Chapter XXXIV

Viola was withdrawn from Eastbourne in disgrace and replanted in London under a cloud.

From morning till night she was aware of a tacit disapproval. No one reproached her in words. It was a relief to receive by post a piece of Mrs. Ainley’s mind. The veneer of Reggie’s mother gave way under the prick of her maternity.

She wrote four pages of under-scored anger in a perfectly religious tone. But Viola’s own mother said nothing, and the things she didn’t say remained ineffaceably in Viola’s heart.

There is no intimacy so deep, and no hostility so bitter as that between a mother and daughter when their wills conflict.

For twenty-one years Mrs. Egerton and Viola had been literally all the world to each other.

Viola knew when her mother felt a draught, or disliked the wording of a phrase.

The turn of a vexed eyelash or the annoyed inflection of her mother’s voice were as sharp as a blow to her. She could not get away from the weight of her mother’s anger, it lay on her spirit with the inflexibility of frost.

She knew that her father was angry with her too; he showed it by a curtness of manner and the absence of his usual jokes. He remembered whenever he saw Viola that she was the cause of trouble; but he did not see her very often and he was not thinking of her when she was not there, so that he had no accumulation of anger to visit upon her.

But there was no interval in Mrs. Egerton’s anger. It was perfectly smooth, bare and stationary.

Nothing could be done with it but surrender to it, and Viola often felt herself on the verge of surrender. She had none of the secret pleasures of obstinacy, her opinions were not important to her, and her emotions wavered. But there was something in her that called out for air and knew that submission meant suffocation. Her conscience, goaded by perpetual disapproval, enlarged its margin.

It permitted Viola to do things that if the disapproval had lifted would have been automatically forbidden to her.

She was secretly astonished by this feeling of inner latitude, but she took advantage of it.

She went for queer little walks by herself, and insisted on visiting people she knew her mother didn’t like—strange people who read books as if they were important and went to Sunday afternoon concerts even when they hadn’t got proper seats.

Viola reached the summit of her secret violence when she saw the announcement of a big labour meeting, and decided to attend it.

‘What on earth do you want to go to a Labour meeting for?’ her father asked her irritably. ‘No decent person is ever seen at a place like that! Why, the fellow James Barton is going to speak, and I consider him personally responsible for the dock strike. He’s holding up the whole river, confound him! The man ought to be imprisoned and the strike funds seized, and would be if any one knew how to govern the country! And you want to go and hear him talking about it?’

‘I want,’ said Viola firmly, ‘to hear what they have to say for themselves.’

‘Say for themselves!’ cried Mr. Egerton, helping himself to turbot with a splash, ‘what on earth does it matter what fellows like that say for themselves? They get their arguments out of inflammatory rags, and are paid for repeating the lies they find there!’

‘Wherever they get their arguments from, I should like to hear them,’ said Viola; ‘after all, we get our own arguments from newspapers, too, I suppose?’

‘Really, my dear child,’ said Mrs. Egerton, ‘I hope you don’t mean to suggest as well, that your father and I draw our income from our political views? But of course you do not know what you are talking about, nor have you yet mentioned with whom you purpose to go?’

‘Go—she mustn’t go at all,’ said Mr. Egerton. ‘I can’t have it said that my daughter is rushing about to places of that kind.’

Mrs. Egerton changed the conversation. She wanted it to stop with the full force of her husband’s authority unwatered down by any further reflections from Viola. She would not forbid Viola to do anything herself. She had gone beyond the intimacy of orders, but she wanted her to be prevented from attending the meeting. She did not realise that Viola had moved also, she had gone beyond the force of prevention.

She had been hanged for lambs for three penitential weeks, and now she hardened her heart and presented her parents with a sheep.

The night of the meeting arrived, and Viola, having dressed as usual for dinner, went out and took her latchkey.

She was sorry afterwards that she wore a blue velvet coat trimmed with ermine and her pearls, but she had never been to a Labour meeting before, and she vaguely intended to join her mother at a reception afterwards.

The hall was crammed to its capacious brim, almost everybody was dressed in something dark that looked a little rough.

A great many women wore glasses and must have been school teachers; there were shop-girls, too, who looked a little smarter, but most of the audience were men.

Viola had never seen so many men before in her life—they ware like an army. Men with curious white lustreless faces and blue shadows under their eyes, who worked in mines or were engineers, and had had the colour bleached out of them by furnaces.

Hundreds of narrow-chested young men who had never had enough to eat, or games to play themselves alive; clerks and shop-men and factory hands, and the unlabelled multitude of fugitive Londoners, who can be divided chiefly by age. When they were young their salaries were big enough to make them a little irresponsible; they bought large ties and their eyes had a flicker of expectation. Sometimes they played football and sometimes they were in love. But when they were middle-aged the flicker in their eyes went out. They did not make money enough for expectations, they struggled on, driven by domestic difficulties under the harrow of their narrow incomes.

Viola sat back thoughtfully in her seat and studied the faces around her.

There was something odd and stirring in the air as if every man and woman in the hall had a personal stake and knew what they meant by it.

The seat by Viola’s side was empty, but just before the meeting began a girl slipped unobtrusively into it. She had an expressionless face, which was very nearly pretty, and odd eyes which seemed to hover over what she looked on, as if she might, if it were worth while, strike.

She looked quite well off, but as if she were accustomed to going about a good deal alone.

She glanced at Viola, her pearls, her soft blue velvet cloak, and down at her little gray suède slippers with paste buckles. It was an impersonal glance, bright and hard, like an animal’s in a hedge. Viola wondered if the girl’s eyes had ever looked friendly.

The meeting opened dully with a radical peer. None of the audience could forget he was a peer, and he couldn’t forget he was a radical.

He spent most of his time explaining how unimportant he was, while the people waited.

The vast audience grew restless under his explanations, they cheered good-naturedly, but they wanted him to stop. They knew he was unimportant. The chairman, a shrewd, heavy-browed man with luminous eyes, introduced each of the speakers in turn, he made no speeches himself, but he said plainly and loudly who each speaker was and what subject he was going to speak about.

It was a large programme, and Viola was astonished at the clearness and character of the speakers.

Sometimes they began stumblingly, as if the huge crowded hall blocked their utterance and shook their nerves, but after a moment or two of floundering, something in the urgency of what they had to say, or a wave of fellow-feeling from their audience drew them into self-forgetfulness.

These men were there to say what they had thought about for years. They had run risks to say it and gone to great expense.

They could not afford to fail in saying what they meant.

Their words came out steadily, solidly, with the weight of familiar facts.

Viola had often been to political meetings before, but the clear, fluent platitudes of people she agreed with, had passed over her mind as colourlessly as water.

These words shook her.

One by one men got up and said what their work was like. Very few of them had any style beyond their sincerity. They were tied to narrow vocabularies. But they were all workers, and the people who listened to them were workers. Some of them worked with their hands and some with their heads, but they were part of the same correspondence between personal effort and daily bread.

Very few people were there for fun or had any resources that came without struggle.

It was this which gave to the meeting what Viola had never felt before, an acuteness of interest and an extraordinary comradeship.

None of these people knew each other, but they knew one fact about each other which made them feel as compact and involved as a family.

When a mill girl from the north in clogs and a shawl got up and stood facing the gathered multitudes of London, to tell them she had been fined for sneezing, the angry wave that stirred the whole audience was as personal as if they had shared the injustice. They knew what fines meant. They knew the personal humiliation of them and the havoc they made in the weekly budget.

Some of them could check from personal experience the tyrannical inhibitions of the living-in system, and most of them knew the deadly ruthlessness of lock-outs for unpunctuality.

It seemed incredible to Viola that two hundred workers could be left in a strange neighbourhood without shelter, losing half a day’s pay because of a belated train.

She was stirred to the bottom of her heart by tragedies newspapers never tell, tragedies that do not end fatally because they do not end at all.

She listened with burning cheeks to the sometimes reasonable and sometimes merely vindictive diatribes against men in the position of her father. Their privileges, their perfunctory attention to their work-people’s claims, their inaccessibility.

