Part 9

Mrs. Folyat began, as she always did in the presence of a newcomer, to talk of the ancestors on the wall, and to tell the lurid stories of the Red Lady, who had known more than was ever written of the Monmouth rebellion, and the Grey Lady who had such a violent temper, that, losing it one day out driving with her husband in a high chariot, she boxed his ears so that he lost his balance and fell out and broke his neck. She rambled on by way of Baron Folyat to Willie, now safely established as Earl of Leedham, and she declared, being thoroughly warmed to her subject, that failing heirs male, and in the event of the extirpation of two other branches of the family--and less likely things had happened--Serge would become heir, or his sons, if he ever had any.

Bennett was much impressed, as it was meant that he should be, and began to talk of his own ancestry. There were Lawries in Elgin as far back as Robert the Bruce, and for hundreds of years there had been Lawries who were lairds or in the ministry. Mrs. Folyat asked him who his mother was, and Bennett replied:

"She was a Miss Smith. She married my father when she was seventeen. People don't seem able to marry so young nowadays."

"It is difficult, isn't it, Gertrude?" asked Minna.

The meal came to an end, and Francis asked Frederic to accompany him to the study to discuss a theatrical entertainment that was in process of organisation in aid of the restoration of the organ. Mary and Minna cleared away and Gertrude helped her mother upstairs, carrying her spectacles, book and knitting-bag. Serge, Bennett, and Father Soledano were left in the dining-room. Serge and Bennett smoked and Father Soledano began to talk. Bennett was unused to drinking beer. Serge had plied him with it rather too generously in the frequent lapses in their conversation, and the fumes of it had gone to his head so that it felt very hot and large, while inside it his brain worked with unwonted swiftness and a hectic clarity. His cheeks were flushed and they burned, but on the whole he found his new sensations very pleasant, and there was a sort of splendour in being treated by these grown men, an artist and a priest, as one of themselves. To Bennett all artists were great artists--he was not his father's son for nothing--and the priesthood was the noblest and most exalted calling possible for man. He lived from Sunday to Sunday. On Monday morning he died and was buried in his office. On Saturday evening came a glorious resurrection, and he rose to exalted heights each Sunday morning when he took the sacrament. He was an emotional creature and had no other outlet.

He sat looking from Serge to Father Soledano and from Father Soledano to Serge as they talked, but took little account of what they said. They were exchanging impressions of the town and speaking of it in a curious critical way that Bennett found difficulty in following. He knew nothing of the machinery of the world. He was poor, and he had accepted it as axiomatic that poor people had to do work that was distasteful to them. He had no notion of what that work resulted in, or who profited by it. You went on working until you had enough to marry, and then you married and went on working until you died. His brothers were both bank-clerks, and he gathered that their work was even duller than his own, which consisted in addressing envelopes and taking messages down into the warehouse where there were rough men who were even poorer than himself. They packed and unpacked bales of cotton-goods which were placed on lorries and carried off to trains, which took them away to the sea and across the sea to Bombay and Calcutta and Shanghai and Yokohama. There were many other processes going on in the office and warehouses, but that seemed to be the general principle--cotton came from America, was bought on the Exchange, spun and woven in the mills near Oldham, brought to the warehouse and dispatched--fully insured--through the complicated machinery of the office. There were five partners in the firm and they were all very rich. One of the employees, the head-clerk, had six hundred a year, but he himself, Bennett, received every week only thirty shillings. Many young men of his age were earning only half that sum, and he was quite ready to admit, without thought or examination, that he was worth no more to his employers. He did not understand the machinery in which he played a part, did not want to understand it, and did not find it sufficiently interesting. Being poor, he had to work, and the nature of the work was not his affair. It absorbed the greater part of his life, but it was outside his work that he was as really alive as he could be.

This visit to Fern Square was perhaps the greatest adventure of his life. He had heard Father Soledano's voice droning on for some time, and now he heard words that interested him.

"The middle classes are beginning to invest their savings in industrial securities. That is going to make things worse than ever for the poor, since it means organised exploitation, dividends to be paid as well as the profits of private enterprise. It seems to me that men are inventing machinery for making money and letting them get out of hand. A machine that no man can control or use for the purposes of good is the most perilous engine of destruction."

"A machine," thought Bennett, and at once there came to his mind the streets surrounding his office where all day long there was the thud of machinery and thousands of men and women being swallowed up in the morning by great black ugly buildings, and spewed out again in the evening, all, he supposed, as weary and listless as he felt himself on every evening except Saturday.

"Isn't that," said Serge, "isn't that what has happened with the Church? . . . You don't mind my discussing it in that way? . . . Hasn't it become a machine which takes everything from men and gives them nothing? I fancy my father's Church doesn't meddle much, or, at any rate, effectually, with politics, but yours is always struggling after the temporal power which it has lost."

