第20章

"You are all old-fashioned-and stiff with prejudice," Furley declared. "Even Orden," he went on, turning to Catherine, "only tolerates me because we ate dinners off the same board when we were' both making up our minds to be Lord High Chancellor."

"Our friend Furley," Julian confided, as he leaned across the table and took a cigarette, "has no tact and many prejudices. He does write such rubbish about the aristocracy. I remember an article of his not very long ago, entitled `Out with our Peers!'

It's all very well for a younger son like me to take it lying down, but you could scarcely expect my father to approve.

Besides, I believe the fellow's a renegade. I have an idea that he was born in the narrower circles himself."

"That's where you're wrong, then," Furley grunted with satisfaction. "My father was a boot manufacturer in a country village of Leicestershire. I went in for the Bar because he left me pots of money, most of which, by the bye, I seem to have dissipated."

"Chiefly in Utopian schemes for the betterment of his betters,"

Julian observed drily.

"I certainly had an idea," Furley confessed, "of an asylum for incapable younger sons."

"I call a truce," Julian proposed. "It isn't polite to spar before Miss Abbeway."

"To me," Mr. Stenson declared, "this is a veritable temple of peace. I arrived here literally on all fours. Miss Abbeway has proved to me quite conclusively that as a democratic leader I have missed my vocation."

She looked at him reproachfully. Nevertheless, his words seemed to have brought back to her mind the thrill of their brief but stimulating conversation. A flash of genuine earnestness transformed her face, just as a gleam of wintry sunshine, which had found its way in through the open window, seemed to discover threads of gold in her tightly braided and luxuriant brown hair.

Her eyes filled with an almost inspired light:

"Mr. Stenson is scarcely fair to me," she complained. "I did not presume to criticise his statesmanship, only there are some things here which seem pitiful. England should be the ideal democracy of the world. Your laws admit of it, your Government admits of it.

Neither birth nor money are indispensable to success. The way is open for the working man to pass even to the Cabinet. And you are nothing of the sort. The cause of the people is not in any country so shamefully and badly represented. You have a bourgeoisie which maintains itself in almost feudal luxury by means of the labour which it employs, and that labour is content to squeak and open its mouth for worms, when it should have the finest fruits of the world. And all this is for want of leadership. Up you come you David Sands, you Phineas Crosses, you Nicholas Fenns, you Thomas Evanses. You each think that you represent Labour, but you don't. You represent trade - the workers at one trade. How they laugh at you, the men who like to keep the government of this country in their own possession! They stretch down a hand to the one who has climbed the highest, they pull him up into the Government, and after that Labour is well quit of him. He has found his place with the gods. Perhaps they will make him a `Sir' and his wife a `Lady,' but for him it is all over with the Cause. And so another ten years is wasted, while another man grows up to take his place."

"She's right enough," Furley confessed gloomily. "There is something about the atmosphere of the inner life of politics which has proved fatal to every Labour man who has ever climbed. Paul Fiske wrote the same thing only a few weeks ago. He thought that it was the social atmosphere which we still preserve around our politics. We no sooner catch a clever man, born of the people, than we dress him up like a mummy and put him down at dinner parties and garden parties, to do things he's not accustomed to, and expect him to hold his own amongst people who are not his people. There is something poisonous about it."

"Aren't you all rather assuming," Stenson suggested drily, "that the Labour Party is the only party in politics worth considering?"

"If they knew their own strength," Catherine declared, "they would be the predominant party. Should you like to go to the polls to-day and fight for your seats against them?"

"Heaven forbid!" Mr. Stenson exclaimed. "But then we've made up our mind to one thing - no general election during the war.

Afterwards, I shouldn't be at all surprised if Unionists and Liberals and even Radicals didn't amalgamate and make one party."

"To fight Labour," Furley said grimly.

"To keep England great," Mr. Stenson replied. "You must remember that so far as any scheme or program which the Labour Party has yet disclosed, in this country or any other, they are preeminently selfish. England has mighty interests across the seas. A parish-council form of government would very soon bring disaster."

Julian glanced at the clock and rose to his feet.

"I don't want to hurry any one," he said, "but my father is rather a martinet about luncheon."

They all rose. Mr. Stenson turned to Julian.

"Will you go on with Miss Abbeway?" he begged. "I will catch up with you on the marshes. I want to have just a word with Furley."

Julian and his companion crossed the country road and passed through the gate opposite on to the rude track which led down almost to the sea.

"You are very interested in English labour questions, Miss Abbeway," he remarked, "considering that you are only half an Englishwoman."

"It isn't only the English labouring classes in whom I am interested," she replied impatiently. "It is the cause of the people throughout the whole of the world which in my small way I preach."

"Your own country," he continued, a little diffidently, "is scarcely a good advertisement for the cause of social reform."

Her tone trembled with indignation as she answered him.