He stooped from his throne with a swift movement and took the great sword from the man below; lifted and shook it so that it seemed to flame like the sword of St. Michael. And then there sounded over all that staring crowd the ancient words that accompany the Accollade and dedicate a man to God and the cause of the widow and orphan.

  CHAPTER XV

  THE PARTING OF THE WAYS

  Olive Ashley came away from the scene of the indignant oration looking even paler than usual; nor was she only pale with excitement, but also with a sort of self-inflicted pain. She seemed to have come suddenly to the end and edge of something; to a challenge and a choice. She was one of those women who cannot be stopped from hurting themselves, when once their moral sense is strongly moved. She needed a religion; and chiefly an altar on which to be a sacrifice. She also had in her own way a singular intellectual intensity; and ideas to her were not merely notions. And it seemed to her, with an abrupt and awful clearness, that she could not any longer maintain her merely romantic parley with the enemy, unless she was prepared honestly to go over to him. If she went over, she would go over for ever; and she had to consider what exactly she would leave behind. If it had been merely the whole world, or in other words society, she would not have hesitated; but it was England; it was patriotism; it was plain morals. If the new national cause had really been only an antiquarian antic, or a heraldic show, or even a sentimental reaction such as she might once have dreamed of, she could have brought herself easily to leave it. But now with her whole brain and conscience she was convinced that it would be like deserting the flag in a great war. Her conviction had been finally clinched by the denunciation of Hendry’s oppressors in human and moving terms; the cause was the cause of her father’s old friend and of her father. But it is an ironical fact that what had most convinced her of the justice of Braintree’s great enemy had been the truth of his tribute to Braintree. Without a word to anyone, she went out of the main gateway and took the road to the town.

  As Olive walked slowly through the dreary suburbs to the even darker central places of the town of the factories, she became conscious that she had crossed a frontier and was walking in a world she did not know. Of course she had been in such towns a thousand times, and even in that particular town often enough; as it was the nearest town to Seawood Abbey and the house of her friend. But the frontier she had passed was not so much of space as of time; or perhaps not of space but of spirit. Like somebody discovering a new dimension, she realised that there was, and had been all the time, another world beside her own world, a world of which she had heard nothing; nothing from the newspapers; nothing from the politicians, even when they were talking after dinner. The paradox was that the papers and politicians were never so silent about it as when they were supposed to be talking about it.

  The great Strike that had begun far away in the mines had been going on for nearly a month. Olive and her friends regarded it as a Revolution; in which they agreed with the very small but determined group of Communists among the strikers. But it was not its being a revolution that surprised or puzzled her. It was rather that it was unlike anything she had ever associated with the word. She had seen silly films and melodramas about the French Revolution and imagined that a popular rising must be a mob, and that a mob must be a mob of half-naked and howling demons. She had known this thing in front of her described as much fiercer than it was and much milder than it was; described by one sort of party hack as a conspiracy of gory brigands against God and the Primrose League; and by another sort of party hack as a trivial though regrettable misunderstanding, which would soon be smoothed out by the sympathetic statesmanship of the Under Secretary to the Ministry of Capital. She had heard about politics all her life; thought she had never been interested in them. But she had never doubted that these were modern politics; and that being interested in modern politics meant being interested in them. The Prime Minister and Parliament and the Foreign Office and the Board of Trade and tiresome things of that sort — there were those things and everything else was Revolution. But as she passed first through the groups in the groups in the street, and then through the groups in the outer offices of official buildings, there dawned on her a truth quite different.

  There was a Prime Minister she had never heard of; and he was a man she knew. There was a Parliament she had never heard of; and he had just swayed it with an historic speech that would never go down to history. There was a Board of Trade she had never heard of; a Board that really met and had a great deal more to say about Trade. There were Government Departments quite outside the Government; Government Departments quite against the Government. There was a bureaucracy; there was a hierarchy; there was an army. It had the qualities and defects of such systems; but it was not in the least like the frightful French mob on the film. She heard the people talking round her and mentioning names as her own class mentioned the names of politicians; and she found she knew none of them, except Braintree, and that of one other who had been capriciously picked out by the papers from all the rest and caricatured as a sort of raging buffoon. But the statesmen of this buried state were spoken of with an air of calm familiarity, that made her feel as if she had fallen from the moon. Jimson was right after all and though Hutchins had done good work in his time, he was wrong now. They mustn’t always let Ned Bruce talk them round. Now and then Braintree was mentioned as the chief leader, and not unfrequently criticised, which annoyed her a good deal; she was a little thrilled when he was praised. Hatton, the man who had been caricatured so often in the papers as the fire-brand of Red Revolution, was a good deal blamed for his extreme caution and consideration for the employers. Some even said he was in the pay of the capitalists.

