Part 24 (1/2)
It was natural that Sir Richmond should talk of his Fuel Commission to a young woman whose interests in fuel were even greater than his own.
He found that she was very much better read than he was in the recent literature of socialism, and that she had what he considered to be a most unfeminine grasp of economic ideas. He thought her att.i.tude towards socialism a very sane one because it was also his own. So far as socialism involved the idea of a scientific control of natural resources as a common property administered in the common interest, she and he were very greatly attracted by it; but so far as it served as a form of expression for the merely insubordinate discontent of the many with the few, under any conditions, so long as it was a formula for cla.s.s jealousy and warfare, they were both repelled by it. If she had had any illusions about the working cla.s.s possessing as a cla.s.s any profounder political wisdom or more generous public impulses than any other cla.s.s, those illusions had long since departed. People were much the same, she thought, in every cla.s.s; there was no stratification of either rightness or righteousness.
He found he could talk to her of his work and aims upon the Fuel Commission and of the conflict and failure of motives he found in himself, as freely as he had done to Dr. Martineau and with a surer confidence of understanding. Perhaps his talks with the doctor had got his ideas into order and made them more readily expressible than they would have been otherwise. He argued against the belief that any cla.s.s could be good as a cla.s.s or bad as a cla.s.s, and he instanced the conflict of motives he found in all the members of his Committee and most so in himself. He repeated the persuasion he had already confessed to Dr. Martineau that there was not a single member of the Fuel Commission but had a considerable drive towards doing the right thing about fuel, and not one who had a single-minded, unenc.u.mbered drive towards the right thing. ”That,” said Sir Richmond, ”is what makes life so interesting and, in spite of a thousand tragic disappointments, so hopeful. Every man is a bad man, every man is a feeble man and every man is a good man. My motives come and go. Yours do the same. We vary in response to the circ.u.mstances about us. Given a proper atmosphere, most men will be public-spirited, right-living, generous. Given perplexities and darkness, most of us can be cowardly and vile. People say you cannot change human nature and perhaps that is true, but you can change its responses endlessly. The other day I was in Bohemia, discussing Silesian coal with Benes, and I went to see the Festival of the Bohemian Sokols.
Opposite to where I sat, far away across the arena, was a great bank of men of the Sokol organizations, an unbroken brown ma.s.s wrapped in their brown uniform cloaks. Suddenly the sun came out and at a word the whole body flung back their cloaks, showed their Garibaldi s.h.i.+rts and became one solid blaze of red. It was an amazing transformation until one understood what had happened. Yet nothing material had changed but the suns.h.i.+ne. And given a change in laws and prevailing ideas, and the very same people who are greedy traders, grasping owners and revolting workers to-day will all throw their cloaks aside and you will find them working together cheerfully, even generously, for a common end.
They aren't traders and owners and workers and so forth by any inner necessity. Those are just the ugly parts they play in the present drama.
Which is nearly at the end of its run.”
”That's a hopeful view,” said Miss Grammont. ”I don't see the flaw in it--if there is a flaw.”
”There isn't one,” said Sir Richmond. ”It is my chief discovery about life. I began with the question of fuel and the energy it affords mankind, and I have found that my generalization applies to all human affairs. Human beings are fools, weaklings, cowards, pa.s.sionate idiots,--I grant you. That is the brown cloak side of them, so to speak.
But they are not such fools and so forth that they can't do pretty well materially if once we hammer out a sane collective method of getting and using fuel. Which people generally will understand--in the place of our present methods of s.n.a.t.c.h and wrangle. Of that I am absolutely convinced. Some work, some help, some willingness you can get out of everybody. That's the red. And the same principle applies to most labour and property problems, to health, to education, to population, social relations.h.i.+ps and war and peace. We haven't got the right system, we have inefficient half-baked systems, or no system at all, and a wild confusion and war of ideas in all these respects. But there is a right system possible none the less. Let us only hammer our way through to the sane and reasonable organization in this and that and the other human affairs, and once we have got it, we shall have got it for good. We may not live to see even the beginnings of success, but the spirit of order, the spirit that has already produced organized science, if only there are a few faithful, persistent people to stick to the job, will in the long run certainly save mankind and make human life clean and splendid, happy work in a clear mind. If I could live to see it!”
”And as for us--in our time?”
”Measured by the end we serve, we don't matter. You know we don't matter.”
”We have to find our fun in the building and in our confidence that we do really build.”
”So long as our confidence lasts there is no great hards.h.i.+p,” said Sir Richmond.
”So long as our confidence lasts,” she repeated after him.
”Ah!” cried Sir Richmond. ”There it is! So long as our confidence lasts!
So long as one keeps one's mind steady. That is what I came away with Dr. Martineau to discuss. I went to him for advice. I haven't known him for more than a month. It's amusing to find myself preaching forth to you. It was just faith I had lost. Suddenly I had lost my power of work.
My confidence in the rightness of what I was doing evaporated. My will failed me. I don't know if you will understand what that means. It wasn't that my reason didn't a.s.sure me just as certainly as ever that what I was trying to do was the right thing to try to do. But somehow that seemed a cold and personally unimportant proposition. The life had gone out of it....”
He paused as if arrested by a momentary doubt.
”I don't know why I tell you these things,” he said.
”You tell them me,” she said.
”It's a little like a patient in a hydropath retailing his ailments.”
”No. No. Go on.”
”I began to think now that what took the go out of me as my work went on was the lack of any real fellows.h.i.+p in what I was doing. It was the pressure of the opposition in the Committee, day afterday. It was being up against men who didn't reason against me but who just showed by everything they did that the things I wanted to achieve didn't matter to them one rap. It was going back to a home, lunching in clubs, reading papers, going about a world in which all the organization, all the possibility of the organization I dream of is tacitly denied. I don't know if it seems an extraordinary confession of weakness to you, but that steady refusal of the majority of my Committee to come into co-operation with me has beaten me--or at any rate has come very near to beating me. Most of them you know are such able men. You can FEEL their knowledge and commonsense. They, and everybody about me, seemed busy and intent upon more immediate things, that seemed more real to them than this remote, theoretical, PRIGGISH end I have set for myself....”
He paused.
”Go on,” said Miss Grammont. ”I think I understand this.”
”And yet I know I am right.”
”I know you are right. I'm certain. Go on.
”If one of those ten thousand members of the Sokol Society had thrown back his brown cloak and shown red when all the others still kept them selves cloaked--if he was a normal sensitive man--he might have felt something of a fool. He might have felt premature and presumptuous. Red he was and the others he knew were red also, but why show it? That is the peculiar distress of people like ourselves, who have some sense of history and some sense of a larger life within us than our merely personal life. We don't want to go on with the old story merely. We want to live somehow in that larger life and to live for its greater ends and lose something unbearable of ourselves, and in wanting to do that we are only wanting to do what nearly everybody perhaps is ripe to do and will presently want to do. When the New Age Martineau talks about begins to come it may come very quickly--as the red came at Prague. But for the present everyone hesitates about throwing back the cloak.”
”Until the cloak becomes unbearable,” she said, repeating his word.