Читать книгу The Holy Terror - H.G. Wells - Страница 21

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They got on very well at Wexley. They had much to say, and Wexley found it fresh and lively stuff. Things there had been going rather slackly. The school had been feeling the need for new blood. And here it was. Chiffan saw fit to play the rôle of impresario, an admirable impresario, for Rud. Chiffan too was made of imaginative stuff. He was elaborating his own reverie about Rud. Rud's peculiar type of ugliness attracted him. He conceived himself as a sort of deferential elder-brother tutor to this new acquisition. He knew just when it was time for Rud to speak, he advised him quite sagely about the temper of the place, suggested lines of action, talked about him loyally behind his back and set the school remarking Rud's exceptional quality.

The New World Summer School was a fair sample of the continually increasing chaff of mentally unsettled people that was being winnowed out of the social order by the advancing disorganisation of the period. It was a sort of lodgement of wind-driven minds in a cranny of the Yorkshire hills. They had one thing in common, an enthusiasm for progress. The New World Society was pledged to progress in any direction, to anywhere, and to any idea about a New World its members chose to entertain. It was of all ages above fourteen and it included everything from barely cryptic nudists to extremely woolly vegetarians, and from single-taxers to Douglasites; there were Swedenborgians, Spenglerites, modern spiritualists, aberrant Fabians, seers and great thinkers, teachers of all grades, sex-reformers, thoughtful people who listened intently and never said anything, professional and genuine refugees from Nazi tyranny, Indian nationalists and one Chinaman of incomprehensible speech and consequently unknown attribution, who bowed very politely. The school led a hardy, healthy and extremely inexpensive life, sleeping crowdedly in austerely simplified dormitories at night, and eating in tumultuous refectories on trestle-tables covered with marbled white American cloth by day. There was much walking and swimming, table-tennis, medicine-ball and Badminton, and a series of conferences that it was bad form to cut altogether. There were a number of young women, brightly rather than over-dressed, who supplied little more than applause to the discussions, but manifestly appealed and set themselves to appeal to the pairing instinct of mankind. One or two of them decided to betray an interest in Rud, but he was wary and unresponsive. Chiffan after a slight resistance lit up and responded almost too much.

Rud never discovered who was running the assembly. There was a secretary, an anxious-looking spectacled lady of the head mistress type whose name he never learnt, who stood up and made proclamations and stuck up notices, and there was an omnipresent white-bearded old gentleman in a state of earnest inactivity, who may have been her husband. And there was something that met somewhere called the Committee. The essential interest for Rud were a score of nuclear individuals, who did seem to be trying to shape out some sort of ideas about the current world drama and the rôles they might have to play in it. Chiffan made rapid and quite plausible estimates of their quality and Rud concentrated upon them to learn and impress.

It was not that he was indifferent to the sexual stir that was going on around him. Indeed he was acutely aware of it, but his habits and instinct in these matters were becoming increasingly solitary and secretive. He did not like to give himself away to a fellow creature even amorously. He made no advances and no responses. He wouldn't go near the bathing-pool or look a girl in the face if he could help it. He was acutely jealous and at the same time contemptuous of Chiffan's gallantries and of all the other scarcely masked love-affairs in progress.

Nevertheless he showed off as brilliantly as he could in the meetings.

Mainly the newcomers summarised and decanted what they had discussed during their four days of interchanges. There was an earnest ex-ophthalmic little man with a black beard and an uncontrollable feather at the back of his head who had swallowed the Douglas gospel whole and apparently digested some of it. His mind ran on certain definite rails, and if an argument knocked him off them he just picked himself up and put himself on his rails again. He had already been making Social Credit unattractive by dragging it in as an irrelevant topic and so disorganising other issues, but Rud, talking across the table at supper, seemed to take a fresh sort of hold upon the question, and the little man, when it came to his turn to give a conference, was pleased to find an unexpectedly full room awaiting him. He did not realise at first that he was to be the victim at the feast. He read a paper that most of the School had already heard in fragments several times.

Chiffan sat and listened with a growing admiration while Rud, who had had only the most rudimentary and casual ideas about the whole business three days ago, now not only repeated but expanded and filled in and rounded off what he had picked up in their conversations. Chiffan watched the bulging forehead and the pugnacious profile with an almost parental interest and kept up a sotto voce endorsement to the sentences that came clear and emphatic from Rud's determined mouth.

