 3 While she and Helen were sitting thus, momentarily out of tune with each other, the silence was suddenly broken by a familiar voice. I say, Helen, is this all right? The words came from a young man who, having knocked unheeded, opened the door and cautiously put in a curly head. Frank, is that you? Come in! cried Helen, springing up. Frank Levin came in, and at once perceived the lady sitting in the window. Well, I am glad, he cried, striding across the room and shaking Helen's hand, by the way. Miss Boyce, I thought none of your friends were ever going to get a sight of you again. Why, what? he drew back, scanning her, a gay look of a quizzing surprise on his fair boy's face. He expected me in cap and apron, said Marcella, laughing, or means to pretend he did. I expected a sensation, and here you are, just as you were, only twice. I say, Helen, doesn't she look well? This in a stage aside to Helen, while the speaker was drawing off his gloves and still studying Marcella. Well, I think she looks tired, said Helen with a little attempt at a smile, but turning away. Everybody felt a certain tension, a certain danger, even in the simplest words, and Miss Helen's call to supper was very welcome. The frugal meal went gaily, the chattering Christ Church boy brought to it a breath of happy, careless life, to which the three others, overdriven and overpressed, all of them responded with a kind of eagerness. Helen, especially delighted in him, and would have out all his budget, his peacock's pride, at having been just put into the varsity eleven, his crooked engagements for the summer, his rouses with his dons, above all, his lasting amazement, that he should have just scraped through his mods. I thought those Roman emperors would have done for me, he declared with a child's complacency. Brutes, I couldn't remember them. I learned them up and down, backwards and forwards, but it was no good. They nearly dished me. Yet it comes back to me, said Helen slyly, that when a certain person was once asked to name the winner of the derby in some obscure year, he began at the beginning and gave us all of them from first to last without a hitch. The winner of the derby, said the lad eerily, bending forward with his hands on his knees. Why, I should rather think so. That is in memory. That's knowledge. Goodness, who's this? The last remark was addressed Sotovoce to Marcello. Supper was just over, and the two guests with Helen had returned to the window, while Miss Helen, stoutly refusing their help, herself cleared the table and set all straight. Helen, hearing a knock, had gone to the door while Levin was speaking. Four men came crowding in, all of them apparently well known both to Helen and his sister. The last two seemed to be workmen, the others were Bennett, Helen's old and tried friend among the Labour leaders, and Nehemiah Wilkins, MP Helen introduced them all to Marcello and Levin, but the newcomers took little notice of any one but their host, and were soon seated about him, discussing a matter already apparently familiar to them, and into which Helen had thrown himself at once with that passionate directness which, in the social and speculative feel, replaced his ordinary gentleness of manner. He seemed to be in strong disagreement with the rest, a disagreement which troubled himself and irritated them. Marcello watched them with quick curiosity from the window where she was sitting, and would have liked to go forward to listen, but Frank Levin turned suddenly round upon her with sparkling eyes. Oh, I say don't go. Do come and sit here with me a bit. Oh, isn't it rum? Isn't it rum? Look at Helen. Those are the people whom he cares to talk to. That's a shoemaker, that man to the left, really an awfully cute fellow, and this man in front, I think he told me he was a mason. A socialist, of course, would like to string me up tomorrow. Did you ever see such a countenance? Whenever that man begins, I think we must be precious near to shooting, and he's pious too, would pray over us first and shoot us afterwards, which isn't the case I understand with many of them. Then the others, you know them? That's Bennett, regular good fellow, always telling his pals not to make fools of themselves, for which, of course, they love him no more than they are obliged, and Wilkins, oh Wilkins, he chuckled. He say it'll come to a beautiful row in the house before they've done. Between him and my charming cousin, Harry Wharton, my father says he backs Wilkins. Then suddenly the lad recollected himself, and his clear cheek colored a little after a hasty glance at his companion. He felt a silence and looking at his boots. Marcella wondered what was the matter with him. Since her flight from Mellor she had lived, so to speak, with her head in the sand. She herself had never talked directly of her own affairs to anybody. Her sensitive pride did not let her realize that, notwithstanding, all the world was aware of them. I don't suppose you know much about your cousin, she said to him with a little scorn. Well, I don't want to, said the lad. That's one comfort, but I don't know anything about anything, Miss Boyce. He plunged his head in his hands and Marcella, looking at him, saw at once that she was meant to understand she had woe and lamentation beside her. Her black eyes danced with laughter. At Mellor she had been several times his confidant. The handsome lad was not apparently very fond of his sisters and had taken to her from the beginning. Tonight she recognized the old symptoms. What? Have you been getting into scrapes again, she said? How many since we met last? There, you make fun of it, he said indignantly from behind his fingers. You're like all the rest. Marcella teased him a little more. To the last she was astonished by a flash of genuine wrath from the hastily uncovered eyes. If you're only going to chaff a fellow, let's go over there and talk. And yet I did want to tell you about it. You were awfully kind to me down at home. I want to tell you, and I don't want to tell you. Perhaps I oughtn't to tell you. You'll thank me a brute, I daresay, and ungentlemanly brute for speaking of it at all. And yet, somehow, the boy, crimson, bit his lips. Marcella arrested and puzzled, laid a hand on his arm. She had been used to these martholy ways with him at Mellor on the strength of her seniority, so inadequately measured by its two years or so of time. I won't laugh, she said. Tell me. No. Really, shall I? Whereupon there burst forth a history precisely similar, it seemed, to some half-dozen others she had already heard from the same lips. A pretty girl, or rather, an exquisite creature, met at the house of some relation in Scotland, met again at the boats at Oxford, and yet again at commemoration balls, nunham picnics and the rest, adored and adorable, yet, of course, a sphinx borne for the torment of men, taking her haughty way over a prostrate sex, kind to-day, cruel to-morrow, not to be won by money, yet, naturally, not to be won without it. Possessed like rose-almer of every virtue, every grace, whether a form or family, yet making nothing but a devastating and death-dealing use of them, how familiar it all was, and how many more of them there seemed to be in the world, on a man's reckoning than on a woman's. And, you know, said the lad eagerly, though she's frightfully pretty, well, frightfully fetching, rather, and well-dressed and all the rest of it, she isn't a bit silly, not one of your empty-headed girls, not she. She's read a lot of things, a lot. I'm sure, Miss Boyce, he looked at her confidently. If you were to see her, you'd think her awfully clever, and yet she's so little and so dainty and she dances my goodness, you should see her dance, skirt-dance, I mean. Letty Lind isn't in it. She's good, too, awfully good. I think her mother's a most dreadful old bore. Well, no, I didn't mean that, of course. I didn't mean that, but she's fussy, you know, and invalidity, and has to be wrapped up in shawls and dragged about in bath-chairs, and Betty's an angel to her. She is really, though her mother's always snapping her head off, and as to the poor something in his tone, and the way he had of fishing for her approval, sent Marcella into a sudden fit of laughter. Then she put out a hand to restrain this plunging lover. Look here, do come to the point. Have you proposed to her? I should rather think I have, said the boy, fervently. About once a week since Christmas. Of course she's played with me, that sort always does, but I think I might really have a chance with her if it weren't for her mother. Horrible old—no, of course I didn't mean that, but now he comes in when I oughtn't to tell you. I know I oughtn't to tell you. I'm always making a beastly mess of it. It's because I can't help talking of it. And, shaking his curly head into spare, he once more plunged his red cheeks into his hands and fell abruptly silent. Marcella colored for sympathy. I really wish you wouldn't talk in riddles, she said. What is the matter with you? Of course you must tell me. Well, I know you wouldn't mind, cried the boy, emerging as if you could mind, but it sounds like my impudence to be talking to you about—about—you see, he blurted out. She's going to Italy with the Rayburns. She's a connection of theirs somehow, and Miss Rayburn's taken a fancy to her lately, and her mother's treated me like dirt ever since they asked her to go to Italy. And naturally a fellow sees what that means. And what her mother's after. I don't believe Betty would. He's too old for her, isn't he? Oh, my goodness. This time he's smote his knee in real desperation. Now I have done it. I'm simply bursting always with the thing I'd rather cut my head off than say, Why they make them like me, I don't know. You mean, said Marcella with impatience, that her mother wants her to marry Mr. Rayburn? He looked round at his companion. She was lying back in a deep chair, her hands lightly clasped on her knee, something in her attitude in the pose of the tragic head. In the expression of the face, stamped tonight with a fatigue which was also a dignity, struck a real compunction into his mood of vanity and excitement. He had simply not been able to resist the temptation to talk to her. She reminded him of the Rayburns, and the Rayburns were in his mind at the present moment, by day and by night. He knew that he was probably doing an indelicate and indiscreet thing. But all the same, his boyish egotism would not be restrained from the headlong pursuit of his own emotions. There was in him too such a burning curiosity as to how she would take it, what she would say. Now, however, he felt a genuine shrinking. His look changed. Drawing his chair close up to her, he began a series of penitent and self-contradictory excuses which Marcella soon broke in upon. I don't know why you talk like that, she said, looking at him steadily. Do you suppose I can go on all my life, without hearing Mr. Rayburn's name mentioned, and don't apologize so much? It really doesn't matter what I suppose that you think about my present state of mind. It is very simple. I art never to have accepted Mr. Rayburn. I behaved badly, I know it, and everybody knows it. Still, one has to go on living one's life somehow. The point is that I am rather the wrong person for you to come to just now, for if there's one thing I ardently wish about Mr. Rayburn, it is that he should get himself married. Frank Levin looked at her in bewildered dismay. I never thought of that, he said. Well, you might, mightn't you? For another short space there was silence between them, while the rush of talk in the center of the room was still loud and unspent. Then she rated herself for want of sympathy. Frank sat beside her, shy and uncomfortable, his confidence chilled away. So you think Miss Rayburn has views, she asked him, smiling, and in her most ordinary voice. The boy's eyes brightened again with the implied permission to go on chattering. I know she has. Betty's brother as good as told me that she and Mr. MacDonald, that's Betty's mother, she hasn't got a father, had talked it over, and now Betty's going with them to Italy, and Aldous is going too for ten days, and when I go to the McDonald's, Mr. MacDonald treats me as if I were a little chap in jackets, and Betty worries me to death, it's sickening. And how about Mr. Rayburn? Oh, Aldous seems to like her very much, he said despondently, she's always teasing and amusing him, when she's there she never lets him alone, she harries him out, she makes him read to her and ride with her, she makes him discuss all sorts of things with her you'd never think Aldous would discuss, her lovers and her love affairs, and being in love, it's extraordinary the way she drives him round. At Easter she and her mother were staying at the court, and one night Betty told me she was bored to death, it