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Ebook has 1770 lines and 91835 words, and 36 pages

And Lady Tressady struggled to a sitting position, looking at her son with a certain hostility. The frown on her white face showed that she was already angry with him for his emotion--this rare emotion, that she had never yet been able to rouse in him.

He could only implore her to be guided by her doctor--to rest, to give up at least some of the mill-round of her London life, if she would not go abroad. Lady Tressady listened to him with increasing obstinacy and excitability.

"I tell you I know best!" she said, passionately, at last. "Don't go on like this--it worries me. Now, look here--"

She turned upon him with emphasis.

"Promise me not to tell Letty a word of this. Nobody shall know--she least of all. I shall do just as usual. In fact, I expect a very gay season. Three 'drums' this afternoon and a dinner-party--it doesn't look as though I were quite forgotten yet, though Letty does think me an old fogey!"

She smiled at him with a ghastly mixture of defiance and conceit. The old age in her pinched face, fighting with the rouged cheeks and the gaiety of her fanciful dress, was pitiful.

"Promise," she said. "Not a word--to her!"

George promised, in much distress. While he was speaking she had a slight return of pain, and was obliged to submit to lie down again.

"At least," he urged, "don't go out to-day. Give yourself a rest. Shall I go back, and ask Letty to come round to tea?"

Lady Tressady made a face like a spoilt child.

"I don't think she'll come," she said. "Of course, I know from the first she took an ungodly dislike to me. Though, if it hadn't been for me--Well, never mind! Yes, you can ask her, George--do! I'll wait and see if she comes. If she comes, perhaps I'll stay in. It would amuse me to hear what she has been doing. I'll behave quite nicely--there!"

And, taking up her fan, Lady Tressady lightly tapped her son's hand with it in her most characteristic manner.

He rose, seeing from the clock that he should only just have time to drive quickly back to Letty if he was to be at the House in time for an appointment with a constituent, which had been arranged for one o'clock.

"I will send Justine to you as I go out," he said, taking up his hat, "and I shall hear of you from Letty this evening."

Lady Tressady said nothing. Her eyes, bright with some inner excitement, watched him as he looked for his stick. Suddenly she said, "George! kiss me!"

Her tone was unsteady. Infinitely touched and bewildered, the young man approached her, and, kneeling down again beside her, took her in his arms. He felt a quick sobbing breath pass through her; then she pushed him lightly away, and, putting up the slim, pink-nailed hand of which she was so proud, she patted him on the cheek.

"There--go along! I don't like that coat of yours, you know. I told you so the other day. If your figure weren't so good, you'd positively look badly dressed in it. You should try another man."

Letty was at home, just about to share her lunch with Harding Watton, who had dropped in. Hearing her husband's voice, she came out to the stairhead to speak to him.

But after a minute or two George dashed down again to his study, that he might write a hurried note to a middle-aged cousin of his mother's, asking her to go round to Warwick Square early in the afternoon, and making excuses for Letty, who was "very much engaged."

For Letty had met his request with a smiling disdain. Why, she was simply "crowded up" with engagements of all sorts and kinds!

"Mother is really unwell," said George, standing with his hands on his sides, looking down upon her. He was fuming with irritation and hurry, and had to put a force on himself to speak persuasively.

She said this with the air of someone making a great concession. It was, indeed, her first formal condonement of the offence offered her just before the Castle Luton visit.

George attempted a little more argument and entreaty, but in vain. Letty was rather puzzled by his urgency, but quite obdurate. And as he ran down the stairs, he heard her laugh in the drawing-room mingled with Harding Watton's. No doubt they were making merry over the "discipline" which Letty found it necessary to apply to her mother-in-law.

In the House of Commons the afternoon was once more given up to the adjourned debate on the second reading of the Maxwell Bill. The House was full, and showing itself to advantage. On the whole, the animation and competence of the speeches reflected the general rise in combative energy and the wide kindling of social passions which the Bill had so far brought about, both in and out of Parliament. Those who figured as the defenders of industries harassed beyond bearing by the Socialist meddlers spoke with more fire, with more semblance, at any rate, of putting their hearts into it than any men of their kind had been able to attain since the "giant" days of the first Factory debates. Those, on the other hand, who were urging the House to a yet sterner vigilance in protecting the worker--even the grown man--from his own helplessness and need, who believed that law spells freedom, and that the experience of half a century was wholly on their side--these friends of a strong cause were also at their best, on their mettle. Owing to the widespread flow of a great reaction, the fight had become a representative contest between two liberties--a true battle of ideas.

