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A People's Man, a novel by E. Phillips Oppenheim |
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Chapter 30 |
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_ CHAPTER XXX Selingman had the air of one who has achieved a personal triumph as, with his arm in Maraton's, he led him towards the man whom they had come to visit. "Behold!" he exclaimed. "It is a triumph, this! It is a thing to be remembered! I have brought you two together!" Maraton's first impressions of Maxendorf were curiously mixed. He saw before him a tall, lanky figure of a man, dressed in sombre black, a man of dark complexion, with beardless face and tanned skin plentifully freckled. His hair and eyes were coal black. He held out his hand to Maraton, but the smile with which he had welcomed Selingman had passed from his lips. "You are not the Maraton I expected some day to meet," he said, a little bluntly, "and yet I am glad to know you." Selingman shrugged his shoulders. "Max--my friend Max, do not be peevish," he begged. "I tell you that he is the Maraton of whom we have spoken together. I have heard him. I have been to Sheffield and listened. Don't be prejudiced, Max. Wait." Maxendorf motioned them to seats and stood with his finger upon the bell. "Yes," Selingman assented, "we will drink with you. You breathe of the Rhine, my friend. I see myself sitting with you in your terraced garden, drinking Moselle wine out of cut glasses. So it shall be. We will fall into the atmosphere. What a palace you live in, Max! Is it because you are an ambassador that they must house you so splendidly?" Maxendorf glanced around him. He was in one of the best suites in the hotel, but he had the air of one who was only then, for the first time, made aware of the fact. "These things are done for me," he said carelessly. "It seems I have come before I was expected. The Embassy is scarcely ready for occupation." He ordered wine from the waiter and exchanged personal reminiscences with Selingman until it was brought. Selingman grunted with satisfaction. "Two bottles," he remarked. "Come, I like that. A less thoughtful man would have ordered one first and the other afterwards. The period of waiting for the second bottle would have destroyed the appetite. Quite an artist, my friend Max. And the wine--well, we shall see." He raised the glass to his lips with the air of a connoisseur. "It will do," he decided, setting it down empty and lighting one of his black cigars. "Now let us talk. Or shall I, for a change, be silent and let you talk? To-day my tongue has been busy. Maraton is a silent man, and he has a silent secretary with great eyes behind which lurk fancies and dreams the poor little thing has never been encouraged to speak of. A silent man--Maraton. Rather like you, Max. Which of you will talk the more, I wonder? I shall be dumb." "It will be I who will talk," Maxendorf asserted. "I, because I have a mission, things to explain to our friend here, if he will but listen." "Listen--of course he will listen!" Selingman interrupted. "You two--what was it the _Oracle_ called you both--the world's deliverers. Put your heads together and decide how you are going to do it. The people over here, Max, are rotting in their kennels. Sink-holes they live in. Live! What a word!" "If you indeed have something to say to me," Maraton proposed, "let us each remember who we are. There is no need for preambles. I know you to be a people's man. We have all watched your rise. We have all marvelled at it." "A Socialist statesman in the stiffest-necked country of Europe," Selingman muttered. "Marvelled at it, indeed!" "I am where I am," Maxendorf declared, "because the world is governed by laws, and in the main they are laws of justice and right. The people of my country fifty years ago were as deep in the mire as the people of your country to-day. Their liberation has already dawned. That is why I stand where I do. Your people, alas! are still dwellers in the caves. The moment for you has not yet arrived. When I heard that Maraton had come to England, I changed all my plans. I said to myself--' I will go to Maraton and I will show him how he may lead his people to the light.' And then I heard other things." "Continue," Maraton said simply. Maxendorf rose to his feet. He came a little nearer to Maraton. He stood looking down at him with folded arms--a lank, gaunt figure, the angular lines of his body and limbs accentuated by his black clothes and black tie. "It came upon me like a thunderbolt," Maxendorf proceeded. "I heard unexpectedly that Maraton had entered Parliament, had placed his hand in the hand of a Minister--not even the leader of the people's Party. You do not read the Press of my country, perhaps. You did not hear across the seas the groan which came from the hearts of my children. I said to myself--'The Maraton whom we knew of exists no longer, yet I will go and see.'" Maraton moved in his chair a little uneasily. He felt suddenly as though he were a prisoner at the bar, and this man his judge. "You do not understand the circumstances which I found existing on my arrival here," Maraton explained. "You do not understand the promises which I have received from Mr. Foley, and which he is already carrying into effect. You read of the Lancashire strike?" Maxendorf nodded his long head slowly but said nothing. "The settlement of that," Maraton continued, "was arranged before I spoke to the people. It is the same with Sheffield. For the first time, the Parliament of this country has passed a measure compelling the manufacturers to recognise and treat with the demands of the people. Trade Unionism has been lifted to an entirely different level. There are three Bills now being drafted--people's Bills. Revolutionary measures they would have been called, a thousand years ago. Every industry in the country