Demos Part 93

'Arry refused the offer.

'Give me the money instead,' was his reply.

Argument was vain; Richard and the old woman pa.s.sed to entreaty, but with as little result.

'Give me ten pounds and let me go about my business,' 'Arry exclaimed irritably. 'I want no more from you, and you won't get any good out o'

me by jawin'.'

The money was of course refused, in the hope that a week or two would change the poor fellow's mind. But two days after he went out and did not return. Nothing was heard of him. Mrs. Mutimer sat late every night, listening for a knock at the door. Sometimes she went and stood on the steps, looking hither and thither in the darkness. But 'Arry came no more to Wilton Square.

Mutimer had been pressing on his scheme for five months. Every night he addressed a meeting somewhere or other in the East End; every Sunday he lectured morning and evening at his head-quarters in Clerkenwell.

Ostensibly he was working on behalf of the Union, but in reality he was forming a party of his own, and would have started a paper could he have commanded the means. The 'Tocsin' was savagely hostile, the 'Fiery Gross.' grew more and more academical, till it was practically an organ of what is called in Germany _Katheder-Sozialismus_. Those who wrote for it were quite distinct from the agitators of the street and of the Socialist halls; men--and women--with a turn for 'advanced' speculation, with anxiety for style. At length the name of the paper was changed, and it appeared as the 'Beacon,' adorned with a headpiece by the well-known artist, Mr. Boscobel. Mutimer glanced through the pages and flung it aside in scornful disgust.

'I knew what this was coming to,' he said to Adela 'A deal of good _they_'ll do! You don't find Socialism in drawing rooms. I wonder that fellow Westlake has the impudence to call himself a Socialist at all, living in the way he does. Perhaps he thinks he'll be on the safe side when the Revolution comes. Ha, ha! We shall see.'

The Revolution.... In the meantime the cry was 'Democratic Capitalism.'

That was the name Mutimer gave to his scheme! The 'Fiery Gross' had only noticed his work in a brief paragraph, a few words of faint and vague praise. 'Our comrade's noteworthy exertions in the East End.... The gain to temperance and self-respecting habits which must surely result....'

The 'Beacon,' however, dealt with the movement more fully, and on the whole in a friendly spirit.

'd.a.m.n their patronage!' cried Mutimer.

You should have seen him addressing a crowd collected by chance in Hackney or Poplar. The slightest encouragement, even one name to inscribe in the book which he carried about with him, was enough to fire his eloquence; nay, it was enough to find himself standing on his chair above the heads of the gathering. His voice had gained in timbre; he grew more and more perfect in his delivery, like a conscientious actor who plays night after night in a part that he enjoys. And it was well that he had this inner support, this _brio_ of the born demagogue, for often enough he spoke under circ.u.mstances which would have damped the zeal of any other man. The listeners stood with their hands in their pockets, doubting whether to hear him to the end or to take their wonted way to the public-house. One moment their eyes would be fixed upon him, filmy, unintelligent, then they would look at one another with a leer of cunning, or at best a doubtful grin. Socialism, forsooth! They were as ready for translation to supernal spheres. Yet some of them were attracted: 'percentage,' 'interest,' 'compound interest,' after all, there might be something in this! And perhaps they gave their names and their threepenny bits, engaging to make the deposit regularly on the day and at the place arranged for in Mutimer's elaborate scheme. What is there a man cannot get if he asks for it boldly and persistently enough?

The year had come full circle; it was time that Mutimer received another remittance from his anonymous supporter. He needed it, for he had been laying out money without regard to the future. Not only did he need it for his own support; already he and his committee held sixty pounds of trust money, and before long he might be called upon to fulfil his engagement and contribute a hundred pounds--the promised hundred which had elicited more threepences than all the rest of his eloquence. A week, a month, six weeks, and he had heard nothing. Then there came one day a communication couched in legal terms, signed by a solicitor.

