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Title: To-morrow and to-morrow: A novel
Author: McKenna, Stephen
Language: English
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BY STEPHEN McKENNA
_NOVELS_:
TO-MORROW AND TO-MORROW
VINDICATION
THE COMMANDMENT OF MOSES
SOLILOQUY
THE CONFESSIONS OF A WELL-MEANING WOMAN
THE SENSATIONALISTS:
I _Lady Lilith_
II _The Education of Eric Lane_
III _The Secret Victory_
SONIA MARRIED
MIDAS AND SON
NINETY-SIX HOURS’ LEAVE
SONIA
THE SIXTH SENSE
SHEILA INTERVENES
THE RELUCTANT LOVER
* * * * *
BY INTERVENTION OF PROVIDENCE
WHILE I REMEMBER
TEX: A CHAPTER IN THE LIFE OF ALEXANDER TEIXEIRA DE MATTOS
TO-MORROW AND
TO-MORROW . . .
_A NOVEL_
BY
STEPHEN McKENNA
BOSTON
LITTLE, BROWN, AND COMPANY
1924
_Copyright, 1924_,
BY STEPHEN MCKENNA.
_All rights reserved_
Published, October, 1924
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
TO
MARION
Three years ago, _The Secret Victory_ brought to an end the trilogy
which I called _The Sensationalists_. This book and the antecedent
volumes—_Lady Lilith_ and _The Education of Eric Lane_—described the
fortunes of certain men and women who constituted part of the larger
groups which I had approached in _Sonia, Midas and Son_ and _Sonia
Married_.
By the accident of birth, fortune or talent, “these our actors” were
made to fill a position—before, during and after the war—which
attracted to them more attention than was warranted by their historical
importance. My defence—if I must defend myself—is that the butterfly
in every age has claimed more notice than the bee. The social scene, to
change my metaphor, presented by so single-minded a writer as Mr.
Greville has to find room for the D’Orsays, the Egremonts, the Sidney
Smiths and the Madame de Lievens, who throng his stage in act after act,
as well as for the Peels, Wellingtons and Melbournes.
Is a defence still necessary for continuing the life of a character from
one novel to another? Mr. Disraeli, in his splendid progress through a
part of Mr. Greville’s period, refused to cut the thread of an imaginary
existence at the moment when his last page was bound into its cover; and
the novel-sequence which aims to describe a social and political scene
must, no less than succeeding volumes of memoirs, call back to the stage
the same leaders and the same camp-followers. If this present series
have any artistic or historical value, I should like it to be found in
the completed picture.
I attempted, in _Sonia_, to trace the adolescence of the generation that
grew to manhood in time to meet the shock of the war. That war ends in
the first line of the present volume; and, before the last page, the
government that was charged to bring peace back to the sparse survivors
has itself passed away. One phase in history has been concluded; and
this series, which aimed at describing a single English scene in the
life of a single generation, ends with the end of that phase.
I ask no one to share any regret which I may feel in taking leave of
characters that have been my constant companions for more than eight
years. If they are no more likable than the men and women we meet in
daily life, I have at least never allowed parental affection to cover up
their shortcomings. I present them to you as a small mark of a deep
devotion.
STEPHEN MCKENNA.
“All our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death.” . . .
SHAKESPEARE: _Macbeth_.
CONTENTS
PART ONE
CHAPTER
I TRUCE
II RETROSPECT
III THE DAWNING OF MORN
IV AFTER THE DELUGE
V THE RED ACCOUNT
PART TWO
I THE NAKEDNESS OF THE LAND
II THAT WHICH REMAINED
III AS YOU SOW
IV IN A GILDED CAGE
V “UN SACRIFICE INUTILE”
PART THREE
I TO-MORROW AND TO-MORROW
II THE TEST
III TWO IN THE FIELD
PART ONE
CHAPTER ONE
TRUCE
“‘Rise up, rise up, thou Dives, and take again thy gold,
And thy women and thy housen as they were to thee of old.
It may be grace hath found thee
In the furnace where We bound thee,
And that thou shalt bring the peace My Son foretold.’”
RUDYARD KIPLING: _The Peace of Dives_.
1
“_The eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month_ . . .”
Though the departmental order was marked “secret”, I did not hesitate to
give my wife a hint of its contents. All the world—if the armistice
were accepted—could read the news next morning. And the armistice would
be accepted. Silence hung over town and country throughout the misty,
long hours of Sunday: it was, I felt, as though all England were at
prayer. Faint restlessness muttered throughout the lagging, cold hours
of Sunday night: it was as though all England were keeping vigil.
“You _can’t_ doubt,” I told Barbara, as we parted at the door of the
Admiralty. “With any luck, the news is waiting for me.”
“I can’t _believe_,” she answered. “Four years and three months. Nearly
a fifth of my whole life. I’m used to the war . . . almost. I don’t see
why it should ever stop.”
2
It was my turn for late duty; but, when I reached my room, I found a
message:
“Captain Hornbeck’s compliments; and it will not be necessary
for Commander Oakleigh to stay unless he wishes.”
Peace was not yet come, then, or Philip Hornbeck would have told me; it
would come that night, or he would not have granted me leave of absence.
The Admiralty, meanwhile, could not have been more silent if the old
world had died in giving birth to the new.
“You got my chit?,” Hornbeck asked in an undertone, when I went to
report. “Unless you _want_ to hang about here . . .”
“My taste for bureaucracy,” I answered, with a glance of loathing at his
“IN”, “OUT” and “PENDING” trays, “has been cured.” How long did Barbara
say the war had lasted? Since 1914? Yes, four years and three months had
passed since I began to masquerade unconvincingly as an officer of the
Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve. With the actors, artists, barristers and
stockbrokers who combined to make up my section of the intelligence
department, I had talked a hundred times of the day when we should have
taken our last undeserved salute and laid aside the latest of our
comic-opera uniforms. Now it was come. “As I’m here, I may as well lend
a hand. I suppose they’re bound to sign?”
Hornbeck unlocked a row of japanned boxes and glanced perfunctorily at
his secret files before plunging them in the fire.
“It won’t come through in time for the morning papers, so I’m getting
rid of the evidence before I’m told not to,” he chuckled. “‘_The
eleventh hour . . . of the_ _eleventh day . . . of the eleventh month._’
Sounds as if a journalist had had something to do with that!” One file
slipped to the floor; and I read on the faded docket “_Goeben and
Breslau, 1914_”. It had been a very long war. “Lord! These papers are a
satire on the vanity of human wishes!,” he drawled. “You can give all
your people leave for the day. They won’t be in a fit state to work
. . . even if you had any work to give them. And I suppose you won’t
have. It . . . takes you some time to grasp that it’s all over,” he
added, checking half way to the fire and staring bemusedly at the papers
in his hands. Looking at him, I needed time to recall that he had been a
young man when war broke out. “What are you and Lady Barbara going to do
with yourselves?,” he asked after a pause.
“Get away to the sun,” I answered with the grim determination of a man
whose vitality was spent for lack of rest and good food.
“Wonder . . . what will happen . . . to _us_,” Hornbeck pondered,
punctuating his words with abrupt shrieks of rending paper. “No more
wars; . . . no more navies . . . or armies.”
“Well, you of all men are entitled to a holiday,” I said. Four years of
Whitehall had made him short-sighted and round-shouldered; his square,
wooden face was pallid; and his slow speech argued a tired brain.
“Everything will seem a bit flat now,” muttered one of the most powerful
men in England, who within the next few days or hours would be as
inconsequential as myself. Beyond a narrow circle described round the
Treasury Exchange, the name of Captain Hornbeck was unknown; the weight
and cunning of his hand, however, had been felt for more than four years
in Mexican revolutions, Greek _coups d’état_ and Russian
counter-revolutions. The papers which he was destroying ranged from
reports on South American credit-transfers to track-charts of North
Atlantic commerce-raiders. “This is what the N.O. has been training for,
ever since the old Britannia days,” he went on. “Now that we’ve finished
it . . .”
Wiping the sweat from his forehead, he threw open the window. From force
of habit, he switched off the lights before pulling up the blind; then,
as the last night of the war engulfed him in a grey eddy of fog, he
laughed at his own forgetfulness.
“There’s still a fair-sized mess to clean up,” I reminded him, as he
raked with irresolute fingers the memoranda that constituted the
Admiralty’s suggestions for the peace conference.
“Ah, I must leave that to you politicians,” he laughed. “And I don’t
envy you the job. A world without war . . . It’s a thing we’ve never
seen, George. And when you consider that we’re all of us demoralized and
most of us bankrupt . . . I suppose friend Woodrow knows what he wants,
but I don’t believe any one else does. . . . Doctor feller once told me
that, when a baby’s born, it comes into the world with its fists
clenched. I sometimes wonder if war isn’t a natural instinct.”
“Self-preservation is the first natural instinct,” I answered; “but it’s
not consistent with modern methods of fighting.”
“Oh, I know. This war will be a friendly scrap by comparison with the
next.”
“It’s stopping,” I said, “just when we were beginning to learn something
of mass-production, mass-enlistment, mass-mobilization of resources,
mass-destruction.”
Hornbeck strolled to a vast wall-map of the world and stared at it, with
his hands dug deep into his pockets.
“In the next war, we shan’t attempt to distinguish between combatants
and non-combatants,” he predicted. “The air-raids and the blockade have
caught the civilian.”
“And no country will be allowed to remain neutral,” I added, “any more
than Luxemburg and Greece in this war.”
“Until, at the end, when the human population of the earth has been
destroyed with typhoid-germs and poison-gas, you’ll be left with two
submersible flying-tanks chasing each other among the ice of the North
Pole.”
He stirred the fire to a blaze and began once more to feed it with the
papers from his private safe. I might have helped him; but this news of
approaching peace seemed to relax all my muscles. For the first time in
more than four years I could look beyond the work of the moment and see
myself as an individual. When I was less tired, I could go back to the
old life; and, for a man with a competence, life in England had been
more than tolerable until the fourth of August, 1914.
“Don’t let’s talk about the _next_ war,” I said. “Unless we can find a
substitute . . .”
“People talked like that after Waterloo,” Hornbeck murmured.
“I expect they talked like that after the siege of Troy; but they always
sowed their peace with the seeds of the next war.”
The night air was chilling the room; and Hornbeck interrupted his task
of destruction to shut the window.
“Well, what kind of peace do you want now?,” he asked, with a smile half
mocking, half wistful playing over his tired face. “This war followed
inevitably on the war of ’70, which followed inevitably on the
nationalist wars, which followed inevitably on Napoleon’s conquests.
Will you divide the world now according to nationalities? I’m afraid
you’ll have new wars in Poland, Alsace-Lorraine, Austria, Turkey; not to
mention Egypt and India. People talk about a United States of the World;
but, when you’ve been getting the last ounce out of national spirit for
all these years, you won’t persuade white men to take their orders from
an international committee of dagos.”
I turned from the wall-map to the official estimates of casualties in
all countries.
“When people remember what a bloody business war is . . .” I began.
“We had South Africa and Japan to warn _us_!” he interrupted. “The next
generation . . . George, I promise you that, unless you get your new
heaven and your new earth functioning at once, you’ll drift back to the
only kind of life a nation knows. Fear and arrogance; insane hatred and
colossal stupidity. Periodically the world will panic into war, which is
the only final solution known to history.” . . .
“The only one we’ve tried; and it’s a solution of nothing,” I answered.
“My God, if I didn’t believe this was really a war to end war . . .”
I paused as Hornbeck was called to the telephone. He listened for a
moment, nodded to me and took down his coat and cap. Even he could work
no longer; and, as I walked home alone, I tried to understand that the
“war to end war” had itself ended. In four years I had forgotten how
London looked before the lamps were shrouded and the hoardings placarded
with patriotic appeals. Their purpose was accomplished; a uniform would
soon be as rare as civilian clothes were now; the hospitals would empty;
the blue coats and red ties of the convalescents would disappear.
The city was very silent; but at eleven o’clock, I imagined, there would
be such a silence as would make men think that the earth was halting in
her course. Out there, over the water, some would adventure amicably
into the enemy’s lines; some would drift back to their base; most would
wait dumbly for orders; and one man would be the last to die in the
Great War.
At the top of Waterloo Place I found a policeman flashing his lantern on
the doors and shutters of the shops.
“I think you’d like to know that the Germans have accepted the
armistice,” I said.
“Thank you, sir,” he answered with a salute.
A taxi crawled westward across Piccadilly Circus; and I told the driver.
“They ’ave, ’ave they?,” he muttered in perplexity. “Oh, they
_’ave_. . . . Well . . .”
I hesitated long before reckoning the number of those for whom peace
came too late. In ’14 my generation was of an age to be called for the
hottest and the longest of the fighting. Sam Dainton had escaped with a
flesh wound, Jack Waring with a split head and a broken nerve, David
O’Rane with the loss of his sight; these, with the five or six who had
failed to pass the doctors or had been tied to a mission abroad, were
all that remained of the friends who had said good-bye to their schools
in the last years of the nineteenth century.
A lifetime had passed since we all talked of what we would do “on the
day peace is signed”; and yet, when we spoke of “last summer”, we always
meant “the summer before the war”. It was, at the same time, an eternity
and an episode.
“So,” I reflected at the door of my house in Seymour Street, “one school
of political thought in France looked upon the Revolution and the
Empire.”
From force of habit, I headed for the hot milk in my dressing-room and
rang to have my bath prepared. Then I recollected that I need never
again work by night and sleep by day.
“I’ll breakfast first,” I told Barbara’s maid. “And I shan’t go to bed
this morning. The armistice has been signed.” The girl tried to speak,
but could only turn away with a sob that sounded like “dad”. “Has her
ladyship been called?,” I asked.
Still unable to speak, the girl shook her head and nodded in the
direction of a breakfast-tray.
3
Barbara was asleep, with a light burning by her side and an open book
face-downwards on the bed. At last, I told myself, I could see something
of my wife. I should be able to read the new poets and novelists who
overflowed her cases. At last we could entertain our friends again. At
last, after eight months, we could have our honeymoon. Barbara looked
dangerously fragile. As I watched her, one hand was drawn slowly up the
sheet; and the fingers were almost transparent. Her head turned
restlessly from side to side; and I knew that she was dreaming. There
was a whispered sigh; and I felt that her dreams were unhappy.
“George! Oh, it’s you!,” she exclaimed with a throb of relief; and, as
she brushed the cloudy hair back from her face, I saw that her big,
deep-set eyes were black and anguished.
“Who else should it be?,” I asked, as I draped a shawl over her thin
shoulders and kissed her flushed cheeks. “They’ve signed, Babs. It’s all
over.”
“It’s . . . all . . . over?,” she repeated dreamily.
“Yes. I telephoned to your mother from the Admiralty. They’re safe:
Neave and Charlie.”
Silence fell between us until Barbara covered her face and murmured:
“Thank God!” Then she sat up and stared round the shadowy room:
“What . . . what are we going to do now?”
Within an hour I felt that most people would be asking themselves that
question:
“I don’t know. For this morning Phil Hornbeck suggested that I should
invite a few friends to my room in case there’s anything to see.
Afterwards . . .”
“Afterwards you must take me away!,” she cried. “You’re quite sure
there’s been no mistake?”
“Quite sure!,” I answered, as I sat down by the telephone and tried to
remember which of our friends we should both care to have with us at the
moment when peace dawned.
A change had overtaken London by the time that I set out to collect my
party. As on August bank-holiday four years earlier, when I drove about
Gloucestershire, with Loring and O’Rane, waiting for news, the city had
an air of suspended animation. Of the twenty strangers who interrogated
me on my way across the park, not one had more doubt that the terms
would be accepted than that the sun would rise on the morrow. And yet,
so nicely balanced were hope and fear, I should have been surprised if
any one had laid me long odds on peace. Like Barbara, they were grown
used to the war. As I spread the news from house to house, every one
said: ‘What time is it now?’; and it seemed as if the eleventh hour of
the eleventh day would never come. There was a muddle-headed point of
honour, too, that no one should betray even impatience.
“Oh, yes, I’ll look in, if I have nothing better to do. You might have
called here instead of bringing me to this infernal contraption,”
growled my uncle Bertrand, who always visited his hatred of the
telephone on the heads of those who addressed him by it. “That all you
have to say? Filson! Filson!,” I heard him calling to his man. “They’ve
signed!”
Lady Dainton, whom I invited for the sake of old associations, murmured:
“Thank you so much. I know Roger will be interested,” as though I had
announced a minor change in the cabinet. Raymond Stornaway said: “I
trust this doesn’t mean a general holiday: I’ve the very devil of a
day’s work ahead of me.” My sister Beryl hoped that I had not gone to
the expense of buying that new uniform.
I had already warned old Lady Loring by telephone; and, when I reached
Curzon Street, I found my cousin Violet dressed to go out and playing in
the hall with her boy.
“I’m waiting to be told what to do next,” was her greeting.
Though she had worn her deep mourning for more than three years, her
little white face looked pathetically young and helpless. I wondered
what kind of life she could expect from the armistice.
“We’re all in the same boat,” I answered. “I called to suggest that you
should bring Sandy to the Admiralty. My father could just remember the
Famine; my mother remembers the crowds in the streets when Sebastopol
fell. Sandy may carry away something to fix this, eighty years hence, as
the day when the Great War ended.”
“I wonder if people will talk about it then as ‘the Great War’?,” Violet
mused.
As she buttoned her boy into his coat, I felt that she was thinking only
of the day when her husband of a month, with all that health, fortune,
rank and riches could give him, drifted whimsically to France, in the
meshes of a machine which he ridiculed, there to die in defence of one
country, which he faintly despised, against another, which he mildly
disliked. Violet had been left with a son to bring up and a vast estate
to administer. She would never, I knew, marry again; and, now that the
war was over, she saw herself fading into the twilight of life to dwell
with ghosts and memories and dreams.
“The Great Waste,” I suggested, as we set out. “If any one could have
foreseen, four years ago, how this would end, I wonder if there’d have
been a war? I tremble to think what the world will look like when we
have time to take stock.”
In our passage from Loring House to the Admiralty, I found that the news
had spread before us; and young Lucien de Grammont, speeding towards the
French Embassy, stopped long enough to vent on us his disappointment
that the allies had not insisted on unconditional surrender.
“Those accursed Americans!,” he cried. “But for them, peace would have
been signed in Berlin! Now in fifty years’ time . . . Well, let us hope
we shan’t be alive to see it.”
As he flung off in furious disappointment, I ventured the opinion that,
but for the Americans, a German peace might have been dictated in Paris.
Then we pressed through the crowd in the Processional Avenue and took up
our positions to see at least the greatest war in history ending. My
secretary had cleared the table of its trays; and we sat in a row,
looking through the mist of Horse Guards’ Parade and trying to guess
what was going to happen. The Crawleighs had arrived before us and were
talking to Raymond Stornaway; Sir Roger and Lady Dainton followed on our
heels; and our last inch of space was filled when my uncle Bertrand,
puffing and growling at the stairs, lumbered in with heavy tread and
demanded in the loud voice of incipient deafness why it was necessary to
collect this nest of magpies.
“Disreputable old wrecks we are!,” he muttered with a glance of sour and
comprehensive disfavour from Lord Crawleigh to Sir Roger Dainton and
from Sir Roger Dainton to Raymond Stornaway. The grey November light,
shining on a row of bent backs and haggard faces, made us older than our
years. “We’ve _had_ our chance,” he continued; “I believe the only way
of stopping war is to have conscription for all men and women over fifty
and to call up the oldest classes first.”
“So that you could hear men of thirty boasting that they’d ‘given’ two
grandfathers to the army?,” asked Raymond.
“They’d still be of an age to be kicked, if they tried that kind of
cant. . . . No, but I’m sufficiently sick of everything to feel it’s
indecent for me to be alive when mere children are wearing black for men
who might have been my grandsons. Eighty-four. . . . Most of my friends
will tell you I’ve lived twenty years too long; and, on my soul, I
believe they’re right.”
“You said something of the kind on the day war broke out,” I reminded
him. “Now that it’s all over . . .?”
Bertrand gathered himself for attack, towering over me with his hands on
his hips till the silence of the room daunted him. Then he shrugged his
shoulders and turned, with a savage tug at his black walrus-moustache,
to shake hands with his neighbours:
“I don’t detect any great reason for optimism. Um, Crawleigh. You
English have seen a million or two of your best men killed or
wounded. . . . Whose child is that? . . . You’ve seen new debt piled up
to the tune of thousands of millions. . . . How do, Lady Crawleigh?
. . . I’m an Irishman. . . . Violet, my dear! . . . And a liberal. I’ve
seen liberalism stamped out of existence and the Irish party
broken. . . . Lady Dainton, your humble servant. Find me a seat, George,
there’s a good boy.”
Most of us knew my uncle well enough to imagine his violent anger if any
one else had dared to be so despondent. My father-in-law, however, felt
obliged to pick up the gage.
“You mean that we should be no worse off,” he suggested, “if the Germans
had drawn up the terms and we had accepted them?”
“Not quite,” Bertrand conceded, “not quite. . . . I beg your pardon,
Barbara my dear, I didn’t see you! . . . If you know your Bible, my dear
Crawleigh, you’ll recollect that a Jew called Samson tried to get level
with the Philistines by pulling a heavy roof down on their heads. He got
level; but he paid for it with his life. Some one pulled away the
pillars that had been holding up our civilization for Heaven knows how
many centuries. Credit, commerce, law and order, faith and morals,
production, exchange, distribution: they’ve all toppled; and they’ve
toppled on the heads of _all_ of us. You’ll see as soon as peace really
sets in. No! No, Crawleigh! This war should have ended two years ago,
while there were still a few tiles left on the roof!”
I recalled my uncle’s warning, on the day war broke out, that freedom of
speech was dead; on the day it ended, he asserted his right to it with a
truculence that had been shouted down when he pleaded for “a patched-up
peace” at the end of 1916, before the United States came in, and again
in 1917 when the Lansdowne letter was published.
“Lucien de Grammont wants to go on to Berlin,” I said.
Bertrand clasped his hands over the crook of his stick and nodded
scornfully at a headstrong world that refused to take his advice. His
expression and attitude reminded me of Dr. Johnson, in the celebrated
picture, awaiting an audience with Lord Chesterfield.
“He forgets, perhaps, that we at least went into this war to uphold the
neutrality of Belgium. We stayed in to make the Germans pay for the
damage they’d done there. Later . . . Later, we were told that the
French must have Alsace-Lorraine, Russia must have Constantinople, Italy
must have an infernal place called the Trentino. And any stray islands
or continents where a German or the ally of a German has ever set foot
must be taken away and given to somebody else. It may be all very right
and proper; but that wasn’t our aim in 1914.”
More was coming; but his audience began to shew signs of hostility; and
Violet intervened by setting her boy on the old man’s knee and
whispering:
“You mustn’t quarrel on a day like this. Help me to shew him the
different nationalities, Uncle Bertrand. Sandy! Sandy! You see the
little man down there by the tree. D’you know what he is? He’s a Jap.
Japanese.”
“Jap-an-ese,” Sandy repeated slowly.
“Those are Americans,” she continued, with her finger pointing to three
grave, lean-faced young officers. “Amer-i-cans.”
“Call ’em ‘Yanks’, most noble marquess,” grunted Bertrand, who—with
much else that was Johnsonian—exhibited the doctor’s unreasoning
antipathy to the new world.
“Merry-cans,” Sandy repeated.
“There’s a Frenchman! There’s a Canadian! See, Sandy? Uncle Bertrand,
find me an Italian,” Violet pleaded. “I don’t know how much this mite
will remember, but it is rather marvellous to see them all together.
That’s a South African, isn’t it? Oh, and a poor soul with only one leg.
There’ll still be plenty of them for him to see when he’s grown up. I
_wish_ I could find an Italian!”
The open space under my window had filled so rapidly that it was hardly
possible for any one to move. Typists from the government offices, in
short skirts and transparent blouses, were standing on tiptoe,
bare-headed in the biting cold, staring bright-eyed over the shoulders
of those in front. There were soldiers, in uniform and in their hospital
undress; sailors; nurses; government messengers with battered red boxes;
a park-keeper; two clergymen; some errand-boys; and a thousand
nondescripts. At one moment they were very silent; at another, they
broke into feverish conversation with unknown neighbours, occasionally
shaking hands and cheering a foreign uniform.
“Five minutes to eleven,” muttered a voice which I could not identify.
4
The emotions of the crowd were reacting on us. Behind me, I could hear
murmurs like the soughing of wind, rising and falling with the murmurs
of the crowd. When hands were excitedly shaken below us, I felt
Barbara’s fingers gripping my wrist and saw Violet bending to kiss the
silken curls of her child’s head.
Out there, over the water, the ‘cease-fire’ must be travelling down the
unending shambles of the two opposing lines. The shadow that had
darkened the world for more than four years had at last been driven
away; and no one was going to be mutilated or killed any more. All—more
than all—that we set out to do in 1914 had been accomplished; and the
bound heads and empty sleeves of the survivors, the black dresses of
those with no survivors to welcome, testified to the cost. Of the
uniforms below us, some had first been donned in Tasmania, some in
Natal, others on the Alaskan border. Belgium and Servia, Russia and
France, Portugal and Japan, Italy and Rumania: all had joined hands with
our English-speaking peoples to hem in the wild beast. Throughout the
night, the news had crackled from Poldhu to the Azores, from Arlington
to Seattle, that the wild beast was subdued. It had flashed to lonely
patrols through the frost of the North Sea and the fire of the Persian
Gulf; two hundred million men were now standing silent, with their eyes
on their watches; and I fancied again the unearthly hush that must drop
on the world when the last war ended.
In spite of Bertrand, in spite of Lucien de Grammont, in spite of
Hornbeck I believed that it was the last war.
_Burp! . . . Burp! . . . Burp!_ The maroons were like the rending of
colossal drums. _Burp! . . . Burp! . . . Burp!_ Sandy turned wide eyes
of alarm upon us and buried his face in Violet’s bosom. _Burp! Burp!
Burp!_
“Eleven o’clock,” muttered Roger Dainton in a quavering voice.
My secretary collapsed into a chair, murmuring “Air-raid”; and, though I
knew that air-raids had now passed into history, I imagined for a moment
that the last ‘scrap of paper’ had followed the first and that London
and Paris were to be laid in ruins.
_Burp! . . . Burp! Burp!_
There was no concerted cheering from the crowd below; but I had a
curious feeling that the next man but one, down all that line from the
Admiralty Arch to Buckingham Palace, had opened his lips and was waiting
for a neighbour to cheer with him. Heads were turning in every
direction; eyes were gazing upward, as though they expected to see
“Peace” written across the sky in letters of flame; bodies, for a
moment, were very still.
Then that vast sea of men and women gathered itself up and poured with a
hoarse roar towards the Palace. There was a check, and I fancy the
first-comers must have been pressed against the railings; I threw open
my window in time to hear a mutter rolling from lip to lip: “The king!
They’re calling for the king.” Later, though we could see and hear
nothing of it, the word was passed: “The king! He’s speaking”; later
still: “He’s finished! Give him a cheer! Hip, hip! _Come on._”
The human sea must have eddied at the Palace. Five minutes later, as the
crowd below my window surged forward, a returning stream poured down the
Processional Avenue into Trafalgar Square; and a new current set in
towards the Abbey. There was little cheering now, though every one made
individual noises of greeting and laughter. A War Office car hooted its
deliberate way across Horse Guards’ Parade and was promptly seized by
three wounded soldiers and four girl-clerks, who ranged themselves along
the running-boards and perched on the bonnet. As though all had been
awaiting a signal, the crowd broke into little groups and swept like
swarming bees upon every vehicle in sight. So long as all could move, it
did not matter whither they hurried: something, all seemed to feel, must
be happening somewhere else.
“The war’s over!,” some one cried; and mechanically, like hysterical
children, a dozen others repeated uncomprehendingly: “The war’s over!
The war’s over! The war’s over! The war’s over.” . . .
“And the funny thing,” said Raymond Stornaway, blowing his nose
vigorously, “is that they don’t know what to do next.”
“Do _we_?,” asked Bertrand; and, for once, he seemed less anxious to
instruct than to be instructed.
5
No one wanted to speak first. No one wanted to move. No one cared to
look any one else in the eyes. Lady Crawleigh, I think, was the first to
recover; and she was slipping out of the room, with a twisted smile,
when Raymond put his back to the door and took the position in hand with
a general invitation to lunch with him at the Carlton.
“No speeches or ‘celebrations’,” he promised. “If you’ll fight your way
there as best you can, I’ll telephone for a table.”
With the exception of Violet, we were glad to have our minds made up for
us. Bertrand was right: we none of us knew what to do next. The
movements of the crowd had become rhythmical by the time that we set
out. Every cab and bus was loaded with excited clusters of men and women
who seemed ready to do anything but remain still. Boys with paper caps
and empty tins marched aimlessly at the head of irregular battalions;
overwrought girls and grave grey-beards tramped with arms linked,
sublimely unselfconscious. The streets were carpeted with torn paper. An
indistinguishable hum of voices floated over and about us, still
seeming—as before—to come from our next neighbour but one; and on
every face was written vague relief, vague good-will, dawning
disappointment and vast perplexity.
“‘They order this matter, I said, better in France’,” quoted Raymond, as
we drifted slowly through the crowd to kill time before luncheon. “The
English don’t know how to express their emotions.”
“They haven’t had much time yet to think what their emotions are,” I
reminded him. “What’s the next stage? Babs and I are going off to the
Riviera as soon as we can. But after that?”
“_My_ work will go on,” Raymond murmured with a rueful glance down Pall
Mall. We were within sight of the unwieldy mansion from whose roof young
Deryk Lancing fell or flung himself on the eve of the war. The estate, I
believe, was valued at about twenty-five million pounds sterling; and a
freakish will had laid upon Raymond’s shoulders the task of distributing
a fortune which Deryk himself could not control nor keep from
increasing. “You can come and help me, if you like, George.”
“Thanks, I’ve done the last day’s work of my life,” I answered; “but
I’ve lived so long at other people’s orders that I’ve forgotten how to
take a holiday.”
The rest of our party was awaiting us by the door of the restaurant; and
throughout the meal we talked, for talking’s sake, of the fourteen
points and the probable terms of peace. Though we had all accepted
Raymond’s invitation with relief, we were more sincerely relieved when
luncheon came to an end. We wanted to think; and, when I had written a
formal request for immediate demobilization, I took Barbara home. The
streets were emptying as the silent crowds began to feel that they could
not for ever tramp to and fro or steal aimless rides. Hunger was driving
them in search of food; and the sunless November afternoon, already
touched with frost, was mottling their white faces and chapped hands.
“I feel . . . dazed,” Barbara signed, as we got into a taxi with her
parents.
“We all do,” answered Lady Crawleigh.
As we drove away, I watched our party scattering. From their silence I
judged the Crawleighs were trying to realize that their two elder boys
were safe at last; the Daintons, walking close together with bent heads,
were no doubt thinking of the son who would not return. As my uncle’s
big, lonely figure disappeared from sight, I fancied that he might
indeed be feeling he had lived too long. William the Fourth had
completed half his reign when Bertrand was born: a man who had survived
the nineteenth century, the Victorian era and the greatest war in
history might well shrink aghast from the unknown future.
6
At Barbara’s thoughts I could make no guess. Before the war, she had
been more mercilessly pursued by publicity than any one of her
generation. When our engagement was announced, I slunk like a criminal
past the contents-bills that proclaimed a “_Famous Society Beauty
Engaged_”; and, on the day of the wedding, when the traffic was held up
for three hours and the auxiliary police were numbered by hundreds, the
London crowd was certainly far more concerned to catch a glimpse of Lady
Barbara Neave than to hear that the Channel ports were safe. Since our
marriage, she had hardly appeared in public; but, as she crouched over
the fire without speaking, I wondered what picture she was composing for
her life in the unknown, new peace.
When her maid came to dress her, I went to my own room. Night had fallen
silently; and, when I looked towards the corner of Park Lane, the
streets were more empty than on the night of an air-raid. Once or twice
I heard the echo of subdued revelry; but, in ten minutes, I counted only
four men and two women walking rapidly westward, closely buttoned
against the biting air. Any vision of what this day would be had nothing
in common with the patchwork I had seen. Dawdling luxuriously—for the
first time in four years—over my dressing, I could recall scraps of
altercation with Bertrand, flashes of speculation with Hornbeck,
confidences with Crawleigh. Jerkiness, incompleteness, artificial
reserve, an overwhelming perplexity and a relief too great to be
expressed were what I carried away from the armistice; and I should
think that most people in England experienced the same confused emotions
and lay down that night with the same confused recollections.
There was none of the vulgar debauchery that had disgraced the capital
of a great empire on Mafeking night: in nineteen years our pride was
more chastened and our thankfulness more heartfelt, even if we did not
know how to give it words.
“I thought you promised to arrange a survivors’ dinner,” said Barbara,
as we went up to bed.
“Only about six of us survived,” I answered. “And we’re all scattered.
We’re tired, too. The war went on too long.” Though I was almost too
exhausted to think, I remembered a far-away debate at Melton on the
first anniversary of the war, when the greatest headmaster and the
wisest man that I have met warned me that a long war would be followed
by an even longer moral reaction: a bruised world, said old Burgess,
would go back to the ways it knew and to the fleshpots it loved. “We
shall be useless for years,” I said.
“I wonder if it was worth it,” Barbara mused.
“That depends on what you expected or wanted. We’ve secured our terms.
And, if it’s not too rhetorical, I believe that every man who
voluntarily offered his life, at a time when we thought we were
degenerating, has to a great extent saved his soul. This country has
been spared invasion.”
Barbara parted the curtains in her room and looked down on the silent
street.
“The first night of peace since Jim’s last party at Loring Castle,” she
murmured. “We . . . Well, I suppose we go on from that?”
“If we want to.”
“Well, don’t you? For the last four years we haven’t been able to call
our souls our own.”
“I wonder whether we ever shall again,” I said, as I filled my final
pipe. That last night of peace lingered more vividly in my memory than
any since. War was certain. We had read Grey’s speech; and I walked with
O’Rane up and down the valley-terrace, trying to decide what we were
fighting to preserve. “We want something more than the _status quo_,” I
told Barbara. “That night . . . There was no question, then, of a
general levy: the war must be over in a few months, and only the regular
army would fight. Well, we’d seen Jack Summertown and a car-load of
officers driving off the night before: they were a small minority who
were quite clearly going to risk their skins for the rest of us. Were we
worth it? I told Raney that I’d like to shew something that was better
worth fighting for.”
“And haven’t we? When you think how every one has worked and fought
. . .”
“But now that it’s all over?,” I persisted. “Raney said that people
couldn’t come back from the war to take up the old futility; you
couldn’t set up social barriers between men who had undertaken the same
charge. It was unthinkable to save a country from invasion in order to
perpetuate things like sweated labour. I wonder.” . . .
“What a long time ago it all seems!”
There was no cynicism in Barbara’s voice; but, if anybody spoke nowadays
of a new world, his words were dismissed as Fleet Street rhetoric or
Downing Street claptrap; and, though not one man of all the thousands
who would be returning in the next few days was likely to say that he
had risked his life to perpetuate sweated labour, I could not imagine
that many would exert themselves to abolish it.
Exertion! I was too tired to undress! The world might be bankrupt and
yet survive; the world might be decimated and yet make good its wastage;
first and foremost, the world was weary to the marrow of its bones.
CHAPTER TWO
RETROSPECT
“Now tell us what ’t was all about,”
Young Peterkin, he cries;
And little Wilhelmine looks up
With wonder-waiting eyes;
“Now tell us all about the war,
And what they fought each other for.”
“It was the English,” Kaspar cried,
“Who put the French to rout;
But what they fought each other for,
I could not well make out;
But every body said,” quoth he,
“That ’t was a famous victory. . . .
. . . . . . .
“With fire and sword the country round
Was wasted far and wide,
And many a childing mother then,
And new-born baby died;
But things like that, you know, must be
At every famous victory. . . .
. . . . . . .
“And every body praised the Duke
Who this great fight did win.”
“But what good came of it at last?”
Quoth little Peterkin.
“Why that I cannot tell,” said he,
“But ’t was a famous victory.”
ROBERT SOUTHEY: _The Battle of Blenheim_.
1
When we set out for Cannes three days after my demobilization, I
intended to remain out of England for at least a twelvemonth. Since the
night when Hornbeck and I waited for news of the armistice I had thought
many times of his blank and puzzled confession: ‘_This is what the N.O.
has been training for, ever since the old Britannia days._’ If I had not
also been preparing for the peace and for the war which preceded it, I
had at least toiled for the whole of my adult life to preserve the peace
which preceded the war. Now I could have adapted Hornbeck’s reasoning of
‘_no more wars, no more armies and navies_’ to my own case; and, when my
friends asked me what I was going to do now, I might have said: ‘No more
wars, no more politics or journalism on the old lines.’
And this, I take it, was the attitude of all who had even a smattering
of modern history. From the moment when I warned Barbara that we should
perhaps never again be able to call our souls our own, I realized that
the armistice had ended nothing but the long business of killing. The
victors would now contend for the fruits of their victory, as Russians,
Prussians and British had contended in the Congress of Vienna; the
vanquished would struggle to preserve in defeat all that compassion,
adroitness and obstinacy could secure them, as Talleyrand had struggled
for France after Waterloo. The alliance, if it was like any other of
modern times, would be strained and perhaps broken in the first weeks of
peace, as after our wars with Louis XIV and Napoleon. We should hear men
speaking, as de Grammont and Hornbeck already spoke, of “the next war”.
Any one who was concerned to avert that must be prepared for a continued
effort in which he might truly be unable to call his soul his own.
2
Such energy or ability as I possess were ready to be thrown into the
common stock. I had told Philip Hornbeck that the war would have been
fought to no purpose if we failed to discover a means of preventing
future wars. My difficulty was to know where my own very moderate
ability and energy were to be applied. The leading articles and public
speeches of these days, taking their time from President Wilson, were
familiarizing the idea of a league of nations. Neither speech nor
article, however, made clear how the league could be helped to birth by
the good-will of insignificant, isolated individuals. I debated with
Bertrand whether I should stand again for parliament; but my radicalism
from 1906 to 1910 was too strong for the taste of Frank Jellaby and the
other liberal whips; it would be repugnant now to every section of an
assembly that had sunk party divisions and was aiming at an agreed
peace. Very much as Bishop Blougram counselled Gigadibs to “overhaul
theology”, my uncle suggested sardonically that I should examine the
creeds which I had been professing for the last quarter of a century and
see how much of them the war had left. He did not, however, urge my
returning to the House; and, if the outbreak of war had justified him in
discontinuing our propaganda in _Peace_, the end of the war was hardly
the occasion for resurrecting it.
“I’m more completely out of a job than any of you,” I told Hornbeck when
my old colleagues at the Admiralty entertained me to a farewell dinner
on my last night in England. “An obsolete political editor . . .”
“Lucky man!,” he sighed enviously. “I’ve been warned for duty when the
peace conference opens. And, after that, I’m to convert the intelligence
department here to peace uses. Beating swords into plough-shares; and
what not.”
“If I thought I could be of any use to you . . .,” I began, with
temperate enthusiasm; but Hornbeck shook his head and nodded meaningly
towards the men at the far end of the table.
“I’ve already more than I know what to do with,” he murmured ruefully.
“_You_ don’t _need_ a job, but most of these fellows do; and it’ll be
harder for them to find one than for you. The war was the opportunity of
a lifetime for most of them; but when it’s a question of conventional,
peace-time billets . . .”
Hornbeck shrugged his shoulders and looked with mingled pride and
amusement at the flock which he had collected. There were men and women,
married and single, old and young; drawn from a dozen different
professions, they were alike in nothing but their admitted ignorance of
civil-service ways. And, in the hands of Hornbeck, this ignorance had
been converted into an asset. As the department is dead, I can praise
it—without offence—for loyalty, hard work and efficiency such as I
have never seen excelled; without offence, too, I hope, I can say that
we were the strangest collection of government officials that one man
ever assembled below one roof. The war, if it did nothing else, gave
scope to our versatility. At this dinner I recollect that Bellamy, the
actor, sat next to Clayton, the paper-manufacturer. On his other side
was Whitburn, the chancery silk; and, beyond him, old Norton, the
banker. Next to him sat my private slave and fact-finder, Spence-Atkins,
who had reached manhood as a traveller in Manchester goods and, on being
discharged for neglect of business, had drifted about the world,
collecting figures and languages. Next to him, again, was Jefferson
Wright, who began the war as a mathematical coach, lost a hand at Neuve
Chapelle, formed the statistical branch of the Purchase-and-Supply
Department, seconded himself to the Admiralty and ended mysteriously as
a brigadier on the pay-roll of the Ministry of Labour.
“It takes all kinds to make an intelligence department,” I said.
“I wish I could find something for them to do now,” answered Hornbeck;
and I remember his words as the first hint of the human dislocation that
would come as the country declared itself in a state of peace.
In the meantime, our conversation at this dinner strengthened my feeling
that I could do no good by remaining in England at present; and I had
excellent private reasons for wishing to go abroad and to keep my wife
abroad. Until conditions were normal, we did not even know where to
live. Most of my income was derived from Ireland: sentiment and duty
required that I should spend part of my time there as soon as the
country was habitable; and, now that my sister was married and my mother
had made her home in the south of France, Barbara might well grasp at
the chance of escaping from England.
