CHAPTER XXXVI.
OUT OF THE HAND OP THE PHILISTINES.
Ernest's unexpected success with 'London's Shame' was not, as Arthur
Berkeley at first feared it might be, the mere last dying flicker
of a weak and failing life. Arthur was quite right, indeed, when
he said one day to Lady Hilda that its very brilliancy and fervour
had the hectic glow about it, as of a man who was burning himself
out too fiercely and rapidly; you could read the feverish eagerness
of the writer in every line; but still, Lady Hilda answered with
her ordinary calm assurance that it was all going well, and that
Ernest only needed the sense of security to pull him round again;
and as usual, Lady Hilda's practical sagacity was not at fault.
The big pamphlet--for it was hardly more than that--soon proved
an opening for further work, in procuring which Hilda and Arthur
were again partially instrumental. An advanced Radical member
of Parliament, famous for his declamations against the capitalist
faction, and his enormous holding of English railway stock, was
induced to come forward as the founder of a new weekly paper,
'in the interest of social reform.' Of course the thing was got
up solely with an idea to utilising Ernest as editor, for, said
the great anti-capitalist with his usual charming frankness, 'the
young fellow has a positive money-value, now, if he's taken in hand
at once before the sensation's over, and there can be no harm in
turning an honest penny by exploiting him, you know, and starting
a popular paper.' When Ernest was offered the post of editor to
the new periodical, at a salary which almost alarmed him by its
plutocratic magnificence (for it was positively no less than six
hundred a year), he felt for a moment some conscientious scruples
about accepting so splendid a post. And when Lady Hilda in her
emphatic fashion promptly over-ruled these nascent scruples by the
application of the very simple solvent formula, 'Bosh!' he felt
bound at least to stipulate that he should be at perfect liberty
to say whatever he liked in the new paper, without interference or
supervision from the capitalist proprietor. To which the Radical
member, in his business capacity, immediately responded, 'Why,
certainly. What we want to pay you for is just your power of startling
people, which, in its proper place, is a very useful marketable
commodity. Every pig has its value--if only you sell it in the
best market.'
'The Social Reformer, a Weekly Advocate of the New Economy,' achieved
at once an immense success among the working classes, and grew
before long to be one of the most popular journals of the second
rank in all London. The interest that Ernest had aroused by his big
pamphlet was carried on to his new venture, which soon managed to
gain many readers by its own intrinsic merits. 'Seen your brother's
revolutionary broadsheet, Le Breton?' asked a friend at the club
of Herbert not many weeks later--he was the same person who had
found it 'so very embarrassing' to recognise Ernest--in his shabby
days when walking with a Q.C.--'It's a dreadful tissue of the
reddest French communism, I believe, but still, it's scored the
biggest success of its sort in journalism, I'm told, since the
days of Kenealy's "Englishman." Bradbury, who's found the money to
start it--deuced clever fellow in his way, Bradbury!--is making an
awful lot out of the speculation, they say. What do you think of
the paper, eh?'
Herbert drew himself up grimly. 'To tell you the truth,' he said
in his stiffest style, 'I haven't yet had time to look at a copy.
Ernest Le Breton's not a man in whose affairs I feel called upon to
take any special interest; and I haven't put myself to the trouble
of reading his second-hand political lucubrations. Faint echoes of
Max Schurz, all of it, no doubt; and having read and disposed of
Schurz himself long ago, I don't feel inclined now to go in for a
second supplementary course of Schurz and water.'
'Well, well, that may be so,' the friend answered, turning over the
pages of the peccant periodical carelessly; 'but all the same I'm
afraid your brother's really going to do an awful lot of mischief
in the way of setting class against class, and stirring up the
dangerous orders to recognise their own power. You see, Le Breton,
the real danger of this sort of thing lies in the fact that your
brother Ernest's a more or less educated and cultivated person. I
don't say he's really got any genuine depth of culture--would you
believe it, he told me once he'd never read Rabelais, and didn't
want to?--and of course a man of true culture in the grain, like
you and me now, my dear fellow, would never dream of going and
mistaking these will-o'-the-wisps of socialism for the real guiding
light of regenerated humanity--of course not. But the dangerous
symptom at the present day lies just in the fact that while the
papers written for the mob used to be written by vulgar, noisy,
self-made, half-educated demagogues, they're sent out now with all
the authority and specious respectability of decently instructed
and comparatively literary English gentlemen. Now, nobody can
deny that that's a thing very seriously to be regretted; and for my
part I'm extremely sorry your brother has been ill-advised enough
to join the mob that's trying to pull down our comfortably built
and after all eminently respectable, even if somewhat patched up,
old British constitution.'
