CHAPTER XXIX
The scene was Hyde Park; the day, a Saturday in June.
Dressed in green and wearing a sword, Everard Webley was addressing a thousand British Freemen from the back of his white horse, Bucephalus. With a military precision which would have done credit to the Guards, the Freemen had formed up on the Embankment at Blackfriars, had marched with music and symbolic standards to Charing Cross, up Northumberland Avenue, through Trafalgar Square and Cambridge Circus to the Tottenham Court Road and thence along the whole length of Oxford Street to the Marble Arch. At the entrance to the Park they had met an AntiVivisection procession and there had been some slight confusion--a mingling of ranks, a musical discord, as the bands collided, of 'The British Grenadiers' and 'My Faith looks up to Thee, Thou Lamb of Calvary,' an entangling of banners, 'Protect our Doggies' with 'Britons never shall be slaves,' 'Socialism is Tyranny' with 'Doctors or Devils?' But the admirable discipline of the Freemen had prevented the confusion from becoming serious, and after a short delay the thousand had entered the Park, marched past their leader and finally formed themselves into three sides of a hollow square, with Everard and his staff at the centre of the fourth side. The trumpets had sounded a fanfare and the thousand had sung the four verses of Everard's rather Kiplingesque 'Song of the Freemen.' When the singing was done Everard began his speech.
'British Freemen!' he said, 'comrades!' and at the sound of that strong effortless voice there was a silence even among the spectators who had idly collected to watch the proceedings. Carrying a power not intrinsically theirs, a power that belonged to the speaker, not to what he spoke, his words fell one by one, thrillingly audible, into the attentive hush they had created. He began by praising the Freemen's discipline. 'Discipline,' he said, 'voluntarily accepted discipline is the first condition of freedom, the first virtue of Freemen. Free and disciplined Spartans held the Persian hordes at bay. Free and disciplined Macedonians conquered half the world. It is for us free and disciplined Englishmen to deliver our country from the slaves who have enslaved it. Three hundred fought at Thermopylae against tens of thousands. The odds we face are not so desperate. Your battalion is only one of more than sixty, a single thousand among the sixty thousand Freemen of England. The numbers daily increase. Twenty, fifty, sometimes a hundred recruits join us every day. The army grows, the green army of Freemen.
'The British Freemen are uniformed in green. Theirs is the livery of Robin Hood and Little John, the livery of outlaws. For outlaws they are in this stupid democratic world. Outlaws proud of their outlawry. The law of the democratic world is quantity. We outlaws believe in quality. For the democratic politicians, the voice of the greatest number is the voice of God; their law is the law that pleases the mob. Outside the pale of mob-made law, we desire the rule of the best, not the most numerous. Stupider than their liberal grandfathers, the democrats of to-day would discourage individual enterprise and, by nationalizing industry and land, invest the state with tyrannical powers such as it has never possessed, except perhaps in India in the time of the Moguls. We outlaws are freemen. We believe in the value of individual liberty. We would encourage individual enterprise; for we believe that, co-ordinated and controlled in the interests of society as a whole, individual enterprise produces the best economic and moral results. The law of the democratic world is human standardization, is the reduction of all humanity to the lowest common measure. Its religion is the worship of the average man. We outlaws believe in diversity, in aristocracy, in the natural hierarchy. We would remove every removable handicap and give every man his chance, in order that the best may rise to the position for which nature has qualified them. In a word, we believe in justice. And we revere, not the ordinary, but the extraordinary man. I could go on almost indefinitely with this list of the points on which we British Freemen are in radical disagreement with the democratic governors of what once was free and merry England. But I have said enough to show that there can be no peace between them and us. Their white is our black, their political good is our evil, their earthly paradise is our hell. Voluntary outlaws, we repudiate their rule, we wear the green livery of the forest. And we bide our time, we bide our time. For our time is coming and we do not propose to remain outlaws for ever. The time is coming when the laws will be of our making and the forest will be the place for those who now hold power. Two years ago our band was insignificant. To-day it is an army. An army of outlaws. Yet a little while, my comrades, and it will be the army of those who make the laws, not of those who break them. Yes, of those who break them. For, before we can become the makers of good laws, we must be the breakers of bad laws. We must have the courage of our outlawry. British Freemen, fellow outlaws, when the time comes, will you have that courage?'
From the green-coated ranks rose an enormous shout.
'When I give the word, will you follow.'
'We will, we will,' the green thousand repeated.
'Even if laws must be broken?'
There was another burst of affirmative cheering. When it died down and as Everard Webley was opening his mouth to continue, a voice shouted,'down with Webley! Down with the rich man's militia! Down with the Bloody B...' But before the voice could enunciate the whole hated parody of their name, half a dozen of the nearest British Freemen had thrown themselves upon its owner.
