Lord of the World 5
Mabel got up presently and came across to her husband.
"My dear," she said, "you must not be downhearted. It all may pass as it
passed before. It is a great thing that they are listening to America at
all. And this Mr. Felsenburgh seems to be on the right side."
Oliver took her hand and kissed it.
II
Oliver seemed altogether depressed at breakfast, half an hour later. His
mother, an old lady of nearly eighty, who never appeared till noon,
seemed to see it at once, for after a look or two at him and a word, she
subsided into silence behind her plate.
It was a pleasant little room in which they sat, immediately behind
Oliver's own, and was furnished, according to universal custom, in light
green. Its windows looked out upon a strip of garden at the back, and
the high creeper-grown wall that separated that domain from the next.
The furniture, too, was of the usual sort; a sensible round table stood
in the middle, with three tall arm-chairs, with the proper angles and
rests, drawn up to it; and the centre of it, resting apparently on a
broad round column, held the dishes. It was thirty years now since the
practice of placing the dining-room above the kitchen, and of raising
and lowering the courses by hydraulic power into the centre of the
dining-table, had become universal in the houses of the well-to-do. The
floor consisted entirely of the asbestos cork preparation invented in
America, noiseless, clean, and pleasant to both foot and eye.
Mabel broke the silence.
"And your speech to-morrow?" she asked, taking up her fork.
Oliver brightened a little, and began to discourse.
It seemed that Birmingham was beginning to fret. They were crying out
once more for free trade with America: European facilities were not
enough, and it was Oliver's business to keep them quiet. It was useless,
he proposed to tell them, to agitate until the Eastern business was
settled: they must not bother the Government with such details just now.
He was to tell them, too, that the Government was wholly on their side;
that it was bound to come soon.
"They are pig-headed," he added fiercely; "pig-headed and selfish; they
are like children who cry for food ten minutes before dinner-time: it is
bound to come if they will wait a little."
"And you will tell them so?"
"That they are pig-headed? Certainly."
Mabel looked at her husband with a pleased twinkle in her eyes. She knew
perfectly well that his popularity rested largely on his outspokenness:
folks liked to be scolded and abused by a genial bold man who danced and
gesticulated in a magnetic fury; she liked it herself.
"How shall you go?" she asked.
"Volor. I shall catch the eighteen o'clock at Blackfriars; the meeting
is at nineteen, and I shall be back at twenty-one."
He addressed himself vigorously to his _entree_, and his mother looked
up with a patient, old-woman smile.
Mabel began to drum her fingers softly on the damask.
"Please make haste, my dear," she said; "I have to be at Brighton at
three."
Oliver gulped his last mouthful, pushed his plate over the line, glanced
to see if all plates were there, and then put his hand beneath the
table.
Instantly, without a sound, the centre-piece vanished, and the three
waited unconcernedly while the clink of dishes came from beneath.
Old Mrs. Brand was a hale-looking old lady, rosy and wrinkled, with the
mantilla head-dress of fifty years ago; but she, too, looked a little
depressed this morning. The _entree_ was not very successful, she
thought; the new food-stuff was not up to the old, it was a trifle
gritty: she would see about it afterwards. There was a clink, a soft
sound like a push, and the centre-piece snapped into its place, bearing
an admirable imitation of a roasted fowl.
Oliver and his wife were alone again for a minute or two after breakfast
before Mabel started down the path to catch the 14-1/2 o'clock 4th grade
sub-trunk line to the junction.
"What's the matter with mother?" he said.
"Oh! it's the food-stuff again: she's never got accustomed to it; she
says it doesn't suit her."
"Nothing else?"
"No, my dear, I am sure of it. She hasn't said a word lately."
Oliver watched his wife go down the path, reassured. He had been a
little troubled once or twice lately by an odd word or two that his
mother had let fall. She had been brought up a Christian for a few
years, and it seemed to him sometimes as if it had left a taint. There
was an old "Garden of the Soul" that she liked to keep by her, though
she always protested with an appearance of scorn that it was nothing but
nonsense. Still, Oliver would have preferred that she had burned it:
superstition was a desperate thing for retaining life, and, as the brain
weakened, might conceivably reassert itself. Christianity was both wild
and dull, he told himself, wild because of its obvious grotesqueness and
impossibility, and dull because it was so utterly apart from the
exhilarating stream of human life; it crept dustily about still, he
knew, in little dark churches here and there; it screamed with
hysterical sentimentality in Westminster Cathedral which he had once
entered and looked upon with a kind of disgusted fury; it gabbled
strange, false words to the incompetent and the old and the half-witted.
