The Socialist

Her success, then, had been supreme and overwhelming, and, apart from all the romantic circumstances which had attended it, her position upon the stage had grown into one which was entirely apart from anything outside her Art.

The world now – after five years – still knew that she was a duchess – if she chose, that was how the world put it – but the fact had little or no significance for the public. She was just Mary Marriott – their own Mary – and if she so often spent her genius in interpreting the brilliant socialistic plays of James Fabian Rose – well, what of that? They went to see her play in the plays, not, in the first instance, to see the play itself. And even after that, Rose was always charming – there was always a surprise and a delightfully subversive point of view. One went home to Bayswater and West Kensington "full of new ideas," and certainly full of enthusiasm for beautiful Mary Marriott. "What a darling she is, mother!" … "Charming indeed, Gertie. And do not forget that she is, after all, the Duchess of Paddington. Of course the duke gave up his fortune to the Socialists some years ago, but they are still quite wealthy. Maud knows them. Your Aunt Maud was there to an afternoon reception only last week. Every one was there. All the leading lights! They have renounced society, of course, but quite a lot of the best people pop in all the same – so your Aunt Maud tells me – and, of course, all the leading painters and actors and writers, and so on. And, of course, they can go anywhere they like directly they give up this amusing socialistic pose. They're even asked down to Windsor. The King tolerates the young duke with his mad notions, and of course Miss Marriott is received on other grounds too – like Melba and Patti and Irving, don't you know. Nothing like real Art, Gertie! It takes you anywhere." Such statements as these were only half true. Every one came to the duke's house who was any one in the world of Art. But they came to see his wife, not to see him. And despite the rumours of Bayswater his own class left him severely alone by now. The years had passed, his property was no longer his, he had very definitely "dropped out." The duke did not care for "artistic" people, and he knew that they didn't care for him. He could not understand them, and on their part they thought him dull and uninteresting. There was no common ground upon which they could meet. Many of the people who came were actors and actresses, and when it had been agreed between Mary and her husband that she was to continue her artistic career, he had not contemplated the continual invasion and interruption of his home life which this was to mean. He had a prodigious admiration for Mary's talent; it had seemed, and still seemed, to him the most wonderful thing in the world. His ideal had been from the first a life of noble endeavour for the good of the world. He had given up everything he held dear, and would spend the rest of his life in active service for the cause of Socialism. Mary would devote her supreme art to the same cause. But there would also be a hidden, happy life of love and identity of aim which would be perfect. They had done exactly as he had proposed. His enthusiasm for the abstract idea of Socialism had never grown less – was stronger than ever now. Mary's earnestness and devotion was no less than his. In both of them the flame burned pure and brightly still.

But the duke knew by this time that nothing had turned out as he expected and hoped. His home life was non-existent. His work was incessant, but the Cause seemed to be making no progress whatever. It remained where it had stood when he had just made his great renunciation.

The vested interests of Property were too strong. A Liberal and semi-socialistic government had tried hard, but had somehow made a mess of things. The House of Lords had refused its assent to half a dozen bills, and its members had only smiled tolerantly at the Duke of Paddington's fervid speeches in favour of the measures which were sent up from the Lower House. And worse than this, the duke saw, the Socialists saw, every one saw, that the country was in thorough sympathy with the other party, that at the next general election the Conservatives would be returned by an overwhelming majority. And there was one other thing, a personal, but very real thing, which contributed to the young man's general sense of weariness and futility of endeavour. He loved his wife with the same dogged and passionate devotion with which he had won her. He knew well that her own love for him was as strong as ever. But, as far as she was concerned, there was so little time or opportunity for an expression of it. She was a public woman, a star of the first rank in Art and in affairs. Her day was occupied in rehearsals at the theatre or in public appearances upon the socialistic platform. Her nights were exercised in the practice of her Art upon the stage.

