The Socialist

"I know, my dears, that it was not an enlivening entertainment, but Sir Andrew, you must remember, is a very solid man, and is well liked by the country. He will be in the Cabinet when this wretched Radical and Socialistic ministry meets the fate it deserves, and, you know, Hayle, that in our position, it is necessary to endure a good deal sometimes. One must keep in with one's own class. We must be back to back, we must be solid. I have nothing to say against Sir Andrew, except that, of course, he is not a very intellectual man. At the same time, he is liked at court, and is, I believe," the bishop concluded with a chuckle, "one of the most successful breeders of short-horns in the three kingdoms."

The motor-car brought the party back into civilisation. It rolled up the High, past the age-worn fronts of the colleges, brilliantly illuminated now by the tall electric light standards. They flitted by St. Mary's, where Cranmer made his great renunciation, past the new front of Brazenose, up to the now dismantled Carfax.

As they turned The Corn was almost deserted, in a flash they were abreast of the Martyrs' Memorial, and the car was at rest before the doors of Oxford's great hotel.

The three entered the warm, comfortable hall.

"Good-night, father!" Lady Constance said "Good-night, Gerald, I shall go straight up-stairs!"

She kissed her father and brother, and turned to the right towards the lift.

"I think I will have a final smoke, father," Lord Hayle said, "before I go back to college. There's lots of time yet. Shall we go upstairs, or shall we go into the smoking-room?"

"Oh, well, let us go into the smoking-room," said the bishop. "It's a comfortable place."

They gave their coats to an attendant, and went through the door under the stairs into the smoking-room.

No one else was there, though a great fire burned upon the hearth, and drawing two padded armchairs up before it they sat down and lit their cigarettes.

"I think," said the bishop, "that I shall have a glass of Vichy. Will you have anything more, dear boy?"

"No, thanks, father," Lord Hayle answered, "but I will ring the bell for you."

He pressed the button, and the waiter came into the room, shortly afterwards returning with the bishop's aerated water.

Lord Hayle was well known at the Randolph. He sometimes gave dinners there, in preference to using the Mitre or the Clarendon. He and the duke sometimes dined there together.

As he was sitting with his father, quietly talking over the events of the day, one of the managers of the hotel came hurriedly into the smoking-room and up to the earl and the viscount.

"My lord," he said, and his face was very white and agitated. "I fear I have very sad news for you."

There was something in the man's voice that made both the bishop and his son turn round in alarm.

"What is it?" said Lord Hayle.

"My lord," the manager continued, "a telegram has just reached us that there has been a terrible railway accident to the six o'clock train from here to Paddington. We are informed that the Duke of Paddington, your friend, my lord, was in the train, and it is feared that his grace has been killed."

CHAPTER XI

THE DISCOVERY

It really was appalling!

All the others had seen this sort of thing many times, and it did not appeal to them with the same first flush of horror and dismay as it did to Mary Marriott.

She turned to Fabian Rose.

"Oh, Mr. Rose," she said, "it is dreadful, more dreadful than I could ever have thought!"

"There is much worse than this, my dear," he answered in a grave tone, from which all the accustomed mockery had gone. "A painful experience is before you, but you must endure it. At the end of that time – "

Mary looked into the great Socialist's face, and she knew what his unspoken words would have conveyed. She knew well that she was on a trial, a test; that this strange expedition had been devised, not only that her art as an actress might be stimulated to its highest power, but that the very strings of her pity and womanhood should be touched also. Her new friends knew well that when at last she was on the boards of the Park Lane Theatre, acting there for all the rich and fashionable world to see, her work could only accomplish its great mission with success if it came poignantly from her heart.

"Yes," she said in answer to his look, "I am beginning to see, I am beginning to hear the cry of the down-trodden and the oppressed, the wailing of the poor."

Rose nodded gravely.

"Now, Miss Marriott and gentlemen," said Inspector Brown, "we will turn down here, if you please. I should like to show you one or two tenements."

As he spoke he turned to the right, down a narrow alley. Tall, grimy old houses rose up on either side of them, and there was hardly room for two members of the party to walk abreast. The flags upon which they trod were soft with grease and filth. The air was fœtid and chill. It was, indeed, as though they were treading a passage-way to horror!