“Quite deliberately, I feel as if I never wanted to go back,” she
announced next day, as we watched the white cliffs of Dover fading from
view.
“But London, without you, would simply not be London!,” said Lucien de
Grammont, who was taking us to stay with him at his father’s house by
the Etoile.
“It will perhaps be better for London, certainly better for me, if we
both make a fresh start,” she answered. “I’m rather tired of it all.”
“Of London in war? Naturally!,” Lucien persisted. “And for the first
months after the war, when we look for the familiar faces and have to
tell ourselves that they will not come back . . . Later on . . .”
“Later on, we must see how we feel,” I said; and the conversation swung
on to a less dangerous tack.
Though we never discussed her adventures in the days before our
marriage, I felt that Barbara was thinking less of the familiar faces,
which she would not see again, than of those which would inevitably
reappear in London when each man returned to his own place. Among our
distressingly free-spoken friends it was commonly reported that she was
half engaged at the beginning of the war to young Jack Waring; and,
though she never pretended to be in love with him, the
engagement—according to the Crawleighs—kept her from marrying Eric
Lane, with whom she was in love beyond all shadow of doubt. Jack was in
England looking for work. Eric had been lecturing and travelling in
America and Japan; he would be coming to England as soon as he had a new
play to produce. I did not want Barbara to be reminded, I did not want
to be reminded myself, that she only married me when Eric vanished from
her world.
“We want to begin our married life in some place with no associations,”
she went on, half to herself. Then, as though to protest that she was
not thinking of Eric, she looked up with a smile and took my arm.
“George and I have had no honeymoon yet; and my beloved parents didn’t
make things very comfortable for us when I married without a
dispensation. Perhaps they’ll be more reconciled if we give them a
holiday. . . . How soon will peace be signed?”
“That depends how soon the conference opens,” Lucien answered with a
shrug. “You are to have your general election first; and we . . . you
will not find we are in any hurry. There are nearly five lost years to
make up. France too is tired.”
The lost years were being recovered when we reached Paris in the last
days of November. We had seen the war ending in London; here we watched
it being buried. Every one who could get a passport and a ticket seemed,
like us, to be heading for the Riviera and spending a week in Paris on
the way. Every one, too, seemed to share our vagueness and indifference
to what lay ahead of this holiday. For the first time in four years, our
time was our own; for the first time in four years Paris could dine and
dance without fear of being bombed or shelled. Barbara bought frocks;
Lucien arranged parties; and I added the hall of the Ritz to the brief
list—headed by Port Said and Charing Cross—of the places where a man,
without waiting unduly long, can be sure of meeting every one who has
ever crossed his path before.
I doubt if in any other single week I have eaten so many meals or spent
so much money. From time to time Lucien grumbled half-heartedly at all
this waste of time: he had been recalled from the embassy in London to
assist in drafting the agenda for the conference, and I felt he owed a
grumble to his conscience. For myself, I blessed every hour of delay
that enabled us to shed the memories of the last five years and to
forget the acerbities of the last five months. Lucien had long been an
old enough friend to drop his diplomatic reserve in talking to me; and
there were times, before and after the expeditions to Gallipoli and
Salonica, before and after the United States entered the war, before and
after the Italian reverse and the Russian collapse, when the alliance
would have been severed if we had been responsible for it. Now, as I
told him, this brief spell of dissipation had saved us from becoming
stale. With Victor Boscarelli, from the Italian embassy, and Clifford
van Oss, from the American Red Cross, we formed a private international
alliance, each entertaining the others by turn and all swearing
friendships that death itself would be powerless to sunder. A critic
might have been puzzled to say whether Clifford’s Italian was worse than
my French; but our radiant good-will transcended the halting
interpretation of words, and I felt a warmer liking for my neighbours
than I had ever, in my pitiable insularity, been able to achieve before
with men of another race.
“At last,” I pointed out to Lucien, “we can talk amicably without
discussing whether one country did all the work and another made all the
money. There’s a real understanding. France, England, America: all are
at the very top of their prestige. If we can pull together, we can make
what we like of the peace.”
“I still think we ought to have gone on to Berlin,” he persisted.
“However, if you back us up and if we can get what we want without it, I
shan’t complain.”
“Remember you’re all coming to stay with us at Cannes,” I said.
And, on that word, we set out for a house where the rumour of war and
world-settlement seemed never to have penetrated.
Looking back on the three months which we spent with my mother, I am in
one way reminded of the two years which Jack Waring passed as a prisoner
in Germany. So complete was our isolation that, when we emerged from it,
we found a world of peace hardly less different from the one we had left
than Jack’s war-world of tanks and gothas and tear-shells was different
from the one which was blotted out in the early days of 1915. In the
first weeks we saw no visitors; we read no papers; and, when we were
rested enough to think and talk, we turned to the days when the world
had last been at peace and speculated why the war had come and how other
wars were to be prevented.
The last of my reasons for hurrying abroad was that I could take up no
work in England until I had discharged the task which Violet Loring
imposed on me within a few hours of her husband’s death. As the world in
which we had been brought up was swallowed by the war, she asked me to
set down my memories of it for the later instruction of her boy. I had
carried my account to 1915; but, after that, the mass of material was
too great for me to attack in odd hours after my work at the Admiralty.
A steamer-trunk, filled with memoirs and monographs, kept me company to
Cannes; and, in the few weeks that remained before my cousin came to
demand her bond, I philosophized about the deluge and described the
world before it and speculated about the world that would appear when
the waters had subsided.
Small wonder if at this time, with my mother placidly dipping into
Victorian biographies and with Barbara dreaming over her share in the
history I was writing, we knew little and cared less about what was
happening in Paris and London, Washington and Rome! While Lucien de
Grammont drew the lines of a recreated Europe, I was living again
through the years when Sandy Loring’s father and I were fellow-fags and
fellow-monitors at Melton, when we were freshmen at Oxford, when we
ventured together into Edwardian London. The dead so came to life, as I
wrote about them, that sometimes I would lay down my pen and forget the
war for the days before David O’Rane was blinded and Tom Dainton killed,
the days when every one was quoting Barbara’s latest epigram and
discussing Val Arden’s last novel, the days when Sonia Dainton broke a
heart a week and an engagement a season. Musing of days and nights
softened by time, I felt that never had there been such years in the
life of any country, never had there been women and men like those of
our generation.
“In two or three years I expect everything will be very much as it was
before the war,” predicted Barbara.
“The people will be different,” I answered; “and they’ll make everything
else different. Sandy’s world will never be like Jim’s.”
And then I fell to wondering what Sandy’s father would have made of the
new dispensation which was taking shape before our eyes. He and I, who
agreed on little else, agreed that we were saying good-bye, that last
night at Loring Castle, to a phase in history. The old ruling families
had lost their power since the first marquess commanded his fifteen
seats in the unreformed House of Commons and “Trimmer” Crawleigh dodged
in and out of George the Fourth’s ministries, leaving a broken
government in his train; under a new distribution of wealth they might
lose their prestige. The _arrivistes_ of the nineties, who had floated
on waves of beer and diamonds into the arid heights of a depressed
territorial aristocracy, would find their places taken, in the
nineteen-twenties, by social adventurers of ambition equal to Lady
Dainton’s and of wealth greater than Sir Adolph Erckmann’s. A new class
of politician, officer, publicist and financier must inevitably be
brought to birth by the new demands of public life: the sons of the new
men would quickly preponderate in the old schools and universities,
their daughters would soon come to dominate a new society. That which I
had denounced, in my hotter radical days, as “privilege” would count for
less in Sandy Loring’s life.
It was not within my terms of reference to say if the one order was in
any way better or worse than the other: it was different. My haphazard
recollections, covering a period of about fifteen years, were chosen
solely for the light which they threw on the generation that was of
military age when war broke out.
“_As_,” I wrote in conclusion, “_the French Revolution challenged and
overthrew the territorial aristocracies and feudal kingships of the
middle ages, so the Great War challenged the systems which the French
Revolution had evolved in their place._”
There—for the moment—I stopped, for no one could say what systems the
Great War would evolve in place of those which it overturned. Later, in
brooding over these reminiscences of a vanished generation, I began to
read a moral into them; and, on the morning of Violet’s arrival, when
Barbara bent over my chair to ask if I had finished my work, I had to
answer that, so far as I could see, it was only beginning.
“If I’m right,” I explained, “the old governing classes are being
superseded, under our eyes . . .”
“The new lot will pick up the old ideas,” she interrupted.
“That’s just what I’m afraid of,” I said.
3
My discovery—the one incontrovertible moral that I could read into the
war—had been made by others before me; and I doubt not that some at
least of them reached it by the same road after toiling conscientiously
through the official explanations and apologies which every foreign
office in Europe issued in proof of its own innocence. The polychromatic
outpouring of white papers, green books and red books was succeeded by a
vaster flood of unofficial polemics, in which defensive chancellors and
prime ministers, field-marshals and admirals demonstrated that some one
else was responsible for the war and that peace would have been
preserved or victory secured if only their advice had been followed. To
the strategical arguments I paid little attention: nothing will make me
understand strategy by land or sea, and it was hardly relevant to my
main enquiry. The diplomatic defence, on the other hand, I studied with
care, deciding—as, I imagine, most people outside Germany have decided
independently—that, while Berlin was guilty of starting the
conflagration, every other power lent a hand in piling up an inflammable
heap of suspicions, jealousies and misunderstandings. It was this
conclusion that pointed me my moral.
“And what do you make of it all?,” my mother asked as I laid aside the
last of these bitter, aggressive manifestoes.
“Well,” I said, “whoever made the war, it’s clear that no single
country, no single form of government was able to keep the peace.”
With that conclusion no one could disagree.
“In contrasting Jim’s world with the present,” I told Violet Loring,
when my essay was ready for her criticism, “the outstanding lesson is
that the government of man by his fellow-man has broken down in every
form that’s been tried. You had constitutional monarchy in England,
absolutism in Russia, a republic in France and America, a feudal
kingship in Austria-Hungary. None of them could perform the elementary
duty of protecting the life and liberty of their citizens. Those who
took no part lived on the sufferance of the belligerents. From China to
Honduras . . .”
“When once war breaks out . . .” Violet began helplessly.
“The governments that allowed war to break out failed in their first
duty,” I maintained. “By negligence or malignity or impotence they’re
responsible for the death or mutilation of some ten million human
beings. It’s not enough to put the blame on Germany or the kaiser or
Bernhardi. If a homicidal maniac runs amok in England, we blame the
police for not stopping him.”
While my cousin turned the pages of my manuscript, I flung a similar
cold douche of first principles over the head of Philip Hornbeck, who
had come to us for a week between dismantling his old department and
erecting the new.
“If you’d had a bigger police-force,” he suggested, “your homicidal
maniac would have had no run for his money. If we’d smashed the German
navy while it was building . . .”
“And turned homicidal maniac on our own account?,” I interrupted.
“If you like to put it that way. It’s not much use arguing with me,
George, because I’m one of the old impenitents who believe that there
will always be wars and what not. _Admitting_ that it’s the duty of all
governments to keep the peace, _admitting_ that every government has
failed in its duty, what are you going to do then?”
“Try a different kind of government,” I answered.
“A soviet?,” he asked. “If the aristocracy and _bourgeoisie_ have
failed, that’s all you have left.”
“I’d sooner have a soviet that thought it could keep peace than an
aristocracy that admits it can’t.”
“You should go and live in Russia,” Hornbeck recommended.
The battle-piece which I was composing for Violet seemed naturally to
take the form of a triptych; and the first two panels shewed that the
governing classes in all countries had failed to keep the peace and had
bungled the business of making war. When the third panel came to be
painted, I wondered whether they would be more successful in making
peace.
“Is this going to be a _lasting_ settlement?,” I asked Lucien de
Grammont, when he came to refresh himself after his work on the agenda.
“We’re doing our best,” he answered. “As I told you at the time, the war
stopped too soon. If we’re to secure that France is never again to be
menaced, we must to some extent carry the war on into the peace.”
“Do you still think there will be another war in fifty years’ time?”
“I won’t pin myself to a date, but you’ll never abolish war.”
“Then,” I said, “it’s time you made way for somebody who will. The old
systems, the old diplomacy, the old men who ran the old system, are a
self-confessed failure.”
Lucien twirled his neat moustache and addressed to his neatly-shod feet
a muttered confidence about doctrinaire idealists. Gerald Deganway, for
the honour of the old diplomacy as practised in the British Foreign
Office, screwed his eye-glass into place and exclaimed:
“I say, you know, George, you’re an absolute bolshevist!”
And Hornbeck administered the most damaging criticism by accepting my
premises and proceeding to a diametrically opposite conclusion.
“You’re proving too much, old son,” he argued. “I agree that governments
should prevent wars, I agree that every government in the world failed
to prevent this last one. That only shews you’re asking governments to
do an impossibility. Take every nation in turn, from Belgium to the
States, and tell me how the government of any one could have kept out of
the war. When once the racket begins . . .”
“We must go back a stage, then,” I said, “to the time before it begins.
We must have a ‘will to peace’.”
“Didn’t we have that in England?,” asked Violet. “Honour apart, we
couldn’t afford to stay out in 1914.”
“You must go beyond England,” I told her. “We want an international
‘will to peace’; a solemn league and covenant, not between foreign
secretaries, but between the units of the world’s cannon-fodder. War
will end of its own accord when you can’t fill your armies.”
“And how will you set your solemn league and covenant to work?,”
Hornbeck enquired sceptically.
I could make no reply until I had found more time to think; time, too,
perhaps, to talk with my uncle Bertrand of the old Disarmament League
and of the propaganda that issued from _Peace_ office before the war.
When I told Barbara that, so far as I could see, my work was only
beginning, I felt that in all likelihood the task before our generation
would be to create a ‘will to peace’ out of the present disgust with
war. If history was human nature repeating itself, there had been the
same disgust at the end of every great war; but the memory of that
disgust faded quickly. It was no match for the urgent plea that honour
or security was at stake; no match for the cynical resignation of those
who said that there always had been wars and always would be.
“Of course you’re right to try,” was the utmost encouragement that I
could win even from Violet, “but these Hague Conventions and things
haven’t done much good, have they?”
“No one has yet appealed to the rank-and-file,” I answered. “No one has
appealed while the full horror of war was vividly remembered. No one has
shewn the dumb millions of the world how much alike they all are, how
they swim together and sink together. In all I’ve been reading these
last few weeks I’ve been amazed by the sameness of conditions in all
countries. If we can work on that till the sameness becomes a oneness
. . .”
In aiming at perspective for my second panel, I tried to set my own
impressions and experiences of the war beside those of the cosmopolitan
population that floated through Cannes in these first weeks of the
armistice. When we had passed the stage of fancying that our individual
histories were unique, I was more struck by the similarities of what I
heard than by the differences. Necessarily, the islander and the
continental must always disagree on foreign politics; and in Cannes I
met for the first time the chronic terror that is begotten of land
frontiers. “It’s all very well for you,” I was told by Italians, Greeks,
Poles and Dutch: “You’re an island.” With allowance for this, I felt
that the war had left on every country an almost identical mark. The
Austrians and Germans whom I met in Monte Carlo, old journalistic
allies—for the most part—, were as bitterly convinced that the war had
been forced upon them as we in England were convinced that they had
forced it on us; but, when we had agreed to differ, their description of
the last four years in their own countries might have been applied,
almost without a word changed, to England. There were, I discovered,
idlers, _embusqués_ and adventurers of both sexes in all classes
everywhere; and it was amusing, for one who thought of a German
alternately as a sheep and a genius, to hear the tribute of Austria and
Germany to our more than Teutonic docility and enterprise. France had
her rapacious profiteers, Prussia her bloated munition-makers. The
drinking that was said to obtain in English high-places could be matched
by the drugging that was reported to be corrupting Austrian society. I
was assured, without calling for proof, that there was little to choose
for courage and endurance between the best troops of any two countries;
and, when the public morale broke, any one class in its own way cut as
sorry a figure as any other. If I despaired of the populace that
believed the grotesque stories in the Pemberton-Billing case, I
despaired more profoundly of Lady Dainton when she told me that Prince
Louis of Battenberg had been executed in the Tower for treason.
“The moral is,” I told Violet Loring, “that, under an abnormal strain,
the sublime and the dastardly go hand-in-hand. Five years ago, we didn’t
know the meaning of danger or suffering. To face it without breaking, we
called up the primitive beast that lies inside all of us: he was a very
brave beast, but he was also very treacherous, savage, credulous.” . . .
As Violet turned my pages, I looked through a palisade of palm-trees to
the sparkling blue of the Mediterranean and filled my lungs with warm,
scented air. Cannes, after London, was like the open street after an
opium-den; and, in thinking of the strange shapes seen in the long, mad
half-light of the war, I almost fancied that I had been dreaming. The
political intrigue and chicanery that began with the high-explosive
controversy in 1915 and continued until the 1918 election was incredible
unless one likened it to a panic on board a burning ship. If Violet had
told me four years earlier that one common acquaintance would be
imprisoned for trafficking in cocaine and that another would commit
suicide to avoid prosecution for forgery, I should not have believed
her. I could now hardly believe my own certain knowledge until I
remembered that every war has claimed its civil casualties.
“How long does it take to chain up your primitive beast?,” Violet asked.
“I mean, . . . these are the people that the war has left us to live
with and work with.” . . .
To that I had no answer ready. It was easier to say that Sonia O’Rane
would not have run away from her husband before the war than to be
certain she would not run away again. And it seemed idle to talk of
international conferences and a reconstructed world, of a new spirit and
a ‘will to peace’ while the passions of the war were still unfettered.
4
My triptych, displaying—in its centre—the war and—on either side—the
peace that preceded and should follow the war, spared no space for
dividing or linking frame-work: though I was working in the
transition-period between full war and full peace, I made little attempt
to describe the condition in which we all found ourselves at the moment
when a truce was called.
To some extent—in these blissful, lazy days, when we had nothing to do
but sleep and eat and smoke and gossip—we filled the blank by
discussing the present and future states of our friends. My battle-piece
was subjected to a more general scrutiny than I had intended; and for
many rather embarrassing days I was challenged to defend myself against
critics who opened wide fields of speculation with the words:
“_If_, as you think, the old political game is really played out . . .”;
or
“_If_ you’re right about the redistribution of wealth . . .”
In the morning, as we idled in long chairs on a glowing marble verandah;
at night, as we sat in a half-circle while Barbara played to us; in
leisurely afternoon walks and occasional peripatetic sessions from one
bedroom to another, we discussed war-literature and war-religion, the
new position of women, the fate of the demobilized soldier and the
day-to-day life which we expected to lead when peace was proclaimed.
Most of our predictions were unbelievably wild, in their assumption
either that everything or that nothing would be the same as before the
war; and our discussions were so formless that they could never be
summarized or recorded. When we abandoned conjecture for the concrete
plans that each was making for himself, I felt that—in the words used
at a dinner to Eric Lane in New York—‘the convulsion’s as great, when
you turn a soldier into a civilian, as when you turn a civilian into a
soldier.’ Sam Dainton, after ten years’ service, was leaving the army,
“to prey on society”, as he put it. Deganway was saying good-bye to the
Foreign Office; Barbara’s cousin, John Carstairs, to the Diplomatic.
Professionally, the climax in both their lives had been reached and
passed; the first wanted to make money, the second to look after his
estates.
At this time I began to detect the rise of that adventurer-class at
which history points a punctual finger after every great war but which I
somehow did not expect to see in my own time. When I was called back to
London, I found new men in Fleet Street and the City, new names at
Covent Garden and in the candidates’ books of the clubs; at Cannes I
discerned, in the good-looking person of Violet’s brother Laurence, an
adventurer in the making. As I became acquainted with his friends in the
course of the next three years, I saw the natural, perhaps the
necessary, evolution of a type which has not yet found its place in the
social void. My cousin had been snatched from Melton on his eighteenth
birthday and thrust into the Irish Guards, where his precocious
development as a man-of-the-world had been won at the expense of his
small aptitude for learning. The Hunter-Oakleighs could not afford to
maintain him in idleness; and Laurence, recognizing this, quartered
himself on Loring House and allowed Violet or any other of his relations
to maintain him. In theory, he was reading for the bar; and a text-book
on Roman law was always at hand to rebut the charge of idleness. In
practice, he blandly awaited pecuniary compensation from a society which
had taught him expensive tastes at a time when he might have been
teaching himself the means of gratifying them. The army had paralysed
his initiative; he believed—or affected to believe—that, at
one-and-twenty, his life-work was done; and already he had learned that
personal charm and rich friends were a fair substitute for industry.
“I wish you’d advise me about Laurie,” said Violet one day, with a
troubled glance down the verandah to the bed of down cushions where her
brother was devoting to _La Vie Parisienne_ the hours demanded by the
institutes of Justinian. “He’s rather a problem.”
“The whole of his generation is a problem,” I said. “He stands between
Jim, who’s dead, and Sandy, who’s still a child. He and his like have
already borne the burden of the war; now he’ll have to bear the burden
of clearing up after the war.”
My proposal found less than no favour in the hearing to which it was
directed.
“I’m not bearing any more burdens till I’ve made myself secure,”
Laurence declared. “Nor’s any one else. Half the men I know have come
back to see another fellow doing their job; the other half are like me
and never had a job to come back to. And, while we were away, you let a
pack of women into all the professions,” he grumbled.
“Laurie will marry a rich wife,” Sam Dainton prophesied. “I’d do the
same myself, only I’m so precious ugly.”
“That doesn’t matter when men are scarce,” said Laurence reassuringly;
“but I’d much prefer it if _you_ married the rich wife and let me blow
in as the _tertium quid_. That’s the way all the best marriages are
arranged nowadays.”
“I wonder what the modern girl will turn into,” drawled Philip Hornbeck
at a tangent.
“The modern girl is a contradiction in terms,” answered Lucien de
Grammont. “To modernize yourself is to change; and woman never changes,
she only adapts herself.”
“She adapted herself in the war, good and plenty,” said Sam Dainton with
authority.
“She was brought up to know nothing,” rejoined Barbara; “she thought she
knew everything. With luck she’ll learn enough to bring her daughters up
better than she was brought up herself.”
“This from you!,” Violet laughed.
“It’s only now that I see what narrow squeaks I had,” said Barbara
reflectively. “Whenever a girl makes a mess of her life, I believe it’s
the parents who are to blame.”
While this theme was developed in the uneasy hearing of my mother,
Violet took a last look at my manuscript before handing it back to me.
“You say nothing about religion,” she commented in an undertone. “It’s
the biggest thing in life for many people.”
“For women more than for men,” I submitted. While we were still at
school, Darwin, Huxley and Renan were made accessible to us in cheap
reprints. I have felt, ever since, that, if my salvation depends on
faith in something that ignores ordinary rules of evidence, I would
prefer not to be saved. “And you couldn’t have had a bloodier war, if
we’d all been followers of Anti-Christ. By a paradox, the only people
who tried to live up to their religion were persecuted as conscientious
objectors.”
“What will you put in its place?,” Violet asked.
I should only have hurt her feelings if I had suggested that
Christianity might now be given a trial: to her, that faith is
synonymous with the Holy Roman Catholic Church; to me, it is the service
of man, and the Christian churches with their deadening forms and dead
rules, their deferred punishments and rewards, their proscriptions and
feuds and exclusive salvations have gone far to stifle Christianity.
“If people thought less about the next world,” I answered, “they might
make a more tolerable place of this.”
And it was in some such words that I ended my criticism of the war. The
folly and suspicion and malevolence of all the nations had made it
possible; when it came, all the nations engaged in it exhibited much the
same endurance, if simultaneously they exhibited much the same savagery.
“Well, is it ‘the Great War’ or ‘the Great Waste’?,” Violet asked. “Jim
was over age when he gave up the staff. They didn’t want him to go. He
felt that every one who got so much out of England in peace _must_ go.
_I_ felt that, too. I shouldn’t like to think I’d helped to have him
killed for no purpose.”
If we had taken a poll of the eager disputants at the other end of the
verandah, I doubt if the verdict would have satisfied her. On their own
admission, the mailed fist of Philip Hornbeck, the diplomacy of Lucien
de Grammont and the first-hand experience of war which Laurence and Sam
Dainton had won on four fronts provided no more security than the
religion of Violet Loring that another war, equally or more cruel,
unnecessary and futile, should not break out as soon as the memories of
one generation were grown dim and the exhaustion of one generation had
been repaired.
“Doesn’t that depend on the people who’ve survived?,” I asked. “Until
the conscriptionists turned a crusade into a hunt for cannon-fodder, the
war had a moral grandeur. Whether Jim’s death served a useful purpose
for any one but himself depends on our power to recapture the spirit of
1914.”
For this elastic formula I can claim little credit. The cynic is now
sure of his laugh if he mocks the idea of “a war to end war”; but I saw
too much of my contemporaries in 1914 to join the later chorus of
fashionable disparagement. Before their first idealism became jaded, the
young men who had been reared in an atmosphere of war-preparations and
war-scares, who aspired to a world orderly and a life beautiful and who
saw their aspirations thwarted by men too old for hope or faith,
resolved to create from the war a world of which they need not be
ashamed. They enlisted in the service of man. From their deaths I
learned the phrase. One of them, the last and best of my friends, who
was literally and awfully crucified, came back blinded and broken to
tell me that he was unrepentant.
“_I was in New York_,” O’Rane wrote at this time, “_when the armistice
was proclaimed. If you’d shouted ‘as you were’ from the Woolworth Tower,
you couldn’t have scattered people more quickly. ‘As you were before the
war’ is the general feeling. I expect it’s been the same in England. We
must do better than that._” . . .
“I’m not sure that I know what you mean,” said Violet.
“And I’m not sure that I can put it into words,” I answered. “In general
terms, no sacrifice was too great in the war; I want people to feel no
sacrifice is too great in peace. It’s an empty victory if a high
proportion of the victors are diseased, hungry, verminous, discontented.
Any one of imagination must be ashamed of the slums in our big cities;
but we _won’t_ make the effort or the sacrifice to cure them. I want to
fan the crusading spirit of 1914 back to life. . . . Before that,
though, we must make sure that we aren’t going to drift into another
war. That means a crusade covering the whole inhabited world.”
“I don’t know how you’ll begin.”
“Nor do I yet. I may be able to tell you more in a week’s time. Have you
heard that the O’Ranes are coming here? He cabled to say that he was in
urgent need of my advice. I cabled back that I was in much more urgent
need of his.”
Glancing at my manuscript for the last time before sending it to be
typed, I felt that, in a week’s time, I might know better how to paint
my third panel. We had to see now whether those who had failed to avert
war were capable of ending war.
5
Though I charged O’Rane at the time with disturbing the repose of our
retreat, I can see now that, even before I invited him to Cannes, I was
resigned to moving at least one stage nearer to the heart of politics.
It is true that my uncle Bertrand’s appeal for help in his election was
answered with a lame reference to Barbara’s health; simultaneously I
told Frank Jellaby, without a trace of lameness or indecision, that I
was too little in sympathy with the liberal party to fight a seat on my
own account; all the time, however, I was conscious of a chilling
remoteness. I did not want to go back; I was thankful that Barbara
seemed content to vegetate; but, if I was right in thinking that the
fruits of the war remained to be gathered, I was right in thinking that
they could not be gathered in Cannes.
I hoped that O’Rane, with his knowledge of other countries, would tell
me whether my derided ‘will to peace’ was practicable or even necessary.
If he shared my misgivings, I wanted his help in planning a campaign
that would be bounded only by the confines of the inhabited earth and
would engage our energies for the rest of our lives. A train of
reasoning is sometimes so persuasive in its premises and overwhelming in
its conclusion that human intelligence rejects it without argument; and
a train of this kind was presented to me on the eve of the armistice,
when Hornbeck declared in succeeding breaths that another war would be
synonymous with the end of the world and that nothing could prevent
another war. His first premise was substantiated by all the evidence of
the late war; his second was at least supported by every soldier and
statesman whose memoirs I had been reading for the last month. The
syllogism could only be refuted by a general strike against war. This
was my revelation and mission; and I had suffered too long from the
revelations and missions of others to trust my own until I had been put
to the question.
The O’Ranes arrived, with my sister and her husband, a week before
Christmas. It was characteristic of the times that I should first set
eyes on my brother-in-law two years after his marriage. Beryl wrote in
1916 to say that she was engaged to a certain Gervaise Maxwell, whom she
had nursed at the Lorings’ hospital in Scotland. They parted after a
week’s honeymoon: Beryl went back to House of Steynes, Gervaise rejoined
his battalion in Mesopotamia; and they met for the second time four days
after the armistice.
Now they were coming to exploit my influence in finding work for
Gervaise; and I, knowing the slender proportions of that influence and
recollecting the claims already advanced by Sam Dainton and my cousin
Laurence, wondered helplessly whether the government did wisely in
releasing men from the army before they had found civil employment. For
a week before leaving London my telephone had been agitated by the
voices of anxious friends who assured me that they could be demobilized
at once if I would invent some urgent private business for them. “Good
pay, light work and decent holidays,” they all said. I suppose the army
let them go because the army could not retain them. At Wilminster and
Yareham the troops demobilized themselves and walked home; at Enstaple
and Durncliffe they threatened to mutiny if they were ordered back to
France. It was one thing, however, to kick a uniform into a cupboard;
and something quite different to find civilian clothes that would fit.
Gervaise, I decided, must wait until I had discussed with O’Rane my own
plans. It might be that, within a few months, I should want all the men
I could get; or it might be that I should be cultivating my garden in
Ireland. I must wait, too, until I had heard O’Rane’s proposals.
Eighteen months had passed since I hunted him out to America, nominally
to lecture on the war and really to make a fresh start with Sonia after
her disaster with Vincent Grayle. In that time I had purposely not
enquired how they were getting on, as a fresh start might well be the
fresh start only to more trouble. The woman who jilts two men, marries a
third, runs away with a fourth and returns with his child, all before
the age of thirty-three, has either too much emotion in her nature or
else too little.
I must confess to a feeling of embarrassment as the train drew in. The
feeling passed as Sonia waved ecstatically from her window and announced
breathlessly that no one would believe what a success she had had in
Paris, that she was insolvent, that this no longer mattered, that she
had the most wonderful news for me, that she was going to have an
unprecedented success in London, that it was heavenly to see me again
and that she was really going to enjoy herself in Cannes.
A woman who lived only for the moment was not likely to be disturbed by
regrets or fears; and, as Sonia swung down from the train into my arms,
her eyes were as limpid and innocent, her lips were as moistly red and
provocative, as when I took her to supper at her first parties fifteen
years before. Then and now, she was of those who make the world take
them at their own valuation. Then she had babbled of her earliest
ball-room triumphs; now she described the men who had thrown themselves
at her feet from San Francisco to Paris.
“Then you enjoyed yourself?,” I asked, when she paused for breath.
“_They_ enjoyed _me_,” she answered complacently. “I don’t think they’d
ever seen anything quite like me before. Oh, George! Has David told you
our news? We met Mr. Stornaway in London; and he wants us to come and
work with him! Say, kid, can you beat it? I asked him what the work was;
and he said it was just helping him to spend money. If there’s one thing
I _do_ know about . . . We’re going to be the new big noise in London.
Collect David; and we’ll tell you all about it!”
If my embarrassment returned as I went forward to give her husband a
hand, it vanished as he took up the interrupted tale. In voice and
manner there was nothing to hint that he had ever been estranged from
his radiant wife; and I decided that, in a sense, he too lived only for
the moment. When we first met, a small boy without a friend in the world
had decided that he must put himself to school. His father had been
killed, fighting for Greece against Turkey; and David made his way to
England, with enough money for one term, by working his passage round
the world. When he had sucked in all that Melton and Oxford could give
him, he banished them into the past, as he had already banished his
wanderings, and concentrated all his energies on making money; when the
money was made, he turned his back for ever on the oil-fields of Mexico
and devoted himself to English politics until the war imposed on him a
more urgent duty. On the day that he was discharged from hospital,
blinded and maimed, he called to tell me that he had already secured new
work. When Sonia left him, he set himself to get her back; and, when she
returned, I am sure that he set himself with equal singleness of purpose
to forget that they had ever been parted.
Now he could think of nothing but Raymond Stornaway’s proposal.
“That’s where I want your advice,” he explained gravely, as though in
all his thirty-five tempestuous years of life he had ever taken advice
from anybody.
“And I want yours,” I told him. “I’m sorry to find Raymond butting in: I
expect to need your help much more.”
That evening after dinner, when the others had gone away to gamble, we
talked of the war and of that other evening, when we stood on the
dividing ridge between two worlds. Of the men who dined at Loring Castle
on the last night of peace, he and I alone had survived. We talked of
the war that was over as then we had talked of the war that was coming.
I quoted him the words in which he had described his vision of what the
world might be after the war; and I challenged him to say whether he
still believed in the perfectibility of man.
“I’ve acquired a lot of patience in the last four years,” he answered.
Then I tested him with Hornbeck’s prediction that wars would be fought
so long as the human race survived to fight them.
“I want you to help me organize a general strike against war,” I said,
as I began to blow out the candles. Then I paused to frame a question
which I had kept unasked since our last evening of peace: “D’you
remember blowing out the candles that night?” He nodded. “You left two.
Why?”
As he hesitated, I saw that he was frowning. I saw also that, like the
rest of us, he had aged in the last five years, though the thin face had
its old passionate vitality and the fine black hair its old gay
disorder. Slight as ever, boyish as ever, he was none the less lined
with the mental and physical tortures of the war. His very hesitation
was a subtle mark of decline, as though for the first time in his life
he doubted himself.
“I knew in my bones that only two of us would come through,” he
muttered. “I should be one; I couldn’t make a guess at the other.”
“There aren’t more than half-a-dozen left out of all our generation,” I
told him. “The old club-groups at Oxford. . . . I can’t look at them.”
“And I couldn’t see ’em if I _did_ look. Not that I need to be reminded
of them.” . . . The unseeing eyes flashed in sudden exaltation. “What
death takes away, George, is very little by comparison with what he
leaves! The men I’ve loved best in the world have been my father and
your uncle and old Burgess and you and Jim. Three of you, thank God!,
are alive: I stayed with Burgess for his last night before he retired
from Melton; but you’re no more alive than my father and Jim. Nothing
can take away the time I spent with them. . . . I shan’t see again in
this world, but nothing can take away all that I’ve seen in the past. I
still see the men I recruited, the men who trained with me, though I
helped to bury more than a few.”
“Some of them were here to-night,” I said.
“Yes! And what death has done is just to put their bodies out of action
. . . . That means there are fewer hands and more work.” . . .
As I led him to the door, O’Rane’s fingers ran lightly down my arm.
“It’s about twenty years since you first came to stay with us,” I
reminded him.
“I suppose it must be. Good, full years.”
“I was feeling middle-aged till you came. Middle-aged and depressed.”
He laughed and gripped my hand:
“We’ve no time to grow middle-aged. It’s the next twenty years that will
count. We must pull together. In a sense we _are_ the last two.”
As I blew out the remaining candles, the room once more seemed to fill
with our friends of other days. We were indeed almost the only
survivors; and I could not tell these ghosts that they had given their
lives, I could not tell O’Rane that he had given his sight, to no
purpose.
“Think over what we’ve been saying,” I suggested. “Tell me if you can
see any reason why just such another war shouldn’t break out with just
as little reason.”
“If it does, then this war wasn’t worth while. . . . And it’s our
business to make it worth while,” he answered.
CHAPTER THREE
THE DAWNING OF MORN
“‘Rise up, rise up, thou Satan, upon the Earth to go,
And prove the peace of Dives if it be good or no;
For all that he hath planned
We deliver to thy hand,
As thy skill shall serve to break it or bring low.’”
RUDYARD KIPLING: _The Peace of Dives_.
1
Average, sensual man is no match for an enthusiast. When O’Rane wrote
that he wanted to ask my advice, vague instinct warned me that he wanted
the costlier, if no more valuable, privilege of my personal cooperation.
And it was my intention that he should cooperate with me. If I seemed a
doctrinaire to Lucien, a fanatic to Hornbeck and a
‘bolshevist’—whatever that might mean—to Deganway, I seemed to myself
the mildest revolutionary that had ever schemed to carry out a
revolution by deputy. When, at this time, people talked of “winning the
peace” and asked what we meant to do, I felt and said that no active man
or woman who had survived the war was justified in sitting idle. I was
ready to write, speak and subscribe money on behalf of any organization
that would rouse the world to the danger which I saw threatening it. I
would work for my “will to peace” as others worked, in the years that
followed and along lines which I deplored, for the League of Nations. I
lacked the fire and the endurance, however, to inspire a crusade. This,
I felt, was O’Rane’s part.
Nevertheless, from our first conversation I divined that we were
thinking on different planes. To “make the war worth while”, in my view,
was to secure, first and foremost, that there should be no future wars.
Perhaps because he had spent so many months in America, where by now the
world seemed already to have been made “safe for democracy”, perhaps
because he had seen too much of the late war to fancy that any one
wanted more of it, O’Rane assumed the end at which I was aiming.
“If the war is to be made ‘worth while’,” he pronounced at the end of
our first night together, “we have . . . in some way . . . to make
England . . .”
“‘A land fit for heroes’ and what not,” Philip Hornbeck interrupted
flippantly.
After that, though we conducted our debates in private, I felt that
O’Rane’s enthusiasm was sapping my will to the point when I should be
drawn from my own leisurely crusade and pressed into his. If, at the end
of ten days, he returned to London without me, I can only explain his
failure by saying that in the meantime I had fallen to the assault of a
yet more formidable enthusiast.
2
“You heard what Sonia said about Stornaway’s proposal?,” O’Rane began on
the second day.
The rest of the party had disappeared to Monte Carlo; and I was
imprisoned in the shade of a palm-tree until I surrendered or bolted.
“He made the same proposal to me,” I said. “I turned it down because I
thought there was more important work nearer to hand.”
“Our work won’t lack in importance.”
“Then you’ve accepted his offer?,” I asked. “You’re giving up the
House?”
“I’m committed in principle,” he answered. “Yes, I shan’t stand again:
this coupon business leaves no scope for the independent member. Why the
prime minister wants an election at all, when his position is
impregnable . . .”
“He wants to keep it impregnable,” I said. “Well, you’re going in with
Raymond to succeed where Deryk Lancing and his father and every
millionaire in history has so far failed? It’s easier to make money
honestly than to spend it wisely, you’ll find. How much is there?”
“About twelve hundred thousand a year.”
“You can do a lot of harm with that,” I said. “How will you spend it?”
“For the first year or two it’s ear-marked for universities and
hospitals.”
“And after that?”
“We might make the war worth while,” he laughed. “But you must help. The
trouble with England at present is that we’ve so little sense of
responsibility. Isn’t it about time we educated people up to a civic
conscience? In the war, I admit . . .”
“You found a hundred men who would die for their country to one who
would live for it.”
“Because, in peace, we call people ‘good citizens’ if they obey the laws
and pay their taxes. That’s not enough for a civilized state, George!
Good God, when a man commits murder, we hire another man to hang him!
It’s you and I who ought to be hanged for not teaching him our own
reverence for law. We hire people to persecute other people for beating
their wives or neglecting their children or concealing their diseases!
It’s _we_ who ought to be persecuted. Illness, to me, is the wound
inflicted on society by the indifference of the healthy. Poverty.
Degradation.” . . .
“And your civic conscience . . .?,” I reminded him.
“Another word for imagination! You’d be ashamed of yourself if your
tenants in Ireland died of want; if the men drank or the women turned
prostitutes. Yet I’ve seen sights in different parts of the world that
would make your blood run cold. Famines and pestilences and massacres.
Things we don’t allow in England: we’ve got _that_ far. Now it’s time we
went farther. If the war’s to be worth while, you must satisfy yourself
that what has been saved was worth saving.”
“But how on earth are you to do it?”
In other days I had heard Aylmer Lancing, as he wheeled himself with
slow impatience about his workroom, muttering of a dread project to
corner the raw material of high explosives throughout the world. Some
Central American republic was causing him trouble; and he had decided to
make future wars impossible. Later, I had been present when Raymond
Stornaway schemed to force up the standard of living for manual labour
by paying uneconomic wages in one place and raising a storm of envious
discontent in every other. Both men had been wonderfully convincing; but
they had done nothing. Behind O’Rane’s shining eyes, in a stain of
shadow between two white sheets of sunshine, I seemed now to see
Raymond’s tired face at his luncheon-party on Armistice Day.
“So far,” said O’Rane thoughtfully, “no one’s gone about it in the right
way.”
“It was not for want of intelligence. Can it be that the modern world
has grown too fast for any one to control it?”
If I had not parted with my little monograph on the war, I should have
liked to explore this idea that civilization was bursting like an
overripe fruit. Everywhere, in my own lifetime, I had seen
fourth-dimensional energy collecting in a world of three dimensions. At
a far distance, I had watched the Harrimans and Carnegies and
Rockefellers bowing under wealth too great for a single man’s direction;
and, since we began to raise men a hundred thousand at a time and to
spend money at the rate of millions a day, I was convinced that we were
operating forces which we could not control. For twenty years I had
tried to “think imperially”, but I doubt if Mr. Chamberlain himself
would have recognized the British Empire as I saw it represented from my
window at the Admiralty on Armistice Day: in fifty years it had changed
to something that might become a federation of British states but had
certainly ceased to be an empire. America had ceased to be a nation
without becoming even a federation. When I heard of a gas that would
destroy whole cities, when I read of private fortunes that could buy
whole countries, I felt that the earth was hardly big enough for its
Rockefellers and Hearsts and Fords; the Rockefellers and Hearsts and
Fords themselves seemed hardly big enough for the monsters they had
created.
