Part 30 (1/2)

II.

It was after nine o'clock when Selwyn woke from a deep, refres.h.i.+ng sleep. Hurrying into the other room, he found no sign of his guests.

'When did these gentlemen leave?' he asked of his servant, who had answered his ring.

'It must have been about six o'clock, sir. I heard the door open and shut then.'

'Why didn't you call me?'

'I wasn't wanting to disturb you, sir. It's the first good sleep you've had for a long time.'

It was true. The sinking of himself into the personality of another man had released the fetters of his intensive egotism. For a whole night he had forgotten, or at least neglected, his world-mission in simple solicitude for one who had fallen by the wayside.

After the stimulus of a cold shower and a hearty breakfast, he resumed his crusade against the entrenched forces of Ignorance, but in spite of the utmost effort in concentration, the memory of the lonely figure by the Thames intruded constantly on his mind. It was not only that d.i.c.k was the brother of Elise--although Selwyn's longing for her had become a dull pain that was never completely buried beneath his thoughts; nor was it merely the unconscious charm possessed by the boy, a charm that seized on the very heart-strings. To the American the real cruelty of the thing lay in the existence of a Society that could first debase so fine a creature, and then make no effort to retrieve or to atone for its crime.

Putting aside the day's work he had planned, he flung his mind into the arena of England's social conditions. Exerting to the full his gift of mental discipline, he rejected the promptings of prejudice and of sentiment, and brought his sense of a.n.a.lysis to bear on his subject with the cold, callous detachment of a scientist studying some cosmic phenomenon.

For more than an hour his brain skirmished for an opening, until, spreading the blank sheets of paper before him, he wrote: 'THE ISLAND OF DARKNESS.' Tilting his chair back, he surveyed the t.i.tle critically.

'Yes,' he said aloud, squaring his shoulders resolutely, 'I have generalised long enough. Without malice, but without restraint, I will trace the contribution of Britain towards the world's debacle.'

With gathering rapidity and intensity he covered page after page with finely worded paragraphs. He summoned the facts of history, and churning them with his conceptions of humanity's duty to humanity, poured out a flood of ideas, from which he chose the best. Infatuated by the richness of the stream, he created such a powerful sequence of facts that the British began to loom up as a reactionary tribe fighting a rearguard action throughout the ages against the advancing hosts of enlightenment. The Island of Britain, the 'Old Country,' as its people called it, began to shape in his eyes like a hundred-taloned monster sprawling over the whole earth. This was the nation which had forced opium on China, ruled India by tyranny, bl.u.s.tered and bullied America into rebellion, conquered South Africa at the behest of business interests. . . . Those and endless others were the counts against Britain in the open court of history.

And if those had been her crimes in the international sphere, what better record could she show in the management of human affairs at home? She had clung to the feudal idea of cla.s.s distinction, only surrendering a few outposts reluctantly to the imperious onslaught of time; she had maintained a system of public schools which produced first-cla.s.s sn.o.bs and third-rate scholars; she had ignored the rights of women until in very desperation they had resorted to the crudities of violence in order to achieve some outlet for the pent-up uselessness and directionlessness of their s.e.x; she had tolerated vile living conditions for the poor, and had forced men and women to work under conditions which were degrading and an insult to their Maker. . . .

One by one these dragons reared their heads and fell to the gleaming Excalibur of the author.

Selwyn made one vital error--he mistook facts for truth. He forgot that a sequence of facts, each one absolutely accurate in itself, may, when pieced together, create a fabric of falsehood.

There were many contributing influences to Austin Selwyn's denunciation of Britain that morning. Although he had ordered sentiment and prejudice to leave his mind unclogged, these two pa.s.sions cannot be dismissed by mere will-power.

He was keenly moved by the meeting with d.i.c.k Durwent, and, almost unknown to himself, his love for Elise was a smouldering fever whose fumes mounted to his head. Love is so overpowering that it overlaps the confines of hate, and his hunger for her was mixed with an almost savage desire to conquer her, force homage from her. And she was Englis.h.!.+

In addition to these undercurrents affecting his thoughts, there was the dislike towards England which lies dormant in so many American b.r.e.a.s.t.s. Gloss it over as they will, no political _entente_ can do away with the mutual dislike of Americans and Englishmen. It is a thing which cannot be eradicated in a day, but will die the sooner for exposure to the light, being an ugly growth of swampy prejudice and evil-smelling provincialism that needs the darkness and the damp for life.

Mingling these subconscious elements with those of logic and reason, Selwyn wrote for two days, almost without an hour's rest, and when it was finished 'The Island of Darkness' was a powerful, vivid, pa.s.sionate arraignment of England, the heart of the British Empire. It was clever, full of big thoughts, and glowed with the genius of a man who had made language his slave.

It lacked only one ingredient, a simple thing at best--_Truth_.

But that is the tragedy of idealism, which studies the world as a crystal-gazer reading the forces of destiny in a piece of gla.s.s.

III.

A week later, in the early afternoon, Selwyn was going up Whitehall, when he heard the sound of pipes, and turned with the crowd to gaze.

With rhythmic pomposity a pipe-major was twirling a staff, while a band of pipes and drums blared out a Scottish battle-song on the frosty air.

Following them in formation of fours were five or six hundred men in civilian clothes, attested recruits on their way to training-centres.