Simon the Jester

CHAPTER XVIII

One day I had walked from Cadogan Gardens with a gadfly phrase of Lola's tormenting my ears:

“You're not quite alive even yet.”

I had spent most of the day over a weekly article for James's high-toned periodical, using the same old shibboleths, proclaiming Gilead to be the one place for balm, juggling with the same old sophistries, and proving that Pope must have been out of his mind when he declared that an honest man was the noblest work of God, seeing that nobler than the most honest man was the disingenuous government held up to eulogy; and I had gone tired, dispirited, out of conceit with myself to Lola for tea and consolation. I had not been the merriest company. I had spoken gloomily of the cosmos, and when Adolphus the Chow dog had walked down the room in his hind legs, I had railed at the futility of canine effort. To Lola, who had put forth all her artillery of artless and harmless coquetry in voice and gesture, in order to lure my thoughts into pleasanter ways, I exhibited the querulous grumpiness of a spoiled village octogenarian. We discussed the weather, which was worth discussing, for the spring, after long tarrying, had come. It was early May. Lola laughed.

“The spring has got into my blood.”

“It hasn't got into mine,” I declared. “It never will. I wonder what the deuce is the matter with me.”

Then Lola had said, “My dear Simon, I know. You're not quite alive even yet.”

I walked homewards pestered by the phrase. What did she mean by it? I stopped at the island round the clock-tower by Victoria Station and bought a couple of newspapers. There, in the centre of the whirlpool where swam dizzily omnibuses, luggage-laden cabs, whirling motors, feverish, train-seeking humans, dirty newsboys, I stood absently saying to myself, “You're not quite alive even yet.”

A hand gripped my arm and a cheery voice said “Hallo!” I started and recognised Rex Campion. I also said “Hallo!” and shook hands with him. We had not met since the days when, having heard of my Monte Cristo lavishness, he had called at the Albany and had beguiled me into giving a thousand pounds to his beloved “Barbara's Building,” the prodigious philanthropic institution which he had founded in the slums of South Lambeth. In spite of my dead and dazed state of being I was pleased to see his saturnine black-bearded face, and to hear his big voice. He was one of those men who always talked like a megaphone. The porticoes of Victoria Station re-echoed with his salutations. I greeted him less vociferously, but with equal cordiality.

“You're looking very fit. I head that you had gone through a miraculous operation. How are you?”

“Perfectly well,” said I, “but I've been told that I'm not quite alive even yet.”

He looked anxious. “Remains of trouble?”

“Not a vestige,” I laughed.

“That's all right,” he said breezily. “Now come along and hear Milligan speak.”

It did not occur to him that I might have work, worries, or engagements, or that the evening's entertainment which he offered me might be the last thing I should appreciate. His head, for the moment, was full of Milligan, and it seemed to him only natural that the head of all humanity should be full of Milligan too. I made a wry face.

“That son of thunder?”

Milligan was a demagogue who had twice unsuccessfully attempted to get into Parliament in the Labour interest.

“Have you ever heard him?”

“Heaven forbid!” said I in my pride.

“Then come. He's speaking in the Hall of the Lambeth Biblical Society.”

I was tempted, as I wanted company. In spite of my high resolve to out-Ishmael Ishmael, I could not kill a highly developed gregarious instinct. I also wanted a text for an article. But I wanted my dinner still more. Campion condemned the idea of dinner.

“You can have a cold supper,” he roared, “like the rest of us.”

I yielded. Campion dragged me helpless to a tram at the top of Vauxhall Bridge Road.

“It will do Your Mightiness good to mingle with the proletariat,” he grinned.

I did not tell him that I had been mingling with it in this manner for some time past or that I repudiated the suggestion of its benign influence. I entered the tram meekly. As soon as we were seated, he began:

“I bet you won't guess what I've done with your thousand pounds. I'll give you a million guesses.”

As I am a poor conjecturer, I put on a blank expression and shook my head. He waited for an instant, and then shouted with an air of triumph:

“I've founded a prize, my boy—a stroke of genius. I've called it by your name. 'The de Gex Prize for Housewives.' I didn't bother you about it as I knew you were in a world of worry. But just think of it. An annual prize of thirty pounds—practically the interest—for housewives!”

