12

That American campaign outran Steenhold's wildest hopes. Rud was intensely excited and met his every occasion with an inspired aptness. He conferred. He addressed meetings. He talked on the air. He dictated interviews. His energy seemed inexhaustible. Always he seemed to be saying something fresh and always he seemed to be saying something obvious. "You disentangle things," said Steenhold, trying to give it a name.

In a dozen cities ambitious young men were presently starting nuclei for the Party of the Common Man.

Rud surveyed America from east to west and from north to south from the air. His first impression was an amazing spaciousness. Everywhere there was space. Too much desert there was, too much wilderness; the empty undefended coasts of the west frightened him, the vast unkempt rivers. When later he flew from London to Moscow and thence by way of Constantinople and Rome home, Europe in comparison, with its strips and roads and disciplined waterways, looked like one continuous land of gardens. But everywhere where he descended in America he found communities living in fine great cities, speaking the same language, using the same idiom of thought, and prepared to understand him completely. And he took the utmost care that his great idea was understood.

He kept his end up against Steenhold with difficulty in a long and tedious comparison of these two sections of the English–speaking world. He and Steenhold had absolutely the same ideas and the same vision of things, and yet so subtle is the virus of patriotism that these two professional anti–patriots made international comparisons until they argued themselves into a rage. Steenhold was the more aggressive of the two; he was never happy until he had roused Rud to retort. And Rud, in spite of himself, was forced to be partisan and counter–offensive.

"You English," said Steenhold.

"You Americans," said Rud.

"When you aren't as fresh as paint," he said, "you Americans are as stale as old cabbage leaves. I'm amazed at your Labour leaders, at the sort of things you can still take seriously as Presidential Candidates. These leonine reverberators tossing their manes back in order to keep their eyes on the White House—they belong to the Pleistocene. We dropped that sort of head in England after John Bright. When the Revolution is over and I retire, I shall retire as Hitler did, to some remote hunting–lodge, and we'll have the heads of Great Labour Leaders and Presidential Hopes stuck all round the Hall. Hippopotami won't be in it."

Rud's picture of the world, under the stimulus of this experience, expanded and became factual with terrific rapidity. He felt that his Anglo–American idea had been mere talk before, even to himself; that hitherto he had never believed in its feasibility; but now it was becoming immensely credible. "The pivot of our movement has to be in America. The bulk of our Party has to be on this side and"—he paused and looked at Steenhold—"I haven't to come to America more often than once a year. For one short week."

"I don't quite see," began Steenhold.

"Public men in America are too public. Too accessible. This sitting on the stoop and being 'just folk' was all very well for local politics and the simple farmer days of a hundred years ago, but it's no good for world affairs. Opening flower–shows and being genial to babies and all that is out of date. These parish politics methods have to go. The ultimate leader ought to be distant, audible but far off. Show yourself and then vanish into a cloud. Marx would never have counted for one tenth of his weight as 'Charlie Marx' playing chess with the boys, and Woodrow Wilson threw away all his magic as far as Europe was concerned when he crossed the Atlantic. Before he crossed he was a god—what a god he was! After he arrived he was just a grinning guest. I've got to be the Common Man, yes, but not common like that."

"It's a new thing for America—an invisible Great Man," said Steenhold, considering it, "but I believe you're right."

"I'm right," said Rud, and then with a certain bitterness: "Look at me. It would be money in my pocket if I were invisible altogether."

Steenhold considered his leader's visage judicially. "No," he said. "You've got to be careful with it, of course, and you don't want to make it too cheap. I admit a snapshot might make a mess of you. But you've got force about you. They never laugh at you on the platform. Not a titter. They gape until you begin, wondering what that scowl's about, and then your voice gets them. But you're dead right about not overdoing it with the cinema and the mike. Aloof's the word. No pomp—but aloof."