The Painful Fall of a Great Reputation Basil Grant and I were talking one day in what is perhaps the most perfect place for talking on earth--the top of a tolerably deserted tramcar.To talk on the top of a hill is superb, but to talk on the top of a flying hill is a fairy tale.
The vast blank space of North London was flying by; the very pace gave us a sense of its immensity and its meanness.It was, as it were, a base infinitude, a squalid eternity, and we felt the real horror of the poor parts of London, the horror that is so totally missed and misrepresented by the sensational novelists who depict it as being a matter of narrow streets, filthy houses, criminals and maniacs, and dens of vice.In a narrow street, in a den of vice, you do not expect civilization, you do not expect order.But the horror of this was the fact that there was civilization, that there was order, but that civilisation only showed its morbidity, and order only its monotony.No one would say, in going through a criminal slum, "I see no statues.I notice no cathedrals." But here there were public buildings; only they were mostly lunatic asylums.
Here there were statues; only they were mostly statues of railway engineers and philanthropists--two dingy classes of men united by their common contempt for the people.Here there were churches;only they were the churches of dim and erratic sects, Agapemonites or Irvingites.Here, above all, there were broad roads and vast crossings and tramway lines and hospitals and all the real marks of civilization.But though one never knew, in one sense, what one would see next, there was one thing we knew we should not see--anything really great, central, of the first class, anything that humanity had adored.And with revulsion indescribable our emotions returned, I think, to those really close and crooked entries, to those really mean streets, to those genuine slums which lie round the Thames and the City, in which nevertheless a real possibility remains that at any chance corner the great cross of the great cathedral of Wren may strike down the street like a thunderbolt.
"But you must always remember also," said Grant to me, in his heavy abstracted way, when I had urged this view, "that the very vileness of the life of these ordered plebeian places bears witness to the victory of the human soul.I agree with you.I agree that they have to live in something worse than barbarism.They have to live in a fourth-rate civilization.But yet I am practically certain that the majority of people here are good people.And being good is an adventure far more violent and daring than sailing round the world.
Besides--"
"Go on," I said.
No answer came.
"Go on," I said, looking up.
The big blue eyes of Basil Grant were standing out of his head and he was paying no attention to me.He was staring over the side of the tram.
"What is the matter?" I asked, peering over also.
"It is very odd," said Grant at last, grimly, "that I should have been caught out like this at the very moment of my optimism.I said all these people were good, and there is the wickedest man in England.""Where?" I asked, leaning over further, "where?""Oh, I was right enough," he went on, in that strange continuous and sleepy tone which always angered his hearers at acute moments, "I was right enough when I said all these people were good.They are heroes; they are saints.Now and then they may perhaps steal a spoon or two; they may beat a wife or two with the poker.But they are saints all the same; they are angels; they are robed in white;they are clad with wings and haloes--at any rate compared to that man.""Which man?" I cried again, and then my eye caught the figure at which Basil's bull's eyes were glaring.
He was a slim, smooth person, passing very quickly among the quickly passing crowd, but though there was nothing about him sufficient to attract a startled notice, there was quite enough to demand a curious consideration when once that notice was attracted.
He wore a black top-hat, but there was enough in it of those strange curves whereby the decadent artist of the eighties tried to turn the top-hat into something as rhythmic as an Etruscan vase.
His hair, which was largely grey, was curled with the instinct of one who appreciated the gradual beauty of grey and silver.The rest of his face was oval and, I thought, rather Oriental; he had two black tufts of moustache.
"What has he done?" I asked.
"I am not sure of the details," said Grant, "but his besetting sin is a desire to intrigue to the disadvantage of others.Probably he has adopted some imposture or other to effect his plan.""What plan?" I asked."If you know all about him, why don't you tell me why he is the wickedest man in England? What is his name?"Basil Grant stared at me for some moments.
"I think you've made a mistake in my meaning," he said."I don't know his name.I never saw him before in my life.""Never saw him before!" I cried, with a kind of anger; "then what in heaven's name do you mean by saying that he is the wickedest man in England?""I meant what I said," said Basil Grant calmly."The moment I saw that man, I saw all these people stricken with a sudden and splendid innocence.I saw that while all ordinary poor men in the streets were being themselves, he was not being himself.I saw that all the men in these slums, cadgers, pickpockets, hooligans, are all, in the deepest sense, trying to be good.And I saw that that man was trying to be evil.""But if you never saw him before--" I began.
"In God's name, look at his face," cried out Basil in a voice that startled the driver."Look at the eyebrows.They mean that infernal pride which made Satan so proud that he sneered even at heaven when he was one of the first angels in it.Look at his moustaches, they are so grown as to insult humanity.In the name of the sacred heavens look at his hair.In the name of God and the stars, look at his hat."I stirred uncomfortably.
"But, after all," I said, "this is very fanciful--perfectly absurd.