was a very smart party, but everything was so flat and everybody so dull, so she suddenly got up and ran across to Aldous, now look here Mr. Aldous, she said, this'll never do, you've got to come and dance with me and push those chairs and tables aside, I can fancy the little stamp she'd give and make those other people dance to, and she made him, she positively made him. Aldous declared he didn't dance, and she wouldn't have a word of it, and presently she got to all her tricks, skirt dancing and the rest of it, and of course the evening went like smoke. Marcel's eyes, unusually wide open, were somewhat intently fixed on the speaker, and Mr. Rayburn liked it, she asked in a tone that sounded incredulous, didn't he just? She told me they got regular close friends after that, and he told her everything, oh well, said the lad embarrassed and clutching at his usual formula, of course I didn't mean that, and she's fearfully flattered, you can see she is, and she tells me that she adores him, that he's the only great man she's ever known, that I'm not fit to block his boots, and ought to be grateful whenever he speaks to me in all that sort of rot, and now she's going off with him, I shall have to shoot myself, I declare I shall. Well, not yet, said Marcel in a soothing voice. The case isn't clear enough. Wait till they come back, shall we move I'm going over there to listen to that talk, but first come and see me whenever you like, three to four thirty, Brown's buildings, Main Street, and tell me how this goes on. She spoke with a careless likeness, lapping at him with a half-sisterly freedom, she had risen from her seat, and he, whose thoughts had been wrapped up for months in one of the smallest of the sex, was suddenly struck with her height and stately gesture as she moved away from him. By Jove, why didn't she stick to Aldous, he said to himself, discontentedly, as his eyes followed her, it was only her cranks, and of course she'll get rid of them just like my luck. Meanwhile, Marcelo took a seat next to Miss Helen, who looked up from her knitting to smile at her. The girl filled into the attitude of listening, but for some minutes she was not listening at all. She was reflecting how little men knew of each other, even the most intimate friends, and trying to imagine what Aldous Rayburn would be like, married to such a charmer as Frank had sketched. His friendship for her meant, of course, the attraction of contraries, one of the most promising of all possible beginnings, on the whole she thought Frank's chances were poor. Then unexpectedly her ear was caught by Wharton's name, and she discovered that what was going on beside her was a passionate discussion of his present position and prospects in the Labour Party, a discussion, however, mainly confined to Wilkins and the two workmen. Bendit had the air of the shrewd and kindly spectator who has his own reasons for treating a situation with reserve, and Helen was laying back in his chair flushed and worn out. The previous debate, which had now merged in these questions of men and personalities, had made him miserable. He had no heart for anything more. Miss Helen observed him anxiously and made restless movements now and then, as though she had it in her mind, to send all her guests away. The two socialist workmen were talking strongly in favour of an organised and distinct Labour Party and of Wharton's leadership. They referred constantly to Parnell and what he had done for those Irish fellows. The only way to make Labour formidable in the House was to learn the lessons of unionism and Parnellism, to act together and strike together, to make of the Party a two-handed engine, ready to smite Tory and Liberal impartially. To this end, a separate organisation, separate place in the House, separate whips, they were ready nay clamorous for them all, and they were equally determined on Harry Wharton as a leader. They spoke of the Clarion with enthusiasm and declared that its owner was already an independent power and was, moreover, as straight as he was sharp. The contention and the praise lashed Wilkins into fury. After making one or two visible efforts at a sarcastic self-control, which came to nothing, he broke out into a flood of invective which left the rest of the room staring. Marcella found herself indignantly wondering who this big man with his fierce eyes, long puffy cheeks, coarse black hair and north country accent might be. Why did he talk in this way? With these epithets, this venom, it was intolerable. Helen roused himself from his fatigue to play the peacemaker, but some of the things Wilkins had been saying had put up the backs of the two workmen, and the talk flamed up unmanageably, Wilkins dialect getting more pronounced with each step of the argument. Well, if I ever had thought that I would come into London to put myself in my party under the heel of Mr. Harry Wharton, I had stayed home, I'd tell the, cried Wilkins slapping his knee. If it's to be the people's party, why in the name of God must you put a young rip stitch, like young, not the head of it, a man who'd just make use of us all, you and me, and every man jack of us for his own advancement, and kick us down when he's done with us. Why shouldn't he? What is he? Is he a man of us, bone a bone? He's a landlord and aristocrat, I tell you that. What have the likes of him ever been but thorns in our side? When have the landlords ever gone with the people? Have they not been to blight in the curse of the country for hundreds of years, and you're going to tell me that a man bred out of them, living on his rent and interest, grinding the faces of the poor? I'll be bound if the truth were known, as all the rest of them do, is going to lead me, and those that'll act with me to the pulling down of the landlords. Why are we to go ellipse-spittle into any man of his sort to do our work for us? Let him go to his own class. I'm told Mr. Wharton is mighty fond of countesses, and them of him, or let him set up as the friend of the working man just as he likes. I'm quite agreeable. I shan't make any bones of by taking his vote, but I'm not going to make him master over me and give him the right to speak for my mates in the House of Commons. I'd cut my hand off first. Levin grinned in the background. Bennett lay back in his chair with a worried look. Wilkins' crudities were very distasteful to him, both in and out of the House. The younger of the Socialist workmen, A. Mason, with a strong square face, incongruously lit somehow with the eyes of the religious streamer, looked at Wilkins contemptuously. There's none of you in the House will take orders, he said quickly, and that's the ruin of us. We all know that. Where do you think we'd have been in the struggle with the employers if we'd have gone about our business as you're gone about yours in the House of Commons? I'm not saying we shouldn't organize, said Wilkins fiercely. What I'm saying is that a man of the working class, a man who has the wants of the working class, a man whom the working class can get a hold on to do your business for you, and not any blood-sucking landlord or capitalist. It's a slap in the face to every honest working man of the country to make a Libba party and put Harry Wharton at the head of it. The young Socialist looked at him as scantz. Of course you'd like it yourself was what he was thinking, but they'll take a man as can hold his own with the swells and quite right, too. And if Mr. Wharton is the landlord, he's a good sort, exclaimed a shoemaker, a tall, lean man in a well-brushed frock coat. There's many on us noses have been to hear him speak, what he's tried to do about the land and the cooperative foreman. He's straight, is Mr. Wharton. We haven't got Socialism yet, and it isn't his fault being a landlord. He was born it. I'll tell you that he's playing for his own hand, said Wilkins doggedly, the red spot deepening on his swarthy cheek. He's running that paper for his own hand, haven't I had experience of him? I know it, and I'll prove it some day. He's one for feathering his own nest as Mr. Wharton, and when he's doing it by making fools of us, he'll leave us to whistle for any good we're ever likely to get out of him. He'll go again to landlords when they come to the real tussle. I know him. I'll tell you that I know him. A woman's voice clear and scornful broke into the talk. It's a little strange to think, isn't it, that while we in London go on groaning and moaning about in sanitary houses and making our small attempts here and there, half of the country poor of England have been rehoused in our generation by these same landlords, no fuss about it, and rents for five-room cottages somewhere about one in four pence a week, Helen swung his chair round and looked at the speaker amazed. Wilkins also stared at her under his eyebrows. He did not like women least of all, ladies. He gruffly replied that if they had done anything like as much as she said, which he begged her pardon, but he didn't believe, it was done for the landlord's own purposes, either to buy off public opinion or just for show and a grandisement. People who had prized pigs and prized cattle must have prized cottages, of course, without race of slaves inside them. Marcella, bright-eyed, erect, her thin right hand hanging over her knee, went avengingly into fax, the difference between landlords' villages and open villages, the agrarian experiments made by different great landlords, the advantage to the community, even from the socialist point of view of a system which had preserved the land in great blocks for the ultimate use of the state as compared with a system like the French which had forever made socialism impossible. Helen's astonishment almost swept away his weariness. Where in the world did she get it all from, and is she standing on her head or am I? After an animated little debate in which Bennett and the two workmen joined, while Wilkins sat for the most part in moody, contemptuous silence, and Marcella, her obstinacy roused, carried through her defense of the landlords with all a woman's love of emphasis and paradox. Everybody rose simultaneously to say good night. You ought to come and lead a debate down at our Limehouse Club, said Bennett, pleasantly to Marcella, as she held out her hand to him. You take a lot of beating. Yes, I'm a venturist, you know, she said, laughing I am. He shook his head, laughed too, and departed. When the four had gone, Marcella turned upon Helen. Are there many of these labor members like that? Her tone was still vibrating and sarcastic. He's not much of a talker, our Nehemiah, said Helen, smiling, but he has the most extraordinary power as a speaker over a large popular audience that I have ever seen. The man's honesty is amazing. It's his tempers and his jealousies getting his way. You astonished him, but, for the matter of that, you astonished Frank and me still more. And as he fell back into his chair, Marcella caught a flash of expression, a tone that somehow put her on her defense. I was not going to listen to such unjust stuff without a word. Politics is one thing, slanderous abuse is another. She said throwing back her head with a gesture which instantly brought back to Helen the scene in the Miller drawing room when she had denounced game laws and Wharton had scored his first point. He was silent, feeling a certain inner exasperation with women in their ways. She only did it to annoy, cried Frank Levin, because she knows it teases. We know very well what she thinks of us. But where did you get it all from, Miss Boyce? I just wish you'd tell me. There's a horrid radical in the house I'm always having rouse with and upon my word I didn't know there was half so much to be said for us. Marcella flushed. Never mind where I got it, she said. In reality, of course, it was from those agricultural reports she had worked through the year before under Wharton's teaching with so much angry zest and to such different purpose. When the door closed upon her and upon Frank Levin, who was to escort her home, Helen walked quickly over to the table and stood looking for a moment in a sort of bitter reverie at Rayburn's photograph. His sister followed him and laid her hand on his shoulder. Do go to bed, Edward. I'm afraid that talk has tired you dreadfully. It would be no good going to bed, dear, he said with a sigh of exhaustion. I will sit and read a bit and see if I can get myself into sleeping-trim, but you go, Alice, a good night. When she had gone, he threw himself into his chair again with the thought, she must contradict here as she contradicted there, she and justice. If she could have been just to a landlord for one hour last year, he spent himself for a while in endless chains of recollection, oppressed by the clearness of his own brain and thirsting for sleep. Then from the affairs of Rayburn and Marcella, he passed with a fresh sense of strain and effort to his own. That discussion with those four men which had filled the first part of the evening weighed upon him in his weakness of nerve, so that suddenly, in the phantom silence of the night, all life became an oppression and a terror, and rest either to-night or in the future a thing never to be his. He had come to the moment of difficulty, of tragedy, in a career which so far, in spite of all drawbacks of physical health and cramped activities, had been one of singular happiness and success. Ever since he had discovered his own gifts as a lecturer to working men, content, cheerfulness, nay, a passionate interest in every hour had been quite compatible for him with all the permanent limitations of his lot. The study of economical and historical questions, the expression through them of such a hunger for the building of a city of God among men as few are capable of, the evidence not to be ignored even by his modesty and perpetually forthcoming over a long period of time, that he had the power to be loved, the power to lead among those tarlers of the world on whom all his thoughts centered. These things had been his joy, and had led him easily through such self-denial to the careful husbanding of every hour of strength and time in the service of his ideal end. And now he had come upon opposition, the first cooling of friendships, the first distrust of friends that he had ever known. Early in the spring of this year, a book called Tomorrow and the Land had appeared in London, written by a young London economist of great ability and dealing with the nationalization of the land. It did not offer much discussion of the general question, but it took up the question as it affected England especially and London in particular. It showed, or tried to show, in picturesque detail what might be the consequences for English rural or municipal life of throwing all land into a common or national stock of expropriating the landlords and transferring all rent to the people to the effacement of taxation and the indefinite enrichment of the common lot. The book differed from progress and poverty which also powerfully and directly affected the English working class in that it suggested a financial scheme of great apparent simplicity and ingenuity for the compensation of the landlords. It was shorter and more easily to be grasped by the average working man, and it was written in a singularly crisp and taking style, and by the help of a number of telling illustrations borrowed directly from the circumstances of the larger English towns, especially of London, treated with abundant humor. The thing had an enormous success in popular phrase caught on. Soon Helen found that all the more active and intelligent spirits in the working class centers where he was in vogue as a lecturer were touched nay possessed by it. The crowd of more or less socialistic newspapers which had lately sprung up in London were full of it. The working men's clubs rang with it. It seemed to him a madness, an infection, and its spread like one. The book had soon reached an immense sale and was in everyone's hands. To Helen, a popular teacher, interested above all in the mingle problems of ethics and economics, such an incident was naturally of extreme importance, but he was himself opposed by deepest conviction, intellectual and moral to the book and its conclusions. The more its success grew, the more eager and passionate became his own desire to battle with it. His platform, of course, was secure to him, his openings many. Hundreds and thousands of men, all over England, were keen to know what he had to say about the new phenomenon. And he had been saying his say, throwing into it all his energies, all his finest work, with the result that for the first time in eleven years he felt his position in the working-class movement giving beneath his feet, and his influence beginning to drop from his hand, coldness in places of enthusiasm, critical aloofness in places of affection, readiness to forget and omit him in matters where he had always hitherto belonged to the inner circle, and the trusted few. These bitter ghosts, with their hard, unfamiliar looks, had risen of late in his world of idealistic effort and joy, and had brought with them darkness and chill. He could not give way, for he had a singular unity of soul. It had been the source of his power, and every economical or social conviction, was in some way bound up with the moral and religious passion, which was his being his inmost nature, and his sensitive state of nerve and brain, his anchor-rights way of life, did not allow him the distractions of other men. The spread of these and other similar ideas seemed to him a question of the future of England, and he had already begun to throw himself into the unequal struggle with a martyr's tenacity, and with some prescience of the martyr's fate. Even Bennett, as he sat there alone in the dim-lamp light, his head bent over his knees, his hands hanging loosely before him, he thought bitterly of the defection of that old friend who had stood by him through so many lesser contests. It was impossible that Bennett should think the schemes of that book feasible, yet he was one of the honestest of men, and within a certain range one of the most clear-headed. As for the others, they had been all against him, intellectually their opinion did not matter to him, but morally it was so strange to him to find himself on the side of doubt and dissent, while all his friends were talking language which was almost the language of a new faith. He had various lecturing engagements ahead, connected with this great debate which was now searching throughout the labour world of London. He had accepted them with eagerness. In these weary night-hours he looked forward to them with terror, seeing before him perpetually thousands of hostile faces, living in a nightmare of lost sympathies and broken friendships, oh for sleep, for the power to rest, to escape this corrosion of an ever-active thought which settled and reconciled nothing. The tragedy of life lies in the conflict between the creative will of man and the hidden wisdom of the world which seems to thwart it. These words written by one whose thoughts had penetrated deep into his own, rang in his ears as he sat brooding there, not the hidden fate or the hidden evil, but the hidden wisdom. Could one die and still believe it? Yet what else was the task of faith? into book 3 chapter 5 Say Monday? Wharton, whose tendency in matters of business was always to go rather further than he had meant to go, for the sake generally of making an impression on the man with whom he was dealing, had spoken of a two-years engagement and had offered two hundred a year. So far as that went Craven was abundantly satisfied. And I understand from you, he said, that the paper goes in for the strike, that you will fight it through. He fixed his penetrating greenish eyes on his companion. Lewis Craven was now a tall man with narrow shoulders, a fine oval head and face, delicate features, and a nervous look of short sight, producing in appearance and manner a general impression of thin grace and of a courtesy which was apt to pass unaccountably into sarcasm. Wharton had never felt himself personally at ease with him, either now or in the old days of venturous debates. Certainly we shall fight it through, Wharton replied with emphasis. I have gone through the secretary's statement, which I now hand over to you, and I never saw a clearer case. The poor wretches have been skinned too long. It is high time the public backed them up. There are two of the masters in the house. Denny, I should say, belonged quite to the worst type of employer going. He spoke with Light Venom, buttoning his codice he spoke with the air of the busy public man who must not linger over an appointment. Oh, Denny, said Craven, musing. Yes, Denny is a hard man, but at just one, according to his lights, there are plenty worse than he. Wharton was disagreeably reminded of the venturous habit of never accepting anything that was said quite as it stood, of not, even in small things, swearing to the words of anybody. He was conscious of the quick passing feeling that his judgment, with regard to Denny, ought to have been enough for Craven. One thing more, said Craven suddenly as Wharton looked for his stick. You see there is talk of arbitration. Oh, yes I know, said Wharton impatiently. A mere blind. The men have been done by it twice before. They get some big wig from the neighborhood, not in the trade indeed, but next door to it, and of course the award goes against the men. Then the paper will not back arbitration? Craven took out a notebook. No, the quarrel itself is as plain as a pike staff. The men are asking for a mere pittance, and must get it if they are to live. It's like all these home industries, abominably ground down. We must go for them. I mean to go for them hot and strong, poor devils. Did you read the evidence in that blue book last year? Arbitration? No indeed. Let them live first. Craven looked up absently. And I think, he said, you gave me Mr. Thorpe's address? Mr. Thorpe was the secretary. Again Wharton gulped down his annoyance. If he chose to be expansive, it was not for Craven to take no notice. Craven, however, except in print, where he could be as vehement as anybody else, never spoke but in the driest way of those workman's grievances, which in reality burned at the man's heart. A deep disdain for what had always seemed to him the cheapest form of self-advertisement held him back. It was this dryness, combined with an amazing disinterestedness which had so far stood in his way. Wharton repeated the address, following it up by some rather curt directions as to the length and date of articles to which Craven gave the minutest attention. May we come in? said Marcella's voice. By all means, said Wharton, with a complete change of tone. Business is up, and I am off. He took up his hat as he spoke. Not at all. T is just coming, without which no guest departs, said Marcella, taking as she spoke a little tray from the red-haired Daisy who followed her and motioning to the child to bring the tea table. Wharton looked at her, irresolute. He had spent half an hour with her, teta-teta, before Lewis Craven arrived, and he was really do-it-the-house. But now that she was on the scene again, he did not find it so easy to go away. How astonishingly beautiful she was, even in this disguise. She wore her nurse's dress, for her second daily round began at half past four, and her cloak, bonnet, and bag were lying ready on a chair beside her. The dress was plain brown Holland, with collar and armlets of white linen. But to Wharton's eye, the dark Italian head, and the long slenderness of form had never shown more finely. He hesitated and stayed. All well, said Marcella, in a half whisper, as she passed Lewis Craven on her way to get some cake, he nodded and smiled, and she went back to the tea table with an eye all gayety, pleased with herself and everybody else. The quarter of an hour that followed went agreeably enough. Wharton sat among the little group, far too clever to patronize a cat, let alone a venturist. But nonetheless master and conscious master of the occasion, because it suited him to take the airs of equality. Craven said little, but as he lounged in Marcella's long cane chair with his arms behind his head, his serene and hazy air showed him contented. And Marcella talked and laughed with the animation that belongs to one whose plots for improving the universe have, at least temporarily, succeeded. Or did it betray perhaps a woman's secret consciousness of some presence beside her, more troubling and magnetic to her than others? Well, then, Friday, said Wharton at last, when his time was more than spent. You must be there early, for there will be a crush. Miss Craven comes to? Excellent! I will tell the doorkeeper to look out for you. Goodbye! Goodbye! And with a hasty shake of the hand to the Craven's, and one more keen glance, first at Marcella, and then round the little workman's room in which they had been sitting, he went. He had hardly departed before Anthony Craven, the lame elder brother who must have passed him on the stairs, appeared. Well, any news, he said, as Marcella found him a chair. All right! said Lewis, whose manner had entirely changed since Wharton had left the room. I am to go down on Monday to report the damesly strike that is to be, a month's trial, and then a salary, two hundred a year. Oh, it'll do! He fidgeted and looked away from his brother, as though trying to hide his pleasure. But in spite of him it transformed every line of the pinched and worn face. And you and Anna will walk to the registry office next week, said Anthony, sourly as he took his tea. It can't