“No one,” said O’Rane, “has spent twelve hundred thousand a year to
spread his own doctrines. We’ll buy up derelict palaces like Braye and
Eldridge; turn ’em into schools for the new poor who can’t afford Eton
and the new rich who can’t get in. We’ll stuff them with scholarships to
attract the brightest wits; we’ll have our subjects taught, as we want
them taught, by giving prizes at Oxford and Cambridge. And, when the
best men in every profession, every walk of life, are men who’ve been
through our mill, we can convert the world.”
What the text-books of a civic conscience were to be I did not enquire
at this stage. If O’Rane aspired to make each man love his neighbour as
himself, that was an aspiration towards which the Christian churches,
usually with relatively greater wealth, often with the power of the
sword and always with a grip on the fears and hopes of the faithful, had
been working for nearly two thousand years.
“The late war,” I propounded, “was not a good advertisement for
Christian teaching.”
“Because Christianity has never been brought to men’s doors and into
their lives.
‘_What ragamuffin-saint_
_Believes God watches him continually,_
_As he believes in fire that it will burn,_
_Or rain that it will drench him?_’
I often wonder what would have happened to Christianity if it had come
into the world with our modern means of communication.”
We were still arguing when the rest of the party returned; and, until
the brief winter twilight faded, we sat and spent Stornaway’s money for
him. To this day I can see the half-circle of light dresses and the
fire-fly movements of the men’s cigarettes; I can see faces white with
avarice and eyes dark with excitement.
“Over a million a year . . .,” Barbara gasped.
“I told you we were going to be the big new noise in London,” said Sonia
complacently. “George, of course, thinks he’s very superior.” . . .
“I only think it’s a tremendous responsibility,” I defended myself.
“If the job’s too big, we can turn it down,” said O’Rane.
“The others thought that, too,” I warned him.
It was a strange discussion, which ultimately became a monologue of
foreboding. As all the world knows, Aylmer Lancing made his first
fortune by chance and then found that he could not help adding to it;
after buying the site of a burnt city, he had to build a city on the
site; he constructed railroads to feed his city and manufactured
agricultural machinery to pay for the food. Daily, until his breakdown,
he grew richer; and, in the long years of his dying, he was to find
that, while the hospitals, the universities, the museums and galleries
could live on his bounty for a year, after that he must invent new
outlets.
“If your income’s too big, you can always reduce your capital,” Sam
Dainton contributed. “I’ve been doing it for years.”
“With a capital of five-and-twenty million?,” I asked. “It’s not a
simple question of dropping bags of gold into the sea.”
Early in his career, as I told them, Aylmer Lancing had tried to sell
the New-Mexico-Montana Railroad when it was threatened by the
South-Western Trunk. As he unloaded, the price fell; and, as the price
fell, others unloaded too. A panic set in at one moment, to be ended the
next by a rumour that Lancing was selling a bear. Up went the price; and
Aylmer sold his last share on a soaring market, to find himself the
richer by several million dollars.
In time I tired of my Cassandra prophecies. Unlike his predecessors,
Raymond Stornaway was face to face with a world in which every one would
for many years be trying to pay for the war; and I fancy the annual
income of the trust had been handsomely exceeded before each of us had
explained the best method of spending it. While my sister Beryl, with
her hospital training, launched vague projects for stamping out phthisis
and cancer, Gervaise rebuilt the more unsightly parts of England.
Hornbeck petitioned for an arctic expedition; and Barbara threw the
stock-markets into confusion by paying off the national debt.
“I don’t say it’s impossible,” I told them in conclusion, “but Lancing
wasn’t the only multimillionaire in history. Other people have faced his
problem, but none of them solved it.”
3
In the two years that followed, O’Rane and I were to hark back many
times to this first discussion; but we suspended it now before I learned
what part he was assigning me in his moral revolution. The invitations
which I had scattered so impulsively in Paris matured disconcertingly at
the same moment; and we were dragged from our lazy reminiscences and
lazier speculations to disagree fiercely about frontiers of which I had
never heard and which I suspected Lucien de Grammont of inventing.
As my mother’s villa was by now full, our guests overflowed to the
Regina and came to us only for meals and for a preliminary peace
conference at sundown. Daily, with noses sensitized to the lure of gin
and vermouth, the dark and voluble spokesmen of the new states collected
to redraw the map of Europe. Through indolence or defective imagination,
the rest of us took little part in the earlier discussions: the peace,
like the armistice, would be based on President Wilson’s fourteen
points; and I for one was thankful that it was some one else’s business
to unravel these unpronounceable Balkan combinations and to delimit
these undiscoverable Baltic states.
“The English are incurably insular!,” Lucien fumed at short intervals.
“If you would look at politics from a _European_ point of view, George
. . .”
“It was our love for the European point of view,” Hornbeck retorted,
“that made us shoulder a heavier burden than any other power. Our
contribution in money, men, ships . . .”
Though the claim was inoffensive enough to my “insular” hearing, he was
not allowed to finish. The war, we were assured in spluttering rotation,
had been won wholly and solely by the Belgians in their first defence of
Liège and Namur; wholly and solely by Russian numbers; wholly and solely
by French endurance and strategy. Italy and Rumania had won it by
intervening to prevent a stalemate; the United States by pouring in
money and men at a time when the allies were exhausted.
For an hour the verandah was like a Tower of Babel attacked by a swarm
of bees.
“If those who did most to win the war are going to have most voice in
making the peace,” Hornbeck prophesied as we went up to dress, “you’ll
be able to hear their deliberations in London. This dago-parliament is
your remedy against future wars?”
If I left his gibe unanswered, it was because the tone—still more the
unanimity—of these impassioned voices had disquieted me. I can hardly
say too often that my mother’s villa was a political vacuum: we all
assumed that, when we emerged from it, we should find the armistice
taking permanent form in a peace drawn on similar lines. I had not
dreamed until this night that a new war was to be declared at the
conference-table. Yet the demands of my excited young friends were of a
kind that no signatory of the armistice could accept. Paul Sanguszko, I
think, outdistanced all competitors by demanding a united Poland which
in fact included more Germans than Poles; but Lucien, in his rape of
Alsace, and Boscarelli, in his butchery of the Tyrol, were but a short
head behind him.
“Aren’t you rather forgetting your old panegyrics on nationality?,” I
asked Lucien.
“Are you handing back the German colonies?,” he demanded in his turn.
“That’s for our dominions to say. I don’t know.”
“_And_ you don’t care!,” Lucien rejoined bitterly. “Now that the German
navy is out of the way, nothing else matters!”
“With luck, George, this ought to be a peace to end peace,” Hornbeck
whispered.
Next day, I asked Barbara whether she was feeling homesick for England.
I have been so long indentured to politics that the hint of a new
development sets me fidgeting to be back amid the whispers of the clubs
and the rumours of Fleet Street. Unless I could wholly discount the wild
words of Lucien and his friends, the peace negotiations would develop
very differently from my expectations; and, whether I could discount him
or not, I was realizing for the first time how far we had travelled
since the day when we talked of fundamental understanding and a common
effort for a common cause.
“Do you mean you’re tired of this place?,” asked Barbara with a smile.
“I was only feeling we were rather out of things,” I answered. Then, as
the “dago-parliament” collected round the cocktail-table for a morning
session, I caught Hornbeck’s eye. “Are people in England talking the
same kind of criminal nonsense?”
“Well, the House is not sitting,” he summed up judicially. “On the other
hand, there’s a general election raging. What you lose on the swings,
you make on the roundabouts.”
“If you _want_ to go back . . .,” Barbara was beginning with a sigh,
when my mother came on to the verandah with a cable in her hand.
It was from my uncle Bertrand: if we had a bed to spare, might he occupy
it? Otherwise, would we engage a room for him at the Regina? He must see
me at once. A letter was following; but, if we did not know already, he
had lost his seat.
In so far as any one moment can be separated from all that goes before
and linked with all that follows after, I suppose this moment should be
called decisive. Two minutes before, my wife had shewn me that she
wished to remain abroad; from this moment hung the chain that drew us
back to London. Twenty-four hours earlier I had been bandying academic
crusades with O’Rane; forty-eight hours later I forsook my own crusade
and extricated myself from his in order to join my uncle’s.
“Bertrand _beaten_?,” I cried. “That’s been a safe radical seat for
fifty years!”
“Where are the English papers?,” O’Rane asked.
“It must have been an odd election if _he_ couldn’t get in,” said
Hornbeck.
Thanks to our isolation, I think we were all taken equally by surprise.
As I read out the strength of the new parties, our tranquil garden
became like a stricken field the day after battle. For a time we tried
to count the dead; then we found it simpler to hunt for the living.
“Runciman’s gone!,” I cried. “McKenna’s gone . . .” Then the tragedy
changed to farce. “_Asquith’s_ gone!”
Laurence caught the paper from my hand:
“Coalition-liberal . . . Coalition-liberal . . . Coalition-unionist.”
. . .
“The old liberal party’s dead!,” I exclaimed. “There’s a handful of
independents.” . . .
“Ireland, except in the north, has gone solid for Sinn Fein,” Hornbeck
read out over my shoulder.
“Labour will be the biggest single party in the House,” said Laurence.
“You were asking if people in England were talking the same kind of
rot,” Hornbeck reminded me.
Then we sat silent as he pieced together this amazing election and
rehearsed the battle-cries on which it had been won. As he read, I saw
O’Rane rising slowly and facing north with one hand outstretched for an
instant towards the bleeding and exhausted world on the far side of our
sheltering mountains: from Denmark to Italy, from Ireland to Siberia,
two continents were still fighting for life because one man, nearly five
years before, had flung bombs at another.
“It’ll take years to undo this,” he muttered.
Hornbeck read remorselessly on.
“The Germans themselves couldn’t improve on it,” he commented at the
end.
“But _we_ can! We _must_!,” O’Rane cried. “In Heaven’s name . . . We
went into this to secure the rights of small nations to a free
existence; no one seems to care whether the big nations have a free
existence or not! Could France and England follow out their destinies in
the days when we lived under the shadow of this war? Can they do it now,
when Europe is being sown with dragon’s teeth?”
None answered him; but, as I waded later through the rhetoric of the
election, I felt something of the helplessness that came over me four
and a half years earlier, when one telegram after another shewed us that
peace was slipping momentarily farther from our reach. The old
dispensation could not avert war and could not make war; was this the
third panel of my triptych and should we have to admit that the old
dispensation could not make peace?
We should all of us, I suppose, have been less thrown off our balance,
if we had been given the least warning how the election was being
conducted. Writing four years afterwards, I seem to be claiming an
exceptional wisdom for our criticism at this time: section by section,
the electorate that backed the 1918 coalition has withdrawn its support,
though my old liberal colleagues made no sign of protest at the time.
Little by little, the government itself swallowed its own rash words.
The wildest fire-eater says now what Hornbeck and Laurence, O’Rane and
I—a sufficiently heterogeneous group!—were saying in the last days of
December four years ago. Our views were an accident of geography, for we
were living in a political vacuum; an accident of history, too, for in
our serious moments we based our expectations on the settlement of
Vienna, believing that we in our generation were neither less
magnanimous nor more insane than the contemporaries of Castlereagh.
“If this is to be the atmosphere of the peace conference . . .” Hornbeck
muttered.
“These,” I reminded O’Rane, “are the people you’re going to educate up
to a civic conscience.”
“I must be getting back to London,” was all he would answer.
I was reminded irresistibly of a similar party, similarly dispersing in
the first days of August four and a half years earlier. We had all said
then that we must get back to London; we could none of us have said what
we expected to do there.
“You’ll wait till Bertrand comes,” I begged.
“Yes. I don’t suppose a day or two more or less will make much
difference,” said O’Rane. “After all these years, too . . . It’s a
curious thing, George; we’re both of us Irishmen, both of us men of
peace; and, most of all, we’re reformers. All our working life we’ve
seen the reforms nearest our hearts postponed and postponed by an
eruption in Ireland or by a threat of European war. God forgive me, I
had to stand as a tory and a militarist, because I saw this war coming!
Overboard went all my dreams of making life tolerable for the sons of
Ishmael! And now again!”
I might have added that it was this feeling of futility which kept me
from standing again for parliament when I lost my seat in 1910.
“Until these same sons of Ishmael strike against war,” I answered, “it’s
idle to think of improving their lot.”
“And yet it’s so little I’m asking!,” he sighed. “I only want every man
to have freedom to work . . . and save money . . . and marry . . . and
have children . . . without interfering with his neighbours . . . and
without interference from them. I want him to spend his old age in the
comfort and peace of mind which he has earned. His children must be born
healthy, to work, to save, to marry, to live and die as he has done. If
civilized society can’t give him that . . . And it can’t so long as a
country contains one single prison or workhouse or infirmary or brothel
. . .”
“I suspect there were brothels in the golden age,” I interposed.
O’Rane leant forward and gripped my wrist till I winced with the pain.
“In the golden age,” he answered between his teeth, “there were
hopeless, uncaring cynics, who said that prostitution was the oldest
profession in the world. Slavery was the oldest solution of all labour
problems. Torture was the oldest safeguard of civil authority. The moral
sense of the world must be roused till it sweeps away prostitution and
disease, as it swept away torture and slavery. It was not to keep them
flourishing that we went to war. And we _can’t_ sweep them away while
another war threatens.” . . .
He broke off, as my mother came into the garden with the day’s letters;
and, as I struggled against the impact of my uncle’s fury, I recognized
that I was being assailed by a stronger enthusiast even than O’Rane and
being asked to save by propaganda a world that I thought had already
been saved by war.
4
Bertrand’s descent upon Cannes may be likened to the unheralded arrival
of the headmaster in a form-room that has for some time been left to its
own devices.
“‘_The Theodosian code_’,” Laurence recited virtuously, “‘_was published
in Constantinople on the 15th of February, 438 . . ._’ If Bertrand tries
to find me a job, say I’m suited, thank you.”
The rest of us, for all our feeling that we were drowsing in a
back-water, looked regretfully at the blazing hibiscus-hedge and
guiltily at one another.
“We all ought to be going back,” said Barbara, who—six weeks
before—had never wished to see Dover Cliffs again.
I asked what good we could do; I nearly told her what harm we could not
avoid doing, for Eric Lane had crossed from New York on O’Rane’s boat
and was now in London. Bertrand’s outpouring, however, was beyond the
range of argument.
“_You will find_,” he predicted, “_that the world is entering on a new
glacial age of materialism. We must fight it._”
And his method of fighting it was to resurrect our old paper, to set me
in the old editorial chair, to sweep the country with new propaganda and
to create a new political party in the dining-room of Seymour Street.
Those who have never edited a paper are inclined to compare themselves
with Delane at his most legendary; and the comparison is seldom
favourable to Delane or to _The Times_. Those who have never tried to
influence opinion—as my uncle and I tried in six years’ devoted service
to the Disarmament League—become in their daydreams a rival to Parnell
or Gladstone and convert mass-meetings with a single speech. Hard-won
experience had taught me better, yet this is what Bertrand proposed; and
Barbara, I knew, was seeing herself already as the maker of cabinets and
the adviser of kings.
“_Read your Balzac_,” my uncle recommended in a disastrous postscript.
“_London, for the next few years of your life, will be amazingly like
Paris in the restoration-period . . ._”
It was the postscript, I think, that fired Barbara’s imagination; and,
as I watched her big eyes lighting up, I knew that it was empty to ask
if she felt competent to stay a glacial age in its course. For a year or
two before the war, she had occupied a position that, so far as I know,
had never before been accorded in England to an unmarried woman,
certainly to an unmarried woman of twenty. Raised above ordinary laws by
her utter fearlessness, she had imposed a law of her own, in dress and
manners, speech and thought, upon the greater part of her generation. As
a child, Barbara has often told me, she saw that her personality would
be bled white by her father’s. In Ottawa, in Simla and in London her
wings beat unceasingly against the political, the religious and the
social bars of the Crawleigh cage. Then she asserted herself; and, ten
years later, she was known by sight wherever an illustrated paper
penetrated; the first colonial contingents demanded to see Westminster
Abbey and Lady Barbara Neave; and, had she ever paused, she might have
seen herself becoming a legend in her own lifetime, as Bernhardt—on
vastly more bizarre lines—became the heroine of the ‘Sarah myth’ in
France.
I had my answer to the question which I had asked myself on Armistice
Day, when she gazed into the fire for a picture of what her own new life
was to be. London, in the restoration-period, was marked out for her
empire.
When my uncle arrived, his mood was made apparent by the sombre opening
statement that nations got the governments they deserved. He added, with
fine public spirit, that the worst result of the election was the lack
of an effective opposition. Then less impersonal feelings broke through:
he charged ministers with treating the fourteen points as ‘a scrap of
paper’ and recommended a strait-waistcoat for all who escaped the
lamp-post. Sitting in a half-circle round his chair, with Lucien’s
international parliament huddled on our fringe, we were castigated with
a fury that would have been better deserved if we had in fact uttered
the vain things with which we were charged: _we_ had promised that there
should be no punitive damages and now _we_ were threatening to squeeze
Germany like an orange; _we_ were pledged to try the kaiser, if not to
execute him without trial; _we_ were to restore our trade by destroying
our best customer.
“If I’d asked for the kaiser’s head on a charger,” Bertrand thundered,
“you’d have promised me _two_ heads on _two_ chargers.”
When the first fury had abated, Lucien fanned it to life by a reference
to the peace of Brest-Litovsk, demanding why Germany should be treated
more tenderly in defeat than she had treated others in victory.
“If England had been _invaded_ . . .” he went on with a kindling eye.
“The mistake your prime minister made was that he didn’t say enough.”
“You should have thought of all that before you agreed to the
armistice,” Bertrand retorted.
“Well, say, the terms of the armistice . . .” began Clifford van Oss.
I have no doubt he was going to say that, if the French quoted one set
of undertakings against us, then America, which had drawn the terms,
would speedily quote another. My uncle, however, who detested what he
called “the American habit of making speeches instead of conversing”,
broke in with a speech of his own:
“Not that it matters whether he said too little or too much! The
speeches have served their turn. I tell you, Lloyd-George is a better
journalist than Northcliffe in knowing what the public will want the day
after to-morrow! _He_ knew that, when the troops came home to find no
job waiting for them, people would forget they’d ever called him ‘the
man who won the war’. Before they forgot him for high taxation, high
prices, falling wages and a creeping paralysis of unemployment, he had
to make himself snug. _And he has!_ Five years of autocratic power with
the certainty that something _must_ turn up; five years’ support from
the Curzons and Milners who’d never have seen the back-door of office
without him; five years’ support from the Monds and Greenwoods of the
liberal second-eleven; five years’ support from every man who’s lost a
son, every woman who can’t make both ends meet. You need only promise to
hang the kaiser and make Germany pay: England was worth a general
election.”
Bertrand’s outburst was followed by a long silence; and, as he chewed
his moustache and gathered strength, I fancied that he might be
reflecting how much he had aged since we incubated the Disarmament
League in Princes Gardens and hatched _Peace_ out of a grimy office in
Bouverie Street.
“You give this lot five years, sir?,” asked O’Rane.
“Unless they blunder into a new war before then,” Bertrand answered; “or
unless we can make an opposition strong enough to break them.”
As he swung round on me, I pointed out that he was forming an opposition
before he had anything tangible to oppose.
“We must _shape_ the peace!,” he cried. “I give you till to-night to
make up your mind! If you desert me, George, I shall fight
single-handed. And I’m getting too old for that. Where’s Barbara? I must
explain what’s expected of her.”
I capitulated without even taking my hours of grace. When Bertrand
stumped indoors, I knew he was going to depict a shattered and mutinous
army of liberals rallying to our exhortations and reconciled by
Barbara’s diplomacy. I knew, further, that, outside the pages of a
woman’s novel, politics never had been so theatrically arranged. Lord
Crawleigh might dine with his daughter, but he would never vote with his
son-in-law. Frank Jellaby and the independent liberals might, if we
caught them unawares, maintain a civil front to the coalition-liberals,
but they would never serve in the same administration as the men whom
they charged with stabbing them in the back. None of this, however, was
likely to influence Barbara in her present mood of exaltation.
“Liberalism,” said my uncle in one of his fine, vague phrases, “is
greater than the liberal party.”
“In the present state of the liberal party,” I answered, “that would not
be difficult. But you don’t _believe_ you’re going to make a new party
of any kind.”
Bertrand shook his head mournfully and sat with the far-away expression
of an old and tired man who had sampled in his time the liberalism of
Mazzini and Lincoln, Bright and Cobden, Bradlaugh and Chamberlain,
Gladstone and Asquith.
“If we can bring liberalism back to life,” he sighed, “a party will form
without our help: all we need is a rallying-point. I mean something
bigger than electoral reform and tariff squabbles, George: I mean a
liberal spirit in politics. At the beginning, I should have called this
a liberal war. When Wilson aimed at a peace that should leave nobody too
strong, nobody too much broken, I called that a liberal spirit. I wrote
to you about the glacial age of materialism, because a liberal spirit is
the only thing that can melt it. Every individual, every country will
fight for its own hand: it’s instinctive, like food-hoarding in 1914.
Does Lucien care if Russia’s starving? Does van Oss care if England’s
crippled with debt? Does any one care if the majority get less than the
best out of life? Devil take the hindmost! That’s the spirit we have to
fight.”
“But can it be done with a sixpenny review?,” I asked.
5
When our other guests had left us, Bertrand, Barbara and I set ourselves
to collect our headquarters staff.
“Old men,” boomed my uncle oracularly, “make wars; and young men fight
them. We must be surrounded by the young men.”
He then sat back, in the attitude which had become characteristic of him
since his stroke, with his hairy, gnarled hands clasped over the ivory
knob of his stick. I saw Barbara’s dark eyes shining as she hurried
indoors and returned to the verandah with a pencil and paper. In her
absence, Bertrand sought to seduce me by describing my room at the
office and hinting at the furniture which he proposed to transfer from
Princes Gardens. He resented my criticism that we were setting out to
convert the world with six dubious Sheraton chairs and less than six
more than dubious phrases; but, as we drafted our programme, I became
ever more gloomily convinced that we were losing sight of the essentials
in a wanton outburst of ornamentation. My excellent and unpractical
colleagues agreed that we could have a delicious meal sent in from the
Greyfriars Tavern for the editorial dinners; Barbara fought gamely for a
weekly cartoon; Bertrand informed us, with an air of originality, that
the youth of the nation were the trustees of posterity; and no one said
a word about our gospel or our prophets.
“All the conditions are new,” my uncle reminded me at short intervals.
“We need new men, new methods. A new spirit . . .”
And, while he coined phrases and Barbara designed our front page, I
thought over the young men whom I had met when I was working at the
Admiralty. Spence-Atkins and Jefferson Wright were still on Hornbeck’s
“live register” of unemployed; and I invited them to take charge of our
foreign policy and economics. That their names were unknown seemed a
recommendation to Bertrand, who exclaimed in high glee:
“New men! To catch the other new men!”
On that, I presented him with a cynical jack-of-all-trades whom Hornbeck
had engaged for his experience in the deeper waters of undetected
roguery. I have no proof that Triskett’s hands were soiled, though a man
whose friends included the scamps of every race and country must have
lived under constant temptation to blackmail. I did not propose to give
him free scope in what he wrote; but I thought that his curious
information might sometimes illuminate an obscure motive.
“A new man to catch the other new men,” Bertrand repeated.
“A thief to catch a thief,” I answered; “but, if it’s youth you want,
these men are all under thirty-five.”
The average was reduced further when, at Barbara’s suggestion, I invited
a novelist of thirty, a poet of twenty-five and a composer of nineteen
to take our artistic pages under their protection. They were all, she
told me, touched with genius. I was also becoming reckless.
“And now,” said Bertrand, “can you set them to work in three months’
time? You’ll want that to get in touch with new conditions. You must
study life in the marketplace, George. Mass-feeling. The great movement
of men. . . . We’ll have our first editorial dinner somewhere about the
end of March.”
“I should have it,” I suggested, “on the first of April.”
When my uncle returned a few weeks later, we returned with him; and,
while Barbara made our house ready for party-meetings and drawing-room
conclaves, I carried the dubious Sheraton chairs to Fetter Lane and
passed from the Eclectic Club to my uncle’s study in Princes Gardens, in
leisurely pursuit of the great movement of men.
I doubt if I have at any time felt more out of my element. I could
understand O’Rane’s contention that, for all they won from civilization,
the vast majority of mankind would be no worse off by taking to the
hills and woods as bandits. I was prepared to work quite reasonably hard
for my rooted faith that, if this vast majority was to be saved, it must
be saved by its own efforts. I could sympathize with the proselytes to
the League of Nations, though I placed no reliance in a league that did
not make disarmament its first condition of membership. What I wholly
failed to grasp was my uncle’s objective in taking an expensive office,
exhuming our old manager from his retirement and entering the name of
our paper once more at Stationer’s Hall.
London had never, in all my experience, been so little interested in
politics.
“What’s been happening?,” Sam Dainton echoed when I took Barbara to dine
with his parents. “Well, I’ve awarded myself the order of the
bowler-hat; and I had the hell of a time in Paris after I left you; and
now I’m thinking how I can make a bit of money.”
“Same here,” added John Gaymer. “If you come across anything, George
. . .”
“Oh, the family first,” Laurence interrupted. “_Dear_ Cousin George
. . .”
The conversation at most dinner-parties in these weeks seemed to run on
ways and means. Seizing on the jargon of the times at a moment when
every one else was abandoning it, Lady Dainton described herself
facetiously as “one of the new poor” and denounced every more fortunate
neighbour as a “profiteer”, though I could not see that her novel
poverty compelled her to retrenchment nor that her scorn for profiteers
prevented Sir Roger’s trying to sell Crowley Court, at three times what
he gave for it, to one of “the new rich”. In place of retrenchment I
found a bewildering blend of ingenuity, industry and blackmail on the
part of those who insisted on a life of pleasure and could find no one
to finance it for them. Day after day, Barbara was dragged to new shops,
where her friends sold her hats at exorbitant prices. Other friends
offered to decorate our house. Others, again, begged me to open a
“social” column in _Peace_ and to put them in charge of it.
“You can’t expect people to take much interest in public affairs,” Lady
Dainton said to me at this first dinner. “There are _so_ many other
things! These children”—she looked benevolently round the table at the
girls she had collected for the approval of her necessitous son—“they
don’t know what society _was_ before the war. They’ve none of them even
been presented, so you can imagine the flutter they’re in. Their first
season!”
“I shouldn’t have thought any one had the money to make much of a
season,” I objected, with a cast back to her late confession of
universal ruin.
“The war has only transferred it from one pocket to another,” she
assured me.
This dark saying was made plain in these first unsettled days before the
rebirth of our paper, when I drifted about London, analysing the
atmosphere of the armistice. Less diplomatically, Lady Dainton might
have said that, if the natives had too little money, the foreigners had
too much; and, without a trace of diplomacy, a number of my
acquaintances seemed to be coaxing it back from the new pockets to the
old. With my own ears I heard the Duchess of Ross demanding a list of
the Americans she could advantageously invite to her house. I listened
with amusement as Clifford van Oss tried to explain politely that the
people on whom she fawned were not received in New York. And I watched
Sir Adolf Erckmann being made a test case for the date at which a
wealthy man with a German name could be received by his less wealthy
friends.
“The great movement of men isn’t carrying me anywhere in particular,” I
confessed to Bertrand as the day of our first issue drew near. “I’ve met
a number of spongers, lately, and a greater number of snobs. Which are
the more to be pitied . . .”
“That’s only a phase,” my uncle answered. “London’s only a part of
England; these people are only a part of London. While you were a boy,
you must have seen the Rand Jews agonizing to fill their houses; and you
saw the ‘new poor’ of the Harcourt death duties taking all they could
get.”
“And we saw the result in the last years before the war,” I said, as Sir
Adolf Erckmann shambled out of earshot. Could we give rein to our racial
prejudices, I never knew whether I would sooner lynch him or the girls,
like Sonia Dainton, who in those days had endured his odious
familiarities for the sake of a string-quartet, a champagne supper and a
free drive home in an Erckmann car. “A whole generation grew up in the
belief that man had a natural right to be amused at some one else’s
expense.”
“You’d have found the same thing in Rome and Nineveh,” said Bertrand.
“Whenever a conspicuous social position is divorced from the means to
keep it up . . . _That’s_ not a thing to notice. I told you to study the
movement of men because one class is being squeezed out of existence. It
may last my time, but it won’t last yours. It was never a big class, but
in some ways it was the best. Now the sons have been killed; and the
parents are crippled with taxation. Who’s coming to take their place,
George? That’s the riddle for boys like you; and it’s to the newcomers
we must appeal. . . . Is everything ready for our first number?”
“As ready as it can be,” I answered, “without a principle, a policy or
even a catchword.”
When I went to Fetter Lane for the ceremony of ordering the machinists
to print off, I was glad to see that my colleagues shewed no lack of
enthusiasm. Headed by Bertrand, we marched to the Clock Tower Press and
stood in a half-circle till he should give the sign. Martin Luther,
printing his own bibles, could hardly have been more impressive; and, as
we marched back to toast Bertrand in tepid champagne, the day seemed
pregnant with fate.
“All the same,” I said, as we dispersed, “you’ve none of you suggested a
single reason why any one should want to buy this paper. People are
simply not thinking of politics.”
“They will, when they come out of their fool’s paradise,” answered
Bertrand.
With a prediction so vague I could not contend. Reconstruction, of which
I had heard so much in the last years of the war, appeared to stop short
when private lives and fortunes had been reconstructed. Employment was
good; money was plentiful; trade was booming; and, after we had spent
five million pounds a day without suffering for it, after we had found
work for every one at his own price, it was not wonderful if the laws of
political economy seemed to have been suspended. My brother-in-law
Gervaise was but one of many whom I settled on the permanent wage-sheet
of the country; during the next few days I was to help Sam Dainton into
an engineering firm at Hartlepool and to be told that the directors
could accommodate as many more of the same kind as I chose to send.
It was too good to be true; it was too good to last; but, while it
lasted, I felt we could expect little support for gloomy vaticinations
that were being falsified under our eyes.
CHAPTER FOUR
AFTER THE DELUGE
Death is the end of life; ah, why
Should life all labour be?
Let us alone. Time driveth onward fast,
And in a little while our lips are dumb.
Let us alone. What is it that will last?
All things are taken from us, and become
Portions and parcels of the dreadful Past.
Let us alone. What pleasure can we have
To war with evil? Is there any peace
In ever climbing up the climbing wave?
TENNYSON: _The Lotus-Eaters_.
1
At the end of March, as Bertrand had ordained, our first editorial
dinner took place. It was followed by a reception; and the two events
might have been read, by the optimistic, as an announcement that a new
force was at work in political and social London. Throughout the long
preparations, Barbara told us repeatedly that she had no personal
interest in our organization; but she could not have worked harder if
this had been a battle which she had to win or a lost battle which she
had to retrieve. For the first time since our marriage, she seemed fully
alive; the old love of ascendancy had returned; and I forgot the
futility of my uncle’s crusade in the happiness which it brought to my
wife.
“Well, I wasn’t going to spoil _your_ life, if I could help it,” she
laughed, when I complimented her on her new radiance. “Whatever kind of
mess I’ve made of my own . . .”
“It’s early days to be saying you’ve made a mess of your life,” I told
her.
These first weeks had been less formidable than I had expected. Every
one was too busy with his own concerns to recall the furious
tongue-wagging of the war; and the players in what Barbara counted her
tragedies had obligingly withdrawn from the stage. Jack Waring, the
first of her victims, crossed my path but once in three years: I met him
hurrying out of his tailor’s, and he stopped only long enough to say
that he was breeding blood-stock in the midlands and hardly ever came to
London. Eric Lane, a greater sufferer in a longer tragedy, had
disappeared; I was told that he was in London and I assumed that he must
be at work on a new play. Certainly we did not see him for several
months; and it was only in rare, startling moods of depression that
Barbara seemed to remember him.
“How much you feel depends on how much you put into life,” she
suggested, a little wistfully. “You can make a mess of your life when
you’re a child, if you go the right way about it. _You_ wouldn’t,
because you let other people live your life for you; but I always had to
make mine a great spiritual adventure, a thing to be squeezed dry, not
tasted! At the end I must feel that I’ve taken a wonderful journey and
that every moment of it has been marked by poignant emotions, vivid
experiences. The whole of myself must go into everything.”
“When you see a WET PAINT sign, you must make sure that the paint is
really wet?,” I asked.
“With both hands! Unlike my dear George, who avoids all paint because
some of it is sometimes not quite dry. We’re a strange and wonderful
combination, darling.”
“The actor and the audience.”
“You’re content just to look on?”
“Life is varied enough!,” I said. “And, though I don’t suppose any
period is dull when you know it, I believe our own period is the most
interesting in all history. I believe, too, that we’re in the most
interesting part of the most interesting period. Bertrand will tell you
that our day is over and that the future lies with the new men. I’m
watching.”
2
My uncle’s opinion was endorsed, perhaps naturally, by one who was a new
man himself and who introduced me at this time to some at least of the
other new men. Nearly four years have passed since I began to watch this
battle of old and new; I am watching still, and the battle is undecided.
It was on the day when our paper was reborn that our old
advertisement-manager called in Fetter Lane to prove that we were
working on wrong lines; and, as he knew enough of mob-psychology to make
a fortune out of it, I listened respectfully to the criticism and
studied the critic. Sir Philip Saltash had travelled far since the
August day when Bertrand paid off the staff—Mr. Saltash included—and
brought _Peace_ to an end by shivering the electros of the headings with
a mallet; he was to travel farther before he entered the House of Lords
as Lord Saltash of Bonde, publicity-expert and political wire-puller.
How much farther he will travel is another of the things I am watching.
“If _you_ think people will listen to the _stuff_ your old man’s put in
his _prospectus_,” he began with a force and directness that made me
feel the new men were bringing new manners with them, “you’re making the
mistake of your life. You may be right; every one else may be wrong
. . .”
As he paused with a shrug of contemptuous challenge, I reminded myself
that he was come to offer me publicity for _Peace_ and must therefore
prove that, without publicity, _Peace_ would wilt and die.
“My uncle feels,” I said, “that it’s bad policy to cure one
Alsace-Lorraine by setting up half-a-dozen others. It’s time _some_ one
made a protest against the last election.”
“Even if no one pays any attention to it? Mark you, I can _make_ people
listen,” he added, as he rolled an unlighted cigar from side to side of
his loose mouth; and I tried to recall how many million pounds Saltash
had advertised into war-loans and how many thousand men he had ordered,
from his ubiquitous hoardings, into the army. “That’s my job. _Has_
been, ever since I left you.”
“How would you make people listen to _us_?,” I asked.
Saltash caught up a copy of our first number and turned the pages with
loud slaps of an annihilating hand. I have forgotten his technical
proposals, though I remember that he kindled me with his cleverness the
while he was outraging me with his vulgarity. I have not, however,
forgotten his lyrical flights in describing the place of publicity in
public life. I had met “press-secretaries” and heard of “propaganda
sections” in government departments; I had suspected that certain
ministers were raised or disgraced at the bidding of certain
newspaper-proprietors; but I had not imagined that newspaper-proprietors
themselves struck or spared at the behest of men like Saltash, who in
their turn controlled the flow of information from Whitehall to Fleet
Street.
“It’s a question of spot-light,” Saltash explained; and I learned that,
when Dormer came to grief over food-rationing, it was Saltash’s artful
manipulation of the switches that saved him from public vengeance and
secured him his seat in the cabinet.
“I never _did_ think Dormer was to blame,” I happened to interpose.
“I never let you!,” cried Saltash. “Remember the Flying Corps scandal?
_I_ did that. And you soon forgot about Dormer. I told him from the
first he had only to lie quiet. . . . Later on . . .”
Later on, without prompting, I remembered Dormer’s reappearance.
Discovered by the caricaturists and taken to the heart of the public,
Dormer—with his vast chin and grotesque hat—became a music-hall hero.
“Our Willie” was acclaimed by the gallery with the loyal fervour
accorded in other days to “good old Joe”. The _Snap-Shot_ shewed him
pruning roses with his smiling wife in an “old-world garden” and playing
bumble-puppy with his apple-cheeked children. Finally, in the last days
of a united front against a common foe, his portrait was thrown on the
screen—after those of King Albert and General Joffre, Lord Kitchener
and Mr. Lloyd-George—as the man who had saved England from starvation.
The cost of Dormer’s apotheosis was one baronetcy and the promise of a
peerage when the more squeamish section of the government was better
used to the Saltash idea.
“Spot-light,” repeated the wizard. “People can’t look at more than one
thing at a time. Has it ever occurred to you why the old coalition went
and the new one came? The ginger-group were working that way from the
day Asquith carried conscription for them; they didn’t need him after
that, but the public wasn’t ready for a change. Well, it was my job to
_make_ the public ready. I concentrated opinion against certain men and
never left ’em alone; I concentrated in favour of others. The
Dardanelles. Mesopotamia. Shells. Food. You and I know that the new lot
were tarred with the same brush as the old; but we made the public think
they’d been on another planet when all these messes were made. The old
lot were too quiet; they never hit back.”
“There was a war on,” I reminded him.
“They would never have fallen if they’d shewn fight,” Saltash retorted.
“A man’s power in politics is what he makes others believe it to be.
‘This war is too big for ordinary folk,’ people were saying: ‘we want
supermen.’ Well, we said the new lot _were_ supermen. When there weren’t
enough to go round, we made so much din that office-sweepers seemed like
supermen. We restored confidence; and we frightened the Germans. Now,
you say you’re reviving the old rag and your slogan is to be ‘a
_lasting_ peace’. You’ll be called pro-Boche. You’ll be told you’re
letting the Hun off. I don’t despair, though. The first thing is to out
the present lot; and I can do that on departmental scandals alone. ’Got
all the papers. Then we must prepare a big peace-boost. . . . Lunch with
me and talk it over.”
Though I had nothing to discuss, I went with Saltash because Saltash
hypnotized me to come. All the vitality of young America radiated from
him, though he styled himself a Canadian; his features recalled semitic
South Russia, though he dissembled his love for the Jews; in the ten or
twelve years that I had known him I never detected a trace of breeding,
education or principle; and in the next two years I was never to see him
entirely sober. Until he has his first stroke, however, I count him one
of the six most dangerous men in Europe, for the “yellow” press of every
country is an instrument on which he has played himself into wealth and
power. As a purveyor of publicity, he is the logical conclusion from the
cheap press that came into existence when England was taught,
willy-nilly, to read; and England is imperilled by him, as she is
imperilled by every man who, in his daily work and life, has everything
to gain and nothing to risk.
“_I_ trouble waters,” he explained thickly. “_Other_ fellers do fishing.
No personal axe t’ grind.”
After a champagne luncheon he talked to me of these others. If the war
unified the British Empire, it also brought to England a number of
adventurous spirits who had made existence unsafe for themselves in
their native dominions and whose claim to a hearing depended less on
their political wisdom than on the number of miles they had travelled to
reach Downing Street. The blatant harangues of Mr. Giles to indulgent
imperial conferences were received with so much respect that hysterical
women petitioned to have him included in the war-cabinet; a country with
population and wealth equal to the city of Glasgow ranked in our
councils as a great power.
“_I_ did that,” Saltash confided. “Overseas dominions. Young wolves
claiming place council-rock. People here _crawled_ to him. And the
government didn’t dare snub him.”
“So long,” I said, “as the prophet comes from another country, he has
full honour in ours.”
“He was a cut above some of them,” said Saltash defensively; and I was
told of one great public man who had dodged the dock in Australia to buy
papers in England, of another who operated in London because he was
threatened with a bullet in his brain if he ventured back to Winnipeg.
Though Saltash did not say so, I think they may have fished in the
waters which he troubled.
“The revenges of time!,” I said, as I stood up to go. “This is the
remittance-man come home to roost.”
“A party can’t exist without funds,” said Saltash, beckoning to our
waiter for a third liqueur. “Or without publicity.”
That I was not prepared to contest; and, as a new-born party had to
collect its funds and build up its organization at short notice, I was
not surprised that the rich men surrounding the coalition were more
numerous and less savoury than the sufficiently dubious candidates for
honours whom I had seen haunting the whips’ office during my active
political career. If I was to believe Saltash, however, London had
suddenly become a hunting-ground for the desperadoes of the empire.
These “new men” were unknown names when the war began; soon I heard of
them whenever a political crisis was being engineered. Their ability was
undoubted; their experience had been gained in rough schools; and their
resourcefulness admitted no limit. Supplying the impecunious with money
and the affluent with advice, they acquired knowledge and influence
which they used to acquire more money; and this in turn purchased them a
further power of unseen interference in the direction of our government.
That night, as I sat down to our inaugural dinner, I told Bertrand of my
host at luncheon and of his conversation.
“It’s no new thing,” said my uncle, who in these nights of doubt and
sorrow unmasked an almost irritating resolution to be jolly at all
costs. “The great international financiers have influenced governments
and been influenced by them since banks and governments began.”
Historically, that may have been true. The new thing, as Bertrand
himself might have said, was the character of the new men and the new
methods which they employed.
3
This dinner was to be my last frolic as an irresponsible spectator.
