Part 5

"My lords and gentlemen, I have not forgotten the toast I am asking you to drink. 'The Commerce of London' is a mighty fact, a tribute to our national energies and honourable name. It is potent; yet its power might be greater than ever for securing human happiness. All that is required is a little more humanity, sympathy, imagination, easy sacrifice on the part of--_us_! We, the masters, can do great things. Let us manage this. We shall not make our means and wealth appreciably less by securing that those dependent on us have sufficient to live on in decency and comfort; nor shall we lose anything worth the keeping if we resolutely refuse to condescend to such shoddy evils as sweating, jerry-building, wild-cat speculations, and the maintenance of the slums. Let us live well, and avoid dying leaving preposterous fortunes behind us. Let me make a public confession. I own five houses in a street in South London. They are old, ill-built, badly-drained, rack-rented. I know it well, but have never thought of the true facts about them till now. Those houses shall be destroyed; and, in their stead, buildings erected that will provide decent and comfortable homes at a fair rent for the present occupiers. I shall not lose much, if anything, through the improvement; but the happiness I shall in consequence gain will be immeasurable. There will be no skeletons in my cupboard henceforth. My lords and gentlemen, am I to go on this crusade alone? Will you join me in this effort for human good?"

Every man in the assembly, including the toast-master, rose in his place and shouted "Yes!"

"Then may I suggest that each of you takes his menu and writes on it resolutions--no pie-crust promises these, no New Year good intentions, but resolutions to be lived up to and with determination kept? If I fail in my intention, hoot me and stone me at the end of my year of office; but I will not fail! I will not fail!"

June flew, and kneeling on the top of the Lord Mayor's head--so round and smooth and shiny--kissed it delightedly. A new inspiration thereupon came to him:

"Above the resolutions write--'Let us make London fit for the fairies!' My lords and gentlemen, I give you the toast."

They drank it in bumpers.

*CHAPTER VII*

*ARCHIDIACONAL FUNCTIONS*

When the excitement which followed the Lord Mayor's speech had to some extent subsided, there was a hurried borrowing and sharpening of pencils.

The Lord Mayor wrote his resolutions with a flourish.

"I'll have that framed," he said, as he gazed with head a-slant at the inscribed menu. The Archdeacon wrote his in Latin verse. Emmanuel Oldstein--far away--began his with a gold pencil as large as a cigar; and then paused, puzzled.

"'Ow d'ye thpell fairieth--oh, and what are fairieth?"

He had a faint fear that they were something to do with the Book of Common Prayer.

The man he addressed was a Personage, the Past-Master of a City Company--which had no longer a Hall, and was blessed with a dwindling income of seventy pounds per annum.

"The fairies," he began, with a tremendous air of authority--"tales, you know--ah!--the fairies--."

Bim, who happened to be wandering along his part of the table, hearing this hesitancy on the most real and important subject under the sun and moon, raised the wand and gave him a punishing rap on the knuckles. At once the Past-Master was an informed authority. He talked like a school child who knows his lesson too well, hurriedly, glibly.

"The fairies are the mimic rulers of the world. Where beauty is, where purity is, where love is, there is Fairyland. Oberon is the king, Titania queen. The little people are the only living realities. We--you--I, these others--are shadows, only shadows!" He paused. "May I trouble you to pass that candle?" he asked, and lighted a new cigar.

Oldstein was impressed. He wrote his resolutions--there were necessarily many, as his past social defects had been numerous--with firmness and slow care, in a good commercial hand. While he did so, the music was playing, and there were brief, ecstatic, uninspired speeches, built on the lines of the Lord Mayor's. June waited for higher game.

At last the Toast-master's voice rang out for the last of their orators.

"My lords and gentlemen! Pray silence for the Venerable Archdeacon Pryde!"

The ecclesiastic slipped a final voice lozenge between his lips and calmly absorbed it, while the applause which welcomed his rising went on. The hand-clapping and table-rapping coming unexpectedly and abruptly to an end, he swallowed the last of the lozenge with a gulp.

