The Message. A. J. Dawson
of the opposite sex in whom he detects sympathy and responsiveness.
Mrs. Wheeler spoke in a kind and motherly way of my bereavement, and the generosity of youth somehow prevented my appreciation of this being dulled by the fact that, until reminded, she had forgotten whether I had lost a father or a mother. Indeed, though not greatly interested in other folk's affairs, I believe that while the good soul's eyes rested upon the supposed sufferer, or his story, she was sincerely sorry about any kind of trouble, from her pug's asthma to the annihilation of a multitude in warfare or disaster. She had the kindest heart, and no doubt it was rather her misfortune than her fault that she could not clearly realize any circumstance or situation which did not impinge in some way upon her own small circle.
I met Leslie's father for the first time at dinner that evening. One could hardly have imagined him sparing time for visits to Cambridge. He was a fine, soldierly-looking man, with no trace of City pallor in his well-shaven, purple cheeks. Purple is hardly the word. The ground was crimson, I think, and over that there was spread a delicate tracery, a sort of netted film, of some kind of blue. The eyes had a glaze over them, but were bright and searching. The nose was a salient feature, having about it a strong predatory suggestion. The forehead was low, surmounted by exquisitely smooth iron-gray hair. Mr. Wheeler was scrupulously fine in dress, and used a single eye-glass. He gave me hearty welcome, and I prefer to think that the apparent chilling of his attitude to me after he had learned of my financial circumstances was merely the creation of some morbid vein of hyper-sensitiveness in myself.
At all events, we were all very jolly together that evening, and I went happily to bed, after what I thought a hint of responsive pressure in my handshake with Sylvia, and several entertaining anecdotes from Mr. Wheeler as to the manner in which fortunes had been made in the purlieus of Throgmorton Street. Launching oneself upon a prosperous career in London seemed an agreeably easy process at the end of that first evening in the Wheeler's home, and the butterfly attitude toward life appeared upon the whole less wholly blameworthy than before. What a graceful fellow Leslie was, and how suave and genial the father when he sat at the head of his table toying with a glass of port! And these were capable men, too, men of affairs. Doubtless their earnestness was strong enough below the surface, I thought—for that night.
III AN INTERLUDE
"To observations which ourselves we make,
We grow more partial for th' observer's sake."
Pope.
Though in no sense unfriendly or lacking in sympathy, I noticed that Leslie Wheeler showed no inclination to be drawn into intimate discussion of my prospects. I was not inclined to blame my friend for this, but told myself that he probably acted upon paternal instructions. For me, however, it was impossible to lay aside for long, thoughts regarding my immediate future. I was aware that a nest-egg of eleven or twelve pounds was not a very substantial barrier between oneself and want. Mr. Wheeler told no more stories of fortunes built out of nothing in the City, but he did take occasion to refer casually to the fact that City men did not greatly care for the products of public schools and universities, as employees.
I was more than half-inclined to ask why, in this case, Leslie had been sent to Rugby and Cambridge, but decided to avoid the personal application of his remark. It was, after all, no more than the expression of a commonly accepted view, striking though it seems as a comment upon the educational system of the period, when one remembers the huge proportion of the middle and upper-class populace which was absorbed by commercial callings of one kind or another.
There was practically no demand for physical prowess or aptitude, outside the field of sport and games, nor even for those qualities which are best served by a good physical training. One need not, therefore, be greatly surprised that the public schools should have given no physical training outside games, and that even of the most perfunctory character, the majority qualifying as interested spectators merely, of the prowess of the minority. But it certainly is remarkable, that no practical business training, nor studies of a sort calculated to be of use in later business training, should have been given in the schools most favoured by those for whom business was a life's calling. In this, as in so many other matters, I suppose we were guided and directed entirely by habit and tradition; the line of least resistance.
When I talked of my prospects with handsome Leslie Wheeler—his was his father's face, unblemished and unworn—our conversation was always three parts jocular, at all events upon his side. I was to recast society and mould our social system anew by means of my pen, and of journalism. I was to provide "the poor blessed poor" with hot-buttered rolls and devilled kidneys for breakfast, said Leslie, and introduce old-age pensions for every British workman who survived his twenty-first birthday.
I would not be understood to suggest that this sort of facetiousness indicated the average attitude of the period with regard to the horrible fact that the country contained millions of people permanently in a state of want and privation. But it was a quite possible attitude then. Such people as my friend could never have mocked the sufferings of an individual. But with regard to the state of affairs, the pitiful millions, as an abstract proposition, indifference was the rule, a tone of light cynicism was customary, and "the poor we have always with us," quoted with a deprecatory shrug, was an accepted conversational refuge, even among such people as the clergy and charitable workers.
And this, if one comes to think of it, was inevitable. The life and habits and general attitude of the period would have been absolutely impossible, in conjunction with any serious face-to-face consideration of a situation which embraced, for example, such preposterously contradictory elements as these:
The existence of huge and growing armies of absolutely unemployed men; the insistence of the populace, and particularly the business people, upon the disbandment of regiments, and upon great naval and military reductions, involving further unemployment; the voting of considerable sums for distribution among the unemployed; violent opposition to the mere suggestion of State aid to enable the unemployed of England to migrate to those parts of the Empire which actually needed their labour; the increasing difficulty of the problem which was wrapped up in the question of "What to do with our sons"; the absolute refusal of the nation to admit of universal military service; the successive closing by tariff of one foreign market after another against British manufactures, and the hysterical refusal of the people to protect their own markets from what was graphically called the "dumping" into them of the surplus products of other peoples.
It is a queer catalogue, with a ring of insanity about it; but these were the merest commonplaces of life at that time, and the man who rebelled against them was a crank. My friend Leslie's attitude was natural enough, therefore; and, with a few exceptions, it was my own, for, curiously enough, the political school I favoured was, root and branch, opposed to the only possible remedies for this situation. Liberals, Radicals, Socialists, and the majority of those who arrogated to themselves the title of Social Reformers; these were the people who insisted, if not upon the actual evils and sufferings indicated in this illustrative note of social contradictions, then upon violent opposition to their complements in the way of mitigation and relief. And I was keenly of their number.
Many of these matters I discussed, or perhaps I should say, dilated upon, in conversation with Sylvia, while her brother and father were in London. We would begin with racquets in the tennis-court, and end late for some meal, after long wanderings among the pines. And in Sylvia, as it seemed to me, I found the most delightfully intelligent responsiveness, as well as sympathy. My knowledge of feminine nature, its extraordinary gifts of emotional and personal intuition, was of the scantiest, if it had any existence at all. But my own emotional side was active, and my mind an inchoate mass of ideals and more or less sentimental longings for social betterment. And so, with Sylvia's gentle acquiescence, I rearranged the world.
Much I have forgotten, and am thus spared the humiliation of recounting. But, as an example of what I recall, I remember a conversation which arose from our passing a miniature rifle-range which some local resident—"Some pompous Jingo of retrogressive tendencies,"