When, as editor and managing-director, I proposed the toast of
“_Peace_”, a vibration from my colleagues’ eagerness troubled my rigid
negations and stirred doubt in my bland assurance. _Was_ Bertrand’s
project so hare-brained as I had thought? I questioned myself in honest
uncertainty as I settled my tie and looked down on the double row of
expectant faces. The old man’s predictions at Cannes were fulfilled as
soon as the conference met and a vague parliament of man reformed as a
quarrelsome committee of ten; the clash between President Wilson’s
fourteen points and Mr. Lloyd-George’s election speeches rang out when
the committee of ten shrank to a camarilla of four; and, if we had ever
doubted the apathy of the British public, our doubt must have evaporated
day by day as the first House of Commons in the new glacial age sat with
hands folded and eyes set jealously on the position each member had
wrested from the war. Twice or thrice in these months a
vigilance-committee of sterner and more unbending new members sent
hectoring telegrams to keep their representatives up to the mark;
President Wilson once ordered his ship to get up steam; and the Duchess
of Ross dined out intermittently on M. Clemenceau’s latest epigram; but
it is substantially true to say that no one in England thought of the
peace-treaty until it was submitted for the approval of parliament.
In my speech I confined myself to congratulating Bertrand on his staff.
At the end, he hoisted himself slowly to his feet and indicated his own
part in our endeavour:
“You young men will have to do the work; but perhaps, from a long
experience, I may be able to advise you. No lasting peace can be founded
on a sense of grievance; and, though the heathen are raging furiously
now, they’ll outgrow that phase. Maybe it’s because I had to keep my
mouth shut during the war, maybe old age is making me more radical. This
is not a party organ, it never was; it was an expression of liberal
spirit, and that’s what it has to be again. We were called hard names
when war broke out; but we had the right vision. Labour still thinks
parochially; toryism still thinks imperially, which is the same thing;
radicalism must think internationally. These fierce local patriotisms
are an unconscionable time a-dying; but England is a bigger conception
than the heptarchy, Europe is a bigger conception than England, the
world is a bigger conception than Europe. We depend too much on our
neighbours to blow them out of existence every few years. That truth has
been vouchsafed to those of us who are at this table; we have to get it
accepted.”
I rang a bell; and we were handed early copies of our first number.
Every man turned avidly to his own contribution. Then Barbara sent for
me to help her receive our guests.
This first of many receptions might have been arranged, I thought, as a
review of all that the war had left us. Barbara stood at the stair-head
in a white shawl of Chinese silk, with flamingoes in flight and a deep
fringe sweeping to the scarlet heels of her white shoes. One shoulder,
miraculously whiter than the shawl, was bare; a high comb of dark
tortoise-shell proclaimed the astonishing fairness of her skin; and in
the soft light of the chandelier her deep-set eyes shone like huge
sapphires. I stopped in stupefaction to realize that this was my wife;
and Barbara, reading my thoughts, coloured softly and pressed my hand.
As our guests came self-consciously up the stairs, I saw one after
another checking in the same bewilderment; and Raymond Stornaway
supplied the image that was eluding me when he exclaimed:
“A wand! A wand! You sweet child, with a wand in your hand you’d be the
fairy queen I fell in love with at my first pantomime, fifty years
before you were born.”
As I had taken little part in sending out the invitations, I have only
an indistinct memory of all who came. A phalanx of perpetually
disapproving relations gave place to a battalion of my old Admiralty
colleagues, headed by Hornbeck; new young diplomats, representing yet
younger, newer states, raised Barbara’s hand ceremoniously to their
lips; _débutantes_ of a generation after mine pressed under the elbows
of old family friends, who blocked the traffic while they retailed
trivial anecdotes of my wife’s or my infancy. Here and there I saw an
actress, whose name in private life always eluded me; time and again I
uttered or received a warning against ‘the world’s worst bore’. I
remember being introduced, after frantic, whispered explanations, to
innumerable authors in tortoise-shell-rimmed spectacles. In my turn, I
remember introducing to Barbara the lost political sheep whom she was to
charm back into their fold.
“I didn’t know there were so many people in the _world_!,” she exclaimed
in one of the few brief lulls.
Raymond Stornaway overheard her and sighed:
“It’s the summer and autumn without the spring.”
As the brief lull ended, my thoughts went back to the morning of
Armistice Day when I paused on my way home from the Admiralty to reckon
how many of my own generation had survived the war. As Robson bent,
straightened himself and turned at the stair-head, I expected at every
moment to hear him calling out “Captain Dainton” or “Lord Loring” or
“Mr. Arden”; had I shut my eyes to their absence, I could have fancied
that we were living in 1914. Now, as then, Crawleigh was so much
engrossed in a political altercation with Bertrand that he walked
stormily into the drawing-room without noticing us; Sam Dainton trotted
up grinning—as usual—and whispering scandal into Violet Loring’s
reluctant ear; Sir Roger, waiting uneasily for his wife, was
mistaken—as usual—for a hired waiter and urged to tell John Gaymer
where he could get his usual drink.
“The last time I did this sort of thing was at my coming-of-age ball,”
Barbara murmured.
“Which you gave for yourself because no one would give it for you?”
“Well, I hated father’s friends; and he hated mine,” she laughed.
“Besides, I’d been in so many scrapes that I _had_ to see whether people
would continue to know me.”
“They all came,” I said.
“Except one. That was the time when Jack Waring proposed to me one day
and quarrelled with me the next,” she explained lightly. “Why he wanted
to marry me when he disapproved of everything I did . . . I invited him
specially.” . . .
“And he wouldn’t come?”
“No. Apparently . . . Eric isn’t coming . . . to-night.”
The announcement fell so tranquilly, it was so long since we had
mentioned Eric Lane’s name that I doubted for a moment if I had heard
her aright.
“You . . . invited him?,” I asked.
“Yes. Sonia and David were dining with him; and I told David to bring
him. You don’t mind? I wanted to be friends. Ah . . .!” The sound was
painfully like a sob; but, when I turned, I saw Barbara smiling eagerly
as the O’Ranes came—unaccompanied—up the stairs. “Take David where he
won’t be trampled on,” she whispered.
I was glad of a moment’s respite after the unintended shock which
Barbara had given me. Eric had left too deep a mark on her spirit to be
quickly forgotten; but I fancied, when her old exuberant joy in life
returned, that she was no longer missing him. An hour before, I had been
stupefied to realize that Barbara was my wife; now I wondered how much
she was my wife. Not all her thoughts were mine; was all her affection?
I was checked, by some question from O’Rane, on the verge of a shameful
jealousy.
“You want to know who’s here?” I looked down on a seething mass of
heads. “It would be easier to say who’s not. Generally speaking, any one
who was too old or too young for the war; and a sprinkling of people
with charmed lives. The summer and winter without the spring, Raymond
calls it.”
“It was a slaughter and a half!,” O’Rane muttered. “If you calculate,
among your own friends, the families who’ve been left without a direct
heir . . .”
“Oh, Bertrand will tell you the old aristocracy is done for. I don’t
know. It weathered the industrial revolution and the Napoleonic wars.”
“The shock was more gradual; there was a greater power of resistance.
Now the big estates are breaking up; and the great masses are becoming
conscious of their strength.”
As I looked down the stairs, Crawleigh and Bertrand were finishing their
altercation. I heard Raymond telling them that it was time for old men
to be in bed; and the phrase reminded me of my meeting with Saltash. In
every sense of the term, they were old men, no longer able to hold their
own against the young vigour of Saltash’s recruits; in any struggle of
class with class, the material ammunition had passed from their hands.
Their prestige was weakening before the pressure of those who excelled
them in everything but length of tradition; and that tradition was now
being cut short.
“I suppose you can call yourself a radical and still believe in the
value of a good strain in breeding,” I said. “That hard-worked creature
‘the historian of the future’ will _have_ to say, I suppose, that the
people of this country carried a heavier burden than any other in the
war? I _think_ he’ll say that, of all our people, those who carried the
heaviest burden were the leaders. In fighting, in directing, in paying
. . . And in being killed: that’s why there are so few of them here
to-night. We shall be the poorer if we lose that strain.”
“We’ll hope there are still enough of them left to carry it on,” said
O’Rane.
“The next few years will be a race; there’ll be a fight against time, to
spread the tradition before the people who maintain it are swallowed
up.”
We talked at random until Sonia came to collect him for another party.
“I’m sorry we couldn’t bring Eric,” I heard him say to Barbara on
leaving. “Some friend of his had a first night; and he’d promised to
look in.”
“Did he say if he was coming on?,” asked Barbara.
“I should think it depends on the time. There was some talk about a
supper-party afterwards.”
“Then I don’t suppose he will,” she answered with the composure of
complete indifference. “Good-night, David. Good-night, Sonia.”
When we were by ourselves, I sent the servants to bed; and we sat for
half-an-hour discussing the party.
“Half-past one,” she sighed at last. “Nobody _can_ be coming now.”
“If any one does,” I said, “he’ll find an excellent doorstep to sit on.
Come to bed, Babs.”
“I must write one letter first. You go on and turn out the lights. If
you see my torch, you might put it on the hall-table.”
I chose a book and went to my room. Only when I was in bed did I
discover that I had brought the wrong book; and, on going downstairs
again, I saw the lights in the hall blazing. Then, as I reached the
drawing-room, I caught sight of Barbara, seated in a high-backed chair
at the stair-head. At first I thought she was asleep; then I saw that
she was staring through the hall to the front door.
“Is anything the matter?” I asked.
“He _can’t_ be coming now,” she answered.
“Who? Eric?”
My earlier whisperings of jealousy were silenced by her utter
forlornness. I did not care whether her thoughts and affection and heart
and soul were his, so long as I could take the look of pain out of her
eyes. I wanted to tell her that I understood and was sorry for her; but
the name had roused her, and she stood up with languid dignity:
“Yes.” . . . She was once again the alert and vigilant hostess of an
hour before. “I thought it would look so terribly rude if he came here
and found no one to receive him. After I’d specially asked him, too,”
she added on a higher note. Then her self-possession returned to her.
“It’s two o’clock. As he hasn’t come now, I suppose . . . he’s not
coming . . . at all.” . . .
4
If “the historian of the future”, whom I have already invoked, have the
microscopic vision and the titanic industry with which his predecessors
credit him, I believe he must find space for a footnote, in brilliant,
to describe our share in forming a critical opposition during the last
four months of the armistice. In the days immediately following the 1918
election, the government had hardly an enemy; in the months after the
peace-treaty was signed, it had hardly a friend. Even before the
_Economic Consequences of the Peace_, even before the mutual
vituperation of the allies, an independent mood of questioning and doubt
succeeded to the hysterical assertions and demands of the mad election.
How far we fostered that mood by means of open propaganda and private
suggestion, how far we made articulate a frame of mind that was already
struggling to express itself, I cannot say; but that the mood became
contagious cannot be challenged. In these first spring days, Barbara’s
circumspect cousin, Lord John Carstairs, avoided our house for fear of
finding himself described as a ‘defeatist’, a friend of the enemy, a
creature of Caillaux or a hireling of Stinnes. By the end of the summer,
an alert opportunist such as Sir Rupert Foreditch sought publicity in
the columns of _Peace_ or opened his campaign by an attack on Seymour
Street because our paper was frank and fearless and because “the
Oakleigh gang”, as we were unflatteringly called, was too important and,
in time, too numerous to be ignored.
On the morrow of the inaugural dinner, Bertrand hunted me out of doors
to study “the great movement of men”, while he plotted with Barbara new
days of keeping me on the run. No reference was made to our pitiful
encounter at the stair-head; but I left a note to say that she was not
to be called, and, when I carried in her breakfast, she looked up—with
the eloquent silence of a dog—to thank me for understanding and to shew
that she too understood. At once, after that, she began to discuss the
party of the night before.
I am not going to pretend that my work for the next three years, though
it left me without an hour, a house or a wife to call my own, was void
of interest: duty compelled me to meet every one, from labour-leaders to
cabinet ministers and from editors to bishops, who might be thought to
influence action or opinion by a hair’s breadth; I had to read the new
books and absorb a mass of papers; I explored different parts of the
country to find what different classes were saying or thinking; and a
New York reporter could not have been quicker to lay hands on the
foreign bankers and diplomats who passed through London. Two or three
dinner-parties were given in each week to these unofficial missionaries;
I met my uncle daily at the Eclectic Club to pool our discoveries in
collective psychology; and on Wednesday nights the staff of _Peace_
assembled on their spurious Sheraton chairs and helped to hammer out a
new message to mankind.
If from time to time I harboured unworthy projects for desertion, my
weakness of purpose must be attributed to natural indolence and perhaps
justifiable impatience. Our progress seemed so lamentably slow; our aims
were so exasperatingly vague! Much as I valued Bertrand’s long
experience, greatly as I admired his flashes of intuition, I dreaded his
descents on Fetter Lane in these first discouraging months. From Sir
Philip Saltash or from the spirit of the age he had caught an itch for
supermen; and I went about my work with a shame-faced consciousness of
inadequacy while my uncle clasped his hands over his stick and boomed
oracularly of novel tendencies and strange expedients.
“We’re becoming precious,” he grunted unamiably at our second number.
“Average opinion; the common touch: you mustn’t neglect that, George. If
you take your friend Dainton as a barometer . . .”
And I was incontinently pricked into the least comfortable of my clubs,
where I tested average feelings as they were represented in the changing
utterances of one well-meaning and uniquely stupid legislator. The first
experiment was made at a time when the successful candidates of the
December election were uneasily hoping to be saved by the firmness and
idealism of President Wilson from the consequences of their less
temperate speeches.
“‘Wilson _le bienvenu_’,” Dainton murmured approvingly, as he laid down
a welcoming number of _Punch_.
A few weeks later, I found the French press excitedly proclaiming that
Germany was being let off too easily. Sir John Woburn demanded with all
the polyphonic energy of the Press Combine why America should be allowed
to deprive the allies of their just reparations; and Dainton assured me
profoundly that the task of winning the war was child’s play compared
with that of winning the peace.
“Damned obstinate fellow, Wilson,” he grumbled. “If he thinks we’re
going to let him throw away all that our gallant boys fought for, he’ll
have a rude awakening.”
Later still, he ceased to speak of the president altogether. Remembering
Limehouse, he could not give implicit trust to the prime minister; but
the gossip that floated from Paris to London convinced him that M.
Clemenceau was the only statesman in Europe and he was content to leave
himself in the hands of a man whose rare, sardonic utterances embodied
the ferocity which Dainton had expressed so much less concisely in his
election speeches. Members of parliament, he told me, had duties nearer
home. Labour menaces were more important than quibbles about frontiers:
coal strikes and railway strikes, both leading through nationalization
and civil war to ruin and the disruption of the empire, were the proper
study of political mankind. Sir Roger no longer spoke of the British
working-man as one of “our gallant boys”; and I was invited to penetrate
the disguise that sheltered a Russian communist. Before I could do
justice to this conception, he had found new duties even nearer to the
hand of a patriot. “Bolshevism” was bad, but it soon ceased, in
Dainton’s eyes, to be quite so bad as “profiteering”; and neither, by
the middle of the summer, was so exasperating nor so tenacious of life
as Irish irreconcilability.
“If I could hold the wretched country under the sea for five minutes!,”
he exploded.
Fed on political catch-words and instructed by safe cartoons, Sir Roger
Dainton, coalition-unionist member for the Crowley Division of
Hampshire, would explain Ireland on alternate days by reference to the
incurable dourness of the north and the ineradicable savagery of the
south. He was the ‘pendulum voter’, the representative of all that is
unstable, ill-informed and irresponsible in public life. For that I was
prepared; for that Bertrand had sent me to study him. I was not
prepared, however, to be accepted as a disciple and an ally. Dining
weekly in Rutland Gate, I wondered whether the little man had ever
before found any one who would listen to him: obviously, pathetically,
he looked forward to our “good pow-wows”; and, when he saw me to the
door and gave me a fresh cigar, still more when he said, “Then, next
Tuesday as usual?”, I felt that I was being sent back to school with a
sovereign in my hand and being invited to Crowley for my next leave-out
day. My embarrassment was increased by a sense of black ingratitude. Sir
Roger always made these meetings “an occasion within the meaning of the
act”, as he called it, and opened his best champagne for me. When
Barbara deserted me on the plea that we wanted to talk business and she
would be in the way, Dainton redoubled his hospitality and became
increasingly confused in speech. As I watched the clock, I would ask
myself how such a man was admitted to the board of a company or
tolerated in parliament; then, in a flash of revelation, I saw him as
the type of all the class on which Sir Philip Saltash exercised the
wiles of his publicity. Saltash was a logical inference from Dainton.
“Now you see why I told you to study him,” Bertrand chuckled, when I
announced that I would resign my editorship before I submitted to
another spell of Dainton’s political conversation.
In despair, I asked how our little office in Fetter Lane was to overtake
and undo the work of Saltash and his forebears of the popular press. To
this, however, my uncle had no answer.
Though he continued to speak of us as a chosen people, our mission of
enlightenment was established on a paying basis by the success of our
literary editors, who made of _Peace_ the most feared and least loved
review in London. As Hancock confined his criticism to novels and
Mattrick to poetry, they could not be charged with rolling their own
logs or obstructing a rival, though I noticed that Mattrick’s sweeping
condemnations stopped short of “Mr. Hancock’s true lyrical genius” and
Hancock’s devastating onslaughts on modern fiction made an exception in
favour of Mr. Mattrick. My conscience became unquiet when books were
sent out for review and I heard Hancock choosing critics who could be
trusted to “sit on this sort of rot”; but, as the “rot” was usually
written by men who seemed to be making a substantial income, I hoped
that they could afford an occasional attack and console themselves with
the knowledge that, in the Penmen’s Club, fifty yards away, a league of
disgruntled novelists and poets was plotting the destruction of “the
Hancock-Mattrick gang”.
“All the same,” Bertrand expostulated after a month or two, “we’re not
running this paper so that one ill-tempered young gentleman can read
what another ill-tempered young gentleman has said about a book he
hasn’t troubled to finish. We’re not in touch yet with opinion. You
don’t mix with enough people, George: it’s all the office, or the club,
or Barbara’s parties.”
“But where am I to find your new men?,” I asked. “You say politics are
no longer manufactured over a week-end party at Woburn. The political
clubs only harbour your Tapers and Tadpoles. Where do men like Saltash
and Wister and Foreditch do their work?”
“They take their pleasure at the Turf and Stage,” Bertrand answered
sourly.
“I’m dining there with the O’Ranes to-night,” I said, as we began to
walk home.
“Then you’ll probably meet them. New men, new meeting-places.” My uncle
laughed mirthlessly. “If Pam or Johnnie Russell . . . It’s the rising
tide of democracy. Agricultural depression and death duties have slowly
strangled the landed classes; their social influence is tottering.
Before the war, Asquith was almost the only prime minister, bar Dizzy,
who wasn’t drawn from them; but the prime ministers of the future will
come from the middle class . . . till they come from labour. And the
stage changes with the actors,” he continued in a deep rumble that
carried from the one side of Fleet Street to the other. “_Circumspice!_
When the masses had been taught to read, Newnes gave them _Tit-Bits_;
Pearson and Harmsworth followed with the cheap daily press; headlines
took the place of news and arguments. The focus shifts to the newspaper
office.”
We were passing a flamboyant, white-and-gold building described as a
“Super Electric Palace de Luxe”; and I asked Bertrand if he thought
pictures were coming to take the place of headlines.
“It’s not the instrument that matters, but the man who handles it,” he
answered. “Does Saltash play on Ll-G. or does Ll-G. play on Saltash?
You’ll know better to-night when you’ve seen the new stage with the new
men on it. Your modern prime minister doesn’t waste his time with
duchesses at Ross House or with dukes at the Carlton. He has suave young
secretaries to feed the press; he has rich friends to provide him
personally with the sinews of war. He has his publicity agent. And, if
he’s wise, he has a chain of intermediaries running through the country,
somebody always knowing somebody who knows somebody else, so that he can
draw any one into his net at a moment’s notice.” As we crossed Waterloo
Place, Bertrand glanced contemptuously at Mr. Gladstone’s old house in
Carlton House Terrace. “There’d be no end to the buzzing if Ll-G. spent
a week-end with Sir John Woburn: he _must_ be trying to collar the Press
combine! But if my Lord Lingfield entertains a few actresses and a
jockey or two and a prize-fighter and if Woburn happens to come along
. . .? That’s how politics are manufactured nowadays; and the Turf and
Stage is the sort of place to see them manufacturing.”
5
Such a preparation was almost inevitably a preparation for
disappointment; but the unexpected end of my first evening at the Turf
and Stage left me no time to define my expectations nor judge whether
they had been fulfilled. As Barbara had a headache, I entered the
resplendent club-room off Hanover Square under Sonia’s protection; and,
for all the scars that the last five years had left, I could have
fancied for a moment that we were back in 1914 when the “Cottage
Cabaret” and “Blue Moon” were tentatively opening their doors. I
observed the same mirrored walls and plush sofas, the same small tables
surrounding the same polished floor, the same high gallery and beaming,
southern band. From the atmosphere I inhaled the same desolating
quality, only to be rendered by the desolating name of “smartness”.
I found no hint, however, that my rigidly standardized neighbours were
powers behind thrones. Apart from a passion for dancing that grew ever
more feverish as youth receded, they were severely domesticated. Men
brought their wives to supper, I was told, their sisters to dinner and
their mothers to luncheon; I should not have been surprised to hear of a
nursery upstairs or to see Gaspard, the incomparable manager, devising
quiet games with the children in their parents’ absence. Most of the men
that night were young and exceedingly prosperous financiers; the rest,
exemplified by Laurence Hunter-Oakleigh and Johnnie Gaymer, had at least
the appearance of prosperity. Born to rule, they had all done well in
the war; they were doing well in the peace; and their women dominated
the situation as shrewdly, as calmly and as confidently as the men. Some
trick of memory sent my thoughts back to the “Duchess of Richmond” ball
at Loring Castle on the eve of the war. I remembered standing in the
hall with Puggy Mayhew, watching the lithe girls and hard-trained men
mounting the stairs with their magnificently English self-possession;
and, though Mayhew filled a grave in Mesopotamia, I could hear again his
tone of startled discovery as he murmured: “There’s nothing to touch
them in any country _I_ know.” . . .
I had been invited to meet a girl who aspired to that career of
mendicancy and private blackmail which is known to women with a friend
in Fleet Street as “freelance journalism”; and, while O’Rane waited in
the hall for the rest of his party, Sonia led me downstairs for a
cocktail.
“I have a standing invitation from Gaspard to come here at his expense,”
she confided. “He considers me rather a draw. And, as Lorrimer is always
good for a dress if I’ll wear it in public, I can usually kill two
guests with one free dinner. If Johnnie Gaymer would only give me one of
his firm’s cars to be seen driving about in, David would get a perfectly
good wife below cost.”
As we descended to a more intimate room, with smaller tables half hidden
by plates of oysters, I suggested that the assistant-almoner of the
Lancing millions could afford to buy his wife a car.
“Then you don’t know David,” she rejoined with a touch of petulance.
“He’s working himself to death; but, if any one tries to pay him for
what he does, he thinks it’s charity. Let’s talk of something else.
You’ve not met this Maitland child? She’s very pretty and very silly, I
should think. Just what I was at her age . . . or at my own, I suppose
you’d say if I gave you a chance. Finished? Then let’s go up,” she
continued with the restlessness that characterized the age or at least
the women of it whom I met that night.
One and all, they sat down and jumped up again like marionettes that
would collapse if their wires slackened; they looked at one page of a
paper and then tossed it away; they clamoured for cigarettes and laid
them aside. Finding that her other guests were not yet arrived, Sonia
hurried into the dining-room, snatched a youth unknown to me from his
protesting party and danced with him till a voice, peevish with hunger,
cried: “Bertie, you little beast, come back and order dinner.” She then
attached herself precariously to another party, stole some one else’s
portion of caviare and rejoined us in the hall with her booty.
O’Rane, I thought, was looking ill and overworked.
“Stornaway’s gone down with pneumonia,” he explained; “so I’ve had all
his work to do. It’s a bigger thing than I contemplated. I wonder . . .
I wonder very much . . .”
“Whether you can carry out the schemes we discussed at Cannes?,” I
asked.
“No! Whether we’ve any place in our present civilization for these
colossal fortunes . . . Ah, that’s Ivy’s voice. Come and be introduced.”
I have never known for certain who constituted our party that night.
Four of us met in the hall; but we mislaid Sonia as we went to our
table; and John Gaymer invited himself to join us until his own friends
arrived. Between the dances, some twenty to forty people surged into our
corner; during them, I was usually left with one compassionate
neighbour. As in a dream, I talked to O’Rane with grave absorption about
shell-shock treatment; then I listened as Sam Dainton was convinced
against his will that he had spent the previous night in the hall of his
hotel, because he could not remember his bedroom number nor his name;
then Sonia plunged me in a morass of domestic finance, demanding how any
one could keep herself, her husband and child on the pittance which
David allowed her.
“And now I’m going to have another,” she added, as the saxophone uttered
a warning bleat.
“Dance?,” I asked.
“No, baby, of course. . . . Do knock some sense into David’s head. . . .
Good-bye-ee.”
As she slipped away, I found myself alone with a pretty little dark-eyed
girl, precocious and unbalanced, whom I remembered with difficulty as
Ivy Maitland; and for another five minutes we talked gravely of work and
life and careers for women. Ivy must have been younger by several years
than any other woman in the club; and in that setting she seemed a human
note of interrogation, scored by the present on the threshold of the
future. She also seemed sadly out of place. Her friends were too old for
her, most of them were married, some were living apart from their wives
and others were not living far enough apart from the wives of other men.
At the end of five minutes, forgetting her concern for a career, she
darted off to dance with John Gaymer; and her place was taken by Sam
Dainton, lately returned from Paris and full of gossip about the
conference. The unruffled Gaspard conjured one more chair to our
ever-lengthening table; and a basket of plover’s eggs for Sam appeared
simultaneously with O’Rane’s chicken and my savoury, while heated
revellers lolled over chair-backs with coffee and cigarettes. A warning
of indigestion assailed me as I changed my place for the fourth time;
intellectual dyspepsia had prostrated me from the moment when these
five-minute conversational turns began.
“You look a bit out of the picture, old son,” Sam told me candidly.
“I’m a spectator,” I said. “My uncle feels that I should study the great
movement of men.” . . .
“Paris is the spot for that,” he chuckled, with his mouth full. “They
call it a peace conference, but I should say it was a full-dress parade
for the next war.” . . .
He broke off as Sonia danced up with shining eyes to whisper her
discovery that one of our neighbours had married a second husband in the
premature belief that the first had been killed. By the time she had
done, Sam had finished his plover’s eggs and was in the thick of a
discussion with my cousin Laurie, which was to enrich them both if they
could only find an out-of-work capitalist to launch them. Ivy concluded
an audible disagreement with Gaymer, who I thought was more sodden than
his wont, and dragged me headlong into a conversation that seemed to
begin as startling indecency and cooled to the temperate obscurity of
psychoanalysis.
“You should read Freud,” she told me. “Psychoanalysis explains
everything. You _are_ behind the times.”
From the little knowledge which I had been compelled to acquire in the
hope of understanding the novels and plays of the period, I should have
said that psychoanalysis defiled more than it explained; but I was
chiefly interested to distinguish this night as the first on which the
old reticences between men and women were torn away.
“Not bored, I hope?,” murmured a voice at my elbow, as Ivy flitted away
for the second time.
I turned to see O’Rane sitting huddled with fatigue.
“Bewildered, rather. This . . . this is the generation you’re
undertaking to educate,” I said.
“You must expect some kind of reaction.”
“It’s been going on for six months now. . . . However, I’m more
concerned with the shepherds than with the sheep.”
It was only as the theatres emptied that I appreciated my uncle’s
sardonic wisdom in sending me to study “the great movement of men” in
the Turf and Stage. The government was then represented by Lord
Lingfield, who danced—for exercise rather than pleasure—with Miss Maud
Valance, of the Pall Mall Theatre, and by the Right Honourable Wilmot
Dean, who refrained from dancing on the principle that a man must learn
to walk before he can run and must be in a condition to stand before he
can dance. What weight Mr. Dean and Lord Lingfield contributed to
cabinet councils I am too ignorant to guess; at the Turf and Stage they
demonstrated that ministers, in spite of a nonconformist head, were not
killjoys; and those who did not get many chances of hailing convivial
privy councillors by their Christian names took the opportunity when it
came.
“It’s about twenty-one years since Gladstone died,” I murmured to
O’Rane. “It’s ‘new men, new manners’, with a vengeance.”
In strident conversation with Wilmot Dean, I could hear ‘Blob’ Wister
roaring the latest of his political creeds. For three months he had won
consequence by purchasing in succession the _People’s Tribune_, the _St.
Stephen’s Times_ and the _Daily Echo_. No one knew whence the money had
been collected; no one that I ever met could tell me whence Wister
himself sprang. He burst upon London like Sir Philip Saltash, like
Wilmot Dean, like a third of the new men inside the government and on
its outskirts, in response to the prime minister’s known desire for
business talent. I was still watching the unsteady antics of Lingfield,
when Sir Philip Saltash himself rose with a well-remembered lurch and
bore down on us with the customary unlighted cigar swinging like a
semaphore from the one side of his mouth to the other.
“Come to inspect my bunch?,” he enquired, with a careless nod and a less
careless scrutiny of our liqueurs. Then, as I hesitated for an answer:
“You’re too dam’ superior for these times. When you’ve been in the game
as long as I have . . . Funny thing! The first slogan I ever heard in
the States was that politics was not a job for a gentleman; ten years
later I heard it in Canada; I’ve heard it in Australia; and, from what
I’ve seen of your rag, you’re sighing for the great days of Salisbury
and Pitt and all that lot.”
“I should hardly expect to find them here,” I said.
“They wouldn’t be in a state to come here! Old Pitt was a rare one for
the booze. People don’t change much. You remember the old Limehouse
days? Lloyd-George said that an aristocracy was like old cheese; and the
aristocracy answered that Lloyd-George was a dirty little Welsh
attorney: ‘Oh, how _vulgar_!,’ you cried. Was that worse than your old
Salisbury’s nicknaming Joey Chamberlain ‘Jack Cade’?” He looked round
with a fuddled but tolerant smile, as a miller might look when his wheel
stopped suddenly, at the corner where startling silence had fallen on
the conspiratorial, closely grouped heads of Dean, Wister and Lingfield.
“The war opened up a place in the sun for people who hadn’t been brought
up to your kid-glove ideas of public life.”
The whispering group was joined by Sir Rupert Foreditch, whose chief
claim on his country’s gratitude is that he sacrificed the dilatory
chance of promotion on the staff in order to race home after Neuve
Chapelle and offer himself for a place in the first coalition. It was by
an accident of geography rather than through any lack of zeal that
others were before him; but he and the group that broke the first
war-administration have the comfort of knowing that all decisions at the
Dardanelles were postponed till an embarrassed government could decide
which of their willing swords must be declined.
“Would you say,” I asked, “that there was a touch of the adventurer
about some of them?”
“A man,” enunciated Saltash, “is only an adventurer till he arrives;
then he’s a pioneer. Nobody minds new men when they’re like Asquith.
Nobody minds rich men when they’re like Derby.” . . .
“For one reason, because the Stanleys don’t drift from one country to
another, seeing which they can turn to their own greatest profit.”
Saltash shook his head incredulously:
“Don’t try to pull any stake-in-the-country stuff on me. That’s well
enough for your father-in-law. I sat next to old Crawleigh at a city
dinner last week; and he didn’t know what to make of things. I did. And
I told him. ‘The aristocracy,’ I said, ‘has been swamped by the
middle-classes. Well, if the aristocracy couldn’t keep its end up
against men like Chamberlain and Asquith and Lloyd-George, it was best
out of the way.’ D’you mind if I bring Foreditch over here? He’s just
back from Germany; and I want to know how the land lies there.”
I could not repel such a man at a time when my sole function in the Turf
and Stage was to study the new leaders in our political life. When I
first met Sir Rupert at Oxford, he was an unbending radical; but the
1906 election brought into the world more radical mouths than there was
bread to feed, and, when I took my seat, Foreditch was spaciously
enthroned in the wastes of opposition. As a hired assassin, his tale of
Budget Leaguers’ scalps won him the deputy-leadership of the Die-Hards
when the Parliament Bill came to be fought; and, in the Home Rule
controversy, he preached rebellion in Ulster with a gusto not exceeded
by Mr. Bonar Law, Sir Edward Carson and Mr. F. E. Smith. An incautious
declaration that the kaiser could be trusted to save Ulster from a false
Hanoverian, as William of Orange had saved her from a perfidious Stuart,
kept Foreditch from reaping the reward of his shell-intrigue in 1916;
but, if he missed cabinet rank, he achieved a greater position as the
unofficial plenipotentiary who was always being sent, with the easy
informality introduced by a ‘business’ government, to make overtures and
arrange deals. His ambition, I think, was to play the part of Colonel
House to Mr. Lloyd-George’s President Wilson: in the last years of the
war he was always vanishing mysteriously to Stockholm or Berne; and, two
years after this date, I heard that he was visiting, in disguise, the
leaders of all the parties in Ireland.
“The present condition of Germany . . .,” he began; but, before I could
hear what it was, an unknown woman bustled up to our table and began to
make notes for an article which informed the world two days later (1)
that anybody who was anybody would be found dining at the Turf and
Stage, (2) that “Lucile”—as she confided to her “darling Betty”—had
seen good-looking Bobbie Pentyre dancing with Lady Clackmannan’s girl,
(3) that Lady Barbara Oakleigh—“Babs Neave, as we must still think of
her”—had been at the table next to “Lucile’s” and (4) that her husband
would certainly stand again for parliament when opportunity offered. In
its slangy pertness and familiarity, the style was the woman; and, as
accuracy was less important to the _Daily Picture_ than snappy diction
or a knowing air of intimacy, it would have been idle to correct her
statements or to reprove her manners. No doubt she had a livelihood to
earn; and those who create a demand have to bear as heavy a
responsibility as those who furnish the supply. When I had recovered
from my first exasperation, I felt that the loud-voiced lady was less to
blame than “Blob” Wister, who owned the paper for which she wrote, and
the two million readers (the circulation of the _Daily Picture_ was
certified by an impeccable firm of chartered accountants) who liked to
think of Miss Murchison as “Lady Clackmannan’s girl” and of Lord Pentyre
as “Bobbie”. Those who had no chance of seeing for themselves whether he
was good-looking must have been grateful to “Lucile” for lifting a
corner of the curtain from the world of beauty, rank and fashion.
“Another section of the public you propose to educate,” I told O’Rane.
“And you,” he retorted. “You heard what Sam Dainton said about the state
of Paris. Everybody hating everybody else.” . . .
I looked round to make sure that we were not being overheard. Lucien de
Grammont, I knew, was somewhere in the room; but I fancied that he was
avoiding me.
“That’s only these damned French,” I said. “Instead of thanking us for
pulling them out of the mire, they think _they_ won the war
single-handed and our job is just to foot the bill. Hang it all, Raney,
we spent more money and provided more ammunition than any one else; we
raised about five million men; we stayed on to clear the Germans out of
France when it was all we could do to keep the French in the war at all;
and, when our papers were gushing about the splendid unity, the French
government was making us pay rent for the trenches our men occupied to
defend their miserable country. They’re the meanest hounds on earth.
During the war, one couldn’t say these things . . .”
“Does one do much good by saying them now? The Americans bring pretty
much the same charge against us. You’ve an organization, George, and you
should make it your business to fight the hatred-epidemic.” . . .
He broke off, as the bland Gaspard presented himself at our table with
the announcement that a lady was waiting outside. When I read Yolande
Manisty’s name, I guessed that Raymond Stornaway was worse; when I met
her, I knew—without being told—that he was dead. As I came back to the
blaze and blare of the dining-room, I felt that this was my first
contact with reality that night. The financiers and wire-pullers and
propagandists, the glittering _corps de ballet_, the punctual scribe who
chronicled their movements, all belonged to a world of masquerade. I
cannot say what lesson Bertrand had sent me there to learn; the lesson
which I carried away was a doubt—the first since 1914—of victory.
I drove O’Rane to his house in Westminster and left him to think over
Yolande Manisty’s message. By the terms of her uncle’s will, he had—for
better or for worse—inherited unconditionally an estate of more than
twenty million pounds.
CHAPTER FIVE
THE RED ACCOUNT
_Countess of Montesquiou_:
So much for the Congress!
Only a few blank nobodies remain,
And they seem terror-stricken. . . . Blackly end
Such fair festivities. The red god War
Stalks Europe’s plains anew!
THOMAS HARDY: _The Dynasts._
1
Those who had never before heard of Sir Aylmer Lancing or of Deryk are
no more likely than I am to forget the excitement of the week that
followed Raymond Stornaway’s death. That it lasted no more than a week
was due to the number of competing claims on the public attention; but,
between the Bloomsbury cocaine-prosecution and the Dawlish murder, half
the papers were calling O’Rane’s heritage “romantic” and the other half
“sensational”, while the conversation at every dinner-party that I
attended came by divers ways to the unanimous conclusion that Sonia
would now spend twelve hundred thousand pounds a year on feeding her
friends. Before she had recovered from her first shock, I observed that
she was considering bigger houses in other parts of London; on the
morrow, when I dined—for the last time, as I vowed to myself—in
Rutland Gate, Lady Dainton told me that she had never entertained any
idea of selling Crowley Court; and, when I visited O’Rane to enquire if
he needed help, he shewed me a pile, waist-high, of begging letters.
2
It was my first visit to the offices of the Lancing Trust; and I retain
the memory of a vast, wind-swept barn on the edge of Hampstead Heath,
with an old red-brick cottage and pent-houses of tarred wood attached.
There were a great many box-files, a gigantic set of loose-leaf ledgers,
a fair-sized reference library and a large number of typewriters. On one
wall I recognized the map which Aylmer Lancing used to keep in his study
to remind him of the stages by which his grip had spread over the
earth’s surface. In all other respects, the building might have belonged
to a poor-law relieving-officer; and Sonia, who obviously expected to
find a double row of bankers smoking long cigars at a gleaming mahogany
table, was no less obviously disappointed.
“I came to see if I could help you in any way,” I told O’Rane, who had
rather frightened me the night before by his air of physical exhaustion.
We found him now with one of his secretaries in Raymond Stornaway’s
private office, fidgeting with the will. I learned that the money was to
be spent “for the good of humanity”; and in the construction of that
clause he had already received so much contradictory advice that he had
closed his office to chance callers.
“I didn’t expect Stornaway to die so soon,” was all he would say when I
asked him his plans.
“I doubt if time will make your problem any easier,” I answered, as I
joined Sonia in front of the tattered wall-map.
There, from the centre of what Lancing had bought as a burnt-out
town-site, the Lancing influence spread in extending circles. A name and
date in faded ink marked the advance of his railroads, the acquisition
of his forests and mines, the linking of lake to ocean for the
transportation of his grain. Dotted lines, leading to vague infinity,
shewed where Lancing had splashed out of the union into the Atlantic,
the Pacific and the Gulf of Mexico.
“You must move to a decent office,” Sonia put in. “And we can’t go on at
The Sanctuary if you want to entertain properly. People will expect us
to live up to our position, you know.”
O’Rane smiled grimly as he ushered us compellingly to the door.
“Whether that’s for the good of humanity . . .,” he murmured.
After this single meeting I resolved not to break in on his
contemplation until I was invited. Very soon my attention was to be
claimed by troubles of my own, for I was not satisfied with the state of
Barbara’s mind or body; I, too, wanted to think; and, though I treated
O’Rane to an unsolicited misgiving whenever I remembered his new estate,
I will not pretend that I thought of him much after the feverish seven
days in which every one I met said: “You’ve heard about it, of course?
That’s the sort of thing that _would_ happen to Sonia. What d’you
suppose they’ll do with it?” . . .
It was in these days that the last touches were being given to the great
peace-treaty which was to make an end of war; and, but for that, I
should have handed Bertrand my resignation and taken Barbara abroad.
Until we saw the terms, however, we could not tell how far his gloomy
predictions at Cannes would be fulfilled nor how far any one could undo
the mischief that was reported from Paris. If we could believe a quarter
of all we heard, the butchery for which Sanguszko and Boscarelli
clamoured in Lucien’s verandah-parliament was taking place in one
country after another; as I warned Saltash, three discontented
Alsace-Lorraines were being created for one that was pacified; and the
mood of the December election seemed to return as the public realized
the helplessness of the defeated enemy. Outside the now notorious
“Oakleigh gang” I found few to admit that any country but Germany had
been responsible for the war; and on that foundation each man erected
his own standard of retribution. My father-in-law went the length of
collecting a party at the Eclectic Club to reason with me and to check
the wrong-headed doctrines that poured forth, week after week, from
Fetter Lane.
“You really seem to live in a world of your own,” he explained wearily.
“_I_ don’t hope to convince you; but, if you take a poll of your
friends, on a question like indemnities . . .”
Before he had time to finish or I to answer, John Carstairs put his own
case with alluring brevity:
“The Boche made the war. The Boche must pay for it.”
“What would have happened to our colonies if we’d lost?,” pursued
Crawleigh, who seemed to regard the empire as a dumping-ground for the
viceregally-inclined members of his family. German West Africa was below
his dignity, but he had three sons. “These people mustn’t complain if
they’re served in the same way.”
I recalled and quoted Bertrand’s dictum that no lasting peace could be
established on a sense of grievance.
