The Socialist

Upon the Chelsea Embankment there is a house which, for some months after its new occupants had taken possession of it, was an object of considerable interest to those who passed by.

People used to point there, at that time, and tell each other that "That's where the Socialist duke and his actress wife have gone to live. The Duke of Paddington —you know! – gave up all his possessions, or nearly all, to be held in trust for the Socialists. They say that he's half mad, never recovered from being captured by those burglars on the night of the big railway smash on the G.E.R."

"Silly Juggins!" would be the reply. "Wish I'd have had it. You wouldn't see me giving it all up – not half!"

But for several years the house has been just like any ordinary house and few people point to it or talk about it any more.

There have been hundreds of sensations since the duke and his wife settled down in Chelsea.

* * * * * *

It was about one o'clock in the afternoon.

The duke sat in his library in Cheyne Walk. It was a large and comfortable room, surrounded by books, with a picture here and there which the discerning eye would have immediately seen to be of unusual excellence, and, indeed, surprising in such a house as this. A barrister earning his two thousand a year, a successful doctor not quite in the first rank, a county court Judge or a Clerk in the Houses of Parliament would have had just such a room – save only for the three pictures.

The duke had changed considerably in appearance during the past five years.

The boyishness had departed. The serenity and impassivity of a great prince who had never known anything but a smooth seat high upon Olympus had gone also.

The face, now strong with a new kind of strength, showed the marks and gashes of Experience. It was the mask of a man who had done, suffered, and learned, but it was, nevertheless, not a very happy face.

There was, certainly, nothing of discontent in it. But there was a persistent shadow of thought – a brooding.

Much water had flowed under the bridge since the night at the theatre when he had made a public renunciation of almost everything that was his.

Life had not been placid, and for many reasons. There had been the long and terribly difficult breaking away from his own class and order, for he had not been allowed to go into "outer darkness" without a protracted struggle.

All the forces of the world had arrayed themselves against him. The wisest, the most celebrated, the highest placed, had combined together in that they might prevent this dreadful thing.

He was not as other men.

Hardly a great and stately house in England but was connected with him by ties of kindred. His falling away was a menace to all of them in its opening of possibilities, a real grief to many of them. There had been terrible hours of expostulation, dreadful scenes of sorrow and recrimination.

Compromise had assailed him on every side. His wife would have been received everywhere – it was astonishing how Court and Society had discovered that Mary Marriott was one of themselves after all – a "Mem-Sahib." He could do what he liked within reason, and still keep his place.

A prime minister had pointed out to him that no one at all would object to his countenance of the Socialistic party. He might announce his academic adherence to Socialism as often and as loudly as he pleased. It would, indeed, be a good thing for Socialism, in which – so his lordship was pleased to say – there was indubitably a germ of economic good. All great movements had begun slowly. These things must ripen into good and prove themselves by their own weight. But it was economically wrong, and subversive of all theories of progress, that a sudden and overpowering weight should be put into one side of the scale by a single individual.

"It will disturb everything" said the Prime Minister. "And any one who, from an individual opinion, disturbs the balance of affairs is doing grave, and perhaps irreparable, harm."

In short, they would have allowed him to do anything, but give up his PROPERTY. They would have let him marry any one if he did not give up his PROPERTY.

For all of them had won their property and sovereignty by predatory strength throughout the centuries, or the years. Landowners of ancient descent, millionaires of yesterday, all knew the power of what they held and had. All loved that power and were determined to keep it for themselves and their descendants… And, all had sons, young and generous of mind as yet, to whom the duke's example might prove an incentive to a repetition of such an abnegation.

They were very shrewd and far-seeing, all these people. Collectively, they were the most cultured, beautiful, and charming folk in England. They were the rulers of England, and by birth, temper, and inheritance he was one of them. The pressure put upon him had been enormous, the strain terrible.

