17

Another interesting addition to the Group was Thirp, originally a philanthropic prison reformer, a man of some wealth, whose political ideas it seemed were broadening with experience, and who was specially interested in the police side of life. He teemed with ideas about class and type psychology. He was a small man with a thin, fine face and a feminine voice, and his long, lean, restless hands seemed always to be handling details too subtle for words. He had nothing of the conventional revolutionary in his appearance; he was always very carefully dressed with large, coloured neck–ties and delicately patterned silk shirts. He liked what he called investigation, and sometimes his investigations about public characters had the quality of personal gossip. Into that, indeed, in a more stable age, he might have relapsed, but for a time at least the movement picked him up and exalted and nourished his mind. It gave his curiosities a purposive quality. He was capable of handling big affairs and at a pinch he would do so, but he preferred the secondary aspects of life.

He too became a separate process in the Party, most closely in contact with Rud. He liked Rud and was curious about him. He was at great pains to please him. He avoided the others, he cut the Group meetings whenever he could, but he talked to Rud alone whenever he had a chance. His brilliant little pamphlet, The Man inside the Uniform, had had a circulation of over two million copies in England and America before the British authorities condemned it as a seditious document. On the whole that stimulated its circulation.

Norvel again began as a loosely attached associate of the Group, who gradually assumed a central position only second to the nuclear, indefatigable Bodisham. He was a different kind of tentacle altogether, who specialised in the publication and distribution of cheap books on both sides of the Atlantic. He was a born educator and propagandist. His distinctive excitement lay in that. For that he lived. He it was who brought down the price of paper–covered popular books in America to a dime. To most people in those days a change in the price of books seemed trivial commercialism, but he had a better imagination than that. It meant a vast infiltration of rational ideas into previously inert social masses. It meant a heightened social awareness, a step forward in the awakening and release of the common man. Norvel had a considerable genius for business; without any loss of revolutionary zeal, he became one of the controlling magnates in the paper world, and later, when wood pulp ran short, he exploited the manufacture of paper out of light metallic alloys, to the great advantage of the Party and the enquiring Common Man.

In his earlier schemes Bodisham had contemplated the development of new daily newspapers as a necessary part of the Common–sense Movement. Then Rud and he had found themselves doubting whether the contemporary newspaper retained any political influence. It had become more and more an ephemeral advertisment–sheet seasoned with news of crimes, catastrophes and gossip. It was slipping away from the centre of collective consciousness. As the big newspaper proprietors realised the futility of their political ambitions, they replaced political matter more and more by distraction. Many daily papers were little more than personal gossip and photographic pornography. Norvel confirmed Rud's ideas of the decadence of the newspaper, and pushed them on to practical realisation. And most of the accepted methods of party propaganda, meetings, processions and so forth, he declared to be also completely out–of–date. Instead of daily papers the Group ultimately found its chief educational medium in small, cheap books of a size to go inconspicuously into a working man's pocket, and before a year was out Norvel had filled at least twenty million pockets where English was spoken, with the stuff of the Common–sense Movement, and incalculable millions more of minds with variations upon the question: "Why do you stand it? Why do you let these out–of–date people play games with your bodies and lives?"

"Out–of–date" is a very deadly phrase for an accepted institution.

With the constant reiteration of this question, of why people stood what they were enduring, went the plain, clear insistence that in the world it was now possible to have peace and plenty for all—given courage, given tolerance, given plain common–sense. And this Norvel did at a monetary profit to the gathering movement. These little books had much more frontier–passing power than a newspaper that lives and dies in a day. They passed from hand to hand. They played a vital part, a catalytic part, in the brewing of the World Revolution.