Everard Webley rose in his stirrups. 'Keep your ranks,' he called peremptorily. 'How dare you leave the ranks?'
There was a scurrying of officers to the scene of confusion, an angry shouting of orders. The over-zealous Freemen slunk back to their places. Holding a bloody handkerchief to his nose and escorted by two policemen, their enemy marched away. He had lost his hat. The dishevelled hair blazed red in the sunlight. It was Illidge.
Everard Webley turned to the officer commanding the company whose men had broken their ranks. 'Insubordination,' he began; and his voice was cold and hard, not loud, but dangerously penetrating, 'insubordination is the worst...'
Illidge removed his handkerchief from his nose and shouted in a shrill falsetto, 'Oh, you naughty boys!'
There was a guffaw from the spectators. Everard ignored the interruption and having concluded his rebuke, went on with his speech. Commanding and yet persuasive, passionate, but controlled and musical, his voice thrilled out; and in a moment the shattered silence was reconstructed round his words, the dissipated attention was once more focussed and concentrated. There had been a rebellion; he had made another conquest.
Spandrell waited without impatience. Illidge's tardiness gave him the opportunity to drink an extra cocktail or two. He was at his third and feeling already much better and more cheerful, when the restaurant door swung open and in walked Illidge, very militant and defiant, with an air of truculently parading his blackened eye.
'Drunk and disorderly?' questioned Spandrell at the sight of the bruise. 'Or did you meet an outraged husband? Or have words with a lady?'
Illidge sat down and recounted his adventure, boastfully and with embellishments. He had been, according to his own account, a mixture of Horatius defending the bridge and St. Stephen under the shower of stones.
'The ruffians!' said Spandrell sympathetically. But his eyes shone with malicious laughter. The misfortunes of his friends were an unfailing source of amusement to him, and this of Illidge's was a particularly entertaining disaster.
'But at least I spoilt the best effect in Webley's disgusting oration,' Illidge went on in the same selfcongratulating tone.
'It might have been slightly more satisfactory if you'd spoilt his face for him.'
Illidge was stung by the note of mockery in Spandrell's words. 'Spoiling his face wouldn't be enough,' he said with ferocity, scowling as he spoke. 'The man ought to be exterminated. He's a public danger, he and his gang of bravoes.' He broke into profanity.
Spandrell only laughed. 'It's easy to yammer,' he said. 'Why not do something for a change? A little direct action in Webley's own style.'
The other shrugged his shoulders apologetical
ly. 'We're not well enough organized.'
'I shouldn't have thought it needed much organization to knock a man on the head. No, the real trouble is that you're not courageous enough.'
Illidge blushed. 'That's a lie!'
'Not well enough organized!' Spandrell went on contemptuously 'At least you're modern in your excuses. The great god organization. Even art and love will soon be bowing down like everything else. Why are your verses so bad? Because the poetry industry isn't well enough organized. And the impotent lover will excuse himself in the same way and assure the indignant lady that, next time, she'll find his organization perfect. No, no, my dear Illidge, it won't do, you know; it won't do.'
'You're being very funny, no doubt,' said Illidge, still pink with anger. 'But you're talking rot. You can't compare poetry and politics. A political party's a lot of men who've got to be disciplined and held together. A poet's one man.'
'But so's a murderer, isn't he?' Spandrell's tone, his smile were still sarcastic. Illidge felt the blood running up again into his face like the warmth of a suddenly flaring inward fire. He hated Spandrell for his power of humiliating him, for making him feel small, a fool and ashamed. He had come in feeling important and heroic, flushed with satisfaction. And now, with a few slow sneering words, Spandrell had turned his selfsatisfaction to an angry shame. There was a silence; they ate their soup without speaking. When his plate was empty, 'One man,' said Spandrell meditatively, leaning back in his chair. 'With all one man's responsibility. A thousand men have no.) responsibility. That's why organization's such a wonderful comfort. A member of a political party feels himself as safe as the member of a church. The party may order civil war, rape, massacre; he does what he's told cheerfully, because the responsibility isn't his. It's the leader's. And the leader is the rare man, like Webley. The man with courage.'
'Or cowardice, in his case,' said Illidge. 'Webley's the bourgeois rabbit terrified into ferocity.'
'Is he?' asked Spandrell raising his eyebrows derisively. 'Well, you may be right. But anyhow, he's rather different from the ordinary rabbit. The ordinary rabbit isn't scared into ferocity. He's scared into abject inactivity or abject activity in obedience to somebody else's orders. Never into activity on his own account, for which he has to take the responsibility. When it's a question of murder, for example, you don't find the ordinary rabbits exactly eager, do you? They wait to be organized. The responsibility's too great for the little individual. He's scared.'