"My lords and gentlemen, the toast which it is my privilege to propose is in an especial manner also the toast of the evening. I am going to ask you to drink with me the health of our host, the Right Honourable the Lord Mayor!"

During these words Bim had been clambering up the Archdeacon's right-arm coat-sleeve. It was a fine piece of mountaineering. He arrived safely at the summit, and squatted cross-legged on the speaker's right shoulder, proud and pleased, intending to lead the cheering with waves of the wand. June decided once more to be an influence at the board, so she fluttered up to the archidiaconal head, and reverently topped its raven tresses with the crown; then she reclined on the gentle slope of his left shoulder. Again the effect of the crown was instantaneous.

The Archdeacon, let it be confessed, had prepared a speech. It was to be full of adulation and carefully considered impromptus. There were to have been a Greek epigram, two quotations from Shakespeare, one from Stow, one from the Archdeacon's own version of the "Georgics," two old stories from Punch, and a reference--dragged in somehow--to the Oxyrhynchus papyri. The peroration, as devised, was a golden picture, with purple slabs, of the wide, wide, circling Empire, with the Lord Mayor's bounteous table as its hub. That speech was like the heroine of an old-fashioned love tale, beautiful and doomed.

The speaker gasped when the crown touched him, and cried, "Ahem!" Then the words came in a torrent, tumultuous, tumbling, liquid, verbal waters of Lodore. He clenched a fist and looked sternly at his hearers.

"This is no conventional evening. The Lord Mayor--honour to him!--has set an example of high purpose and pluck, which I shall unhesitatingly follow. Once upon a time, dear friends, I was a curate, pale and young, 'tis true, but also ambitious and hopeful. I saw the world as a vast wilderness, waiting to be redeemed from its emptiness, to be adorned again with blossoming roses. As the immortal Bard of Avon has told us--but never mind that now! I said to myself in those young days, Here am I, chosen to share in the greatest work that can be done by man. Here am I, dubbed by my fellows reverend. The task I have to do is a great one. I will do it. Gentlemen, I did not do it. For seven months I laboured as I should have done, then adulation and tea-parties made mischief of me. I forgot my early aspirations, lost my young ideals, forgot the sacred character--the responsible privilege--of my calling, and began that long process of careful courtliness which has brought me worldly appreciation, a large correspondence, many paragraphs in the papers, and a useless life. Behold in me an Archdeacon who has lost the illusions!--an Archdeacon who will find them again!"

Bim waved his wand; and, the Lord Mayor leading, the excited gathering broke into a round of applause. The Archdeacon looked about him gratified: not often did his words gain appreciation like this! The idea that he too should mount the chair the better to speak flashed through his brain. But that was not to be. Archidiaconal dignity is no light thing; even the power of June could hardly have lifted it.

The ruling fairy, reclining on his left shoulder, her head resting against his coat-collar, forgot the present in waking-dreams. In her mind-world she wandered again through glades of Fairyland, sun-lighted, flower-haunted, and shining with dew; and was singing a song to an audience of wrens and squirrels. The even flow of clerical oratory, though so near, seemed to her dream-laden senses merely the sough of the wind through charmed branches, the roll of a distant sea, the murmur of waterfalls drumming on swollen rivers--musical, soothing.

"My friends, we need the illusions: even more than dividends we need the dreams. Have not we, the practical men, lost very much through our mere matter-of-factness? We have been too careful, we have neglected the gift of vision, and the world has lost immeasurably thereby. The time has surely come when Quixote should live again. We want one brave enough and sufficiently unselfish to tilt against the windmills, possibly to destroy the ugly shadows which frighten, certainly to recreate Knight-errantry, and give Mrs. Grundy, the better-half of Mammon, her right dismissal. Ah, brethren, how much I am asking! Convention is the greatest of citadels for weak men to conquer. It were easier to put the Monument into a cigarette-case than remove the formalities, snobbery and narrownesses--due to lack of sympathy, and loss of the touch-faculty, as Ruskin calls it--which hinder man's humanity. What said Tennyson--yes, I must give you this quotation--

"'Sweet St. Francis of Assisi, would that he were here again!'--would that he were here, to sweeten the selfish world of to-day as he sweetened the Middle Ages! And not he only. We want the saints--every one--with their selflessness and rapture, to come again. Oh, that we could once more see haloes about the heads of men. Joan of Arc, too, the lily-maid of Domremy, we want her; would that she could return, bringing the inspiration of her Voices to help us throw off the tyrants of selfishness, lust, foolish formality, and greed, which burden and endanger our beloved land!"

