“Mercy on us!” interrupted the lady, laughing, “you really must stop somewhere. What a lot you seem to have read!”
Wister appeared, for some reason or other, to be very much annoyed; almost waspish. “If you ask me,” he said, “it’s all part of the mob and its hatred of superiority. Always wants to drag merit down. That’s why your infernal trade unions won’t have a good workman paid better than a bad one.”
“That has been defended economically,” said Braintree, with restraint. “One authority has pointed out that the best trades are paid equally already.”
“Karl Marx, I suppose,” said the expert, testily.
“No, John Ruskin,” replied the other. “One of your Victorian giants.” Then he added, “But the text and title of the book were not by John Ruskin, but by Jesus Christ; who had not, alas, the privilege of being a Victorian.”
The stodgy little man named Hanbury possibly felt that the conversation was becoming too religious to be respectable; anyhow, he interposed pacifically, saying, “You come from the mining area, Mr. Braintree?”
The other assented, rather gloomily.
“I suppose,” said Braintree’s new interlocutor, “I suppose there will be a good deal of unrest among the miners?”
“On the contrary,” replied Braintree, “there will be a good deal of rest among the miners.”
The other frowned in momentary doubt, and said very quickly, “You don’t mean the strike is off?”
“The strike is very much on,” said Braintree, grimly, “so there will be no more unrest.”
“Now, what do you mean?” cried the very practical young lady, shortly destined to be the Princess of the Troubadours.
“I mean what I say,” he replied, shortly. “I say there will be a great deal of rest among the miners. You always talk as if striking meant throwing a bomb or blowing up a house. Striking simply means resting.”
“Why, it’s quite a paradox,” cried his hostess, with a sort of joy, as if it were a new parlour game and her party was now really going to be a success.
“I should have thought it was a platitude, otherwise a plain truth,” replied Braintree. “During a strike the workers are resting; and a jolly new experience for some of them, I can tell you.”
“May we not say,” said Wister, in a deep voice, “that the truest rest is in labour?”
“You may,” said Braintree, dryly. “It’s a free country–for you anyhow. And while you’re about it, you may also say that the truest labour is in rest. And then you will be quite delighted with the notion of a strike.”
His hostess was looking at him with a new expression, steady and yet gradually changing; the expression with which people of slow but sincere mental processes recognise something that has to be reckoned with, and possibly even respected. For although, or perhaps because, she had grown up smothered with wealth and luxury, she was quite innocent, and had never felt any shame in looking on the faces of her fellows.
“Don’t you think,” she said at last, “we are just quarrelling about a word?”
“No, I don’t, since you ask me,” he said, gruffly. “I think we are arguing on two sides of an abyss, and that one little word is a chasm between two halves of humanity. If you really care to know, may I give you a little piece of advice? When you want to make us think you understand the situation, and still disapprove of the strike, say anything in the world except that. Say there is the devil among the miners; say there is treason and anarchy among the miners; say there is blasphemy and madness among the miners. But don’t say there is unrest among the miners. For that one little word betrays the whole thing that is at the back of your mind; it is very old and its name is Slavery.”
“This is very extraordinary,” said Mr. Wister.
“Isn’t it?” said the lady. “Thrilling!”
“No, quite simple,” said the Syndicalist. “Suppose there is a man in your coal-cellar instead of your coal-mine. Suppose it is his business to break up coal all day, and you can hear him hammering. We will suppose he is paid for it; we will suppose you honestly think he is paid enough. Still, you can hear him chopping away all day while you are smoking or playing the piano– until a moment when the noise in the coal-cellar stops suddenly. It may be wrong for it to stop–it may be right–it may be all sorts of things. But don’t you see–can nothing make you see– what you really mean if you only say, like Hamlet to his old mole, ‘Rest, perturbed spirit.’”
“Ha,” said Mr. Wister, graciously, “glad to see you have read Shakespeare.”
But Braintree went on without noticing the remark.
“The hammering in your coal-hole that always goes on stops for an instant. And what do you say to the man down there in the darkness? You do not say, ‘Thank you for doing it well.’ You do not even say, ‘Damn you for doing it badly.’ What you do say is, ‘Rest; sleep on. Resume your normal state of repose. Continue in that state of complete quiescence which is normal to you and which nothing should ever have disturbed. Continue that rhythmic and lulling motion that must be to you the same as slumber; which is for you second nature and part of the nature of things. Continuez, as God said in Belloc’s story. Let there be no unrest.’”
As he talked vehemently, but not violently, he became faintly conscious that many more faces were turned towards him and his group, not staring rudely, but giving a general sense of a crowd heading in that direction. He saw Murrel looking at him with melancholy amusement over a limp cigarette, and Archer glancing at him every now and then over his shoulder as if fearing he would set fire to the house. He saw the eager and half-serious faces of several ladies of a sort always hungry for anything to happen. All those close to him were cloudy and bewildering; but amid them all he could see away in the corner of the room, distant but distinct and even unreasonably distinct, the pale but vivid face of little Miss Ashley of the paint-box, watching–.
“But the man in the coal-cellar is only a stranger out of the street,” he went on, “who has gone into your black hole to attack a rock as he might attack a wild beast or any other brute force of nature. To break coal in a coal-cellar is an action. To break it in a coal-mine is an adventure. The wild beast can kill in its own cavern. And fighting with that wild beast is eternal unrest; a war with chaos, as much as that of a man hacking his own way through an African forest.”
“Mr. Hanbury,” said Rosamund, smiling, “has just come back from an expedition of that sort.”
“Yes,” said Braintree, “but when he doesn’t happen to go on an expedition, you don’t say there is Unrest at the Travellers’ Club.”
“Had me there. Very good,” said Hanbury, in his easy-going way.
“Don’t you see,” went on Braintree, “that when you say that of us, you imply that we are all so much clockwork, and you never even notice the ticking till the clock stops.”
“Yes,” said Rosamund, “I think I see what you mean and I shan’t forget it.” And, indeed, though she was not particularly clever, she was one of those rare and rather valuable people who never forget anything they have once learnt.
CHAPTER V
THE SECOND TRIAL OF JOHN BRAINTREE
Douglas Murrel knew the world; he knew his own world, though that lucky love of low company had saved him from supposing it was the whole world. And he knew well enough what had happened. Braintree, brought there to be abashed into silence, was being encouraged to talk. There was in it perhaps some element of the interest in a monstrosity or performing animal; some touch of that longing of all luxurious people for something fresh; but the monstrosity was making a good impression. He talked a good deal; but he did not have the air of being conceited; only of being convinced. Murrel knew the world; and he knew that men who talk a great deal are often not conceited, because not conscious.