“I feel no tenderness towards Germany,” I said, “but aren’t we making
another war inevitable?”
“You will make it inevitable,” said Mr. Justice Maitland, “if you let
the last war go unpunished. No one will deny that the Germans broke a
treaty, that they robbed, tortured, violated and murdered, not in the
heat of fighting but as part of a terrorizing campaign ordered from
headquarters. If acts like these go unpunished, every nation will know
that it can take ‘frightfulness’ as its starting-point. Rape and
mutilation will become sanctified usages of war. There will be a
precedent.”
“That’s unanswerable,” I told the judge. “But, if this war proves
anything, it proves that war doesn’t pay. I want to make that the great
contribution of this war to history. If we impose a peace so unendurable
that even war is no worse . . .”
Maitland interrupted me with a smiling head-shake:
“I have to try murderers in the course of my duties. Their state would
be no better than that of their victims, if vendettas were permitted.
You might say truly enough that murder doesn’t pay. I should be sorry to
see the death-penalty abolished on that reasoning.”
“If you could hang every German,” I said, as I left to dress for the
opera, “I might accept your argument. As it is, a punitive peace will
set them thinking of revenge; and, the moment they’re strong enough,
they’ll take it.”
“A good reason for keeping them weak,” said Carstairs, “which—quite
rightly—is all Clemenceau cares about.”
I might have multiplied, almost to infinity, the number of similar
opinions, held by the most dissimilar people. I heard them at the club,
I was inundated by them at my office and I wrestled with them at
Barbara’s parties.
“I wonder whether Bertrand thinks we’re making any headway?,” I asked
that night at dinner, after venting my despondency on my wife.
I am not sure whether she heard me; her only answer was to look at her
watch and to ask which opera was being played.
“_Louise?_” she repeated. “Then we can miss the first two acts. I
suppose you wouldn’t care to go alone?”
“Aren’t you feeling up to it?,” I asked.
Barbara turned her back on me and busied herself with the wad of her
cigarette-holder:
“Oh, I don’t know! Yes, I’m all right! And, anyway, I shan’t do any good
. . . I don’t know what I’m talking about!,” she cried with sudden loss
of control. “I’m going to lie down till we start.”
“I’ll take you up,” I said.
“No!,” she answered, with what I can only call a suppressed scream.
Her look and tone took me aback as though she had struck me in the face.
For some weeks I had fancied that her nerves were disordered; but, as I
finished my cigar in solitude, I felt that this night marked a subtle
change in my relations with her. To this day I cannot tell when it
began. We had been married little more than a year; before that, for ten
years, we had been excellent friends. At first I believe she told me
every thought in her heart; and there were times when I wished for both
our sakes that she would think less and say less about what could not be
mended. As though I had put my wish into words, her manner changed at
the armistice: we were to make a new start, she was to forget her love
for Eric Lane; and, after that, an onlooker would have said that she
belonged to me, soul and body. She and I alone knew that, in some way,
we were becoming strangers. Though she was bored with Cannes after the
first week, she never told me; she might be bored with the life of a
political hostess, but loyalty or lack of confidence kept her silent.
She would not admit that she was ill or unhappy; but something now
tortured her beyond bearing.
And I was afraid to ask her. In all that touched her soul, I was a
stranger, an amateur and a bungler. Something of this must have revealed
itself in my expression, for on her return to the dining-room she put
her arms round my neck and told me not to look so worried.
“I’m worried about you,” I said.
“But I swear to you I’ve never felt better in my life! Come on; or we
shall miss the only act worth hearing!”
I followed her, more worried than ever. If I said nothing, I should seem
callous; if I said anything, I might inflame her misery. I knew her too
little for any idea what she wanted of me; and she trusted me too little
to help by a hint. At this rate, she would become every day more
uncommunicative; and each unanswered appeal for understanding would
separate her farther from me.
“If _ever_ there’s anything the matter,” I said, as we got into the car,
“I hope you’ll tell me, Babs.”
“Everything’s _perfect_,” she answered. “A darling house, a darling
husband.” . . . Her voice suddenly lost its false ring of assurance.
“No, the fault’s in _me_ somewhere. There’s something missing. Don’t
let’s talk about it.”
At the unexpected quaver, I caught her fingers in mine; and she brushed
away a tear with the back of my hand. Though no more was said, I felt
that something more ought to have been said and that I was a moral
coward for not saying it. In the silence and darkness of the car, I
wondered whether Barbara was unhappy because she had been given no sign
that she was to bear children. For all I knew, she did not want them or
was afraid; for all I knew, she wanted them and could not bear them and
was afraid to tell me. And we were both afraid to confess our fear.
3
When we reached the opera-house, the second act was over; and, on the
way to our box, we ran the gauntlet of a dozen friends, who invited us
to meals, and of a hundred staring strangers, who turned to their
neighbours and whispered: “There’s Lady Barbara!” with the mingled
triumph and awe which the English display when they recognize any idol
of the illustrated papers.
“One gets used to anything, even the manners of the well-bred,” I
murmured, as we struggled towards the stairs.
“If any one else asks us to lunch, I shall say we’ve given up
eating. . . . Oh, I _must_ speak to Marion! You go on.”
I ploughed slowly into an open space by the entrance to the pit-tier
boxes, then came to an involuntary standstill. Face to face, too near
for either of us to escape, I found Eric Lane smoking a cigarette and
looking over my shoulder to the place where Barbara was talking to Mrs.
Shelley. Unless she had already seen him and was lingering behind till I
had made myself a screen, they must meet in another moment. Eric never
had much colour to lose, but even his lips now seemed bloodless. When
our eyes met, I could not have said which was the more uncomfortable. I
enquired after his father, I believe; and he asked me, as he had been in
Japan at the time of our wedding, to accept his belated good wishes now.
“When are we to have another play?,” I asked.
“This autumn, I hope,” he answered.
“Good for that. Well, Eric, I little thought in the old Phoenix Club
days that we were entertaining a genius unawares.”
“They were g-good days,” he sighed.
Then there was a pause; and the cordiality which old habit had brought
to life wilted. As he glanced in Barbara’s direction, I fancy he was
charging her with making our friendship impossible; this second sight of
her seemed to incapacitate him; and we stood stockishly silent. When she
joined us, there was, indeed, a smile on either side, a high and rather
breathless “Oh, how do you do?” Then we hurried to our box; and Eric
strolled across the hall. His hand was shaking as he tried to relight
his cigarette; and the hollow eyes and cadaverous cheeks seemed ten
years older for the ten seconds’ encounter.
Was it a presentiment of this meeting that had unnerved Barbara? I had
no time to speak before we were surrounded by a new throng. It was her
first appearance at Covent Garden; and from the boxes and stalls we had
opera-glasses trained upon us until I seemed to be looking at a tank of
lobsters; a queue formed outside our door and we were flattened against
the side of the box. The acclamation was not confined within a ring of
our friends: I felt the atmosphere of the whole house warming in the
greatest tribute to personality that I have ever seen.
“I watched you coming in to-night,” Dr. Gaisford told her at the end.
“It was like the sun breaking through. . . . How are you, my dear child?
As you don’t come to see me professionally, I hope that means you’re
well and happy?”
“Everything’s _perfect_,” Barbara cried, with a conviction that had been
lacking when she used the same words earlier. As we settled ourselves in
the car, she added joyously: “How sweet every one is! Marion wants us to
choose a night for dining with her next week. And I’ve committed you to
the Pinto de Vasconcellos the week after. And Bobbie Pentyre wants us to
go to Croxton one week-end. Can you remember all that? And will you
come?”
“Anywhere you like,” I promised. “You seem to have had rather a success
to-night, Babs.”
“It’s a good world! I’ve got back my grip on life. . . . I feel _free_,”
she went on with a note of wonder; and her hand stole shyly into mine as
though we were composing a quarrel: “George dear, I’m sorry to have been
unsatisfactory, sorry to have worried you. I promised on Armistice Day
that I wouldn’t speak of certain people. You can’t help thinking of
them, but since to-night I’m not . . . haunted. _Seeing_ Eric has broken
the spell. . . . I can meet him now. I’m going to. Madame Pinto said he
was coming to her party.”
Remembering Eric’s look of anguish when he caught sight of Barbara, I
felt that the greatest kindness she could shew him would be to prevent
further meetings. It was folly, I thought, for her to invite him to our
first reception, it was madness to expect that he would come; and, if I
said nothing at the time, it was for fear she would imagine that I was
jealous.
“Make things as easy as you can for him,” I recommended.
“We can give him the opportunity of being friends again.”
“And don’t be hurt if he doesn’t take it. Men of that kind, imaginative
and highly-strung . . . In his way, he is a bit of a genius.” . . .
“I gave him that,” she murmured with a pride which I thought ill-timed.
“He had only talent before.”
To judge by appearances, Eric had paid dearly for his goddess’ kiss.
“They feel things more intensely,” I continued, “than dull,
matter-of-fact people like me.”
Barbara made no answer for several minutes; then she looked straight
ahead and asked:
“Wouldn’t you feel it as much if you lost me?”
“I should feel it more than anything in the world.”
“It’s broken Eric. He’ll never be mended. But it wouldn’t break you?”
Faint though the challenge was, I fancied, for the first time in my
life, that Barbara was trying to drag me into a ‘scene’.
“We won’t talk about it,” I said.
“I don’t think anything would break you. And you may take that how you
like.”
The words may have been her tribute to flint-like resolution or her
criticism of wooden insensibility. The way that I decided to take them
was in silence. Barbara hid her face in the great nosegay of carnations
which she always carried, then held them out, like an impulsive child,
for me to smell. As she walked, slender, tall and radiant, into the
house, I felt that this was the day which I had waited fourteen months
to see dawning.
“Yes, I had quite a success,” she murmured to her reflection, when we
paused in front of a mirror halfway up the stairs. “You seem surprised,
George.”
“I don’t know how any one could hope to resist you,” I said. “_I_ never
can.”
The South American dinner to which Barbara had committed me marked our
grudging surrender to a lady whose hospitality was rapidly breaking the
_morale_ of London. Madame Pinto de Vasconcellos, if her ambitions had
been examined before the judgement-seat, must have confessed a
resolution to force free wine, food and tobacco on a larger number of
victims than had fallen to any other Brazilian. Setting out with an
introduction to the Duchess of Ross and a system of snowball
terrorization for every one else, she secured B for her parties by
playing on his fear of hurting A’s feelings.
“She is a stranger to London,” the duchess explained to Lady Crawleigh
in a tone that hid natural exultation under less natural pity. “I should
like to shew her a little hospitality.”
Lady Crawleigh had been caught too often in similar traps to forget
that, while Herrig Castle and Ross House remained unlet, no one was
secure; but, like every one else, she tried to shelter herself behind a
substitute. Madame Pinto, she told Barbara, had heard so much of her
“beautiful daughter”; it would be only a kindness to accept one of her
many invitations.
When I pointed out that the whole English-speaking world had heard so
much of Barbara, my mother-in-law rejoined wistfully that it was a small
thing to ask, that she did not ask much and that she would not have
asked now if she had imagined we should make difficulties. Remembering
the unsteady concordat which was the best that a heretic and a radical
could ever hope to establish with the Crawleighs, I urged Barbara to
capitulate before I knew that Eric Lane was to be our fellow-guest. Had
I now urged her to refuse, Lady Crawleigh would have had a grievance;
and Barbara might have thought that I had a personal interest in
preventing another encounter.
Though the dinner passed off pleasantly enough, it had one wholly
unexpected result which changed the course of history for two or three
of Madame Pinto’s guests. Had we refused this invitation, I might not
have seen John Carstairs for another month; had I not seen him, I should
not have asked him to tell me about his recent tour of the Ross estates
in Connemara; had he not told me, I might have contentedly played my
part of absentee landlord for years to come. Carstairs, however,
succeeded in frightening me with his stories of impending Irish trouble.
The precarious peace, he said, might break down at any moment. As
trustee for his half-witted brother, he was anxious to sell at any
sacrifice and advised me to do the same. Whether I sold or not, I should
be a fool if I did not at least visit an estate which I had neglected
since the Easter rising of 1916.
Our chance conversation was the cause of my first serious disagreement
with Barbara. Before parting with a property that had been in the family
for three hundred years, I told her that we must explore the conditions
of the County Kerry for ourselves. In my suggestion that we should go to
Lake House for Whitsuntide she acquiesced at once, only stipulating that
she should be allowed to stay behind at the last moment if the crossing
threatened to be very rough. Next morning I reserved our sleepers and
arranged with Spence-Atkins to postpone his own holiday and to take
charge of our paper till my return; in the evening she warned me, rather
fretfully, that she might not feel well enough to come. I asked if she
would care for me to send for Gaisford; but, after a night’s rest, she
assured me buoyantly that she was all right. I telegraphed to warn my
agent of our coming; and, when I read out his reply, Barbara exclaimed
with almost hysterical passion that, well or ill, in fine weather or
foul, nothing would induce her to come with me to Ireland.
“Well, do you mind my leaving you alone here?,” I asked, when I had
recovered my breath.
“No. Bobbie Pentyre has arranged his Croxton party for Whitsuntide.”
“But why didn’t you tell me that before? I could have gone another week.
Now I’ve made Spence-Atkins cancel his own plans . . .”
“Oh, you’d better stick to your present arrangement,” she answered.
Then, for some reason that I could not guess, she broke into wild
weeping. “I’m so miserable! I’m mad! I don’t know what I’m saying!
George, I’m sorry I was rude.”
“You weren’t rude,” I assured her.
“I’ve not slept for nights and nights,” she gasped. “You’ve been very
patient with me. Go on being patient, go on loving me! I’m so
miserable.” . . .
This time I determined to be a moral coward no longer:
“But why?”
“Oh, I’ve told you! Because I’m a damned soul. I told you that when you
asked me to marry you.”
“And I told you that I’d make you happy or die in the attempt. There’s
nothing I won’t do . . .”
In her first convulsion of grief, Barbara had allowed me to take her
into my arms; but, as she became more composed, I felt her struggling
gently to be free.
“You really mean that?,” she asked, with her head averted. “If it meant
your honour, your life, your happiness, you’d give all that to see me
happy?” I fancied again that she was challenging me and that, if I made
unguarded reservations, I should be told that I did not love her as Jack
Waring and Eric Lane had loved her. The second, as she believed, was
paying with his life; the first had already paid with his soul. “I don’t
know what I’m saying!” she cried, with her hands pressed to her temples.
“I’m worried . . . No, I won’t see a doctor. You go off as you arranged.
I’ll go to Croxton if I feel in the mood. When you come back, I may be
all right; if not . . .”
She stared distractedly round the room in a way that reminded me of the
sad, mad time when Eric first went out of her life.
“But you _will_ be all right,” I assured her.
“If I’m not, remember you married a lost soul, George; I warned you. I
kill whatever I touch.” . . .
4
It is hardly to be imagined that I carried a light heart to Ireland. And
the state of the country at this time was not of a kind to cure any
private depression. In 1916 I entered Dublin as an academic nationalist,
who had voted year after year with the staunch, self-effacing
Redmondites; I left as a perfervid Sinn Feiner, when the men who had
played with me as boys five-and-twenty years before were shot off their
crazy barricades or done to death by a mockery of legal forms. Then for
the first time, face to face with a people cheated of its promised
independence, I too said that no trust was to be reposed in English
honour and no sane leadership expected from men who believed in English
pledges. Through weary years we liberals had fought constitutionally for
our Home Rule Bill; it was inscribed on the Statute Book in spite of
intrigues and intimidation; but treason triumphed over constitutionalism
on the day when Germany made war in the belief that an Irish guerilla
would keep Great Britain from taking part.
Melancholy memories and uneasy forebodings were my companions on the
familiar road to Holyhead. I was dining with my uncle Bertrand on the
night when the Home Rule Act was suspended; he at least had protested
and perhaps he was a little self-righteous, but in 1916 I was to
remember his grim prediction that from the breach of that undertaking,
which every party in parliament helped to repudiate, would follow
inevitably the discredit of the simpleton nationalists and the rise of
Sinn Fein. The rebellion, which he foretold so accurately, was succeeded
by a repression, which he and every one else knew would continue until
the next rebellion. Sinn Fein, in these first months of the armistice,
was penetrating the country peacefully; but even John Carstairs, who
usually advocated the use of machine-guns and aeroplanes against
political opponents, recognized that there would be war if the present
army of occupation interfered. As yet there were only sporadic outrages
on both sides, followed by reprisals, followed by counter-reprisals. As
always happens, the non-combatants, squeezed by both sides, suffered
most.
On this score, when at last I reached Lake House, I had no personal
complaint to make. My agent told me that certain Sinn Feiners had been
billeted on me and certain stores of food commandeered; my gun-room had
been emptied; but both my cars, after a short period of detention, were
returned with a permit from republican headquarters. This, I believe,
made them liable to seizure by the forces of the crown; but my agent
warned me that any license which recognized the authority of Dublin
Castle would cause the cars to be taken and not restored. And nothing in
Kerry tempted the Castle to send its emissaries so far into hostile
territory. If I abstained from provocative acts or speeches, I should be
left in peace.
“They like you,” my agent was good enough to tell me; “and it’s what
they’re all saying, that you should be living here.”
“Are the tenants paying me any rent?,” I asked.
“They are.”
I drifted away by myself to see how well the house would suit Barbara.
The lake was like a sheet of glass, in a frame of dense green wood,
hanging from the gardens by the red ribands of the fuchsia hedges. Here
and there I saw thin spirals of smoke: it was turf smoke, though I could
not smell it. From Castlemaine, in the west, the air blew soft and salt
from the Atlantic. I cursed the malevolence of man that disturbed such
peace and desecrated such beauty. I cursed, too, the fate that had sent
me to an English school, because there was none good enough in Ireland,
so robbing me of one home without giving me another.
“I’m a married man,” I told my agent, “since last I was here. I don’t
care to bring my wife over till things are more settled.”
That, he assured me regretfully, was what every one said; but I should
be comfortable enough if I did not make trouble. He was himself an
avowed republican, not from any hostility to the king, whom he admired,
nor from devotion to the forms and spirit of republicanism: he wanted
peace; and, whether Sinn Fein would achieve it or not, no other party
had succeeded. Sinn Fein was feared, if not respected; and the English
only remembered Ireland when they were frightened. If Redmond and his
lot had put the fear of God into the English one half as well as the
others, they would be lords and ministers and the rest now, like Mr. Law
and the man who prosecuted Roger Casement. My agent disapproved of Sir
Edward Carson’s politics but admired him as the Irishman who had put
more fear of God into the English than any one since Parnell.
The one sentimental relaxation that this hard-headed, soft-spoken man
allowed himself was that Parnell was still alive and would come back to
lead Ireland.
“If I could find a purchaser . . .” I began.
“An Englishman? The house would be burnt over your honour’s head if the
whisper of it ran round!”
“Then,” I said, “I may as well be getting back to London.”
My agent protested with touching fervour, but I was uneasy at being
separated from Barbara. Two days after I landed at Kingston, she
telegraphed: “_Missing you dreadfully hope you arrived safely and are
coming back immediately all my love bless you_”; and, if her language
seemed still a trifle neurotic, she had almost recovered her
tranquillity by the time she wrote to describe the Whitsuntide party at
Croxton Hall. The week-end had been uneventful; and, though Eric Lane
was in the house, I could not read any embarrassment between the lines
that described their meeting. The nervous excitability, however, of
which I had seen too much evidence in London, betrayed itself once in a
comment on a rumour: “_You remember the Miss Maitland you met with the
O’Ranes? She’s here. A pretty little thing! Obviously in love with Eric.
I’d give anything to see him happily married, but I hope he’s not
serious about this child. She’s too hopelessly young, she’d send him mad
in a week. It’ll be too tragic if he lets another woman make a mess of
his life._” The next day Barbara telegraphed again, telling me once more
how much I was being missed and offering to join me at Lake House.
I returned to London as soon as I had finished my business and was met
at Euston by a shivering form in a scarlet tea-gown and an ermine cloak.
“You crazy child, you’ll give yourself pneumonia!,” I cried as I hurried
her into the car through a double line of smiling porters.
“That’s a pretty way to greet me when I’ve stayed up all night for
you!,” Barbara laughed. “I _am_ glad to see you again, George, though
that wasn’t why I came to meet you. It’s your little friend Ivy
Maitland: she’s gone down suddenly with appendicitis.”
“Well, I’m very sorry, of course . . .” I began.
“Yes, dear, but we must do something about it. You know she was acting
as Eric’s secretary while his own girl had a holiday? Yes! And this
child has collapsed in his flat. Dr. Gaisford’s attending her; and he
says she’s not to be moved on any consideration whatsoever. When I heard
about it last night, I felt we _must_ offer Eric a couple of rooms till
she can return home. Things being as they are, though . . .” Barbara
faltered and turned away. “It’s all such a muddle that I thought I
couldn’t ask him without your permission.”
From her consulting me, I surmised that she doubted the wisdom of her
impulse. From my knowledge of Eric, I imagined he would sleep on the
Embankment before he accepted a bed from us. If Barbara wished to make a
sign of friendship, however, I would not check her.
“You don’t need my permission,” I said. “If you think it will do any
good for us to invite him . . .”
5
We received our answer before the invitation could be sent. At the end
of breakfast, Lady John Carstairs telephoned to say that she had herself
placed her house at Eric’s disposal, but that he preferred to remain in
Ryder Street till the girl was out of danger. On my way to Fetter Lane,
I left some flowers and a card bidding Eric to let us know if we could
be of any service; but we heard nothing till a week later, when O’Rane
telephoned to catch me for five minutes before I went to bed.
“I couldn’t get round before,” he apologized, “and I thought you ought
to know. Poor old Eric! He’s getting all his troubles in a lump. Where’s
Babs? I’m afraid she ought to hear this, too.”
I was under the impression that she had gone to bed half an hour before;
but I heard sounds in the drawing-room, almost as though she had
expected news of Eric and was staying up because it was bad news.
“What’s happened to him now?,” I asked, as we went upstairs.
“He’s been ordered abroad immediately,” O’Rane answered. “California.
Lungs.”
I do not know whether Barbara heard more than the last word; but she
seemed to rise from her chair and cross the room in a single movement.
O’Rane’s expression changed to wonder and then softened to pity as she
caught and gripped his hand. No name had been mentioned in her hearing;
but I think we both realized that he and I and all the world—with one
exception—might be ordered to California for our lungs without striking
an equal terror into her heart. In that moment I knew how far I had
always been from winning her love.
O’Rane, I feel, atoned for want of sight by keenness of hearing. I
fancied that a little of the pity in his expression might be intended
for me.
“Is he . . . dying?,” Barbara whispered.
“Not yet awhile.” O’Rane withdrew his hand to feel for a chair. I
thought I saw his expression changing again, this time hardening
slightly as though to keep the flash-point of her emotions low or,
perhaps, to douse them with a single chilling jet. “He can get all right
if he wants to. You may imagine, he’s rather bowled over at present.” As
he turned to me, I felt that he wanted Barbara to hear his next
announcement without being watched. “It came quite suddenly,” he told
me; “and, but for this, you’d have seen him happily married to Ivy
Maitland.” If Barbara gave any sign of interest, I saw and heard
nothing. O’Rane took time to let his announcement sink in; and I fancied
again that he was tacitly advising her to close her side of an account
which Eric had already closed against her. If she chose to think that he
was still in love with her and that his engagement to Ivy was an act of
despair, no argument would cure her; at least there was now no reason
why this shadow should force its way between us any longer. “It’s rather
a facer,” O’Rane continued, “when you lose your wife and your health on
the same day. I’ve been telling him all evening that no woman in the
world is big enough to spoil a man’s life, but at the moment he’s in the
mood to creep into a corner and die. He’s too good for that. I want you
to see him before he starts, George; and write to him while he’s away.”
Naturally, I promised without hesitation. If Barbara sent a letter of
farewell, she said nothing to me about it; when I told her next day that
I was going to Ryder Street on my way to the office, she nodded
abstractedly but made no suggestion of accompanying me; and, on my
return, she sat like a spirit of tragedy, refusing to ask me the result
of my mission, till I volunteered to tell her.
“By the way, I missed Eric this morning,” I said.
“Oh? Had he gone already?,” she asked.
“The maid said he was not at home,” I answered; and, mercifully for me,
Barbara did not enquire further.
A less diplomatic version would have recounted that, as I hurried round
to Ryder Street, I saw Eric getting out of the taxi in front of me. His
front-door slammed as I was halfway up the stairs; and, when I said
something to the maid about being one of his older friends, I was
informed that Miss Maitland was still seriously ill. Divining that Miss
Maitland could not be occupying all the rooms in the flat, I scribbled a
note in which I begged Eric to see me for two minutes. A verbal message
apprised me that Mr. Lane was engaged; and I went away, more hurt, I
believe, than ever in my life before. Since his interrupted romance with
Ivy, the fellow could bear me no grudge for marrying the woman he had
tried so long to win; our friendship went back, sixteen years, to Oxford
and the dinners of the Phœnix. There were not too many survivors from
those days; and, coming to sympathize, I had seen my sympathy flung back
in my face. I made every allowance for his illness and misery; but I
could not write to him, at least for the present and, when a letter from
him, several months later, hurtled like a flask of vitriol from
California to England, I was too nearly blinded to attempt an answer.
“Will you call again?,” asked Barbara perfunctorily.
“I don’t suppose he wants to be bothered,” I said.
There was a long silence; and Barbara’s shoulders moved in a slight
shrug:
“I don’t suppose he wants to be friends. I tried, when we met at
Croxton; but, when there’s been love, I don’t think you can go back to
friendship.” She looked at me almost guiltily; and for an embarrassed
moment I feared that I was to be drawn into yet one more unwanted
confidence. Then, changing her mind, she walked slowly to the fire and
stood with the dancing flames reflected in her sombre eyes. “I’m . . .
_glad_ he’s going,” she murmured at last. “I’ve not really been myself
since I met him again, whatever I told you about feeling free. When you
wanted me to come with you to Ireland . . . I was mad. I’ll go with you
now, if you like . . . anywhere. We’ve talked so often about a fresh
start: I can make it now. I _do_ want our life to be a success. If
there’s anything I can do . . .”
“You can’t do more than you’re doing at present,” I said.
With a sudden turn, Barbara flung her arms about my neck and hid her
face against my chest.
“Is there nothing more that you want?,” she asked. “Don’t say ‘your
happiness’! I know you want that, darling. Don’t you want anything for
yourself? Don’t you want me to be like other women? Don’t you want me to
have children?”
“Most men want children,” I said, “but women have to bear them.”
“Yes . . . I’ve always wanted children and I’ve always been afraid of
them. I’m still afraid, . . . but I’m going to have one now, George,
. . . for your sake. You’re pleased? Hold me tight, darling, and promise
me one thing. If anything goes wrong . . .”
“But, good God . . .!,” I began.
“It _may_. If anything _does_ go wrong and one of us has to die, promise
you’ll let it be me!”
I was dispensed from answering by Barbara’s sudden surrender to
hysterics. When she was recovered, I put her to bed and sent for
Gaisford; as soon as he allowed her up, I took her to Crawleigh Abbey
and left her to recuperate from something which the doctor described
enigmatically as “a nervous breakdown that didn’t come off”.
“I’ve been expecting this for years,” he told me. “And for years I’ve
felt that she’d be a healthier, happier woman when she had some brats to
look after. This business about Eric Lane must have been a shock to
her.”
“Well, thank Heaven, that’s all over,” I said.
“At last,” Gaisford grunted. “If you’re going down to Crawleigh . . .”
“I shall stay here, except for week-ends, unless I’m sent for,” I
interrupted. “This is going to be a busy time. The peace terms are to be
signed within the next few days.”
“I wonder what kind of mess they’ve been making out there,” Gaisford
mused.
“You’re convinced it _will_ be a mess?”
“My dear George, when two human beings get together, they always make a
big mess,” he answered with more than his usual misanthropy; “and I’ve
known human beings who could make a fair-sized mess with their four
unaided paws.”
6
The peace of Versailles was celebrated in London with thanksgivings by
day and fireworks at night.
“I wonder why,” said Bertrand sadly.
“Lady Dainton wants me to bring you to her party at the Excelsior,” I
said, though, when he repeated: “I wonder why”, it was not easy to find
a convincing answer.
“Are _you_ going?” he asked suspiciously, as though I were revenging
myself on him for my dinners in Rutland Gate.
“Yes,” I answered. “I wonder why myself; but I’m a bachelor at present
and I must dine somewhere.”
“All right,” sighed my uncle; and, on that, we drove to the office and
sat until seven o’clock considering the terms and discussing, with
Spence-Atkins and any one else who drifted in, what the future policy of
our paper was to be.
For several weeks the dearth of news in Fetter Lane and the claims of
outside interests had brought our fragile bantling to the verge of death
by starvation. Ministers, I thought, revealed a shrewd knowledge of
mass-psychology in denying us all news of the conference.
“Kid asks for a thing,” explained Sir Philip Saltash, when I loosed a
grumble in his hearing; “you refuse it; kid screams. Go on refusing it;
kid goes on screaming. Go on refusing still; kid thinks of something
else.”
By July, even the press had almost ceased to scream; parliament had long
been silent; and the country was probably thinking of a prize-fight. My
own record was representative of the vast majority: I went to my office
six days a week, I continued the farce of exploring London to find what
people were thinking, I supported a wall at the parties which my wife
gave to please my uncle; but such intellectual energy as I possessed had
been devoted at one moment to my private affairs in Ireland, at another
to O’Rane’s inheritance and again at another to the havoc which poor
Eric Lane’s return had wrought in my life with Barbara. At our editorial
dinners I was chiefly concerned to see that we had enough readable
matter of any kind to fill twenty-four pages. Like the child in
Saltash’s parable, I was now indifferent; and, when at last the great
secrets which we had screamed to know were flung to us in bulk, we were
mildly bored.
“I warned you at Cannes how it would be,” said Bertrand; then he lapsed
into unhelpful silence.
“You heard what they were saying in Paris?,” asked Spence-Atkins. “‘The
seeds of a great and durable war’.”
“Meanwhile,” I said, “as our first article will be on the treaty . . .?”
We had reached no decision by the time my uncle and I adjourned for
dinner with the Daintons; if seventy men out of London’s seven millions
understood what kind of peace had been made, I do not believe that seven
men of the seventy cared by now whether it was a good peace or a bad.
“Indifference! Indifference!,” Bertrand sighed. “If you compare this
night with the day of the armistice . . . We said ‘never again!’; and we
meant it. Now, though half the world’s still in mourning, we’re racing
along a road that will put the other half in mourning.”
“I suppose you can never repeat your emotions,” I ventured, as I
followed his gaze over the packed restaurant. “The war ended at the
armistice; people say ‘All right! It’s _still_ ended.’”
“And they’re not interested to see whether the present world is built on
quicksand.”
“No one can say _we_ haven’t done our best to warn people,” I said
wearily, as the Daintons came into the lounge.
“No one but a fool would say that any one had paid the slightest
attention to our warnings,” Bertrand rejoined. “The harm’s done now.
That phase is over.”
As we went in to dinner, Lady Dainton told me that the scene was quite
like 1914. From a long and intimate acquaintance with her no less than
from the ring of pleasure in her voice, I realized that this was her
return from exile: for thirty years she had lived and laboured to enter
what she considered the “right” houses and to secure the “right” people
in her own. The war had thrown her out of work; but she could begin
again now. One of her sons had been killed, the other wounded; her
daughter had disappointed the family by marrying O’Rane and shocked it
by running away from him; for the Daintons, who had worked as hard as
any one, it had not been a pleasant or an easy war; and now Lady Dainton
was dismissing it as a regrettable incident, least said, soonest mended.
She was not wanting in affection for her dead son nor for the son who
would be among the first to die if another war came; but she was by now
too inelastic to remodel her daily life, still less to attempt
improvements on the scene of 1914 when there were no ‘profiteers’, no
‘temporary gentlemen’, no six-shilling income-tax, no bloated wages for
insatiable domestic servants.
“You think it will last?,” I enquired.
“I feel sure it will,” she answered. “It’s to _all_ our interests, don’t
you know?, to keep the big houses open, to have plenty of employment,
money circulating. . . . Of course, if the socialists had their way
. . . but I don’t think there’s much socialism in England, George. The
war has thrown people together so much. The agitators simply wouldn’t be
able to make a living if they weren’t paid from abroad. There’s a little
book I must send you on the Jewish peril.” . . .
A new taste for spreading scares was the only change that I could detect
in my hostess. Whereas she had occupied herself before the war by
sitting on endless committees, she reached a larger public now by
sitting at home and inundating her friends with pamphlets on bolshevism,
prohibition, the white-slave traffic, secular education and every other
danger that threatened, day by day, to sap the security of England. Sir
Roger, I fancy, had changed even less. Whereas he had formerly jobbed in
and out of wild-cat industrial securities, he now dabbled in the more
chaotic of the European exchanges. Sonia danced; Sam had left his firm
of contractors in Hartlepool for a vague “agency-business” of his own in
London; Tom Dainton’s widow had married again; and I believe this single
family could have been reproduced, in every detail of history and
circumstance, in almost every town and county throughout Great Britain
and Ireland.
“George not being pessimistic, is he?,” Sir Roger enquired genially, as
we settled into our places.
“I confess I don’t like the outlook,” I said; and for the life of me I
could not imagine how any one enjoyed the prospect of a peace abroad
that was nothing but a silent war. My volatile host had been
sufficiently dissatisfied a few days before when the labour party,
realizing that the government was properly contemptuous of its servile
supporters in the House of Commons, threatened the “direct action” of a
general strike. Dainton knew; and I knew; and every man with a
smattering of economic history knew that the present boom would be
followed by a disastrous slump. “Things seem too good to last.”
The flow of geniality ran suddenly dry.
“You’d be the first to complain if they did,” said Dainton; and his tone
surprised me out of a reply till I noticed his flushed face and watery
eyes. “My friend George has great qualities,” he continued, with
malicious jocularity, to the table at large, “but he’s no great shakes
as a prophet. Before the war he told us there would be no war; when it
came, he said it could never end one way or the other; now that it’s
ended, he says it _must_ start again. Cheerful customer, George.”
I might have reminded him that in the nineties he was prophesying an
inevitable war with Russia, in the nineteen-hundreds with France. I
might have asked him to reconcile the treaty of Versailles with the
fourteen points. I might have enquired whether he would keep his
promises of the December election that the kaiser should be hanged and
the whole cost of the war covered by a German indemnity. In the
interests of a quiet dinner, I said nothing; Dainton, as a political
barometer, was more valuable to me than Dainton as a political
controversialist. I realized for the first time that the class which he
represented would be our most aggressive antagonists when we worked to
secure a sane peace. Thanks to the determination of the French prime
minister and the vacillation of our own, he was enabled to go back
impenitently to the mood of his election address. No longer speaking of
“Wilson, _le bienvenu_”, he had discovered in the president an insidious
agent for strengthening Germany and weakening France. Forgetting his
earlier lip-service to the League of Nations, he paraded comparative
populations and, in my hearing that night, based his hopes of enduring
peace on “bleeding Germany white and keeping her white”.
I had not, for several months, mentioned the inflammatory fourteen
points: had I done so, Dainton might have retorted that President Wilson
had himself departed from them by throwing his lot in with M. Clemenceau
and Mr. Lloyd-George. I did not discuss the equity of the peace terms. I
discussed very little with Dainton; but I tried, as I had been trying
all day, to envisage the new world which circumstances and the efforts
of the peace conference were labouring to bear. Russia was in the grip
of revolution, civil war and famine; Germany, Austria, Hungary and Italy
might follow at any moment; the map of Europe was dotted with strangely
named, new, self-governing republics, alike only in their complete
ignorance of self-government; as we were soon to see, there was no
European police to restrain the Italian who might be inspired to seize
Fiume or the Rumanian who was tempted to march on Buda Pesht; the League
of Nations had been invested with no power; and the world outside
Europe, from India to Egypt and from Ireland to the Philippines, had
been taught the magic word “self-determination” and had realized its
possibilities more vividly than those who coined it.
In an unguarded moment I did ask Dainton whether he imagined that the
Germans could ever pay the indemnity which he had so sternly demanded.
He believed it confidently. How, I asked him; but Dainton told me that
he was not in the mood to split hairs: if they could pay it, they should
(and the allies would remain in occupation till the last penny had been
handed over); if the Hun ruined himself in the attempt, as I seemed to
think likely, it would be something to feel that he would never again
menace the world.
“And if he ruins us too?,” I asked. “Economically, the whole world is
knitted together. If the Russian revolution spreads to Germany?”
“It won’t spread here,” Dainton answered in happy forgetfulness of
earlier speeches against the corrupting influence of those Russian and
German agents who controlled British trades unions. “Our people are too
sensible. You’re very gloomy, George! This won’t do at all. Drink up
that cocktail and let’s begin our dinner.”
As I looked round on the scene of peace, now officially proclaimed, I
reflected that five years, all but a few days, had passed since I
strolled on to the valley-terrace at Chepstow, to smoke a cigarette
between dances; it seemed less than five weeks since Colonel Farwell
walked diffidently out of the darkness to say that, while war had not
yet been declared, it was prudent for all officers to be in touch with
their depots. They had gone, those first, in a spirit of routine
enlivened by adventure; they were followed by men who went in a spirit
of bewilderment clarified by sacrifice. The bewilderment passed; and the
sacrifice turned to resignation. Soon the resignation became fatalism:
every one went because every one else was going; none expected to come
back, and, of those who went first, few were cheated of their
expectation. Now we were celebrating the end of a war that dwarfed the
campaigns of Napoleon to so many intermittent brawls.
I must have spoken the name, for my uncle caught at it eagerly:
“Seventeen-ninety-three, eighteen-fifteen,” he murmured.
“Nineteen-fourteen, nineteen-nineteen. Napoleon ended the middle ages
and changed the map. Have we begun anything, ended anything, changed
anything? We spilt a paint-box over the atlas; but will the colours
stick? Germany and Russia cancel out; the rest of us have to play for
pennies instead of shillings; but have we ended war, have we ended the
nineteenth century, have we done anything but lose a few pawns in the
first moves?”
“We’d won _everything_ at the armistice!,” I exclaimed. “The world was
ready and willing to be disarmed, ready and willing to accept
arbitration in place of war . . .”
“What election-cry has a chance against ‘revenge’?,” Bertrand demanded,
with a glance of contempt towards the end of the table, when Dainton was
arguing heatedly with the wine-waiter. “‘The red account is cast’; and
Germany must pay. You and I know that we shall be the first to suffer.
You and I know that these dolts are laying the foundations of the next
war. You and I know that we have some misty world-vision and that we
must work for a united states of Europe and a brotherhood of man. People
won’t listen to us . . . yet. I shall be dead before you’ve cleared the
first unbelievers out of the temple. _Si monumentum requiris_ . . .
George, George, this is a blacker day in the world’s history than the
fourth of August.”
I have forgotten almost everything about that dinner except the sense of
depression that grew deeper with every advance to gaiety on the part of
my neighbours. We were spared speeches; but at the end our host called
us to our feet for some toast which I did not hear. As I sat down, a
kite’s-tail of coloured paper floated to us from the next table. A giant
bunch of air-balloons was divided among eager hands. Crackers exploded;
and a blare of tin trumpets punctuated the cheeping of wooden whistles.
Perhaps I had spent too many hours that day in discussion that led
nowhere: I suddenly felt that I was not in the mood for such artless
merry-making.
“_Si monumentum requiris_ . . .” Bertrand repeated.
At the table from which that tail of coloured paper had been thrown, I
observed my old ally, Sir Philip Saltash, entertaining a party of
friends. Dainton, in acknowledging a bow, informed us that Saltash had
“done as much as any one to win the war”; and, in examining Saltash’s
guests, I felt that the same tribute could be paid to each. Wilmot Dean,
representing a government of new men and new methods, was resting a
flushed face on the bare shoulder of a beautiful and, I should imagine,
wholly brainless mannequin. Lord Lingfield, whose inclusion in the
cabinet shewed that ministers were not indifferent to rank and lineage,
was deep in conversation with a Balkan millionaire who had been
naturalized in time to become private secretary to the needy holder of a
sinecure. And any one with attention to spare had it unpityingly claimed
by Mr. ‘Blob’ Wister, who had won the war by purchasing papers for the
government.
I did not know the rest. I did not greatly want to know them. If I had
been asked who won the war, I should have named David O’Rane rather than
Wilmot Dean, Lord Loring rather than Lord Lingfield. Saltash’s guests
may have given body and soul to victory; but their material position was
founded on the war. After fine winnowing, we had arrived—in these ‘new
men’—at the governing class of the immediate future: borrowing the name
from ‘Blob’ Wister, they called themselves “realists”, and the
coalitions of 1915 and 1916 had certainly intrigued the “sentimentalist”
in politics to his extinction. Peace was too welcome for me to complain
if it had been ushered in by ministers with more ambition than scruple.
An obsolescent administration may have needed business brains to fit it
for war; a democratic country cannot ignore its press-man and
publicity-agent; and the rich hangers-on of a government only prove that
bricks cannot be made without straw. Of the men who had won the war I
only felt what Bertrand expressed bluntly:
“They look as if they’d made a damned good thing out of it.”
“Seventeen-ninety-three, eighteen-fifteen,” I replied.
“Nineteen-fourteen to nineteen-nineteen. We have changed our rulers.”
“It’s about all we _have_ changed,” Bertrand rejoined.
