the Socialist experiments we know of. We shall be working not only to support ourselves, but every bit as much set on profit as any capitalist in Belwick. The difference is, that the profit will benefit no individual, but the Cause. There’ll be no attempt to carry out the idea of every man receiving the just outcome of his labour; not because I shouldn’t be willing to share in that way, but simply because we have a greater end in view than to enrich ourselves. Our men must all be members of the Union, and their prime interest must be the advancement of the principles of the Union. We shall be able to establish new papers, to hire halls, and to spread ourselves over the country. It’ll be fighting the capitalist manufacturers with their own weapons. I can see plenty of difficulties, of course. All England ‘ll be against us. Never mind, we’ll defy them all, and we’ll win. It’ll be the work of my life, and we’ll see if an honest purpose can’t go as far as a thievish one.’

The climax would have brought crashing cheers at Commonwealth Hall; in Mr. Westlake’s study it was received with well-bred expressions of approval.

‘Well, Mutimer,’ exclaimed the idealist, ‘all this is intensely interesting, and right glorious for us. One sees at last a possibility of action. I ask nothing better than to be allowed to work with you. It happens very luckily that you are a practical engineer. I suppose the mechanical details of the undertaking are entirely within your province.’

‘Not quite, at present,’ Mutimer admitted, ‘but I shall have valuable help. Yesterday I had a meeting with a man named Rodman, a mining engineer, who has been working on the estate. He seems just the man I shall want; a Socialist already, and delighted to join in the plans I just hinted to him.’

‘Capital! Do you propose, then, that we shall call a special meeting of the Committee? Or would you prefer to suggest a committee of your own?’

‘No, I think our own committee will do very well, at all events for the present. The first thing, of course, is to get the financial details of our scheme put into shape. I go to Belwick again this afternoon; my solicitor must get his business through as soon as possible.’

‘You will reside for the most part at Wanley?’

‘At the Manor, yes. It is occupied just now, but I suppose will soon be free.’

‘Do you know that part of the country, Stella?’ Mr. Westlake asked of his wife.

She roused herself, drawing in her breath, and uttered a short negative.

‘As soon as I get into the house,’ Richard resumed to Mr. Westlake, ‘I hope you’ll come and examine the place. It’s unfortunate that the railway misses it by about three miles, but Rodman tells me we can easily run a private line to Agworth station. However, the first thing is to get our committee at work on the scheme.’ Richard repeated this phrase with gusto. ‘Perhaps you could bring it up at the Saturday meeting?’

‘You’ll be in town on Saturday?’

‘Yes; I have a lecture in Islington on Sunday.’

‘Saturday will do, then. Is this confidential?’

‘Not at all. We may as well get as much encouragement out of it as we can. Don’t you think so?’

‘Certainly.’

Richard did not give expression to his thought that a paragraph on the subject in the Union’s weekly organ, the ‘Fiery Cross,’ might be the best way of promoting such encouragement; but he delayed his departure for a few minutes with talk round about the question of the prudence which must necessarily be observed in publishing a project so undigested. Mr. Westlake, who was responsible for the paper, was not likely to transgress the limits of good taste, and when Richard, on Saturday morning, searched eagerly the columns of the ‘Cross,’ he was not altogether satisfied with the extreme discretion which marked a brief paragraph among those headed: ‘From Day to Day.’ However, many of the readers were probably by that time able to supply the missing proper-name.

It was not the fault of Daniel Dabbs if members of the Hoxton and Islington branch of the Union read the paragraph without understanding to whom it referred. Daniel was among the first to hear of what had befallen the Mutimer family, and from the circle of his fellow-workmen the news spread quickly. Talk was rife on the subject of Mutimer’s dismissal from Longwood Brothers’, and the sensational rumour which followed so quickly found an atmosphere well prepared for its transmission. Hence the unusual concourse at the meeting-place in Islington next Sunday evening, where, as it became known to others besides Socialists, Mutimer was engaged to lecture. Richard experienced some vexation that his lecture was not to be at Commonwealth Hall, where the gathering would doubtless have been much larger.

The Union was not wealthy. The central hall was rented at Mr. Westlake’s expense; two or three branches were managing with difficulty to support regular places of assembly, such as could not being obliged as yet to content themselves with open-air lecturing. In Islington the leaguers met in a room behind a coffee-shop, ordinarily used for festive purposes; benches were laid across the floor, and an estrade at the upper end exalted chairman and lecturer. The walls were adorned with more or less striking advertisements of non-alcoholic beverages, and with a few prints from the illustrated papers. The atmosphere was tobaccoey, and the coffee-shop itself, through which the visitors had to make their way, suggested to the nostrils that bloaters are the working man’s chosen delicacy at Sunday tea. A table just within the door of the lecture-room exposed for sale sundry Socialist publications, the latest issue of the ‘Fiery Cross’ in particular.

Richard was wont to be among the earliest arrivals: to-night he was full ten minutes behind the hour for which the lecture was advertised. A group of friends were standing about the table near the door; they received him with a bustle which turned all eyes thitherwards. He walked up the middle of the room to the platform. As soon as he was well in the eye of the meeting, a single pair of hands—Daniel Dabbs owned them—gave the signal for uproar; feet made play on the boarding, and one or two of the more enthusiastic revolutionists fairly gave tongue. Richard seated himself with grave countenance, and surveyed the assembly; from fifty to sixty people were present, among them three or four women, and the number continued to grow. The chairman and one or two leading spirits had followed Mutimer to the place of distinction, where they talked with him.

Punctuality was not much regarded at these meetings; the lecture was announced for eight, but rarely began before half-past The present being an occasion of exceptional interest, twenty minutes past the hour saw the chairman rise for his prefatory remarks. He was a lank man of jovial countenance and jerky enunciation. There was no need, he observed, to introduce a friend and comrade so well known to them as the lecturer of the evening. ‘We’re always glad to hear him, and to-night, if I may be allowed to ‘int as much, we’re particularly glad to hear him. Our friend and comrade is going to talk to us about the Land. It’s a question we can’t talk or think too much about, and Comrade Mutimer has thought about it as much and more than any of us, I think I may say. I don’t know,’ the chairman added, with a sly look across the room, ‘whether our friend’s got any new views on this subject of late. I shouldn’t wonder if he had.’ Here sounded a roar of laughter, led off by Daniel Dabbs. ‘Hows’ever, be that as it may, we can answer for it as any views he may hold is the right views, and the honest views, and the views of a man as means to do a good deal more than talk about his convictions!’

Again did the stentor-note of Daniel ring forth, and it was amid thunderous cheering that Richard left his chair and moved to the front of the platform. His Sunday suit of black was still that with which his friends were familiar, but his manner, though the audience probably did not perceive the detail, was unmistakably hanged. He had been wont to begin his address with short, stinging periods, with sneers and such bitterness of irony as came within his compass. To-night he struck quite another key, mellow, confident, hinting at personal satisfaction; a smile was on his lips, and not a smile of scorn. He rested one hand against his side, holding in the other a scrap of paper with jotted items of reasoning. His head was thrown a little back; he viewed the benches from beneath his eyelids. True, the pose maintained itself but for a moment. I mention it because it was something new in Richard.

He spoke of the land; he attacked the old monopoly, and visioned a time when a claim to individual ownerships of the earth’s surface would be as ludicrous as were now the assertion of title to a fee-simple somewhere in the moon. He mustered statistics; he adduced historic and contemporary example of the just and the unjust in land-holding; he gripped the throat of a certain English duke, and held him up for flagellation; he drifted into oceans of economic theory; he sat down by the waters of Babylon; he climbed Pisgah. Had he but spoken of backslidings in the wilderness! But for that fatal omission, the lecture was, of its kind, good. By degrees Richard forgot his pose and the carefully struck note of mellowness; he began to believe what he was saying, and to say it with the right vigour of popular oratory. Forget his struggles with the h-fiend; forget his syntactical lapses; you saw that after all the man had within him a clear flame of conscience; that he had felt before speaking that speech was one of the uses for which Nature had expressly framed him. His invective seldom degenerated into vulgar abuse; one discerned in him at least the elements of what we call good taste; of simple manliness he disclosed not a little; he had some command of pathos. In conclusion, he finished without reference to his personal concerns.

The chairman invited questions, preliminary to debate.

He rose half-way down the room,—the man who invariably rises on these occasions. He was oldish, with bent shoulders, and wore spectacles—probably a clerk of forty years’ standing. In his hand was a small note-book, which he consulted. He began with measured utterance, emphatic, loud.

‘I wish to propose to the lecturer seven questions. I will read them in order; I have taken some pains to word them clearly.’

Richard has his scrap of paper on his knee. He jots a word or two after each deliberate interrogation, smiling.

Other questioners succeeded. Richard replies to them. He fails to satisfy the man of seven queries, who, after repeating this and the other of the seven, professes himself still unsatisfied, shakes his head indulgently, walks from the room.

The debate is opened. Behold a second inevitable man; he is not well-washed, his shirt-front shows a beer-stain; he is angry before he begins.

‘I don’t know whether a man as doesn’t ‘old with these kind o’ theories ‘ll be allowed a fair ‘earin—’

Indignant interruption. Cries of ‘Of course he will!’—‘Who ever refused to hear you?’—and the like.

