Walter nodded. “Obviously.”
“But you rich,” the other went on, “you have no real neighbours. You never perform a neighbourly action or expect your neighbours to do you a kindness in return. It’s unnecessary. You can pay people to look after you. You can hire servants to simulate kindness for three pounds a month and board. Mrs. Cradock from next door doesn’t have to keep an eye on your babies when you go out. You have nurses and governesses doing it for money. No, you’re generally not even aware of your neighbours. You live at a distance from them. Each of you is boxed up in his own secret house. There may be tragedies going on behind the shutters; but the people next door don’t know anything about it.”
“Thank God!” ejaculated Walter.
“Thank him by all means. Privacy’s a great luxury. Very pleasant, I agree. But you pay for luxuries. People aren’t moved by misfortunes they don’t know about. Ignorance is insensitive bliss. In a poor street misfortune can’t be hidden. Life’s too public. People have their neighbourly feeling kept in constant training. But the rich never have a chance of being neighbourly to their equals. The best they can do is to feel mawkish about the sufferings of their inferiors, which they can never begin to understand, and to be patronizingly kind. Horrible! And that’s when they’re doing their best. When they’re at their worst, they’re like this.” He indicated the crowded room. “They’re Lady Edward—the lowest hell! They’re that daughter of hers. …” He made a grimace, he shrugged his shoulders.
Walter listened with a strained and agonizing attention.
“Damned, destroyed, irrevocably corrupted,” Illidge went on like a denouncing prophet. He had only once spoken to Lucy Tantamount, casually, for a moment. She had seemed hardly to notice that he was there.
It was true, Walter was thinking. She was all that people enviously or disapprovingly called her, and yet the most exquisite and marvellous of beings. Knowing all, he could listen to anything that might be said about her. And the more atrocious the words, the more desperately he loved her. Credo quia absurdum. Amo qui turpe, quia indignum. …
“What a putrefaction!” Illidge continued grandiloquently. “The consummate flower of this charming civilization of ours—that’s what she is. A refined and perfumed imitation of a savage or an animal. The logical conclusion, so far as most people are concerned, of having money and leisure.”
Walter listened, his eyes shut, thinking of Lucy. “A perfumed imitation of a savage or an animal.” The words were true and an excruciation; but he loved her all the more because of the torment and because of the odious truth.
“Well,” said Illidge in a changed voice, “I must go and see if the Old Man wants to go on working tonight. We don’t generally knock off before half-past one or two. It’s rather pleasant living upside down like this. Sleeping till lunch time, starting work after tea. Very pleasant, really.” He held out his hand. “So long.”
“We must dine together one evening,” said Walter without much conviction.
Illidge nodded. “Let’s fix it up one of these days,” he said, and was gone.
Walter edged his way through the crowd, searching.
Everard Webley had got Lord Edward into a corner and was trying to persuade him to support the British Freemen.
“But I’m not interested in politics,” the Old Man huskily protested. “I’m not interested in politics. …” Obstinately, mulishly, he repeated the phrase, whatever Webley might say.
Webley was eloquent. Men of good will, men with a stake in the country ought to combine to resist the forces of destruction. It was not only property that was menaced, not only the material interests of a class; it was the English tradition, it was personal initiative, it was intelligence, it was all natural distinction of any kind. The Freemen were banded to resist the dictatorship of the stupid; they were armed to protect individuality from the mass man, the mob; they were fighting for the recognition of natural superiority in every sphere. The enemies were many and busy.
But forewarned was forearmed; when you saw the bandits approaching you formed up in battle order and drew your swords. (Webley had a weakness for swords; he wore one when the Freemen paraded, his speeches were full of them, his house bristled with panoplies.) Organization, discipline, force were necessary. The battle could no longer be fought constitutionally. Parliamentary methods were quite adequate when the two parties agreed about fundamentals and disagreed only about trifling details. But where fundamental principles were at stake, you couldn’t allow politics to go on being treated as a parliamentary game. You had to resort to direct action or the threat of it.
“I was five years in Parliament,” said Webley. “Long enough to convince myself that there’s nothing
