The Wone house was neither a cottage nor a villa. It was one of those nondescript and modest residences, which, erected in the mid-epoch of Victoria’s reign, when money was circulating freely among the middle-classes, win a kind of gentle secondary mellowness in the twentieth century by reason of something solid and liberal in their original construction. It stood at the corner of the upper end of Nevilton, where, beyond the fountain-square, the road from Yeoborough takes a certain angular turn to the north. The garden at the back of it, as with many of the cottages of the place, was larger than might have been expected, and over the low hedge which separated it from the meadows behind, the long ridge of wooded upland, with its emphatic lines of tall Scotch firs that made the southern boundary of the valley, was pleasantly and reassuringly visible.
Philip Wone worked in Yeoborough. He was a kind of junior partner in a small local firm of tombstone makers — the very firm, in fact, which under the direction of the famous Gideon, had constructed the most remarkable monument in Nevilton churchyard. It was doubtful whether he would ever attain the position of full partner in this concern, for his manner of life was eccentric, and neither his ways nor his appearance were those of a youth who succeeds in business. He was a tall pallid creature. His dark coarse hair fell in a heavy wave over his white forehead, and his hands were thin and delicate as the hands of an invalid.
He was an omnivorous reader and made incessant use of every subscription library that Yeoborough offered. His reading was of two kinds. He read romantic novels of every sort — good, bad, and indifferent — and he read the history of revolutions. There can hardly have been, in any portion of the earth’s surface, a revolution with whose characters and incidents Philip was unacquainted. His chief passion was for the great French Revolution, the personalities of which were more real to him than the majority of his own friends.
Philip was by temperament and conviction an ardent anarchist; not an anarchist of Mr. Quincunx’s mild and speculative type, but of a much more formidable brand. He had also long ago consigned the idea of any Providential interference with the sequence of events upon earth, into the limbo of outworn superstitions.
It was Philip’s notion, this, of planting geraniums in the back-garden. Dressed nearly always in black, and wearing a crimson tie, it was his one luxurious sensuality to place in his button-hole, as long as they were possibly available, some specimen or other of the geranium tribe, with a preference for the most flaming varieties.
The Christian Candidate regarded his son with a mixture of contempt and apprehension. He despised his lack of business ability, and he viewed his intellectual opinions as the wilful caprices of a sulky and disagreeable temper.
It was as a sort of pitying concession to the whim of a lunatic that Mr. Wone was now assisting Philip in planting these absurd geraniums. His own idea was that flower-gardens ought to be abolished altogether. He associated them with gentility and toryism and private property in land. Under the regime he would have liked to have established, all decent householders would have had liberal small holdings, where they would grow nothing but vegetables. Mr. Wone liked vegetables and ate of them very freely in their season. Flowers he regarded as the invention of the upper classes, so that their privately owned world might be decorated with exclusive festoons.
“I shall go round presently,” he said to his son, “and visit all these people. I see no reason why Taxater and Clavering, as well as the two Andersens, should not make themselves of considerable use to me. I am tired of talking to these Leo’s Hill labourers. One day they will strike, and the next they won’t. All they think of is their own quarrel with Lickwit. They have no thought of the general interest of the country.”
“No thought of your interests, you mean,” put in the son.
“With these others it is different,” went on Mr. Wone, oblivious of the interruption. “It would be a real help to me if the more educated people of the place came out definitely on my side. They ought to do it. They know what this Romer is. They are thinking men. They must see that what the country wants is a real representative of the people.”
“What the country wants is a little more honesty and a little less hypocrisy,” remarked the son.
“It is abominable, this suppression of our Social Meeting. You have heard about that, I suppose?” pursued the candidate.
“Putting an end to your appeals to Providence, eh?” said Philip, pressing the earth down round the roots of a brilliant flower.
“I forbid you to talk like that,” cried his father. “I might at least expect that you would do something for me. You have done nothing, since my campaign opened, but make these silly remarks.”
“Why don’t you pray about it?” jeered the irrepressible young man. “Mr Romer has not suppressed prayer, has he, as well as Political Prayer-Meetings?”
“They were not political!” protested the aggrieved parent. “They were profoundly religious. What you young people do not seem to realize now-a-days is that the soul of this country is still God-fearing and religious-minded. I should myself have no hope at all for the success of this election, if I were not sure that God was intending to make His hand felt.”
“Why don’t you canvass God, then?” muttered the profane boy.
“I cannot allow you to talk to me in this way, Philip!” cried Mr. Wone, flinging down his trowel. “You know perfectly well that you believe as firmly as I do, in your heart. It is only that you think it impressive and original to make these silly jokes.”
“Thank you, father,” replied Philip. “You certainly remove my doubts with an invincible argument! But I assure you I am quite serious. Nobody with any brain believes in God in these days. God died about the same time as Mr. Gladstone.”
The Christian Candidate lost his temper. “I must beg you,” he said, “to keep your infidel nonsense to yourself. Your mother and I are sick of it! You had better stay in Yeoborough, and not come home at all, if you can’t behave like an ordinary person and keep a civil tongue.”
Philip made no answer to this ultimatum, but smiled sardonically and went on planting geraniums.
But his father was loath to let the matter drop.
“What would the state of the country be like, I wonder,” he continued, “if people lost their faith in the love of a merciful Father? It is only because we feel, in spite of all appearances, the love of God must triumph in the end, that we can go on with our great movement. The love of God, young man, whatever you foolish infidels may say, is at the bottom of all attempts to raise the people to better things. Do you think I would labour as I do in this excellent cause if I did not feel that I had the loving power of a great Heavenly Father behind me? Why do I trouble myself with politics? Because His love constrains me. Why have I brought you up so carefully — though to little profit it seems! — and have been so considerate to your mother — who, as you know, isn’t always very cheerful? Because His love constrains me. Without the knowledge that His love is at the bottom of everything that happens, do you think I could endure to live at all?”
Philip Wone lifted up his head from the flower-border.
“Let me just tell you this, father, it is not the love of God, or of anyone else, that’s at the bottom of our grotesque world. There is nothing at the bottom! The world goes back — without limit or boundary — upwards and downwards, and everywhere. It has no bottom, and no top either! It is all quite mad and we are all quite mad. Love? Who knows anything of love, except lovers and madmen? If these Romers and Lickwits are to be crushed, they must be crushed by force. By force, I tell you! This love of an imaginary Heavenly Father has never done anything for the revolution and never will!”