be next week, said Edith Craven's quiet voice, interposing. Anna's got to work out her shirt making time. She only left the Taylorises and began this new business ten days ago, and she was to have a month at each. Marcella's lifted eyebrows asked for explanations. She had not yet seen Lewis' betrothed, but she was understood to be a character and a better authority on many labour questions than he. Lewis explained that Anna was exploring various sweated trades for the benefit of an East End newspaper. She had earned fourteen shillings her last week at tailoring, but the feet had exhausted her so much that he had been obliged to insist on two or three days' respite before moving on to shirts. Shirts were now brisk in the hours appallingly long in this heat. It was on shirts they made acquaintance, said Edith pensively. Lewis was lodging on the second floor. She in the third floor back, and they used to pass on the stairs. One day she heard him imploring the little slavie to put some buttons on his shirts. The slavie tossed her head and said she'd see about it. When he'd gone out, Anna came downstairs, calmly demanded his shirts, and, having the slavie under her thumb, got them, walked off with them, and mended them all. When Lewis came home, he discovered a neat heap reposing on his table. Of course he wept, whatever he may say, but next morning Miss Anna found her shoes outside her door, blacked as they had never been blacked before, with a note inside one of them. Affecting, wasn't it? Thenceforward, as long as they remained in those lodgings, Anna mended, and Lewis blacked. Naturally, Anthony and I drew our conclusions. Marcella laughed. You must bring her to see me, she said to Lewis. I will, said Lewis with some perplexity, if I can get hold of her. But when she isn't stitching, she's writing, or trying to set up unions. She does the work of six. Shiller nearly as much as I do when we're married. Oh, we shall swim! Anthony surveyed his radiant aspect, so unlike the gentle or satirical detachment which made his ordinary manner, with a darkening eye, as though annoyed by his effusion. Two hundred a year, he said slowly. About what Mr. Harry Wharton spends on his clothes, I should think. The labour men tell me he is superb in that line. And for the same sum that he spends on his clothes, he is able to buy you, Lewis, body and soul, and you seem inclined to be grateful. Never mind, said Lewis recklessly. He didn't buy someone else, and I am grateful. No, by heaven you shan't be, said Anthony, with a fierce change of tone. You, the dependent of that charlatan? I don't know how I'm to put up with it. You know very well what I think of him, and of your becoming dependent on him. Marcella gave an angry start. Lewis protested. Nonsense, said Anthony doggedly. You'll have to bear it from me, I tell you, unless you muzzle me too with an Anna. But I don't see why I should bear it, said Marcella, turning upon him. I think you know that I owe Mr. Wharton a debt. Please remember it. Anthony looked at her an instant in silence. A question crossed his mind concerning her, then he made her a clumsy little bow. I am dumb, he said. My manners, you perceive, are what they always were. What do you mean by such a remark, cried Marcella, fuming? How can a man who has reached the position he has in so short a time, in so many different worlds, be disposed of by calling him an ugly name? It is more than unjust. It is absurd. Besides, what can you know of him? You forget, said Anthony, as he calmly helped himself to more bread and butter, that it is some three years since Master Harry Wharton joined the venturists and began to be heard of it all. I watched his beginnings, and if I didn't know him well, my friends and Louis's did, and most of them, as he knows, have pretty strong opinions by now about the man. Come, come, Anthony, said Louis. Nobody expects a man of that type to be the pure-eyed patriot, but neither you nor I can deny that he has done some good service. Am I asked to take him to my bosom? Not at all. He proposes a job to me and offers to pay me. I like the job and mean to use him and his paper, both to earn some money that I want and do a bit of decent work. You use Harry Wharton, said the cripple, with a sarcasm that brought the color to Louis's thin cheek and made Marcella angrier than before. She saw nothing in his attack on Wharton, except personal prejudice and ill-will. It was natural enough that a man of Anthony Craven's type, poor, unsuccessful, and embittered, should dislike a popular, victorious personality. Suppose we leave Mr. Wharton alone, she said with emphasis, and Anthony, making her a little, proud gesture of submission, threw himself back in his chair and was silent. It had soon become evident to Marcella, upon the renewal of her friendship with the Cravens, that Anthony's temper towards all men, especially towards social reformers and politicians, had developed into a mere impotent bitterness. While Louis had renounced his art and devoted himself to journalism, unpaid public work, and starvation, that he might so throw himself the more directly into the socialist battle, Anthony had remained an artist, mainly employed as before in decorative design. Yet he was probably the more fierce venturist and anti-capitalist of the two. Only what with Louis was an intoxication of hope, was on the whole with Anthony a council of despair. He loathed wealth more passionately than ever, but he believed less in the working man, less in his kind. Rich men must cease to exist, but the world on any terms would probably remain a sorry spot. In the few talks that he had had with Marcella since she left the hospital, she had allowed him to gather, more or less clearly, though with hardly a mention of Aldous Rayburn's name, what had happened to her at Malore. Anthony Craven thought out the story for himself, finding it a fit food for a caustic temper. Poor devil, the lover, to fall a victim to enthusiasm so raw, so unprofitable from any point of view, was hard. And as to this move to London, he thought he foresaw the certain end of it. At any rate, he believed in her no more than before. But her beauty was more marked than ever, and would, of course, be the dominant factor in her fate. He was thankful at any rate that Louis, in this two years interval, had finally transferred his heart elsewhere. After watching his three companions for a while, he broke in upon their chat with an abrupt What is this job, Louis? I told you I am to investigate, report, and back up the Damesley strike, or rather the strike that begins at Damesley next week. No chance, said Anthony shortly. The masters are too strong. I had a talk with Denny yesterday. The Denny, he meant, however, was not Wharton's colleague in the house, but his son, a young man who, beginning life as the heir of one of the most stiffed back and autocratic of capitalists, had developed socialist opinions, renounced his father's allowance, and was now a member of the intellectual proletariat, as they have been called, the Freelances of the Collectivist Movement. He had lately joined the Venturists. Anthony had taken a fancy to him. Louis, as yet, knew little or nothing of him. Ah, well, he said in reply to his brother. I don't know. I think the Clarion can do something. The press grows more and more powerful in these things, and he repeated some of the statements that Wharton had made, that Wharton always did make in talking of the Clarion, as to its growth under his hands and the increasing influence in labour disputes. Bunkham, interrupted Anthony dryly. Pure Bunkham. My own belief is that the Clarion is a rotten property, and that he knows it. At this, both Marcella and Louis laughed out. Extravagance, after a certain point, becomes amusing. They dropped their vexation, and Anthony, for the next ten minutes, had to submit to the part of the fractious person whom one humours, but does not argue with. He accepted the part, saying little, his eager, feverish eyes, full of hostility, glancing from one to the other. However, at the end Marcella bathed him a perfectly friendly farewell. It was always in her mind that Anthony Craven was lame and solitary, and her pity, no less than her respect for him, had long since yielded him the right to be rude. How are you getting on? He said to her abruptly as he dropped her hand. Oh, very well. My superintendent leaves me almost alone now, which is a compliment. There is a parish doctor who calls me my good woman, and a sanitary inspector who tells me to go to him whenever I want advice. Those are my chief grievances, I think. And you are as much in love with the poor as ever. She stiffened at the note of sarcasm, and a retaliatory impulse made her say, I see a great deal more happiness than I expected. He laughed. How like a woman! A few ill-housed villagers made you a Democrat. A few well-paid London artisans will carry you safely back to your class. Your people were wise to let you take this work. Do you suppose I nurse none but well-paid artisans? She asked him, mocking. And I didn't say money or comfort, did I? But happiness! As for my democracy, you are not perhaps the best judge. She stood, resting both hands on a little table behind her, in an attitude touched with the wild freedom which best became her, a gleam of storm in her great eyes. Why are you still a venturist? he asked her abruptly. Because I have every right to be. I joined a society pledged to work for a better future. According to my lights, I do what poor work I can in that spirit. You are not a socialist. Half the things you say or imply show it. And we are socialists. She hesitated, looking at him steadily. No. So far a socialism means a political system, the trampling out of private enterprise and competition and all the rest of it. I find myself slipping away from it more and more. No. As I go about among these wage earners, the emphasis, do what I will, comes to lie less and less on possession, more and more on character. I go to two tenements in the same building. One is hell. The other, heaven. Why? Both belong to well-paid artisans with equal opportunities. Both, so far as I can see, might have a decent and pleasant life of it. But one is a man. The other, with all his belongings, will soon be a vagabond. That is not all, I know. Oh, don't trouble to tell me so. But it is more than I thought. No, my sympathies in this district where I work are not so much with the socialists that I know here, saving your presence, but with the people. For instance, that slave at charity organization, and get all the abuse from all sides. Anthony laughed scornfully. It is always the way with a woman, he said. She invariably prefers the tinkers to the reformers. And as to your socialism, she went on, unheeding, the thought of many days finding defiant expression. It seems to me like all other interesting and important things destined to help something else. Christianity begins with the poor and division of goods. It becomes the great bulwark of property and the feudal state. The crusades, they set out to recover the tomb of the Lord. What they did was to increase trade and knowledge. And so with socialism, it talks of a new order. What it will do is to help make the old one sound. Anthony clapped her ironically. Excellent. When the liberty and property defense people have got hold of you, ask me to come in here. Meanwhile, Lewis stood behind with his hands on his sides, a smile in his blinking eyes. He really had a contempt for what a handsome, half-taught girl of twenty-three might think. Anthony only pretended or desired to have it. Nevertheless, Lewis said goodbye to his hostess with real and for him rare effusion. Two years before, for the space of some months, he had been in love with her. That she had never responded with anything warmer than liking and comradeship, he knew. And his Anna now possessed him wholly. But there was a deep and gentle chivalry at the bottom of all his stern, social faiths, and the woman towards whom he had once felt as he had toward Marcella Boyce could never lose the glamour lent her by that moment of passionate youth. And now, so kindly, so eagerly, she had given him his Anna. When they were all gone, Marcella threw herself into her chair a moment to think. Her wrath with Anthony was soon dismissed. But Lewis's thanks had filled her with delicious pleasure. Her cheek, her eye had a child's brightness. The old passion for ruling and influencing was all alive and happy. I will see it is all right, she was saying to herself. I will look after them. What she meant was, I will see that Mr. Wharton looks after them. And through the link of thought, memory flew quickly back to that teta-tet with him which had preceded the Craven's arrival. How changed he was. Yet how much the same. He had not sat beside her for ten minutes before