His eyes flashed in his enthusiasm; he brought his heavy hand down on my knee.

“Well?” I asked, not electrified by this announcement.

“Don't you see?” he exclaimed. “I throw the competition open to the women in the district, with certain qualifications, you know—I look after all that. They enter their names by a given date and then they start fair. The woman who keeps her home tidiest and her children cleanest collars the prize. Isn't it splendid?”

I agreed. “How many competitors?”

“Forty-three. And there they are working away, sweeping their floors and putting up clean curtains and scrubbing their children's noses till they shine like rubies and making their homes like little Dutch pictures. You see, thirty pounds is a devil of a lot of money for poor people. As one mother of a large family said to me, 'With that one could bury them all quite beautiful.'”

“You're a wonderful fellow,” said I, somewhat enviously.

He gave an awkward laugh and tugged at his beard.

“I've only happened to find my job, and am doing it as well as I can,” he said. “'Tisn't very much, after all. Sometimes one gets discouraged; people are such ungrateful pigs, but now and again one does help a lame dog over a stile which bucks one up, you know. Why don't you come down and have a look at us one of these days? You've been promising to do so for years.”

“I will,” said I with sudden interest.

“You can have a peep at one or two of the competing homes. We pop into them unexpectedly at all hours. That's a part of the game. We've a complicated system of marks which I'll show you. Of course, no woman knows how she's getting on, otherwise many would lose heart.”

“How do the men like this disconcerting ubiquity of soap and water?”

“They love it!” he cried. “They're keen on the prize too. Some think they'll grab the lot and have the devil's own drunk when the year's up. But I'll look after that. Besides, when a chap has been living in the pride of cleanliness for a year he'll get into the way of it and be less likely to make a beast of himself. Anyway, I hope for the best. My God, de Gex, if I didn't hope and hope and hope,” he cried earnestly, “I don't know how I should get through anything without hope and a faith in the ultimate good of things.”

“The same inconvincible optimist?” said I.

“Yes. Thank heaven. And you?”

I paused. There came a self-revelatory flash. “At the present moment,” I said, “I'm a perfectly convincible vacuist.”

We left the tram and the main thoroughfare, and turned into frowsy streets, peopled with frowsy men and women and raucous with the bickering play of frowsy children. It was still daylight. Over London the spring had fluttered its golden pinions, and I knew that in more blessed quarters—in the great parks, in Piccadilly, in Old Palace Yard, half a mile away—its fragrance lingered, quickening blood already quickened by hope, and making happier hearts already happy. But here the ray of spring had never penetrated either that day or the days of former springs; so there was no lingering fragrance. Here no one heeded the aspects of the changing year save when suffocated by sweltering heat, or frozen in the bitter cold, or drenched by the pouring rain. Otherwise in these gray, frowsy streets spring, summer, autumn, winter were all the same to the grey, frowsy people. It is true that youth laughed—pale, animal boys, and pale, flat-chested girls. But it laughed chiefly at inane obscenity.

One of these days, when phonography is as practicable as photography, some one will make accurate records in these frowsy streets, and then, after the manner of the elegant writers of Bucolics and Pastorals, publish such a series of Urbanics and Pavimentals, phonographic dialogues between the Colins and Dulcibellas of the pavement and the gutter as will freeze up Hell with horror.

An anemic, flirtatious group passed us, the girls in front, the boys behind.

“Good God, Campion, what can you do?” I asked.

“Pay them, old chap,” he returned quickly.

“What's the good of that?”

“Good? Oh, I see!” He laughed, with a touch of scorn. “It's a question of definition. When you see a fellow creature suffering and it shocks your refined susceptibilities and you say 'poor devil' and pass on, you think you have pitied him. But you haven't. You think pity's a passive virtue. It isn't. If you really pity anybody, you go mad to help him—you don't stand by with tears of sensibility running down your cheeks. You stretch out your hand, because you've damn well got to. If he won't take it, or wipes you over the head, that's his look-out. You can't work miracles. But once in a way he does take it, and then—well, you work like hell to pull him through. And if you do, what bigger thing is there in the world than the salvation of a human soul?”