A resolution made in a moment of great emotion, and an enthusiasm fostered by every incident of time and circumstance, seems a very different thing regarded dispassionately when the blood is cool, and, so to speak, the footlights are lowered, the curtain down, the house empty.

Once, indeed, he had nearly given in. He had been sent for privately to the Palace, and some wise and kindly words had been spoken to him there by A Personage to whom he could not but listen with the gravest and most loyal attention.

Compromise was once more suggested, he was bidden to remember his order and his duty to it. He was again told that his opinions were his own, that short of taking the irrevocable step he might do almost anything.

Nor does a young man whose inherited instincts are all in fierce war with his new convictions listen unmoved to gracious counsel such as this from the Titular Head of all nobility, for whose ancestors his own had bled on many a historic field.

He had stood quite alone. Mary Marriott, his wife that was to be, had given him no help. Tender, loving, ready to marry him at any cost, she nevertheless stood aloof from influencing his decision in the hour of trial.

He tried hard to get help and support from her, to make her love confirm his resolution, but he tried in vain. With the clear sanity of a noble mind, the girl refused to throw so much as a feather-weight into the scale of the balance, though in this she also suffered (secretly) as much as he.

Then he went to the others, sick and sore from the buffetings he was receiving at all hands – from his own order and from the great public press they influenced, from the great solid middle-class of the country which, more than anything else perhaps, preserves the level of wise-dealing and order in England. The others were as dumb as the girl he loved. It was true that a section of the Socialist party, the noisy, blatant – and possibly insincere – big drum party, hailed him as prophet, seer, martyr, and Galahad in one. But there was a furious vulgarity about this sort of thing which was more unnerving, and made him more wretched than anything else at all. Such people spoke a different language from his own, a different language from that of Fabian Rose and his friends. They said the same thing perhaps – he was inclined to doubt even that sometimes – but the dialect offended fastidious ears, the attitude offended one accustomed to a certain comeliness and reticence even in the new life and surroundings into which he had been thrown. Both the Pope and General Booth, for example, serve One Master, and live for Our Lord. But it is conceivable that if the Bishop of Rome could be present at a mass meeting of the Salvation Army in the Albert Hall, he would leave it a very puzzled and disgusted prelate indeed.

Rose and his friends avoided influencing the duke, of set purpose. They were high-minded men and women, but they were also psychologists, and trained deeply in the one science which can dominate the human mind and human opinion.

They wanted the Duke of Paddington badly. They wanted the enormous impetus to the movement that his accession would bring; they wanted the great revenues which would provide sinews of war for a vast campaign. But they knew that nothing would be more disastrous than an illustrious convert who would fall away. The duke had been left alone.

For a month after the few words he had addressed to the people at the theatre supper, the struggle had continued. His name was in every one's mouth. It would not be too much to say that all Europe set itself to wonder what would be the outcome. The journals of England and the Continent teemed with denunciation, praise, sneers. Tolstoi sent a long message – the thing fermented furiously, and, instructed by the journalists, even the man in the street recognised that here was something more than even the renunciation of one man of great possessions for an idea – that it would create – one way or the other – a disintegrating or binding force, that a precedent would establish itself, that vast issues were involved.

After a week of it, the duke disappeared. Only a few of his friends knew where he was, and they were pledged not to say. He was fighting it out alone in a little mountain village of the Riviera – Roquebume, which hangs like a bird's nest on the Alps between Monte Carlo and Mentone, and where the patient friendly olive growers of the mountain steppes never knew who the quiet young Englishman was who sat in the little auberge under the walls of the Saracen stronghold and watched the goats and the children rolling in the warm dusk, or stared steadfastly out over the Mediterranean far below, to where the distant cliffs of Corsica gleamed like pearls in the sun.

He came back to England, his decision made, his first resolve strengthened into absolute, assured purpose. The ruffians who had kidnapped him on the night of the railway accident had been unable to torture him into buying his freedom. For what to him would have been nothing – a penny to a beggar – he might have gone free. And yet he had nearly died rather than give in. Save for the chance or Providence which brought his rescuers to him in the very last moment, he would have died – there is no doubt about it.