The whole party came out into a court, a sort of quadrangle some thirty yards by twenty. The space between the houses and the floor of the quadrangle was of beaten earth, though here and there some half-uprooted flagstone showed that it had once been paved. The whole of it was covered with garbage and refuse. Decayed cabbage leaves lay in little pools of greasy water. Old boots and indescribable rags of filthy clothes were piled on heaps of cinders.

As they came into the square Mary shrank back with a little cry; her foot had almost trodden upon a litter of one-day old kittens which had been drowned and flung there.

The houses all round this sinister spot had apparently at one time, though many years ago, been buildings of some substance and importance. Now they wore an indescribable aspect of blindness and misery. There was hardly a whole window in any of the houses. The broken panes were stopped with dirty rags or plastered with newspaper. The doors of the houses stood open, and upon the steps swarms of children – dirty, pale, pallid, and hopeless – squirmed like larvæ. A drunken old woman, her small and ape-like face caked and encrusted with dirt, was reeling from one side of the square to another, singing a hideous song in a cracked gin-ridden voice, which shivered up into the cold, dank air in a forlorn and bestial mockery of music.

"What is this?" Mary said, turning round to the police inspector by her side.

"This, miss," said the bearded man grimly, "is called Taverner's Rents. Every room in these houses is occupied by a family; some rooms are occupied by two families. The people that live here are the poorest of the poor. The boys that sell newspapers, the little shoeless boys and girls who hawk the cheaper kinds of flowers about the streets, the cab-runners, the people who come out at night and pick over the dust-bins for food, those are the people that live here, miss. And there's a fairly active criminal population as well."

Mary shuddered. The inspector noticed her involuntary shrinking.

"Miss," he said, "you have only seen a little of it yet. Wait until I take you inside some of these places, then you will see what life in London can be like."

The clergyman, Mr. Conrad, broke in.

"You have come, Miss Marriott," he said, "now to the home of the utterly degraded and the utterly lost. Nothing I or anybody else can say or do is possible to redeem this generation. Their brains have almost gone, through filth and starvation. They live more terribly than any animal lives. Their lives are too feeble and too awful, either for description or for betterment. It is, indeed, difficult for one who, as myself, believes most thoroughly in the fact that each one of us has an immortal soul, that each one of us in the next world will start again, according to what we have done in this, to realise that the poor creatures whom you have seen now are human. Come!"

It was almost with the slowness and solemnity of a funeral procession that the party passed up the broken steps of one of the houses and entered what had once, in happier bygone days, been the hall of a mansion of some substance and fair-seeming.

The broken stairs stretched up above. The banisters which guarded them had long since been broken and pulled away. The doors all round were almost falling from their hinges.

"Come in here, gentlemen," said the sanitary inspector of the London County Council, pushing a door open with his foot as he did so.

They all followed into a large front room.

A slight fire was burning in a broken grate, and by it, upon a stool, sat an immensely fat woman of middle-age. Her hair was extremely scanty and caught up at the back of her head in a knot hardly bigger than a Tangerine orange. Through the thin dust-coloured threads the dirty pink scalp showed in patches. The face was inordinately large, bloated, and of a waxen yellow. The eyes were little gimlet holes. The mouth, with its thick lips of pale purple, smiled a horrid toothless smile as they came in.

All round the walls of the room were things which had once been mattresses, but from which damp straw was bursting in every direction. These mattresses were black, sodden, and filthy, and upon them – covered, or hardly covered as the case might be, with scraps of old quilt or discarded clothing – lay young children of from one year to eighteen months old. These little mites were almost motionless. Their heads seemed to be extraordinarily large, their unknowing, unseeing eyes blazed in their faces.

The fat woman, suffering from dropsy, rose from her seat and curtsied as she saw the sanitary inspector and his colleagues.

"It is all right, gentlemen," she said in a wee, fawning voice. "There's food on the fire for the little dearies, and they're going to have their meal, bless 'em, as soon as it's boiled up."

She pointed to an iron pot full of something that looked like oatmeal which was simmering upon the few coals.

"That's all right, Mary," the County Council inspector said in a rough but genial voice. "We haven't come to make any trouble to-day. We know you do your best. It is not your fault."