'The subject's one,' Herbert answered curtly, 'in which I for my
part cannot pretend to feel the remotest personal interest.'
Ernest and Edie, howerer, in the little lodgings up at Holloway,
which they couldn't bear to desert even now in this sudden burst
of incredible prosperity, went their own way as self-containedly
as usual, wholly unconcerned by the non-arrival of Mrs. Herbert
on a visit of ceremony, or the failure of the 'Social Reformer' to
pierce the lofty ethereal regions of abstract contemplation where
Herbert himself sat throned like an Epicurean god in the pure halo
of cultivated pococurantism. Every day, as that eminent medical
authority, Hilda Tregellis, had truly prophesied, Ernest's cheeks
grew less and less sunken, and a little colour returned slowly
to their midst; while Edie's face was less pale than of old, and
her smile began to recover something of its old-fashioned girlish
joyousness. She danced about once more as of old, and Arthur Berkeley,
when he dropped in of a Sunday afternoon for a chat with Ernest,
noticed with pleasure that little Miss Butterfly was beginning to
flit round again almost as naturally as in the old days when he
first saw her light little form among the grey old pillars of Magdalen
Cloisters. Yet he couldn't help observing, too, that his feeling
towards her was more one of mere benevolence now, and less of tender
regret, than it used to be even a few short months before, in the
darkest days of Edie's troubles. Could it be, he asked himself
more than once, that the tall stately picture of Hilda Tregellis
was overshadowing in his heart the natural photograph of that
unwedded Edie Oswald that he once imagined was so firmly imprinted
there? Ah well, ah well, it may be true that a man can love really
but once in his whole lifetime; and yet, the second spurious
imitation is positively sometimes a very good facsimile of the
genuine first impression, for all that.
As the months went slowly round, too, the time came in the end for
good Herr Max to be released at last from his long imprisonment.
On the day that he came out, there was a public banquet at the
Marylebone dancing saloon; and all the socialists and communards
were there, and all the Russian nihilists, and all the other
wicked revolutionary plotters in all London: and in the chair sat
Ernest Le Breton, now the editor of an important social paper, while
at his left hand, to balance the guest of the evening, sat Arthur
Berkeley, the well-known dramatic author, who was himself more than
suspected of being the timid Nicodemus of the new faith. And when
Ernest announced that Herr Schurz had consented to aid him on the
'Social Reformer,' and to add the wisdom of age to the impetuosity
of youth in conducting its future, the simple enthusiasm of the wicked
revolutionists knew no bounds. And they cried 'Hoch!' and 'Viva!'
and 'Hooray!' and many other like inarticulate shouts in many
varieties of interjectional dialect all the evening; and everybody
agreed that after all Herr Max was VERY little grayer than before
the trial, in spite of his long and terrible term of imprisonment.
He WAS a little embittered by his troubles, no doubt;--what can
you expect if you clap men in prison for the expression of their
honest political convictions?--but Ernest tried to keep his eye
steadily rather on the future than on the past; and with greater
ease and unwonted comforts the old man's cheerfulness as well as
his enthusiasm gradually returned. 'I'm too old now to do anything
more worth doing myself before I die,' he used to say, holding
Ernest's arm tightly in his vice-like grip: 'but I have great hopes
in spite of everything for friend Ernest; I have very great hopes
indeed for friend Ernest here. There's no knowing yet what he may
accomplish.'
Ernest only smiled a trifle sadly, and murmured half to himself that
this was a hard world, and he began himself to fear there was no
fitting feeling for a social reformer except one of a brave despair.
'We can do little or nothing, after all,' he said slowly; 'and
our only consolation must be that even that little is perhaps just
worth doing.'