Then we stood up as a waiter begged leave to push our table away from
the dancing-floor. Sir Roger, unexpectedly on his feet, exhibited
symptoms of impending oratory, which was checked, at the instigation of
Wilmot Dean, by a well-directed crust of bread from the hand of the
mannequin. The band, for the first time in several years, played the
national anthems of all the allies. Our host ordered more champagne and
then called for his bill. Sonia led off the dancing with Lord Lingfield;
and I invented an excuse to go home to bed.
The streets round the hotel were too crowded for driving. I told my
chauffeur to get home as best he could and walked with Bertrand into the
quiet backwaters north of Piccadilly. At the door of Loring House we met
my cousin Violet, who insisted on our going the rest of the way in her
car.
“I’ve missed all the celebrations,” she told us. “I’ve been unveiling
the memorial to Jim at Chepstow.”
“You’ve not missed very much,” I answered. “Are you satisfied with the
memorial?”
“Yes. It’s only a medallion in the chapel; and you can only see it from
the corner where I sit. I have . . . rather a horror of the
war-memorials that are being put up everywhere.”
“They’re the easiest means of forgetting the dead with a good
conscience,” Bertrand suggested.
“But not the only means,” I said, as a dishevelled vagrant steadied
himself against the bonnet of the car and invited us to a confession of
political faith.
Its form consisted of question and answer: “_What’s the matter with
Lloyd-George? ’E’s orl right! And what’s the matter with Winston? ’E’s
orl right. What’s the matter with Beatty?_” . . .
“That fellow is surprisingly like our friend Dainton,” said my uncle.
PART TWO
CHAPTER ONE
THE NAKEDNESS OF THE LAND
“Nothing except a battle lost can be half so
melancholy as a battle won.”
DUKE OF WELLINGTON: _Despatches_.
1
On the day after the peace-treaty had been signed, my uncle sent me to
make a political survey of England. If it brought no benefit to England
or to our paper, it provided me with a pleasant holiday and a welcome
break.
Looking back on my two years’ labours in Fetter Lane, I feel that the
first six months were given to creating an atmosphere. As Bertrand
proclaimed at our inaugural dinner, no lasting peace could be
established on a sense of grievance; and, until the terms of peace were
published, we tried to deflect public attention from crude thoughts of
triumph and cruder hankerings after revenge to a frank desire for mutual
forgiveness and good-will. For twelve months after the treaty was placed
in our hands, we laboured to demonstrate that it was unworkable. And in
the six months during which the peace coalition was tottering to the
fall I received my answer to the old question whether those who could
neither keep peace nor make war were competent to make peace.
“It won’t do,” Bertrand declared summarily, when we met to discuss our
public attitude to the treaty of Versailles. “‘Revision’ must be our
battle-cry. Revision of the treaty.”
I fancy I was expressing what Spence-Atkins and Triskett and all of us
had long felt, when I said:
“Thank God we have a battle-cry at last.”
“It will not be popular,” predicted my uncle, with his usual love for
being in a minority. “The fools who shouted that we were ‘letting the
Hun off’ will shout more than ever that we’re making the treaty ‘a scrap
of paper’. . . . And yet, if we try to enforce it, all central Europe
will go the way of Russia.”
“I’m afraid it will be another unpopular cry,” added Jefferson Wright,
“but it’s time we drew attention to the economic position at home. We’re
pouring out money as though the war were still going on.”
“Our battle-cry, then,” said Bertrand, “must be ‘Produce more and
consume less’.”
“We shall be told we’re trying to enslave labour. And there’ll be no end
to unemployment when the ‘consuming less’ begins.”
“We’re here to tell people the truth, even if it’s an unpleasant truth,”
Bertrand rejoined with stern virtue; and our shorthand-writer looked up
encouragingly to see if this also was to be a battle-cry.
Then, as Wright and Spence-Atkins had been given their orders, he packed
me out of the office to collect material for six articles on _England in
Reconstruction_.
“The great pulse of the people,” he ordained as my objective. “London’s
a hot-house: abnormal.”
2
My last duty, before taking the road, was to attend little Ivy
Maitland’s wedding.
She had wasted no time, I thought, in consoling herself for the loss of
Eric Lane; but the quick decisions and quicker changes of this period
were a conspicuous part of the “abnormality” which my uncle found
devastating London in the first years of peace. We attended the
ceremony, on O’Rane’s entreaty, to support Ivy, who was out of favour
with most of her friends; and we went on to the reception in the hope of
comforting Mr. Justice Maitland, who was deriving a morose satisfaction
from prophesying the inevitable misery which his daughter was laying up
for herself. I seem to possess an irresistible fascination for elderly
bores; and the first chapter in my survey of England might have been
headed: _Maitland on the Decay of Faith and Morals_.
“It would break your heart,” he told me, “if you listened to some of the
stories I have to hear in the Divorce Court. If young people thought
less of themselves and more of their elders . . . The churches have lost
their grip. Young people don’t take us into their confidence.”
“Did they ever,” I asked, “where marriage was concerned?”
The judge pursued his denunciation without a check:
“Headstrong children like Ivy rush into it quite cynically. Their
deepest affections are not engaged, so they have little to fear from
failure; as for the scandal, none of their friends think the worse of
them.”
“It’s a reaction from the cramping discipline of the war,” I answered.
“The people who find their way into the Divorce Court are taking their
revenge, in private lawlessness, for long submission to a machine that
had neither body to be kicked nor soul to be damned.”
If my explanation was heard, it was not answered.
“One woman, my dear Oakleigh,” the judge recalled sombrely and
unseasonably as his daughter drove away for her honeymoon, “actually
asked me—in court—what was to be done with a husband who insulted her
in public: it was not, she explained, as if they had not a home where he
could do that. It’s terrible!”
I agreed; but, as I could suggest no remedy, I took my leave and motored
Barbara to Chepstow for a week before we set our hand on the great pulse
of the people in Scotland. Most of the houses where we stayed had been
closed for five years or turned into hospitals; and, as they opened
their doors, I felt that the interrupted play of 1914 was being resumed
on a stage from which all the old actors had departed. The new avenue at
Loring Castle seemed no taller; if the dogs were older, they were for
the most part the same dogs; but the present marquess was a
four-year-old boy whose father was reported missing some eight-and-forty
hours before he himself came into the world. The terrible emptiness of
those days returned to me when I saw Violet walking by herself along the
valley-terrace, where I had walked with her husband on the last night of
peace.
I wondered how much of Jim Loring’s world would survive into this
child’s manhood. The servant who unpacked for me confided that he was
marking time till he heard of an opening in the colonies. The
house-carpenter, who had married one of the maids, told me that he was
setting up in business with her savings from a munition-works. The
stud-groom engaged me unexpectedly in a discussion of the Pyramids,
which he had visited since last I stayed at Chepstow. At first I thought
that in his blood, too, unrest was stirring; but I discovered later that
the war had only changed his outlook by convincing him of the literal
truth of the Old Testament.
“Moses . . . and them Pharaohs,” he murmured to himself, looking
dreamily towards the junction of Wye and Severn as though it were the
Red Sea waiting to pile up its waters and let the children of Israel
through.
He at least had no desire to roam. Grandfather, father and son, the
family had lived and died in sight of the Castle stables; and he would
have repudiated his king before he defaulted in his allegiance to the
Lorings. In Gallipoli, I gathered, there were frothy, worthless
fellows—the scum of midland factories and the dregs of South Welsh
pits—who were ready enough to criticize their betters. Firebrands and
hot-heads, they maintained that their betters had muddled them into the
war and that, if the politicians and the generals had known their job as
well as the hewers and fitters, the flower of an army would not have
been sent to its death in this way. Their “betters”, according to these
critics, had been found out.
I suggested that the French, in spite of their scientific training, and
the Americans, for all their democratic upbringing had also made
blunders; so, I added, had the Germans; but I was preaching to the
converted. This criticism was the yapping of town-bred curs; and, if
anything exceeded my friend’s devotion to his feudal head, it was his
scorn and hatred for the thieving upstarts of city streets.
“Then you don’t think anything will come of all this talk?,” I asked.
“Not while their lazy bellies are full, sir,” he answered.
How long that would be was one of the problems that Bertrand had sent me
to solve.
“So long as the price of wheat stops where it is,” one of Violet’s
tenant-farmers told me, “I can make a living. Of course, if her ladyship
raises my rent . . .” He complained of the wages that had to be paid
nowadays to old men and boys for a third of the work that was done
before the war. “I can’t reduce them,” he added. “Why, d’you know, sir,
what a pair of good boots costs you in Chepstow to-day?”
I have forgotten the figure; but, when I had occasion to make a few
purchases, the shop-keepers apologized for their charges. The cost of
labour and materials had gone up; but you could not reduce them when
living was so expensive.
“A loaf of bread nowadays . . .” began the bootmaker who was oppressing
the tenant-farmer’s labourer, who was keeping up the price of bread.
Then he muttered something about “middlemen” and “profiteers”.
At the other end of the scale, Violet Loring deferred making any
improvements on the Chepstow estate until her tenants paid a rent
commensurate with the high cost of labour and material. She was a rich
woman, by the standard of gross income; but she had three houses in
England, a palace in Scotland and a derelict barrack in Ireland. The
greater part of her income was derived from coal; and the latest
strike-cloud was being illuminated terrifyingly with lightning-forks
that spelt ‘nationalization’. In one paper I read that some Angevin
king, with more generosity than geography, had granted to Sir Humfrey de
Loringe certain lands that were his by right of seizure alone; the
paper—and I with it—knew of no service by Sir Humfrey to the community
at large that justified this grant in perpetuity; and, if right of
seizure was the basis of the Loring estates in one century, right of
seizure—it was suggested—might be the means of expropriating the
Lorings in another.
“I don’t think there’ll be any confiscation in my time,” said Violet,
“but I have to think of Sandy.”
And her surplus income was therefore being invested in various
securities of various foreign countries, in the hope that all would not
default at the same moment.
As I moved to houses less well endowed than my cousin’s, I found the
uneasiness more marked. The Knightriders, taking early advantage of the
boom in real estate, had sold their house in Raglan to a rich
colliery-proprietor; John Carstairs, when we went to stay with him at
Herrig, said that, after this experimental year, he would have to let
the shooting; and our visit to Philip Hornbeck in Yorkshire had to be
cancelled because his wife had suggested a general reduction of wages
and his servants had left her in a body without notice.
“_Insecurity is the first, universal quality of the times_,” I wrote to
my uncle.
3
At the beginning of the autumn, a railway-strike assailed the country
with partial paralysis.
“_It may help_,” wrote Bertrand from the security of London, “_to bring
people to their senses. They think they’re rich because the
printing-presses keep ’em well supplied with depreciated notes. As
usual, Spence-Atkins prophesies a tremendous slump; and that will be
just as unreal as the boom. If people would think in terms of
commodities and services instead of chattering about money!_
“_But this is not the worst of the trouble. The triple alliance is a
political engine. Direct action is a political method; the reply of
organized labour to a government that represents no one in particular
and organized labour least of all. This is the first protest against the
1918 election and I’ve been torn in pieces by the tory press for asking
what else any sane man could have expected, when the present House never
tries to control ministers._ ‘Vous l’avez voulu, Georges Dandin.’”
Barbara and I turned south on the first day of the strike; and, by the
time we reached Crawleigh Abbey, it was over. In the tone of my
father-in-law, however, I detected a new rancour such as I had not met
since the almost daily strikes and lock-outs before the war. Neave had
been warned for duty; and, as he changed out of uniform, I fancied that
father and son were like a pair of reluctant game-cocks, as difficult to
drag out of a fight as to urge in.
“I regret nothing,” said Crawleigh on the first night, “that shews
labour it can’t hold the country to ransom. If I’d been the prime
minister, though, I’d have recalled every man jack of them to the
colours . . .”
“And if they refused to come?,” I ventured to interrupt.
“After being ordered to mobilize?,” asked Neave with the aloof patience
of a Guards officer in teaching a civilian his A.B.C.
“Yes,” I answered. “In 1914 the regular officer threatened to resign if
he were ordered to put down rebellion in Ulster. That’s never been
quoted, but you may be sure it’s not been forgotten. And if you ever try
to use troops against an industrial strike . . .”
“I should use troops to protect life and property,” Crawleigh
interposed. “A very few days without trains, and the babies in every
city would die for want of milk. One hopes that these drastic steps will
never be necessary. One hopes the lesson’s been taken to heart.”
“I hope so too,” I said; but I knew Crawleigh to be only one of many who
regretted that the strike had not been fought to a finish.
As I began my articles, I noticed sadly that neither he nor Neave,
neither the capitalist press which called our paper “bolshevistic” nor
the labour sheets which damned us with faint, patronizing praise
suggested that strikes and lock-outs ought to be as impossible in a
civilized state as a wheat-corner or that, whoever was to blame and
whoever was punished, the noncombatant majority suffered most.
“Human nature being what it is . . .” began Sir Roger Dainton, with a
fine affectation of political wisdom, when I put this view before him.
I had driven Barbara to luncheon at Crowley Court; and throughout the
meal our host droned of high taxation without considering the capital
loss of a strike.
“Every one’s the poorer for a struggle that has changed nothing and
proved nothing,” I said.
“In time, perhaps, the agitators will see that,” answered Lady Dainton,
who had been expatiating, from the other end of the table, on
class-hatred and proving in alternate sentences that the man Thomas was
responsible for all this unrest and that Mr. Thomas really seemed the
only person who would stand up to these bolshevists.
It was at this time that the secret funds on which labour disturbances
throve were discovered—by her—to come from Irish organizations in
America and Jewish societies in Russia; perhaps her brain was tired, but
in the course of one brief conversation the Indian home-ruler, the
modernist in religion, the eccentric in music and the individualist in
dress were all found to be tainted with “bolshevism”. Their
predecessors, I recalled, had all been anarchists.
“I must send you a little book on _The Soviet Peril_,” promised Lady
Dainton, who at other times and in her untiring search for whipping-boys
had sent me pamphlets on _A Short Way with Profiteers_.
I refrained from commenting on her husband’s incautious boast that he
had increased his capital twenty _per cent._ since 1914.
“Are these agitators actually to be found in England?,” I asked.
Lady Dainton assured me that they were, though neither she nor any one
she knew had actually met one. Not content with fomenting revolution on
earth, they were unseating religion from on high. Communist schools were
springing up to poison youthful minds with secularist literature. So far
as I could make out, she accounted it for enlightenment when her own
friends paraded their scepticism; but, if there had been no god, she
would have invented one for the poorer classes. It was no defence that
the secular propagandist might be a sincere secularist; so long as he
was paid, he stood condemned.
“By the same test,” I asked, “would you call the clergy of the
Established Church or the officers of the Employers’ Defence League
‘paid agitators’?”
“Certainly not! Good gracious, why . . .?” she asked in a voice that
faded into the silence of stupefaction.
The pulse of the Dainton family was the last that I felt before
returning to London and presenting Bertrand with my report on the first
phase of reconstruction. Looking over this review later, I noticed a
_diminuendo_ in the rather robust optimism with which I began. England
was still enjoying superficial plenty; and yet I heard a mutter of
misgiving. Some of the factories were over-producing; finished articles,
of material bought at war prices, had to be sold at post-war prices;
credit became harder to obtain from the banks; and, as the first year of
peace hastened to its close, other people than the Daintons woke to the
unpleasant discovery that income-tax would have to be paid as though the
war were still being waged and that they had for a year, in disregard of
Bertrand’s battle-cries, been producing less and consuming more than
they could afford.
It was a time to draw in horns. Barbara and I had ordered a new car; and
in a spirit of prudence we decided to cancel the order. Sam Dainton—I
hope, without his mother’s knowledge—gave me £300 for my place in the
waiting-list and made another £300 within two days by selling it to one
of the Jews against whom I was so indefatigably warned. After this one
experience of practical finance and of an “agency-business” as conducted
by Sam, I went back to the unassailable heights of theory; and for the
next six months, until other cares claimed my attention, I watched the
unreal boom of 1919 changing to the unreal slump of 1920.
The one was no better justified than the other. While the country
clamoured for houses, the building trade clamoured for work; domestic
servants were not to be procured, and the figures of unemployment rose
steeply. Every other country, I read, was working overtime; and our own
exports threatened to dry up.
“Ever heard of a man called Keynes, George?,” my uncle asked on my
return, tossing me _The Economic Consequences of the Peace_.
“Yes. I sent my copy to your friend Dainton. It was the least I could do
after the literature that his good lady has been pouring in on me.”
“What Keynes preaches from inside knowledge is what I’ve been preaching
to you since the armistice.”
“It’s what our worthy Wright and every other economist would have
preached, if he’d had the figures before him,” I answered. “But have you
seen Keynes’ reception in the press? This country’s still drunk from
armistice night. _People won’t listen._”
And then I told Bertrand of the psychological discovery that impressed
me most in the whole course of my tour. On the minds of men who had
taken part in the war the printed word had ceased to exert its old
spell. In the first recruiting of 1914 the boys in my old Wiltshire
constituency were forbidden to pluck the blackberries by the roadside,
because a mysterious red car had been abroad, before daylight,
sprinkling the hedges with what was believed to be a strong solution of
typhoid germs. The story was printed in the papers and believed because
it was in print. Five years later the same story—with a Russian or a
Sinn Feiner in charge of the car—might have been believed until it was
published; then it would have been relegated to the teeming limbo of
“newspaper lies”. The captain of the Loring yacht, who had served for
most of the war on an auxiliary cruiser, told me of his amazement on
reading that the _Pelion_, which was at that time his home, had been
sunk by a mine in the North Sea; he was less surprised, though more
aggrieved, to read a year later that his ship, which had lately been
sunk by a torpedo in the Irish Channel, was still convoying troopers in
the Mediterranean. He accepted my explanation that the Admiralty was of
malice aforethought misleading the newspaper-readers of England in the
hope of misleading the German intelligence department; but his faith was
shattered beyond repair. If the press lied to him on matters which he
could check from his own experience, how much more easily it would lie
about defeats and casualties, wages and prices!
“And in future,” I told Bertrand, “we have to reckon with this
incredulity in addition to all the apathy that’s been breaking our
hearts.”
“_And_ the misrepresentation,” he sighed with a sensitiveness surprising
in so scarred a fighter to the charge of the Woburn press that he was
selling the French for thirty pieces of German silver.
“There are times,” I said, “when I feel that only the logic of events
will convince people. Aren’t we wasting our energy, Bertrand? I’ve given
the experiment more than six months’ trial; now I want to get away.
Barbara’s going to have a baby.” . . .
I could have piled argument on argument if my uncle had resisted me; but
he sat without speaking, his hands crossing and uncrossing themselves
tremulously over the ivory knob of his stick and his eyes set gloomily
on the fire.
“The logic of events?,” he repeated at length.
“I don’t believe we shall do any good here till we have a revolution,” I
said, with bitter memories of my battle-piece in its three panels. “A
revolution; or another war.”
“Our intention was to avert it,” he reminded me.
4
Because Bertrand made no effort to detain me, I stayed in
London—sullenly protesting that we only bored the converted and
exasperated the inconvertible—till the end of the year. Looking back, I
suppose the autumn brought with it the first signs of returning reason,
though Sir Roger Dainton—more in sorrow than anger—burnt the _Economic
Consequences_ and left me—with anger and sorrow nicely balanced—to buy
myself another copy. It was one thing, however, to concede that the
peace terms were unworkable; it was something quite different to
precipitate a general election in the hope of mending them. The
coalition survived the Paisley election, when Mr. Asquith was drawn to
Westminster through an avenue of cheering crowds; it survived the
awkward questions which the average voter was beginning to frame. And,
so long as it steered clear of another war, it could disregard the
academic questions of sentimental leader-writers who asked if any one
was a penny the better for war and victory.
“You’ve had a year to get your new heaven and earth into working order,”
said Philip Hornbeck, when I visited him at the Admiralty on the
anniversary of the armistice. “I’ve been tied here so much that I’ve
entirely lost track of the millennium. It’s arrived, I suppose?”
“A number of people haven’t heard of it yet,” I answered, with my
thoughts on the filibustering expeditions of the last three months.
D’Annunzio had revived memories of Garibaldi by seizing Fiume and
defying the great powers to turn him out; admirals and generals of the
old _régime_ in Russia were being supplied by amateur strategists in
England with arms to crush a revolutionary government in a country that
had never been successfully invaded since the coming of the Tartars. “If
the allies had an agreed policy . . .”
“You can’t have an agreed policy when you’re not on speaking-terms with
a single one of your neighbours,” Hornbeck retorted. “I invited your
friend Lucien de Grammont . . .”
“He won’t come if he knows I’m here,” I interrupted. “And I don’t know
that I’m very keen to meet French people at present.”
It was twelve months, to a minute, since Violet Loring pointed out to
her boy the men who had come from Rhodesia and Japan, Portugal and
Vancouver to die in a common cause.
“I offered van Oss as a bait,” said Hornbeck with a grin. “If you three
high-minded idealists can’t make a millennium, you mustn’t get impatient
with the rank-and-file.”
It was a matter for congratulation that a party so rashly collected
could meet and scatter without a scene of violence. Clifford expected,
quite obviously, to be castigated because America would not sign the
covenant of the League; Lucien, no less obviously, looked only for a
chance of castigating me because I criticized the treaty in every issue
of _Peace_.
“I don’t quite know what we’re celebrating,” he muttered provocatively,
with a morose eye on the gathering crowds in Whitehall. “The loss of the
war?”
“We haven’t lost it yet,” I said, “but some of us are doing our best. I
wish you’d explain to me, Lucien, how you expect to make Germany pay for
the war when you’re standing with your foot on her throat.”
“I am sorry if we are keeping you from trading with her,” he answered
with icy politeness, “but security is as necessary to France as trade is
to England. You made _yourselves_ secure when you took the German fleet.
Now, when France is left alone . . .”
He glanced malevolently at Clifford van Oss and turned again to the
window.
“But, hell, Wilson had no power to commit us!” Clifford protested. “If
you’d any of you gotten down to the constitution of the United States
. . .”
“I fancy America signed the treaty?,” said Lucian coldly.
“We’d best quit talking about bad faith,” Clifford recommended, without,
however, following his own advice. “Clemenceau and Lloyd-George let up
on Wilson over the fourteen points; they let up on the Germans . . .”
I turned to Hornbeck, whose square face was alight with malicious
enjoyment.
“What are you supposed to be doing nowadays?,” I asked, as we strolled
up and down the room where we had worked so long together.
“I’m adviser to the secretariat,” he answered. “What does that mean?
Well, you may say, if you like, that I’m preparing for the next war.”
“It’s a pity there’s no one to bang all our heads together,” I murmured,
as a new wrangle broke out between Clifford and Lucien. “The German
menace has gone, but there’s a French menace coming. Nine or ten months
ago I told Lucien in Paris that his people were at the top of their
prestige; now they’re the most hated, feared and despised people in
Europe. A mad war, a mad peace . . .”
“And nothing to prevent another war as mad,” Hornbeck began. Then we
stood without speaking, in a silence that spread over London, freezing
sound and movement. The customary rumble of traffic receded to a
distance and faded away; the blare of horns, the ringing of bells, the
click of typewriters, all the shouting, speaking and whispering that
made up the unceasing drone of a great city now, for two minutes,
ceased. Then, very far away, the rumble of traffic began again. I felt
as if I were recovering consciousness after an anæsthetic. Nearer at
hand I heard voices, then the scuffle of feet; a typewriter clicked
interrogatively, as though wondering if the two minutes were over; then
a telephone-bell rang; and the city heaved and roared its way back to
life. “We’re no better off,” Hornbeck resumed. “Only you sentimentalists
ever thought we should be.”
I had been indescribably awed by that sudden silence and by the
spectacle of those many thousands all stricken motionless at the same
time. The street was a solid block of devout, bare-headed humanity; from
the Victoria Tower to the National Gallery a single mood of gratitude
and reverence bowed those myriad heads. Far from Westminster, far from
London, the same silence had fallen, the same devotion had risen from a
myriad other hearts.
“Spiritually?,” I asked.
“Not in the very least! A great many people were very brave in an
emergency; a great many people always are very brave in an emergency. A
great many people have suffered . . . shall I say, on behalf of
civilization? A great many people always suffer on behalf of
civilization, which is a wasteful and cruel business, George, only one
degree less wasteful and cruel than barbarism. This wasn’t the first war
in history; people like you have always looked for a spiritual
regeneration; you’ve never found it.”
“I should be content,” I said, “if one man in ten out of all that crowd
would join me in making future wars impossible.”
“I should be content if one man in all the world would tell me how
that’s to be done.”
5
I reached Fetter Lane in a chastened mood; and for the rest of the
morning we talked of the year that had passed since Armistice Day.
There was to be no United States of Europe, still less a United States
of the World. The peace-treaty, to the view of us all, indicated the
swiftest and surest way to another war; and there was no influence,
outside parliament or within, to modify it. Trade depression was
attracting attention to unemployment and taxation; but, of a hundred men
who said “We must cut down expenditure,” ninety-nine added “You can’t
touch pensions, of course; or the army and navy; or the air force.”
. . . And, after nine months, the one political organ that looked beyond
the cheap scores and cheaper promises of the 1918 election was read by a
growing literary public for the sake of its musical notes and dramatic
criticism.
“Are we addressing the right people?,” asked Jefferson Wright.
“Any person who’ll listen is the right person for me,” said Bertrand
sententiously.
“Then why not speak to labour?”
“Because it’s no more opposed to war than any other class,” grunted
Bertrand. “If it were, there’d have been no war in ’14. When your German
workman mobilized, the British workman had to mobilize against him.”
“The labour party kept us out of a war with Russia,” Wright interposed.
“Would the labour party keep us out of a war with France if the French
turned nasty? If you’ve the guts of a louse, it’s human nature to resist
a threat,” said Bertrand with more rhetorical force than biological
accuracy. “How can we stop people putting pistols to other people’s
heads?”
The discussion, like so many in these inconclusive months, ended with
the evaporating discovery that we were all late for a meal. I drove to
the O’Ranes’ house in Westminster with the now familiar feeling that we
should waste our strength and temper until some force more potent than
our mild and scholarly articles came to rouse the country out of its
drunken sleep. My uncle reminded me that we had been through one period
of incredulous apathy for half-a-dozen years before 1914. Then the only
people to think a war possible were the militarists who, with the best
intentions, precipitated it with their preparations and their talk of
“inevitability”; the Disarmament League alone tried to make it
impossible, as duelling was made impossible, by taking away the
privilege and the means of private vengeance. What we had done then we
must do now.
“But in 1919,” I said, as we parted, “I am older and more easily
discouraged than I was in 1909.”
Barbara had come up from Crawleigh Abbey to make the acquaintance of
Sonia’s new baby; and, as I strolled up and down the long library with
O’Rane, I asked him how he enjoyed being the richest commoner in
England.
“I can’t say I’ve noticed any difference,” he laughed, “except in the
number of people who think they’ve a right to be supported by some one
else.”
“And the millennium?,” I pursued in a fair imitation of Hornbeck. “The
civic conscience? Man’s natural right to life, liberty and the pursuit
of happiness?”
“What would you do in my place?,” he asked. “I’m almost certain to
follow your advice.”
As he spoke without irony, we beguiled the first part of luncheon with
the sort of conversation that is affected by somnolent house-parties on
wet afternoons. As at Cannes, each of us spent his money in dizzy
flights of imagination; but now he brought us to earth with the
criticism that we were not spending “for the good of humanity”.
“Which was Stornaway’s condition,” he reminded me.
And, in O’Rane’s hands, it was a condition that we could not fulfil.
When Barbara spoke of the incurable cripples left by the war, he
enquired why humanity should be relieved of its obligations. When I
talked, as so often before I had talked with Deryk Lancing, of
universities and institutions for research, of libraries and museums, of
travelling fellowships and exploration funds, of subsidized opera and
national newspapers, of model cities and a country made perfect, he
applauded my enthusiasm and asked what I was doing to give it effect.
“I do my modest share,” I said.
“And, if I take that responsibility off your shoulders, you’ll only have
more money to . . . _waste_ on yourself.”
I cannot recall that the tone or choice of language was more vigorous
than I had long been accustomed to hearing from O’Rane. Certainly I
should have taken up the challenge without concern, if Sonia had not
rushed superfluously to my assistance. Her indignation, however, in
demanding why personal expenditure should be called waste, warned me
against taking sides in a family quarrel.
“David’s _impossible_ about money!,” she cried. “So long as I have _one_
crust of bread, _one_ dress that would disgrace a scarecrow . . .”
“If this is how the poor live, let’s join them!,” interposed Barbara
pacifically.
In spite of herself, Sonia laughed as she saw us admiring her frock. The
house was unpretentious, but it was enviably comfortable. I never wish
to be given better food or wine. And, on a lower plane of morality,
whatever she lacked from her husband was made up by the munificence of
her friends.
“It’s so difficult, when every one thinks you’re rich . . .” she began.
“But it isn’t our money,” O’Rane objected.
Another explosion was threatening; and, at a sign from Barbara, I ranged
myself beside Sonia.
“You’re entitled to pay yourself a salary,” I told him. “As chairman and
managing-director of a trust-company with a capital of twenty-five
millions, I think five thousand a year . . .”
“I’m pretty sure Sonia will do less harm with it than I shall,” he
sighed. “Is that _all_ the advice you can give me, George?”
“Well,” I reminded him, “I told you at Cannes not to touch the money
with a pole.”
“And, as I told you ten minutes ago, I should almost certainly follow
your advice if you repeated it. Sonia won’t let me talk about that,
though . . . Tell me your plans for the winter. The south of France
again?”
By the time we left, the last echo of discord was hushed. On our way
home, however, Barbara warned me that new trouble would break out if
some one did not create a diversion. I hardly know what difference Sonia
and her friends expected O’Rane’s inheritance to make; but she was
bitterly and undisguisedly disappointed by what she regarded as a life
of wasted opportunities.
“Get your mother to invite them out to Cannes,” Barbara suggested; and I
sent an invitation that night on my own responsibility.
It was refused, rather tartly, on the ground that David, as we might
have known, would not leave his work and that Sonia, as we might have
guessed, would not come, “trailing clouds of infants”, without him. I
comforted myself with the reflection that, whatever her provocation, she
would not try to repeat an effect by running away; and then I dismissed
them both from my thoughts till the crisis in my own life should be
passed.
The word, I think, is not too strong for a moment and an event that were
to test the union of two people who, on any reasoning, ought never to
have married. Good friends though we were, Barbara had never pretended
to be in love with me; I could judge of all that she was withholding
when she forgot to hide her love for Eric Lane. Though he was five
thousand miles away, she was still haunted by him; and I sometimes
wondered whether anything short of his death would cure the obsession.
Then, on the day when she told me that she was going to have a child, I
took hope again; what I had never been able to achieve was to be brought
about by our son. She had decided that it would be a boy; we had even
chosen his name; and I had begun to love him, before he was quickened,
for drawing us together.
As Lady Crawleigh wanted Barbara in the country, I spent most of the
early spring by myself in London; and at the end of April I went down
for a week to be at hand if I were needed. It was the twenty-first of
the month when I arrived; and, though the date is of no interest to any
one, I am unlikely to forget it; my car crossed the bridge into the
abbey precincts at twenty minutes past seven in the evening, and I am
not likely to forget that either. I shall not forget the eerie silence
in which the abbey was wrapped, nor the scared faces of the servants,
nor the darkness of the rooms, nor the atmosphere of disaster impending.
I hope I am as self-controlled as my neighbour, but I seemed to feel a
hand of ice on my heart as the butler helped me out of my coat and
murmured that he believed his lordship was in the garden.
“Everything all right?,” I asked as carelessly as I could.
“Yes, sir. Lady Barbara is in her room. I believe her ladyship is with
her.”
When I went upstairs, Barbara was in bed. The blinds were down, and a
closing door hinted that my mother-in-law was for some reason hurrying
away to avoid me. As I crossed the room, Barbara told me to stop; and,
as I tried to ask how she was, I was waved into silence. Then she
covered her eyes and turned away:
“You’ve not been told? It’ll be a shock, but I wanted to tell you
myself. I’m sorry, George . . . I . . . I did my best. You mustn’t be
_too_ dreadfully disappointed. Dead . . . He was born dead. If only it
could have been the other way round!”
Mercifully, as though she had been listening at the door, Lady Crawleigh
came back to say that my father-in-law wished to see me. Together we
drafted the announcement for the press; and I asked whether it would be
prudent for me to go upstairs again. He said “yes” and “no” alternately,
concluding on a “yes” in the frantic hope of getting rid of me. As I
tapped on Barbara’s door, I heard Lady Crawleigh scuttling through
another; and it was Barbara, undaunted and indomitable, who hid her own
agony under a gentle concern for me.
“I suppose people will want to sympathize,” she began. “May I have all
my letters sent to you, George? Open them, answer them. I shall have to
be here for some weeks, I’m afraid, but I’ll make up for deserting you
when I come back to London. I’ll give some lovely parties for you. We
shall be so busy we shan’t have time to think. I _want_ to keep busy.”
. . .
And, on that word, her dead child, her suffering and her disappointment
were banished from Barbara’s life. Three years have passed since that
April evening of 1920 when we made our compact of silence; and, with a
single exception, we observed it with equal scruple on both sides.
CHAPTER TWO
THAT WHICH REMAINED
No doubt, there’s something strikes a balance. Yes,
You loved me quite enough, it seems to-night.
This must suffice me here. What would one have?
In heaven, perhaps, new chances, one more chance—
Four great walls in the New Jerusalem,
Meted on each side by the angel’s reed,
For Leonard, Rafael, Agnolo and me
To cover—the three first without a wife
While I have mine! So—still they overcome
Because there’s still Lucrezia,—as I choose.
Again the Cousin’s whistle! Go, my love.
ROBERT BROWNING: _Andrea del Sarto_.
1
Before we settled in London for the summer of 1920, I asked Bertrand
whether he was prepared to run our paper without me if I could persuade
Barbara to dull the edge of her grief by coming round the world with me.
“You’ll be leaving us,” answered my uncle rather blankly, “just at the
moment when life is becoming normal after the war. We’ve hideous
labour-troubles in store; unemployment . . . From all I hear, there’s
going to be an explosion in Ireland.”
“And this,” I interrupted, “is what you describe as normal conditions
after the war?”
Bertrand nodded slowly over his clasped hands:
“I do. A peace-treaty you may regard as another aspect of war: the last
chapter, if you like. Then you come to that which remains: the bill
that’s still unpaid when you’ve counted your dead and disbanded your
armies and dismembered your empires. All the complications of our
spiritual convalescence are before us. Still . . .”
I might have spared him my importunity until I had approached Barbara.
With the choice of six months in London and twelve on a steamer, she had
no difficulty in making up her mind; and I soon found myself studying,
in her company and from a somewhat different angle, “that which
remained” in London after eighteen months of armistice and peace. If the
life was a little bewildering and sometimes more than a little
uncongenial, that—as Bertrand would have said—was part of the unpaid
bill.
2
“One swallow may not make a summer,” said my cousin Laurence, when his
long-suffering sister banished him from Loring House to the admittedly
inferior amenities of Seymour Street; “but one duchess is going to make
a season. Eleanor Ross has decided that London is again to be the
metropolis of England.”
“For that,” I said, “you must blame the prime minister. It’s one thing
for her to keep open restaurant in Paris, it’s quite another to play
round-the-world-in-eighty-days with an international conference. San
Remo, Hythe . . .”
In a few months I might have added Boulogne, Brussels and Spa, so
swiftly did one final settlement follow on another. The hangers-on,
meanwhile, had abandoned the pursuit and returned to London. A season,
of some kind, was opening; and poor Barbara was giving the first of
those “wonderful parties” which were to make her forget our recent
tragedy.
“Any one who ever had any money seems to have spent it,” said Laurence
with irrelevant regret and an appraising glance round the table. “I
suppose _you_ don’t know of a decent job? Something with a bit more
money and a bit less work than the bar?”
If I had, I told him, I could have filled the position fifty times over
with the men who were being thrown on to the labour-market as the last
regiments returned home and the last war-departments were dismantled. I
hesitate to say how many men like my brother-in-law Gervaise I helped
into lucrative billets in the first six months of peace; I can say
without hesitation that in 1920 I looked vainly for a single position
that I could recommend to the pathetic, unspecialized men and boys who
sent me testimonials beginning: “_Public school and university
ex-service officer_, 1914-1918, _wounded_.” . . . If others received
half the appeals that came to me, the city was packed close with them;
and the only man of my acquaintance who benefited by this congestion was
the enterprising Sam Dainton, who expanded his agency-business into a
colourable imitation of highway-robbery by making a corner in empty
houses. The premiums which he imposed and the commissions which he
accepted light-heartedly from vendor and purchaser would probably have
landed him in the dock if he had remained longer in this kind of
business; but vaulting ambition tempted him to compete with more
experienced brigands in buying surplus stores from the government, and
the blackmail which he levied on the homeless may have been balanced,
with poetic justice, on the day when makeshift houses were erected below
cost-price from the forced sale of his unmarketable stocks.
“Nobody could want _less_ work than you do at the bar,” Philip Hornbeck
pointed out.
“I call that mocking a feller’s misfortunes,” replied my cousin with
dignity. “I’ve a good mind not to tell you now.” . . . As we said
nothing, Laurence pulled his chair close to mine and helped me to a
glass of my own madeira. “These devastated areas, George: they’ll need
the hell of a lot of building material. If you’ve any capital lying idle
. . .”
“My trustees see to it that I haven’t,” I answered.
“Ready money’s gone out of circulation since the millennium,” explained
Hornbeck; and for once I almost agreed with him.
In these months I was indeed reminded of the embarrassing first days of
hostilities, before the Treasury began to issue its own notes. Houses,
land, stock-in-trade were visible and tangible; we could have rubbed
along somehow under a general system of barter; but no one seemed to be
blessed with cash. The owners of big fortunes made in the war, so useful
a year earlier in buying unmanageable estates, disappeared as suddenly
as they had emerged: a few, I fancy, were frightened by talk of a
retrospective levy on their profits, but most of them derived their
wealth from industry; and industry at this time was being attacked by
creeping paralysis. Sir John Woburn’s group of papers set up a cry for
economy; the ‘coupon’ system of electioneering was thrown into its first
practical discredit by the success of independent ‘anti-waste’
candidates; and, when my political barometer told me that all this talk
of ‘reconstruction’ was well enough, but that we must reconstruct the
whole of Europe, I felt that the logic of facts had done what the
pleadings of _Peace_ would never do.
At my own table, though I had achieved an ingenious double revenge by
placing Dainton, who feared my uncle, within earshot of my uncle, who
despised Dainton, I did not feel justified in pointing political morals;
and it was with outward cordiality that I listened to his diagnosis and
treatment of international prostration.
“The _whole_ of Europe,” he repeated. “No good tinkering. Take Germany.
Take Austria. _Take Russia._”
And, with that, he lowered his voice conspiratorially and invited me to
join a concession-hunting syndicate which the alert Sir Adolf Erckmann
was forming. The proposal surprised me, inasmuch as a sense of personal
unworthiness, stronger even than my impatience of Dainton’s politics,
had frightened me away from Rutland Gate since Lady Dainton chose it for
her second blooming. Whenever I failed in an excuse to dine elsewhere, I
seemed to pick my way through the melancholy ruins of fallen European
dynasties. Starting with refugee Russian princes, the Daintons extended
the net of hospitality to catch expropriated Poles and were only waiting
for a change in public sentiment before opening their doors to the
crownless heads of Germany. All were welcomed with the ceremony which
England accords to the runaway scions of a kingly house: Sir Roger
received his guests in the hall with a braver display of decorations
than etiquette warranted; Lady Dainton curtseyed till I felt giddy; and,
if the throne of the Czars remained empty, that was only because Moscow
was so far from London.
I had heard so much of the coming royalist counterrevolution that I
fully expected to find Dainton smuggling arms into Russia.
“Your foreign information is better than most,” he began darkly; and
then the plans of the syndicate were laid before me.
Listening with half of one ear, I seemed—with the other—to catch the
thick tones of Sir Philip Saltash as he discoursed of the waters which
he troubled and of the adventurous anglers who fished therein. My sleek
tempter, I confess, appeared to me at this moment rather in the guise of
a vulture; and, when I thought of the get-rich-quickly schemes that were
discussed daily in my hearing, the heavens seemed to darken with these
birds of prey. Sam, with his options on empty houses; Laurie, with his
plans for holding the devastated areas to ransom; Dainton, with his
gambling in marks and francs: all looked on Europe primarily as a place
to loot. Yet two of these three had offered even their lives so few
years before; and the third had given away his cars and sold his
securities to fit out Red Cross ambulances!
“Are you shaking the bloody hand of the soviet?,” I enquired, with
shocked memories of Dainton’s attacks on ‘bolshevism’.
“The soviet? Good heavens, why . . .?” he gasped with much the same
perplexity as his wife had exhibited when I asked if ministers of
religion should be regarded as paid agitators.
Dainton would have nothing to do with the soviet. Lenin and his gang
would, with the help of God, be brought to book by Admiral Kolchak; but,
without waiting for that consummation, he was ready to help the
commercial recovery of Russia by pouring in goods, machinery and the
material of a new transport-system. As he could not hope to receive
commodities in exchange, he would be content with gold.
“Then you’re recognizing the revolution?,” I asked, as we moved
upstairs.