will have its day. In the next ten years Capital will have earned many millions less, and those many millions will have gone to the labouring classes." "Is it you who speak," Maxendorf asked grimly, "or is this another man--a sophist living in the shadow of Maraton's fame? Is there anything of the truth, anything of the great compelling truth in this piecemeal legislation? Is it in this way that the freedom of a country can be gained? One gathered that the Maraton who sent his message across the seas had different plans." "I had," Maraton admitted, "but the time came when I was forced to ask myself whether they were not rather the plans of the dreamer and the theorist, when I was forced to ask myself whether I was justified in destroying this generation for the sake of those to come. Life, after all, is a marvellous gift. You and I may believe in immortality, but who can be sure? It is easy enough to play chess, but when the pawns are human lives, who would not hesitate?" Maxendorf sighed. "I cannot talk with you, Maraton," he said. "You will not speak with me honestly. You came, you landed on these shores with an inspired idea--something magnificent, something worthy. You have substituted for it the time-worn methods of all the reformers since the days of Adam, who have parted with their principles and dabbled in sentimental altruism. Piecemeal legislation--what can it do?" "It can build," Maraton declared. "It can build, generation by generation. It can produce a saner race, and as the light comes, so the truth will flow in upon the minds of all." "An illusion!" Selingman interrupted, with a sudden fierceness in his tone. "Once, Maraton, you looked at life sanely enough. Are you sure that to-day you have not put on the poisoned spectacles? Don't you know the end of these spasmodic reforms? You pass, your influence passes, your mantle is buried in your grave, and the country slips back, and the people suffer, and the great wheel grinds them into bone and powder just as surely a century hence as a century ago. Man, you don't start right. If you would restore a ruined and neglected garden, you must first destroy, make a bonfire of the weeds prepare your soil. Then, in the springtime, fresh flowers will blossom, the trees will give leaf, the birds who have deserted a ruined and fruitless waste will return and sing once more the song of life. But there must be destruction, Maraton. You yourself preached it once, preached fire and the sword. Something has gone from you since those days. Compromise--the spirit of compromise you call it. How one hates the sound of it! Bah! Man, you are on a lower level, when you talk the smug talk of to-day. I am disappointed in you. Maxendorf is disappointed in you. You are riding down the easy way on to the sandbanks of failure." "Your garden," Maraton rejoined, with an answering note of passion in his tone, "would never have blossomed again if you had driven the plough across it, ripped up its fruit trees, torn up its neglected plants by ruthless force. You must plant fresh seed and grow new trees. Then there's another nation, another world. What about your responsibilities to the present one? Isn't it great to save what is, rather than to destroy for the sake of those who have neither toiled nor suffered? I thought as you once. The philosopher thinks like that in his study. Stand before those people, look into their white, labour-worn faces, feel with them, sorrow with them for a little time, and I tell you that your hand will falter before it drives the plough. You will raise your eyes to heaven and pray that you may see some way of bringing help to them--to them who live--the help for which they crave. Haven't they a right to their lives? Who gives us a mandate to sweep them away for the sake of the unborn?" "You have become a sentimentalist, Maraton," Maxendorf declared grimly. "The soft places in your heart have led you to forget for a moment the inexorable laws. Let us pass from these generalities. Let us speak of things such as you had at first intended. I know what was in your heart. You meant to pass from Birmingham to Glasgow, to preach the holy war of Labour, a giant crusade. You meant to close the mills, to stop the wheels, to blank the forges and rake out the furnaces of the country. You meant to place your finger upon its arteries and stop their beating. You meant to turn the people loose upon their oppressors. Though they must perish in their thousands, yet you meant to show them the naked truth, to show them of what they are being deprived, to show them the irresistible laws of justice, so that for very shame they must drop their tools and stand for their rights. Why didn't you do it?" "I have told you," Maraton answered. "Yes, you have told us," Maxendorf continued. "Supposing there were still a way by which even this present generation could reap the benefit? Are you great enough, Maraton, to listen to me, I wonder? That is what I ask myself since you have become a Party politician, a friend of Ministers, since you have joined in the puppet dance of the world. See to what I have brought my people. In ten years' time I tell you that nearly every industry in my country will be conducted upon a profit-sharing basis." "You have brought them to this," Maraton reminded him swiftly, "by peaceful methods." "For me there were no other needed," Maxendorf urged. "For you the case is different. If you are one of those who love to strut about and boast of your nationality, if you are one of those in whom lingers the smallest particle of the falsest sentiment which the age of romance has ever handed down to us--what they call patriotism--then my words will be wasted. But here is the message which I have brought to you and to your people. This is the dream of my life which he, Selingman, alone has known of--the fusion of our races." "Magnificent!" Selingman