The young man, who looked even younger than he really was—and at best it was only two or three months since Lord Hovenden had attained his majority—smiled amiably at Mr. Cardan and shook his head, then turned hopefully to the person who sat opposite him. ‘Ask me anover,’ he said. Lord Hovenden still found it difficult to pronounce a th. ‘What do you say, Mr. Falx?’ An expression of respectful attention appeared on his boyish, freckled face as he waited for Mr. Falx’s answer. Whatever the answer might be, it was obvious that Lord Hovenden would regard it as oracular. He admired, he revered Mr. Falx.
Mr. Falx, indeed, invited admiration and respect. With his white beard, his long and curly white hair, his large dark liquid eyes, his smooth broad forehead and aquiline nose, he had the air of a minor prophet. Nor were appearances deceptive. In another age, in other surroundings, Mr. Falx would in all probability have been a minor prophet: a denouncer, a mouthpiece of the Lord, a caller to salvation, a threatener of wrath to come. Having been born in the middle of the nineteenth century and having passed the years of his early manhood in the profession which, between three and seven, every male child desires to embrace—that of the engine driver—he had become not exactly a prophet, but a Labour leader.
Lord Hovenden, whose claim to figure in Mrs. Aldwinkle’s court was the fact that she had known him since he was a baby, that he was descended from Simon de Montfort, and that he was immensely rich, had added a further merit: he had become an ardent Guild Socialist. An earnest young schoolmaster had first apprised him of the fact—hitherto but very imperfectly realized by Lord Hovenden—that there are a great many poor people whose lives are extremely disagreeable and arduous and who, if justice were done, would be better off than they are at present. His generous impulses were stirred. Youthfully, he desired to precipitate an immediate millennium. Perhaps, too, a certain egotistical ambition to distinguish himself above his fellows had something to do with his enthusiasm. Among persons born in privileged positions and in the midst of wealth, snobbery often takes a form rather different from that which it commonly assumes. Not always, indeed; for there are plenty of rich and titled persons who regard wealth and title with the same abject respect as is shown by those whose acquaintance with the nobility and the plutocracy is only in fiction and the pages of the weekly papers.
But others, whose ambition it is to climb out of the familiar surroundings into, at any rate intellectually, higher spheres, become infected with a passionate snobbery in regard to the artistic or political world. This snobbery—the snobbery of blood towards brain—had mingled without his being conscious of it with Lord Hovenden’s purely humanitarian ardour, and had given it added strength. Lord Hovenden’s pleasure at being introduced to Mr. Falx had been enormous, and the thought that he alone, of all his friends and relations, enjoyed the privilege of Mr. Falx’s acquaintance, that he alone was free of the exciting political world in which Mr. Falx lived, had made him more than ever enthusiastic in the cause of justice. There had been occasions, however—and they had become more frequent of late—when Lord Hovenden had found that the demands made on him by a strenuous social life left him very little time for Mr. Falx or Guild Socialism. For one who danced as long and often as he did it was difficult to pay much attention to anything else.
In lulls between the merrymaking he remembered with shame that he had not done his duty by his principles. It was to make up for arrears in enthusiasm that he had cut short his grouse shooting to accompany Mr. Falx to an International Labour Conference in Rome. The conference was to be held towards the end of September; but Lord Hovenden had sacrificed a month’s more shooting than was necessary by suggesting that, before the conference, Mr. Falx and he should go to stay for a few weeks with Mrs. Aldwinkle. ‘Come when you like and bring whom you like.’ Those were the words of Lilian’s invitation. He telegraphed to Mrs. Aldwinkle to say that Mr. Falx needed a holiday and that he proposed to bring him; Mrs. Aldwinkle replied that she would be delighted to have him. There they were.
Mr. Falx paused for a moment before answering Mr. Cardan’s question. He turned his bright dark eyes round the table, as though collecting everybody’s attention; then spoke in the penetrating musical voice that had stirred so many audiences to enthusiasm. ‘Twentieth-century rulers,’ he said, ‘respect the educated democracy too much to try to bamboozle it and keep it falsely contented by mere shows. Democracies demand reason.’