It was to the effect that his benefactor--name and address given in full--had just died. The decease was sudden, and though the draft of a will had been discovered, it had no signature, and was consequently inoperative. But--pursued the lawyer--it having been the intention of the deceased to bequeath to Mutimer an annuity of five hundred pounds for nine years, the administrators were unwilling altogether to neglect their friend's wish, and begged to make an offer of the one year's payment which it seemed was already due. For more than that they could not hold themselves responsible.

Before speaking to Adela, Mutimer made searching inquiries. He went to the Midland town where his benefactor had lived, and was only too well satisfied of the truth of what had been told him. He came back with his final five hundred pounds.

Then he informed his wife of what had befallen. He was not cheerful, but with five hundred pounds in his pocket he could not be altogether depressed. What might not happen in a year? He was becoming prominent; there had been mention of him lately in London journals. Pooh! as if he would ever really want!

'The great thing,' he exclaimed, 'is that I can lay down the hundred pounds! If I'd failed in that it would have been all up. Come, now, why can't you give me a bit of encouragement, Adela? I tell you what it is.

There's no place where I'm thought so little of as in my own home, and that's a fact.'

She did not wors.h.i.+p him, she made no pretence of it. Her cold, pale beauty had not so much power over him as formerly, but it still chagrined him keenly as often as he was reminded that he had no high place in his wife's judgment. He knew well enough that it was impossible for her to: admire him; he was conscious of the thousand degrading things he had said and done, every one of them stored in her memory. Perhaps not once since that terrible day in the Pentonville lodgings had he looked her straight in the eyes. Yes, her beauty appealed to him less than even a year ago; Adela knew it, and it was the one solace in her living death. Perhaps occasion could again have stung him into jealousy, but Adela was no longer a vital interest in his existence. He lived in external things, his natural life. Pa.s.sion had been an irregularity in his development. Yet he would gladly have had his wife's sympathy. He neither loved nor hated her, but she was for ever above him, and, however unconsciously, he longed for her regard.

Irreproachable, reticent, it might be dying, Adela would no longer affect interests she did not feel. To these present words of his she replied only with a grave, not unkind, look; a look he could not under stand, yet which humbled rather than irritated him.

The servant opened the door and announced a visitor--'Mr. Hilary.'

Mutimer seemed struck with a thought as he heard the name.

'The very man!' he exclaimed below his breath, with a glance at Adela.

'Just run off and let us have this room. My luck won't desert me, see if it does!'

CHAPTER x.x.xII

Mr. Willis Rodman scarcely relished the process which deprived him of his town house and of the greater part of his means, but his exasperation happily did not seek vent for itself in cruelty to his wife. It might very well have done so, would all but certainly, had not Alice appealed to his sense of humour by her zeal in espousing his cause against her brother. That he could turn her round his finger was an old experience, but to see her spring so actively to arms on his behalf, when he was conscious that she had every excuse for detesting him, and even abandoning him, struck him as a highly comical instance of his power over women, a power on which he had always prided himself. He could not even explain it as self-interest in her; numberless things proved the contrary. Alice was still his slave, though he had not given himself the slightest trouble to preserve even her respect. He had shown himself to her freely as he was, jocosely cynical on everything that women prize, brutal when he chose to give way to his temper, faithless on principle, selfish to the core; perhaps the secret of the fascination he exercised over her was his very ingenuousness, his boldness in defying fortune, his clever grasp of circ.u.mstances. She said to him one day, when he had been telling her that as likely as not she might have to take in was.h.i.+ng or set up a sewing-machine:

'I am not afraid. You can always get money. There's nothing you can't do.'

He laughed.

'That may be true. But how if I disappear some day and leave you to take care of yourself?'

He had often threatened this in his genial way, and it never failed to blanch her cheeks.

'If you do that,' she said, 'I shall kill myself.'

At which he laughed yet more loudly.

In her house at Wimbledon she perished of _ennui_, for she was as lonely as Adela in Holloway. Much lonelier; she had no resources in herself.