"That is because we believe that the Church and State should be one."

"I agree. And so they would be if the Church were really a Church, and the State were really a State. I have never been to your church, but I know that my father's is only an imitation, a fairly good imitation and quite attractive, but it has nothing at all to do with religion as I understand it."

"It depends what you mean by religion."

"I take it to mean the profoundest instinct in a human being, that instinct of life which embraces and should direct all the rest."

"I agree, but it is impossible."

"Why is it impossible?"

Bennett did not hear Father Soledano's reply. The dialogue had been to him like the murmuring of mysterious voices in a dream, bearing no relation to his own actual experience. His own religion was so axiomatic that the possibility of criticism, outside crude condemnation, to which he was hardened and accustomed, had never occurred to him, and yet, now that it had happened, it was as something remote, impious, but menacing and disturbing. That Father Soledano should lend himself to such talk perturbed him not at all, for he had been brought up to believe that anything was possible for the Roman Catholic priesthood. He was conscious of resentment, and told himself that it was because these things were being said in Mr. Folyat's house. He was hurt, and childishly he wished to hand on the pain to some one. He waited until Father Soledano's voice had died down, and then he said, taking no account of his words:

"It isn't for us to inquire into these things. If we believe at all in the authority and the Divine origin of the Church we are bound by its tradition and its--its dogma."

"I beg your pardon," replied Serge. "I forgot that you were there. I don't believe in the authority or the Divine origin of the Church, and I refuse to be bound by its tradition, which has always been, to say the least of it, unhappy in its results, or its dogma, which seems to me unsound and more or less contradictory of the spirit of the New Testament."

"But--but . . ." Bennett pounced on Serge with an air of triumph, brandishing his point before proving it. "But what about morals?"

"That," said Serge, "is exactly where you and I part company. You Christians have only evolved a morality which you apply to the affairs of others and not to your own. You have no standard of goodness--only the wickedness of other people, a Pharisaic standard which would have been repulsive to the Man whom you choose to regard as your Founder. My father's sermons, for instance--and they are like every parson's sermons--begin by drawing such a frightful picture of human wickedness that when it is over his hearers feel that they are angels of goodness in comparison. It's an old dodge, and I daresay Father Soledano makes use of it too."

"I do," said Father Soledano. "I do."

Bennett gaped at him. He felt that he would burst into tears if this went on any longer, and indeed his eyes were wet and his throat was so dry that he could not speak.

"You like your religion?" asked Serge.

"It is my whole life." Bennett was surprised at the ferocity with which he said this. He was staggered by Serge's answer:

"I am sorry for you. You will be badly hurt when life gobbles you up and gives you other engrossing interests, which you will be ill-equipped to tackle."

"Come, come," said Father Soledano. "It is not fair. It is not fair to come down from the general to the particular like that."

"I protest," answered Serge. "My whole indignation arises from the unkindness and dishonesty of stuffing young people, and ignorant people, with generalisations."

"What else can you give them? They are not conscious of individuality."

"I don't believe that, and even if it were so you ought to leave them free to become conscious--if they can."

"The risk is too great."

"What risk?"

Bennett's mind had been moving swiftly and partly by memory, partly by intuition he came to this:

"People can't do as they like."

Serge stood up suddenly and paced round the room.

"Young idiot!" he said. "They can, and they do. Isn't it your experience, Father, that they do? The trouble is that with all these foolish generalisations buzzing in their heads they are always doing the wrong things, and doing them in the wrong way, shuffling, and sneaking so as to hide away from the bogies you give them." He turned to Bennett and asked: "Has what you do and think on Sunday the slightest bearing on what you do and think on week-days?"

"It keeps me from temptation," said Bennett so earnestly that there was not the smallest hint of priggishness in him.

Serge took him by the arm and lifted him clean out of his chair and set him down with a jolt on to his feet.

"Keeps you from temptation, does it! How?--By running away from it."

Bennett was very angry. He raised his voice:

"If you had to live in my house you wouldn't talk like that. My father's a drunken beast and my mother doesn't even try to understand us. You'd believe in God if you lived in our house. . ." He came to an end suddenly. Serge patted him kindly on the shoulder.

"That's all right. That's all right. Let's go upstairs and see what a happy home is like, or perhaps you would prefer to go and talk to my father and Father Soledano in the study."

"I'll go with you," said Bennett.

They went upstairs, and Father Soledano joined Francis in the study. In the drawing-room they found Frederic holding forth about the performance in the school-room. The piece chosen was _The Rose and the Ring_, in a musical version.

