CHAPTER XXXV.
THE TIDE TURNS.
When Ernest Le Breton got a letter from the business house of a
well-known publishing firm, asking him whether he would consent to
supply appropriate letterpress for an illustrated work on the poor
of London, then in course of preparation, his delight and relief
were positively unbounded. That anyone should come and ask him for
work, instead of his asking them, was in itself a singular matter
for surprise and congratulation; that the request should be based
on the avowed ground of his known political and social opinions
was almost incredible. Ernest felt that it was a triumph, not only
for him, but for his dearly-loved principles and beliefs as well.
For the first time in his life, he was going to undertake a piece
of work which he not only thought not wrong, but even considered
hopeful and praise-worthy. Arthur Berkeley, who called round as if
by accident the same morning, saw with delight that Lady Hilda's
prognostication seemed likely to be fulfilled, and that if only
Ernest could be given some congenial occupation there was still
a chance, after all, for his permanent recovery; for it was clear
enough that as there was hope, there must be a little life yet left
in him.
It was Lady Hilda who, as she herself expressively phrased it,
had squared the publishers. She had called upon the head of the
well-known house in person, and had told him fully and frankly
exactly what was the nature of the interest she took in the poor
of London. At first the publisher was scandalised and obdurate: the
thing was not regular, he said--not in the ordinary way of business;
his firm couldn't go writing letters of that sort to unknown young
authors and artists. If she wanted the work done, she must let them
give her own name as the promoter of the undertaking. But Hilda
persevered, as she always did; she smiled, pleaded, cajoled,
threatened, and made desperate love to the publisher to gain his
acquiescence in her benevolent scheme. After all, even publishers
are only human (though authors have been frequently known to deny
the fact); and human nature, especially in England, is apt to
be very little proof against the entreaties of a pretty girl who
happens also to be an earl's daughter. So in the end, when Lady Hilda
said most bewitchingly, 'I put it upon the grounds of a personal
favour, Mr. Percival,' the obdurate publisher gave way at last,
and consented to do her bidding gladly.
For six weeks Ernest went daily with Ronald and the young artist into
the familiar slums of Bethnal Green, and Bermondsey, and Lambeth,
whose ins and outs he was beginning to know with painful accuracy;
and every night he came back, and wrote down with a glowing pen all
that he had seen and heard of distressing and terrible during his
day's peregrination. It was an awful task from one point of view,
for the scenes he had to visit and describe were often heart-rending;
and Arthur feared more than once that the air of so many loathsome
and noxious dens might still further accelerate the progress of
Ernest's disease; but Lady Hilda said emphatically, No; and somehow
Arthur was beginning now to conceive an immense respect for the
practical value of Lady Hilda's vehement opinions. As a matter of
fact, indeed, Ernest did not visibly suffer at all either from the
unwonted hard work or from the strain upon mind and body to which
he had been so little accustomed. Distressing as it all was, it
was change, it was variety, it was occupation, it was relief from
that terrible killing round of perpetual personal responsibility.
Above all, Ernest really believed that here at last was an
opportunity of doing some practical good in his generation, and he
threw himself into it with all the passionate ardour of a naturally
eager and vivid nature. The enthusiasm of humanity was upon him, and
it kept him going at high-pressure rate, with no apparent loss of
strength and vigour throughout the whole ordeal. To Arthur Berkeley's
intense delight, he was even visibly fatter to the naked eye at the
end of his six weeks' exploration of the most dreary and desolate
slums in all London.