each was once more vividly, specially conscious of the other. She felt in him the old life and daring, the old imperious claim to confidence, to intimacy. On the other hand, a new atmosphere, a new gravity, which suggested growing responsibilities, the difficulties of power, a great position. Everything fitted to touch such an imagination as Marcellus, which whatever its faults was noble both in quality and range. The brow beneath the bright chestnut curls had gained lines that pleased her, lines that a woman marks because she thinks they mean experience and mastery. All together to have met him again was pleasure. To think of him was pleasure. To look forward to hearing him speak in Parliament was pleasure. So too was his new connection with her old friends and a pleasure which took nothing from self-respect, which was open, honourable, eager. As for that ugly folly of the past, she frowned at the thought of it, only to thrust the remembrance passionately away, that he should remember or allude to it would put an end to friendship. Otherwise friends they would and should be, and the personal interest in his public career should lift her out of the cramping influences that flow from the perpetual commerce of poverty and suffering. Why not? Such equal friendships between men and women grow more possible every day. While, as for Hallen's distrust and Anthony Craven's jealous hostility, why should a third person be bound by either of them? Could anyone suppose that such a temperament as Wharton's would be congenial to Hallen or to Craven or to yet another person of whom she did not want to think? Besides, who wished to make a hero of him? It was the very complexity and puzzle of the character that made its force. So with a reddened cheek she lost herself a few minutes in this pleasant sense of a new wealth in life, and was only roused from the dreamy running to and fro of thought by the appearance of Minta, who came to clear away the tea. Why, it is close on the half hour, cried Marcella, springing up. Where are my things? She looked down the notes of her cases, satisfied herself that her bag contained all she wanted, and then hastily tied on her bonnet and cloak. Suddenly the room was empty, for Minta had just gone away with the tea, by a kind of subtle reaction the face in that photograph on Hallen's table flashed into her mind, its look, the grizzled hair. With an uncontrollable pang of pain she dropped her hands from the fastening of her cloak and wrung them together in front of her, a dumb gesture of contrition and of grief. She, she, talk of social reform and character. She give her opinion, as of right, on points of speculation and of ethics. She, whose main achievement so far had been to make a good man suffer. Something belittling and withering, swept over all her estimate of herself, all her pleasant self-conceit. Quietly, with downcast eyes, she went her way. End of Chapter 6 Recording by Shana Cohen Book III Chapter VII of Marcella by Mrs. Humphrey Ward This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Ruth Kidson Marcella by Mrs. Humphrey Ward Chapter VII Her first case was in Brown's buildings itself, a woman suffering from bronchitis and heart complaint, and tormented besides by an ulcerated foot which Marcella had now dressed daily for some weeks. She lived on the top floor of one of the Easterly blocks, with two daughters and a son of eighteen. When Marcella entered the little room it was, as usual, spotlessly clean and smelt of flowers. The windows were open and a young woman was busy shirt-inning on a table in the centre of the room. Both she and her mother looked up with smiles as Marcella entered. Then they introduced her with some ceremony to a lady, who was sitting beside the patient, a long-faced melancholy woman employed at the moment in marking Lynn in handkerchiefs, which she did with extraordinary fineness and delicacy. The patient and her daughter spoke of Marcella to their friend as the young person, but all with a natural courtesy and charm that could not have been surpassed. Marcella knelt to undo the wrappings of the foot. The woman, a pale, transparent creature, winced painfully as the dressing was drawn off. But between each half-stifled moan of pain she said something eager and grateful to her nurse. I never knew any one nurse to do it as gentle as you. Or I do take it kind of you nurse to do it so slow. Oh! There were a young person before you. Or hasn't she got nice hands, Mrs Burton? They don't never seem to jar you. Poor foot! But I think it's looking better, said Marcella, getting up at last from her work when all was clean and comfortable, and she had replaced the foot on the upturned wooden box that supported it, for its owner was not in bed, but sitting propped up in an old-arm chair. And how is your cough, Mrs Jervis? Oh! it's very bad nights, said Mrs Jervis mildly. Disturbs Emily dreadful. But I always pray every night when she lifts me into bed, as I maybe took before the morning, and God will do it soon. Mother! cried Emily, pausing in her awning. You know you oughtn't to say them things. Mrs Jervis looked at her with sly cheerfulness. Her emaciated face was paler than usual because of the pain of the dressing. But from the frail form there breathed an indomitable air of life, a gay courage, indeed, which had already struck Marcella with wonder. Well, you're not to take them to art, Emily. It'll be when it'll be, for the Lord likes us to pray, but he'll take his own time, and she's got troubles enough of her own nurse. Just see as she's left off her ring. Marcella looked at Emily's left hand, while the girl flushed all over, and ironed with a more fiery energy than before. I've ear'd such things of him nurse this last two days, she said with low vehemence, as I'm never going to wear it again. It had burned me. Emily was past twenty. Some eighteen months before this date she had married a young painter. After nearly a year of incredible misery her baby was born. It died, and she very nearly died also owing to the brood little treatment of her husband. As soon as she could get on her feet again she tottered home to her widowed mother, broken for the time in mind and body, and filled with loathing of her tyrant. He made no effort to recover her, and her family set to work to mend if they could what he had done. The younger sister of fourteen was earning seven shillings a week at paper bag-making. The brother, a lad of eighteen, had been apprenticed by his mother, at the cost of heroic effort some six years before, to the leather-currying trade, in a highly skilled branch of it, and was now taking sixteen shillings a week with the prospect of far better things in the future. He at once put aside from his earnings enough to teach Emily the shirt ironing, denying himself every indulgence till her training was over. Then they had their reward. Emily's colour and spirits came back to her. Her earnings made all the difference to the family between penury and ease, while she and her little sister kept the three tiny rooms in which they lived, and waited on their infallid mother with exquisite cleanliness and care. Marcella stood by the ironing table a moment after the girl's speech. Poor Emily, she said softly, laying her hand on the ringless one that held down the shirt on the board. Emily looked up at her in silence, but the girl's eyes glowed with things unsaid and inexpressible, the eternal passion, eternal pain, which in half the human race have no voice. He was a very rough man, was Emily's husband, said Mrs. Jervis, in her delicate, thoughtful voice, a very uncultivated man. Marcella turned round to her, startled and amused by the adjective, but the other two listeners took it quite quietly. It seemed to them, apparently, to express what had to be said. It's a sad thing is want of education, Mrs. Jervis went on in the same tone. Now there's that lady there, with a little courtly wave of her hand towards Mrs. Burton. She can't read you, no nurse, and I'm that sorry for her, but I've been reading to her, and Emily, just while my cough's quiet, one of my old tracks. She held up a little paper-covered tract, worn with use. It was called A Peneth of Grace or A Pound of Works. Marcella looked at it in respectful silence as she put on her cloak. Such things were not in her line. I do love a track, said Mrs. Jervis pensively. That's why I don't like these buildings so well as them others, Emily. Here you never get no tracks, and there, but with one person and another, there was a new one most weeks. But her voice dropped, and she looked timidly, first at her friend, and then at Marcella. She isn't a Christian nurse, isn't it sad? Mrs. Burton, a woman of a rich, mahogany complexion, with a black front and a mouth which turned down decisively at the corners, looked up from her embroidery with severe composure. No nurse, I'm not a Christian, she said in the tone of one stating a disagreeable fact, for which they are no ways it responsible. My brother is, and my sister's, real good Christian people. One of my sisters married a gentleman up in Wales. She has two servants and family prayers regular. But I've never felt no call, and I tell them I can't pretend. And Mrs. Jervis here, she don't seem to make me see it no different. She held her head erect, however, as though the unusually high sense of probity involved, was, after all, some consolation. Mrs. Jervis looked at her with pathetic eyes. But Emily coloured hotly. Emily was a church woman. Of course you're a Christian, Mrs. Burton, she said indignantly. What she means, nurse, is she isn't a member of any chapel like mother. But she's been baptised and confirmed, for I asked her, and of course she's a Christian. Emily, said Mrs. Jervis, with energy. Emily looked round trembling. The delicate invalid was sitting bolt upright, her eyes sparkling, a spot of red on either hollow cheek. The glances of the two women crossed. There seemed to be a mute struggle between them. Then Emily laid down her arm, stepped quickly across to her mother, and kneeling beside her through her arms around her. Have it your own way, mother, she said, while her lip quivered. I wasn't again to cross you. Mrs. Jervis lay her wax and cheek against her daughter's tangle of brown hair, with a faint smile, while her breathing, which had grown quick and panting, gradually subsided. Emily looked up at Marcella with a terrified self-reproach. They all knew that any sudden excitement might kill out the struggling flame of life. You ought to rest a little, Mrs. Jervis, said Marcella, with a gentle authority. You know the dressing must tire you, though you won't confess it. Let me put you comfortable. There. Aren't the pillows easier so? Now rest, and good-bye. But Mrs. Jervis held her while Emily slipped away. I shall rest soon, she said significantly, and it hurts me when Emily talks like that. It's the only thing that ever comes between us. She thinks of forms and ceremonies, and I think of grace. Her old woman's eyes so clear and vivid onto the blanched brow searched Marcella's face for sympathy. But Marcella stood shy and wandering in the presence of words and emotions she understood so little, so narrow a life in these poor rooms, under these crippling conditions of disease, and all this preoccupation with, this passion over, the things not of the flesh, the thwarted, cabined flesh, but of the spirit. Wonderful! On coming out from Brown's buildings she turned her steps reluctantly towards the street some distance from her own immediate neighbourhood, where she had a visit to pay which filled her with repulsion and an unusual sense of helplessness. A clergyman, who often availed himself of the help of the St. Martin's nurses, had asked the superintendent to undertake for him a difficult case. Would one of their nurses go regularly to visit a certain house ostensibly for the sake of a little boy of five just come back from the hospital who required care at home for a while, really for the sake of his young mother who had suddenly developed drinking habits and was on the road to ruin? Marcella happened to be in the office when the letter arrived. She somewhat unwillingly accepted the task, and she had now paid two or three visits always dressing the child's sore leg and endeavouring to make acquaintance with the mother. But in this last attempt she had not had much success. Mrs. Vincent was young and pretty with a flighty, restless manner. She was always perfectly civil to Marcella and grateful to her, apparently, for the ease she gave the boy. But she offered no confidences. The rooms she and her husband occupied showed them to be well to do. Marcella had so far found them well kept, and though the evil she was sent to investigate was said to be notorious, she had as yet discovered nothing of it for herself. It seemed to her that she must