“It's worth living for,” said I.

“It's worth doing any confounded old thing for,” he declared.

I envied Campion as I had envied no man before. He was alive in heart and soul and brain; I was not quite alive even yet. But I felt better for meeting him. I told him so. He tugged his beard again and laughed.

“I am a happy old crank. Perhaps that's the reason.”

At the door of the hall of the Lambeth Ethical Society he stopped short and turned on me; his jaw dropped and he regarded me in dismay.

“I'm the flightiest and feather-headedest ass that ever brayed,” he informed me. “I just remember I sent Miss Faversham a ticket for this meeting about a fortnight ago. I had clean forgotten it, though something uncomfortable has been tickling the back of my head all the time. I'm miserably sorry.”

I hastened to reassure him. “Miss Faversham and I are still good friends. I don't think she'll mind my nodding to her from the other side of the room.” Indeed, she had written me one or two letters since my recovery perfect in tact and sympathy, and had put her loyal friendship at my service.

“Even if we meet,” I smiled, “nothing tragic will happen.”

He expressed his relief.

“But what,” I asked, “is Miss Faversham doing in this galley?”

“I suppose she is displaying an intelligent interest in modern thought,” he said, with boyish delight at the chance I had offered him.

“Touche,” said I, with a bow, and we entered the hall.

It was crowded. The audience consisted of the better class of artisans, tradesmen, and foremen in factories: there was a sprinkling of black-coated clerks and unskilled labouring men. A few women's hats sprouted here and there among the men's heads like weeds in a desert. There were women, too, in proportionately greater numbers, on the platform at the end of the hall, and among them I was quick to notice Eleanor Faversham. As Campion disliked platforms and high places in synagogues, we sat on one of the benches near the door. He explained it was also out of consideration for me.

“If Milligan is too strong for your proud, aristocratic stomach,” he whispered, “you can cut and run without attracting attention.”

Milligan had evidently just began his discourse. I had not listened to him for five minutes when I found myself caught in the grip which he was famous for fastening on his audience. With his subject—Nationalisation of the Land—and his arguments I had been perfectly familiar for years. As a boy I had read Henry George's “Progress and Poverty” with the superciliousness of the young believer in the divine right of Britain's landed gentry, and before the Eton Debating Society I had demolished the whole theory to my own and every one else's satisfaction. Later, as a practical politician, I had kept myself abreast of the Socialist movement. I did not need Mr. John Milligan, whom my lingering flippancy had called a son of thunder, to teach me the elements of the matter. But at this peculiar crisis of my life I felt that, in a queer, unknown way, Milligan had a message for me. It was uncanny. I sat and listened to the exposition of Utopia with the rapt intensity of any cheesemonger's assistant there before whose captured spirit floated the vision of days to come when the land should so flow with milk and money that golden cheeses would be like buttercups for the plucking. It was not the man's gospel that fascinated me nor his illuminated prophecy of the millennium that produced the vibrations in my soul, but the surging passion of his faith, the tempest of his enthusiasm. I had enough experience of public speaking to distinguish between the theatrical and the genuine in oratory. Here was no tub-thumping soothsayer, but an inspired zealot. He lived his impassioned creed in every fibre of his frame and faculties. He was Titanic, this rough miner, in his unconquerable hope, divine in his yearning love of humanity.

When he ended there was a dead silence for a second, and then a roar of applause from the pale, earnest, city-stamped faces. A lump rose in my throat. Campion clutched my knee. A light burned in his eyes.

“Well? What about Boanerges?”

“Only one thing,” said I, “I wish I were as alive as that man.”

A negligible person proposed a vote of thanks to Milligan, after which the hall began to empty. Campion, caught by a group of his proletariat friends, signalled to me to wait for him. And as I waited I saw Eleanor Faversham come slowly from the platform down the central gangway. Her eyes fixed themselves on me at once—for standing there alone I must have been a conspicuous figure, an intruder from the gorgeous West—and with a little start of pleasure she hurried her pace. I made my way past the chattering loiterers in my row, and met her. We shook hands.