Sometimes he went to see his wife act, but his pride and joy in her achievement was always tempered and partly spoiled by a curious – but very natural —physical jealousy which he was quite unable to subdue. It offended and wounded all his instincts to see some painted posing actor holding his own wife – the Duchess of Paddington! – in his arms and making a pretended love to her. It was all pretence, of course; it was simply part of the inevitable mechanism of "Art" ("Oh, damn Art," he would sometimes say to himself very heartily), but it was beastly all the same. He had to meet the actor-men in private life. First with surprise, and then with a disgust for which he had no name, he watched their self-consciousness of pose, their invincible absorption in a petty self, their straining efforts to appear as gentlemen, their failure to convince any one but their own class that they were real human beings at all – that they were any more than empty shells into which the personality of this or that creative genius nightly poured the stuff that made the puppets work. No doubt his ideas were all wrong and distorted. But they were very real, and ever present with him. Nor was it nice to know that any horrid-minded rascal with a few shillings in his fob could buy the nightly right to sit and gloat over Mary's charm, Mary's beauty. It was a violation of his inherited beliefs and impulses, though, if it had been another man's wife, and not his own, he would probably not have cared in the least!

* * * * * *

So the Duke of Paddington sat in the library of his house in Chelsea. It was a Saturday afternoon. There was a matinée, and Mary had rushed off after an early lunch. The duke felt very much alone. He had no particular engagement that afternoon. His correspondence he had finished during the morning, and he was now a little at a loss how to occupy his time. At the moment life seemed rather hollow and empty, the very aspect of his comfortable room was somehow distasteful, and, though he did not feel ill, he had a definite sensation of physical mis-ease.

"I must have some exercise," he thought to himself. "I suppose it's a touch of liver."

He debated whether he should go to the German gymnasium for an hour, to swim at the Bath Club, or merely to walk through the town. He decided for the walk. Thought and pedestrianism went well together, and the other two alternatives were not conducive to thought. He wanted to think. He wanted to examine his own sensations, to analyse the state of his mind, to find out from himself and for himself if he really were unhappy and dissatisfied with his life, if he had made a frightful mistake or no. It was late autumn. The weather was neither warm nor cold. There was no fog nor rain, but everything was grey and cheerless of aspect. The sky was leaden, and there was a peculiar and almost sinister lividity in the wan light of the afternoon.

He walked along the Embankment dreamily enough. The movement was pleasant – he had certainly not taken enough exercise lately! – and he tried to postpone the hour of thought, the facing of the question.

When he had crossed the head of the Vauxhall Bridge road, and traversed the rather dingy purlieus of Horseferry, he came out by the Lords' entrance to the Houses of Parliament. The Victoria Tower in all its marvellous modern beauty rose up into the sky, white and incredibly massive against the background of grey. The house was sitting, so he saw from the distant, drooping flag above; but it was many months now since he had ventured into the Upper Chamber. As he came along his heart suddenly began to beat more rapidly than usual, and his face flushed a little. A small brougham just set down the Archbishop of Canterbury as the duke arrived at the door – the man whom in the past he had known so well and liked so much, Lord Camborne, to whose daughter the duke had been engaged – Lord Camborne, older now, stooping a little, but no less dignified and serene. Time had not robbed the bishop and earl of any of his stateliness of port, and the Primate of All England was still one of the most striking figures of the day.

He turned and saw the duke. The two men had never met nor spoken since the day upon which the younger had told of his new convictions. The archbishop hesitated for a moment. His fine old face grew red, and then paled again; there was a momentary flicker of indecision about the firm, proud mouth. Then he held out his hand, with a smile, but a smile in which there was a great deal of sadness.

"Ah, John!" he said, shaking his venerable head. "Ah, John! so we meet again after all these years. How are you? Happy, I hope? – God bless you, my dear fellow."

A pang, like a spear-thrust, traversed the young man's heart as he took that revered and trembling hand.

"I am well, your Grace," he said slowly, "and I'm happy."

"Thank God for it," returned the archbishop, "Who has preserved your Grace" – he put a special and sorrowful accent upon the form of address the younger man shared with him – "for His own purposes, and has given you His grace! as I believe and hope."

And then, something kindly and human coming into his face and voice, the ceremonial gone from both, he said: "Dear boy, years ago I never thought that we should meet like this – as duke and as archbishop. I hoped that you would have called me father! And since dear Hayle's death … Well, I am a lonely old man now, John. My daughter has other interests. I am not long for this world. I spend the last of my years in doing what I can for England, according to the light within me. As you do also, John, I don't doubt it. Good-bye, good-bye – I am a little late as it is. Pray, as I pray, that we may all meet in Heaven."

And with these last kindly words the old man went away, and the Duke of Paddington never saw him again, for in five months he was dead and the Church mourned a wise and courtly prelate.