cried, springing to his feet. "The dream of a god! Listen to it, Maraton. My brain has realised it. I, too, have seen it. Your country is bound in the everlasting shackles. Generations must pass before you can even weaken the hold of your bourgeoisie upon the soul and spirit of your land. You are tied hard and fast, and withal you are on the downward grade. The work which you do to-day, the next generation will undo. Give up this foolish legislation. Listen to Maxendorf. He will show you the way." "When you speak of fusion," Maraton asked, "you mean conquest?" "There is no such word," Maxendorf insisted. "The hearts of our people are close together. Put aside all these artificial ententes and alliances. There are no two people whose ideals and whose aims and whose destiny are so close together as your country's and mine. It is for that very reason that these periods of distrust and suspicion continually occur, suspicions which impoverish two countries with the millions we spend on senseless schemes of defence. Away with them all. Stop the pendulum of your country. Declare your coal strike, your railway strike, your ironfounders' strike. Let the revolution come. I tell you then that we shall appear not as invaders, but as friends and liberators. Your industries shall start again on a new basis, the basis which you and I know of, the basis which gives to the toilers their just and legitimate share of what they produce. Your trade shall flourish just as it flourished before, but away to dust and powder with your streets of pig-sties, the rat-holes into which your weary labourers creep after their hours of senseless slavery. You and I, Maraton, know how industries should be conducted. You and I know the just share which Capital should claim. You and I together will make the laws. Oh, what does it matter whether you are English or Icelanders, Fins or Turks! Humanity is so much greater than nationality. Your men shall work side by side with mine, and what each produces, each shall have. What is being done for my country shall surely be done for yours. Can't you see, Maraton--can't you see, my prophet who gropes in the darkness, that I am showing you the only way?" Maraton rose to his feet. He came and stood by Maxendorf's side. "Maxendorf," he said, "you may be speaking to me from your heart. Yes, I will admit that you are speaking to me from your heart. But you ask me to take an awful risk. You stand first in your country to-day, but in your country there are other powerful influences at work. So much of what you say is true. If I believed, Maxendorf--if I believed that this fusion, as you call it, of our people could come about in the way you suggest, if I believed that the building up of our prosperity could start again on the real and rational basis of many of your institutions, if I believed this, Maxendorf, no false sentiment would stand in my way. I would risk the eternal shame of the historians. So far as I could do it, I would give you this country. But there is always the doubt, the awful doubt. You have a ruler whose ideas are not your ideas. You have a people behind you who are strange to me. I have not travelled in your country, I know little of it. What if your people should assume the guise of conquerors, should garrison our towns with foreign soldiers, demand a huge indemnity, and then, withdrawing, leave us to our fate? You have no guarantees to offer me, Maxendorf." "None but my word," Maxendorf confessed quietly. "You bargain like a politician!" Selingman cried. "Man, can't you see the glory of it?" "I can see the glory," Maraton answered, turning around, "but I can see also the ineffaceable ignominy of it. Is your country great enough, Maxendorf, to follow where your finger points? I do not know." "Yet you, too," Maxendorf persisted, "must sometimes have looked into futurity. You must have seen the slow decay of national pride, the nations of the world growing closer and closer together. Can't you bear to strike a blow for the great things? You and I see so well the utter barbarism of warfare, the hideous waste of our mighty armaments, draining the money like blood from our countries, and all for senselessness, all just to keep alive that strange spirit which belongs to the days of romance, and the days of romance only. It's a workaday world now, Maraton. We draw nearer to the last bend in the world's history. Oh, this is the truth! I have seen it for so long. It's my religion, Maraton. The time may not have come to preach it broadcast, but it's there in my heart." Selingman struck the table with the palm of his hand. "Enough!" he said. "The words have been spoken. To-morrow or the next day we meet again. Go to your study, Maraton, and think. Lock the door. Turn out the Julia I shall some day rob you of. Hold your head, look into the future. Think! Think! No more words now. They do no good. Come. I stay with Maxendorf. I go with you to the lift." Maxendorf held out his hand. "Selingman is, as usual, right," he confessed. "We are speaking in a great language, Maraton. It is enough for to-night, perhaps. Come back to me when you will within the next forty-eight hours." They left him there, a curious figure, straight and motionless, standing upon the threshold of his room. Selingman gripped Maraton by the arm as he hurried him along the corridor. "You've doubts, Maraton," he muttered. "Doubts! Curse them! They are not worthy. You should see the truth. You're big enough. You will see it to-morrow. Get out of the fog. Maxendorf is the most profound thinker of these days. He is over here with that scheme of his deep in his heart. It's become a passion with him. We have talked of it by the hour, spoken of you, prayed for some prophet on your side with eyes to see the truth. Into the lift with you, man. Look for me to-morrow. Farewell!" _ |
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