'Well, obviously nobody wants to be hanged.'
'He'd be scared even if there wasn't any hanging.'
'You're not going to trot out the categorical imperative again, are you.?' It was Illidge's turn to be sarcastic.
'It trots itself out. Even in your case. When it came to the point, you'd never dare do anything about Webley, unless you had an organization to relieve you of all responsibility. You simply wouldn't dare,' he repeated, with a kind of mocking challenge. He looked at Illidge intently between half-closed eyelids, and through the whole of Illidge's rather rhetorical speech about the scotching of snakes, the shooting of tigers, the squashing of bugs, he studied his victim's flushed and angry face. How comic the man was when he tried to be heroic! Illidge stormed on, uncomfortably conscious that his phrases were too big and sounded hollow. But emphasis and still more emphasis, as the smile grew more contemptuous, seemed to be the only possible retort to Spandrell's maddeningly quiet derision--more and still more, however false the rhetoric might sound. Like a man who stops shouting because he is afraid his voice may break, he was suddenly silent. Spandrell slowly nodded.
'All right,' he said mysteriously. 'All right.'
'It's absurd,' Elinor kept assuring herself. 'It's childish. Childish and absurd.'
It was an irrelevance. Everard was no different because he had sat on a white horse, because he had commanded and been acclaimed by a cheering crowd. He was no better because she had seen him at the head of one of his battalions. It was absurd, it was childish to have been so moved. But moved she had been; the fact remained. What an excitement when he had appeared, riding, at the head of his men! A quickening of the heart and a swelling. And what an anxiety in the seconds of silence before he began to speak! A real terror. He might stammer and hesitate; he might say something stupid or vulgar; he might be longwinded and a bore; he might be a mountebank. And then, when the voice spoke, unstrained, but vibrant and penetrating, when the speech began to unroll itself in words that were passionate and stirring, but never theatrical, in phrases rich, but brief and incisive--then what an exultation, what pride! But when that man made his interruption, she had felt, together with a passion of indignation against the interrupter, a renewal of her anxiety, her terror lest he might fail, might be publicly humiliated and put to shame. But he had sat unmoved, he had uttered his stern rebuke, he had made a pregnant and breathless silence and then, at last, continued his speech, as though nothing had happened. Elinor's anxiety had given place to an extraordinary happiness. The speech came to an end; there was a burst of cheering and Elinor had felt enormously proud and elated and at the same time embarrassed, as though the cheering had been in part directed towards herself; and she had laughed aloud, she did not know why, and the blood had rushed up into her cheeks and she had turned away in confusion, not daring to look at him; and then, for no reason, she had begun to cry.
Absurd and childish, she now assured herself. But there, the absurd and childish thing had happened; there was no undoing it.
From Philip Quarles's Notebook
In the Sunday Pictorial, a snapshot of Everard Webley with his mouth open--a black hole in the middle of a straining face--bawling. 'Mr. E. W., the founder and chief of the B. B. F., addressed a battalion of British Freemen in Hyde Park on Saturday.' And that was all that remained of the event, that gargoylish symbol of demagogy. A mouth opened to bray. What a horror!
And yet the event was genuinely impressive. And E.'s bawling sounded quite nobly, at the time. And he looked monumental on his white horse. Selecting a separate instant out of what had been a continuity, the camera turned him into a cautionary scarecrow. Unfair? Or was the camera's vision the true one and mine the false? For after all, the impressive continuity must have been made up of such appalling instants as the camera recorded. Can the whole be something quite different from its parts? In the physical world, yes. Taken as a whole a body and brain are radically different from their component electrons. But what about the moral world? Can a collection of low values make up a single high value? Everard's photo poses a genuine problem. Millions of monstrous instants making up a splendid half-hour.
Not that I was without my doubts of the splendidness at the time. E. talked a lot about Thermopylae and the Spartans. But my resistance was even more heroic. Leonidas had three hundred companions. I defended my spiritual Thermopylae single-handed against E. and his Freemen. They impressed me; but I resisted. The drill, to begin with, was superb. I watched, enchanted. As usual. How does one explain the fascination of the military spectacle? Explain it away, by preference. I wondered all the time I was watching.