The book was written at white heat, as the best of such books always
are, and it was engraved and printed at the very shortest possible
notice. Terrible and ghastly it certainly was at last--instinct
with all the grim local colouring of those narrow, squalid,
fever-stricken dens, where misfortune and crime huddle together
indiscriminately in dirt and misery--a book to make one's blood run
cold with awe and disgust, and to stir up even the callous apathy
of the great rich capitalist West End to a passing moment's
ineffective remorse; but very clever and very graphic after its
own sort beyond the shadow of a question, for all its horror. When
Arthur Berkeley turned over the first proof-sheets of 'London's
Shame,' with its simple yet thrilling recital of true tales taken
down from the very lips of outcast children or stranded women, with
its awful woodcuts and still more awful descriptions--word-pictures
reeking with the vice and filth and degradation of the most
pestilent, overcrowded, undrained tenements--he felt instinctively
that Ernest Le Breton's book would not need the artificial aid of
Lady Hilda's influential friends in order to make it successful
and even famous. The Cabinet ministers might be as silent as they
chose, the indignant duke might confine his denunciations to the
attentive and sympathetic ear of his friend Lord Connemara; but
nothing on earth could prevent Ernest Le Breton's fiery and scathing
diatribe from immediately enthralling the public attention. Lady
Hilda had hit upon the exact subject which best suited his peculiar
character and temperament, and he had done himself full justice in
it. Not that Ernest had ever thought of himself, or even of his
style, or the effect he was producing by his narrative; it was just
the very non-self-consciousness of the thing that gave it its power.
He wrote down the simple thoughts that came up into his own eager
mind at the sight of so much inequality and injustice; and the
motto that Arthur prefixed upon the title-page, 'Facit indignatio
versum,' aptly described the key-note of that fierce and angry
final denunciation. 'Yes, Lady Hilda had certainly hit the right
nail on the head,' Arthur Berkeley said to himself more than once:
'A wonderful woman, truly, that beautiful, stately, uncompromising,
brilliant, and still really tender Hilda Tregellis.'
Hilda, on her part, worked hard and well for the success of Ernest's
book as soon as it appeared. Nay, she even condescended (not being
what Ernest himself would have described as an ethical unit) to
practise a little gentle hypocrisy in suiting her recommendations
of 'London's Shame' to the tastes and feelings of her various
acquaintances. To her Radical Cabinet minister friend, she openly
praised its outspoken zeal for the cause of the people, and its
value as a wonderful storehouse of useful facts at first hand for
political purposes in the increasingly important outlying Metropolitan
boroughs. 'Just think, Sir Edmund,' she said, persuasively, 'how
you could crush any Conservative candidate for Hackney or the Tower
Hamlets out of that awful chapter on the East End match-makers;'
while with the Duke, to whom she presented a marked copy as a
sample of what our revolutionary thinkers were really coming to,
she insisted rather upon its wicked interference with the natural
rights of landlords, and its abominable insinuation (so subversive
of all truly English ideas as to liberty and property) that they
were bound not to poison their tenants by total neglect of sanitary
precautions. 'If I were you, now,' she said to the Duke in the
most seemingly simple-minded manner possible, 'I'd just quote those
passages I've marked in pencil in the House to-night on the Small
Urban Holdings Bill, and point out how the wave of Continental
Socialism is at last invading England with its devastating flood.'
And the Duke, who was a complacent, thick-headed, obstinate old
gentleman, congenitally incapable of looking at any question from
any other point of view whatsoever except that of his own order,
fell headlong passively into Lady Hilda's cruel little trap, and
murmured to himself as he rolled down luxuriously to the august
society of his peers that evening, 'Tremendous clever girl, Hilda
Tregellis, really. "Wave of Continental Socialism at last invading
England with its what-you-may-call-it flood," she said, if I remember
rightly. Capital sentence to end off one's speech with, I declare.
Devizes'll positively wonder where I got it from. I'd no idea before
that girl took such an intelligent interest in political questions.
So they want their cottages whitewashed, do they? What'll they ask
for next, I wonder? Do they think we're to be content at last with
one and a-half per cent, upon the fee-simple value of our estates,
I should like to know? Why, some of the places this writer-fellow
talks about are on my own property in The Rookery--"one of the most
noisome court-yards in all London," he actually calls it. Whitewash
their cottages, indeed! The lazy improvident creatures! They'll
be asking us to put down encaustic tiles upon the floors next, and
to paper their walls with Japanese leather or fashionable dados.
Really, the general ignorance that prevails among the working classes
as to the clearest principles of political economy is something
absolutely appalling, absolutely appalling.' And his Grace scribbled
a note in his memorandum-book of Hilda's ready-made peroration, for
fear he should forget its precise wording before he began to give
the House the benefit of his views that night upon the political
economy of Small Urban Holdings.
Next morning, all London was talking of the curious coincidence
by which a book from the pen of an unknown author, published only
one day previously, had been quoted and debated upon simultaneously
in both Houses of Parliament on a single evening. In the Commons,
Sir Edmund Calverley, the distinguished Radical minister, had read
a dozen pages from the unknown work in his declamatory theatrical
fashion, and had so electrified the House with its graphic and
horrible details that even Mr. Fitzgerald-Grenville, the well-known
member for the Baroness Drummond-Lloyd (whose rotten or at least
decomposing borough of Cherbury Minor he faithfully represented in
three successive Parliaments), had mumbled out a few half-inaudible
apologetic sentences about this state of things being truly
deplorable, and about the necessity for meeting such a distressing
social crisis by the prompt and vigorous application of that excellent
specific and familiar panacea, a spirited foreign policy. In the
Lords, the Duke himself, by some untoward coincidence, had been
moved to make a few quotations, accompanied by a running fire of
essentially ducal criticism, from the very selfsame obscure author;
and to his immense surprise, even the members of his own party
moved uneasily in their seats during the course of his speech; while
later in the evening, Lord Devizes muttered to him angrily in the
robing-room, 'Look here, Duke, you've been and put your foot in it,
I assure you, about that Radical book you were ill-advised enough
to quote from. You ought never to have treated the Small Urban
Holdings Bill in the way you did; and just you mark my words,
the papers'll all be down upon you to-morrow morning, as sure as
daylight. You've given the "Bystander" such an opening against
you as you'll never forget till your dying day, I can tell you.'
And as the Duke drove back again after his arduous legislative
efforts that evening, he said to himself between the puffs at his
Havana, 'This comes, now, of allowing oneself to be made a fool
of by a handsome woman. How the dooce I could ever have gone and
taken Hilda Tregellis's advice on a political question is really
more than I can fathom:--and at my time of life too! And yet, all
the same, there's no denying that she's a devilish fine woman, by
Jove, if ever there was one.'
Of course, everybody asked themselves next day what this book
'London's Shame' was like, and who on earth its author could be;
so much so, indeed, that a large edition was completely exhausted
within a fortnight. It was the great sensational success of that
London season. Everybody read it, discussed it, dissected it,
corroborated it, refuted it, fought over it, and wrote lengthy
letters to all the daily papers about its faults and its merits.
Imitators added their sincerest flattery: rivals proclaimed themselves
the original discoverers of 'London's Shame': one enterprising author
even thought of going to law about it as a question of copyright.
Owners of noisome lanes in the East End trembled in their shoes,
and sent their agents to inquire into the precise degree of squalor
to be found in the filthy courts and alleys where they didn't care
to trust their own sensitive aristocratic noses. It even seemed as
if a little real good was going to come at last out of Ernest Le
Breton's impassioned pleading--as if the sensation were going to
fall not quite flat at the end of its short run in the clubs and
drawing-rooms of London as a nine days' wonder.
And Ernest Le Breton? and Edie? In the little lodgings at Holloway,
they sat first trembling for the result, and ready to burst with
excitement when Lady Hilda, up at the unwonted hour of six in the
morning, tore into their rooms with an early copy of the 'Times'
to show them the Duke's speech, and Sir Edmund's quotations, and
the editorial leader in which even that most dignified and reticent
of British journals condescended to speak with studiously moderated
praise of the immense collection of facts so ably strung together
by Mr. Ernest Le Breton (in all the legible glory of small capitals,
too,) as to the undoubtedly disgraceful condition of some at
least among our London alleys. How Edie clung around Lady Hilda
and kissed her! and how Lady Hilda kissed her back and cried over
her with tears of happier augury! and how they both kissed and
cried over unconscious wondering little Dot! And how Lady Hilda
could almost have fallen upon Ernest, too, as he sat gazing in
blank astonishment and delight at his own name in the magnificent
small capitals of a 'Times' leader. Between crying and laughing,
with much efficient aid in both from good Mrs. Halliss, they hardly
knew how they ever got through the long delightful hours of that
memorable epoch-making morning.