The Archdeacon paused--he was thoroughly enjoying his eloquence--to moisten his lips with wine. Bim touched the golden liquid with the wand, drawing the speaker's purpose fairywards.

"Joan of 'oo, did 'e say? Joan of what?" asked Emmanuel of the Past-Master.

"Hush, friend!" was all the answer he received. The Past-Master meant to say "Shut up!"; but the influence in the loving-cup compelled euphemisms.

"The Lord Mayor, in a moment of splendid inspiration--yes, splendid inspiration--bade us so live and do that London should be rendered fit for the fairies. A delightful idea! Let us live up to that bidding. But primarily shall we pause and think? What are the fairies? What but sweet invisibles, the fruits of happy imagination, through whose influence the buds open and become beautiful flowers, the birds lift their songs, and all of us are kind. Delightful fancies! Delightful fancies! Truly it were well for ourselves and our fellows if we could make this great City, this hub of Empire--may we not regard this bounteous table as the core of that hub?--this influential centre of the wide world, a joy to the dainty denizens of Fairyland? We may make it so; and, friends, we will make it so--I repeat, we will!"

Bim was quite frantic at this bold announcement. To have a real Archdeacon pronouncing benediction on Fairyland was beyond expression delightful. No suburban aristocrat paragraphed in a London paper could have rejoiced more fully. He lost himself in ecstasy, and compelled that audience to cheer for three solid minutes, till they were hoarse and began to feel foolish. The Archdeacon took advantage of the well-spread enthusiasm to eat another voice lozenge.

"The fairies will be with us in our enterprise; the angels also. Both these spiritual forces are on our side. Dear me! dear me! How wonderful it seems! Now to facts! Naturally from my office I am most concerned with the materialism about us, a materialism which finds expression in the hateful cocksure ugliness abounding in this London of ours, as well as in the devil-may-care thriftlessness, the drunkenness and vice, the mean excitements of gambling in its many forms, the squalor, the poverty, the want, which make wide areas of this unequalled Metropolis a Devil's City. Everyone here knows, as well as I do, the shame of it all; and the greater shame which hangs over us, the practical men, for the existence, persistence, continuance of this state of things. It is iniquitous, intolerable; yet it goes on. How much longer shall it continue? For years, or for weeks, or for days? That rests with us. All here, following the Lord Mayor's example, have written down resolutions, which, if they are kept, will modify this evil everywhere, and end it in parts. The more thoroughly we live up to our intentions, and redeem our voluntary pledges, the sooner the end of these iniquities will come. For mark this, gentlemen. The greed or the carelessness--more the latter than the former--of individuals has wrought the havoc. The unselfishness and scrupulous care of individuals alone can undo it. It is no good crying for Government to do the work."

"Hear, hear!"

"The Ministerial machine is a lumbering instrument. It takes the breath of gods to inspire it, to get it to move along the right way, and then is apt to break down suddenly and finally, in an amazingly human manner. The State is a sleepy inconsequent monster, which when it acts is apt to do so like a thunderstorm, with violence and but casual good results. It is individuals--you, I, the man in the street--who can do things, if we will: and now we must do them. We are pledged to it. Our words have been taken down by the Mercuries of the Press to be--within an hour or so--flashed to all parts of England, eventually to reach the farthest limits of the earth. We are bound, in honour, to keep our words!"

After that mouthful of eloquence the Archdeacon was compelled again to pause. But the audience, their due excitement heated and quickened by Bim's insistence, cried incessantly, "Go on! Go on!" while June, far away from this effort of prose statesmanship, was dreaming of Faerie.