be either stupid, or that there must be something about her which made Mrs. Vincent more secretive with her than with others, and neither alternative pleased her. Today, however, as she stopped at the Vincent's door, she noticed that the doorstep, which was, as a rule, shining white, was muddy and neglected. Then nobody came to open, though she knocked and rang repeatedly. At last a neighbour who had been watching the strange nurse through her own parlor window came out to the street. I think, Miss, she said, with an air of polite mystery, as you'd better walk in. Mrs. Vincent hasn't been enjoying very good else this last few days. Marcella turned the handle, found it yielded, and went in. It was after six o'clock, and the evening sun streamed in through a door at the back of the house. But in the Vincent's front parlor, the blind's wall pulled down, and the only sound to be heard was the fretful wailing of a child. Marcella timidly opened the sitting-room door. The room at first seemed to her dark. Then she perceived Mrs. Vincent sitting by the grate, and the two children on the floor beside her. The elder, the little invalid, was simply staring at his mother in a wretched silence. But the younger, the baby of three, was restlessly throwing himself hither and thither, now pulling at the woman's skirts, now crying lustily, now whining in a hungry voice for Mrs. Vincent neither moved nor spoke, even when Marcella came in. She sat with her hands hanging over her lap in a desolation incapable of words. She was dirty and unkempt, the room was covered with litter, the breakfast things were still on the table, and the children were evidently starving. Marcella, seized with pity, and, divining what had happened, tried to rouse and comfort her, but she got no answer. Then she asked for matches. Mrs. Vincent made a mechanical effort to find them, but subsided helpless with a shake of the head. At last Marcella found them herself, lit a tar of some sticks she discovered in a cupboard, and put on the kettle. Then she cut a slice of bread and dripping for each of the children, the only eatables she could find, and after she had dressed Bertie's leg she began to wash up the tea-things and tidy the room, not knowing very well what to be at, but hoping minute by minute to get Mrs. Vincent to speak to her. In the midst of her labours an elderly woman cautiously opened the door and beckoned to her. Marcella went out into the passage. I'm a mother, miss. I heard you were here, and I followed you. Oh, such a business as we had, her husband and me, and getting over her own last night. There's a neighbour come to me, and she says, Mrs. Lucas, there's your daughter at drinking in that public house, and if I was you I'd go and fetch her out, for she's got a lot of money, and she's treating everybody all round. And Charlie, that's her husband, he come along too, and between us we got old on her, and ever since we brought her home last night she sat there in that chair, and never a word to nobody, not to meet any rate nor the chilling. I believe her husband and her had words this morning, for she won't tell me nothing. She sits there, just awe-broke! The woman put up her apron to her eyes and began crying. She ain't eating nothing all day, and I'll doesn't leave the house out of my sight, I'll live's close by, miss, for fear of her doing herself a mischief. How long had she been like this? said Marcella, drawing the door cautiously too behind her. About fourteen months, said the woman hopelessly, and none of us knows why. She was such a neat pretty girl when she married him, and he's such a steady fella. And I've done my best, I've talked to her, and I've hid her at and are walking things, and taken her money out of her pockets, and bless you, she's been all right now for seven weeks till last night. Oh, dearie, dearie me, whatever will become of them, her and him, and the children. Tears coursed down the mother's wrinkled face. Leave her to me a little longer, said Marcella, softly, but come back to me in about half an hour, and don't let her be alone. The woman nodded and went away. Mrs. Vincent turned quickly round as Marcella came back again, and spoke for the first time. That was my mother you were talking to? Yes, said Marcella quietly, as she took the kettle off the fire. Now, I do want you to have a cup of tea, Mrs. Vincent. Will you, if I make it? The poor creature did not speak, but she followed Marcella's movements with her weary eyes. At last, when Marcella knelt down beside her, holding out a cup of tea, and some bread and butter, she gave a sudden cry. Marcella hastily put down what she carried, lest it should be knocked out of her hand. He struck me this morning, Charlie did, the first time in seven years. Look here! she pulled up her sleeve, and on her white delicate arm she showed a large bruise. As she pointed to it, her eyes filled with miserable tears, her lips quivered, anguish breathed in every feature. Yet even in this abasement Marcella was struck once more with her slim prettiness, her refined air. This woman, drinking and treating in a low public house at midnight, rescued thence by a decent husband. She soothed her as best she could, but when she had succeeded in making the wretched soul take food, and so in putting some physical life into her, she found herself the recipient of an outburst of agony before which she quailed. The woman clung to her moaning about her husband, about the demon instinct that had got hold of her, she hardly knew how. By means it seemed originally of a few weeks of low health and small self-indulgences, and she felt herself powerless to fight about the wreck she had brought upon her home, the shame upon her husband, who was the respected well-paid foreman of one of the large shops of the neighbourhood. All through it came back to him. We had words nursed this morning when he went out to his work. He said he'd nearly died of shame last night, that he couldn't bear it no more, that he'd take the children from me, and I was all queer in the air still, and I sourced him, and then he looked like a devil, and he took me by the arm and threw me down as if I'd been a sack. And he never, never touched me before in all his life, and he's never come in all day, and perhaps I shall never see him again. And last time, but it wasn't so bad as this, he said he'd try and love me again if I behave, and he did try, and I tried too, but now it's no good, and perhaps he'll not come back. What shall I do? What shall I do? She flung her arms above her head. Won't anybody find him? Won't anybody help me? She dropped a hand upon Marcella's arm, clutching at her wild eyes seeking her companions. But at the same moment, with the very extremity of her own emotion, a cloud of impotence fell upon Marcella. She suddenly felt that she could do nothing, that there was nothing in her adequate to such an appeal, nothing strong enough to lift the weight of her human life thus flung upon her. She was struck with a dryness, a numbness that appalled her. She tried still to soothe and comfort, but nothing that she said went home, took hold. Between the feeling in her heart, which might have reached and touched this despair, and the woman before her, there seemed to be a barrier she could not break. Was it that she was really barren and poor in soul, and had never realised it before? A strange misery rose in her too, as she still knelt, tending and consoling, but with no efficacy, no power. At last Mrs. Vincent sank into miserable quiet again. The mother came in, and silently began to put the children to bed. Marcella pressed the wife's cold hand, and went out hanging her head. She had just reached the door when it opened and a man entered. A thrill passed through her at the sight of his honest, haggard face, and this time she found what to say. I've been sitting by your wife, Mr. Vincent. She is very ill and miserable, and very penitent. You will be kind to her. The husband looked at her, and then turned away. God help us, he said. And Marcella went without another word, and with that same wild, unaccustomed impulse of prayer, rilling her being, which had first stirred in her at mellow, at the awful moment of her death. She was very silent and distracted at tea, and afterwards, saying that she must write some letters and reports, she shut herself up, and bad good night to Minter and the children. But she didn't write or read. She hung at the window a long time, watching the stars come out as the summer light died from the sky. And even the walls and roofs and chimneys, this interminable London, spread out before her, took a certain dim beauty. And then, slipping down on the floor with her head against a chair, an attitude of her stormy childhood, she wept with an abandonment and a passion she had not known for years. She thought of Mrs. Gervis, the saint, so near to death, so satisfied with grace, so steeped in the heavenly life. Then of the poor sinner she had just left, and of the agony she had no power to stay. Both experiences had this in common, that each had had some part in plunging her deeper into this darkness of self-contempt. What had come to her? During the past weeks, there had been something wrestling in her, some new birth, some conviction of sin, as Mrs. Gervis would have said. As she looked back over all her strenuous youth, she hated it. What was wrong with her? Her own word to Antony Craven returned upon her, mocked her, made now a scourge for her own pride, not a mere measure of blame for others. Aldous Rayburn, her father and mother, her poor, one and all rose against her, plucked at her, reproached her. I, what indeed a wealth and poverty, cried a voice, which was the voice of them all. What are opinions, what is influence, beauty, cleverness, what is anything worth but character, but soul? And character, soul, can only be got by self-surrender, and self-surrender comes not of knowledge, but of love. A number of thoughts and phrases hitherto of little meaning to her floated into her mind, sank and pressed there. That strange word, grace, for instance, a year ago it would not have smitten or troubled her. After her first inevitable reaction against the evangelical training of her school years, the rebellious cleverness of youth had easily decided that religion was played out, that socialism and science were enough for mankind. But nobody could live in hospital. Nobody could go among the poor. Nobody could share the thoughts and hopes of people like Edward Hallan and his sister, without understanding that it is still here in the world, this grace, that sustaineth, however variously interpreted, still living and working, as it worked of old, among the little Galilean towns in Jerusalem, in Corinth. To Edward Hallan it did not mean the same, perhaps, as it meant to the hard-worked clergyman she knew, or to Mrs. Jervis. But to all it meant the motive power of life, something subduing, transforming, delivering, something that tonight she envied with a passion and a yearning that amazed herself. How many things she craved, as in eager child craves them. First some moral change, she knew not what, then all those ravens pardon and friendship, then, and above all, the power to lose herself, the power to love. Dangerous, significant moment in a woman's life, moment at once of despair and of illusion. CHAPTER VIII Warton was sitting in a secluded corner of the library of the House of Commons. He had a number of loose sheets of paper on a chair beside him, and others in his hand and on his knee. It was Friday afternoon, questions were going on in the house, and he was running rapidly for the last time through the notes of his speech, penciling here and there, and every now and then taking up a volume of Hansard that lay near that he might verify a quotation. An old county member with a rugged face and eyeglasses who had been in Parliament for a generation came to the same corner to look up a speech. He glanced curiously at Warton, with whom he had a familiar House of Commons acquaintance. Nervous, eh? he said as he put on his eyeglasses to inspect first Warton, then the dates on the backs of the reports. Warton put his papers finally together and gave a long stretch. Not particularly. Well, it's a beastly audience, said the other, carrying off his book. Warton, lost apparently in contemplation of the ceiling, fell into a dreamy attitude, but his eyes saw nothing of the ceiling and was not at all dreamy. He was not thinking of his speech nor of the other man's remark. He was thinking of Marcella Boyce. When he left her the other day, he had been conscious only more vividly and intensely, more possessively as it were, than she of the same general impression that had been left upon her. A new opening for pleasure. Their meeting presented itself to him too in the same way. What had he been about all this time? Forget such a creature? Why it was the merest wantonness, as if such women, with such a brow, such vitality, such a gate, passed in every street. What possessed him now was an imperious eagerness to push the matter, to recover the old intimacy. And as to what might come out of it, let the gods decide. He could have had but a very raw appreciation of her at Mellor. It seemed to him that she had never forced him to think of her then in absence, as he had thought of her since the last meeting. As for the nursing business and the settlement in Brown's buildings, it was, of course, mere play-acting. No doubt when she emerged, she would be all the more of a personage for having done it. But she must emerge soon. To rule and shine was as much her metier as it was the metier of a bricklayer's labourer to carry hordes. By George, what would not Lady Selina give for beauty of such degree and kind as that? They must be brought together. He already foresaw that the man who should launch Marcella Boyce in London would play a stroke for himself as well as for her. And she must be launched in London. Let other people nurse and pitch their tents in little workmen's flats and live democracy instead of preaching it. Her fate was fixed for her by her physique. Even the faux pas sortir de son caractère. The sight of Bennett approaching distracted him. Bennett's good face showed obvious vexation. He sticks to it, he said, as Wharton jumped up to meet him. Talks of his conscience and a lot of windy stuff. He seems to have arranged it with the whips. I daresay he won't do much harm. Excepter himself, said Wharton, with dry bitterness. Goodness, let's leave him alone. He and Bennett lingered a few minutes, discussing points of tactics. Wilkins had, of course, once more declared himself the enfant terrible of a party which, though still undefined, was drawing nearer day by day to organised existence and separate leadership. The effect of tonight's debate might be of far-reaching importance. Wharton's resolution, pledging the house to a legal eight hours day for all trades, came at the end of a long and varied agitation, was at the moment in clear practical relation to labour movements all over the country, and had in fact gained greatly in significance and interest, since it was first heard of in public, owing to events of current history. Workable proposals, a moderate tone, and the appearance at any rate of harmony and a united front among the representatives of labour, if so much at least could be attained tonight, both Wharton and Bennett believed that not only the cause itself, but the importance of the labour party in the house would be found to have gained enormously. I hope I shall get my term before dinner, said Bennett, as he was going. I want badly to get off for an hour or so. The division won't be till half-past ten at earliest. Wharton stood for a moment in a brown study, with his hands in his pockets, after Bennett left him. It was by no means wholly clear to him what line Bennett would take, with regard to one or two points. After a long acquaintance with the little man, Wharton was not always, nor indeed generally, at his ease with him. Bennett had curious reserves. As to his hour off, Wharton felt tolerably certain that he meant to go and hear a famous revivalist preacher hold forth at a public hall not far from the house. The streets were full of placards. Well, to every man, his own excitements. What time? He looked first at his watch, then at the marked question paper Bennett had left behind him. The next minute he was hurrying along passages and stairs, with his springing boyish step to the ladies' gallery. The magnificent doorkeeper saluted him with particular deference. Wharton was, in general, a favourite with officials. The two ladies are come, sir. You'll find them in the front. Oh, not very full yet, sir. We'll be directly. Wharton drew aside the curtain of the gallery and looked in. Yes. There was the dark head bent forward, pressed, indeed, against the grating, which closes the front of the den into which the House of Commons puts its ladies, as though its owner were already absorbed in what was passing before her. She looked up with an eager start as she heard his voice in her ear. Oh! now, come and tell us everything, and who everybody is. Why don't we see the speaker, and which is the government side? Oh, yes, I see. And who's this speaking now? Why, I thought you knew everything, said Wharton as, with a greeting to Miss Craven. He slipped in beside them, and took a still vacant chair for an instant. Shall I instruct a speaker's great niece? Why, of course, I feel as if the place belonged to me, said Marcello impatiently, but that somehow doesn't seem to help me to people's names. Where's Mr. Gladstone? Oh, I see. Look, look, Edith, he's just come in. Oh, don't be so superior, though you have been here before. You couldn't tell me heaps of people. Her voice had a note of joyous excitement, like a child's. That's because I'm short-sighted, said Edith Craven calmly. But it's no reason why you should show me, Mr. Gladstone. Oh, my dear, my dear, do be quiet. Now, Mr. Wharton, where are the Irishmen? Oh, I wish we could have an Irish row. And where do you sit? I see. And there's Mr. Bennett. And that black-faced man, Mr. Wilkins, I met at the Hallens. You don't like him, do you? She said, drawing back and looking at him sharply. Who? Wilkins. Perhaps you'd better ask me that question later on, said Wharton, with a twist of the lip. He's going to do his best to make a fool of himself, and us, tonight. We shall see. It's kind of you to wish us an Irish row, considering that if I miss my chance tonight I shall never get another. Then for heaven's sake don't let's wish it, she said decidedly. Oh, that's the Irish secretary answering now, is it? A pause. Dear me, how civil everybody is! I don't think this is a good place for a Democrat, Mr. Wharton. I find myself terribly in love with the government. But who's that? She crained her neck. Wharton was silent. The next instant she drew hurriedly back. I didn't see, she murmured. It's so confusing. A tall man had risen from the end of the Government bench, and was giving an answer connected with the Home Secretary's department. For the first time since their parting in the Mellor drawing-room, Marcella saw Aldous Rayburn. She fell very silent, and lent back in her chair. Yet Wharton's quick glance perceived that she both looked and listened intently, so long as the somewhat high-pitched voice was speaking. He does those things very well, he said carelessly, judging it best to take the bull by the horns. Never a word too much. They don't get any change out of him. Do you see that old fellow in the white beard under the gallery? He's one of the chartered boars. When he gets up to-night the house will dine. I shall come up and look for you and hand you over to a friend, if I may, a Staffordshire member who has his wife here, Mrs. Lane. I have engaged a table, and I can start with you. Unfortunately I mustn't be long out of the house, as it's my motion, but they will look after you. The girls glanced a little shyly at each other. Nothing had been said about dining, but Wharton took it for granted, and they yielded. It was Marcella's day off, and she was a free woman. Good-bye, then, he said, getting up. I shall be on in about twenty minutes, wish me well through. Marcella looked round and smiled. But her vivacity had been quenched for the moment, and Wharton departed not quite so well heartened for the fray as he could have wished to be. It was hard luck that the ray-burn ghost should walk this particular evening. Marcella bent forward again when he had gone, and remained for long, silent, looking down into the rapidly filling house. Older's ray-burn was lying back on the treasury bench, his face upturned. She knew very well that it was impossible he should see her, yet every now and then she shrank a little away as though he must. The face looked to her older, and singularly blanched, but she supposed that must be the effect of the light, for she noticed the same pallor in many others. All that my life can do to poor good measure, down, running over into yours, I found you then. The words stole into her memory, throbbing there like points of pain. Was it indeed this man under her eyes, so listless, so unconscious, who had said them to her with a passion of devotion, it shamed her to think of. And now, never so much as an ordinary word of friendship between them again, on the broad seas of life, an eye old, separate, estranged, forever. It was like the touch of death, the experience brought with it such a chill, such a sense of irreparable fact, of limitations never to be broken through. Then she braced herself. The things that are behind must be left. To have married him, after all, would have been the greatest wrong. Nor, in one sense, was what she had done irreparable. She chose to believe Frank Levin rather than Edward Hallen. Of course he must and should marry. It was absurd to suppose that he should not. No one had a stronger sense of family than he, and as for the girl, the little dancing, flirting girl. Why the thing happened every day? His wife should not be too strenuous, taken up with problems and questions of her own. She should cheer, amuse, distract him. Marcella endeavoured to think of it all with the dry common sense her mother would have applied to it. One thing at least was clear to her. The curious recognition that never before had she considered Aldous Rayburn in and for himself as an independent human being. He was just a piece of furniture in my play last year, she said to herself with a pang of Frank remorse. He was well quit of me. But she was beginning to recover her spirits, and when at last Rayburn, after a few words with the minister who had just arrived, disappeared suddenly behind the speaker's chair, the spectacle below her seized her with the same fascination as before. The house was filling rapidly, questions were nearly over, and the speech of the evening, on which considerable public expectation both inside and outside Parliament had been for some time concentrated, was fast approaching. Peers were straggling into the gallery, the reporters were changing just below her, and some crack-hands among them who had been lounging till now were beginning to pay attention and put their paper in order. The Irish benches, the opposition, the government all were full, and there was a large group of members round the door. There he is! cried Marcella involuntarily with the pulse of excitement, as Wharton's light young figure made its way through the crowd. He sat down on a corner seat below the gangway, and put on his hat. In five minutes more he was on his feet, speaking to an attentive and crowded house, in a voice clear and a little hard, but capable of the most accomplished and subtle variety, which for the first moment sent a shudder of memory through Marcella. Then she found herself listening with as much trepidation and anxiety as though some personal interest and reputation depended for her, too, on the success of the speech. Her mind was first invaded by a strong and irritable sense of the difficulty of the audience. How was it possible for any one, unless he had been trained to it for years, to make any effect upon such a crowd, so irresponsible, individualist, unfused, so lacking as it seemed to the raw spectator, in the qualities and excitements that properly belong to multitude. Half the men down below, under their hats, seemed to her asleep, the rest indifferent. And were those languid, indistinguishable murmurs what the newspapers called cheers? But the voice below flowed on, point after point came briskly out, the atmosphere warmed, and presently this first impression passed into one wholly different, near the opposite pole. Gradually the girls ardent sense, informed perhaps more richly than most women's, with the memories of history and literature, for in her impatient way she had been at all times a quick, omnivorous reader, awoke to the peculiar conditions the special thrill attaching to the place and its performers. The philosopher derides it, the man of letters out of the house talks of it with a smile as a ship of fools, both when occasion offers passionately desire a seed in it. Each would give his right hand to succeed in it. Why? Because here after all is power, here is the central machine, here are the men who, both by their qualities and their defects, are to have for their span of life the leading, or the wrecking, of this great fate-bearing force, this weary titan we call our country. Here things are not only debated but done, lamely or badly perhaps, but still done, which will affect our children's children, which link us to the past, which carry us on safely or dangerously to a future only