Yet George, sitting below the Gangway beside his leader, his eyes staring at the ceiling, and his hands in his pockets, listened to it all in much languor and revolt. He himself had made his speech on the third day of the debate. It had cost him endless labour, only to seem to him in the end--by contrast with the vast majority of speeches made in the course of the debate, even those by men clearly inferior to himself in mind and training--to be a hollow and hypocritical performance. What did he really think and believe? What did he really desire? He vowed to himself once more, as he had vowed at Ferth, that his mind was a chaos, without convictions, either intellectual or moral; that he had begun what he was not able to finish; and that he was doomed to make a failure of his parliamentary career, as he was already making a failure of coal-owning and a failure--

He curbed something bitter and springing that haunted his most inmost mind. But his effort could not prevent his dwelling angrily for a minute on the thought of Letty laughing with Harding Watton--laughing because he had asked her a small kindness, and she had most unkindly refused it.

Suddenly he was startled by a movement beside him.

"The honourable member has totally misunderstood me," cried Fontenoy, springing to his feet and looking eagerly towards the Speaker.

The member who was speaking on the Government side smiled, put on his hat, and sat down. Fontenoy flung out a few stinging sentences, was hotly cheered both by his own supporters and from a certain area of the Liberal benches, and sat down again triumphant, having scored an excellent point.

George turned round to his companion.

"Good!" he said, with emphasis. "That rubbed it in!"

How long was it--one hurried month only--since he had walked with her along the river at Castle Luton? While the crowded House about him was again listening with attention to the speech which had just brought the protesting Fontenoy to his legs; while his leader was fidgeting and muttering beside him; while to his left the crowd of members round the door was constantly melting, constantly reassembling, Tressady's mind withdrew itself from its surroundings, saw nothing, heard nothing, but the scenes of a far-off London and a figure that moved among them.

Well!--and what had he seen? Nothing, certainly, of which he had not had ample information before. Under the fresh spur of the talk that occupied the Maxwell circle he had made one or two rounds through some dismal regions in Whitechapel, Mile End, and Hackney, where some of the worst of the home industries to which, at last, after long hesitation on the part of successive Governments, Maxwell's Bill was intended to put an end, crowded every house and yard. He saw some of it in the company of a lady rent-collector, an old friend of the Maxwells, who had charge of several tenement blocks where the trouser and vest trade was largely carried on; and he welcomed the chance of one or two walks in quest of law-breaking workshops with a young inspector, who could not say enough in praise of the Bill. But if it had been only a question of fact, George would have felt when the rounds were done merely an added respect for Fontenoy, perhaps even for his own party as a whole. Not a point raised by his guides but had been abundantly discussed and realised--on paper, at any rate--by Fontenoy and his friends. The young inspector, himself a hot partisan, and knowing with whom he had to deal, would have liked to convict his companion of sheer and simple ignorance; but, on the contrary, Tressady was not to be caught napping. As far as the trade details and statistics of this gruesome slopwork of East London went, he knew all that could be shown him.

Nevertheless, cool and impassive as his manner was throughout, the experience in the main did mean the exchange of a personal for a paper and hearsay knowledge. When, indeed, had he, or Fontenoy, or anyone else ever denied that the life of the poor was an odious and miserable struggle, a scandal to gods and men? What then? Did they make the world and its iron conditions? And yet this long succession of hot and smelling dens, this series of pale, stooping figures, toiling hour after hour, at fever pace, in these stifling backyards, while the June sun shone outside, reminding one of English meadows and the ripple of English grass; these panting, dishevelled women, slaving beside their husbands and brothers, amid the rattle of the machines and the steam of the pressers' irons, with the sick or the dying, perhaps, in the bed beside them, and their blanched children at their feet--sights of this sort, thus translated from the commonplace of reports and newspapers into a poignant, unsavoury truth, had at least this effect--they vastly quickened the personal melancholy of the spectator, they raised and drove home a number of piercing questions which, probably, George Tressady would never have raised, and would have lived happily without raising, if it had not been for a woman, and a woman's charm.

And yet she had not turned from him. To her personal mood, to her wifely affection even, he must appear more plainly than ever as the callous and selfish citizen, ready and glad to take his own ease while his brethren perished. He had been sceptical and sarcastic; he had declined to accept her evidence; he had shown a persistent preference for the drier and more brutal estimate of things. Yet she had never parted from him without gentleness, without a look in her beautiful eyes that had often tormented his curiosity. What did it mean? Pity? Or some unspoken comment of a personal kind she could not persuade her womanly reticence to put into words?

Or, rather: had she some distant inkling of the real truth--that he was beginning to hate his own convictions--to feel that to be right with Fontenoy was nothing, but to be wrong with her would be delight?