"You can't deal with money questions in this way," said Rud in the magisterial tones of one who had studied the subject for years. "You can't do it like that. Before you can begin to talk about money you must settle in your mind what you mean by property—for money is only a ticket for property—and before you can talk about property you must have made up your mind about the social system you want. How much private property is there to be? What can be bought? What can be sold?"

"Hear, hear!" became audible from Chiffan.

"In a theoretically complete socialism, it goes without saying, the only property you will be able to buy will be consumable goods, and the only way you will ever get hold of money will be as anticipatory or current or deferred wages. It won't matter whether it is cash down or cash held over because there will be no interest."

"Dole?" said someone.

"Dole is just vacation wages," said Rud. "It's the duty of the community to find a man work."

"Hear, hear!"

For a time the assurance of his manner carried the meeting. Then objections arose.

A young man from Belfast, Figgis, raised the issue of foreign trade and started an excursus about the Workers' International. That and one or two unfamiliar phrases promised trouble for Rud, but Chiffan, to whom no current political phrase seemed unfamiliar, came to his help and pulled the debate back within his reach.

That was Rud's début. After supper nine or ten of them sat and talked round him for a good three hours, they talked of "Socialism in our Time," and the talk went wide and far. "Socialism," said Chiffan, "has got to rejuvenate itself. Prewar socialism was sentimental and insufficient. He and I have been talking about that for days. Socialism's got to dot its i's and cross its t's. Marx ran away with it and lost bits as he ran. It never understood money."

"What I told you," said the ex-ophthalmic young man with the black beard. "Exactly what I told you."

Next day a well-trained Marxist from the Black Country, named Bennet, took on Rud with considerable vigour.

"All this sneering at Marx," he opened, "I don't know who started it..."

It was a live discussion and once or twice Rud felt himself cornered, and broke through with some effective rhetoric.

"Talk every time you can," said Chiffan late that night and with the manner of a trainer. "It's all you can do here."

"As long as they listen," said Rud.

"They'll listen to you," said Chiffan.

Rud displayed no gratitude for Chiffan's aid and support. He took Chiffan as a matter of course. He was always to take Chiffan as a matter of course. He trusted him, he relied upon him; he expected everything from him and gave nothing in return. He took credit to himself for everything Chiffan taught him or told him to do. That was Rud's way with life and it worked very well for him...

When Rud was disposed to guy the Swedenborgian's account of the Master as Socialist, Chiffan kicked him on the ankle.

Afterwards Rud discussed that kick with some heat. "Never ridicule a man except for a definite party purpose," said Chiffan. "And then kill him. Guy him so that he will never rise again. But don't make an enemy of him for fun...Oh, yes, I know I do. But I'm different."

Two tepid discussions on "Agriculture in a Socialised World" and "The Nationalisation of Mineral Products" were instructive rather than provocative for Rud, and Chiffan did most of the talking. Rud began to realise that the level of information in the School was higher than he had assumed. Several of these non-university men were much better read than he was.

Things livened up to flaming reality with a discussion of pacificism and non-resistance.

"Are we to Use Force and if so How Much?" was the question mooted, and before the two days' debate had lasted for an hour Rud realised that hitherto he had consistently shirked this particular and very fundamental issue in political affairs. In his reveries of a stupendous political ascent there had been great marches and demonstrations, flag-waving and cheering, there had been battles (heard off) and tremendous displays of armament, thousands of planes in the air and the like, but so far the rougher stuff had always been fairly remote from his person. Once or twice he had been under fire in dreamland, undismayed and unscathed. When he had imagined himself arrested and put on trial, it had always been an open trial, numerous reporters present, the whole world wondering, the judge cowed or secretly sympathetic, and himself practically in control of proceedings. Prisons, concentration camps, domiciliary visits, disappearances and secret examinations had been far beyond the actual margin of his picture.

But now, in clumsy and distressful speeches, in broken sentences and broken English, came harsh reality, at first hand, One of the refugees had been crippled and broken. He limped. He clung to the chair in front of him as he talked. "Even here," he said, "among friends, one hesitates to tell."

He spoke admirable, bookish English, slowly, carefully and with a German flavour rather than a positive accent.

