Hadrian the Seventh

worth consideration, a decayed relic of antiquity, useful perhaps as a monument of the bad old days when the world was drowned in damnable idolatry: but nothing more. That any man whose reputation so publicly had been besmirched as His had been, should dare to hold up his head, to live and move and have his being, to dispose of millions of money and of the minds of nations, struck them as simply atrocious. He had refused the honour of their alliance, had scorned their overtures with contemptuous silence. They would return Him scorn for scorn: they would show Him what He had lost. If He flattered Himself that His so called “Epistles” to this that and the other would have any influence, the sooner He was undeceived the better. The Liblab Fellowship soon would let “an unhappy old drawler of platitudinous flapdoodle like Hadrian” know His place, quoth the blameless Comrade Bob Matchwood. All the same, amid all the rhapsodic rhodomontade of sound and fury signifying nothing, there remained among the fellowshippers just enough intellect to perceive one thing. Comrade Frank Conollan put on his pince-nez; and, with a spasm of jerks and twitches, was delivered of the opinion that the Liblab Fellowship could not hope to recover anything like a respectable position in the popular estimation as long as it remained where it was. He said that to blink the fact, that Liblabbery had taken a false step in approaching the Pope of Rome, was not a bit of good. Liblabbery had courted a snub; and had been smitten with the snubbiest of snubs. If he might use a metaphorical expression, he would say that Liblabbery had been enticed into a bog and made to look unspeakably silly. If he might use a poetical expression from Shakespeare, he would say “like unback’d colts they pricked their ears, advanced their eyelids, lifted up their noses, and calf-like follow’d through tooth’d briers, pricking goss, and thorns, which enter’d their frail skins, into the filthy mantled pool, where, dancing up to the chins, the foul lake o’er-stunk their feet.”

(It began to dawn upon the Liblabs that the Comrade was doing the very thing desired. He was leading up to the customary denunciation of some traitor. He was about to provide them with the name of the usual scapegoat. They prolonged pleased ears in his direction.)

He would go further. He would say, still using the expressions of the immortal bard of Avon, “Your fairy, which you say is a harmless fairy, has done little better than played the Jack with us.”

(This was something like! The meeting’s ears positively flapped.)

And then, being unable to keep-on his pince-nez any longer by reason of a steamed nose, he brought his climax to an abrupt term by demanding the instant and public expulsion of Comrade Jerry Sant. That was voted nem. con. The Liblab Fellowship shook-off the dust of its dirty feet at the traitor; and Comrade Mat Matchwood said some very slighting things about him in the Salpinx. No one is so facile and energetic about believing evil as a Pessimist, that is to say a Socialist; and, when one traitor is detected, what could be more natural than for others to be suspected. It happened so. The mutual jealousy, the flaring incompetency, the sordid selfishness, which always infected the socialist demagogues, and (of course) the essentially sandy foundation upon which the socialist system was based, led to further and more fatal dissensions. Suspicion mated with Baffled Purpose. Recrimination was the offspring of the match. The fellowshippers, who had connived at the scheme of Jerry Sant, found themselves accused as his accomplices, and denounced and expelled in turn. From dissension it was no more than one step to disunion. Each demagogue, fearful lest he should have to take up an honest trade for a livelihood, devoted persuasive loquacity to the attracting of personal supporters. Burnson battened on Battersea. West Ham went a-whoring after strange Bills. Glasgow got into the galley of Kerardy. And Devana succumbed to a split-thumb-nailed and anarchistic plumber. Schisms within schisms insued. Dens and caves received the remnants of the Liblab Fellowship. Mutual damnation was the order of the day. The Socialists were almost Christian. The ranks were thinned by internecine war. Then came desertions. Socialism didn’t pay; and socialists openly asked conservative agents for tory gold. When it was refused, they swore (after their kind). Labor (without the u) looked about for the patronage of Capital. And British Socialism was in a fair way to perish of its own radical fatuity, and instability.

Hadrian watched the process of disintegration from His tower in Rome, watched the natural absorption of the more respectable socialists by the more respectable community; and He was glad. Very soon now the silly obscene heresy would die and disappear, with the obsolete delusions of Gymnosophists, Anabaptists, Picards, Adamites and Turlupins. Hadrian was glad. Then came the Times, announcing that Australia, Canada, and South Africa had armed all healthy males between the ages of 17 and 50; and that England was mobilizing the sea-and-land-forces of her Empire. Now the whole world was in battle array. He took out His pyx again, and prayed the prayer of the Danaides, “O King of kings, Most Blessed of the blessed, Most Perfect Mighty One of the perfect, be persuaded and let this come to pass⁠—avert from Thy race the insolence of men who (for a reason) hate it; and plunge the black-benched pest into the dark abyss.” It was a pagan enough prayer for a Pope to utter. It was a fierce enough sentiment for an altruist to express. It was an entirely comprehensible suggestion of a misanthrope and misogynist, tired by, impatient of, armed against, the tiresome divarication of little silly people. The thing which troubled Him most was the irreconcilability of the King of Italy. He had tried hard to give Victor Emanuel to understand that, not rebuff but, welcome waited for him. He knew the