The duke went on. Melancholy filled his mind. He never heard a voice now like that of the man he had just left. It brought back many memories of the past. He wasn't among the great of the world any more. The people who filled his house in Chelsea were clever and charming no doubt. But they weren't his people. He had departed from the land of his inheritance. He was no longer a prince and a ruler among rulers and princes. The waters of Babylon were not as those of Israel, and in his heart he wept.

… It was to be an afternoon of strain and stress. As he went up Parliament Street towards Trafalgar Square he met a long line of miserable sandwich men. Upon their wooden tabards he saw his wife's name "King's Theatre – Miss Mary Marriott's Hundredth Night," and so forth. And as he turned into Pall Mall – for half unconsciously his feet were leading him to a club in St. James's Street to which he still belonged – he received another shock.

A victoria drove rapidly down the street of clubs, and in it, lovely and incomparable in her young matronhood, sat the Marchioness of Dover, Constance Camborne that had been, now the supreme leader and arbitrix of Vanity Fair. She saw him, she recognised him, and he knew it. But she made no sign, not a muscle of her face relaxed as the carriage whirled by. Once more the duke felt very much alone.

* * * * * *

He went into the club – it was the famous old Cocoa Tree – sat down and began to read the evening papers. He lay back upon the circular seat of padded crimson leather that surrounds the central column of the Tree itself. Few people were in the club this afternoon, and as he glanced upwards to where the chocolate-coloured column disappears through the high Georgian ceiling, a sense came to him that he was surrounded by the shades of those august personalities who had thronged this exclusive place of memories in the past – Lord Byron, Gibbon; farther back, Lord Alvanley, Beau Brummell, and the royal dukes of the Regency. Their pictures hung upon the walls – peers, statesmen, royalties, they all seemed crowding out of the frames, and to be pressing upon him now. Stately figures all and each, ghostly figures of men who had lived and died in many ways, well or ill, but all people who had ruled– men of his own caste and clan.

He was overwrought and tired. His imagination, never a very insistent quality with him, was roused by the physical dejection of his nerves to an unusual activity. And in the back of his brain was the remembrances of recent meetings – the meeting with the Primate who might have been his father-in-law; the meeting with the radiant and high-bred young woman whose husband he himself might have been.

… A grave servant in the club's livery came up to him, with a pencilled memorandum upon a silver tray.

"This has just come through by telephone, your Grace," he said. "The telephone boy did not know that your Grace was in the house, or he would have called you. As it was the boy took down the message." This was the message:

"Hoping to see you Bradlaugh Hall, Bermondsey, to-night. Slap-up meeting arranged, and a few words from you will be much appreciated. To-night we shall bump if not much mistaken. Wot O for the glorious cause.

    "SAM JONES, M.P."

The duke folded up the message and placed it in his pocket.

Yes! he was now little more than the figurehead, the complacent doll, whose jerky movements were animated and controlled by Labour Members of Parliament, captains of "hunger marchers" brigades and such-like "riff-raff" – no! of course "salt of the earth!"

Struggling with many conflicting thoughts – old hopes and desires now suddenly and startlingly reawakened, strong convictions up and arming themselves in array against inherited predisposition, a tired and not happy brain, at war with itself and all its environment – he rose from his seat and passed out of the room through the huge mahogany doors. He walked by the tiny room where the hall porter sits, and mounted the few stairs which lead to the lobby in front of the doors of the dining-rooms. The electric "column printer" machines were clicking and ticking, while the long white rolls of paper, imprinted in faint purple with the news of the last hour, came pouring slowly out of the glass case, while a much-buttoned page boy was waiting to cut up the slips, and paste them upon the green baize board under their respective headings.

The duke went up to one of the machines, and held up the running cascade of printed paper. As he did so, this was what he saw and read:

3.30. MR. ARTHUR BURNSIDE, THE BRILLIANT YOUNG BARRISTER, SOCIALIST M.P., AND A TRUSTEE OF THE DUKE OF PADDINGTON'S PROPERTY SHARING SCHEME, HAS BEEN RUN OVER BY A MOTOR OMNIBUS. THE INJURED GENTLEMAN WAS AT ONCE TAKEN TO THE HOUSE OF MR. JAMES FABIAN ROSE BEHIND THE ABBEY.

