Part 12 (1/2)

”I've no quarrel with the rich,” he said. ”I don't care how many rich men there are, so long as there are no poor. Who does? I was riding on a bus the other day, and there was a man beside me with a bandaged head.

He'd been hurt in that railway smash at Morpeth. He hadn't claimed damages from the railway company and wasn't going to. 'Oh, it's only a few scratches,' he said. 'They'll be hit hard enough as it is.' If he'd been a poor devil on eighteen s.h.i.+llings a week it would have been different. He was an engineer earning good wages; so he wasn't feeling sore and bitter against half the world. Suppose you tried to run an army with your men half starved while your officers had more than they could eat. It's been tried and what's been the result? See that your soldiers have their proper rations, and the General can sit down to his six-course dinner, if he will. They are not begrudging it to him.

”A nation works on its stomach. Underfeed your rank and file, and what sort of a fight are you going to put up against your rivals. I want to see England going ahead. I want to see her workers properly fed. I want to see the corn upon her unused acres, the cattle grazing on her wasted pastures. I object to the food being thrown into the sea--left to rot upon the ground while men are hungry--side-tracked in Chicago, while the children grow up stunted. I want the commissariat properly organized.”

He had been staring through her rather than at her, so it had seemed to Joan. Suddenly their eyes met, and he broke into a smile.

”I'm so awfully sorry,” he said. ”I've been talking to you as if you were a public meeting. I'm afraid I'm more used to them than I am to women. Please forgive me.”

The whole man had changed. The eyes had a timid pleading in them.

Joan laughed. ”I've been feeling as if I were the King of Bavaria,” she said.

”How did he feel?” he asked her, leaning forward.

”He had his own private theatre,” Joan explained, ”where Wagner gave his operas. And the King was the sole audience.”

”I should have hated that,” he said, ”if I had been Wagner.”

He looked at her, and a flush pa.s.sed over his boyish face.

”All right,” he said, ”if it had been a queen.”

Joan found herself tracing patterns with her spoon upon the tablecloth.

”But you have won now,” she said, still absorbed apparently with her drawing, ”you are going to get your chance.”

He gave a short laugh. ”A trick,” he said, ”to weaken me. They think to shave my locks; show me to the people bound by their red tape. To put it another way, a rat among the terriers.”

Joan laughed. ”You don't somehow suggest the rat,” she said: ”rather another sort of beast.”

”What do you advise me?” he asked. ”I haven't decided yet.”

They were speaking in whispered tones. Through the open doors they could see into the other room. Mrs. Phillips, under Airlie's instructions, was venturing upon a cigarette.

”To accept,” she answered. ”They won't influence you--the terriers, as you call them. You are too strong. It is you who will sway them. It isn't as if you were a mere agitator. Take this opportunity of showing them that you can build, plan, organize; that you were meant to be a ruler. You can't succeed without them, as things are. You've got to win them over. Prove to them that they can trust you.”

He sat for a minute tattooing with his fingers on the table, before speaking.

”It's the frills and flummery part of it that frightens me,” he said.

”You wouldn't think that sensitiveness was my weak point. But it is.

I've stood up to a Birmingham mob that was waiting to lynch me and enjoyed the experience; but I'd run ten miles rather than face a drawing- room of well-dressed people with their masked faces and ironic courtesies. It leaves me for days feeling like a lobster that has lost its sh.e.l.l.”

”I wouldn't say it, if I didn't mean it,” answered Joan; ”but you haven't got to trouble yourself about that . . . You're quite pa.s.sable.” She smiled. It seemed to her that most women would find him more than pa.s.sable.

He shook his head. ”With you,” he said. ”There's something about you that makes one ashamed of worrying about the little things. But the others: the sneering women and the men who wink over their shoulder while they talk to you, I shall never be able to get away from them, and, of course, wherever I go--”

He stopped abruptly with a sudden tightening of the lips. Joan followed his eyes. Mrs. Phillips had swallowed the smoke and was giggling and spluttering by turns. The yellow ostrich feather had worked itself loose and was rocking to and fro as if in a fit of laughter of its own.