the gods know. And in this passage, this checkered, doubtful passage from thinking to doing, an infinite saver and passion of life is somehow disengaged. It penetrates through the boredom, through all the failure, public and personal. It enraps the spectacle and the actors. It carries and supports patriot and adventurer alike. Ideas, perceptions of this kind, the first chill over, stole upon and conquered Marcella. Presently it was as though she had passed into Wharton's place, was seeing with his eyes, feeling with his nerves, it would be a success this speech, it was a success, the house was gained, was attentive, a case long familiar to it in portions and fragments, which had been spoiled by violence and discredited by ignorance, was being presented to it with all the resources of a great talent, with brilliancy, moderation, practical detail, moderation above all. From the slight historical sketch with which the speech opened of the English working-day, the causes and the results of the factory acts, through the general description of the present situation, of the workman's present hours, opportunities and demands, the growth of the desire for state control, the machinery by which it was to be enforced, then the effects it might be expected to have on the workman itself, on the great army of the unemployed, on wages, on production and on the economic future of England, the speaker carried his thread of luminous speech without ever losing his audience for an instant. At every point he addressed himself to the smoothing of difficulties, to the propitiation of fears, and when, after the long and masterly handling of detail, he came to his peroration, to the bantering of capitalist terrors, to the vindication of the workman's claim to fix the conditions of his labour, and to the vision lightly and simply touched of the regenerate working-home of the future, inhabited by free men, dedicated to something beyond the first brutal necessities of the bodily life, possessed indeed of its proper share of the human inheritance of leisure, knowledge and delight. The crowded benches, before and behind him, grudged him none of it. The House of Commons is not tolerant of flights, except from its chartered masters, but this young man had earned his flight, and they heard him patiently. For the rest the government had been most attractively wooed, and the Liberal Party in the midst of much plain speaking had been treated on the whole with a deference and a forbearance that had long been conspicuously lacking in the utterances of the labour men. The mildest-mannered man, etc., said a smiling member of the late government, to a companion on the front opposition bench, as Wharton sat down amid the general stir and movement which betoken the break-up of a crowded house, and the end of a successful speech which people are eager to discuss in the lobbies, a fine performance, say, great advance on anything last year. Bers about as much relation to facts as I do to the angels, grud the man addressed. What, as bad as that? said the other, laughing. Look, they've put up old Denny, I think I shall stay and hear him, and he laid down his hat again which he had taken up. Meanwhile Marcella in the latest gallery had thrown herself back in her chair with a long breath. How come one listened to anything else? she said, and for a long time she sat staring at the house without hearing a word of what the very competent, caustic and well-informed manufacturer on the government side was saying. Every dramatic and aesthetic instinct she possessed, and she was full of them, had been stirred and satisfied with the speech and the speaker. But more than that, he had spoken for the toiler and the poor, his peroration above all had contained tones and accents which were in fact the products of something perfectly sincere in the speaker's motley personality. And this girl, who in her wild way had given herself to the poor, had followed him with all her passionate heart. Yet at the same time, with an amount of intellectual dissent every now and then as to measures and methods, her skepticism of detail which astonished herself. A year before she had been as a babe beside him whether in matters of pure mind or of worldly experience. Now she was for the first time conscious of a curious growth, independence. But the intellectual revolt, such as it was, was lost again as soon as it arose in the general impression which the speech had left upon her, in this warm quickening of the pulses, this romantic interest in the figure, the scene, the young emerging personality. Edith Craven looked at her with wandering amusement. She and her brothers were typical venturists, a little cynical therefore towards all the world, friend or foe. A venturist is a socialist minus can't, and a cause which cannot exist at all without her passion of sentiment lays it down through him as a first law, that sentiment in public is the abominable thing. Edith Craven thought that after all Marcella was little less raw and simple now than she had been in the old days. There, said Marcella with relief, that's done. Now, who's this? That man Wilkins. Her tone showed her disgust. Wilkins had sprung up the instant warden's conservative opponent had given the first decisive sign of sitting down. Another man on the same side was also up, but Wilkins, black and frowning, held his own stubbornly and his rivals subsided. With the first sentences of the new speech the house knew that it was to have an emotion, and men came trooping in again, and certainly the short stormy utterance was dramatic enough. Descent on the part of an important North Country union from some of the most vital machinery of the Bill, which had been sketched by Wharton, personal jealousy and distrust of the mover of the resolution, denial of his representative place, and sneers at his kid-gloved attempts to help a class with which he had nothing to do, the most violent protest against the civility with which he had chuckled to the now effete party of free contract and political enfranchisement, and the most passionate assertion that between any Labour party worthy of the name, and either of the great parties of the past, there lay and must lie a gulf of hatred unfathomable and unquenchable till Labour had got its rights, and landlord, employer, and dividend-hunter were trampled beneath its heel. All these ugly or lurid things emerged with surprising clearness from the torrent of North Country speech. For twenty minutes Nehemiah Wilkins rioted in one of the best times of his life. That he was an orator, thousands of working men had borne him witness again and again, and in his own opinion, he had never spoken better. The house at first enjoyed its sensation, then, as the hard words rattled on, it passed easily into the stage of amusement. Lady Craddock's burly husband, bent forward from the front opposition bench, caught Wharton's eye and smiled, as though to say, what, you haven't even been able to keep up appearances so far. And Wilkins' final attack upon the Liberals, who after ruining their own chances and the chances of the country, were now come cap in hand to the working man, whining for his support as their only hope of recovery, was delivered to a mocking chorus of laughter and cheers, in the midst of which, with an angry shake of his great shoulders, he flung himself down on his seat. Meanwhile Wharton, who had spent the first part of Wilkins' speech in a state of restless fidget, his hat over his eyes, was alternately sitting erect with radiant looks or talking rapidly to Bennet, who had come to sit beside him. The home secretary got up after Wilkins had sat down and spent a genial forty minutes in delivering the Government non posumous, couched, of course, in the tone of deference to King Labour, which the modern statesman learns at his mother's knee, but enlivened with a good deal of ironical and effective perplexity, as to which hand to shake, and whose voice to follow, and winding up with a tribute of compliment to Wharton, mixed with some neat mock condolence with the opposition under the ferocities of some other of its nominal friends. All together the finished performance of the old stagia, the habitue. While it was going on, Marcella noticed that Aldous Rayburn had come back again to his seat next to the speaker, who was his official chief. Every now and then the minister turned to him, and Rayburn handed him a volume of hands-ard, or the copy of some parliamentary return whence the great man was to quote. Marcella watched every movement, then from the Government bench her eyes sped across the house to Wharton, sitting once more buried in his hat, his arms folded in front of him. A little shiver of excitement ran through her. The two men upon whom her life had so far turned were once more in presence of pitted against each other, and she once more looking on. When the Home Secretary sat down, the house was growing restive with thoughts of dinner, and a general movement had begun. When it was seen that Bennet was up. Again men who had gone out came back, and those who were still there resigned themselves. Bennet was a force in the house, a man always listened to and universally respected, and the curiosity felt as to the relations between him and this new star and would-be leader had been for some time considerable. When Bennet sat down, the importance of the member for Westbrooksha, both in the house and in the country, had risen a hundred percent. A man who over a great part of the North was in labour concerns the unquestioned master of many legions, and whose political position had hitherto been one of conspicuous moderation, even to his own hurt, had given Wharton the warmest possible backing, had endorsed his proposals to their most contentious and doubtful details, and in a few generous, those still perhaps ambiguous words had let the house see what he personally thought of the services rendered to labour as a whole during the past five years, and to the weak and scattered group of labour members in particular, since his entrance into Parliament by the young and brilliant man beside him. Bennet was no orator. He was a plain man, ennobled by the training of religious descent, at the same time indifferently served, often by an imperfect education. But the very simplicity and homeliness of its expression gave additional weight to this first of hour of a strong conviction that the time had come when the Labour Party must have separateness and a leader, if it were to rise out of insignificance, to this frank renunciation of whatever personal claims his own past might have given him, and to the promise of unqualified support to the policy of the younger man in both its energetic and conciliatory aspects. He threw out a little, not unkindly, indignation, if one may be allowed the phrase, in the direction of Wilkins, who in the middle of the speech abruptly walked out. And before he sat down, the close attention, the looks, the cheers, the evident excitement of the men sitting about him, amongst whom were two-thirds of the whole labour representation in Parliament, made it clear to the house that the speech marked an epoch not only in the career of Harry Wharton, but in the parliamentary history of the great industrial movement. The white-bearded bore under the gallery whom Wharton had pointed out to Marcella got up as Bennet subsided. The house streamed out like one man. Bennet, exhausted by the heat and the effort, mobbed his brow with his red handkerchief, and in the tension of fatigue started as he felt a touch upon his arm. Wharton was bending over to him, perfectly white, with a lip he in vain tried to steady. I can't thank you, he said. I should make a fool of myself. Bennet nodded pleasantly, and presently both were pressing into the outgoing crowd, avoiding each other with the ineradicable instinct of the Englishman. Wharton did not recover his self-control completely till, after an ordeal of talk and handshaking in the lobby, he was on his way to the lady's gallery. Then in a flash he found himself filled with the spirits, the exhilaration of a schoolboy, this wonderful experience behind him, and upstairs waiting for him, those eyes, that face. How could he get her to himself somehow for a moment, and dispose of that craven girl? Well, he said to her joyously as she turned round in the darkness of the gallery. But she was seized with sudden shyness, and he felt rather than saw the glow of pleasure and excitement which possessed her. Don't let's talk here, she said. Can't we go out? I'm melted. Yes, of course. Come on to the terrace. It's a divine evening, and we shall find our party there. Well, Miss Craven, were you interested? Edith smiled demurely. I thought it a good debate, she said. Confound these venturist prigs, who's Wharton's inward remark as he led the way. End of Chapter 8