A squad is merely ten men and emotionally neutral. The heart only begins to beat at the sight of a company. The evolutions of a battalion are intoxicating. And a brigade is already an army with banners--which is the equivalent, as we know from the Song of Songs, of being in love. The thrill is proportional to the numbers. Given the fact that one is only two yards high, two feet wide and solitary, a cathedral is necessarily more impressive than a cottage and a mile of marching men is grander than a dozen loafers at a street corner. But that's not all. A regiment's more impressive than a crowd. The army with banners is equivalent to love only when it's perfectly drilled. Stones in the form of a building are finer than stones in a heap. Drill and uniforms impose an architecture on the crowd. An army's beautiful. But that's not all; it panders to lower instincts than the aesthetic. The spectacle of human beings reduced to automatism satisfies the lust for power. Looking at mechanized slaves, one fanc
ies oneself a master. So I thought, as I admired the evolutions of Everard's Freemen. And by taking the admiration to bits, I preserved myself from being overwhelmed by it. Divide and rule. I did the same with the music and afterwards with Everard's speech.
What a great stage manager was lost in Everard! Nothing could have been more impressive than (breaking the studiously prolonged silence) that fanfare of trumpets and then, solemnly, the massive harmonies of a thousand voices singing 'The Song of the Freemen.' The trumpets were prodigious--like the overture to the Last Judgment. (Why should upper partials be so soul-shaking?) And when the trumpet overture was done, the thousand voices burst out with that almost supernatural sound which choral singing always has. Enormous, like the voice of Jehovah. Reinhardt himself couldn't have done the trick more effectually. IV felt as though there were a hole where my diaphragm should be; a kind of anxious tingling ran over my skin, the tears were very nearly at the surface of my eyes. I did the Leonidas turn again and reflected how bad the music was, what ridiculous rant the words.
The Last Trump, the voice of God--and then it was Everard's turn to speak. And one wasn't let down. How well he did it! His voice took you in the solar plexus, like those upper partials on the trumpets. Moving and convincing, even though you knew that what he said was vague and more or less meaningless. I analysed the tricks. They were the usual ones. The most effective was the employment of inspiring words with two or more meanings. 'Liberty,' for example. The liberty in the title and programme of the British Freemen is the liberty to buy and sell and own property with a minimum of government interference. (A pretty large minimum, parenthetically; but let that pass.) Everard bawls out the word in his solar-plexus-punching voice: 'we are fighting for liberty; we are going to free the country,' etcetera. The hearer immediately visualizes himself sitting in shirt-sleeves with a bottle and a complaisant wench and no laws, no code of good manners, no wife, no policeman, no parson to forbid. Liberty! Naturally it arouses his enthusiasm. It's only when the British Freemen come to power that he'll realize that the word was really used in an entirely different sense. Divide and conquer. I conquered. P. S.--Or rather one part of me conquered. I've got into the habit of associating myself with that part and applauding when it triumphs. But, after all, is it the best part? In these particular circumstances, perhaps yes. It's probably better to be dispassionately analytical than to be overwhelmed by Everard's stage-managing and eloquence into becoming a British Freeman. But in other circumstances? Rampion's probably right. But having made a habit of dividing and conquering in the name of the intellect, it's hard to stop. And perhaps it isn't entirely a matter of second nature; perhaps first nature comes in too. It's easy to believe one ought to change one's mode of living. The difficulty is to act on the belief. This settlement in the country, for example; this being rustic and paternal and a good neighbour; this living vegetably and intuitively--is it really going to be possible? I imagine it; but in fact, in fact...? Meanwhile, it might be rather interesting to concoct a character on these lines. A man who has always taken pains to encourage his own intellectualist tendencies at the expense of all the others. He avoids personal relationships as much as he can, he observes without participating, doesn't like to give himself away, is always a spectator rather than an actor. Again, he has always been careful not to distinguish one day, one place from another; not to review the past and anticipate the future at the New Year, not to celebrate Christmas or birthdays, not to revisit the scenes of his childhood, not to make pilgrimages to the birthplaces of great men, battlefields, ruins and the like. By this suppression of emotional relationships and natural piety he seems to himself to be achieving freedom--freedom from sentimentality, from the irrational, from passion, from impulse and emotionalism. But in reality, as he gradually discovers, he has only narrowed and desiccated his life; and what's more, has cramped his intellect by the very process he thought would emancipate it. His reason's free, but only to deal with a small fraction of experience. He realizes his psychological defects, and desires, in theory, to change. But it's difficult to break lifelong habits; and perhaps the habits are only the expression of an inborn indifference and coldness, which it might be almost impossible to overcome. And for him at any rate, the merely intellectual life is easier; it's the line of least resistance, because it's the line that avoids other human beings. Among them his wife. For he'd have a wife and there would be the elements of drama in the relations between the woman, living mainly with her emotions and intuitions, and the man whose existence is mainly on the abstracted intellectual plane. He loves her in his way and she loves him in hers. Which means that he's contented and she's dissatisfied; for love in his way entails the minimum of those warm, confiding human relationships which constitute the essence of love in her way. She complains; he would like to give more, but finds it hard to change himself. She even threatens to leave him for a more human lover; but she is too much in love with him to put the threat into effect.