No one there spoke up for their benevolence. Viola had heard so much always about the care and kindness of capitalists, that she had been unable to judge fairly of a system in which cultured good-heartedness had such an apparent scope. She had not thought of poor people as necessarily bad, but she had taken for granted that they were ignorant, and without the capacity for knowledge; and that power is only safe with knowledge, and that knowledge does not filter down much beneath four hundred a year.

Her mind flinched before Jim’s name on the programme. He was to speak of the issue between her father himself (her father and Reggie, and Reggie’s father) and the dockers. She dreaded it so much that she felt cold and trembled, and she wanted it so much that nothing else in the world seemed to matter.

She had forgotten her private problems.

Her heart, bewildered and submerged in its personal struggle, was flung out suddenly on to a wider sea.

She held her head up with a relieved sense as if she were breathing again.

People weren’t disgraceful because they stood out for freedom. They were only disgraceful when they tried to stop other people from standing out, or felt sure they were right and nothing need be changed because they were not personally hampered.

Viola was glad she was hampered now, it was her only point of union with the people around her.

There was an interval half-way through the meeting. She turned to the girl beside her.

‘Isn’t it wonderful?’ she said eagerly. ‘I’ve never heard anything in the least like it before.’

The girl lifted her quick, hovering eyes to Viola without answering her for a moment; then she said, ‘I don’t often come to Labour meetings myself, but it happens my brother is to speak at this one, and they gave me a free ticket at the door.’

‘Your brother!’ cried Viola. ‘How awfully interesting! Has he spoken yet?’

The girl shook her head.

‘I see him coming on to the platform now,’ she said. ‘He speaks for the dockers.’

‘Oh!’ cried Viola in astonishment, ‘but that’s Jim Barton—is he your brother? I admire him so much—I’ve heard him preach twice.’

‘Have you?’ said Eliza without enthusiasm. ‘I can’t say that I have. He seems to be fond of religion.’

‘It must be wonderful to have a brother like that!’ Viola went on. ‘Do you live with him and take care of him?’ Then she remembered the lady with the mortar-board, and somehow or other Viola could not connect the lady with the mortar-board and Eliza.

‘I don’t,’ said Eliza quietly, ‘hold much with religion myself. Of course I don’t say Jim hasn’t done wisely by sticking to it. He needed education and now he’s got it. So that’s all to the good. But he doesn’t make what he might out of it.’ Eliza dismissed Jim and his projects. She looked more fixedly at Viola. ‘You won’t mind my saying it,’ she asked, ‘will you, but do you think it’s very safe to wear pearls in a big meeting like this? There are rough people about.’

‘Oh, thank you,’ said Viola, ‘but they have a safety catch; I think they must be all right, don’t you? Papa said it was such a good one.’

Eliza’s eyes raised themselves to the catch and looked away again. ‘I should put them in my handbag if I were you,’ she said, ‘a man might make a snatch at them coming out.’

Viola obediently unfastened her pearls and thrust them into her handbag. ‘Thanks so much for warning me,’ she said, ‘though I can hardly believe any of these people would want to snatch pearls.’

‘I don’t know why not,’ said Eliza a little flatly. ‘Most of them are poor, and poor people aren’t honest as a rule unless they have to be. I dare say you haven’t noticed it, because you’d hardly miss what you lost. But people like me have to be careful. It matters to us not to lose things.’

Viola hesitated. ‘You don’t remind me very much of your brother,’ she said after a pause.

‘I’m not like my brother,’ replied Eliza dryly. ‘Jim and I don’t often meet.’

‘But you will to-night,’ pleaded Viola. ‘It would be so thrilling to tell him to come and speak to us, especially if he doesn’t know you’re here.’

‘Well, I don’t mind if you do,’ said Eliza good-naturedly.

‘Let’s send a man with a note to him now,’ Viola said quickly.

‘Not before he’s spoken,’ said Eliza with decision. ‘The man mustn’t even give him the note till he’s finished.’

Viola thought this was very considerate of Eliza. It might put Jim off his speech to know they were there unexpectedly.

The audience were back in their seats by now. An ex-Factory Inspector spoke first, and then Jim.

