Unknown (40 page)

The filmy screen that hid, the sun had grown thicker since high noon. The surface of the small river reflected now what appeared to be a very cloudy sky and the willows and alders were not mirrored there at all. Staring at the water, he tried to summon back every link in the dragging chain that had pulled him to this place. He meditated on the curious difference which exists—when you consider the life of a river—between the outlines of reflections in its flow and the outlines of shadows.

He sat down on a willow stump and stared at the river as intently as if it held a secret for him that at all costs must be drawn forth. At what point, since he stood by Mr. Evans' side in that queer basement of Old Jones' shop, had the determination seized upon him to come out here? Was it when he was looking at that surprising volume ... he could envisage its dirty-whitish modern binding now . . . that fell across the gap in the shelf left by the extraction of St. Augustine? Was it when he was looking for that “fairy-cup” moss by the log on which the three of them had sat down? Was it at the very moment when he had that sudden inspiration about the secret of Christianity and the redemption of Matter?

The willow stump on which he sat now had one living sprout; and from this sprout a little cluster of emerald-green buds had burst forth. These buds now became a portion of what he was feeling and thinking. One conclusion certainly had formulated itself in his slowly moving mind, during that ascent of the Tor; the conclusion, namely, that it was unnecessary to trouble himself one way or the other about his father's Creed; since the essence of the thing lay in the conduct of life rather than in any intellectual doctrine.

“SAe said you had the look of a saint.” What a funny remark that was of Red Robinson's; and how hard to associate it with any impression he had ever received from Crummie Geard! Well, the look of a saint or the look of a satyr, he knew what he could not help doing now! For good or for evil he must see Nell Zoyland that day.

He got up from the willow stump, crossed the bridge, and began tramping westward, along the opposite bank, which, at that portion of the river's progress, resembled a natural tow-path.

When John and his Welsh companion came out of their tea-shop on George Street, they encountered Tom Barter. John had taken the opportunity of carrying further his sudden inspiration as to using “my good friend Evans” as the central figure of his profane Passion Play. The idea of this appealed to a vein of sheer devilry in his impulsive nature. The less there appeared of the Christ-like in the degenerate Roman physiognomy of his Celtic ally the better pleased and the more tickled did this nerve of roguery in him become!

Having agreed to the wild scheme in his “second manner,” the Welshman was now prepared, it seemed, to throw into the notion all the ponderous, pedantic weight of his “first manner'”; and the more he talked about it with John the fuller of dramatic possibilities did the plan seem for John's lively imagination.

But Mr. Evans went off to his shop now; and the two old friends, of the far-off Northwold days, were left together in that drowsy Glastonbury street. It came back to John, as he drifted by his friend's side towards the office of Philip's factory, how full of this man's personality every glittering, rippling reach of that “big river” had been. It came back to him how he had thought of Tom as he stood with Mary at the mill-pond looking at those great salmon-trout. It came to him how he had recalled, without realising the full import of it, their vicious play that hot Sunday afternoon at the bottom of the boat! Vicious with every sort of East-Anglian sensuality had they both been; and John was surprised at himself, glancing furtively at Tom's stolid profile, to find what an intense thrill it still gave him, what a delicious, voluptuous sensation, to feel himself weak and soft, where Tom was strong and hard!

Their way took them—John knew he ought to return to his office but he simply could not tear himself away from his friend —past some of the worst of the Glastonbury slums. These were altogether minor slums compared with those of any big city; but such as they were they were not a pretty sight. Here in these back alleys lived the failures in the merciless struggle of life. At this present moment many of the people who lived in these houses were men and women who would have found employment if Philip Crow's factories had been working full-time.

The sight of the two leisurely men, both of them absolutely sure of two more pleasant meals that day, and of good clean sheets and a quiet bedroom to sleep in, when that day was over, strolling past, did not enhance the peace of mind of such dwellers in “loop'd and windowed raggedness” as chanced to watch them go by.

They had scarcely got past this quarter when they were hailed from behind; and on turning round found Dave Spear hurrying after them. Dave's cheeks were less rosy than usual and there was a dangerous glint in his eye.

“Do you mind if I walk with you a step or two?” he gasped, panting a little, like a dog that has been overtaxed.

“I'm always glad to see you, Spear,” said John. “You know Mr. Barter, of course?”

“Why I troubled you, Crow,”' said Dave, when he had nodded gravely at Tom Barter, and they had moved on together, “was that I've just been reading some of your circulars. They're very good, man. They're topnotch in their way, let me tell you! And Fm a connoisseur, being a Communist, of the art of propaganda.”

“Fm glad you like 'em,” said John, mightily pleased at this unexpected praise from so experienced an expert.

“But what I want you to do, what we want you to do”—it was not clear to John whether this “we” referred to Persephone or to the Bristol headquarters—“is to mention in your circulars that in addition to her other interests, your town here is going to try the experiment of running a municipal factory. You might mention it as an important experiment in the economic life of the town and suggest that visitors come to see it.”

John's eyes gleamed with malicious delight at hearing these words,

“Certainly, certainly, certainly!*' he cried eagerly. ”I'll have what you say printed in my new set that I'm getting out next week."

“Would it be a philistine thing, Mr. Spear,” put in Tom Barter in a casual and supercilious tone, “if I enquired where this municipal factory of. yours fs?”

“We'll have it in working order by the time Mr. Geard's visitors are really here. You'll know where it is then, Mr. Barter.”

John looked a little glum at this remark.

“At first we did think of June the first,” he said, “but we decided that it would be better to have more time to prepare. I'm in favour ... for reasons of my own ... of St. John's Day.”

They came in sight of the factory where Barter's office was. There was a wooden gate leading to a narrow lane between high walls here, which was the access to his labours usually employed hy this Norfolk manager of a Somerset mill.

The others leaned over this gate with him for a moment out of politeness; for he didn't wish them to come any further. There was a very wretched house adjoining this gate, an old house, probably built during the Wars of the Ror.es. for its same buttresses and lintels still carried deeply cut Gothic foliations, and its crumbling walls were thick as those of a castle. But its rafters were rotting, its thatch dilapidated and full of holes, its broken panes stuffed with rags, and so many bricks were missing from the top of its chimney that one interior side, covered with black soot, was open to the air.

Out of the interior of this house there emerged at equal intervals a low moaning sound, a sound that had something in it that was peculiarly disconcerting.

“Hear that?” said Barter in a flat, toneless voice.

“Is anything wrong?”.said John.

“Oh, no . . . all is in order,” said Dave Spear. “I heard this noise the other night, Mr. Barter, when I was calling on the people round here. All is quite regular. No one is being tortured. Oh no! nothing is wrong. It's only an old woman wTho can't afford any comfort, dying of cancer. I can even tell you, gentlemen, her name. Her name is Tittie Petherton. She is not entirely unhappy, in spite of that sound; for her only fear is to die in the hospital. She'd be in the hospital now if the Vicar didn't pay someone to look after her. I've been in there. I've seen her. And though she can't help making that noise her mind is reasonably satisfied. She has no fear of death. All she fears is the hospital. Our good cousin Philip would have sent her there, too, if the Vicar hadn't come to her rescue. Oh, no, gentlemen, all is quite in order.”

“Aren't you making rather too much of one sad case, Spear?” said Barter.

Dave Spear gripped the gate with both his hands and began to shake it. This proceeding arrested the full attention of John who was one who always took note of such manifestations of sudden feeling.

“Besides, my good Sir,” Barter went on, “your Communistic State wouldn't prevent people from getting cancer.”

A curious thing occurred then; ... or at least to the insatiable nervous attention of John it was curious ... for it was as if this short, broad-shouldered, sturdy, little man, without any overcoat, and m a neat navy-blue suit of serge, bpoke in a voice like the voice of a terrible prophet. John, for his part, never forgot that moment. He was himself standing close to his friend Barter. He even had his arm over Barter's shoulder and the smell of Barter's leather coat was in his nostrils. But what he kept his eyes upon, as he stood like that, was a broken corbel that must once have supported some kind of stone shaft, belonging perhaps to a vanished aTchway between this ruined house and another house. This disfigured fragment of stone came to resemble, as John gazed at it, a face whose eyes were at the end of its snout. “Maybe it was a face once,” he thought, “a gargoyle-face, deliberately carved by some mad workman in those old days to ease his mind of some frightful thing.” .

