The Seeds of Enchantment | Page 3

an infantry battalion a progress punctuated by two bullet-wounds and a brace of fairly earned decorations Dicky felt himself in need of a holiday. Beamish, newly demobilized from the Royal Army Medical Corps, fell in with the suggestion as "he wanted to study the social progress of the East at first hand."
So far they had been away from home six months the journey had been pleasant and uneventful except for an incident at Amritsar, which had brought the old fighting fire back to Dicky's languid eyes, and slightly shaken his friend's belief in the universal brotherhood of man.
And here since the incidents which follow were not devoid of influence on the opinions of both it seems necessary to explain the intellectual viewpoints of our two adventurers.
The Honourable Richard Smith, then, as his name implies, was a very average Englishman who believed in the doctrine of individual liberty at home and the exercise of benevolent force abroad. This doctrine of individual liberty probably owing to the fact that his father had been one of the first to introduce profit-sharing into his factories Dicky modified by a leaning towards co-partnership and amalgamation in industry: the exercise of benevolent force over lesscivilized races possibly because of his mixed parentage he deemed the especial prerogative of the English-speaking peoples.
Not so Beamish! In Beamish's eyes dreamy, visionary eyes, small-pupiled, dull-irised his friend's domestic ideas were "reactionary," his international standpoint "militaristic." Beamish saw, emerging from the welter of Armageddon, a new world, warless, full of strangely changed peoples, old enmities put aside, old ambitions abandoned, lying down lamb-like with the lion and the eagle. The millennium, according to Beamish, had almost arrived; the "battle-flags were furled," and the "Parliament of Man" duly and expensively in session at Geneva. Beamish, therefore mind free from the paltry cares of "nationalism" could afford exclusive devotion to "The Cause".
And it was not Beamish's fault, but that of his manifold and contradictory advisers, if their pupil found it rather difficult to explain the exact objects of the cause to which he had vowed allegiance.
The doctor's brain never a very efficient one had so befuddled itself with studying the abstract problems of Internationalism, Communism, Collectivism, Syndicalism, Karl Marxism, Guild-, State-, Christian- and other Socialism, had perused so many pronunciamentos including the mathematical gymnastics of Sir Leo Chiozza Money and Professor John Atkinson Hobson, M.A., the sentimental inaccuracies of Mr. & Mrs. Sidney Webb, the lucubrations of Herrn Bernhard Shaw, and the bucolic phenomena of .Prince Kropotkin as to be almost incapable of individual judgment. Till, eventually, the doctor's bemused soul had taken refuge in generalities.
"International Socialism," Beamish used to say, "is not so much a system as a principle. The Capitalist must go. Capitalism is the prime source of all evils, war included, in the world. Abolish it, organize production for the benefit of everybody, eliminate the sordid motive of private gain, and we shall return to the Merrie England of the Middle Ages."
Exact economic details of this transformation escaped the Fabian's ken; nor, in gloomier moments, was he quite certain about the merriness of England in those joyous early days. Being a medical man, he could not help looking back on the Middle Ages as a rather insanitary, untherapeutic period. In the Merrie England of 1931 there would have to be plumbers; and even Beamish found the merry plumber a difficult conception. Still Socialism could work miracles.
Relying on these miracles, and on the protection afforded to a warless world by the super-salaried idealists of the League of Nations, the soul of Cyprian Beamish had created for itself two dream-countries.
In the first dream-country, the "State" a nebulous entity, compound of Christian love and Jewish sagacity controlled all industry. Resultantly, said Beamish, labour was reduced to its correct minimum of four hours per diem a working week containing four days. For the remainder of its time the "community" ("jolly word", quoth our doctor) devoted itself to "the Arts", to "social intercourse" (compulsory), to "joyous physical self -expression" (including universal Morris-dancing), to the cultivation of crocuses in artgreen pots, and the building with its own hands of "jolly little houses" wherein a limited number of "jolly" children were born, fed, clothed, educated, and of course doctored, free of charge, by the said beneficent State.
Beamish had not progressed quite as far as the doctrine of free love being, among other things, a strict vegetarian, that is to say he ate meat only at other people's expense or when living, as now, on the American plan. Still, in this first dream-country, the endowment of parenthood was already an accomplished fact parents, at the age of forty, becoming entitled (rent and taxes free) to one jolly little house and two jolly little pensions which secured for them most of the comforts hot baths and evening dress excluded