HE brought great news. Not only had his publishers thought well of the novel and offered him good terms, including a substantial advance, but they professed themselves able to place it serially in England for a goodly sum. They had also shown him the figures of the half-yearly returns on American sales of Through Blood and Snow which transcended his dreams of opulence. “I had forgotten America,” he said na?vely.
“You’re nothing, if not original,” she laughed. “That’s what I like about you.”
He insisted on the wild extravagance of a taxi to the garden city. All that money he declared had gone to his head. He felt the glorious intoxication of wealth. When they were about to turn off the safe highway into devious garden-city paths, he said:
“Let us change our minds and go straight on to John o’ Groats.”
“All right. Let us. We’re on the right road.”
He swerved towards her. “Would you? Really?”
She opened her bag and took out her purse.
“I’ve got fifteen and sevenpence. How much have you?”
“About three pounds ten.”
She sighed. “This unromantic taxi man would charge us at least five pounds to take us there.”
“We can turn back and fill our pockets at the bank.”
“It’s Sunday.”
“I never before realized the blight of the British Sabbath.”
“So we’re condemned to Fielder’s Park.”
“But one of these days we’ll go, you and I together, to John o’ Groats—as far as we can and then——”
“And then?”
“And then we’ll take a ship and sail and sail until we come to the Fortunate Isles.”
“You’ll let Myra come too?” said Olivia, deliciously anxious to keep to the playful side of an inevitable road.
“Of course. We’ll find her a husband. The cabin-boy. Pour mousse un chérubin.”
“And when we get to the Fortunate Isles, what should we do there?”
“We shall fill our souls with sunlight, so that we could use it when we came back to our work in this dark and threatening modern world.”
The girl’s heart leapt at the reply.
“I’ll go up to John o’ Groats with you whenever you like,” she said.
But the taxi, at that moment drawing up before the detached toy villa, whose “Everdene” painted on the green garden gate proclaimed the home of the Blenkirons, inhibited Triona’s reply.
They found within an unbeautiful assemblage of humans inextricably mingled with crumbling cake and sloppy cups of tea and cigarette smoke. Agnes, shining with heat and hospitality, gave them effusive welcome and, extricating her brother from a distant welter, introduced him to the newcomers. He was a flabby-faced young man with a back-thatch of short rufous hair surmounting a bald forehead. By his ears grew little patches of side whiskers. He wore an old unbuttoned Norfolk jacket and a red tie in a soft collar without an under pin. He greeted them with an enveloping clammy hand.
“So good of you to come, Miss Gale. So glad to meet you, Mr. Triona. We have heard so much about you. You will find us here all very earnest in our endeavour to find a Solution—for never has human problem been so intricate that a Solution has not been discovered.”
“What’s the problem?” asked Olivia.
“Why, my dear lady, there’s only one. The Way Out—or, if you have faith—The Way In.” He caught a lean, thin-bearded man by the arm. “Dawkins, let me introduce you to Miss Gale. Mr. Dawkins is our rapporteur.”
“You haven’t any tea,” said Dawkins rebukingly, as though bidden to a marriage feast she had no wedding garment. “Come with me.”
He frayed her a passage through the chattering swarm that over-filled the little bow-windowed sitting-room and provided her with what seemed to be the tepid symbols of the brotherhood.
“What did you think of Roger’s article in this week’s Signal?”
“Who is Roger, and what is The Signal?” Olivia asked simply.
Dawkins stared at her for a second and then, deliberately turning, wormed his path away.
Olivia’s gasp of surprise was followed by a gurgle of laughter which shook her lifted cup so that it spilled. The sight of a stained skirt drew from her a sharp exclamation of dismay. Agnes Blenkiron disengaging herself from the cluster round the tea-table came to the rescue. What was the matter? Olivia explained.
“Oh, my dear,” said Agnes, “I ought to have told you. It’s my fault. Dawkins is such a touchy old thing. Roger, of course, is my brother—didn’t you know? And The Signal is our weekly. Dawkins is the editor.”
“I’m awfully sorry,” said Olivia, “but ought I to read The Signal?”
“Why, of course,” replied Agnes Blenkiron intensely. “Everybody ought to read it. It’s the only periodical that matters in London.”
Olivia felt the remorse of those convicted of an unpardonable crime.
