The Return of Don Quixote Read online

  “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.

  “Mostly dye-works and that sort of thing, aren’t they?” asked Murrel, gazing at the forest of factory-chimneys, that began to show through the haze of the horizon.

  “By-products of coal of various kinds,” replied his friend, “used for chemical colours, dyes and enamels, and all sorts of things. It seems to me, in capitalist society, the by-product is getting bigger than the big product. They say your friend Seawood’s millions come much more from the coal-tar products than from the coal– I’ve heard that something of the sort was used for the red coat of the soldier.”

  “And what about the red tie of the Socialist?” asked Murrel reproachfully. “Jack, I cannot believe that red tie of yours is freshly dipped in the blood of aristocrats. Anxious as I am to think well of you, I cannot think you come reeking from the massacre of our old nobility. Besides, I always understood that the blood would be blue. Can it be that you yourself are now a walking advertisement of old What’s-his-name’s dye-works? Buy Our Red Ties. Syndicalist Gents Suited. Mr. John Braintree, the Well-Known Revolutionist, Writes ‘Since Using Your–’”

  “Nobody knows where anything comes from nowadays, Douglas,” said Braintree quietly. “That’s what’s called publicity and popular journalism in a capitalist state. My tie may be made by capitalists; so may yours be made by cannibal islanders for all you know.”

  “Woven out of the whiskers of missionaries,” replied Murrel. “A pleasant thought. And I suppose your work is going on the stump for all these workers.”

  “Their conditions are infamous,” said Braintree, “especially the poor chaps working on some of the dyes and paints and things, which are simple damned poisons and pestilences. They’ve scarcely got any unions worth talking about and their hours are much too long.”

  “It’s long hours that knock a man out most,” agreed Murrel. “Nobody gets enough leisure or fun in this world, do they, Bill?”

  Braintree was perhaps secretly a little flattered by his friend always calling him Jack; but he was wholly unable to understand why, in an excess of intimacy, he should address him as Bill. He was about to ask a question, when a grunt out of the darkness in front of him suddenly reminded him of somebody whose very existence he was bound to admit he had completely forgott
en. It would appear that William was the Christian name of the driver of the omnibus; and that Douglas Murrel was in the habit of addressing him by it. The answering grunt of the person called Bill was sufficient to indicate that he entirely agreed that the hours of proletarian employment were much too long.

  “Well, you’re all right, Bill,” said Murrel. “You’re one of the lucky ones, especially to-night. Old Charley comes on at the Dragon, don’t he?”

  “Why, yes,” said the driver in slow and luxuriantly scornful tones. “’E comes on at the Dragon, but . . .” Leaving the matter there, rather as if coming on at the Dragon were something which even the limited faculties of old Charley might be expected to manage, but that beyond that there was very little ground for consolation.

  “He comes on at the Dragon and we come off at the Dragon,” continued Murrel, “so you can come and have one on me. Show you bear no malice for Golliwog. But I swear I only told you to back him for a place.”

  “Never mind, Sir. Never you mind about that,” observed the benevolent Bill, in a glow of Christian forgiveness. “Never mind having a bit on; and if you lose your bit– why, there you are.”

  “You are indeed,” said Murrel. “And here we are at the Dragon; I suppose somebody’s got to go in and fetch old Charley out.”

  With the worthy object of thus accelerating the service of public vehicles, Murrel appeared suddenly to fall off the top of the omnibus. He fell on his feet, however, having in fact descended by turning a sort of cartwheel in the air on the pivot of a single foothold. He then shouldered his way into the lighted and noisy bar of the Green Dragon, with so resolute a movement that the other two men naturally followed him. The omnibus driver, whose full name was William Pond, followed indeed with no pretence of reluctance. The democratic John Braintree followed with a faint reluctance and some affectation of carelessness. He was neither a prohibitionist nor a prig; and would have drunk beer at any wayside inn on a walking tour naturally enough. But the Green Dragon stood on the outskirts of an industrial town; and the place they entered was not a bar-parlour or a lounge or any of the despicable little cubicles called Private Bars. It was the Public Bar or open and honest place of drinking for the poor. And the moment Braintree stepped across its threshold, he knew he was confronted with something new; with something that he had never touched or tasted or seen or smelt before in all his fifteen years of tub-thumping. There was a good deal to be smelt as well as seen; and much that he did not feel inclined to touch, far less to taste. The place was very hot and densely crowded and full of a deafening clatter of people all talking at once. Many of them did not seem to mind much whether the others were listening or talking at the same time. A great part of the talk was totally unintelligible to him, though evidently full of emphatic expressions; as if a crowd were swearing in Dutch or Portuguese. Every now and then in the stream of rather ugly and unintelligible words one word would occur and an authoritative voice from behind the counter would say: “Now then–now then,” and the expression would be tacitly withdrawn. Murrel had gone up to the counter, nodding to various people and rapped on it with a few coppers asking for four of something.