  For never in any newspaper or book or magazine of modern England had anything remotely resembling a History of the Trade Union Movement come the way of an intelligent and educated English lady like Olive Ashley. The whole of that huge historical change had happened, so far as she was concerned behind a curtain; and the curtain was literally a sheet of paper; a sheet of newspaper. She knew nothing of the differences between Trade Unionists; nothing of the real faults of Trade Unions; not even the very names of men who were directing masses as large as the army of Napoleon. The street seemed full of strange faces or faces all the stranger for being familiar. She caught a glimpse of the large lumbering form of the omnibus-driver that Monkey used to make such a friend of. He was talking, or rather listening, with the others; and his large, shiny, good-humoured face seemed to assent to all that was said. Had Miss Ashley accompanied Monkey on his disgraceful tour round the public-houses, she would even have recognised the celebrated Old George, who now received the challenge of political dispute as he had received the chaff of the tavern. Had she known more of popular life, she would have understood the menacing meaning of the presence of these very sleepy and amiable poor Englishmen amid those sullen groups in the streets. But the next moment she had forgotten all about them. She had only succeeded in penetrating into an outer court of the temple of officialism (it was very like waiting in a Government office) when she heard Braintree’s voice outside in the corridor and he came rapidly into the room.

  When John Braintree came into the room, Olive instantly and in a flash saw every detail about him; all that she liked in his appearance and all that she disliked in his clothes. He had not grown a beard again, whatever his reaction into revolution; he was always thin and it was partly an effect of energy that he looked haggard; he seemed as vigorous as ever. But when he saw her, he seemed to be simply stunned and stupefied by the mere fact of her presence. All the worries went out of his eyes; and showered beneath them rather a sort of shining sorrow. For worries are never anything but worries, however we turn them round. But a sorrow is always a joy reversed. Something in the situation made her stand up and speak with an unnatural simplicity.

  “What can I say?” she said. “I believe now that we must part.”

  So, for the first time, it was really admitted between them that they had come together.

  There is a great deal of fallacy and folly about the ordinary talk of confidential conversation; to say nothing of the loathsome American notion of a heart to heart talk. People are often very misleading when they talk about themselves; even when they are perfectly honest, and even modest, in talking about themselves. But people tell a great deal so long as they talk about everything except themselves. These two had talked so often and so long about all the things that they cared for so much less than for each other, that they had come to an almost uncanny omniscience, and could sometimes have deduced what one or the other thought about cookery from remarks about Confucius. And, therefore, at this unprepared and apparently pointless crisis, they talked in what would be called parables; and neither for one moment misunderstood the other.

  “My God,” said Braintree, out of his full understanding.

  “You say it,” she said, “but I mean it.”

  “I am not an atheist, if that is what you mean,” he said with a somewhat sour smile. “But perhaps it is true that I only have the noun and you have the possessive adjective. I suppose God does belong to you, like so many other good things?”

  “Do you think I would not give them all to you?” she said. “And yet I suppose there is something in one’s mind one cannot give up to anybody.”

  “If I did not love you I could lie,” he said; and again neither of them noticed that a word had been said for the first time. “God, what a gorgeous feast of lying I could have just now, explaining how much you mystified me by your incomprehensible attitude; and what had I done to forfeit our beautiful intellectual friendship; and had I not at least a right to an explanation; and all the rest. Lord, if I were only a real politician! It takes a real politician to say that politics do not matter. How lovely it would be to say all the ordinary and natural and newspaper things — widely as we differ upon many points — opposed as we are in politics. I for one am free to say that never — it is the proud boast of political life in this country that the wildest party differences do not necessarily destroy that essential good feeling — oh, hell and the devil and all the dung-heaps of the world! I know what we mean. You and I are people who cannot help caring about right and wrong.”

  Then after a long silence he said: “I suppose you believe in Herne and all his revival of chivalry? I suppose you really believe it is chivalrous; and even know what you mean by it?”

  “I never believed in his chivalry,” she said, “till he said he believed in yours.”

  “That was very good of him,” said Braintree quite seriously. “He is a good man. But I am afraid his compliments would do me a good deal of harm in my own camp. Some of those words have already come to be symbols of something else with our people.”

  “I might answer your people,” she said, “rather as you have answered me. I know I am called old-fashioned; and your people have all the new fashions. I feel cross with them; I feel inclined to insult them by calling them fashionable. But they really are. Don’t they take up all this business about a woman living for herself and sex making no difference and all the rest of it; just like the intellectual duchesses? They would all say that I was behind the times, and talk of me as if I were a slave in a harem. And yet I will challenge them on that, out of the tragic and hateful tangle in which I am standing to-day. They talk about a woman thinking for herself! They talk about a woman standing alone! How many of the wives of your Socialists are out attacking Socialism? How many women engaged to Labour Members are voting against them at the polls or speaking against them on the platform? Nine-tenths of your revolutionary women are only going along with revolutionary men. But I am independent. I am thinking for myself. I am living my own life, as they call it; and a most miserable life it is. I am not going along with a revolutionary man.”

  There was again a long silence; the sort of silence which endures because it is unnecessary, or rather impossible, to ask questions; and then Braintree took a step nearer and said: “Well, I am miserable enough, if that is part of the logic of the case; and yet again it is just part of this infernal furnace of reality that I cannot attack logic. How easy it is to attack logic! How impossible to find anything else except lying! And then they say that women are not logical; because they never waste logic on things that do not matter. My God, is there any way out of logic?”

