'You leave here at five. You have ordered dinner, and your housekeeper tells me that you come home at ten or eleven. Where are you all that time?'

'I am at the Club.'

'Can you remember? Think--were you at the Club last night? George went there to find you, but you were not there--and you were not at home.

Where were you?'

He tried to speak--but he could not. He shook his head--he gasped twice.

'You cannot remember? Oh! try--Mr. Dering--try--for the sake of everybody--to put an end to this miserable condition--try.'

'I cannot remember,' he said again feebly.

'Is it possible--just possible--that while you are away--during these intervals--you yourself may be actually--in the company--of this Socialist--this Edmund Gray?'

'Elsie--what do you mean?'

'I mean--can you not remember?'

'You mean more, child! Do you know what you mean? If what you suggest is true, then I must be mad--mad. Do you mean it? Do you mean it? Do you understand what you say?'

'Try--try to remember,' she replied. 'That is all I mean. My dear guardian, is there any one to whom I am more grateful than yourself? You have given me a fortune and my lover an income. Try--try to remember.'

She left him without more words.

He sat looking straight before him--the horror of the most awful thing that can befall a man upon him. Presently, he touched his bell, and his old clerk appeared.

'Checkley,' he said, 'tell me the truth.'

'I always do,' he replied surlily.

'I have been suffering from fits of forgetfulness. Have you observed any impairing of the faculties? When a man's mental powers are decaying, he forgets things: he loses the power of work: his old skill leaves him: he cannot distinguish between good work and bad. He shows his mental decay, I believe, in physical ways--he shuffles as he walks; he stoops and shambles--and in his speech--he wanders and he repeats--and in his food and manner of eating. Have you observed any of these symptoms upon me, Checkley?'

'Not one. You are as upright as a lance: you eat like five-and-twenty: your talk is as good and your work is as good as when you were forty.--Don't think such things. To be sure you do forget a bit. But not your work. You only forget sometimes what you did out of the office--as if that matters. Do you remember the case you tackled yesterday afternoon?'

'Certainly.'

'Do you tell me that any man--forty years younger than you--could have tackled that case more neatly? Garn! Go 'long!'

Checkley went back to his office.

'What did she mean by it, then?' Mr. Dering murmured. 'Who put her on to such a suspicion? What did she mean by it? Of course it's nonsense.' So rea.s.suring himself, he yet remained disquieted. For he could not remember.

At half-past five or so, Mr. Edmund Gray arrived at his Chambers. The outer door was closed, but he found his disciple waiting for him. She had been there an hour or more, she said. She was reading one of the books he had recommended to her. With the words of Mr. Dering in her ears, she read as if two voices were speaking to her--talking to each other across her.

She laid down the book and rose to greet him. 'Master,' she said, 'I have come from Mr. Dering. He is your solicitor, you told me.'

'a.s.suredly. He manages my affairs.'

'It is curious--I asked him if he knew you--and he said that he knew nothing about you.'

'That is curious, certainly. My solicitor for--for many years. He must have mistaken the name. Or--he grows old--perhaps he forgets people.'

'Do you often see him?'

'I saw him this morning. I took him my letter to the _Times_. He is narrow--very narrow, in his views. We argued the thing for a bit. But, really, one might as well argue with a stick as with Dering when Property is concerned. So he forgets, does he? Poor old chap! He forgets--well--we all grow old together!' He sighed. 'It is his time to-day and mine to-morrow.--My Scholar, let us talk.'

The Scholar left her Master at seven. On her way out she ran against Checkley, who was prowling round the court. 'You!' he cried. 'You! Ah!

I've caught you, have I? On Sat.u.r.day afternoon I thought I see you going into No. 22. Now I've caught you coming out, have I?'

'Checkley,' she said, 'if you are insolent, I shall have to speak to Mr.

Dering;' and walked away.

'There's another of 'em,' Checkley murmured, looking after her--'a hardened one, if ever there was. All for her lover and her brother! A pretty nest of 'em. And calls herself a lady!'

CHAPTER XXVI

THE LESSON OF THE STREET

'Child,' said the Master, 'it is time that you should take another lesson.'

'I am ready. Let us begin.' She crossed her hands in her lap and looked up obedient.

'Not a lesson this time from books. A practical lesson from men and women, boys and girls, children and infants in arms. Let us go forth and hear the teaching of the wrecks and the slaves. I will show you creatures who are men and women mutilated in body and mind--mutilated by the social order. Come, I will show you, not by words, but by sight, why Property must be destroyed.'

