And now he knew what would follow. The silly people had had their say; the people who cannot help asking an Arctic explorer whether he enjoyed the North Pole; the people who would almost ask a nigger what it felt like to be black. It was inevitable that the old merchant should talk about political economy to anybody he supposed to be political. It did not matter if that old ass Wister lectured him about the great Victorians. The self-educated man had no difficulty in showing he was better educated than those people were. But now the next stage was reached; and the other sort of people began to take notice. The intelligent people in the Smart Set, the people who do not talk shop, the people who would talk to the nigger about the weather, began to talk to the Syndicalist about Syndicalism. In the lull after his more stormy retort, men with quieter voices began to ask him more sensible questions; often conceding many of his claims, often falling back on more fundamental objections. Murrel almost started as he heard the low and guttural drawl of old Eden, in whom so many diplomatic and parliamentary secrets were buttoned up, and who hardly ever talked at all, saying to Braintree: “Don’t you think there’s something to be said for the Ancients–Aristotle and all that, don’t you know? Perhaps there really must be a class of people always working for us in the cellar.”
Braintree’s black eyes flashed; not with rage, but with joy; because he knew now that he was understood.
“Ah, now you’re talking sense,” he said. There were some present to whom it seemed almost as much of a liberty to tell Lord Eden he was talking sense as to tell him he was talking nonsense. But he himself was quite subtle enough to understand that he had really been paid a compliment.
“But if you take that line,” went on Braintree, “you can’t complain of the people you separate in that way, treating themselves as something separate. If there is a class like that, you can hardly wonder at its being class-conscious.”
“And the other people, I suppose, have a right to be class-conscious, too,” said Eden with a smile.
“Quite so,” observed Wister in his more spacious manner. “The aristocrat, the magnanimous man as Aristotle says–”
“Look here,” said Braintree rather irritably, “I’ve only read Aristotle in cheap translations; but I have read them. It seems to me gentlemen like you first learn elaborately how to read things in Greek; and then never do it. Aristotle, so far as I can understand, makes out the magnanimous man to be a pretty conceited fellow. But he never says he must be what you call an aristocrat.”
“Quite so,” said Eden, “but the most democratic of the Greeks believed in slavery. In my opinion, there’s a lot more to be said for slavery than there is for aristocracy.”
The Syndicalist assented almost eagerly; and Mr. Almeric Wister looked rather bewildered.
“I say,” repeated Braintree, “that if you think there ought to be slaves, you can’t prevent the slaves hanging together and having their own notions about things. You can’t appeal to their citizenship if they are not citizens. Well, I’m one of the slaves. I come out of the coal-cellar. I represent all those grimy and grubby and unpresentable people; I am one of them. Aristotle himself couldn’t complain of my speaking for them.”
“You speak for them very well,” said Eden.
Murrel smiled grimly. The fashion was in full blast now. He recognised all the signs of that change in the social weather; that altered atmosphere around the Syndicalist. He even heard the familiar sound that put the final touch to it; the murmuring voice of Lady Boole, “. . . any Thursday. We shall be so pleased.”
Murrel, still smiling grimly, turned on his heel and crossed over to the corner where Olive Ashley was sitting. He noted that she sat watching with compressed lips and that her dark eyes were dangerously bright. He addressed her upon a note of delicate condolence.
“Afraid our practical joke has rather turned bottom up,” he said. “We meant him to be a bear and he’s going to be a lion.”
She looked up and suddenly smiled in a dazzling and highly baffling manner.
“He did knock them about like ninepins, didn’t he?” she cried, “and he wasn’t a bit afraid of old Eden.”
Murrel stared down at her with an entirely new perplexity on his dolorous visage.
“This is very odd,” he said. “Why, you seem to be quite proud of your protege.”
He continued to stare at her undecipherable smile and at last he said: “Well, I don’t understand women; nobody ever will, and it is obviously dangerous to try. But if I may make a mere guess on the subject, my dear Olive, I have a growing suspicion that you are a little humbug.”
He departed with his usual gloomy good humour; and the party was already breaking up. As the last of the visitors left, he stood once more for a moment in the gateway leading into the garden and sent a Parthian arrow.
“I don’t understand women,” he said, “but I do know a little about men. And now I’m going to take charge of your performing bear.”
The country seat of Seawood, beautiful as it was and remote as it seemed, was really only five or six miles from one of those black and smoky provincial towns that have sprung up amid beautiful hills and valleys since the map of England presented itself mainly as a patchwork of coal. This particular town, which bore its old name of Milldyke, was already very smoky but still comparatively small. It was not so much directly connected with the coal trade as with the treatment of various by-products such as coal-tar; and contained a number of factories manufacturing various things out of that rich and valuable refuse. John Braintree lived in one of the poorer streets of the town; and found it uncomfortable but not inconvenient. For a great part of his political life was spent in trying to link up the labour organisations directly connected with the coal-field to these other and smaller unisons of men employed on the derivative substances. It was towards his home that he now turned his face, when he turned his back on the great country house to which he had just paid so curious and apparently aimless a visit. As Eden and Wister and the various nobs of the neighbourhood, (as he would put it) slid away in their sumptuous cars, he took a great pride in walking stiffly through the crowd in the direction of the queer and rustic little omnibus that ran in and out between the great house and the town. When he climbed up the omnibus, however, he was rather surprised to find Mr. Douglas Murrel climbing up after him.
“Mind if I share your omnibus?” asked Murrel, sinking on a bench beside the solitary outside passenger; for nobody else seemed to be travelling by the vehicle; they were sitting well forward in the front seats and the full blast of the night air came in their faces as the vehicle began to move. It seemed to wake Braintree out of a trance of abstraction and he assented rather curtly.
“The truth is,” said Murrel, “that I feel inclined to go and look at your coal-cellar.”
“You wouldn’t like to be locked up in the coal-cellar,” said the other, still a little gruffly.
“Of course, I should prefer to be locked up in the wine-cellar,” admitted Murrel. “A new version of your parable of Labour. The vain and idle revelling above, while the dull persistent sound of popping corks told them that I was still below, toiling, labouring, never at rest. . . . But really, old man, there was a lot in what you said about yourself and your grimy haunts, and I thought I’d have a squint at them.”
To Mr. Almeric Wister and others it might have seemed tactless to talk to the poorer man about his grimy environment. But Murrel was not tactless; and he was not wrong when he said he knew something about men. He knew the morbid sensitiveness of the most masculine sort of men. He knew his friend’s almost maniacal dread of snobbery; and knew better than to say anything about the successes of the salon. To talk about Braintree as a slave in a coal-cellar was to steady his self-respect.