But it would be too dreadful if his own mother ever looked upon it again
with favour.
Oliver himself, ever since he could remember, had been violently opposed
to the concessions to Rome and Ireland. It was intolerable that these
two places should be definitely yielded up to this foolish, treacherous
nonsense: they were hot-beds of sedition; plague-spots on the face of
humanity. He had never agreed with those who said that it was better
that all the poison of the West should be gathered rather than
dispersed. But, at any rate, there it was. Rome had been given up wholly
to that old man in white in exchange for all the parish churches and
cathedrals of Italy, and it was understood that mediaeval darkness
reigned there supreme; and Ireland, after receiving Home Rule thirty
years before, had declared for Catholicism, and opened her arms to
Individualism in its most virulent form. England had laughed and
assented, for she was saved from a quantity of agitation by the
immediate departure of half her Catholic population for that island, and
had, consistently with her Communist-colonial policy, granted every
facility for Individualism to reduce itself there _ad absurdum_. All
kinds of funny things were happening there: Oliver had read with a
bitter amusement of new appearances there, of a Woman in Blue and
shrines raised where her feet had rested; but he was scarcely amused at
Rome, for the movement to Turin of the Italian Government had deprived
the Republic of quite a quantity of sentimental prestige, and had haloed
the old religious nonsense with all the meretriciousness of historical
association. However, it obviously could not last much longer: the world
was beginning to understand at last.
He stood a moment or two at the door after his wife had gone, drinking
in reassurance from that glorious vision of solid sense that spread
itself before his eyes: the endless house-roofs; the high glass vaults
of the public baths and gymnasiums; the pinnacled schools where
Citizenship was taught each morning; the spider-like cranes and
scaffoldings that rose here and there; and even the few pricking spires
did not disconcert him. There it stretched away into the grey haze of
London, really beautiful, this vast hive of men and women who had
learned at least the primary lesson of the gospel that there was no God
but man, no priest but the politician, no prophet but the schoolmaster.
Then he went back once more to his speech-constructing.
* * * * *
Mabel, too, was a little thoughtful as she sat with her paper on her
lap, spinning down the broad line to Brighton. This Eastern news was
more disconcerting to her than she allowed her husband to see; yet it
seemed incredible that there could be any real danger of invasion. This
Western life was so sensible and peaceful; folks had their feet at last
upon the rock, and it was unthinkable that they could ever be forced
back on to the mud-flats: it was contrary to the whole law of
development. Yet she could not but recognise that catastrophe seemed one
of nature's methods....
She sat very quiet, glancing once or twice at the meagre little scrap
of news, and read the leading article upon it: that too seemed
significant of dismay. A couple of men were talking in the
half-compartment beyond on the same subject; one described the
Government engineering works that he had visited, the breathless haste
that dominated them; the other put in interrogations and questions.
There was not much comfort there. There were no windows through which
she could look; on the main lines the speed was too great for the eyes;
the long compartment flooded with soft light bounded her horizon. She
stared at the moulded white ceiling, the delicious oak-framed paintings,
the deep spring-seats, the mellow globes overhead that poured out
radiance, at a mother and child diagonally opposite her. Then the great
chord sounded; the faint vibration increased ever so slightly; and an
instant later the automatic doors ran back, and she stepped out on to
the platform of Brighton station.
As she went down the steps leading to the station square she noticed a
priest going before her. He seemed a very upright and sturdy old man,
for though his hair was white he walked steadily and strongly. At the
foot of the steps he stopped and half turned, and then, to her surprise,
she saw that his face was that of a young man, fine-featured and strong,
with black eyebrows and very bright grey eyes. Then she passed on and
began to cross the square in the direction of her aunt's house.
Then without the slightest warning, except one shrill hoot from
overhead, a number of things happened.
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