ANNA BERGFELD.
‘God help them!’ thought Michael, under a plane tree close to Cleopatra’s Needle, but without conviction. For in his view God was not so much interested in the fate of individual aliens as the Governor of the Bank of England in the fate of a pound of sugar bought with the fraction of a Bradbury; He would not arbitrarily interfere with a ripple of the tides set loose by His arrangement of the Spheres. God, to Michael, was a monarch strictly limited by His own Constitution. He restored the letter to his pocket. Poor creatures! But really, with 1,200,000 and more English unemployed, mostly due to that confounded Kaiser and his Navy stunt –! If that fellow and his gang had not started their naval rivalry in 1899, England would have been out of the whole mess, or, perhaps, there never would have been a mess!
He turned up from the Temple station towards the offices of The Outpost. He had ‘taken’ that weekly for some years now. It knew everything, and managed to convey a slight impression that nobody else knew anything; so that it seemed more weighty than any other weekly. Having no particular Party to patronize, it could patronize the lot. Without Imperial bias, it professed a special knowledge of the Empire. Not literary, it made a point of reducing the heads of literary men – Michael, in his publishing days, had enjoyed every opportunity of noticing that. Professing respect for Church and the Law, it was an adept at giving them ‘what-for’. It fancied itself on Drama, striking a somewhat Irish attitude towards it. But, perhaps above all, it excelled in neat detraction from political reputations, keeping them in their place, and that place a little lower than The Outpost’s. Moreover, from its editorials emanated that ‘holy ghost’ of inspired knowledge in periods just a little beyond average comprehension, without which no such periodical had real importance.
Michael went up the stairs two at a time, and entered a large square room, where Mr Blythe, back to the door, was pointing with a ruler to a circle drawn on a map.
‘This is a bee map,’ said Mr Blythe to himself. ‘Quite the bee-est map I ever saw.’
Michael could not contain a gurgle, and the eyes of Mr Blythe came round, prominent, epileptic, richly encircled by pouches.
‘Hallo!’ he said defiantly. ‘You? The Colonial Office prepared this map specially to show the best spots for Settlement schemes. And they’ve left out Baggersfontein – the very hub.’
Michael seated himself on the table.
‘I’ve come in to ask what you think of the situation? My wife says Labour will be out in no time.’
‘Our charming little lady!’ said Mr Blythe; ‘Labour will survive Ireland; they will survive Russia; they will linger on in their precarious way. One hesitates to predict their decease. Fear of their Budget may bring them down in February. After the smell of Russian fat has died away – say in November, Mont – one may make a start.’
‘This first speech,’ said Michael, ‘is a nightmare to me. How, exactly, am I to start Foggartism?’
‘One will have achieved the impression of a body of opinion before then.’
‘But will there be one?’
‘No,’ said Mr Blythe.
‘Oh!’ said Michael. ‘And, by the way, what about Free Trade?’
‘One will profess Free Trade, and put on duties.’
‘God and Mammon.’
‘Necessary in England, before any new departure, Mont. Witness Liberal-union ism, Tory-Socialism, and –’
‘Other ramps,’ said Michael gently.
‘One will glide, deprecate Protection till there is more Protection than Free Trade, then deprecate Free Trade. Foggartism is an end, not a means; Free Trade and Protection are means, not the ends politicians have made them.’
Roused by the word ‘politician’, Michael got off the table; he was coming to have a certain sympathy with those poor devils. They were supposed to have no feeling for the country, and to be wise only after the event. But, really, who could tell what was good for the country, among the mists of talk? Not even old Foggart, Michael sometimes thought.
‘You know, Blythe,’ he said, ‘that we politicians don’t think ahead, simply because we know it’s no earthly. Every elector thinks his own immediate good is the good of the country. Only their own shoes pinching will change elector’s views. If Foggartism means adding to the price of living now, and taking wage-earning children away from workmen’s families for the sake of benefit – ten or twenty years hence – who’s going to stand for it?’
‘My dear young man,’ said Mr Blythe, ‘conversion is our job. At present our trade-union ists despise the outside world. They’ve never seen it. Their philosophy is bounded by their smoky little streets. But five million pounds spent on the organized travel of a hundred thousand working men would do the trick in five years. It would infect the working class with a feverish desire for a place in the sun. The world is their children’s for the taking. But who can blame them, when they know nothing of it?’