And then there came the gradual awakening to the fact that this
was really fame--fame, and perhaps also competence. First in the
field, of course, was the editor of the 'Cosmopolitan Review,'
with a polite request that Ernest would give the readers of that
intensely hot-and-hot and thoughtful periodical the opportunity of
reading his valuable views on the East End outcast question, before
they had had time to be worth nothing for journalistic purposes,
through the natural and inevitable cooling of the public interest
in this new sensation. Then his old friends of the 'Morning
Intelligence' once more begged that he would be good enough to
contribute a series of signed and headed articles to their columns,
on the slums and fever dens of poverty-stricken London. Next,
an illustrated weekly asked him to join with his artist friend in
getting up another pilgrimage into yet undiscovered metropolitan
plague-spots. And so, before the end of a month, Ernest Le Breton,
for the first time in his life, had really got more work to do
than he could easily manage, and work, too, that he felt he could
throw his whole life and soul into with perfect honesty.
When the first edition of 'London's Shame' was exhausted, there
was already a handsome balance to go to Ernest and his artist
coadjutor, who, by the terms of the agreement, were to divide
between them half the profits. The other half, for appearance'
sake, Lady Hilda and Arthur had been naturally compelled to reserve
for themselves: for of course it would not have been probable that
any publisher would have undertaken the work without any hope of
profit in any way. Arthur called upon Hilda at Lord Exmoor's house
in Wilton Place to show her the first balance-sheet and accompanying
cheque. 'What on earth can we do with it?' he asked seriously. 'We
can't divide it between us: and yet we can't give it to the poor
Le Bretons. I don't see how we're to manage.'
'Why, of course,' Hilda answered promptly. 'Put it into the Consols
or whatever you call it, for the benefit of little Dot.'
'The very thing!' Arthur answered in a tone of obvious admiration.
'What a wonderfully practical person you really are, Lady Hilda.'
As to Ernest and Edie, when they got their own cheque for their
quarter of the proceeds, they gazed in awe and astonishment at the
bigness of the figure; and then they sat down and cried together
like two children, with their hands locked in one another's.
'And you'll get well, now, Ernest dear,' Edie whispered gently.
'Why, you're ever so much fatter, darling, already. I'm sure you'll
get well in no time, now, Ernest.'
'Upon my word, Edie,' Ernest answered, kissing her white forehead
tenderly, 'I really and truly believe I shall. It's my opinion
that Sir Antony Wraxall's an unmitigated ignorant humbug.'
A few weeks later, when Ernest's remarkable article on 'How to Improve
the Homes of the Poor' appeared in one of the leading magazines,
Mr. Herbert Le Breton of the Education Office looked up from his
cup of post-prandial coffee in his comfortable dining-room at South
Kensington, and said musingly to his young wife, 'Do you know,
Ethel, it seems to me that my brother Ernest's going to score a
success at last with this slum-hunting business that he's lately
invented. There's an awful lot about it now in all the papers
and reviews. Perhaps it might be as well, after all, to scrape an
acquaintance with him again, especially as he's my own brother.
There's no knowing, really, when a man of his peculiar ill-regulated
mercurial temperament may be going to turn out famous. Don't you
think you'd better find out where they're living now--they've left
Holloway, no doubt, since this turn of the tide--and go and call
upon Mrs. Ernest?'
Whereto Mrs. Herbert Le Breton, raising her eyes for a moment from
the pages of her last new novel, answered languidly: 'Don't you
think, Herbert, it'd be better to wait a little while and see how
things turn out with them in the long run, you know, before we
commit ourselves by going to call upon them? One swallow, you see,
doesn't make a summer, does it, dear, ever?' Whence the acute and
intelligent reader will doubtless conclude that Mrs. Herbert Le
Breton was a very prudent sensible young woman, and that perhaps
even Herbert himself had met at last with his fitting Nemesis. For
what worse purgatory could his bitterest foe wish for a selfishly
prudent and cold-hearted man, than that he should pass his whole
lifetime in congenial intercourse with a selfishly prudent and
cold-hearted wife, exactly after his own pattern?
