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 apologetically. ‘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
