3
After the capture of the Purple House, Rud insisted on a sort of intensive study of this world they were attacking. His mixture of shrewdness and insight with imaginative vigour was never more apparent than at this time. Chiffan noted his increasing elasticity. Always Rud had had mental bounce, but never so much as this. He would pass at a bound from a private meditation upon his role as the Culminating Common Man, to the most intense practical activity.
"I've got to get into relationship with people now," he insisted. "With all kinds of influential people. I ought to do it. We've got to see what they are made of. We've got to get out of our hole–and–corner stage as soon as possible. Marx was hole–and–corner all his life, and Lenin had too much of it for his health. We've got to be different. We've got to escape from narrowness. We're a movement, not a conspiracy. We've got to radiate contacts, and have as many people aware of us as possible. That's living, modern common sense."
In the various personal encounters in which Rud had made himself known to the worldly powers which might otherwise have impeded the consolidation of his leadership of the renascent Popular Socialist Party, his "living, modern common sense" became as flexible and slippery as an eel.
He saw his loose, large appeal to common humanity spreading and catching on, and he felt not the slightest scruple in talking ambiguously and making vague promises to divert and pacify anyone who might have been disposed to nip him in the bud, restrict his publicity or rob him of police immunity before he was established as a world–wide political fact. Sooner or later a struggle was inevitable, but the later it came, the better for Rud. His instinct was to get all over the picture first.
In the days immediately following the capture of the Purple House he saw as many people of importance as he could, mostly they were people who had hitherto been nothing to him but news and names and portraits. They wanted to see him now, after that bright flare–up of publicity, and he wanted to see them, so it was not very difficult to get together. Opportunities were made for him and he had to ask for very little. Before the nine–days' wonder of the great fight in the West End faded out he knew he had to make sure not only of press but financial support. So he did his utmost to make sure of both.
It was an enormously educational time for him. He grew years older in a few weeks. Chiffan watched him in amazement. Political theorising at Headquarters gave place abroad to practical political canvassing of the most unscrupulous sort. Bodisham and the others schemed, made enquiries, prepared dossiers of important people for him. He went to great pains to make himself "important yet normal" in the eyes of all these key people.
He built up an effigy of himself for their benefit. Deliberately and with great self–restraint, he created an impression that was only effaced in the course of several years. He persuaded or he showed off or he seemed to betray his quality, as occasion required. He wanted them to believe he was the man to capture and sell popular discontent, and they did. After the manner of the British ruling class, they trusted him as a thoroughly untrustworthy man.
He let it be assumed that he was bringing no original ideas whatever into British political life. That, he knew, was fundamentally important. He discussed the internal situation and foreign affairs, discreetly and in established phrases. He read files of The Times for some years back to catch the tone, he devoured political memoirs, volumes of collected letters and speeches. He was, he admitted, airing perhaps a few original ideas in what he had to say, but his heart, he implied, was in the right place.
He was to be a national invigorator, he conveyed. He was to profess much, do nothing, and leave everyone the better for it. He was to take on the task at which Bohun had so signally failed. He was to put the fermenting new red wine of popular discontent, popular discomfort and resentment (and popular behaviour in the Midlands and the North was certainly becoming very serious), internationalism, collectivism and all those gathering horrors, back into the brave old bottles of the established order—in his own way. But he must have a free hand. He must not be prevented. Admittedly he was a clever fellow. He conceded that, but all the same, he intimated, they must not embarrass him. They must not attempt to tell him. He began in fact where most Labour politicians leave off.
He let it be tacitly assumed that fundamentally he was a sound, patriotic Englishman and that, in spite of current difficulties, he regarded the staggering Empire, the inert monarchy, the Anglican Church, the Anglican country–house, as the lovely and eternal framework of the perfect life. Beyond this frame mankind could progress no further until a thoroughly Anglican Last Day inaugurated an unending Anglican season in Heaven, with the Holy Family playing, very tactfully, the part of super–Royalty. Since they could imagine nothing better, he let it be assumed that he could imagine nothing better.