Gertrude asked Bennett if he could sing. He replied that he could, and Frederic graciously allowed him the use of one of his songs, "On, on, my bark, dash through the foam." Bennett had a light baritone voice with a curious harsh quality in the middle notes, but he loved singing and really let himself go. When he had finished Mrs. Folyat looked up from her _Family Herald_ and said:

"Very nice, very nice indeed. Even Frederic does not sing it so well."

Frederic asked Bennett to take a part in _The Rose and the Ring_, and he accepted. Gertrude took him aside to show him his part, and Mary produced her violin and played Mendelssohn's Songs Without Words for half an hour, after which she produced a table and cards and sat playing Bézique with her mother. (Mrs. Folyat declared that she could not sleep without her game. No one else was allowed to play cards on Sunday.)

Serge sat teasing Minna, and time flew.

There came a ring at the bell, and after a little interval a gaunt figure in black stalked into the room, stood by the door, and said:

"Bennett, your mother says you're to come home."

Bennett rose to his feet at once, muttered good-bye, turned the colour of a red peony and slunk out after the old Scotch servant.

XI

ART AND DRAMA

_Each had an upper stream of thought That made all seem as it was not._ PETER BELL THE THIRD.

LAWRIE, Beecroft and Co. had not a monopoly in culture. Our City Fathers provided us with an art gallery, to which, with praiseworthy regularity they added two Academy pictures every year; the Town-hall had been decorated by a Pre-Raphaelite, and there was a whole network of Free Libraries, all equipped with thousands of books in a uniform binding, and with the smell proper to Free Libraries. In the cold weather they were always very full, in the hot weather they were always very empty; but in the hot weather the accumulated smells of the winter were distilled and concentrated. For music we had two or three series of concerts during the winter months. They were chiefly patronised by Germans and Jews, and the English bragged about them. We had a College of Music, and a School of Art in connection with the municipal technical school. This institution was presided over by a Socialistic disciple of William Morris, who spent a great part of his free time in designing banners for Friendly Societies--Buffaloes, Free Foresters, Hearts of Oak--and cartoons for Labour journals. It was situated in a square which was typical of the town. In the centre of it stood a huge ugly Anglican church, and three sides of it were filled with a Presbyterian chapel, a Wesleyan chapel, a Baptist chapel, a Secular hall, a Maternity Hospital and a Dental Hospital. Down a by-street was the headquarters of the Salvation Army, and down another a larger Roman Catholic church. Quite near was the office in which Bennett Lawrie worked, and all round were slums, public-houses, brothels, a wedge of infamy between the working centre and the outskirts. All round the Anglican church in the centre of the square ran a wide pavement on which were wooden benches. Here at night came hundreds of men, women and boys who had no resting-place. They spent half the night there until they were moved on by the police, when they went to a similar pavement with benches outside the Infirmary, meeting half-way their comrades in misery who had been moved on from that place--a sort of general post. In the day-time the square was always busy, for two main roads met in it, and tram-lines from four directions converged. Near at hand were many cheap shops, and the wives of the clerks came thither to make their daily purchases.

It was to this School of Art that Serge Folyat came as the result of his exhibition, which was an almost unredeemed failure. Beecroft banged the drum and old Lawrie blew the trumpet, but the local school of artists were contemptuous, and declared that the new genius could not draw. Serge quite agreed. He sold ten of his pictures, and went to see the disciple of William Morris and arranged to attend eight classes a week, four in the afternoon and four in the evening.

He found the school very amusing, though at first his position was a little difficult, for most of the students were very young and inclined to look askance at a man with a beard turning grey and his hair growing thin on the top of his head. The classes were very cheap, and he was able to pay for the first term himself and postponed discussion as to future ways and means, reckoning that in three months' time his family would have digested and assimilated him, and added him to the already large number of habits which made their common existence tolerable. He worked very hard both at home and at the school, wrestling with the horrible difficulties of the human body. He had an intuitive feeling that he would never be able to draw hands, and he became very ingenious in concealing them.

