Delphi Collected Works of Grant Allen Page 10

  At Oswald’s lodging, Ernest found his friend ready and waiting for him. They went on together to the same street in Marylebone as before, and mounted the stair till they reached Herr Schurz’s gloomy little work-room on the third floor. The old apostle was seated at his small table by the half-open window, grinding the edges of a lens to fit the brass mounting at his side; while his daughter Uta, a still good-looking, quiet, broad-faced South German woman, about forty or a little more, sat close by, busily translating a scientific book into English by alternate reading and consultation with her father. Harry saw the title on her page was ‘Researches into the Embryology of the Isopodal Crustaceans,’ and conceived at once an immense respect for the learning and wisdom of the communist exile’s daughter. Herr Schurz hardly stopped a moment from his work — he never allowed his numerous visitors to interfere in any way with his daily duties — but motioned them both to seats on the bare bench beside him, and waited to bear the nature of their particular business. It was an understood thing that no one came to see the Socialist leader on week days except for a good and sufficient reason.

  The talk at first was general and desultory; but after a little time Ernest brought conversation round to its proper focus, and placed his case of conscience fairly before his father confessor. Was it allowable for a consistent socialist to accept the place of tutor to the son of a peer and a landowner?

  ‘For my part, Herr Schurz,’ Oswald said confidently, ‘I don’t see any reason on earth, from the point of view of any political economy whatsoever, why Ernest shouldn’t take the position. The question isn’t how the Exmoors have come by their money, even allowing that private property in land is in itself utterly indefensible; which is a proposition I don’t myself feel inclined unreservedly to admit, though I know you and Le Breton do: the real question’s this, — since they’ve got this money into their hands to distribute, and since in any case they will have the distribution of it, isn’t it better that some of it should go into Le Breton’s pocket than that it should go into any other person’s? That’s the way I for my part look at the matter.’

  ‘What do you say to that, friend Ernest?’ asked the old German, smiling and waiting to see whether Ernest would detect what from their own standpoint he regarded as the ethical fallacy of Harry Oswald’s argument.

  ‘Well, to tell you the truth, Herr Schurz,’ answered Ernest, in his deliberate, quiet way, ‘I don’t think I’ve envisaged the subject to myself from quite the same point of view as Oswald has done. I have rather asked myself whether it was right of a man to accept a function in which he would really be doing nothing worthy for humanity in return for his daily board and lodging. It isn’t so much a question who exactly is to get certain sums out of the Exmoors’ pockets, which ought no doubt never to have been in them; it’s more a question whether a man has any right to live off the collective labour of the world, and do nothing of any good to the world on his own part by way of repayment.’

  ‘That’s it, friend Ernest,’ cried the old man, with a pleased nod of his big grey head; ‘the socialistic Iliad in a nutshell! That’s the very root of the question. Don’t be deceived by capitalist sophisms. So long as we go on each of us trying to get as much as we can individually out of the world, instead of asking what the world is getting out of us, in return, there will be no revolution and no millennium. We must make sure that we’re doing some good ourselves, instead of sponging upon the people perpetually to feed us for nothing. What’s the first gospel given to man at the creation in your popular cosmogonies? Why, that in the sweat of his face shall he eat bread, and till the ground from which he was taken. That’s the native gospel of the toiling many, always; your doctrines of fair exchange, and honest livelihoods, and free contract, and all the rest of it, are only the artificial gospel of the political economists, and of the bourgeoisie and the aristocrats into whose hands they play — the rascals!’

  ‘Then you think I oughtn’t to take the post?’ asked Ernest, a little ruefully.

  ‘I don’t say that, Le Breton — I don’t say that,’ said Herr Schurz, more quietly than before, still grinding away at his lens. ‘The question’s a broad one, and it has many aspects. The best work a man can do is undoubtedly the most useful work — the work that conduces most to the general happiness. But we of the proletariate can’t take our choice always: as your English proverb plainly puts it, with your true English bluntness, “beggars mustn’t be choosers.” We must, each in his place, do the work that’s set before us by the privileged classes. It’s impossible for us to go nicely discriminating between work that’s useful for the community, work that’s merely harmless, and work that’s positively detrimental. How can we insure it? A man’s a printer, say. There’s a generally useful trade, in which, on the whole, he labours for the good and enlightenment of the world — for he may print scientific books, good books, useful books; and most printing, on the average, is useful. But how’s he to know what sort of thing he’s printing? He may be printing “Gold and the Proletariate,” or he may be printing obscurantist and retrogressive treatises by the enemies of humanity. Look at my own trade, again. You’d say at first sight, Mr. Oswald, that to make microscopes must be a good thing in the end for the world at large: and so it is, no doubt; but half of them — ay, more than half of them — are thrown away: mere wasted labour, a good workman’s time and skill lavished needlessly on some foolish rich man’s caprices and amusement. Often enough, now, I make a good instrument — an instrument, with all its fittings, worth fifty or a hundred pounds. That takes a long time to make, and I’m a skilled workman; and the instrument may fall into the hands of a scientific man who’ll use it in discovery, in verification, in promoting knowledge, in lessening disease and mitigating human suffering. That’s the good side of my trade. But, mark you, now,’ and the old man wiped his forehead rapidly with his sleeve, ‘it has its bad side too. As often as not, I know, some rich man will buy that machine, that cost me so much time and trouble to make, and will buy a few dozen stock slides with it, and will bring it out once in a moon to show his children or a few idle visitors the scales on a butterfly’s wing, or the hairs on the leg of a common flea. Uta sets those things up by the thousand for the dealers to sell to indolent dilettanti. The appetite of the world at large for the common flea is simply insatiable. And it’s for that, perhaps, that I’m spoiling my eyesight now, grinding and grinding and grinding at this very lens, and fitting the thing to an accurate fraction of a millimetre, as we always fit these things — we who are careful and honest workmen — to show an idle man’s friends the hairs on a flea’s fore-leg. If that isn’t enough to make a man ashamed of our present wasteful and chaotic organisation, I should think he must be a survival from the preglacial epoch — as, indeed, most of us actually are!’

  ‘But, after all, Herr Schurz,’ said Harry, expostulating, ‘you get paid for your labour, and the rich man is doing better by encouraging your skill than by encouraging the less useful skill of other workmen.’

  ‘Ah, yes,’ cried Herr Schurz, warmly, ‘that’s the doctrine of the one-eyed economists; that’s the capitalist way of looking at it; but it isn’t our way — it isn’t ours. Is it nothing, think you, that all that toil of mine — of a sensible man’s — goes to waste, to gratify the senseless passing whim of a wealthy nobody? Is it nothing that he uselessly monopolises the valuable product of my labour, which in other and abler hands might be bringing forth good fruit for the bettering and furthering of universal humanity? I tell you, Mr. Oswald, half the best books, half the best apparatus, half the best appliances in all Europe, are locked up idle in rich men’s cabinets, effecting no good, begetting no discoveries, bringing forth no interest, doing nothing but foster the anti-social pride of their wealthy possessors. But that isn’t what friend Ernest wants to ask me about to-day. He wants to know about his own course in a difficult case; and instead of answering him, here am I, maundering away, like an old man that I am, into the generalised platitudes of “Gold and the Pr
oletariate.” Well, Le Breton, what I should say in your particular instance is this. A man with the fear of right before his eyes may, under existing circumstances, lawfully accept any work that will keep him alive, provided he sees no better and more useful work equally open to him. He may take the job the capitalists impose, if he can get nothing worthier to do elsewhere. Now, if you don’t teach this young Tregellis, what alternative have you? Why, to become a master in a school — Eton, perhaps, or Rugby, or Marlborough — and teach other equally useless members of prospective aristocratic society. That being so, I think you ought to do what’s best for yourself and your family for the present — for the present — till the time of deliverance comes. You see, there is one member of your family to whom the matter is of immediate importance.’

  ‘Ronald,’ said Ernest, interrupting him.