Now again, he was firm as granite. His mind was made up, nothing could alter it nor move it. His hand had been placed upon the plough. It was going to remain there, and he left the palms and orange groves of the South a man doubly vowed. He had married at once. Mary Marriott became a duchess. Several problems arose. Should he drop his title – that was one of them. He refused to do so, and in his refusal was strongly backed up by the real leaders of the movement. "You were born Duke of Paddington," said Rose, "and there is no earthly reason why you should become Mr. John something or other. It would only be a pretence, and if you do, I shall change my own name to James Fabian Turnip! and as I have always told you Socialism never says that all men are equal – true Socialism that is. It only says that all men have equal rights! At the same time some of our noisy friends will go for you – though you won't mind that!" They did "go for" him. Despite the fact that he had given up everything – his friends and relatives, his order, his tastes, there was not wanting a certain section of the baser socialistic press which spoke of "The young man with great possessions" who would give up much but not all; like all professional sectarians, rushing to the Gospels in an extremity to pick and choose a few comfortable texts from the history of One whom they alternately held up as the First Great Socialist, and then denied His definite claims to be the Veritable Son of God.

The duke minded their veiled sarcasms not at all; an open attack was never dared. But the attitude gave him pain, and much material forethought. They were always quoting "The Christ," "The Man Jesus." They continually pointed out – as it suited them upon occasion – that private property, privilege, and monopoly were attacked by Jesus, who left no doubt as to the nature of His mission.

They said, and said truly enough, that "He pictured Dives, a rich man, plunged into torment, for nothing else than for being rich when another was poor; while Lazarus, who had been nothing but poor and afflicted, is comforted and consoled. For that, those Evangelical-Nonconformists, the Pharisees, who were covetous, derided him. By the force of His personality (it was not the scourge that did it!), He drove the banking fraternity (who practised usury then as they do to-day) out of their business quarters in the Temple, and named them thieves. 'Woe to you rich, who lay up treasures, property, on earth,' He cried. And 'Blessed are ye poor, who relinquish property and minister to each other's needs,' He cried." And yet, in the same breath with which they spoke of this Supreme Man they denied His Divinity, trying to prove Him, at the same moment, an inspired Socialist, and what is more a very practical One, and also a Dreamer who spoke in simile of His claims to Godhead, or, and this was the more logical conclusion of their premisses, a conscious Pretender and Liar.

"He was," they said, "a Seer, as the ancient prophets were, as John, Paul, Francis of Assisi, Luther, Swedenborg, Fox, and Wesley, were. Such men, modern Spiritualists and Theosophists would call 'mediums.' So great was He in wisdom and power of the spirit, that in His own day He was called 'the Son of God,' as well as 'the Son of Man,' – that is, the pre-eminent, the God-like, Man."

Who need dispute over the stories of the "miracles" wrought by Him and His disciples? To-day, no scientific person would say they were impossible; we have learned too much of the power of "mind" over "matter," for that, by now. There were well-attested marvels in all ages, and in our own living day, which were not less "miraculous" than the Gospel miracles. Therefore, they would not reject the story of Jesus because He was affirmed to have worked many signs and wonders.

The Sermon on the Mount, therefore, was a piece of practical politics which was epitomised in the saying "Love one another." The clear and definite statements which Jesus made then ought to obtain to-day in their literal letter. The equally clear and definite statements which Jesus made as to His own Divine Origin were the misty utterances of a "medium"! The Incarnation was not a fact.