‘Oh, come,’ protested Mr. Cardan. ‘What about Mr. Bryan’s agitation against Evolution?’
‘Moreover,’ Mr. Falx went on, ignoring the point, ‘we in the twentieth century have outgrown that sort of thing.’
‘Perhaps we have,’ said Mr. Cardan. ‘Though I can’t imagine how we should have. Opinions change, of course, but the love of a show isn’t an opinion. It’s founded on something deeper, something which has no business to change.’ Mr. Cardan shook his head. ‘It reminds me,’ he went on after a little pause, ‘of another, similarly deep-rooted change that I can never account for: the change in our susceptibility to flattery. It’s impossible to read any ancient moralist without finding copious warnings against flatterers. “A flattering mouth worketh ruin”—it’s in the Bible. And the reward of the flatterer is also specified there. “He that speaketh flattery to his friends, even the eyes of his children shall fail”—though one would have thought that the vicariousness of the threatened punishment rendered it a little less formidable. But at any rate, in ancient days the great and the prosperous seem to have been fairly at the mercy of flatterers. And they laid it on so thick, they did their job, from all accounts, so extremely coarsely! Can it be that the educated plutocracy of those days was really taken in by that sort of thing? It wouldn’t be now. The flattery would have to be a great deal more subtle nowadays to produce the same effect. Moreover, I never find in the works of the modern moralists any warnings against flatterers. There’s been some sort of change; though how it has come about, I really don’t quite know.’
‘Perhaps there has been a moral progress,’ suggested Mr. Falx.
Lord Hovenden turned his eyes from Mr. Falx’s face, on which, while he was speaking, they had been reverently fixed, and smiled at Mr. Cardan with an air of inquiring triumph that seemed to ask whether he had any answer to make to that.
‘Perhaps,’ repeated Mr. Cardan, rather dubiously.
Calamy suggested another reason. ‘It’s surely due,’ he said, ‘to the change in the position of the great and the prosperous. In the past they regarded themselves and were regarded by others as being what they were by divine right. Consequently, the grossest flattery seemed to them only their due. But now the right to be a prince or a millionaire seems a little less divine than it did. Flattery which once seemed only an expression of proper respect now sounds excessive; and what in the past was felt to be almost sincere is now regarded as ironical.’
‘I think you may be right,’ said Mr. Cardan. ‘One result, at any rate, of this slump in flattery has been a great alteration in the technique of the parasite.’
‘Has the technique of the parasite ever altered?’ asked Mr. Falx. Lord Hovenden passed on his question to Mr. Cardan in an interrogating smile. ‘Hasn’t he always been the same—living on the labours of society without contributing to the common stock?’
‘We are speaking of different sorts of parasites,’ Mr. Cardan explained, twinkling genially at the minor prophet. ‘Your parasites are the idle rich; mine are the idle poor who live on the idle rich. Big fleas have little fleas; I was referring to the tapeworms of tapeworms. A most interesting class, I assure you; and one that has never really had its due from the natural historians of humanity. True, there’s Lucian’s great work on the art of being a parasite, and a very fine work too; but a little out of date, particularly where flattery is concerned. Better than Lucian is Diderot. But the Neveu de Rameau deals with only a single type of parasite, and that not the most successful or the most worthy of imitation. Mr. Skimpole in Bleak House isn’t bad. But he lacks subtlety; he’s not a perfect model for the budding tapeworm. The fact is that no writer, so far as I’m aware, has really gone into the question of parasites. I feel their remissness,’ Mr. Cardan added, twinkling first at Mrs. Aldwinkle, then round the table at her guests, ‘almost as a personal affront. Professing as I do—or perhaps trying to profess would be a more accurate description—the parasitical mystery, I regard this conspiracy of silence as most insulting.’
‘How absurd you are,’ said Mrs. Aldwinkle. The complacent references to his own moral defects and weaknesses were frequent in