  So far as the eddying hubbub had any centre, there seemed to be something like a social circle round one small man who was right up against the counter; and that not so much because he was a talker as because he seemed to be a topic. Everybody was making jokes about him, as if he were the weather or the War Office or any recognised theme for the satiric artist. Much of it was direct, as in the form “Goin’ to get married soon, George?” or “What you done with all your money, George?” Other remarks were in the third person, as “Old George ’e’s been going out with the girls too much,” or “I reckon old George got lost in London,” and so on. It was noticeable that this concentrated fire of satire was entirely genial and friendly. It was still more notable that old George himself seemed to feel no sort of annoyance or even surprise at his own mysteriously isolated position as a human target. He was a short, stolid, rather sleepy little man, who stood the whole time with half-closed eyes and a beatific smile, as if this peculiar form of popularity were a never failing pleasure. His name was George Carter, and he was a small green-grocer in those parts. Why he, more than another, should be supposed at any given moment to be in love or lost in London, the visitor could not guess from the talk of two hours, and would probably never have discovered if he had listened to the talk for ten years. The man was simply a magnet; he had some mystical power of attracting to himself all the chaff that might be flying about the room. It was said that he was rather sulky if by any chance he did not get it. Braintree could make nothing of the mystery; but he sometimes thought of it long afterwards, when he heard people talking in Socialistic salons about brutal yokels and savage mobs jeering at anybody defective or eccentric. He wondered whether, perhaps, he had been present at one of these hideous and barbaric scenes.

  Meanwhile, Murrel continued to rap at intervals on the counter and exchange badinage with a large young woman who had apparently tried to make her own hair look like a wig. Then he fell into an interminable dispute with the man next him about whether some horse or other could win by some particular number of sections of lengths; the difference being apparently one of degree and not of fundamental principle. The debate did not advance very rapidly to any final conclusion, as it consisted mostly of the repetition of the premises over and over again with ever-increasing firmness. These two disputants were polite as well as firm; but their conversation was somewhat embarrassed by the conduct of an immensely tall and lank and shabby man with drooping moustaches, who leaned across them, talking all the time, in a well-meant effort to refer the point in dispute to the gloomy Braintree.

  “I know a gentleman when I see him,” repeated the long man at intervals, “and I arsk ’im . . . I jest arsk ’im, as a gentleman; I know a gentleman when I–”

  “I’m not a gentleman,” said the Syndicalist, with some bitterness.

  The long man tried to lean over him with vast fatherly gestures, like one soothing a fretful child.

  “Now, don’t you say that, sir,” said the fatherly person. “Don’t say that . . . I know a real toff when I see ’im, and I put it to you–”

  Braintree turned away with a jerk and collided with a large navvy covered with white dust, who apologised with admirable amiability and then spat on the sawdust floor.

  That night was like a nightmare. To John Braintree it seemed to be as endless as it was meaningless, and yet wildly monotonous. For Murrel took his festive bus-driver on a holiday to bar after bar, not really drinking very much, not drinking half so much as a solitary duke or don might drink out of a decanter of port, but drinking it to the accompaniment of endless gas and noise and smell and incessant interminable argument; argument that might truly be called interminable, in the literal sense that it did not seem even capable of being terminated. When the sixth public house resounded to booming shouts of “Time,” and the crowds were shuffled and shunted out of it and the shutters put up, the indefatigable Murrel began a corresponding tour of coffee-stalls, with the laudable object of ensuring sobriety. Here he ate thick sandwiches and drank pale-brown coffee, still arguing with his fellow-creatures about the points of horses and the prospects of sporting events. Dawn was breaking over the hills and the fringe of factory chimneys, when John Braintree suddenly turned to his friend and spoke in a tone which compelled his attention.

  “Douglas,” he said, “you needn’t act your allegory any more. I always knew you were a clever fellow, and I begin to have some notion of how your sort have continued to manage a whole nation for so long; but I’m not quite a fool myself. I know what you mean. You haven’t said it with your own tongue, but you’ve said it with ten thousand other tongues to-night. You’ve said, ‘Yes, John Braintree, you can get on all right with the nobs. It’s the mobs you can’t get on with. You’ve spent an hour in the drawing-room and told them all about Shakespeare and the musical glasses. Now that you’ve spent a nig
ht in the poor streets, tell me– which of us know the people best?’”

  Murrel was silent. After a moment the other went on.

  “It is the best answer you could make, and I won’t trouble you now with answers to it. I might tell you something about why we shrink from these things more than you; about how you can play with them and we have had to fight them. But I’d rather just now show you that I understand and that I don’t bear malice.”

  “I know you don’t,” answered Murrel. “Our friend in the pub didn’t select his terms very tactfully; but there was something in what he said about your being a gentleman. Well, this is, let us hope, the last of my practical jokes.”

  But he had not done with practical jokes that day; for as he came back through the garden of Seawood he saw something which startled him; the ladder from the library leaning against a tool-shed. He stopped, and his good-humoured face grew almost grim.

  * * *

  CHAPTER VI

  A COMMISSION AS COLOURMAN

  As Murrel gazed there gradually grew upon his mind (which was perhaps clearing itself rather slowly of many festive fumes) the sense of one result of his nonsensical nocturnal expedition or experiment in the education of revolutionists. He had been out all night and had seen nothing of what had lately been happening to his friends and their theatricals. But he remembered that it was almost exactly at this moment of the morning, with its long, fine tapering shadows and faint, far-flung flush of dawn, that he had abandoned his painting of the scenery and plunged into the library in pursuit of the librarian. He had left the librarian at the top of the ladder a little more than twenty-four hours ago. And here was the ladder thrown away like lumber in the garden, spotted with mildew, a skeleton on which spiders flung their silvery morning webs. What had happened, and why was that particular piece of furniture thus thrown out into the garden? He remembered Julian Archer’s jokes, and his face contracted with a spasm of annoyance as he walked hastily towards the library and looked in.