The classes at the school were mixed. There were a few serious students of both sexes, a great many who attended from the vanity of talent, and some to whom studying art was an occupation. A little hunchback with a malicious intense face had been there for thirteen years, and an old spinster of fifty-five had spent fifteen years without ever passing an examination or taking a single certificate. She was extremely hopeful, and one of the most cheerful persons in the school. On the whole it was not cheerful. It lacked spirit and enthusiasm. Many of the young men no doubt had a secret conviction that they had a great destiny, but they were rather ashamed of it, and only in rare moments of excitement did they dare to let it appear. Theodore Benskin, the Morrisian principal of the school, had been enthusiastic at twenty-five, but he had stopped there. However, he was a good teacher of a mechanical sort. His business was to turn out draughtsmen rather than artists, and he succeeded. Serge desired to become a draughtsman, and he followed Benskin's directions, though all the while he had a feeling of the grotesque in what he was doing, and was inclined to think that a bushman's drawings on the wall of a cave were of more value than all the finished studies turned out under Benskinian rules. However, he was nettled by the failure of his exhibition, and saw that it was quite useless to take keen pleasure in his work unless by the work he could communicate that pleasure to others. He had no concise theory of art beyond a conviction that unless it could create pleasure there was no excuse for it. As for making money by it, there were a thousand easier ways of doing that, ways that left more leisure and did not induce such profound depression. It was all very well, he thought, to gird, as did almost everybody he met, at the sordidness and grimness of the town in which they lived, but the most miserable of all the people in it were the supposed artists, the men who frequented the Arts Club. They were all men of talent, but none of them ever seemed to have used their gifts to any purpose. They were perpetually cursing the lack of appreciation of their fellow-citizens, but they had never made any really serious attempt to win them or to open up any new way for their minds. When it came to the point their standards were those of the rich men, upon whose caprice they lived. Like everybody else in the town they put up with money as the sole channel of communication between one man and another. Serge used sometimes to try to talk to the waifs and strays on the benches outside the church in the square, but he found them nearly all brutalised and fuddled. They seemed to have no thought beyond the next meal, no programme beyond the next drink. They cadged.

Among the students at the school was a young man whom Serge had marked out from the very first moment. He was short, and had a large head, dark hair, bright eyes, and he was always merry. He had a joke for everyone, and he was always in love with one or other of the girl-students. Benskin was proud of him, for he won all possible prizes and was always solidly working. His name was Basil Haslam, brother of that spotty-faced youth who was Frederic's boon companion. They made acquaintance quickly but did not become friends until they both entered for a competition for a prize, the subject being a sea-piece. Haslam won it, and protested with Benskin that Folyat's was the best, because Folyat knew about the sea and he didn't.

He was delighted when Serge told him that he had been a sailor.

"Ah! That's it," he said. "That's it. I've never been anything. I can just draw but I don't understand about men and how they live."

"That's not very difficult," replied Serge. "They are much the same everywhere. They are all born in the same way, and death has not many variations. What lies in between is largely a matter of eating, drinking, and sleeping."

"And loving."

"Just a few get as far as that. Not many."

"But all of them seem to think about getting married."

"That has surprisingly little to do with love. How much love do you get in your own house?"

"Not much. But then they think I'm queer. My father's a doctor. He wanted me to be a doctor, but I've got a hundred-and-fifty of my own, so I can do what I like. I shall go to London as soon as I'm through here. It's no good being a painter here. They all think it's a joke, a sort of excuse for doing nothing."

"I know. They think pictures are produced automatically--like everything else."

"Old Benskin's automatic enough."

"Exactly. He can work just as he can go to sleep, almost without knowing that he's doing it. It's a matter of habit. He's almost forgotten how he used to despise that sort of thing."

"Do you think he ever did?"

"Of course, or his work wouldn't be as good as it is."

"I can't understand people ceasing to be keen."

"I can. You only need to wobble a very little to come down on the wrong side. Then you're done for--in Hell. And after a bit you find that you quite like it, except in awful moments when you realise that after all it is Hell and that you might so easily have been in Heaven."

"I know what you mean. You mean that the whole thing rests with yourself. But it's rotten luck when you're weak and can't help doing the wrong thing though you see the right thing the whole time."

"But we're all like that. We only go to Hell when we do the wrong thing and pretend that it's the right."

"How did you find that out?"

"By a careful study of Hell and its inhabitants."

"Then you don't mean the Hell one's people talk about?"

"No. I mean here and now, the world as it is. I'm not interested in any other."

"Neither am I. Hurray!"

This conversation was the first of many. Haslam used to wait for Serge and walk with him as far as their roads lay together. He was an ambitious young man with his eyes set on the road to London, not so much because he was eager for fame and material rewards as because he was hotly impatient of art which stopped short at Benskin and Beecroft.

"But," Serge would say, "Benskin and Beecroft will both die."

"I know, but there'll be a new Beecroft and a new Benskin by that time."

"That's true. We shall never be rid of them."

"I expect London is crammed full of Benskins and Beecrofts."

"Maybe, but there are more of the other sort there too."

"If I don't reach London by the time I'm twenty-seven I shall throw up the sponge."

"Why twenty-seven?" asked Serge, smiling.

"Oh! if a man hasn't done something by the time he's twenty-seven he never will."

"I'm a good deal more than that. . ."

"But you've done everything. You've made yourself. You're not really any older than I am, and everybody here is so horribly old."

"Yes, they all come to a bad and perfectly respectable end."

Haslam swung his fist in the air and shouted indignantly: