It was Richards first visit to this house. A few days ago he would, in spite of himself, have been somewhat awed by the man-servant at the door, the furniture of the hall, the air of refinement in the room he entered. At present he smiled on everything. Could he not command the same as soon as he chose?
Mr. Westlake rose from his writing-table and greeted his visitor with a hearty grip of the hand. He was a man pleasant to look upon; his face, full of intellect, shone with the light of good-will, and the easy carelessness of his attire prepared one for the genial sincerity which marked his way of speaking. He wore a velvet jacket, a grey waistcoat buttoning up to the throat, grey trousers, fur-bordered slippers; his collar was very deep, and instead of the ordinary shirt-cuffs, his wrists were enclosed in frills. Long-haired, full-bearded, he had the forehead of an idealist and eyes whose natural expression was an indulgent smile.
A man of letters, he had struggled from obscure poverty to success and ample means; at three-and-thirty he was still hard pressed to make both ends meet, but the ten subsequent years had built for him this pleasant home and banished his long familiar anxieties to the land of nightmare. It came just in time, he was in the habit of saying to those who had his confidence. I was at the point where a man begins to turn sour, and I should have soured in earnest. The process had been most effectually arrested. People were occasionally found to say that his books had a tang of acerbity; possibly this was the safety-valve at work, a hint of what might have come had the old hunger-demons kept up their goading. In the man himself you discovered an extreme simplicity of feeling, a frank tenderness, a noble indignation. For one who knew him it was not difficult to understand that he should have taken up extreme social views, still less that he should act upon his convictions. All his writing foretold such a possibility, though on the other hand it exhibited devotion to forms of culture which do not as a rule predispose to democratic agitation. The explanation was perhaps too simple to be readily hit upon; the man was himself so supremely happy that with his disposition the thought of tyrannous injustice grew intolerable to him. Some incidents happened to set his wrath blazing, and henceforth, in spite of not a little popular ridicule and much shaking of the head among his friends, Mr. Westlake had his mission.
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 Richards loss of his employment, of which, as editor of the Unions 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. Westlakes satisfaction. Cheerful news concerning his friends always put him in the best of spirits.
He shook his head, laughing.
Come, come, Mutimer, thisll never do! Im 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 Im not going to make the ordinary use of this fortune. As yet Ive only been able to hit on a few general ideas; Im 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! Heres 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 swans down at her throatshe was perfectly attiredmade 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 directorsand in a very different sense from the usualfor 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. Therell be no attempt to carry out the idea of every man receiving the just outcome of his labour; not because I shouldnt 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. Itll 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, well defy them all, and well win. Itll be the work of my life, and well see if an honest purpose cant go as far as a thievish one.
The climax would have brought crashing cheers at Commonwealth Hall; in Mr. Westlakes study it was received with well-bred expressions of approval.
The climax would have brought crashing cheers at Commonwealth Hall; in Mr. Westlakes 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 youll come and examine the place. Its 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?
Youll 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. Dont you think so?
Certainly.
Richard did not give expression to his thought that a paragraph on the subject in the Unions 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 Mutimers 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. Westlakes 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 mans 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 handsDaniel Dabbs owned themgave 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. Were always glad to hear him, and to-night, if I may be allowed to int as much, were particularly glad to hear him. Our friend and comrade is going to talk to us about the Land. Its a question we cant 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 dont know, the chairman added, with a sly look across the room, whether our friends got any new views on this subject of late. I shouldnt wonder if he had. Here sounded a roar of laughter, led off by Daniel Dabbs. Howsever, 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 earths 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.