  ‘Yes, Ronald. A good boy; a socialist, too, though he doesn’t know it — one of us, born of us, and only apart from us in bare externals. Well, would it be most comfortable for poor Ronald that you should go to these Exmoor people, or that you should take a mastership, get rooms somewhere, and let him live with you? He’s not very happy with your mother, you say. Wouldn’t he be happier with you? What think you? Charity begins at home, you know: a good proverb — a good, sound, sensible, narrow-minded, practical English proverb!’

  ‘I’ve thought of that,’ Ernest said, ‘and I’ll ask him about it. Whichever he prefers, then, I’d better decide upon, had I?’

  ‘Do so,’ Herr Max answered, with a nod. ‘Other things equal, our first duty is to those nearest to us.’

  What Herr Max said was law to his disciples, and Ernest went his way contented.

  ‘Mr. Oswald seems a very nice young man,’ Uta Schurz said, looking up from the microscope slides she had begun to mount at the moment her regular translating work was interrupted by their sudden entry. She had been taking quiet glances at Harry all the while, in her unobtrusive fashion; for Uta had learned always to be personally unobtrusive— ‘the prophet’s donkey,’ those irreverent French exiles used to call her — and she had come to the conclusion that he was a decidedly handsome and manly fellow.

  ‘Which do you like best, Uta — Oswald or Le Breton?’ asked her father.

  ‘Personally,’ Uta answered, ‘I should prefer Mr. Oswald. To live always with Mr. Le Breton would be like living with an abstraction. No woman would ever care for him; she might just as well marry Spinoza’s Ethics or the Ten Commandments. He’s a perfect model of a socialist, and nothing else. Mr. Oswald has some human nature in him as well.’

  ‘There are two kinds of socialists,’ said Herr Max, bending once more over his glasses; ‘the one kind is always thinking most of its rights; the other kind is always thinking most of its duties. Oswald belongs to the first, Le Breton to the second. I’ve often observed it so among men of their two sorts. The best socialists never come from the bourgeoisie, nor even from the proletariate; they come from among the voluntarily déclassés aristocrats. Your workman or your bourgeois who has risen, and who interests himself in social or political questions, is always thinking, “Why shouldn’t I have as many rights and privileges as these other people have?” The aristocrat who descends is always thinking, “Why shouldn’t these other people have as many rights and privileges as I have?” The one type begets aggressive self-assertion, the other type begets a certain gentle spirit of self-effacement. You don’t often find men of the aristocratic class with any ethical element in them — their hereditary antecedents, their breeding, their environment, are all hostile to it; but when you do find them, mark my words, Uta, they make the truest and most earnest friends of the popular cause of any. Their sympathy and interest in it is all unselfish.’

  ‘And yet,’ Uta answered firmly, ‘I still prefer Mr. Oswald. And if you care for my opinion, I should say that the aristocrat does all the dreaming, but the bourgeois does all the fighting; and that’s the most important thing practically, after all.’

  An hour later, Ernest was talking his future plans over with his brother Ronald. Would it be best for Ronald that he should take a mastership, and both should live together, or that he should go for the present to the Exmoors’, and leave the question of Ronald’s home arrangements still unsettled?

  ‘It’s so good of you to think of me in the matter, Ernest,’ Ronald said, pressing his hand gently; ‘but I don’t think I ought to go away from mother before I’m twenty-one. To tell you the truth, Ernest, I hardly flatter myself she’d be really sorry to get rid of me; I’m afraid I’m a dreadful thorn in her side at present; she doesn’t understand my ways, and perhaps I don’t sympathise enough with hers; but still, if I were to propose to go, I feel sure she’d be very much annoyed, and treat it as a serious act of insubordination on my part. While I’m a minor, at least, I ought to remain with her; the Apostle tells us to obey our parents, in the Lord; and as long as she requires nothing from me that doesn’t involve a dereliction of principle I think I must bear with it, though I acknowledge it’s a cross, a heavy cross. Thank you so much for thinking of it, dearest Ernest.’ And his eyes filled once more with tears as he spoke.