Every time that the moaning sound from the interior of the house came again, an invisible hand upon his twitching cheek seemed to turn his face towards the petrified snout, endowed with eyes.

“Come now, Spear, that really is going a bit too far!” were the words that lay, like a tedious meaningless scripture, upon the counter, so to speak, of Tom Barter's practical mouth. But he could not utter them in a convincing tone.

“Come now, Spear!” he began again. And then he flung out “Going a bit too far!” And then his voice could be heard in a sort of stage aside—“Now, Spear, that really is------”

“The pleasure we get from chaos,'” Spear was saying, “is not a patch upon the pleasure we get in reducing chaos to order. Life will never be really pruned and clipped and trimmed, whatever we do to it It will always brim over and escape us. The Communistic State is the only way that's ever been found for using force on the side of the weak. The whole system of human life depends on two things; on wTork and on pain. Communism takes our powder of wTork and our power of bearing pain and, puts these two, like the immortal horses of Achilles, into the harness of the State. Politics are intolerable to all sensitive people. But why are they so? Because they don't touch the real quick, the real nerve, the real ganglia, of the situation! The situation is not political. It's economic. It isn't want of a Napoleon. It's want of a world-machine, run by impersonal force, on behalf of the Weak. When I say ”weak' I mean the poor and the children of the poor. Money is strength, power, comfort leisure, thought, philosophy, art, health, liberty, freedom, faith, hope, peace, rest. Money is sleep. Money is love. Money is ease from pain. Those who deny this are lower than men or higher than men. They are rogues or madmen. They are liars or madmen. They are fools or madmen. Money is the blood of life. Life is created out of work and pain. Life is defended by force. The Communist State is the organised force of humanity. Evolution has been fumbling, groping, staggering, through blood, through tears, through torture, to this organising of human force to human ends. Evolution has created money and it has created the Communistic State to monopolise money. Money—the engine of life—is an engine of death when it is in the hands of individuals. Put it in the hands of the Communist State and whatever blunders are committed the whole situation is transformed! The individual has no more right to own money than he has to own earth, air, water, fire. We are all a herd of gibbering monkeys in a madhouse of inherited superstitions; and the maddest and wickedest of all these superstitions is the idea that private people have a right to be rich! No one has a right to be rich. It is crime to be rich. It is a perversion, an obscenity, a monstrosity. It is an offence against nature, against intelligence, against good taste. To be rich is to be a moral leper. To be rich is to be on the side of Cancer!"

“—a bit too far, Spear!” came the voice of Barter, like the sound of a rain-gutter dripping on a tin roof.

“I wish Mary could have heard that,” thought John; and he Eound himself taking his arm from his friend's shoulder and feeling a certain nausea from the smell of the leather jacket.

His nerves were so much on edge at that moment, that, as Barter quietly unlatched the gate and let himself through, he burst out is if they had been alone:

“Don't forget, Tom, that, if you get fed up with Philip, Geard would willingly take you over. You've only to say the word! Only to say it, Tom!”

GEARD OF GLASTONBURY

THE TWILIGHT OF THAT DAY HAD TURNED INTO DARKNESS BEFORE Tom Barter returned to his lodgings in High Street to wash his hands preparatory to his going out to supper. Tom very rarely had a chance to enjoy any tea. His diurnal relaxation was his mid-day dinner at the Pilgrims", which he relished with the appetite of a fox-hunter. The waitresses there, with every one of whom, especially with a girl called Clarissa Smith, he had a separate and complete understanding, rivalled each other in catering to his taste. Tom's taste was all for freshly cooked meats and substantial puddings.- xA.ny petticoat fluttering about these solid viands was sauce enough for him: and when he blew off the froth from the top of his pewter flagon of brown Taunton ale and followed with his eyes these buxom attendants, passing in and out of the old red-baize swing-door into the mediaeval kitchen, a massive sensual satisfaction, worthy of any of those tall Vikings who grounded their keels at Wick, filled the veins of this short, broad-shouldered man.