Osmond was not getting anywhere. MacLeod and his own inept.i.tude of speech seemed to be forcing him into the solicitous fright of the mother, bent on shielding her child from the wolf.
"You are too powerful," he said, and realized that he was using the evidence Rose had given him, thought for thought.
"I hope so. I ought to be. I"ve got to overturn power."
"What"s the use? You"re a czar yourself. You"re only another kind."
MacLeod looked at him thoughtfully, as if struck by the form of words.
"My dear fellow," he said, "is it possible you believe in the present state of things? Do you want one man to possess everything and the next man nothing?"
Osmond frowned his negation. MacLeod, unfairly it seemed to him, made him feel young and inadequate to the matter. He had the eyes to see what cause was just, yet he had not the equipment to maintain any cause at all.
"What is the use," he essayed, "for you and men like you to head revolts? It only means you are ruling instead of the rulers you overturn. It will all be done over again. The big man will rise to the top. The little man will go under. And in time you will have the same conditions repeated. It"s because you are not teaching love. You are teaching envy and hate."
"How do you know I am?"
Osmond kept on as if he were speaking to himself, groping painfully for what he found.
"You are not preaching good work. You are preaching revolt against work--cla.s.s hatred and discontent."
"Do you believe in non-resistance?"
"No."
"Do you believe in Midas, king of gold, swelled up with power, sitting smiling on the throne he has forced others to build for him, and saying, "I am not as other men are"?"
"No. But I believe in work. You mustn"t take it out of a man, that certainty that his own work is the greatest privilege he"s got. Oh, you mustn"t do that!"
There it was again, his hungry worship of achievement. It might even have seemed to him that oppression was not much to bear if, at the same time, a man had the glory of setting his hand to something and seeing it prosper. MacLeod, who knew something about his life, but nothing of its inward processes, began to feel that here was more than at first appeared, and answered rather temperately,--
"I don"t believe you know much about the general conditions under which work is done. Work means to you Peter"s painting a picture. Let it mean, for example, a great many Peters in a mine delving all day for some smug capitalist who wants to endow monuments to himself and get his children into society. What then?"
What then, indeed? Osmond could not answer; but a moment later he said again, tenaciously,--
"I don"t want you to destroy the idea of good work."
"Well, now!" MacLeod spoke impatiently. He realized that here was not a man whom his torrent of b.l.o.o.d.y facts would move, but who demanded also a more persuasive rhetoric. "Well, now, you acknowledge the world is upside down. Shall we leave it so?"
Osmond shook his head dumbly.
"Shall we say the great scheme counteracts its own abuses, and we won"t interfere? When an empire gets sufficiently corrupt, it tumbles apart of its own rottenness? Or when we see just cause, shall we go to war?"
"Grannie has the whole secret of it in her hand." This he said involuntarily, for he had no idea of talking to MacLeod about grannie.
But the subject had pa.s.sed beyond their predilections of what was best to say. "Science won"t do it--war won"t do it. Religion will."
"Ah! You are an enthusiast."
"No. But there is something beyond force and beyond reason."
"Religion, you mean."
"You can call it that. It is what has made that old woman up there at the house live every day of her life as if she were the multi-millionaire of the universe--without a thought of herself, without a doubt that there is an inexhaustible reservoir, and that everybody can dip into it and bring up the water of life. Sometimes when she told me that--how rich we all are, if we only knew it--I used to see the mult.i.tudes of hands dipping in for their drop--old wrinkled hands, children"s hands."
He was musing now, and yet admitting the other man to his confidence. It was proof of MacLeod"s charm that even Osmond, who kept his true self to himself, and who started by hating a girl"s oppressor, had nevertheless fallen into a maze of self-betrayal. MacLeod spoke softly, as if he recognized the spell and would not break it:--
"Yet, the Founder of her religion said, "I came not to send peace, but a sword.""
"How do you know who the Founder of her religion is? I don"t know it myself. I don"t know but she dug it out of the ground, or breathed it out of the air. She has her sword, too, grannie has. You never saw her licking a boy for torturing a rat. I have."
"What shall we do?"
Osmond roused himself a little from his muse.
"I read something the other day in a book--about the town of Abdera. I suppose you know it."
MacLeod shook his head.
"In the town of Abdera they suddenly began to love one another, that"s all. They went round chanting, "O Cupid, prince of G.o.d and men!""
"Is that going to obviate all the difficulties?"
Osmond looked at him with dog"s eyes, the eyes that seek and wonder out of their confusion of incomplete knowledge.
"Every man would refuse to rest," he said, "while any other man was hungry. They would all be humble, the rich as well as the poor. Now, one"s as c.o.c.ky as the other. I don"t know that the c.o.c.kiness of the ignorant is any more picturesque than the c.o.c.kiness of the privileged."
MacLeod was smiling a little. These, he saw, were pretty dreams, but hardly of the texture to demand destruction. They would fall to pieces, in good time, of their own flimsiness.
"Do you believe in kings?" he asked idly.
Osmond glowed.
"I know it"s a mighty pity not to," he said. "Some people have got to be fostered chiefly because they have gifts. If you don"t draw a little circle round them, you lose the gifts maybe, and you certainly lose the fun of adoring them. I"d like to be a soldier of Alexander--if I couldn"t be Alexander himself. But you"ll never get anywhere smashing round and yelling that one man"s better than another because he works with his hands. No! the man that brings peace will bring it another way."
MacLeod regarded him for a moment curiously.
"But why," he said at length, "why won"t you trust me to bring it precisely that way?"
Osmond smiled faintly.
"No," he said, "you couldn"t."
"But why? You say I am extremely powerful. You rather accuse me of it. I am too powerful, in fact. Wasn"t that what you said?"
"Yes."
"Well, why not trust me to administer your great awakening?"
Osmond kept his ironic smile of unbelief.