What absurdity! With a strong effort, he pulled himself together--steadied his rushing pulse. It was like someone waking at night in a nervous terror, and feeling the pressure of some iron dilemma, from which he cannot free himself--cold vacancy and want on the one side, calamity on the other.

For that cool power of judgment in his own case which he had always possessed did not fail him now. He saw everything nakedly and coldly. His marriage was not three months old, but no spectator could have discussed its results more frankly than he was now prepared to discuss them with himself. It was monstrous, no doubt. He felt his whole position to be as ugly as it was abnormal. Who could feel any sympathy with it or him? He himself had been throughout the architect of his own misfortune. Had he not rushed upon his marriage with less care--relatively to the weight of the human interest in such a matter--than an animal shows when it mates?

Letty's personal idiosyncrasies even--her way of entering a room, her mean little devices for attracting social notice, the stubborn extravagance of her dress and personal habits, her manner to her servants, her sharp voice as she retailed some scrap of slanderous gossip--her husband had by now ceased to be blind or deaf to any of them. Indeed, his senses in relation to many things she said and did were far more irritable at this moment--possibly far less just--than a stranger's would have been. Often and often he would try to recall to himself the old sense of charm, of piquancy. In vain. It was all gone--he could only miserably wonder at the past. Was it that he knew now what charm might mean, and what divinity may breathe around a woman!

"I say, where are you off to?"

Tressady looked up with a start as Fontenoy rose beside him.

"Good opportunity for dinner, I think," said Fontenoy, with a motion of the head towards the man who had just caught the Speaker's eye. "Are you coming? I should like a word with you."

George followed him into the Lobby. As the swing-door closed behind him, they plunged into a whirlpool of talk and movement. All the approaches to the House were full of folk; everybody was either giving news or getting it. For the excitement of a coming crisis was in the air. This was Friday, and the division on the second reading was expected on the following Monday.

"What a crowd, and what a temperature!" said Fontenoy. "Come on to the Terrace a moment."

They made their way into the air, and as they walked up and down Fontenoy talked in his hoarse, hurried voice of the latest aspect of affairs. The Government would get their second reading, of course that had never been really doubtful; though Fontenoy was certain that the normal majority would be a good deal reduced. But all the hopes of the heterogeneous coalition which had been slowly forming throughout the spring hung upon the Committee stage, and Fontenoy's mind was now full of the closest calculations as to the voting on particular amendments.

For him the Bill fell into three parts. The first part, which was mainly confined to small amendments and extensions of former Acts, would be sharply criticised, but would probably pass without much change. The second part contained the famous clause by which it became penal to practise certain trades, such as tailoring, boot-finishing, and shirt-making, in a man's or woman's own home--in the same place, that is to say, as the worker uses for eating and sleeping. This clause, which represented the climax of a long series of restrictions upon the right of a man to stitch even his own life away, still more upon his right to force his children or bribe his neighbour to a like waste of the nation's force, was by now stirring the industrial mind of England far and wide.

And not the mind of England only. Ireland and Scotland, town and country, talked of it, seethed with it. The new law, if it passed, was to be tried, indeed, at first, in London only. But every provincial town and every country district knew that, if it succeeded, there was not a corner of the land that would not ultimately feel the yoke, or the deliverance, of it Every workman's club, every trade-union meeting, every mechanics' institute was ringing with it. Organised labour, dragged down at every point--in London, at any rate--by the competition of the starving and struggling crew of home-workers, clamoured for the Bill. The starving and struggling crew themselves were partly voiceless, partly bewildered; now drawn by the eloquence of their trade-union fellows to shout for the revolution that threatened them, now surging tumultuously against it.

On this vital clause, in Fontenoy's belief, the Government would go down. But if, by amazing good-fortune and good generalship, they should get through with it, then the fight would but rage the more fiercely round the last two sections of the Bill.

The third section dealt with the hours of labour in the new workshops that were to be. For the first time it became directly penal for a man, as well as a woman, to work more than the accepted factory-day of ten and a half hours, with a few exceptions and exemptions in the matter of overtime. On this clause, if it were ever reached, the Socialist vote, were it given solidly for the Government, might, no doubt, pull them through. "But if we have any luck--damn it! they won't get the chance!" Fontenoy would say, with that grim, sudden reddening which revealed from moment to moment the feverish tension of the man.

"One assumption you make I should like to contest. You imagine, I think, that if they carry the prohibition and the hours clauses we shall be able to whip up a still fiercer attack on the 'landlords' clause. Now, that isn't my view."

Fontenoy turned upon him, startled.

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