"Love one another" was the supreme rule of conduct – which made it odd and bewildering that the young man who had given up everything should be covertly assailed for holding fast to the name in which he had been born. But the duke steeled himself. He honestly realised that class hatred must still exist for generations and generations. It was not the fault of one class, or the other, it was the inevitable inheritance of blood. Yet he found himself less harsh in spirit than most of those who forgot his sacrifices, and grudged him his habits of speaking in decent English, of courteous manner, of taste, of careful attention to his finger nails. To his sorrow he found that many of them still hated him for these things – despite everything they hated him. For his part he merely disliked, not them, but the absence in them of these things. But from the first he found his way was hard and that his renunciation was a renunciation indeed. He threw himself into the whole Socialistic movement with enormous energy, but his personal consolations were found in the sympathy and society of people like the Roses, and their set – cultured and brilliant men and women who were, after all was said and done, "Gentlefolk born!"

After his marriage, months had been taken up with the legal business, protracted and beset with every sort of difficulty, by which he had devised his vast properties to the movement.

He was much criticised for retaining a modest sum of two thousand pounds a year for himself and his wife – until James Fabian Rose with a pen dipped in vitriol and a tongue like a whip of steel neatly flayed the objectors and finished them off with a few characteristic touches of his impish Irish wit.

Then – would he go to court? – a down-trodden working-man couldn't go to court. If he was going to be a Socialist, let him be a Socialist – and so on.

For this sort of thing, again, the duke did not care. The only critic and judge of his actions was himself, his conscience. He went to court, Mary was presented also. They were kindly received. High minds can appreciate highmindedness, however much the point of view may differ.

Mary was two things. First of all she was the Duchess of Paddington. It was made quite plain to her that, though perhaps she was not the duchess for whom many people had hoped, she was indubitably of the rank. Gracious words were said to her as duchess. Even kinder words were said to her upon another and more private occasion, as one of those great artists whom Royalty has always been delighted to honour – recognising a sovereignty quite alien to its own but still real!

As for the duke, he had a certain privilege at the levées. It belonged to his house. It was his right to stand a few paces behind the Lord Chamberlain, and when any representatives of the noble family of – appeared before the Sovereign, to draw his court sword and step near to the King – an old historic custom the reasons for which were nearly forgotten, but which was still part of the pomp and pageantry of the Royal palace.

Upon one occasion after his renunciation, he appeared at St. James's and exercised his ancient right. There was no opposition, nothing unkind, upon the faces of any of the great persons there. The ceremony was gone through with all its traditional dignity, but every one there felt that it was an assertion – and a farewell! The duke himself knew it at the time, and as he left St. James's he may be pardoned if, for a moment, old memories arose in him, and that his eyes were dimmed with a mist of unshed tears as the modest brougham drove him back to his house in Cheyne Walk. How kind they had all been! How sympathetic in their way, how highly bred! Yes! it was worth while to be one of them! It was worth while to live up to the traditions which so many of them often forgot. But one could still do that, one could still keep the old hereditary chivalry of race secret and inviolable in the soul, and yet live for the people, love the poor, the outcast, the noisy, the vulgar, those whom Our Lord, who counselled tribute to reason, loved best of all!.. These things are an indication, not a history of the events of the first eighteen months after the Duke of Paddington's marriage.

The story provides a glimpse into some of his difficulties, that is to say, difficulties which were semi-public and patent to his intimate circle of friends, if not, perhaps, to all the rest of the world. Nevertheless, giving all that he had given, he found himself confronted with yet another problem, which was certainly the worst of all. He had married Mary, he loved her and reverenced her as he thought no man had ever reverenced and loved a girl before. She loved and appreciated him also. Theirs was a perfect welding and fusion of identity and hopes. But she was an actress. Her love for her Art had been direct and overwhelming from the very first. She had given all her life and talent to it. For her it had all the sacredness of a real vocation. She was, and always would be, a woman vowed to her Art as truly and strongly as an innocent maiden puts on the black veil and vows herself to Christ. Nor is this a wrong comparison, because there are very many ways of doing things to the glory of God, and God gives divers gifts to divers of his children. And so this also had to be faced by the duke. Since the night upon which her great opportunity had come to her, Mary had never looked back.