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shame comes to the surface at every meeting with former a cqua in tances.
She had not had an easy time, either. She gave me her hand and took me into a park. This was the first old English park that I had seen, and one of the most magnificent. It had not been touched by human hands since the days of Elizabeth; shady, gloomy, it had grown without hindrance and spread more thickly in its aristocratic, monastic remoteness from the world.
The ancient mansion of purely Elizabethan architecture was empty. Although a solitary old lady lived in it there was nobody to be seen; only a grey-haired porter, sitting at the gates, remarked with some pomposity to people going into the park that they should not walk past the mansion at dinner-time. It was so quiet in the park that the fallow deer trooped across the rides and came calmly to a stop, raising their muzzles and sniffing the a ir. Nowhere was there an extraneous sound, and the crows cawed just as they had in our old garden at Vasilevskoye. Somewhere hereabouts I thought I might have lain down under a tree and tried to imagine myself at thirteen . . . . We came from Moscow only yesterday, and somewhere here, not far away, our old gardener is making some peppermint water. We dwellers in the oak-woods feel more kinship with forests and trees than with seas and mountains.
We talked of Italy, of my journey to Mentone; we talked of Medici, with whom she was slightly acquainted, and of Orsini, and we did not speak of what at that time probably occupied the minds of both of us more than anything else.
I saw the sincere sympathy in her eyes and silently thanked her for it. What could I have said to her that was new?
Soon rain began to fall and, since it might rain harder and might be lasting, we went back.
In the drawing-room there was a little, frail old gentleman, with snow-white hair, with an unusually good-natured expression and a bright, clear. gentle eye-that blue, child-like eye which remains with people until extreme old age, a reflection of their great kindness.
My hostess's daughters ran to their white-haired grandfather: it was obvious that they were friends.
I had stopped at the garden door.
'Here is something that could not have happened more appropriately,' said their mother, putting out her hand to the old gentleman. 'To-day I have a treat for you. Let me introduce our Russian friend. I think,' she added, turning to me, 'you will enjoy meeting one of your patriarchs.'
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'Robert Owen,' said the old gentleman, smiling goodnaturedly. 'I'm very, very pleased.'
I took his hand with a feeling of filial respect; if I had been younger I might perhaps have knelt and asked the old man to lay his hands on me.
So this was how he came by his kind, bright eye; this was why the children loved him . . . . This was he, the one sober, courageous jury-man 'among the drunken ones' (as Aristotle once said of Anaxagoras), who dared to pronounce 'not guilty' over humanity, 'not guilty' over the criminal. This was the second eccentric who was grieved for the publican and pitied the fallen and who, without sinking, walked, if not over the sea, yet over the bog of vulgarity of English life-not only without sinking but even without getting dirty!
. . . Owen's manner was very simple; but with him, as with Garibaldi, there shone through his kindliness a strength and a consciousness of the possession of authority. In his affability there was a feeling of his own excellence ; it was the result perhaps of continual dealings with wretched associates: on the whole, he bore more resemblance tn a ruined aristocrat, to the younger son of a great family, than to a plebeian and a socialist.
At that time I spoke no English, and Owen knew no French and was noticeably deaf, so the lady's eldest daughter offered to act as our dragoman: Owen was accustomed to talking to foreigners like this.
'I am expecting great things from your country,' he said to me.
'With you the field is clearer and the priests are not so powerful, prejudices are not so deeply rooted . . . and such strength! If the Emperor were willing to go into, to understand, the new requirements of the harmonious world that is coming into being, how easy it would be for him to become one of the greatest of men.'
With a smile I asked my dragoman to tell Owen that I had very little hope that Nicholas would become a follower of his.
'But he came to see me at Lanark,5 you know.'
5 Nicholas visited Owen in 1815 at New Lanark, where the cotton-mill was that Owen had established. Owen tells in his autobiop;raphy how the Grand Duke Nicholas invited him to move to Russia and set up there.
with support from the Tsar's government, industrial communities like New Lanark. Owen declined the invitation. (A.S.) According to Podmore (I, 1 73 ) , Nicholas wished to take one of Owen"s younp;er sons, David Dale Owen, to Russin and find him a place at his court; and, knowing that these islands were thought hy some statesmen to be overpopulated, he suggested that 0. should come to Russia and bring two
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'And I'm sure he understood nothing.'
'He was young then, and'-Owen laughed-'and was very sorry that my eldest son was so tall and was not going into the army. He did invite me to Russia, though.'
'Now he's old, but he understands just as little, and probably is even sorrier that not every tall man goes for a soldier. I've seen the letter you wrote to him and, I tell you frankly, I don't understand your purpose in writing it. You can't really have any hope?'
'While a man is alive one must not despair of him. There are so many kinds of happening that may lay open the soul. Well, and if my letter doesn't work and he throws it away, where's the harm? I shall have done what I could. It is not his fault that his upbringing and the environment in which he lives have made him incapable of understanding the truth. In such a case, one must not be angry but feel pity.'
So this old man extended his all-embracing forgiveness of sins not only to thieves and criminals but even to Nicholas. For a minute I felt ashamed.
Is not this why people have forgiven Owen nothing, not even his mental torpor before he died and his half-sick ravings about spirits?
When I met Owen he was eighty-one (he was born in 1 7 7 1 ) .
For sixty years h e had not left the arena.
Three years after Sevenoaks I saw Owen again for a moment.
His body was worn out, his mind was dulled and sometimes rambled unchecked about the mystical spheres of spectres and shades. But the same energy was there, the same blue gaze of child-like goodness and the same hope for man. He harboured no gn.Idge, he had forgotten old scores, he was the same young enthusiast, the founder of New Lanark, hard of hearing, grey, feeble, but still preaching the abolition of punishments and the harmonious life of communal labour. One could not see without deep veneration this old man walking slowly, with uncertain step, on to the platform, where once he had been greeted by the fervent applause of a brilliant audience, and where now his yellO\ved white locks evoked a whisper of indifference and an ironical laugh. The crazy old man, with the seal of death upon m illion of the surplus people with him. Both offers were gratefully declined. (R.)