He is that singular phenomenon, that self-contradiction, that expression insoluble into factors of common-sense—the Conservative working man. What do they want to be at? he demands. Do they suppose as this kind of talk ‘ll make wages higher, or enable the poor man to get his beef and beer at a lower rate? What’s the d—d good of it all? Figures, oh? He never heered yet as figures made a meal for a man as hadn’t got one; nor yet as they provided shoes and stockings for his young ‘uns at ‘ome. It made him mad to listen, that it did! Do they suppose as the rich man ‘ll give up the land, if they talk till all’s blue? Wasn’t it human natur to get all you can and stick to it?

‘Pig’s nature!’ cries someone from the front benches.

‘There!’ comes the rejoinder. ‘Didn’t I say as there was no fair ‘earing for a man as didn’t say just what suits you?’

The voice of Daniel Dabbs is loud in good-tempered mockery. Mockery comes from every side, an angry note here and there, for the most part tolerant, jovial.

‘Let him speak! ‘Ear him! Hoy! Hoy!’

The chairman interposes, but by the time that order is restored the Conservative working man has thrust his hat upon his head and is off to the nearest public-house, muttering oaths.

Mr. Cullen rises, at the same time rises Mr. Cowes. These two gentlemen are fated to rise simultaneously. They scowl at each other. Mr. Cullen begins to speak, and Mr. Cowes, after a circular glance of protest, resumes his seat. The echoes tell that we are in for oratory with a vengeance. Mr. Cullen is a short, stout man, very seedily habited, with a great rough head of hair, an aquiline nose, lungs of vast power. His vein is King Cambyses’; he tears passion to tatters; he roars leonine; he is your man to have at the pamper’d jades of Asia! He has got hold of a new word, and that the verb to ‘exploit.’ I am exploited, thou art exploited,—he exploits! Who? Why, such men as that English duke whom the lecturer gripped and flagellated. The English duke is Mr. Cullen’s bugbear; never a speech from Mr. Cullen but that duke is most horribly mauled. His ground rents,—yah! Another word of which Mr. Cullen is fond is ‘strattum,’—usually spelt and pronounced with but one t midway. You and I have the misfortune to belong to a social ‘strattum’ which is trampled flat and hard beneath the feet of the landowners. Mr. Cullen rises to such a point of fury that one dreads the consequences—to himself. Already the chairman is on his feet, intimating in dumb show that the allowed ten minutes have elapsed; there is no making the orator hear. At length his friend who sits by him fairly grips his coat-tails and brings him to a sitting posture, amid mirthful tumult. Mr. Cullen joins in the mirth, looks as though he had never been angry in his life. And till next Sunday comes round he will neither speak nor think of the social question.

Mr. Cowes is unopposed. After the preceding enthusiast, the voice of Mr. Cowes falls soothingly as a stream among the heather. He is tall, meagre, bald; he wears a very broad black necktie, his hand saws up and down. Mr. Cowes’ tone is the quietly venomous; in a few minutes you believe in his indignation far more than in that of Mr. Cullen. He makes a point and pauses to observe the effect upon his hearers. He prides himself upon his grammar, goes back to correct a concord, emphasises eccentricities of pronunciation; for instance, he accents ‘capitalist’ on the second syllable, and repeats the words with grave challenge to all and sundry. Speaking of something which he wishes to stigmatise as a misnomer, he exclaims: ‘It’s what I call a misnomy!’ And he follows the assertion with an awful suspense of utterance. He brings his speech to a close exactly with the end of the tenth minute, and, on sitting down, eyes his unknown neighbour with wrathful intensity for several moments.

Who will follow? A sound comes from the very back of the room, such a sound that every head turns in astonished search for the source of it. Such voice has the wind in garret-chimneys on a winter night. It is a thin wail, a prelude of lamentation; it troubles the blood. The speaker no one seems to know; he is a man of yellow visage, with head sunk between pointed shoulders, on his crown a mere scalp-lock. He seems to be afflicted with a disease of the muscles; his malformed body quivers, the hand he raises shakes paralytic. His clothes are of the meanest; what his age may be it is impossible to judge. As his voice gathers strength, the hearers begin to feel the influence of a terrible earnestness. He does not rant, he does not weigh his phrases; the stream of bitter prophecy flows on smooth and dark. He is supplying the omission in Mutimer’s harangue, is bidding his class know itself and chasten itself, as an indispensable preliminary to any great change in the order of things. He cries vanity upon all these detailed schemes of social reconstruction. Are we ready for it? he wails. Could we bear it, if they granted it to us? It is all good and right, but hadn’t we better first make ourselves worthy of such freedom? He begins a terrible arraignment of the People,—then, of a sudden, his voice has ceased. You could hear a pin drop. It is seen that the man has fallen to the ground; there arises a low moaning; people press about him.

They carry him into the coffee-shop. It was a fit. In five minutes he is restored, but does not come back to finish his speech.