She was back in the Violet Valley. She saw Oberon and Titania, with their most wonderful court. She heard the silver melody of countless elf-voices, she hearkened with worshipful intent to the trills and throbbings of nightingales, she knew the welcome of the flowers, the breath of a soft wind journeying over grasses; and then, through the joys of dreaming, those influences called to her--called to her pleading, to leave her wild mistaken quest in that world of dust and shadows, and return to the happiness and beauty of the old loved life.

Fairyland, in all its voices, pleaded with her earnestly; it drew her heart with its magic, and made her yearn to go back again; but--no, it should not be!

The Archdeacon went on talking. Bim was satisfied now. He lay down once more to rest.

"I will follow our host's example in telling you what I shall do. My income is a thousand a year, with a house. What do I want, even after satisfying the calls of necessary hospitality, with more than four hundred a year? I shall have to sacrifice some luxuries, true; but I shall have found a new luxury--the best of all luxuries--of knowing that through the wider use of my income, comforts--impossible before--will be enjoyed in twelve poor clergyman's homes. By giving fifty pounds annually to each of these deserving servants of the Church, I shall reduce their anxieties, insure that they and their families have a better standard of comfort, and so make these, my comrades of the cloth, better and more efficient workmen for the cause. I shall make it a condition of the gift that every one of them acts cordially with the other priests and ministers in his parish--whatever their denomination may be; because, however much we must and shall differ on points of doctrine--till the truth is found in the world invisible--we all should be soldiers under the one banner, united for the one cause, though in different regiments, to forward right, to end wrong, to raise the fallen, to fight sin, to encourage the weak, to discover and destroy those causes which, unchecked, lead to the starvation, disease and death of body, mind, and soul. For this purpose all men and women, members of the churches, and those who follow the light without belonging to any organized branch of the Church, should see in one another comrades, united for the great purpose of making the world shine with beauty, love and happiness."

Bim, tired through his past enthusiasm, had gradually sunk into slumber. He grasped the wand firmly, though he was asleep. June, on the left shoulder, was still in fairy glades. This is why the Archdeacon had become so serious, and his style and words more suited to his gaiters.

The guests still followed his speech with eagerness, and were strengthened in their new ideals and brave determinings by his bold, plain speaking. It was the strangest banquet they had ever attended, but none of them thought so; and the unconventional addresses seemed just what should have been expected.

"One more personal word in my concluding remarks. I have had many critics, who have not hesitated to say that I lived up to the meaning of my name. Perhaps I have! Perhaps they were right. But, believe me, I will study to reduce my pride. I can see now, as I never saw before, how mistaken I have been in forgetting humility. For a clergyman to be worldly is for him to be unworthy of his faith. It will be a hard battle to be rid of old habits and tendencies, the results of long custom; but I will try. I will endeavour earnestly so to act that the meanest tramp by the wayside, the poorest child, the humblest old man or old woman, may see in me one like themselves, a comrade and a helper."

He paused and remembered the peroration, laboriously prepared under the study lamp; and decided to abandon it. He ended simply.

"It is the Lord Mayor, by his happy lead and example, who has begun what I believe is to all of us a great revolution. My lords and gentlemen, I beg you to join with me in drinking his health."

They did so.

*CHAPTER VIII*

*MAN AND SUPERMAN*

The banquet ended with a buzz of tongues. The guests rose, and, standing in clusters, eagerly gave expression to their views of the evening's happenings. Emmanuel Oldstein, his nature softened by unusual fare and strange appeals, went with a rush to button-hole the Archdeacon and build a monument of promises. The ecclesiastic, greatly daring, asked him to tea--when the rapturous resolutions were fulfilled.

Such was the beginning of a revolution wrought by one Lord Mayor in league with a fairy. What could not such powers do, if they would cooperate more frequently!