“Recognizing . . .?,” he echoed testily. “This is a business deal;
politics don’t enter into it. And I shall be obliged if you’ll keep it
absolutely to yourself.”
I promised readily enough for the sake of sparing him the embarrassment
of explaining how he could accept confiscated Russian gold by day and
monopolize the despoiled Russian nobility at night. I did not feel,
however, that Europe had yet been made safe for the amateur financier.
After their last international flutter the Daintons had let their house
in Hampshire; and I imagined that they, like many others, were trying
belatedly to economize, though Lady Dainton gave another reason that
night for their retirement.
“I honestly find no pleasure,” she told me, “in the life people are
leading in London. Perhaps I’m old-fashioned. The people themselves,
don’t you know? . . . I’m not criticizing _this_ party, of course; but
the tone . . . A gigantic beanfeast.”
If she had criticized the party in words, as she was criticizing it with
her eyes, I should have been constrained to side with her. Old-fashioned
or no, I was bred in an age of strict formality, when Loring House still
bore its hatchment. When I first stayed at House of Steynes, old Lord
Loring hunted us into smoking-suits at eleven o’clock and assembled us
furtively in the billiard-room, where he plied us with “weeds”, negus
and comments on current yearling-sales. My first London dinner-parties
had the ceremony and pomp of a _levée_. In 1920 we had no time for the
ceremony, no money for the pomp.
“I suppose a beanfeast is all that people can afford,” I said, as I
contrasted this revel with the gaieties of a vanished generation.
The opera and the ballet were trying valiantly at this time to make us
feel that we were back in 1914; but there was no public for both. The
Crawleighs and perhaps a dozen others gave their balls and receptions
according to the old tradition; but people who wanted to dance found the
Turf and Stage less troublesome and more amusing. Those who wished to
see their friends could collect them by telephone at the end of dinner
and return from the theatre to see their houses converted out of
recognition.
“Twenty people can find money to entertain,” said Lady Dainton severely,
“for one who can find time to be hospitable.”
As we drifted uncomfortably about the house, I found it expedient to
leave at least this charge unanswered. The smoking-room was given up to
bridge, the dining-room to an endless supper; musicians, whom in time I
came to suspect our butler of keeping on a chain in one of the cellars,
were imprisoned on a landing: and both drawing-rooms were cleared for
dancing. “_Solitudinem faciunt: pacem appellant._ I’m off,” said
Bertrand in bewilderment. “Promise you won’t invite me again!” And I
shared his bewilderment. The success of the party, as of the late war,
lay in unity of command. Our butler was _generalissimo_; and Barbara
asked only that I would leave him alone. If the men could not find
cigars, they appealed to Robson; when an uninvited guest strayed into
the hall, demanding who the guy was who was giving this show, Robson
introduced him promptly to his hostess; I saw him supplying powder and
carrying out repairs to torn dresses; and, when our musicians knocked
off work for the night, Robson obliged at the piano, apologizing for the
slow, melodious waltzes of my undergraduate days and regretting that he
had no temperament for jazz-music.
“I _wish_ I knew his history,” Barbara murmured plaintively. “I daren’t
ask for fear of finding he has a wife. That would break my heart,
because I’m determined to marry him if anything happens to you, George.”
Lady Dainton, meanwhile, was going from strength to strength of
disapproval.
“I would sooner give up society altogether,” she announced, “than
countenance its present form. This, of course, is different,” she added
vaguely and without conviction.
Mentally, I acquiesced in her condemnation. And it was not worth while
to explain that I assisted at these beanfeasts because I believed they
amused Barbara.
3
“This is what remains,” I told Bertrand, when he insisted on holding a
_post mortem_.
“These people don’t _amuse_ you?,” he cried.
“They interest me,” I answered. “Looking on, listening . . .”
Since I had given up dancing on the outbreak of war and am one of the
three worst bridge-players in London, I was thrown back on the delights
of conversation; and, as every gathering included a contingent of
Barbara’s literary friends, I tried to discover what inspiration they
had won from the war. It was soon, however, made abundantly plain to me
that the dangers of this quest were more apparent than the delights. I
was welcomed at first—I hoped for my own sake—to the little circles of
young writers, who—for want of better accommodation—camped on the
landing and stairs outside my dressing-room. Soon, however, I found
myself being used as a stick to beat my literary editor for having
beaten one or other of my bitter-tongued guests. When I refused to help,
they took the beating into their own hands. The “top-hat school of
fiction” was flayed by the “sham-corduoroy school”, the “high-brows” by
the “pin-heads”, the “best sellers” by every one. Shocking tales of
self-advertising were exchanged for dire revelations of log-rolling; and
critics who had been unanimously condemned a moment before were
unanimously reprieved on condition of their taking service against yet
another school that did not happen to be represented in our symposium.
“Aren’t you perhaps exaggerating the importance of contemporary
opinion?,” I asked as soon as I could make myself heard. “If the men who
praised and blamed twenty, forty, sixty years ago could read their
notices now, they’d find they hadn’t spotted one winner in five hundred.
If you’re suffering at the hands of irresponsible reviewers, you’re
suffering in the company of Meredith and Hardy.”
And then I left the rising generation of writers, who had slain more
reputations in half an hour than my staff could hope to scotch in six
months. Truth to tell, I felt rather unworthy of their too
discriminating society. Hampstead was so suspicious of Chelsea; Chelsea
was so contemptuous of Bloomsbury; and all three were so scornful of
Mayfair that I thanked Heaven my house was two hundred yards north of
Oxford Street. The few names that these exotics praised were always
unknown to me; and I was ashamed to admire publicly the work which they
damned so comprehensively. If the war was to produce a new Elizabethan
splendour of imagination, I saw no sign of it at present: perhaps we
should have to wait a generation till the stench of blood and the shriek
of shells had been forgotten.
“Are your very modern friends doing any good?,” I demanded of Barbara,
when our party had dispersed. “If you were analysing the effect of the
war on art . . .?”
“D’you get any reaction from their work?,” she asked. “In art there’s no
such thing as absolute good.”
“I don’t understand it.”
“And I’m thrilled by it!,” she cried in unaffected rapture. “All the
violence and horror and madness of the war are reflected in the art of
to-day. It’s not pretty, but it’s true. This party, which dear Lady
Dainton hated so much . . . The restlessness, the hysteria . . . Jazz,
in itself . . .”
“That which remains,” I murmured, in Bertrand’s phrase.
I was reminded of the days before the war when revues and ragtime first
established their empire in London. Then, as the curtain prepared to
fall, principals and supers, the latest beauty and the last comedian, a
scene-shifter or two and the prompter all jigged and shuffled to the
haunting syncopation of the _Honeymoon Rag_ or _That Ol’ Mason-Dixon
Line_. The audience jigged and shuffled up the gangways; the men were
still humming, the women still working their shoulders when they drove
away. ‘_Oh, honey, I feel funny when dat coon begin to play_ . . .’ Now
they jigged and shuffled through the streets and into the houses; they
could not stop; life was become an endless syncopation.
I wondered when our friends would settle down. If the art of the day
seemed, in my philistine eyes, epileptic, it was at least faithful to
the epileptic contortions and fitful mood of the times. Reviewing these
stupefying parties, I see men and women in a high fever. The girls all
wear the same short skirts and exhibit the same bare backs; they have
achieved the same flat figure; and, granted an upturned nose, they bob
their hair in the same way. Very young, very pretty and very full of
high spirits, they think the same thoughts and express them in the same
jargon with the same loud assurance. Their sameness makes every party
the same. I see myself talking feverishly of films with some star from
Los Angeles and being told, by little Ivy Gaymer, of the latest divorce;
I see young poets discussing a recent lampoon and young actresses
describing their last triumph. There are financial groups and political
caves; my cousin Laurence, who has cultivated a knowing and shrewd
manner, runs feverishly from one to another, nodding, whispering, waving
a vast cigar and, I fancy, rather modelling himself on Saltash. Sam
Dainton, who is beginning to look dissipated, engages in feverish
pursuit of one woman after another. This fever has infected the women;
the divorce-court does a flourishing trade; no one can remember who at
any moment is allied with whom; and Sam makes overtures to all in the
sure belief that some—and, perhaps, most—will prove to be complaisant.
Sir Rupert Foreditch spreads the fever among the young politicians.
I can understand that Lady Dainton is too inelastic for the universal
syncopation of these days. I could wish, in this season of comprehensive
toleration, that I were far more tolerant or far less, for many of these
women would not be received by Violet Loring or my mother, many of the
men would be roughly handled if their business records were examined by
unsympathetic counsel. And no one can for long live comfortably in a
state of delirium. The clatter from the dining-room and the din from the
musicians’ corner are unceasing. Every one is moving, talking, smoking
at top speed. And Robson holds all the threads in his capable hands; he
is, to my house in Seymour Street, what Gaspard is to the Turf and
Stage. My house is indeed a small and noisy club.
It is to be hoped that our guests enjoyed themselves; I believe that
they, like Barbara, were only concerned to be so busy that they could
not think. I should not be surprised to hear that, like Barbara, some of
them broke down before the end. We had intended to stay in London until
I went to shoot with the Knightriders; but early in July Barbara
collapsed suddenly and was ordered to the country. Though there was
nothing organically amiss with her, Gaisford threatened to throw up the
case if she remained in London.
“When I die, you can tell people I was the only honest leech you ever
met,” he muttered with a frown. “I’m never afraid to say I don’t know;
and I don’t know now what’s wrong with that child. She’s very ill
indeed; and there’s nothing the matter with her. I have my suspicions.
You’ll go with her?”
“If I can arrange things at the office,” I answered.
“Office be damned! If she wants you, go!”
More than a little frightened, I took Barbara to Crawleigh next day and
for a week tried to run our paper by means of special messengers and an
indistinct telephone. Then I returned to London. The explosion which
Bertrand had predicted four months earlier took place at a moment when
the office was entrusted to the learned and wholly unpractical
Spence-Atkins; and I judged—God knows how rashly!—that Ireland called
to me the more urgently. I suppose our lives would have been different
if Barbara’s rest-cure had been postponed till September; if Bertrand
had taken his holiday in August, I a month earlier.
“If you _must_ go, you must,” sighed Barbara. “Will you open all my
letters, as you did before? I’m not to be worried; and my letters are
always so uninteresting that they send my temperature up two points.”
“I’ll do anything if you’ll only promise to get well,” I answered.
4
London, on my return, was in what Bertrand called “its tadpole
condition: all head and no body”. The residential streets and squares
were deserted; the clubs and newspaper-offices were thronged.
“I had to cancel leave all round,” he explained, as we left our
dismantled house for dinner at the Eclectic. “Now that the
peace-treaty’s out of the way, the government is looking for fresh
triumphs. Happy thought: an Irish policy! I felt it was time for us to
define our attitude.”
“Hasn’t it been defined for us,” I asked, “by the impetuous gentleman
who invented ‘self-determination’? What’s good enough for
Czecho-Slovakia should be good enough for Ireland.”
“How do you propose to apply it?,” he asked.
Literally, I told him: by electing a constituent assembly on universal
suffrage and then by enforcing on all Ireland whatever constitution the
assembly framed.
“But that,” said my father-in-law, who had invited himself to dine with
us, “means coercing Ulster.”
As I felt we could hardly have too many opinions in our symposium, I
urged Frank Jellaby and Carstairs to join us; and every party was
represented by the time that Roger Dainton pulled a chair to the end of
the table.
“I detest coercion,” I said; “but, if it has to be applied, I’d sooner
coerce the few than the many. Because ministers refused to coerce Ulster
in 1913, the rest of Ireland has been coerced ever since. And I never
know why a thing should be called coercion in one country and
‘maintaining law and order’ in every other.”
Having propounded my own policy, I was free to listen while others
propounded theirs. Our speeches, at this date, would make melancholy
reading, for every one said precisely what was expected of him and
precisely what he had said a hundred times before. Writing now at two
years’ remove, I believe and hope that Ireland is on the road to a
settlement; and this dinner two years ago lingers in my recollection as
one more heart-breaking proof that, if the Irish were incapable of
governing themselves, the English were no less incapable of governing
them. Crawleigh, a former viceroy; John Carstairs, a retired diplomat;
my uncle and Dainton, Jellaby and I, with some hundred years of
parliamentary experience between us, all talked with the white-hot
irreconcilability of Capulets and Montagues. It was this temper, I
reminded myself from time to time, that kept me exiled from the County
Kerry: it was this temper that tore me from Barbara’s side. In the years
that followed, when I tried to mark the rock on which my life split, I
always thought of this fatuous debate and of the pale, angry faces round
our echoing table.
It was something, I suppose, that no one prayed for a new Cromwell,
though I attribute this moderation to a doubt whether even Cromwell
could now “reconquer” Ireland and to a fear that those who had drawn the
sword might be the first to perish by the sword. In the last six years
Ireland had made the dire discovery that the north had won an advantage
by threats of violence and that, if the south wished to redress the
balance, it must employ the same means.
“Can’t we cut out ancient history?,” I suggested, as my patience wore
thin. “We need a policy to meet the present position; and the present
position is an evenly matched civil war.”
As the phrase left my lips, I wondered whether the war was any longer an
even match. Two days before, I heard from Hornbeck that a mail-train had
been held up and the contents of the lord lieutenant’s bag forwarded,
after perusal, with an endorsement “_Passed by the Censor I. R. A._”; my
agent reported that stores were being looted and ammunition seized. If
attacks on private persons and on property were still rare, this was due
to prudence on the one side and to intimidation on the other. Some one,
however, would soon be shot because he refused to be intimidated; the
shooting would be avenged; there would be reprisals against the
avengers; and, worst fate of all, no one would be allowed to remain
neutral.
“It’s begun already,” said Dainton. “That man they murdered in Limerick
. . .”
“That spy they shot?,” Jellaby substituted.
“You call a man a spy for saving British troops from being butchered in
an ambush?,” Crawleigh enquired acidly.
“You called Flaherty a spy,” boomed my uncle, “from your place in the
House of Lords. He gave exactly similar information to the republican
troops.”
“Who were in armed rebellion against the king,” said John Carstairs.
“Whose king?,” asked Jellaby.
The dialogue tripped on with the ease that comes of practice; and most
of us were tried players in the farce or tragedy of mistranslating an
opponent’s terms. In the interests of peace I begged that we should
avoid the more flagrantly question-begging labels; but by now, grown men
though we were, each owed himself the satisfaction of just one more stab
before he laid down his arms.
“You know who’s at the back of all this?,” enquired Dainton, carefully
avoiding my uncle’s eye.
“The bolshevists?,” Bertrand asked indulgently. “You said it was the
Germans in ’16. It was the Americans before that. Good God! I’m old
enough to remember O’Connell: it always _has_ been somebody else! Will
you English never learn that an Irishman’s feeling is for his _own_
country? The more you’re pleased to call a man ‘loyalist’, the more I’d
call him ‘traitor’, as I’d say ‘traitor’ to a Pole who boasted of his
‘loyalty’ to Russia or Germany.”
“As your people _do_ say ‘traitor’ to the loyalists who fought for you
in this war,” muttered Carstairs. “You’ll hang them all as traitors, of
course, when you’ve got your republic?”
My uncle was understood to say that he wished to hang no one; but this
laudable restraint won no favour from the rest.
“I should hang Carson and Bonar Law,” said Jellaby, as though he were
ordering a well-considered dinner.
“Then you must hang Asquith and Birrell for not hanging them,” said
Crawleigh, partly from proconsular devotion to firmness, but chiefly
from hatred of liberalism.
“I,” said Dainton, “should be quite content to shoot de Valera as
Casement was shot. Like a dog. Hanging’s too good for him. President of
the Irish Republic, indeed! It’s treason to the king.”
“If you’re going to hang for treason, you must hang for constructive
treason, for constructive mutiny and for acquiescence in constructive
treason and mutiny,” I pointed out: “that brings in the covenanters, the
Curragh people and the Asquith cabinet.” Dainton, I knew, was a
covenanter; and I wanted him to see the implication of his wholesale
executions. “Personally, I don’t think hanging or shooting ever does
much good . . .”
“It would have been a good thing,” Bertrand interrupted, “if you’d shot
the entire 1914 House of Commons.”
“But as a policy for the government in 1920?,” I asked.
I have thought over this dinner a dozen times since; and, when ministers
were attacked for permitting the slaughter and reprisals that followed,
I would sometimes ask their critics if they could do better than the
reasonably intelligent, reasonably well-informed and reasonably sane men
who shewed themselves so crass, ignorant and mad at this meeting.
“For all the good we’ve done,” I told Bertrand, as we walked home, “I
might as well have been in the country.”
“Don’t leave me yet,” he begged.
And throughout the late summer and early autumn I was torn between
Barbara’s entreaties that I should come back to Crawleigh and Bertrand’s
reproach that I was deserting him when he most needed me.
As a study in “that which remained” I suppose these barren passions
claim their place: in our politics, as in our work and play, our
gettings and spendings, our crimes and insanities, we lived more
rapidly, more violently. The growing disorders of Ireland were ascribed
to a “murder-gang”; in the spirit of the age, they were met by irregular
troops, with general instructions to give at least as good as they
received. Under the reign of reprisals, there was inaugurated an
organized terror for which there had been no parallel since the first
French revolution. Burning, looting, killing and torturing were paid
back, with interest, in the same currency. Mysterious and fatal lists of
names were passed up and down the country; the mails were now
intercepted at will; and, when far-scattered, unsuspecting men and women
were done to death by simultaneous blows, a whisper of “spy” and
“counter-spy”—words that had lost their meaning—explained this
opposing secret carnage which no man had power to stop.
Face to face with this slow bleeding to death, I could not shrug my
shoulders and drift away for a holiday with Barbara. The peace of the
world seemed a madman’s dream when we could not stop this butchery at
our doors. Day after day Bertrand and I wrote and talked, interviewed
and argued. On one set of lips or another, every public man was by now
branded as a traitor who had threatened rebellion in Ulster or a traitor
who had broken faith with the South.
“If our own statesmanship is bankrupt, we must look elsewhere,” my uncle
pronounced.
For a week he laid siege to the League of Nations, then to the Foreign
Office. Simultaneously I went as a suppliant to Crawleigh in the hope
that he would forward my petition to the Vatican. On the same day, in
almost the same words, we were told that there was no precedent to guide
a sovereign power in summoning an arbitrator to settle differences
between a government and its subjects.
“You can’t run an empire on those lines,” said my father-in-law.
“You’re not running an empire on your present lines!” I retorted.
He was impregnable. Until the republican leaders came, like the burghers
of Calais, barefoot, in their shirts, with ropes round their necks, he
would not parley with them; and, unhappily for him, no one was strong
enough to compass an unconditional surrender.
As I walked empty-handed away from Berkeley Square, I met Hornbeck
returning home from the Admiralty.
“Making a nice, tidy world for heroes to live in?,” he enquired with a
grin.
Though his tone was bantering, it was free from malice. Philip Hornbeck
had no political predilections and less than no belief in the
perfectibility of man. Government, for him, always came back to a whiff
of grapeshot, which he was always ready to discharge, always without
passion and always without error.
“The problem’s _not_ insoluble,” I maintained. “We settled Quebec; we
settled South Africa. We could settle Ireland, if we wanted to; but, of
a hundred men who talk of settlements, ninety-nine will only settle on
their own terms.”
On reaching Fetter Lane, I found my uncle at work on an appeal to the
nation.
“The Foreign Office,” he told me with frozen rage, “wanted to know what
business this was of mine. Perhaps we can shew them.”
While he wrote, I hardened my heart to the unpleasantest duty that had
befallen me since my marriage. After the usual enquiries when I was
coming down to Crawleigh, Barbara let fly such a cloud of reproaches
that I was ashamed to finish her letter. A delicate wife was no doubt a
nuisance; but ought I not to have thought of that before marrying her?
Engrossing as my work was, did I—as a matter of academic interest—rate
it higher than her reiterated request that I should come to her when she
was more ill and miserable than ever in her life before?
I was halfway to the station when my secretary overtook me with an
hysterical telegram: _If you love me destroy letter unread_; and I
should be hard put to say whether telegram or letter was the more
disturbing. Crawleigh and the local doctor assured me that she was
progressing famously; Bertrand urged me to go with a vehemence more
inhibitive than the strongest veto; and, in the end, I lamely begged
Barbara to be patient and promised to come at an hour’s notice if she
really needed me.
“Peace,” I reminded my uncle, “is only another aspect of war. ‘The last
chapter, if you like’ . . .”
“Please God it may be!,” he answered with emotion.
5
And, as we spoke, the last chapter was opening. Though neither of us had
paid much attention to the report that certain political prisoners were
being removed to England, we awoke next day to find that public interest
had been deflected to another part of the battle. As a football match is
suddenly suspended at sound of the referee’s whistle and the players
stand apart to watch one of their number who has been injured, so the
armies in Ireland, the factions in England, the spectators all over the
world now stood apart to watch one man slowly dying. The lord mayor of
Cork, arrested and imprisoned, refused to take food. For a week or two,
while life still ticked loudly, we debated over our dinners whether he
had been rightly condemned, whether the government would let him die of
starvation, whether he and his cause would not be made ridiculous if he
were fed forcibly. Then the contest became more determined: the
government would not yield to a hunger-strike; and Terence McSwiney,
with life ticking now less clearly, would not yield to the government.
It was a question of endurance.
“_Do come here next week-end if you can possibly manage it_,” wrote
Barbara. “_This business about the lord mayor must be decided one way or
the other by then._” . . .
I could give no promise. The papers were at this time recording the days
of the fast and hunting for stories of men who had lived for three,
four, five weeks without food. The ticking became feebler; and, one
press-night, when I sat shuffling an obituary, an appeal and a
face-saving leader on McSwiney’s surrender, we heard that the strike was
over. The report was contradicted before I reached the composing-room. A
week later, as the unwound spring stopped, jerked and stopped again, we
were told that the lord mayor was dead. He was still alive next day,
next week. Sympathy flowed and ebbed. The government was entreated to
spare a game fighter; the public grew angrily unhappy at being made an
accomplice in this slow torture. Then a gust of impatience blew against
such crazy stubbornness; there followed a flash of illumination, and
Dainton, who would have shot McSwiney out of hand two months before,
asked dubiously whether an Ireland of McSwineys would be easy to
“reconquer”.
At length the dying prisoner became an institution. His name was tucked
into inconspicuous corners of the daily papers. There were other claims
on the public attention. At last he died; and we realized that, as the
injured player no longer obstructed the field, the match must go on.
On the day of the funeral procession I received an unexpected call from
O’Rane, white-faced and enigmatic. In all the years I had known him I
doubt if we had talked of Ireland a dozen times; but this day stirred
passions older than any he could remember, and I felt that the taut,
bare-headed figure who gripped my arm was saluting McSwiney’s coffin in
the name of his father, “O’Rane the liberator”. The Irish of London were
present in thousands; but the English watched or followed in tens of
thousands. Some, I well believe, came to salve a restless conscience;
some in homage to a brave man; most to gratify an idle curiosity. The
republican colours fluttered unfamiliarly in English faces; the way was
lined with English police.
“In any other country there would have been a riot,” murmured O’Rane,
when I described the scene.
“There will be all the riots you can use when this is over. . . . You’ve
been lying very low the last few months, Raney.”
“I’ve been thinking. All Lancing’s money . . .”
“And ‘the good of humanity’?”
“Yes. I believe . . . I’ve decided . . . to save humanity . . . from
ever touching it,” he answered slowly.
At the time he would say no more; and we spent the afternoon strolling
along one embankment and back by the other. In the course of our walk,
we had a good view of St. Thomas’ Hospital, if he wished to heal the
sick, and of the Tate Gallery, if he cared to foster the fine arts;
south of the river we walked through streets that were more sordidly
grimed with poverty than any I wish to see again. There were, I pointed
out, inequalities of wealth for a millionaire to adjust.
“But is all this for the good of humanity?,” O’Rane asked, breaking
silence for the first time as we pressed into his house. The side-door
of The Sanctuary was like the out-patients’ entrance to a hospital; his
writing-table was submerged in appeals to his charity. “You can begin by
adjusting the difference between yourself and those people outside.”
There was a sneer in his tone that roused my natural perversity. I
distributed a handful of small change and returned to find him smiling.
“What did you give them?,” he asked.
“About a sovereign. Whether they’re deserving cases . . .”
“They’re more deserving than you, George. And, if I’d given Lancing
money, I should have been handing _you_ a sovereign. That’s my
difficulty. Every time I give to a hospital or a gallery, I’m relieving
prosperous people like you of your responsibilities. If the material
good is outweighed by the spiritual harm . . .” He broke off to stalk up
and down the darkening library with shoulders hunched and head thrust
forward. “There’s still plenty of wealth in the world. Places like the
Turf and Stage stink of it. And, if people want things badly enough,
they’ll pay for them. If London had a smallpox epidemic, we should press
money on our neighbours to get them vaccinated.”
“But, while you’re saving humanity from itself,” I pointed out, “the
money’s increasing automatically.”
“I can find outlets farther afield. You wouldn’t let those people starve
under your eyes; but you’ll let people starve to their hearts’ content
if you can’t see ’em.”
“With a million or two of unemployed here,” I began, “you won’t be
popular.”
“If I could afford to consider my popularity!,” he broke out with a
joyless laugh.
As Sonia was in the country, I brought him to dine with me in Seymour
Street. We gossiped until nearly midnight; and, when I had sent him
home, I settled to my daily duty of opening Barbara’s letters for her.
She had been right, three months before, in calling her correspondence
uninteresting; and, until this night, I had not been troubled with any
doubts which letters to send on and which to destroy.
Now I encountered a problem for which I was unprepared. The first letter
referred to an occasion eighteen months before, when my wife—according
to the writer—had invited him to run away with her.
CHAPTER THREE
AS YOU SOW . . .
“. . . The morrow brought the task.
Her eyes were guilty gates, that let him in
By shutting all too zealous for their sin:
Each sucked a secret, and each wore a mask.
But, oh, the bitter taste her beauty had! . . .
“. . . A star with lurid beams, she seemed to crown
The pit of infamy: and then again
He fainted on his vengefulness, and strove
To ape the magnanimity of love. . . .”
GEORGE MEREDITH: _Modern Love_.
1
I hardly remember when the meaning became clear to me.
I was reading with but half my attention, when I met a reference to
Croxton Hall, followed by familiar names. The letter was badly written,
in pencil, and more than badly arranged. The writer had been ill; he was
so ill at that moment that I could not make out the signature. I
examined the envelope. There a different hand had traced the bold
address; I noticed for the first time that the letter had been forwarded
from the Crawleighs’ house in Berkeley Square; then I saw an American
stamp and understood the faint pencil scratching.
It was from Eric Lane; and he was dying as he wrote.
2
The shock numbed me; and I read again with so little attention that I
had to turn back in the middle. Then a second shock drove the first from
my mind.
Eric was dying: yes, I realized that. He was bidding Barbara farewell;
and, in my first uncaring glance, I had seen so much that I must now see
all. After losing Barbara, he had found little inducement to live; and,
though he had once hoped to marry little Ivy Maitland, John Gaymer had
returned—almost on the eve of the wedding—to establish again his
empire over Ivy’s will. Eric had made his failing lungs an excuse to set
her free:
“_Two years would have cured me; but I wanted her to choose for herself.
And, when she too dropped out of my life, I didn’t try to get well._”
. . .
There followed pages of apology, pages of explanation. Eric’s love for
Barbara was consuming him; and, as the flame died to a pale flicker, he
forgot family, friends and self in desperate prayers for her happiness.
Once more the name of Croxton Hall fell like a black shadow across his
mind. There was an agonized reference to some rebuff that he had
inflicted upon her. Then came the reason for the rebuff.
It was while I was in Ireland that Barbara had gone to the Pentyres.
When the party broke up on the first night—Eric’s apology could not
have been more damningly circumstantial if he had been indicting her—,
she had concealed herself till he came up to bed, then invaded his room,
finally begged him to take her, take her away. Her marriage to me was a
mistake; I should not want to keep her when I realized my mistake; I
loved her enough to forgive her. . . .
I remembered, I now understood her distraught questions whether I should
be broken-hearted if I lost her, whether I was prepared to sacrifice
life, honour, everything to secure her happiness. . . .
In the heartlessness and abandonment of that moment, I knew, as well as
if I had seen her, that Barbara was wholly mad. I recalled the telegram
in which she said that she was missing me; I remembered her loving
welcome, on my return; I heard again her promise that she was going to
make a new start. And then I called up any self-control that remained to
keep me from going mad too. The child that lay buried at Crawleigh was
not Eric’s. His letter told me that; and, when I found myself believing
his letter, I felt that I was still sane. Barbara was innocent of
everything but a whole-hearted will and intention to betray me; and Eric
had saved her from that. After he had repelled her, she was innocent of
everything but calculated hypocrisy, sustained triumphantly for fifteen
months. I could never believe her again.
And what then?
A lust for revenge blinded me; and, though I could hardly hold a pen, I
addressed an envelope to Barbara and thrust Eric’s letter, without
comment, half inside it. Then I thought of him dying in California, by
now perhaps dead. I burned the envelope. As it crinkled and scattered, I
promised Eric’s letter the same fate; then I hesitated for fear that my
lust for magnanimity might prove more deadly than my impulse of revenge.
Was my life, also, to be a calculated hypocrisy?
I paced up and down the room till a clock struck midnight. I had lost
the post, I realized.
Then I looked at the other letters. The first was from Barbara. If I
intended to take a holiday at all this year, would I not come down to
Crawleigh? Thanks to this Irish trouble—how remote it all seemed!—I
had refused all my shooting invitations; but now that the McSwiney
chapter was closed . . .
I knew, unreasoningly, that I could not meet Barbara. Whatever happened
to us later, I must have time to think. I telephoned to O’Rane and asked
him to accompany me on a motoring tour. I believe I told him—I, of all
people!—that he seemed overwrought.
“No holidays for me, old man,” he answered with regret.
“I doubt if you’ll find it a holiday,” I said. “I want to discover what
the great public’s thinking about.” . . .
“I wish I could manage it . . .”
And then my self-control left me:
“Raney, you must!,” I said. “I’m going through the worst time of my
life, something more awful than I thought could ever happen to me. If
you _knew_ . . .”
“You can lend me some pyjamas, I suppose?,” he interrupted in a changed
voice. “I’ll have my gear sent round in the morning. I’m sorry, George.
To the best of my poor ability, you know I’ll see you through to the
grave and beyond.”
3
As I waited in the hall, I drafted a telegram to explain that I was
being called away from London on business. O’Rane arrived in the middle;
and I led him at once to his room. I could not unburden myself yet; and,
as we drove out of London next day, I found it necessary to pretend that
I was enquiring into unemployment.
“Bertrand’s afraid the men will get out of hand,” I explained.
I might have said that in some parts of England the men were already out
of hand. It was at this time that the “Homes for Heroes” campaign was
launched: as the government failed to provide sufficient houses, a
homeless band of Welsh quarrymen seized a public hall and announced that
they would stay there until cottages had been built for them. They were
led by a man, then unknown, named John Griffiths, who followed up his
first success by organizing similar raids on any convenient unoccupied
land. No one was paying much attention at present; as Bertrand said, we
were resigned to unemployment in London, but danger would march
hand-in-hand with winter, when the government declared its
housing-policy and when the official leaders of labour indicated whether
they supported “Griffiths’ landgrabbers.”
“Where are you making for first?,” O’Rane asked.
Until that moment I had not thought of any destination.
“We’re half way between Reading and Hungerford. I don’t know. . . . I’ve
had a bit of a shock; and you’ll find me rather disjointed. . . . God! I
don’t know what I should have done without you!,” I broke out.
O’Rane’s fingers rested for a moment on my arm:
“Old man, you knew I was always at hand if you needed me!” His unseeing
eyes softened; and his voice fell to a whisper:
“_‘I cannot come to you—I am afraid._
_I will not come to you. There, it is said._
_Though all night long I lie awake and know_
_That you are lying waking even so:_
_And all the day you tread a lonely road_
_And come at sunset to a dark abode._
_Yet, if so be you are indeed my friend,_
_Then, at the end,_
_There is one road, a road I’ve never gone,_
_And down that road you shall not pass alone;_
_And there’s one night you’ll find me by your side—’_”
He paused; and I waited for the rime that should complete the couplet:
“How does it go on?”
“_‘And there’s one night you’ll find me by your side—_
_. . . The night that they shall tell me you have died.’_
It’s . . . Chinese, I was told. Two or three hundred years before
Homer.”
I drove on, staring drowsily ahead of me at the broad, unfolding ribbon
of black road and the monotonous water-meadows on either hand. The
tender warmth of the little poem made me forget for a moment the
bleakness of the Kennet valley in late autumn; and, after a sleepless
night, the rushing wind drugged my brain.
“_Though all night long I lie awake and know_
_That you are lying waking even so.” . . ._
I murmured the lines to keep myself from falling asleep. What had
Barbara’s thoughts been when I lay waking the night before? Suddenly my
sight was dimmed with a curtain of blood; and I stopped the car in twice
its length because I could not see the road before me. If indeed I had
fallen asleep, I had looked for a moment, through this red curtain, on a
sun-washed verandah, where a dying man was gasping for breath.
“_And there’s one night you’ll find me by your side—_
_. . . The night that they shall tell me you have died._”
The vision faded before I could make out whether Eric was speaking to
Barbara or listening for her voice.
The unexpected jolt had flung O’Rane out of his seat; and, as he pulled
himself back into place, he could hear me stopping the engine.
“Is anything the matter?,” he asked.
“Eric Lane’s just died.”
“Good God! When?”
“This moment. I . . . pulled up to avoid him,” I answered without
knowing what I was saying. “He’s gone now. Poor devil! Oh, poor devil!”
If I was shaken, O’Rane was in no better case:
“Those lines . . . I had them from him.”
“I know.”
“You’d heard him . . .?”
“I heard him then . . . At least I think . . .” The road was once more
stretching firmly ahead of me to a belt of leafless trees. In the
meadows on either side I saw deliberate cattle splashing up to their
knees in muddy water. “It’s ten to two, Raney. Shall we see if we can
find a place for lunch?”
“That’ll wait. You’re not fit to drive any more at present. . . . You’d
. . . better tell me everything, old man.”
“But I’ve told you! I knew Eric was dead or dying because I had . . . I
saw a letter from him quite recently. My nerves are rather jumpy.” . . .
“It’ll break poor Lady Lane’s heart,” he murmured. “And it’ll be a shock
for Ivy.”
Slipping his arm through mine, O’Rane led me into a field by the
roadside. Though he must have guessed that Eric’s letter had something
to do with my frantic appeal the evening before, I could not speak at
present for fear of breaking down. ‘_Boyish to cry—can’t help it—bad
fever—weak—ill._’ For many moments my head sang with Mr. Jingle’s
clipped phrases. A shock for Ivy? Some one had told me her marriage was
all the failure that Mr. Justice Maitland had predicted. It would have
been better if she had married Eric: she might have kept him alive. It
would have been better if Barbara had married him, better if he had
never left America, best of all if he and she and I had never been
born. . . .
“Babs can’t be ill,” O’Rane murmured as though he were thinking aloud;
“or you wouldn’t be here. Sit down and smoke a cigarette.”
When he returned with the basket, I was able to tell him. I wondered at
the time, I wonder still, whether I did right; but I know that I could
not help it. He let me talk myself out, only asking dispassionately at
the end:
“What are you going to do about it?”
And I talked myself out a second time, until the fever left me and I lay
back on the rug, almost too much exhausted to move or think. Physical
infidelity, committed in a moment of passion, stood in relation to this
long infidelity of spirit as a blow struck in hot blood stands to a
calculated and artfully concealed murder. Had Barbara left me and come
back, as Sonia left and came back to Raney, I believe I could have
forgiven her. After deceiving me once, she could deceive me again; to
get what she wanted, in her own way, she would sacrifice me as she had
sacrificed Jack Waring and Eric Lane.
It was all over. And I wanted her desperately. And it was all over.
Hitherto, I had always pretended that there was something I did not
understand in her tragic entanglements: Jack and Eric were straight as
the day; if they both fled from the woman they both loved, I wished to
think that they were parted by a lover’s quarrel which both were too
proud or obstinate to heal; I refused to believe that they had run from
her in disgust.
“I’m here because Barbara will soon be coming back to London,” I told
O’Rane. “I . . . couldn’t divorce her if I wanted to; but I can let her
divorce me.” . . .
“She won’t be very . . . happy alone,” he answered reflectively. “When
Jack Waring disappeared, she turned to Eric out of sheer loneliness and
misery; when Eric went, she turned to you. If you go, George, she’ll
turn to some one else. A married woman without children, without a
husband, more lonely and miserable than ever before . . . Well, you
won’t have long to wait for your divorce.”
Four-and-twenty hours earlier, I should have called my best friend to
account if he had warned me that Barbara needed watching. Now she had
convicted herself and robbed me of all temptation to defend her.
“I don’t see much difference,” I said, “between the woman who runs away
with a man and the woman who only stays at home because the man won’t
run away with her.”
“There’s still a difference between the woman who keeps her reputation
and the woman who loses it. When women become reckless . . . It’s a big
responsibility to give them the first push down the slope.”
The short sunlight of late autumn was fading; and I busied myself with
packing our luncheon-basket. As I had not asked for sympathy, I could
not complain if none was offered.
“If I give her the chance of divorcing me,” I said, “I’m not accountable
for anything she does after that.”
There was a long silence. Then O’Rane asked:
“What will you do?”
I had not thought; but, in that moment, I had a vision of the blue
water, the close-packed green woods and the vivid fuchsia hedges of Lake
House.
“Go back to Ireland, I expect.”
I was making enough clatter with plates and knives to convince the least
attentive that my patience was exhausted; but O’Rane lay with his hands
clasped behind his head, frowning a little at his own thoughts and
wholly unmoved by my demonstration.
“Will divorce make for Barbara’s happiness?,” he asked in a maddening
drawl. “You can’t quite wash your hands of a woman you’ve married. You
weren’t content, you see, with somebody of your own mould. Your wife had
to be brilliant, beautiful, romantic, tragic. . . . You married Babs
when you knew she’d been shaken to the depths of her soul by Jack
Waring, when she’d been broken to the bottom of her heart by Eric Lane.”
“I thought she’d had so much romance and tragedy that she’d be glad to
settle down quietly.”
“When she wasn’t in love with you? Has any one settled down quietly
after gambling with death for nearly five years?”
“I’d have forgiven anything if she’d told me!,” I cried, as we went
back.
We must have driven for an hour before he spoke again:
“Well, George, if you want my advice, I should recommend you to burn
Eric’s letter and pretend you’ve never seen it. Then begin again at the
beginning.”
“You imagine I can forget it?,” I asked.
“If you think more of her and less of yourself. The bigger the crime,
the more she must have been tempted: try to understand that instead of
counting up the things a man has a ‘right’ to expect of his wife. Rights
here, rights there! _Every one’s_ thinking too much of his individual
rights, George! Every group of nations, every nation, almost every man
and woman.” . . .
4
After two years I can appreciate O’Rane’s patience better than was
possible at the time. I know now that he was distracted by a civil war
of his own; but I was too much preoccupied to enquire why Sonia and the
children were in Hampshire; I should have been aggrieved if any one else
had presumed to be unhappy.
“I suppose it’s all the same to you where we spend the night?,” I asked,
several hours later, as we paused at a sign-post.
In the gathering dusk I could distinguish nothing but the gloomy
contours of Stonehenge and the sharp, black outline of innumerable
government huts. Then I saw O’Rane prick up his ears at the tramp of
weary feet.
“Anywhere you like,” he answered, as a white-faced army advanced into
the glare of my lamps. “I was in camp here in ’14. It’s a dam’ bad step.
Recruits, I suppose. We should have been given hell if we hadn’t been
smarter than that.”
As the column approached, I saw fifty or sixty men in tattered civilian
clothes. Two or three wore medals; the rest had a brave line of ribbons
on their coats. At their head marched two standard-bearers with the
adequate device: “_Wanted in 1914. Not wanted now._”
“They’ve had their hell; and they’re not through with it yet,” I said.
It was the first time that I had encountered the searing reproach of
that device; and, as I described it to O’Rane, I recalled—as in a dream
of some other life—that I was the editor of a political review and that
I had been sent to study unemployment. There was an external world,
then. At this moment my uncle was probably taking the chair at our
weekly dinner.
As the tramp of feet grew fainter, O’Rane half rose in his seat and then
subsided with a groan:
“No, I _can’t_! It’s _not_ my business to pay other people’s debts. The
state turned these men into soldiers, in a moment of blue funk; the
state must turn them back into civilians. Sometimes I see so red that I
want to hold this country to ransom. ‘You’ve no use for these fellows,’
I want to say. ‘Well, now I’m going to shew you what would have happened
if they hadn’t come forward when they did.’ After a week of Belgian
atrocities, there’d be a marked increase in popular gratitude! And I
thought this war would produce a . . . spirit of fraternity!”
I had hoped for it, even if I had not expected it after the first months
of 1915. Quick conversions are never permanent: and permanent
conversions are never quick. Our drive that day, past great estates and
big manufacturing towns, might have been chosen as an object-lesson in
the aggressive competition that strangles fraternity at birth.