Viola leaned forward oblivious of anything in the world but Jim’s face. It was very far away and small. Jim sat at the back of the platform. He had no nervous habits as he waited. He leaned forward to listen to the speaker as if he were absorbed. When the Chairman rose to introduce him, he flung back his head, and the relentless flaxen lock which would never lie flat fell forward on to his forehead. He came to the front of the platform with quick firm steps, looking straight at his audience. He did not see them. Jim never saw his audiences—he saw only what he had to say, point after point, in burning words. He read his speeches out of the listening air.

Viola’s breath came so unevenly she could hardly catch his opening words. She felt as if all her life and all who were dear to her were at his mercy. But Jim made no personal attacks.

He was not bitter, and he was as nearly without prejudice as an enthusiast can be. He spoke of the dockers’ cause point by point, and out of his personal experience, as the other speakers had done, but he spoke as no one else had yet done—with imagination.

He was not content with facts as they were; he showed without exaggeration and with deadly simplicity what the facts meant.

No one else had made Viola see what really happens to people who can’t get justice.

The other speakers had shown the faults of a system, but Jim showed what became of human beings when they had been under the faults of a system. Viola forgot about her father; she forgot that if Jim was right, everything that she believed in was wrong. She forgot everything but the issue between the dockers and the owners. She felt herself drawn into their stubborn tussle, passionately upon the dockers’ side.

Jim did nothing to minimise what it meant if their struggle succeeded; sooner or later it would bring about the crash and breakage of her world.

There was not a sound or stir in all the building but his voice. Sometimes Jim would stop with a queer little jerk of his head, and let out a flying, fiery joke which sent a sharp burst of laughter through his audience. Sometimes he would lift his hand with an awkward gesture, and his voice rising suddenly with passion would lose its penetrating cockney accent and shake his hearers with its intensity. Every now and then after an impressive point he paused, and while he paused his whole audience swung into silence with him. He ended with a sudden drop on to a level phrase, not of petition, but of statement. It was as if he had come through sympathy and had nothing left but fact.

Viola gave a long sigh of relief. She had been unbearably stirred, and under the stir her mind had changed. She knew that she would never look at anything in quite the same way again. Eliza sat unmoved and apparently uninterested. She watched a man step forward and give Jim Viola’s note.

Jim got up at once as if there was something urgent in it.

‘Did you ever hear any one speak like your brother?’ Viola asked her breathlessly.

Eliza paused for a moment; a curious reflective look passed over her face.

‘He has a good deal to say for himself,’ she said at last. ‘I grant you. That’s what education does, but it seems to me a pity he should pour it all out like this. It isn’t, you see, much of a profession. I understand they don’t pay him anything for his speeches.’

‘But I suppose his profession,’ said Viola tentatively, ‘is helping poor people, isn’t it?’

Eliza answered her with a certain bitterness.

‘He might help them who help themselves,’ she said coldly. ‘Not those who can’t. But Jim was always soft.’

Viola stared at her apprehensively. There was something in the small, neat figure beside her which had the effect of a drop of acid.

Viola turned, with a curious feeling of relief as if she had been near something dangerous, towards Jim. He came quickly, and as he reached Viola’s side his eyes and Eliza’s met across her with the quick, upward jerk of a knife.

‘How on earth,’ Jim muttered, ‘did you turn up here, Eliza?’

Somebody else began to speak. Jim looked curiously disturbed and upset—it was a moment or two before Viola made him smile at her, and then they found that Eliza had gone! She must have moved like a streak of lightning in the interval when their eyes met. How she had slipped along the row and up the narrow aisle to the door at the top was a mystery, but when they turned their heads to look for her she was nowhere in sight.

‘The devil! She’s gone!’ Jim muttered to himself.

‘She really _was_ your sister?’ Viola asked. She had a funny sensation as if she would rather Eliza hadn’t been Jim’s sister; but he nodded grudgingly.

Viola did not hear what any of the other speakers said. She was absorbed in a curious consciousness of the man beside her. He was a common man, nothing in him had changed from the first night she saw him, but she was losing sight, losing sight with a curious haste, of all his little mannerisms. It was as if a tide was covering over a vast expanse of mud flats. The mud was there still, but it was hidden, glorified by racing waters—there was no sense in it any more of being a thing to despise. Her imagination had begun to yield to him. She knew that there was largeness in him, and a power that could stand any man’s ridicule. He wasn’t bounded by rules, or by arrangements, and he wouldn’t topple over if anything awkward happened.

