“They did, at first,” he answered. “The time-servers and the hypocrites among them. I made it a condition that they should be teetotallers, and chapel goers, and everything else that I thought good for them. I thought that I could save their souls by bribing them with cheap rents and share of profits. And then the union came, and that of course finished it.” She must have knelt and stood mechanically, for the service was ended. The pulpit was occupied by an elderly uninteresting-looking man with a troublesome cough. But one sentence he had let fall had gripped her attention. For a moment she could not remember it, and then it came to her: “All Roads lead to Calvary.” It struck her as rather good. Perhaps he was going to be worth listening to. “To all of us, sooner or later,” he was saying, “comes a choosing of two ways: either the road leading to success, the gratification of desires, the honour and approval of our fellow-men—or the path to Calvary.”!

“Perhaps, I am not of the stuff that conquerors are made,” he went on. “Perhaps, if I were, I should be thinking differently. It comes to me sometimes that I may be one of those intended only to prepare the way—that for me there may be only the endless struggle. I may have to face unpopularity, abuse, failure. She won’t mind.” Mud! that seemed to be the one word with which to describe modern war. Mud everywhere! Mud ankle-deep upon the roads; mud into which you sank up to your knees the moment you stepped off it; tents and huts to which you waded through the mud, avoiding the slimy gangways on which you slipped and fell; mud-bespattered men, mud-bespattered horses, little donkeys, looking as if they had been sculptured out of mud, struggling up and down the light railways that every now and then would disappear and be lost beneath the mud; guns and wagons groaning through the mud; lorries and ambulances, that in the darkness had swerved from the straight course, overturned and lying abandoned in the mud, motor-cyclists ploughing swift furrows through the mud, rolling it back in liquid streams each side of them; staff cars rushing screaming through the mud, followed by a rushing fountain of mud; serried ranks of muddy men stamping through the mud with steady rhythm, moving through a rain of mud, rising upward from the ground; long lines of motor-buses filled with a mass of muddy humanity packed shoulder to shoulder, rumbling ever through the endless mud.

These physical activities into which women were throwing themselves! Where one used one’s body as well as one’s brain—hastened to appointments; gathered round noisy tables; met fellow human beings, argued with them, walked with them, laughing and talking; forced one’s way through crowds; cheered, shouted; stood up on platforms before a sea of faces; roused applause, filling and emptying one’s lungs; met interruptions with swift flash of wit or anger, faced opposition, danger—felt one’s blood surging through one’s veins, felt one’s nerves quivering with excitement; felt the delirious thrill of passion; felt the mad joy of the loosened animal. She was still interested in his work and keen to help him. It was going to be a stiff fight. He himself, in spite of Carleton’s opposition, had been returned with an increased majority; but the Party as a whole had suffered loss, especially in the counties. The struggle centred round the agricultural labourer. If he could be won over the Government would go ahead with Phillips’s scheme. Otherwise there was danger of its being shelved. The difficulty was the old problem of how to get at the men of the scattered villages, the lonely cottages. The only papers that they ever saw were those, chiefly of the Carleton group, that the farmers and the gentry took care should come within their reach; that were handed to them at the end of their day’s work as a kindly gift; given to the school children to take home with them; supplied in ample numbers to all the little inns and public-houses. In all these, Phillips was held up as their arch enemy, his proposal explained as a device to lower their wages, decrease their chances of employment, and rob them of the produce of their gardens and allotments. No arguments were used. A daily stream of abuse, misrepresentation and deliberate lies, set forth under flaming headlines, served their simple purpose. The one weekly paper that had got itself established among them, that their fathers had always taken, that dimly they had come to look upon as their one friend, Carleton had at last succeeded in purchasing. When that, too, pictured Phillips’s plan as a diabolical intent to take from them even the little that they had, and give it to the loafing socialist and the bloated foreigner, no room for doubt was left to them. She forced a laugh. “Oh, I only persuaded him to do what he had made up his mind to do,” she explained. “It was all settled.”