“Well? Saul among the prophets? Who would have thought of seeing you here!”

I waved my hand towards Campion. “We have the same sponsor.” She glanced at him for a swift instant and then at me.

“Did you like it?”

“Have you seen Niagara?”

“Yes.”

“Did you like it?”

“I'm so glad,” she cried. “I thought perhaps——” she broke off. “Why haven't you tried to see me?”

“There are certain conventions.”

“I know,” she said. “They're idiotic.”

“There's also Mrs. Faversham,” said I.

“Mother is the dearest thing in life,” she replied, “but Mrs. Faversham is a convention.” She came nearer to me, in order to allow a freer passage down the gangway and also in order to be out of earshot of an elderly woman who was obviously accompanying her. “Simon, I've been a good friend to you. I believe in you. Nothing will shake my convictions. You couldn't look into my eyes like that if—well—you know.”

“I couldn't,” said I.

“Then why can't two honourable, loyal people meet? We only need meet once. But I want to tell you things I can't write—things I can't say here. I also want to hear of things. I think I've got a kind of claim—haven't I?”

“I've told you, Eleanor. My letters—”

“Letters are rubbish!” she declared with a laugh. “Where can we meet?”

“Agatha is a good soul,” said I.

“Well, fix it up by telephone to-morrow.”

“Alas!” said I; “I don't run to telephones in my eagle's nest on Himalaya Mansions.”

She knitted her brows. “That's not the last address you wrote from.”

“No,” I replied, smiling at this glimpse of the matter-of-fact Eleanor. “It was a joke.”

“You're incorrigible!” she said rebukingly.

“I don't joke so well in rags as in silken motley,” I returned with a smile, “but I do my best.”

She disdained a retort. “We'll arrange, anyhow, with Agatha.”

Campion, escaping from his friends, came up and chatted for a minute. Then he saw Eleanor and her companion to their carriage.

“Now,” said he a moment later, “come to Barbara and have some supper. You won't mind if Jenkins joins us?”

“Who's Jenkins?” I asked.

“Jenkins is an intelligent gas-fitter of Sociological tastes. He classes Herbert Spencer, Benjamin Kidd, and Lombroso as light literature. He also helps us with our young criminals. I should like you to meet him.”

“I should be delighted,” I said.

So Jenkins was summoned from a little knot a few yards off and duly presented. Whereupon we proceeded to Campion's plain but comfortably furnished quarters in Barbara's Building, where he entertained us till nearly midnight with cold beef and cheese and strenuous conversation.

As I walked across Westminster Bridge on my homeward way it seemed as if London had grown less hostile. Big Ben chimed twelve and there was a distinct Dick Whittington touch about the music. The light on the tower no longer mocked me. As I passed by the gates of Palace Yard, a policeman on duty recognised me and saluted. I strode on with a springier tread and noticed that the next policeman who did not know me, still regarded me with an air of benevolence. A pale moon shone in the heavens and gave me shyly to understand that she was as much my moon as any one else's. As I turned into Victoria Street, omnibuses passed me with a lurch of friendliness. The ban was lifted. I danced (figuratively) along the pavement.

What it portended I did not realise. I was conscious of nothing but a spiritual exhilaration comparable only with the physical exhilaration I experienced in the garden at Algiers when my bodily health had been finally established. As the body then felt the need of expressing itself in violent action—in leaping and running (an impulse which I firmly subdued), so now did my spirit crave some sort of expression in violent emotion. I was in a mood for enraptured converse with an archangel.

Looking back, I see that Campion's friendly “Hallo” had awakened me from a world of shadows and set me among realities; the impact of Milligan's vehement personality had changed the conditions of my life from static to dynamic; and that a Providence which is not always as ironical as it pleases us to assert had sent Eleanor Faversham's graciousness to mitigate the severity of the shock. I see how just was Lola's diagnosis. “You're not quite alive even yet.” I had been going about in a state of suspended spiritual animation.

My recovery dated from that evening.