The Freelands | Page 5

were evidently not aware of their own dismal
mediocrity. Hardly a beautiful or a vivid face, hardly a wicked one,
never anything transfigured, passionate, terrible, or grand. Nothing
Greek, early Italian, Elizabethan, not even beefy, beery, broad old
Georgian. Something clutched-in, and squashed-out about it all--on that
collective face something of the look of a man almost comfortably and

warmly wrapped round by a snake at the very beginning of its squeeze.
It gave Felix Freeland a sort of faint excitement and pleasure to notice
this. For it was his business to notice things, and embalm them
afterward in ink. And he believed that not many people noticed it, so
that it contributed in his mind to his own distinction, which was
precious to him. Precious, and encouraged to be so by the press,
which--as he well knew--must print his name several thousand times a
year. And yet, as a man of culture and of principle, how he despised
that kind of fame, and theoretically believed that a man's real
distinction lay in his oblivion of the world's opinion, particularly as
expressed by that flighty creature, the Fourth Estate. But here again, as
in the matter of the gray top hat, he had instinctively compromised,
taking in press cuttings which described himself and his works, while
he never failed to describe those descriptions--good, bad, and
indifferent--as 'that stuff,' and their writers as 'those fellows.'
Not that it was new to him to feel that the country was in a bad way. On
the contrary, it was his established belief, and one for which he was
prepared to furnish due and proper reasons. In the first place he traced
it to the horrible hold Industrialism had in the last hundred years laid on
the nation, draining the peasantry from 'the Land'; and in the second
place to the influence of a narrow and insidious Officialism, sapping
the independence of the People.
This was why, in going to a conclave with his brother John, high in
Government employ, and his brother Stanley, a captain of industry,
possessor of the Morton Plough Works, he was conscious of a certain
superiority in that he, at all events, had no hand in this paralysis which
was creeping on the country.
And getting more buff-colored every minute, he threaded his way on,
till, past the Marble Arch, he secured the elbow-room of Hyde Park.
Here groups of young men, with chivalrous idealism, were jeering at
and chivying the broken remnants of a suffrage meeting. Felix debated
whether he should oppose his body to their bodies, his tongue to theirs,
or whether he should avert his consciousness and hurry on; but, that
instinct which moved him to wear the gray top hat prevailing, he did

neither, and stood instead, looking at them in silent anger, which
quickly provoked endearments--such as: "Take it off," or "Keep it on,"
or "What cheer, Toppy!" but nothing more acute. And he meditated:
Culture! Could culture ever make headway among the blind
partisanships, the hand-to-mouth mentality, the cheap excitements of
this town life? The faces of these youths, the tone of their voices, the
very look of their bowler hats, said: No! You could not culturalize the
impermeable texture of their vulgarity. And they were the coming
manhood of the nation--this inexpressibly distasteful lot of youths! The
country had indeed got too far away from 'the Land.' And this essential
towny commonness was not confined to the classes from which these
youths were drawn. He had even remarked it among his own son's
school and college friends--an impatience of discipline, an insensibility
to everything but excitement and having a good time, a permanent
mental indigestion due to a permanent diet of tit-bits. What aspiration
they possessed seemed devoted to securing for themselves the plums of
official or industrial life. His boy Alan, even, was infected, in spite of
home influences and the atmosphere of art in which he had been so
sedulously soaked. He wished to enter his Uncle Stanley's plough
works, seeing in it a 'soft thing.'
But the last of the woman-baiters had passed by now, and, conscious
that he was really behind time, Felix hurried on. . . .
In his study--a pleasant room, if rather tidy--John Freeland was
standing before the fire smoking a pipe and looking thoughtfully at
nothing. He was, in fact, thinking, with that continuity characteristic of
a man who at fifty has won for himself a place of permanent
importance in the Home Office. Starting life in the Royal Engineers, he
still preserved something of a military look about his figure, and grave
visage with steady eyes and drooping moustache (both a shade grayer
than those of Felix), and a forehead bald from justness and knowing
where to lay his hand on papers. His face was