It was seven o'clock, when Mr. Dering ought to have been thinking of his dinner, that Mr. Edmund Gray proposed this expedition. Now, since that other discourse on the sacredness of Property, a strange thing had fallen upon Elsie. Whenever her Master spoke and taught, she seemed to hear, following him, the other voice speaking and teaching exactly the opposite. Sometimes--this is absurd, but many true things are absurd--she seemed to hear both voices speaking together: yet she heard them distinctly and apart. Looking at Mr. Dering, she knew what he was saying: looking at Mr. Edmund Gray, she heard what he was saying. So that no sooner had these words been spoken, than, like a response in church, there arose the voice of Mr. Dering. And it said: 'Come. You shall see the wretched lives and the sufferings of those who are punished because their fathers or themselves have refused to work and save. Not to be able to get Property is the real curse of labour. It is no evil to work provided one chooses the work and creates for one's self Property. The curse is to have to work for starvation wages at what can never create property, if the worker should live for a thousand years.'

Of the two voices she preferred the one which promised the abolition of poverty and crime. She was young: she was generous: any hope of a return of the Saturnian reign made her heart glow. Of the two old men--the mad man and the sane man--she loved the mad man. Who would not love such a man? Why, he knew how to make the whole world happy! Ever since the time of Adam we have been looking and calling out and praying for such a man.

Every year the world runs after such a man. He promises, but he does not perform. The world tries his patent medicine, and is no better. Then, the year after, the world runs after another man.

Elsie rose and followed the Master. It was always with a certain anxiety that she sat or talked with him. Always she dreaded lest, by some unlucky accident, he should awaken and be restored to himself suddenly and without warning--say in his Lecture Hall. How would he look? What should she say? 'See--in this place for many years past you have in course of madness preached the very doctrines which in hours of sanity you have most reprobated. These people around you are your disciples.

You have taught them by reason and by ill.u.s.tration with vehemence and earnestness to regard the destruction of property as the one thing needful for the salvation of the world. What will you say now? Will you begin to teach the contrary? They will chase you out of the Hall for a madman. Will you go on with your present teaching? You will despise yourself for a madman.' Truly a difficult position. Habit, however, was too strong. There was little chance that Edmund Gray among his own people, and at work upon his own hobby, would become Edward Dering.

They went out together. He led her--whither? It mattered not. North and South and East and West you may find everywhere the streets and houses of the very poor hidden away behind the streets of the working people and the well-to-do.

The Master stopped at the entrance of one of those streets--it seemed to Elsie as if she was standing between two men both alike, with different eyes. At the corner was a public-house with swinging doors. It was filled with men talking, but not loudly. Now and then a woman went in or came out, but they were mostly men. It was a street long and narrow, squalid to the last degree, with small two-storied houses on either side. The bricks were grimy; the mortar was constantly falling out between them: the woodwork of doors and windows was insufferably grimy: many of the panes were broken in the windows. It was full of children: they swarmed: they ran about in the road, they danced on the pavement, they ran and jumped and laughed as if their lot was the happiest in the world and their future the brightest. Moreover, most of them, though their parents were steeped in poverty, looked well fed and even rosy.

'All these children,' said Mr. Edmund Gray, 'will grow up without a trade: they will enter life with nothing but their hands and their legs and their time. That is the whole of their inheritance. They go to school, and they like school: but as for the things they learn, they will forget them, or they will have no use for them. Hewers of wood and drawers of water shall they be: they are condemned already. That is the system: we take thousands of children every year, and we condemn them to servitude--whatever genius may be lying among them. It is like throwing treasures into the sea, or burying the fruits of the earth. Waste!

Waste! Yet, if the system is to be bolstered up, what help?'

Said the other Voice: 'The world must have servants. These are our servants. If they are good at their work, they will rise and become upper servants. If they are good upper servants, they may rise higher.

Their children can rise higher still, and their grandchildren may join us. Service is best for them. Good service, hard service, will keep them in health and out of temptation. To lament because they are servants is foolish and sentimental.'

Standing in the doorways, sitting on the door-steps, talking together, were women--about four times as many women as there were houses. This was because there were as many families as rooms, and there were four rooms for every house. As they stood at the end of the street and looked down, Elsie observed that nearly every woman had a baby in her arms, and that there were a great many types or kinds of women. That which does not surprise one in a drawing-room, where every woman is expected to have her individual points, is noticed in a crowd, where, one thinks, the people should be like sheep--all alike.

'A splendid place, this street, for such a student as you should be, my Scholar.' The Master looked up and down--he sniffed the air, which was stuffy, with peculiar satisfaction: he smiled upon the grubby houses.

'You should come often; you should make the acquaintance of the people: you will find them so human, so desperately human, that you will presently understand that these women are your sisters. Change dresses with one of them: let your hair fall wild: take off your bonnet----'