He had remarkably little difficulty in establishing the fundamental respectability of his intentions. He realised with the profoundest astonishment that a tacit assumption of his Anglicanism was made for him, that it was incredible to most of these influential people that a man could be a born Englishman and still not entertain the completest love and admiration for Anglicanism. He discovered that even the Jews, Atheists and Roman Catholics of Britain are fundamentally Anglican. And there was no question of the entire conformity of the modern Nonconformist. So after all, considering their immense assimilative power, why should they question him?
No one in the world of influence asked him what he thought about the established institutions of his native land, and so he told them no lies. They had no suspicion of the fundamental resentments in his nature. They didn't perceive that his scowl was an expression. That he regarded the whole British system as incurably decayed, a crumbling unteachable system of complex and exasperating appropriations and resistances, and that it was the dearest ambition of his black little heart to see it wiped out of existence as soon as possible and replaced by an Anglo–American synthesis with a cosmopolitan trend, remained an undisclosed aspect of his programme. "One thing at a time," said Rud to his council.
"Of course," he said at a lunch party to which he had been invited by Lady Dragnet, "now that we are one day's journey from America, we must talk just a little more American than we did." (That was the stuff to give them.) "Frankly, I think we are getting badly out of touch with mass opinion over there…
"Yes, but suppose you have made a mistake and put your money on the wrong horse. Suppose this recrudescence of aggressive Big Business over there isn't sound. (You know what Americans are.) Isn't it well to have a strong popular movement in England in touch with the American Labour side?"
Something in that, they thought.
"I could make just those contacts…
"It has always been part of the strength of England to have a strong opposition," he explained. "So that when we have got ourselves into a complete mess—as I think, if you'll forgive me, the government is doing now—we've always had an opposition formula to fall back upon. That, we can say, is what we meant all along. That has been our peculiar advantage, a natural, unpremeditated, providential twofacedness. Sometimes foreigners have thought us inconsistent—almost to the point of perfidy. But it is all perfectly simple. England is like a coin with an obverse and reverse. Has been, anyhow. A great democratic monarchy is a contradiction in itself; particularly with a House of Lords; it must blow hot and cold…
"But nowadays—Our weakness for the last few years has been the ineffectiveness of the Opposition. This Labour Party has never had the quality of a fighting Opposition. It has just sucked the life out of Radicalism. It has never had the definite idealism of the Whigs and Liberals. 'Give us more employment and slightly higher pay and be sure of our contentment,' says Labour. 'We're loyal. We know our place. But we don't like being unemployed.' What good is that as Opposition? It's about as much opposition as a mewing cat. We mean more than that. I tell you frankly. Our task, I take it, my task, is to reinstate that practical working Opposition which has always been Old England's alternative line of defence…For the good of all of us…"
He said that.
He had, he intimated, to put the idea crudely in a conversation. He might have to put it still more crudely to the country. But they must understand that he knew what he meant to do. Now and then he might have to use phrases that would make conservative gentlemen sit up a bit. More than sit up jump. They had to trust him…
"After all, Joseph Chamberlain was a republican Radical who talked of 'ransom'; and look at the Chamberlains now!…
"I don't want support in your papers," he told Lord Thunderclap, the great press peer. "But I want space. Denounce me if you like, but feature me. I'd rather be denounced. I don't want to seem to be in with you. I'm being perfectly open with you."
"And I like openness," said the great Lord Thunderclap, and regarded him, as far as he could manage it, with the candid face of a simple, responsible, old–fashioned newspaper proprietor. "I think we understand one another."
"Anything but silence," said Rud, looking if possible even more candid than his lordship.
"Run along," said Thunderclap, like a benign God. "You shall exist."
Thunderclap was particularly impressed by a comparison that Rud, in developing this theory of British disingenuousness, made of Britain to a double–headed eagle, looking both east and west. Thunderclap thought this discovery of the essential duplicity of England a very penetrating one. In his past he had been accused, with a certain plausibility, of inconsistency and abrupt changes of front. But Rud's inferential present of a second head seemed to put him all square again. He felt Rud was a clever fellow who ought to be encouraged. He ordered that Rud should be "news" throughout his press.
"I've got the hang of him," he said. "Nothing Red in him."