Part 9 (1/2)

Directly any of us young socialists of Trinity found ourselves in immediate contact with servants or cadgers or gyps or bedders or plumbers or navvies or cabmen or railway porters we became unconsciously and unthinkingly aristocrats. Our voices altered, our gestures altered.

We behaved just as all the other men, rich or poor, swatters or sportsmen or Pinky d.i.n.kys, behaved, and exactly as we were expected to behave. On the whole it is a population of poor quality round about Cambridge, rather stunted and spiritless and very difficult to idealise.

That theoretical Working Man of ours!--if we felt the clash at all we explained it, I suppose, by a.s.suming that he came from another part of the country; Esmeer, I remember, who lived somewhere in the Fens, was very eloquent about the Cornish fishermen, and Hatherleigh, who was a Hamps.h.i.+re man, a.s.sured us we ought to know the Scottish miner.

My private fancy was for the Lancas.h.i.+re operative because of his co-operative societies, and because what Lancas.h.i.+re thinks to-day England thinks to-morrow.... And also I had never been in Lancas.h.i.+re.

By little increments of realisation it was that the profounder verities of the problem of socialism came to me. It helped me very much that I had to go down to the Potteries several times to discuss my future with my uncle and guardian; I walked about and saw Bursley Wakes and much of the human aspects of organised industrialism at close quarters for the first time. The picture of a splendid Working Man cheated out of his innate glorious possibilities, and presently to arise and dash this scoundrelly and scandalous system of private owners.h.i.+p to fragments, began to give place to a limitless spectacle of inefficiency, to a conception of millions of people not organised as they should be, not educated as they should be, not simply prevented from but incapable of nearly every sort of beauty, mostly kindly and well meaning, mostly incompetent, mostly obstinate, and easily humbugged and easily diverted.

Even the tragic and inspiring idea of Marx, that the poor were nearing a limit of painful experience, and awakening to a sense of intolerable wrongs, began to develop into the more appalling conception that the poor were simply in a witless uncomfortable inconclusive way--”muddling along”; that they wanted nothing very definitely nor very urgently, that mean fears enslaved them and mean satisfactions decoyed them, that they took the very gift of life itself with a spiritless la.s.situde, h.o.a.rding it, being rather anxious not to lose it than to use it in any way whatever.

The complete development of that realisation was the work of many years. I had only the first intimations at Cambridge. But I did have intimations. Most acutely do I remember the doubts that followed the visit of Chris Robinson. Chris Robinson was heralded by such heroic antic.i.p.ations, and he was so entirely what we had not antic.i.p.ated.

Hatherleigh got him to come, arranged a sort of meeting for him at Redmayne's rooms in King's, and was very proud and proprietorial. It failed to stir Cambridge at all profoundly. Beyond a futile attempt to screw up Hatherleigh made by some inexpert duffers who used nails instead of screws and gimlets, there was no attempt to rag. Next day Chris Robinson went and spoke at Bennett Hall in Newnham College, and left Cambridge in the evening amidst the cheers of twenty men or so.

Socialism was at such a low ebb politically in those days that it didn't even rouse men to opposition.

And there sat Chris under that flamboyant and heroic Worker of the poster, a little wrinkled grey-bearded apologetic man in ready-made clothes, with watchful innocent brown eyes and a persistent and invincible air of being out of his element. He sat with his stout boots tucked up under his chair, and clung to a teacup and saucer and looked away from us into the fire, and we all sat about on tables and chair-arms and windowsills and boxes and anywhere except upon chairs after the manner of young men. The only other chair whose seat was occupied was the one containing his knitted woollen comforter and his picturesque old beach-photographer's hat. We were all shy and didn't know how to take hold of him now we had got him, and, which was disconcertingly unantic.i.p.ated, he was manifestly having the same difficulty with us. We had expected to be gripped.

”I'll not be knowing what to say to these Chaps,” he repeated with a north-country quality in his speech.

We made rea.s.suring noises.

The Amba.s.sador of the Workers stirred his tea earnestly through an uncomfortable pause.

”I'd best tell 'em something of how things are in Lancas.h.i.+re, what with the new machines and all that,” he speculated at last with red reflections in his thoughtful eyes.

We had an inexcusable dread that perhaps he would make a mess of the meeting.

But when he was no longer in the unaccustomed meshes of refined conversation, but speaking with an audience before him, he became a different man. He declared he would explain to us just exactly what socialism was, and went on at once to an impa.s.sioned contrast of social conditions. ”You young men,” he said ”come from homes of luxury; every need you feel is supplied--”

We sat and stood and sprawled about him, occupying every inch of Redmayne's floor s.p.a.ce except the hearthrug-platform, and we listened to him and thought him over. He was the voice of wrongs that made us indignant and eager. We forgot for a time that he had been shy and seemed not a little incompetent, his provincial accent became a beauty of his earnest speech, we were carried away by his indignations. We looked with s.h.i.+ning eyes at one another and at the various dons who had dropped in and were striving to maintain a front of judicious severity.

We felt more and more that social injustice must cease, and cease forthwith. We felt we could not sleep upon it. At the end we clapped and murmured our applause and wanted badly to cheer.

Then like a lancet stuck into a bladder came the heckling. Denson, that indolent, liberal-minded sceptic, did most of the questioning. He lay contorted in a chair, with his ugly head very low, his legs crossed and his left boot very high, and he pointed his remarks with a long thin hand and occasionally adjusted the unstable gla.s.ses that hid his watery eyes. ”I don't want to carp,” he began. ”The present system, I admit, stands condemned. Every present system always HAS stood condemned in the minds of intelligent men. But where it seems to me you get thin, is just where everybody has been thin, and that's when you come to the remedy.”

”Socialism,” said Chris Robinson, as if it answered everything, and Hatherleigh said ”Hear! Hear!” very resolutely.

”I suppose I OUGHT to take that as an answer,” said Denson, getting his shoulder-blades well down to the seat of his chair; ”but I don't.

I don't, you know. It's rather a shame to cross-examine you after this fine address of yours”--Chris Robinson on the hearthrug made acquiescent and inviting noises--”but the real question remains how exactly are you going to end all these wrongs? There are the administrative questions.

If you abolish the private owner, I admit you abolish a very complex and clumsy way of getting businesses run, land controlled and things in general administered, but you don't get rid of the need of administration, you know.”

”Democracy,” said Chris Robinson.

”Organised somehow,” said Denson. ”And it's just the How perplexes me.

I can quite easily imagine a socialist state administered in a sort of scrambling tumult that would be worse than anything we have got now.

”Nothing could be worse than things are now,” said Chris Robinson. ”I have seen little children--”

”I submit life on an ill-provisioned raft, for example, could easily be worse--or life in a beleagured town.”