Sir Titus gave a general good-night, and retired to his private apartments, to convert the Lady Mayoress to his views--no light task, as Sir Titus very well knew. June, with Bim--who as he went seized an armful of fresh spring flowers--departed, and the mortals went their ways.

The two from Fairyland stood by the Mansion House railings watching the carriages draw up and drive away, bearing their excited loads of men with purposes. Not till the last had gone, and the City resumed its wonted state of comparative peace, did June and he turn in the direction of Paradise Court.

How to get there? A solitary motor-cab waited by the pavement on the other side of the road, the chauffeur talking of tyres and race-horses to a loafer. The driver was one of the impossible brigade, who mark their superiority to ordinary folk by disdaining to accept passengers save when it exactly suited them. June saw this monarch of the road reject the prayers of five stranded wayfarers for no other reason than that his views on the coming Derby were not yet fully told.

So she acted. She took her wand and waved it. A puzzled expression flitted over the face of the man. He mounted the seat of the cab, moved the steering wheel, jerked a lever, and drove to where the fairy and gnome were waiting. The loafer and an interested policeman who had sauntered up looked amazed at this comedy of mystery.

They watched the machine stop, the driver alight and open the door with a bow of great respect to--nothing. They saw the cab at its best speed pass rapidly into Cornhill and hurry eastward. When it had glided out of sight the loafer breathed an incredulous whistle, and the policeman found words of wonder. "Well, I'm blowed!" was the inadequate all he could say.

Their astonishment was nothing to that of the driver. He was astounded. He could do nothing but continue his course, steering the car boldly along clattering streets, travelling as if guided by an overwhelming unseen influence, here and there, through tortuous strange ways, until instinctively he applied the brake and stopped beside a mean public-house at the entrance to an alley.

Hurriedly, as if fearful of keeping important patrons waiting, he sprang from his seat, reopened the door of the apparently empty cab, and again made obeisance.

Then, when the invisible passengers had alighted, he shut the door with a bang, and swore thoroughly till he found relief.

June did not enter any of the houses, but with Bim dangling at the end of the wand--his left arm still clasping the flowers--flew up to the roof, carrying him with her.

At once reaction came. The excitement and the interest of the day's proceedings had kept her going; but now, when the time for quiet had come, she passed into a state of torpor and depression. She forgot her triumphs, lost the exhilaration which success had raised in her, and knew, even more than after her first arrival, the grossness and almost hopeless ugliness which beset her. For the first time in a delightful life, she was visited with the blues.

That was an opportunity for Bim.

The long bouts of sleep had refreshed him, and he proved less sensitive than June to the effects of their environment. He took the flowers, and with rapid fingers wove a fairy-bower about her. The white and yellow cups and one purple violet, refreshed by his affection, revived in sympathy. June, noting Bim's helpfulness, took cheer and courage again. For a whole day she remained harassed and weary; but on the following evening she faced her task again.

She flew languidly to the brink of a chimney-pot and studied the world around. Black roofs, seedy houses, blank windows and glaring lights on every side: over all stretched the haze that had frightened her.

"Poor humanity!" she murmured, "doomed day and night, year after year, from birth to death, to be bricked in like that!"

She did not now waste energy in expressing apostrophe, but made immediate plans. She attended to the flowers which Bim had rescued from death.

She touched the cut ends and strengthened their power of life; then lovingly she arranged the best of them about the dusty base of the chimney-stack. They were precious possessions, treasures to hoard.

Bim had seen in a forgotten flower-box in a corner of the court mould, gathered years before from a lost garden. That would do! He went to get some, while June stood on the flat parapet and looked on the court below.

Darkness, dirt, decay! How very like life in the town! She looked above at the wounded sky. Two planets and the moon shone dimly through London smoke. The fairy yearned to be above that cloud, to swim in the azure ocean of night, to be closer to the stars, nearer the ideals, farther from muck-raking men. Up, up, and up!

She spread wings and climbed the skylark's stairway. Up and up she went, deliriously happy now, thinking the thoughts the laverock sings. For a while she absolutely forgot weariness and heartache, and only knew gladness of life and the passion to be nearer the light.