There is an interval of disorder. But surely we are not going to let the meeting end in this way. The chairman calls for the next speaker, and he stands forth in the person of a rather smug little shopkeeper, who declares that he knows of no single particular in which the working class needs correction. The speech undeniably falls fiat. Will no one restore the tone of the meeting?

Mr. Kitshaw is the man! Now we shall have broad grins. Mr. Kitshaw enjoys a reputation for mimicry; he takes off music-hall singers in the bar-parlour of a Saturday night. Observe, he rises, hems, pulls down his waistcoat; there is bubbling laughter. Mr. Kitshaw brings back the debate to its original subject; he talks of the Land. He is a little haphazard at first, but presently hits the mark in a fancy picture of a country still in the hands of aborigines, as yet unannexed by the capitalist nations, knowing not the meaning of the verb ‘exploit.’

‘Imagine such a happy land, my friends; a land, I say, which nobody hasn’t ever thought of “developing the resources” of,—that’s the proper phrase, I believe. There are the people, with clothing enough for comfort and—ahem!—good manners, but, mark you, no more. No manufacture of luxurious skirts and hulsters and togs o’ that kind by the exploited classes. No, for no exploited classes don’t exist! All are equal, my friends. Up an’ down the fields they goes, all day long, arm-in-arm, Jack and Jerry, aye, and Liza an’ Sairey Ann; for they have equality of the sexes, mind you! Up an’ down the fields, I say, in a devil-may-care sort of way, with their sweethearts and their wives. No factory smoke, dear no! There’s the rivers, with tropical plants a-shading the banks, O my! There they goes up an’ down in their boats, devil-may-care, a-strumming on the banjo,’—he imitated such action,—‘and a-singing their nigger minstrelsy with light ‘earts. Why? ‘Cause they ain’t got no work to get up to at ‘arf-past five next morning. Their time’s their own! That’s the condition of an unexploited country, my friends!’

Mr. Kitshaw had put everyone in vast good humour. You might wonder that his sweetly idyllic picture did not stir bitterness by contrast; it were to credit the English workman with too much imagination. Resonance of applause rewarded the sparkling rhetorician. A few of the audience availed themselves of the noise to withdraw, for the clock showed that it was close upon ten, and public-houses shut their doors early on Sunday.

But Richard Mutimer was on his feet again, and this time without regard to effect; there was a word in him strongly demanding utterance. It was to the speech of the unfortunate prophet that he desired to reply. He began with sorrowful admissions. No one speaking honestly could deny that—that the working class had its faults; they came out plainly enough now and then. Drink, for instance (Mr. Cullen gave a resounding ‘Hear, hear!’ and a stamp on the boards). What sort of a spectacle would be exhibited by the public-houses in Hoxton and Islington at closing time to-night? (‘True!’ from Mr. Cowes, who also stamped on the boards.) Yes, but—Richard used the device of aposiopesis; Daniel Dabbs took it for a humorous effect and began a roar, which was summarily interdicted. ‘But,’ pursued Richard with emphasis, ‘what is the meaning of these vices? What do they come of? Who’s to blame for them? Not the working class—never tell me! What drives a man to drink in his spare hours? What about the poisonous air of garrets and cellars? What about excessive toil and inability to procure healthy recreation? What about defects of education, due to poverty? What about diseased bodies inherited from over-slaved parents?’ Messrs. Cowes and Cullen had accompanied these queries with a climax of vociferous approval; when Richard paused, they led the tumult of hands and heels. ‘Look at that poor man who spoke to us!’ cried Mutimer. ‘He’s gone, so I shan’t hurt him by speaking plainly. He spoke well, mind you, and he spoke from his heart; but what sort of a life has his been, do you think? A wretched cripple, a miserable weakling no doubt from the day of his birth, cursed in having ever seen the daylight, and, such as he is, called upon to fight for his bread. Much of it he gets! Who would blame that man if he drank himself into unconsciousness every time he picked up a sixpence?’ Cowes and Cullen bellowed their delight. ‘Well, he doesn’t do it; so much you can be sure of. In some vile hole here in this great city of ours he drags on a life worse—aye, a thousand times worse!—than that of the horses in the West-end mews. Don’t clap your hands so much, fellow-workers. Just think about it on your way home; talk about it to your wives and your children. It’s the sight of objects like that that makes my blood boil, and that’s set me in earnest at this work of ours. I feel for that man and all like him as if they were my brothers. And I take you all to witness, all you present and all you repeat my words to, that I’ll work on as long as I have life in me, that I’ll use every opportunity that’s given me to uphold the cause of the poor and down-trodden against the rich and selfish and luxurious, that if I live another fifty years I shall still be of the people and with the people, that no man shall ever have it in his power to say that Richard Mutimer misused his chances and was only a new burden to them whose load he might have lightened!’