He told them of the foul indignities that men, when they encourage instead of discouraging each other in cruelty, can put upon their victims. "And your martyrdom," he said in a faded voice, "is in vain. Your courage is wasted. You suffer and you are hidden away and lied about. Your persecutors are more horrible than apes, because they are subtler. Beasts and disease and accidents can cause men pain and misery, but such things do not torment you with hope and snatch it away, they do not caricature and disgrace you as well as destroy. They do not leave your friends in doubt whether you have betrayed them. They do not make those you love vanish without a trace or put them to pain and indignity before your eyes. I did not know it was in my fellow creatures to do such things as I have seen—such things as I have been through. Let me tell you—I will tell you—a part of it. What happened to me. If I can tell you..."

It was a hideous and circumstantial tale he had to tell...The speeches of the inexperienced which followed seemed helplessly feeble and pale. It was difficult to listen to them with that man's story fresh and vivid in the mind. Then came a woman recounting at second-hand, but no further off than second-hand, the frightfulnesses that had happened to her family.

Rud wished he could go out of the room; he felt inadequate. His self-satisfaction evaporated.

He wanted to get up and say: "Stop all this! What do you imagine we can do."

A little old Jew from Vienna suddenly jumped up with a great discovery. "I vill tell you someting. I vill tell you someting. A Magna Carta for the whole vorlt. No force except in the hants of disciplined men. Vell paid, vell fed, vell cared for, disciplined men, with officers who know exactly—vat dey may do. And go no more beyond. Exactly. Yess. No wappens. No munitions. Noting. Except for them. And no secret police. No force used out of sight ever. No dossier—or if there must be dossiers, I do not know, but if there must be dossiers, then every man the right to know exactly what you hold against him. Right to inspect and protest. And no secret examinations. No. Wherever there is an examination, then gif me a sort of people to be able to walk through the room, at any time, able to say, What's dis? What you doing? A sort of people able to go through all these things. Valk in. Doctors, mind or body—all controlled—in their examinations. Visitors. Guardians of men. See? A Magna Carta. Until you haf that. Always there will be darkness and abominations. Always—to the end of the vorlt. Better law and order, I tell you, even if it is bad law—then lawlessness and evil in the night. For by night, louts, hooligans touch hell—you haf heard—and rejoice in it. I know. I know. Always, always gif me law."

His face was flushed. His bright eyes glittered with tears of excitement.

"Gif me my Magna Carta. Then—you need not bother. Everyting will be all right. No force, you understand me, no force to be used on anyone except in the hants of disciplined men—"

He went right through what he had said already almost word for word.

He repeated his speech with variations three times and was resuming, da capo, when the chairman overwhelmed him with clock and bell. Whereupon he sat down, sat very subdued for a minute or so and then twisted himself round and began to explain it all in harsh whispers to the people immediately behind him. "My Magna Carta for all the vorlt. No force, you understand me..."

Rud sat in his place during the outbreak of this little old Jew from Vienna, digesting the ugly realities those other two refugees had retailed. They stunned him so that for a time he could not find anything to say. The thought of violence filled him with angry fear and the urge to savage reprisals. He felt just as he had felt when he read of gorillas and wolves in his childhood. The shadow of it lay plainly across the path of his imaginations. What the little old Jew was saying meant nothing to him. What stirred his imagination was the thought of himself being treated brutally and filthily, mutilated, subjected to sub-human indignities.

"Get your blow in first," he thought. "Nothing else for it. Always carry a gun. Carry poison."

When at last he spoke, he raged against Nazis and Fascists, he spoke of the little ways of the British police with mobs and repeated rumours that came out of prisons. He was all for vehement reprisals.

"Never forgive a bully. Mark your man down," he said, "and wait for him. Even if you have to wait for years...

"You've got to attack. Your only safety lies in attack. Choose your moment for attack. Strike first at the devils, strike first."

His voice became a scream.

"Easy," whispered Chiffan.

The meeting was divided. There was still a rather shaken minority for non-resistance, but most of the men and nearly all the girls were with Rud, for fighting and fighting bitterly. But the refugees said little and the little old Jew shook his head and whispered. "If you had my Magna Carta," he whispered.

That night the summer school talked long and late and loud. "And well we may," said Chiffan, "for, after all, violence is the fundamental thing in life. As old as hunger and earlier than lust...

"Before there was even a beast; before a single animal came on land, there was this attacking and defending, devouring and fighting for life. If you think you can escape by being lambs, ask the wolf."

"There's such a thing as Mutual Aid," said the ex-ophthalmic man. "Kropotkin said that ages ago."

"Mutual aid," said Chiffan, "but only to fight better."

"Force you must have somewhere," said the little old Jew. "There's only peace under the power of the law. No peace for man but that. In my Magna Carta..."

"How about bed?" said a voice.