4

Lord Bendigo, another great lord of public opinion in those days, wasn't by any means as easy as Lord Thunderclap. He was one of Rud's more difficult problems. Thunderclap thought in phobias and booms, but Bendigo had ideas of his own. For the most part they were extremely poor ideas. His leading one had been the complete isolation of the British Empire from the rest of the world, which Rud regarded as too obviously silly and impracticable for serious treatment. He thought at first that Bendigo wasn't in earnest about this fancy. Then he came to believe that Bendigo was a man of great obstinacy, fighting down a subconscious realisation that he had spent a large part of his life promulgating puerile nonsense.

There was something about this man that Rud found curiously congenial. He sensed a malignant wilfulness very like his own. This very resemblance gave Bendigo the quality of an awful warning. "He has pushed himself into a corner and away from power by the very vigour of his egotism," Rud reflected. "He thought he could put over just anything through sheer wilfulness. Things aren't like that. I used to think it, but I've learnt some lessons. He got his luck too soon, and that spoilt him. Primary facts are invincible. You have to respect them. Fact is the mountain you have to climb, and the way of it is the way you have to go. It's the only way up. But Bendigo started out to climb a mountain that in fact wasn't there…And he goes on with all the gestures of his Isolationist Crusade long after he has realised its futility…

"I, too, have that disposition…I hate going back on myself. I hate checking up things with other people, but I know enough to know I've got to do it. He must have just plunged into that Imperial Isolationism of his. Before he thought over the change of scale or air war, or any of these newer things. Plunged with a million readers. And then held on, like a child in a tantrum. I did that sort of thing when I was a kid."

Criticism of Bendigo was comparatively easy, but how to get a satisfactory publicity out of him was a riddle. Rud's guess was to go to him for advice about going into Parliament. "Wait, and I will tell you," said Bendigo; "it's no time to start now"; and things were left at that.

Rud tried to convey the effect of a thoroughly dishonest, pushful and able young man ready to sell and be sold, a young man in a state of involuntary admiration and natural envy for a tremendously successful newspaper owner, but even upon these lines he was doubtful if he got Bendigo.

What on earth did Bendigo want? Of Rud or life or anything? There was a wicked scrutiny in his lordship's disillusioned eye. Rud was left with an uneasy memory of that eye. It was an eye that should have twinkled, and it didn't twinkle. It said for a moment, with a touch of the genial fellowship of adventurers, "Well, what are you up to?" and then hardened to "You don't get me, my boy, whatever you want."

It became the cold, resentful eye of an inordinate man in a disappointing world. Bendigo had thought life was a lark, he had handled it inconsiderately and found it a dead lark in his hands.

Steenhold told Rud there were American parallels. Similar forces produce similar results. Newspaper proprietors were the most paradoxical class in the world. Everybody wanted to use newspaper proprietors, and nobody respected their ambitions. No one expected them to have ambitions. They were vehicles to take people to all sorts of desirable destinations—and wait outside. Never would the public recognise any possibility of direct leadership in them. They became resentful, embittered men. All the world over.

In Britain they wore coronets, often slightly askew, but that made no essential difference. They were at once powerful and infuriatingly impotent.

Nowhere in the world, Rud reflected, was journalism anything but a malignant and wanton power. Later on, as the Common–sense Movement grew, he had to think a lot about that. He had to spread a new system of ideas throughout the world, and journalism would neither instruct nor inform nor lend itself consistently to any sustained propaganda.