  To anyone who had not known their knowledge of each other, this conversation would have seemed a series of riddles; but Braintree knew the answers before the riddles were asked. He knew that this woman had got hold of a religion and that a religion is often a renunciation. She would not go with him without helping him to the death. And she would not help him; she would resist him to the death. That antagonism between them, as it had arisen in silly remarks and random repartees in their first interview in the long room at Seawood, that antagonism, transfigured, enlightened, deepened but all the more defined by knowing all the best of each other, was risen again to a noble height of reason, which he was the last man in the world to despise. People laugh at these things when they find them in the old stories of Roman virtue. They are people who have never loved at the same time a truth and a friend.

  “There are some things,” she said at last, “that I do know more about than you. You used to make fun of my old stories about knights and ladies; I don’t think you will stoop to laugh at them now you are fighting them; but you would laugh again if we were back in the old idle days. And yet those things are not altogether idle or laughable. Poetry sometimes talks plainer than prose, I think; and somebody said our souls are love and a perpetual farewell. Did you ever read that part in Malory — about the parting of Lancelot and Guinevere?”

  “I can see it in your face,” he said and kissed once, and they parted like the lovers of Camelot.

  . . . . . . . .

  Outside in the dark streets the crowds had grown thicker and thicker; and there were murmurs about mystifications and delays. Like all men in the unnatural posture of revolt, they needed to be perpetually stimulated by something happening; whether it were favourable or hostile. A defiance on the other side would do; but a defiance on their own side was the best; and there had been promises of a great demagogic display that evening. There had been as yet no positive unpunctuality; but something told them that there was somewhere a little hitch. And it was five minutes later that Braintree amid a roar of cheers, appeared on the balcony.

  He had hardly said a dozen words before it became apparent that he was talking in a tone that had been unusual in English politics. He had something to say that was of the final sort. He refused a tribunal; and in that there is something of the sort that always moves the deep element of epic poetry in a mob. For nothing can really be approved or applauded except finality. That is why all the ethics of evolution and expansive ideas of indefinite progress have never taken hold upon any human crowd.

  The new seat of government had set up a seat of judgment, or chamber of inquiry, for the settlement of the strike which Braintree led. It was a strike now largely confined to the Trade Unions of his own district; which were engaged in the manufacturing of dyes and paints, originally derived from Coal-Tar. The very genuine energy that supported the new government had grappled immediately with the industrial problem in question. It was probable that it would be settled on somewhat saner and simpler lines than those of the complicated compromises of the old professional politician. But it would be settled. That was what the new rulers very legitimately claimed. And that was what Braintree and the strikers very legitimately objected to.

  “For nearly a hundred, years,” he said, “they have thundered at us about our duty to respect the Constitution: the King and the House of Lords — and even the House of Commons. We had to respect that too. (Laughter.) We were to be perfect Constitutionalists. Yes, my friends, we were to be the only Constitutionalists. We were the quiet people, the loyal subjects, the people who took the King and the lords seriously. But they were to be free enough. Whenever the fancy took them to upset the Constitution, they were to be indulged in all the pleasures of revolution. They could in twenty-four hours turn the government of England upside down; and tell us that we were all not to be ruled by a Constitutional monarchy but by a fancy dress ball. Where is the King? Who is the King? I have heard he is a librarian interested in the Hittites. (Laughter.) And we are summoned before this revolutionary tribunal — (cheers) — to explain why we have for forty years, under intolerable provocation, failed to resort to revolution. (Loud cheers.) We do not mind their listening to their lunatic librarian if they like. We will leave this ancient traditional order of chivalry that is ten weeks old; we will respect the profound Conservative principles of continuity that never existed until the other day. But we will not listen to its judgment. We would not submit to lawful Toryism. We will not now submit to lawless Toryism. And if this Wardour Street curiosity shop sends us a message that we must attend its Court — our answer is in four words, ‘We will not come.’”

  Braintree had described Herne as a librarian interested in Hittites but he never failed, in public or private to recognise him as a leader of men much more interested in the resurrection of the Middle Ages. And yet it would have surprised Braintree very much to know how Herne was actually occupied at the moment the words were spoken. There was between them indeed that eternal cross purposes which arises between the two opposite types of truthful man. There was all the contrast between the man who knows from the start exactly what he stands for, whose circle of vision whether narrow or no, is intensely clear, who sees all external things as agreeing or disagreeing with it — and that other type which is conscious of everything before it is conscious of itself, which can devour libraries before realising into what mind they have been absorbed, which can create fairy lands in which its own figure is invisible or at least transparent. Braintree had known from the first, almost from the first quarrel in the long room at Seawood, the irony of his own irritated admiration. He had felt the paradox of his impossible romance. The pale and vivid face of Olive Ashley with its lift and poise and pointed chin had entered his world like a wedge, like the spear of something external and antagonistic. He had hated all her world all the more for not hating her.