LATER. MR. BURNSIDE IS SINKING FAST. SIR FREDERICK DAVIDSON GIVES NO HOPE. MR. ROSE AND ALL OTHER LEADERS OF SOCIALIST PARTY ARE AWAY IN MANCHESTER EXCEPT DUKE PADDINGTON, WHOSE WHEREABOUTS ARE UNCERTAIN.

The duke dropped the paper. The machine went on ticking and clicking, but he did not wish to read any more.

So Burnside was dying! – Burnside who had been the impulse, the ultimate force which had finally directed his own change of attitude towards life and its problems, his great renunciation.

Quite as in a dream, still without any vivid sense of the reality of things, the duke turned to the left, entered the lavatory, and began to wash his hands. He hardly knew what he was doing, but, suddenly, he heard his conscious brain asking him – "Is this symbolic and according to a terrible precedent? Of what are you washing your hands?"

Then, putting the thought away from him, as a man fends off some black horror of the sleepless hours of night by a huge effort of will he went out of the place, found his hat and stick and got into a cab, telling the driver to go to Westminster as if upon a matter of life and death!

* * * * * *

Burnside lay quite pale and quiet in that very bedroom where the duke had once lain in pain and exhaustion – how many years ago it seemed now! how much further away than any mere measure of time as we know it by the calendar it really was! A discreet nurse in hospital uniform was there, sitting quietly by the bedside. A table was covered with bandages and bottles, there was a faint chemical fragrance in the air – iodoform perhaps – and a young doctor, left behind by the great ones who had departed, moved silently about the place.

Burnside was conscious. He turned eyes in which the light and colour were fading towards the new arrival.

"Ah!" he said, in a voice which seemed to come from a great distance. "So there is some one after all! You opened the door to me in the past, duke. And it is strange that you have come here now, after all this time, to close it gently behind me again."

"My poor old fellow," the duke said. "It's heartbreaking to find you like this – you from whom we all hoped so much! But what … I mean, I wish Rose and all the rest of them could be here."

"Never mind, duke, you're here. And Some One Else is coming soon."

The duke did not understand the words of the dying man. But he sat down beside the bed and held a hand that was ice-cold and the fingers of which twitched now and then. The duke felt, dimly, that there ought to be a clergyman here. In his own way he was a religious man. He went to church on Sundays and said "Our Father," and such variations of the prayer as suggested themselves to him, quite frequently.

Of the constant Presence of the Supernatural or Supernormal in the life of the Catholic Church, the duke knew nothing at all. His spiritual life had never been more than an embryo; he was surrounded by people, in the present, many of whom were frankly contemptuous of Christianity, some of whom avowedly hated it, others who called Jesus the Great Socialist, but denied His Divinity. He had never discussed religious matters with his wife, except in the most casual and superficial way. Much as he loved her, certain as he was of her love for him, their lives were lived, to a certain extent, apart. Her Art, his work for Socialism, kept them busy in their own spheres – and her Art, also, had become a most powerful weapon of the socialistic crusade – and left them tired at the close of each crowded day. There was never time or opportunity for talk about religion – for confidences. The duke had known – had always had a sort of vague idea – that Burnside was what some people call "A High Churchman." He knew that his friend belonged to the Christian Social Union, was a friend of the Bishop of Birmingham, lived by a certain rule. But Burnside had never obtruded the Christian Social Union upon that larger and more militant, that political socialism with which the duke was chiefly connected. Burnside had always known that the time was not yet ripe for that. The duke had never realised at all the quietly growing force within the English Catholic Church.

… He held the hand of the dying man, and a singular sense of companionship, identity of feeling came to him, as he did so. It seemed to be stronger even than his grief and sorrow, and much as he had always liked and appreciated Burnside, he now experienced the sensation of being nearer to him than ever before.

Burnside moved his head a little. "You can talk," he said. "Thank God, my head is quite clear, and I am in hardly any pain. I have several hours yet to live, the doctors tell me. Something will happen to me in four or five hours, and I shall then pass away quite simply. Sir William, God bless him, didn't tell me any of the soothing lies that doctors have to tell people. He saw the case was hopeless, and he was good enough to be explicit!"

There was something so calm and certain in the barrister's voice, that the other man's nerves were calmed too. He saw the whole situation with that momentary certainty of intuition which comes to every one now and then, and which is a habit with a great soldier or doctor – a Lord Roberts or Sir William Gull.

"Yes, let's talk, then," he answered in a calm, even voice. "I need hardly tell you, old fellow, what this means to me, and what it means to the movement."