Rodman was away all day in London, and very often he did not return at night; when the latter was the case, Alice cried miserably in her bed for hours, so that the next morning her face was like that of a wax doll that has suffered ill-usage. She had an endless supply of novels, and day after day bent over them till her head ached. Poor Princess! She had had her own romance, in its way brilliant and strange enough, but only the rags of it were left. She clung to them, she hoped against hope that they would yet recover their gloss and s.h.i.+mmer. If only he would not so neglect her! All else affected her but little now that she really knew what it meant to see her husband utterly careless, not to be held by any pettings or entreaties. She heard through him of her brother 'Arry's disgrace; it scarcely touched her. Her brother Richard she was never tired of railing against, railed so much, indeed, that it showed she by no means hated him as much as she declared. But nothing would have mattered if only her husband had cared for her.

She had once said to Adela that she disliked children and hoped never to have any. It was now her despair that she remained childless. Perhaps that was why he had lost all affection?

In the summer Rodman once quitted her for nearly three weeks, during which she only heard from him once. He was in Ireland, and, he a.s.serted, on business. The famous 'Irish Dairy Company,' soon to occupy a share of public attention, was getting itself on foot. It was Rodman who promoted the company and who became its secretary, though the name of that functionary in all printed matter appeared as 'Robert Delancey.'

However, I only mention it for the present to explain our friend's absence in Ireland. Alice often worked herself up to a pitch of terror lest her husband had fulfilled his threat and really deserted her. He returned when it suited him to do so, and tortured her with a story of a wealthy Irish widow who had fallen desperately in love with him.

'And I've a good mind to marry her,' he added with an air of serious reflection. Of course I didn't let her know my real name. I could manage it very nicely, and you would never know anything about it; I should remit you all the money you wanted, you needn't be afraid.'

Alice tried to a.s.sume a face of stony indignation, but as usual she ended by breaking down and shedding tears. Then he told her that she was getting plainer than ever, and that it all came of her perpetual 'water-works.'

Alice hit upon a brilliant idea. What if she endeavoured to make him jealous? In spite of her entreaties, he never would take her to town, though he saw that she was peris.h.i.+ng for lack of amus.e.m.e.nt. Suppose she made him believe that she had gone on her own account, and at the invitation of someone whose name she would not divulge? I believe she found the trick in one of her novels. The poor child went to work most conscientiously. One morning when he came down to breakfast she pretended to have been reading a letter, crushed an old envelope into her pocket on his entering the room, and affected confusion. He observed her.

'Had a letter?' he asked.

'Yes--no. Nothing of any importance.'

He smiled and applied himself to the ham, then left her in his ordinary way, without a word of courtesy, and went to town. She had asked him particularly when he should be back that night He named the train, which reached Wimbledon a little after ten.

They had only one servant. Alice took the girl into her confidence, said she was going to play a trick, and it must not be spoilt. By ten o'clock at night she was dressed for going out, and when she heard her husband's latch-key at the front door she slipped out at the back. It was her plan to walk about the roads for half an hour, then to enter and--make the best of the situation.

Rodman, unable to find his wife, summoned the servant.

'Where is your mistress?'

'Out, sir.'

He examined the girl shrewdly, with his eyes and with words. It was perfectly true that women--of a kind--could not resist him. In the end he discovered exactly what had happened. He laughed his wonted laugh of cynical merriment.

'Go to bed,' he said to the servant. 'And if you hear anyone at the door, pay no attention.'

Then he locked up the house, front and back, and, having extinguished all lights except a small lantern by which he could read in the sitting-room without danger of its being discerned from outside, sat down with a sense of amus.e.m.e.nt. Presently there came a ring at the bell; it was repeated again and again. The month was October, the night decidedly cool. Rodman chuckled to himself; he had a steaming gla.s.s of whisky before him and sipped it delicately. The ringing continued for a quarter of an hour, then five minutes pa.s.sed, and no sound came. Rodman stepped lightly to the front door, listened, heard nothing, unlocked and opened. Alice was standing in the middle of the road, her hands crossed over her breast and holding her shoulders as though she suffered from the cold. She came forward and entered the house without speaking.

In the sitting-room she found the lantern and looked at her husband in surprise. His face was stern.