Viola had always thought it was security to be with people who seldom let awkward things happen, who, when they nevertheless did happen, had to perfection the art of saving themselves.

But that was not Jim’s strength. With him the security would be that the social disaster didn’t matter, simply didn’t count whether it happened or not.

Jim had none of the insolent mastery which Reggie understood and used in all his relations with women. He had roused and moved her, humiliated and hurt her, and yet now he was beside her, he looked shy and very humble, as if he only wanted not to be in her way.

It was not until they got up to go that Viola discovered, in spite of Eliza’s kind precautions, that her pearls were gone.

It surprised Viola that Jim should care so much about the loss of pearls.

He looked as shaken and bereft as if a terrible accident had happened.

‘Come,’ she said laughingly, ‘they’re only property, and you’ve been telling us to-night just how bad property is for us!’

‘Yes,’ he said grimly, ‘you’re right, I did; but I happen to think other people’s property rather worse for us than our own.’

For a moment she wondered if he was even going to take her home.

Then he said abruptly, ‘Am I to walk back with you?’ He would not speak about anything but the pearls. He made her tell him every particular, and he listened intently to everything about them, even Eliza’s warning, and the handbag. He told her that directly he had taken her back he would go straight to Scotland Yard for her.

Viola wanted to tell him that his words had changed her life, but he did not seem to want to hear how she had liked his speech.

Almost before he reached her door he said ‘Good-bye,’ without holding out his hand.

She put her hand on his arm. ‘Do you think,’ she said, ‘that the poor thief will get some dreadful long sentence if he’s caught? I do wish you wouldn’t go to Scotland Yard for me.’ But she saw that her wish was useless.

‘Somebody’s life will be smashed up, no doubt,’ he answered, ‘but you ought to get your pearls back just the same.’

‘But why will you make me feel so miserable,’ she pleaded; ‘I told you I didn’t want them.’

‘It’ll be much worse,’ he said in a softened voice, ‘for the person who keeps them. It’s always worse for people not to get caught.’

Viola held out her hand to him, but he stepped quickly away from it.

‘Oh,’ she said, half laughing, half crying, ‘do you hate me, Mr. Barton, just because I had my pearls stolen?’

Jim shook his head; his eyes had a hard light in them as if he were wrestling with a physical opponent.

‘I wish to Heaven I did!’ he said hoarsely. ‘I’m handicapped by the opposite feeling. I’m fighting your father to a finish. It’ll be him or me down in the end of it. And you? I can’t get you out of my head. It hurts like fun to look at you, and remember all you stand for. But I suppose I’d rather have the eyes out of my head than not look at you!

‘You have a home, and every one who sees you loves you, don’t they? They’d be mad if they didn’t. You don’t know what it is to have nothing else to care about but a woman you’ll never touch!

‘This is your house, isn’t it? I wish to heaven I’d never set foot in it. Don’t be frightened! Everything in the world is on your side, even my heart.

‘You’re as safe from me as if I hated you—only don’t ask impossible things of me. Don’t you see, standing there staring at me with your innocent eyes that nothing ever happened to—why, I’m a bit upset. My sister Eliza has just run off with your pearls.’

Viola moved back suddenly as if Jim had struck her in the face. He had told her too much, she could not take it in, she didn’t want to take it in; and before she had regained her self-control he had left her. She was quite safe now, a policeman sauntered slowly towards the house.

Jim had left her close to her own doorstep. A flight of theatre taxis swept the Square. People she knew, two doors off, were giving a dance.

Viola slipped into the hall and closed the door behind her.

It was all safe and soft, quiet and full of light. There was no violence there. But she had been face to face with violence—incredible violence of feeling and taste. She had to sit down suddenly to save herself from falling.

The violence hadn’t all been left outside, some of it was in her swiftly beating heart, and in her failure of breath, and in something far more permanent and real than any shock to her senses.

There was a violence in the fact that although a common man had told her that he loved her, she had not been able to feel angry, nor even ashamed.