“I’ll get a copy to-morrow at the bookstall at Victoria Station.”
Agnes smiled in her haggard way. “My dear, an organ like The Signal doesn’t lie on the bookstalls, like Comic Cuts or The Fortnightly Review. It’s posted to private subscribers, or it’s given away at meetings.”
“Who pays for the printing of it?” asked the practical Olivia, who had learned from Triona something of the wild leap in cost of printed matter.
“Aubrey Dawkins finds the money. He gets it in the City. He has given up his heart and soul to The Signal.”
“I’ve made an enemy for life,” said Olivia penitently.
Miss Blenkiron reassured her. “Oh, no you haven’t. We haven’t time for enemy making here. Our business is too important.”
Olivia in a maze asked:
“What is your business?”
“Why, my dear child, the Social Revolution. Didn’t you know?”
“Not a bit,” said Olivia.
She learned many astonishing things that afternoon, as she was swayed about from introduction to introduction among the eagerly disputing groups. Hitherto she had thought, with little comprehension, of the world-spread social unrest. Strikes angered her because they interfered with necessary reconstruction and only set the working classes in a vicious circle chasing high wages and being chased in their turn by high prices. At other demands she shuddered, dimly dreading the advent of Bolshevism. And there she left it. She had imagined that revolutionary doctrines were preached to factory hands either secretly by rat-faced agents, or by brass-throated, bull-necked demagogues. That they should be accepted as a common faith by a crowd of people much resembling a fairly well-to-do suburban church congregation stirred her surprise and even dismay.
“I don’t see how intelligent folk can hold such views,” she said to Roger Blenkiron, who had been defending the Russian Soviet system as a philosophic experiment in government.
He smiled indulgently. “Doesn’t the fault lie rather in you, dear lady, than in the intelligent folk?”
“Would that argument stand,” she replied, “if you had been maintaining that the earth was flat and stood still in space?”
“No. The roundness and motion of the earth are ascertained physical facts. But—I speak with the greatest deference—can you assert it to be a scientific fact that a community of human beings are a priori incapable of managing their own affairs on a basis of social equality?”
“Of course I can,” Olivia declared, to the gentle amusement of standers-by. “Human nature won’t allow it. With inequalities of brain and character social equality is impossible.”
“Dear Lady”—she hated the apostrophe as he said it and the lift of the eyebrows which caused an upward ripple that was lost in the far reaches of his bald forehead. “Dear Lady,” said he, “in the Royal Enclosure at Ascot you can find every grade of human intellect, from the inbred young aristocrat who is that much removed”—he flicked a finger nail—“from a congenital idiot to the acute-brained statesman; every grade of human character from the lowest of moral defectives to the highest that the present civilization can produce. And yet they are all on a social equality. And why? They started life on a common plane. The same phenomenon exists in a mass-meeting of working-men—in any assemblage of human beings of a particular class who have started life on a common plane. Now, don’t you see, that if we abolished all these series of planes and established only one plane, social equality would be inevitable?”
“I don’t see how you’re going to do it.”
“Ah! That’s another question. Think of what the task is. To make a clean sweep of false principles to which mankind has subscribed for—what do I know—say—eight thousand years. It can’t be done in a day. Not even in a generation. If you wish to render a pestilence-stricken area habitable, you must destroy and burn for miles around before you can rebuild. Extend the area to a country—to the surface of the civilized globe. That’s the philosophic theory of what is vulgarly called Bolshevism. Let us lay waste the whole plague-stricken fabric of our civilization, so that the world may arise, a new Ph?nix, under our children’s hands.”
“You have put the matter to Miss Gale with your usual cogency, my dear Roger,” said Dawkins, who had joined the group. “Perhaps now she may take a less flippant view of our activities.”
He smiled, evidently meaning to include the neophyte in the sphere of his kind indulgence. But Olivia flushed at the rudeness of his words.
Triona who, hidden from Olivia by the standing group, had been stuffed into a sedentary and penitential corner with two assertive women and an earnest young Marxian gasfitter, and had, nevertheless, kept an alert ear on the neighbouring conversation, suddenly appeared once more to her rescue.
“Pardon me, sir,” said he, “but to one who has gone through, as I have done, the Bolshevist horrors which you advocate so complacently, it’s your view that hardly seems serious.”
“Atroc............