  So it was finally arranged that for the present at least Ernest should accept Lady Exmoor’s offer, and that as soon as Ronald was twenty-one he should look about for a suitable mastership, in order for the two brothers to go immediately into rooms together. Lady Le Breton was surprised at the decision; but as it was in her favour, she wisely abstained from gratifying her natural desire to make some more uncomplimentary references to the snuffy old German socialist. Sufficient unto the day was the triumph thereof; and she had no doubt in her own mind that if once Ernest could be induced to live for a while in really good society the well-known charms and graces of that society must finally tame his rugged breast, and wean him away from his unaccountable devotion to those horrid continental communists.

  CHAPTER VIII.

  IN THE CAMP OF THE PHILISTINES.

  Dunbude Castle, Lord Exmoor’s family seat, stands on the last spurs of the great North Devon uplands, overlooking the steep glen of a little boulder-encumbered stream, and commanding a distant view of the Severn Sea and the dim outlines of the blue Welsh hills beyond it. Behind the house, a castle only by courtesy (on the same principle as that by which every bishop lives in a palace), rises the jagged summit of the Cleave, a great weather-worn granite hill, sculptured on top by wind and rain into those fantastic lichen-covered pillars and tora and logans in which antiquarian fancy used so long to find the visible monuments of Druidical worship. All around, a wide brown waste of heather undulates and tosses wildly to the sky; and on the summit of the rolling moor where it rises and swells in one of its many rounded bosses, the antlered heads and shoulders of the red deer may often be seen etched in bold relief against the clear sky-line to the west, on sunny autumn evenings. But the castle itself and the surrounding grounds are not planned to harmonise with the rough moorland English scenery into whose midst they were unceremoniously pitchforked by the second earl. That distinguished man of taste, a light of the artistic world in his own day, had brought back from his Grand Tour his own ideal of a strictly classical domestic building, formed by impartially compounding a Palladian palace, a Doric temple, and a square redbrick English manor-house. After pulling down the original fourteenth-century castle, he had induced an eminent architect of the time to conspire with him in giving solid and permanent reality to this his awful imagining; and when he had completed it all, from portico to attic, he had extorted even the critical praise of Horace Walpole, who described it in one of his letters as a ‘singular triumph of classical taste and architectural ingenuity.’ It still remains unrivalled in its kind, the ugliest great country-seat in the county of Devon — some respectable authorities even say in the whole of England.

  In front of the house an Italian garden, with balustrades of very doubtful marble, leads down by successive terraces and broad flights of steps to an artificial octagonal pool, formed by carefully destroying th
e whole natural beauty of the wild and rocky little English glen beneath. To feed it by fitting a conduit, the moss-grown boulders that strew the bed of the torrent above and below have been carefully removed, and the unwilling stream, as it runs into the pool, has been coerced into a long straight channel, bordered on either side by bedded turf, and planed off at measured intervals so as to produce a series of eminently regular and classical cascades. Even Lord Exmoor himself, who was a hunting man, without any pretence to that stupid rubbish about taste, did not care for the hopeless exterior of Dunbude Castle: he frankly admitted that the place was altogether too doosid artificial for the line of country. If they’d only left it alone, he said, in its own native condition, it would have been really pretty; but as they’d doctored it and spoilt it, why, there was nothing on earth to be done but just put up with it and whistle over it. What with the hounds, and the mortgages, and the settlements, and the red deer, and Goodwood, the estate couldn’t possibly afford any money for making alterations down in the gardens.

  The dog-cart was in waiting at the station to carry Ernest up to the castle; and as he reached the front door, Lady Hilda Tregellis strolled up the broad flight of steps from the garden to meet him. Lady Hilda was tall and decidedly handsome, as Ernest had rightly told Edie, but not pretty, and she was also just twenty. There was a free, careless, bold look in her face, that showed her at once a girl of spirit; indeed, if she had not been born a Tregellis, it was quite clear that she would have been predestined to turn out a strong-minded woman. There was nothing particularly delicate in Lady Hilda’s features; they were well-modelled, but neither regular nor cold, nor with that peculiar stamp of artificial breeding which is so often found in the faces of English ladies. On the contrary, she looked like a perfectly self-confident handsome actress, too self-confident to be self-conscious, and accustomed to admiration wherever she turned. As Ernest jumped down from the dog-cart she advanced quickly to shake hands with him, and look him over critically from head to foot like a schoolboy taking stock of a new fellow.