That night, when we lay at Gloucester, and next day, as we drove through
the soul-searching loveliness of the Stroud valley, we talked of
education and the gospel of humanity, as we had not talked since our
Indian summer at Cannes; and once or twice, for ten or fifteen minutes
at a time, I forgot to think consciously of Barbara. H. G. Wells, after
years of criticism, was turning teacher on his own account; and _The
Outline of History_ was conspicuous in every house and railway carriage
I entered at this time. One man at least was pleading for the universal
spirit; and his plea gave food for thought to the people who had shouted
for blood and gold in the 1918 election. The havoc which Keynes had made
in the economics of the peace-treaty was completed by the havoc which
Wells made of its history and its spiritual trend.
“And yet,” I exclaimed in sudden reaction, “those books have left things
where they were!” The treaty, which could not be enforced, had to be
modified: the British representatives had to explain why their crazy
election-pledges could not be fulfilled. At regular intervals Germany
threatened to default; France retaliated with a threat of further
occupation; a flustered knot of prime ministers collected at the first
convenient watering-place; and a punctual press announced that the
results of the conference were wholly satisfactory. “I sometimes despair
of education. . . . And, damn it, Raney, you haven’t told me what to do
when I get back to London!”
“You’ve not yet told me what you want to do. . . . It’s strange how
people can hold mutually destructive opinions at the same moment! Lucien
de Grammont talks piteously about German ‘revenge’ at a time when the
French are pouring Senegalese troops into the occupied area!”
“Roger Dainton will tell you that a restored Germany means a new war and
that an unrestored Germany is losing us our best customer.” . . .
At O’Rane’s skilled prompting, we argued our way farther west and
farther until, at the end of a week, we stalled the car and strolled on
foot, because we had reached Land’s End. Surrounded by water, in the
spray and wind of the last rocky outposts of England, I felt my sanity
and self-control returning to me; but a single day without the
distraction of driving brought back the obsession. I flung myself into a
voluminous report on _Unemployment and Public Feeling_, only to discover
that my four folios might have been compressed into the single word
“indifference”. There was no question of class or party: every one
flabbily deplored the breakdown of industry, flabbily pitied the
unemployed, flabbily felt that somebody should do something. Accent and
idiom might change, but the stale thought and worn expression changed
only by becoming more stale: the wayside tap echoed the slipshod
reasoning of an Atlantic liner; a benighted book-maker in a forgotten
Cornish village talked of trades unions in a way that I had thought only
possible in my father-in-law; and there were Roger Daintons manipulating
beer-engines in every bar.
I reminded O’Rane of his scheme for endowing schools and buying papers
till the education of an entire people proceeded from a single pair of
lips.
“I still believe a press-monopoly is possible,” he answered, “but who’s
to be trusted with it? Horatio Bottomley is a political messiah to
several millions; but I’d never give a messiah the power of a messiah
unless he were ready to die as a messiah.”
“Talleyrand’s advice to those about to found new religions,” I said.
“‘Get yourself crucified’? Wasn’t he right? Since people began to doubt
the old heaven and hell, the churches have been losing their power: they
had less to offer, less to threaten; and their ministers became
officials instead of martyrs. Christianity was born of one martyrdom;
and it will only die when there are no more martyrs. There were martyrs
in the war, if we could only make people remember them . . .”
“But the war’s over,” I interrupted. “How can you keep that exaltation
alive in time of peace?”
The question was unanswered when I turned the head of the car, next day,
towards London. We were both shirking our private difficulties; and,
though we argued endlessly about the world as we wished to make it, the
shadow of our own narrow troubles darkened that free, generous concern
for humanity which we talked so eagerly of inculcating in people whose
narrow troubles engrossed them no less blindly.
“I’d better tell Sonia we’re on our way back,” said O’Rane. “If you’ve
any idea where we shall be to-morrow morning, I’ll say she can wire to
the post-office.”
“Is she at Crowley Court?,” I asked.
“Yes. Remember taking her down there the night Tom’s death came through?
She’d put her eyes on sticks for you over that, George.”
“She was at her wits’ end, poor child,” I began.
Then, whether or no he was spreading a snare for me, I thought of
Barbara by herself at the Abbey, reading of a “well-known playwright’s
death” and stumbling blindly through the dim, panelled rooms in vain
search of some one to comfort her.
“We can go back by way of Crowley Court,” I said. “I’ll send Babs a
telegram. If she’s still at the Abbey . . .”
“I’m entirely in your hands,” said O’Rane.
That night we lay at Exeter; and next day we headed for Southampton. As
we got into the car, I was given a telegram from Barbara:
“_All well here hope you are enjoying yourselves can you
possibly return by way of Crawleigh I need you._”
5
Only when I was committed irrevocably did I realize that I had not
decided how I was to meet her.
“I can’t pretend for five minutes,” I said. “I never could.”
“She’s . . . entitled to see her own letters,” O’Rane suggested. “You
opened this at her request . . .”
“But, good God, man, she’s my wife!,” I broke out; and, remembering the
sustained deceit of these fifteen months, I could not trust myself to
say more.
We drove our last stage with heavy hearts. Southampton was shrouded in
the first fog of the year; and, when it lifted on the confines of the
New Forest, I saw bare trees, dead leaves and all November’s decay.
Every few minutes O’Rane asked me what point we had now reached; and I
knew that for him too every turn of the road was marked by a memory and
guarded by a ghost. Through eyes half-closed I could see Jim Loring and
the Daintons striding, three abreast, on a leave-out walk from Melton to
Crowley; I could see Eric Lane piloting me through Lashmar village to
call on his father. . . . Strange! Though he was now dead, though I had
almost loved him and though we had both been punished for trying to play
a game according to its rules, I could not forgive him for flinging this
last shadow across Barbara’s life, I could not whisper his name without
a shudder.
As we drove through a country that was haunted with the shades of our
dead selves, I fell to thinking whether a man was happier in the
discontent of eighteen or the disillusion of thirty-eight. I no longer
aspired to Westminster Abbey and a nation’s gratitude; but, like other
men on the threshold of middle-age, I made the discovery,
incomprehensible to a schoolboy, that I had no heir to shelter himself
under the trees which I had planted; and love seemed almost to have been
left out of my life.
In Crawleigh village, my nerve broke and I headed for London; then, for
very shame in the reproach of O’Rane’s silence, I turned, though I knew
that no love was awaiting me here, and splashed through the floods to
the Abbey. Neave was fishing perfunctorily by the bridge and volunteered
to take the car up to the house if I wanted to look for Barbara.
“The guv’nor’s in London for this Unknown Soldier business,” he
explained. “So it’s only the four of us. Just right for a nice game of
cards.”
“How’s Babs?,” I asked, as unconcernedly as I could.
“Oh, fit as a flea,” he answered. “She’s wandering about the park,
waiting for you.”
I made a pretence of hurrying forward as the car shot ahead; then, as it
passed out of sight, I leaned against the parapet of the bridge till the
low grey line of the refectory wall deepened to black and was gradually
lost in the oncoming tide of darkness. I was still there when the first
rare lights twinkled at the windows and paled as the curtains were
drawn. Then I heard a distant whistle and turned to the house before my
impulse to hurry away got the better of me.
I was halfway to the gardens when I saw the white coil of Barbara’s
furs.
“Darling! I was expecting you hours ago!,” she cried. “Did you have a
breakdown? I hope I didn’t upset your plans by asking you to come here,
George: I wanted you most awfully.”
I could not see her face clearly; but her voice thrilled me till I had
to bite my lip and look away. I wondered how I had existed without her
all these weeks. The long rest had given her back her old vitality. Her
eyes, when we entered the hall, were shining; and for a moment I fancied
that I was seeing her in a vision or that I was emerging from twelve
days’ delirium.
“My _dear_!,” I cried; and she laughed with childlike exultation at my
joy in her.
“Pleased to see your deserted and ill-used wife?”
“Babs . . .” Her cheeks were pink from the biting cold outside; her hair
and eye-lashes were spangled with tiny raindrops. As she flung her coat
aside and twined her arms about my neck, a familiar, faint, warm
fragrance rose from the carnations at her waist. As she clung to me and
our lips met, I could have fancied that no other man had ever made her
heart beat so quickly. “I’ve never _seen_ you like this before!,” I
cried.
“I’ve been getting well . . . for _your_ sake, sweetheart. I’ve been so
patient, so good. And I _did_ miss you so.”
“I’ve been thinking of you day and night,” I answered truthfully enough.
“The next time you go away, I’ll tell your secretary to send me a daily
telegram: ‘_Missing you dreadfully best love George._’ You’d never do it
on your own account. What’s the matter, darling?”
Unconsciously I must have drawn away from her embrace. The delirium was
returning; and I could only think of the telegram which she had sent me
the day after she asked Eric Lane to run away with her.
“Some bad news, I’m afraid. I didn’t want to spoil our first moment
together, but you’ll have to be told some time. I’ve not seen any papers
. . .”
Barbara’s hands fell from my shoulders; and she walked slowly to the
fire.
“I . . . _have_,” she whispered; and her head drooped as though I had
struck her.
“You mean . . . what . . . what _I_ mean?,” I stammered.
As she turned, her eyes were blinded with tears; and her hands groped
for support.
“Darling, if it had been any one else, should I have had to say ‘I
_need_ you’? . . . When I saw the great cruel headlines, I hoped and
prayed that I might die . . . till I knew you were being sorry for me.
You’re all I have; and I promised myself I’d repay you for all your
patience.” She could go on no longer; and her terrible tearless sobbing
shook her till I feared that her heart must break. “I _can’t_ be brave
any longer.” As she once more hid her face against my chest, I could
feel her whole body trembling in the last vain effort to restrain her
weeping. “When . . . when . . . when did you hear?”
“Twelve days ago,” I answered, as I led her to a chair.
“The day he died. You . . . didn’t tell me, George. Did you think I
shouldn’t see?”
“Strictly speaking, I didn’t hear for certain. I knew he was dying
. . .”
“There was a long article in _The Times_. Oh, so _cold_! . . . I knew he
was terribly ill. That’s what made _me_ so ill this summer, though I
couldn’t tell you before. I thought you might guess; the doctor did.
I’ve been going up and down, up and down, as he got better or worse. The
afternoon he died I fainted; and they all thought I was dead too. Now
you understand why I wrote such horrid letters: as he slipped away, I
couldn’t bear myself. I _did_ try to keep it all to myself. I knew how I
hurt you by talking about him. But no one told me anything! . . . I
couldn’t ask Lady Lane for fear she’d say I’d killed him. And he died
before I could ask him to forgive me.”
Barbara was no longer trying to control her tears; and I was no longer
thinking of anything but a means of comforting her.
“He didn’t feel there was anything to forgive,” I assured her.
“Ah, that was the way he talked!”
“It was the way he thought, Babs.”
“Then he might have spared me this!,” Barbara broke out. “Just one
word!”
As her head fell forward, I knelt down and chafed her hands.
“He may have been too weak,” I said.
“A message, then! I can’t _bear_ it! I didn’t think he _could_ be so
cruel.”
In furious self-scorn, I remembered telling O’Rane I could not pretend
for five minutes that I had not received Eric’s letter. Very little more
than five minutes had passed since Barbara and I met.
“In justice to him,” I said, “there _was_ a message. I was paraphrasing
it. He never dreamt you needed his forgiveness, he was begging for
yours. He loved you as much at the end as he’d ever done. His last
words—so faint I could hardly read them!—were ‘God bless you’. And we
must assume that he died at peace. You’d forgiven him so often, he said,
that, if God was disposed to judge him, he believed you would
intercede.”
In her agony of spirit, Barbara’s thoughts were reflected as clearly as
if she had spoken them. Her eyes lightened for a moment in unutterable
relief; they clouded as she looked suspiciously to see if I was
inventing this opportune comfort; then she stared through me and past me
to Eric’s death-bed six thousand miles away.
“He . . . wrote to you?,” she enquired after a long silence.
I half nodded; but, with Barbara’s eyes on mine, I could not put a lie
into words.
“The letter was to you,” I said. “I opened it with the rest.”
There was a single piteous whimper. Then she looked at me in perplexity:
“Where is it? Why didn’t you tell me?”
“It’s in my despatch-box. . . . I didn’t want to harrow you, darling. I
think he was delirious part of the time.” . . .
“Will you get it for me?”
“I’ve told you all that matters. It will only make you miserable to read
it.”
She seemed not to have heard me; but a strangled laugh, more terrible
than her crying, shewed the worth of my comfort:
“D’you think anything can make me more miserable than I’ve been these
last twelve days?,” she asked. Then she tore herself from me and stood
with her hands pressed to her temples, staring at me in mingled
bewilderment and rage. “All the time . . .? And you . . .? The last
thing he ever wrote . . . oh, I might have reached him while there was
still time! When did you get the letter?”
“Just before I left London.”
“While he was still alive . . . Ah, God, the cruelty of kind people!”
With the tears still wet on her cheeks, she forced a smile. “And you’ve
been carrying it about ever since? George dear, you’ve punished me for
all the crimes I’ve committed and all that I shall never have time to
commit if I live to be a thousand. . . . May I have my letter?”
For an instant, as she stood limply drying her eyes, I thought of
telling her that I had destroyed the letter; then I saw that this would
never be forgiven me, even if I had not already told her that it was
with my other papers.
“It will only hurt you to read it,” I said. “Forget it! Forget _him_, if
you can. I’ve told you he had nothing but love for you . . .”
“Then why mayn’t I see it? George, I don’t understand! I’m not a child;
and, if I didn’t know you were trying to spare me, I could almost kill
you for your ghastly kindness. Pocketing it for twelve torturing days,
as though it were a bill! Pretending he was too weak to write! Saying it
was a _message_! You’ll send me mad if you’re not careful!,” she cried
hysterically. “For the last time, please give me my letter.”
“For the last time please try to forget there ever was a letter. I’ve
told you he must have been delirious when he wrote. I won’t answer for
the consequences if you read it. All this time _I’ve_ been trying to
forget it.” . . .
My voice told her all that I was trying to hide. Her eyes were startled,
then compassionate, then defiant. I thought I heard a whisper of ‘Poor
George’. She raised her eyebrows as though to ask what I was minded to
do. Getting no answer, she shrugged her shoulders and turned wearily to
the fire:
“Was that why you left London?” I said nothing. “You told me it was on
business. And you’ve been . . . sitting in judgement on me ever since.”
. . .
I took a step forward and tried to catch her hand:
“It has made no difference.” . . .
“Put it down to my curiosity!,” she taunted. “It’s not pleasant . . . to
be . . . _condemned_ unheard; but I couldn’t _bear_ to be acquitted.
Your despatch-box, you said?”
“Babs, I implore you!,” I cried, as she moved to the bell.
“You’re afraid of being certain?,” she interrupted scornfully. “I’m only
afraid of sheltering myself behind a dead man. . . . Oh, Henry, Mr.
Oakleigh wants his despatch-box. And will you see that there’s a good
fire in the tapestry-room and have his things moved in there? The . . .
peacocks make so much noise on my side of the house,” she added.
6
As I finished dressing, Barbara tapped at my door and came in with
Eric’s letter in her hand.
“If you want this, I must give it you back,” she began. Her voice had
almost left her; and the radiant vitality of an hour before had flown.
“I hope you won’t have to quote it, because these things are so terribly
vulgarized in court. Do I . . . have to be unfaithful? I wasn’t . . .
with Eric,” she added carelessly.
“I know you weren’t.”
“I meant to be, . . . if I must use that . . . unclean word. For one
moment I had a vision of perfect happiness, I forgot everything
else. . . . It would be generous of you to say you won’t use this.
Eric’s dead. And people would think he was to blame.”
“I certainly shan’t use it. Barbara, why are you talking like this?”
Before she could answer, the letter had to be thrust into safety. Then,
with one hand clutching it to her breast, as though Eric’s heart were
beating against hers, she looked up and forced her mind on to my
question:
“Because father’s coming down to-morrow, and we must decide what we’re
going to do. We had to fight him pretty hard to get married, but we
shall have to fight much harder to get divorced.”
“But no one has mentioned divorce.”
“_I_ have. You said you could never forget that letter. . . . It was a
great risk for us to marry; but you were so sweet and I was so
miserable. . . . I see now that the thing never had a fair chance while
Eric was alive. I heard his voice in the streets, wherever we’d been
together, when I knew he was the other side of the world; and, as soon
as I had a chance, I rushed to him. When he wouldn’t have anything to do
with me, I _did_ try once more to make a success of our life. You wished
for a son; and I did my best, though Eric was the only man I wanted as
father of my children. Perhaps that’s why I . . . couldn’t keep him
alive, poor mite. . . . It’s funny that little things should cause such
big troubles. If I hadn’t asked you to open my letters, we _should_ have
made a success.” . . .
There was a moment’s break in her terrible composure; and she turned
away with a single dry sob.
“Why didn’t you tell me, Babs?”
“You wouldn’t have understood; you don’t understand now.”
“If I hadn’t understood . . . a little, should I have come?”
Unwittingly, I moved a step forward; and she held up her hand against me
as though I were assaulting her:
“If you’d understood, you wouldn’t have waited twelve days.”
I was goaded beyond discretion by the scorn in her voice. I had
understood and forgiven too little, it seemed, when I fancied that I had
forgiven and understood too much.
“It was . . . a startling letter,” I answered in her own measure.
“Whenever you told me you’d try to forget Eric . . .”
“You wondered for twelve days whether you could ever trust me again.”
She did not trouble to look at me, but I felt myself flushing. “As
though any other man could tear my heart out of me as Eric did! Why
_did_ you come?”
“Because _I_ needed _you_.”
Barbara’s lip curled in derision:
“Your servant’s too useful to discharge, so you pretend you haven’t
caught her stealing! When we met to-night, I noticed a difference. I
thought you must have seen in the papers about Eric’s death. When you
kissed me so tenderly, my heart leapt; and I thought you really
understood. Now I know . . .”
The incisive scorn cut deeper as her failing voice died away.
“Well?”
“You _need_ me because I’m a woman. That’s why you insult me with your
forgiveness. And that’s why you must divorce me, George. We’re divorced
in spirit; and we should both be dishonoured if we put your _need_ in
the place of love.”
In the distance I heard the gong booming for dinner. Neave’s door opened
and slammed. A cautious footfall, accompanied by a warning whistle, told
me that O’Rane was making his way downstairs.
“I shall not divorce you,” I told Barbara, “even if I could. And I
can’t. You’ll be as independent of me in Seymour Street as if you were
on a South Sea Island. But we mustn’t do anything irrevocable till we’re
more cool-headed.”
“But . . . this is impossible!,” Barbara cried.
“If we find it impossible, I shan’t try to keep you.” As I followed her
down to dinner, I wondered whether we either of us realized what we were
saying. “Coming here to-day,” I told her, “I was thinking that life only
becomes intolerable when there’s no love in it. If I can get back to the
state we were in a fortnight ago . . .”
“You’ll never do that. You’ll be very kind and attentive, as you always
are; but I married you because I thought you understood. Now you’ve
become like any other man who puts a cushion at my back or tucks a rug
round my knees. I’m utterly, utterly indifferent to you!”
On this, the first night of what she called for two years our “life in a
gilded cage”, I was chiefly concerned that her indifference should be
concealed from the sharp eyes of Neave and the abnormally sharp hearing
of O’Rane. With the same intention or in her usual reaction to an
audience, Barbara sparkled her way through dinner in a manner that set
me wondering whether I had not waked from another nightmare; but, when
we looked for her afterwards, she had disappeared; and, when I went—as
a matter of form—to bid her good-night, she answered me through a
locked door.
Neave had asked me at dinner how long I was staying; and, when I reached
my room, I found a note from Barbara:
“_If I am to come at all, I had better come to-morrow. Mother has a big
party this week-end._”
I sat down in front of the fire and tried to picture our life on the day
after to-morrow. Could Bertrand direct my paper if I found it necessary
to live in Ireland? Was Ireland tolerable or even safe? Could I afford
to keep two houses in commission if my wife refused to live with me. And
how long would Barbara endure this spiritual starvation?
“_Utterly, utterly indifferent._” I had never been the romance, the
passion, the great love which she still demanded as of right; even with
Eric Lane out of the way, I could not deck out my humdrum self as a
fairy prince. If I failed in the “understanding” for which alone she had
married me, how was her indifference ever to be overcome? The whole of
our life must be such an evening as this, when she donned a brilliant
mask of gaiety for dinner and discarded it when she locked her door
against me.
A sudden thought urged me from my chair and sent me pacing up and down
my room. How many other masks did Barbara employ? She dramatized her
life so richly that, though her grief for Eric was unfeigned, I doubted
if she could resist the temptation to make a romance out of his death.
Had she been still unmarried, she would have cast herself for a part of
inconsolable bereavement; as I obtruded awkwardly into her scene, she
chose a blend of remorse for the injury she had done him and of heroic
endeavour to forget him in her devotion to me. Unconsciously, in that
queer childish brain that could never separate sincerity from pretence,
the phrases had formed themselves; the emotion that fed the phrases had
been fed by them. Instinctively she had changed her attitude and
improvised a new part when she heard of Eric’s letter; and this trick of
dramatizing her life was now so much ingrained in her nature that within
half an hour she was perfect in her lines, her expression and her whole
reading of the part. Henceforward she would continue to regard herself
as “a damned soul”, with the added damnation of being tied to a crass,
unsympathetic husband and of conspiring with him to deceive her
neighbours as she had deceived O’Rane and Neave at dinner.
I readily believed that Barbara had forgotten half the agony of Eric’s
death in the joy of playing her new part.
“But how long is it to go on?,” I asked myself in despair.
The new part had in some sort been forced upon her; she could not
relinquish it without abandoning her attitude of moral superiority to
one who already believed her to be morally in the wrong and would
believe her to be yet more deeply in the wrong if she admitted that even
her grand romance had been a piece of play-acting. And play-acting it
had been for half the time! She could have married Eric if she had dared
to admit that Jack Waring was tired of her, instead of pretending that
she was pledged to him. . . .
Next day the Crawleighs arrived in time for luncheon; and we returned to
London in the afternoon. Our departure was on the border-line between
farce and tragedy. Muffled in furs and bathed in the warm fragrance of
her beloved carnations, Barbara took her place by my side; her eyes were
shining as when I came back to her the day before; and her
undemonstrative mother was stirred to exclaim: “My dear, you really _do_
look very lovely.” Crawleigh, who had recently met my uncle at dinner
and was overcharged with repartees that had not occurred to him in time,
stood with one foot on the running-board and emphasized his endless
rejoinders with excited cutting movements of a tremulous forefinger. In
the background stretched the low grey walls of the Abbey, unchanged
since the days when the first marquis criticized the treaty of Vienna,
unchanged since Lord Chancellor Neave cavilled at the peace of Utrecht,
unchanged since some nameless political abbot pointed the significance
of Crécy and attacked the staff-work at Poictiers. I can no more
reproduce my father-in-law’s arguments than I can reconstruct those of
his predecessors; but I remember being told that now, two years after
the armistice, we were in a more parlous state than when the war was
still raging.
“That’s what my uncle always tells me,” I answered, though it was not
worth while to remind Crawleigh that this was what I had been preaching
in despised _Peace_ for fifteen months. “If you sow the wind, you must
expect to reap the whirlwind.”
The reply probably bore no relation to the argument, but I wanted to get
away; and I had not listened to the argument.
As the car turned out of sight, Barbara flung aside one mask and pulled
another into place. Her eyes lost their colour; her whole body seemed to
grow limp. Appearances no longer needed to be maintained.
So we returned home, to reap a whirlwind. My trite phrase haunted me. I
wondered who had sown the wind.
CHAPTER FOUR
IN A GILDED CAGE
For remember (this our children shall know: we are too near for that
knowledge)
Not our mere astonied camps, but Council and Creed and College—
All the obese, unchallenged old things that stifle and overlie us—
Have felt the effects of the lesson we got—an advantage no money could
buy us!
. . . . . . .
It was our fault, and our very great fault—and now we must turn it to
use;
We have forty million reasons for failure, but not a single excuse!
So the more we work and the less we talk the better results we shall
get—
We have had an Imperial lesson; it may make us an Empire yet!
RUDYARD KIPLING: _The
Lesson_.
1
My return home from Crawleigh Abbey brought to my mind the reappearance
of the small boy in _Punch_, who, finding his running-away unremarked at
the end of one whole day, drew attention to it by observing that his
parents had the same old cat. For a single moment, as O’Rane and I
reached Salisbury Plain, I had remembered that the world was revolving
in sublime unconcern at my private tragedy; then a starless night of
misery enveloped me once more. In London, a fortnight later, I was
amazed to find letters and messages, proofs and manuscripts from people
who seemed still interested in unemployment or reparations, in the fate
of Ireland or the coalition.
Now and for many weeks I thought only of new means to win back a woman
who had become a stranger to me. After her first declaration of
“indifference, utter indifference”, Barbara never weakened the effect of
her action by talking about it; when I had influenza, she nursed me as
she would have nursed any man who had the misfortune to fall sick in her
house; when she caught my influenza and aggravated it with pleurisy, she
allowed me to take her abroad to recuperate. No two acquaintances,
sharing the same house, could have lived in greater harmony; and no
woman could have devised a keener torment than by treating lover,
husband or friend as an acquaintance.
Meanwhile, the external world was still revolving. . . .
“_I want to see you about these articles of yours_ . . .”, wrote
Bertrand.
“There’ll be a general election within six months,” Sir Philip Saltash
predicted.
“_I hoped to find you had knocked some sense into David’s head_,” Sonia
lamented.
“‘I see you have the same old cat’,” I whispered to myself in
astonishment.
2
It is a tribute, I think, to our loyalty in public that my marriage to
Barbara was commonly quoted at this time as one of the very few
successful unions in an age of confessed failures and desperate escapes.
Had I imagined at the beginning that our unreal separation could drag on
for two years, the myth of our blissful harmony would soon have been
exploded. As it was, we drifted. I thought by day, I dreamed by night,
of a romantic reconciliation that never came. There were moments when I
fancied that Barbara, with her passion for dramatizing life, forgot her
boredom in the excitement of martyrdom. On some plea, which I do not
remember, she gave up entertaining; and, while the young “London of the
restoration”—in Bertrand’s phrase—went leaderless, she had the barren
pleasure of feeling herself wasted.
By degrees which I cannot recall I was driven to spend more and more
time at my office and to dine more and more often at a club. Her
indifference spread beyond me to all the men and women who in other days
had interested her; it culminated in her dispassionate efforts to
interest her husband in some other woman. I returned home one evening to
be told that Ivy Gaymer had fled to us for sanctuary and that Barbara
was waiting for me to say whether we should send her back to her husband
or communicate with Mr. Justice Maitland or wait helplessly for
something to turn up. As Ivy was already in bed, we could hardly prick
her into the street at midnight; and next morning she ruled out our
first two courses by declaring that she would never again enter the
house of a man who intrigued with other women under her nose and that
her father’s advice and sympathy were limited to the triumphant
question: what else could any one expect?
We decided to wait for something to turn up. I did not want to be
inhospitable, but I wanted still less to hear Barbara talking about my
“little _protégée_”. After a week or two I suggested that there were
hotels in plenty and that Ivy was not without money. Barbara confined
herself to saying that, as I had insisted on the creature’s staying on
in the first instance, it was now my delicate task to evict her.
Following the cowardly expedient of writing what I was afraid to utter
by word of mouth, I sent a note to Ivy’s room one night, asking what her
plans were; we should, I said, be going down to Crawleigh for Easter. By
ill luck, she was still up; and her reply was delivered from the foot of
my bed, where she sat, smoking cigarettes, in scantier clothes than
women usually wear in public. If we kept the house open, she would not
in the least mind staying on by herself; her solicitors were advising a
divorce; it was saintly of us to take her in; and she would not have
troubled us if she had not been in fear of her life. The interview was
ended damagingly by Barbara, who came in to insist maternally that, if
Ivy and I wanted to talk, she must put on a warm dressing-gown.
Though my door was locked against similar conferences in the future, my
next attempt was no more fortunate. Ivy agreed that she must go and then
broke into piteous weeping. I comforted her as well as Barbara’s
expression of scornful amusement permitted; and, when the weeping broke
out afresh as Ivy began to pack, I recollected an overdue appointment at
my office. On my return, our guest was still in possession.
“She’s cried herself sick,” Barbara told me. “You can say she must go,
George, or you can say she may stop on; but it’s cruel to keep making
her cry.”
“I want her to go,” I said, without enlarging the field of debate.
“It was a pity you asked her in the first place, if you were going to
turn her out.”
“I fancy she asked herself.”
“I thought she was a passion of yours,” said Barbara in faint surprise.
“You made me go to her wedding, when I hardly knew her.”
“At O’Rane’s request: because her father was being so difficult.”
There was a pause; then Barbara shrugged her shoulders.
“I think she’s rather in love with you,” she murmured.
“That’s very flattering,” I said, “but it doesn’t make things any
easier. Her affections are quickly aroused. First it was Eric, then
Gaymer; now . . .”
“You don’t believe it? George, you’re sometimes rather unobservant. Why
d’you think she came _here_ of all places?”
“I should think she was banking on the softness of your heart or of my
head,” I answered.
I hardly knew whether to be surprised or not when I found Ivy still with
us next day, but I made no further attempt to dislodge her. At the end
of the week Barbara went to Crawleigh and I telephoned for a room at the
Eclectic Club. New developments in Ireland kept me tied to the office at
the last moment; and I did not choose that my wife or Ivy’s husband
should be able to say that the two of us had been alone together. After
four-and-twenty hours’ solitude Ivy discovered that it was possible to
live in an hotel without being tracked by her drunken and homicidal
lord; and the incident closed when Barbara came into my room, on the
night of her return from the Abbey, with a brief letter of thanks.
“You’d get tired of her very soon,” she said judicially, as though I
still needed to be saved from myself. “So would any man. That’s why I
begged Eric not to marry her. I believe you’d be happier, though, if you
found some woman who really interested you.”
“That advice is more suitable for a bachelor than for a married man,” I
pointed out.
Barbara walked to the door in silence, then paused with her fingers on
the handle.
“And how long is this going on?,” she asked with a sigh of utter
exhaustion.
“You alone can say that,” I replied.
The tragic farce had been running for six months and was to run for
another eighteen before the farce was eliminated and only the tragedy
remained. Without regular employment, I should have gone out of my mind;
and I am thankful that my uncle’s increasing infirmities threw ever more
and more of our work on my shoulders.
It was in the spring of 1921 that he despaired openly and finally of the
existing government; it was in the summer that he called for a change.
“Though, mark you, there’s not another man who could have done what
George has!,” cried Bertrand with the generous appreciation that Jack
Sheppard might have exhibited towards Dick Turpin. “After two years of
power he’s made a tumbledown peace that satisfies no one. He _hasn’t_
hanged the kaiser; he _hasn’t_ made Germany pay for the war. The League
of Nations, which we were promised, _isn’t_ functioning; he calls a new
conference every few weeks to settle finally the problems which were
finally settled at Versailles. If that isn’t an achievement . . .”
“Oh, admitted!,” I said. “I’m thinking about the day of reckoning.”
We were walking slowly along Knightsbridge on our way to one of the
weekly editorial dinners; and, as we approached the French Embassy, I
crossed the road for fear of encountering Lucien de Grammont. My
shoulders were not broad enough to support the load of obloquy which he
kept in reserve for our few, uneasy meetings; and, though I stated
candidly that the French were now the chief obstacles to peace, I could
not persuade Lucien that it was the prime minister and not the humble
editor of an obscure review who had coaxed the French to open their
mouths and shut their eyes at Versailles. Now that no sweetmeats were to
be had, the French were threatening to undertake the search themselves.
This was the first bill to be met on the day of reckoning; but I was not
prepared to say that it would be the last or the heaviest. In Ireland,
the practice of wholesale murder and destruction was being met with
reprisals in kind. Of India and Egypt it is enough to say that we knew
very little, that all we knew was bad and that we were not allowed to
print all we knew.
“That’s my point,” said Bertrand with cynical complacency. “Any one of
these things would have brought down a government in old days. Take
taxation! Take unemployment!”
“My one consolation,” I broke in, “is that _no_ man, even if damned
fools call him a ‘little wizard’, can cope with all that at the same
moment.”
“I’ll write you an article on _The First Duty of Government_,” Bertrand
promised. “And that, some of these gentry may be surprised to hear, is
. . . to _govern_.”
3
My most vivid memory of my uncle’s subsequent diatribe was that I
declined to publish it. In Ireland or France, where irony is understood,
it would have gone with a swing; but we were unpopular enough already
without assailing the cherished conviction of the English that they have
a natural talent for self-government. And this is what Bertrand
attempted with artful citations from any convenient speech in which an
English publicist had asserted that Dervishes, Hottentots, Andaman
Islanders or even Irishmen were unfit to govern themselves. Could
darkest Africa shew such a record of misrule as we had at our doors? Had
Egypt plunged to bankruptcy with greater recklessness than we displayed?
By the standard of our Indian crimes and blunders, was not Abdul the
Damned unjustly damned? The English were mistaken, but it was not too
late to repair the mistake; and my uncle proposed in conclusion that the
United States should lend Mr. Herbert Hoover for six months to organize
and run the British Empire Protectorate.
“It won’t do, Bertrand,” I said.
“But isn’t it true?”
“It’s too true.”
That, however, was not to say that the English had enough detachment to
relish the truth underlying the irony. Roger Dainton, on the eve of
signing the Ulster covenant, told me—as an Englishman—that the Irish
would never be fit for independence till they had acquired respect for
law; I had seen Violet Loring whiten to the lips at the report of a
lynching in some southern state and then regain her colour in a spasm of
indignation that a Quaker had not been shot for refusing to enter the
army. Collectively, I had watched the people of London—and, for all I
know, the people of England outdid them—exhibiting, at the time of the
Pemberton-Billing case, a ferocious credulity that was not exceeded by
the French in the Dreyfus trial.
“Well, write your own damned article,” said Bertrand. “If you think you
know these people . . .”
I believe that in one respect I understand the English, among whom I was
brought up, better than Bertrand, to whom they were always a race of
despised aliens. What they lack in imagination they make up in a queer
political instinct. Every one at the Eclectic Club was sublimely
indifferent, in these days, to the case of Egyptian autonomy; the
Amritsar sentences only provoked a desultory discussion whether “damned
black men”, as I heard them described by Sir Roger Dainton, would not be
all the better for “an occasional dressing-down”. When, however,
national bankruptcy was threatened, I encountered an instinctive
preference for solvency; and, when refugees from all parts of Ireland
flooded England with tales of assassination and counter-assassination,
the British liking for order at home grew clamant. I remember carrying
back to Seymour Street an official poster in which recruits were invited
to “_Join the Royal Air Force and_ _See the World_”; an unofficial hand
had appended the grim warning: “_Join the Royal Irish Constabulary and
See the Next World_.”
“It’s beyond a joke: that’s what it is,” said Robson, on whom I tried
the last of my experiments.
For soul-deadening years, my butler’s sentiment had been expressed, from
different angles, by Crawleigh and Bertrand, by O’Rane and Dainton, by
_Peace_ and the _Morning Post_. I believe, however, that no change of
heart can be effected by one man or one paper. England accepted the
reformation and acquiesced in the decapitation of Charles the First when
the Robsons of those days—inarticulate and irrational, for the most
part, but numerous and determined—decided that the unreformed Catholic
Church or the divine right of kings was “beyond a joke”.
“I’ve written my own damned article,” I telephoned to Bertrand. “I think
it’s an improvement on yours.”
“You _would_,” he replied.
“I don’t think this government has very long to live,” I added.
The oldest trick in the bag of a political journalist is to find out
what policy is going to be followed, to insist vehemently that this
policy must be followed and to take credit for having forced his own
policy on a vacillating and apathetic government. During the war, Sir
John Woburn preached conscription from the moment when his chief spy in
the cabinet had revealed that ministers were agreed to bring
conscription in: the Press Combine advertised itself for months as the
mouthpiece of that opinion which demanded conscription; and, when the
first military service act was passed, Woburn stood forth as the giant
who had forced the government, in his own phrase, “to give Haig the
men”. I have to guard against the temptation to employ this trick in
writing of our campaign in 1921. Independently of our prompting, every
one was saying that ministers must govern or go; and I only realized how
far opinion had swung, when I met the lately ennobled Lord Saltash at a
public dinner.
“Well, things are moving,” he began darkly, as he led me to the Turf and
Stage and pointed from an unobserved corner of the gallery to Lord
Lingfield’s customary table.
I needed a few minutes to penetrate the familiar externals. My cousin
Laurence Hunter-Oakleigh was entertaining a party of American revue
actresses; Sam Dainton was dancing with Ivy Gaymer; and the inscrutable
Gaspard was watching and ministering with his wonted resourcefulness and
address. It was like going back to a play at the end of a long run. I
felt that they must all of them have been frozen in the same attitude
since last I looked down on the top of their heads a year before. The
band, which played unceasingly from the moment we arrived to the moment
we left, might well have been playing for twelve months on end. It was
impossible to think of these sleek heads and slim figures without their
Turf and Stage frame, unless you thought of them as the brilliant,
glossy chorus of mannequins and salesmen in a musical comedy at the
Hilarity in old days. Had they homes? Had they private lives?
“I see Wister is withdrawing the support of his papers from the
coalition,” I said.
“Yes, he’s out for an all-conservative ministry,” answered Saltash.
“Foreditch put him up to it; and you can see they’re trying to nobble
Wilmot Dean for their new ginger-group. The rank-and-file tories don’t
want to drive Ll-G. out, though, till they’re sure of keeping him out.
And Lingfield, who’s leading the rank-and-file, doesn’t believe they can
do it yet, unless Bonar comes back. That’s why he wants a centre party,
to include Birkenhead, Winston and that lot. It’s interesting, devilish
interesting! The dying lion ain’t dead yet.”
“What line are you taking yourself?,” I asked.
“A wise man wouldn’t commit himself till the dying lion was much nearer
his last kick,” Saltash answered with refreshing candour. “If
Lingfield’s centre party falls down, he and Birkenhead and Austen won’t
get any mercy from Foreditch and the men who want an all-conservative
ministry; and, if Foreditch wounds Ll-G. without killing the coalition,
his die-hard tories needn’t look for office from the centre party. It’s
too early to say. When I give you the hint . . . I’m here most
evenings,” he concluded with an affability that rather disquieted me.
“I’ll remember that,” I said; and, when the last of many political
crises ended fifteen months later in the prime minister’s resignation, I
made it my business to dine nightly at the Turf and Stage. I was never a
member; but Sonia, who also was not a member, introduced me to Gaspard;
and Gaspard, bowing from the waist, assured me in the French of the Midi
that Mrs. O’Rane’s friends were always welcome.
4
She was not at the club on the night when Saltash took me to observe the
signs of the times; but I found her husband talking to Barbara when I
arrived home. He was armed with the notes of an article and wished to
use my paper for an attack on the entire English system of inheritance
and property.
“We’re hypnotized by 1914,” he broke out stormily. “We treat the old
world like a vast Pompeii, which we’re uncovering bit by bit. People
won’t see that we’re repairing from copies of old models.” . . .
“I’d sooner live in old Pompeii than in new Turin,” Barbara murmured.
“If Pompeii had been paradise in 1914, it would be an outworn paradise
now!” O’Rane, I thought, looked tired and old, as though perpetual
opposition was gradually wearing him down. “The world changes in seven
years, especially if the inhabitants have spent four of them
withstanding a stream of molten lava. Can you tell me a single idea
we’ve put forward, a single effort we’ve made to improve on 1914 so that
Pompeii shall not be buried again?”
I left Barbara to wrestle with his question while I glanced at the
manuscript article. O’Rane’s own contribution to the ideas of the new
age seemed to be that the hand of every man must be against his
neighbour so long as unequal wealth made the one arrogant and the other
envious. As human capacities were unequal, wealth must continue to be
unequally amassed for a single lifetime; but to perpetuate this
inequality was to perpetuate the friction that ultimately lead to
revolution and civil war.
“You’re at least consistent,” I said. “On the night Stornaway died, you
told me there was no room in the modern state for these gigantic
fortunes.”
“I doubt if we have room for private transmitted wealth of any kind,” he
answered. “It debilitates the individual, it demoralizes society. I’m
seeing that every day in my own work.”
The subject was too big to discuss at midnight; but, as his article was
avowedly the preamble to a declaration that he was bent at all costs on
saving humanity from the poison of the Lancing inheritance, I warned him
that the unemployed might break his windows if they heard that a million
a year was going to feed distant Russians when they themselves had not
eaten a square meal for twelve months. I asked whether his wife approved
of the article, but received no answer. Finally, I returned him his
manuscript with a reminder that I could not stultify my weekly
predictions of insolvency by proclaiming of a sudden that we were all
suffering from too much money.
“I’ll try elsewhere,” said O’Rane without resentment. “I’m sorry, but
I’m not surprised. You’re hypnotized by 1914, too, and you think you can
avert another eruption by treaties and boards of arbitration. They
didn’t stop the war in ’14, George; they never _have_ stopped wars, they
never will. If you’d change the course of history, you must change the
heart of man.”
“The more I study the heart of man . . .” I was beginning.
“It changes daily,” O’Rane cried. “It changed when man turned sick at
gladiatorial shows and slavery and torture. It will change again when
men find that cooperation is more comfortable than competition. But
you’ll have competition always—the competition of the rich with the
poor, among individuals and nations, the inevitable forerunner to every
revolution and war—so long as you crystallize an unequal distribution
of wealth.”
“Write me an article on that theme,” I said, “and I’ll publish it
gladly.”
My invitation and promise were forgotten by O’Rane, I imagine, as
quickly as I forgot his demand that I should find a new spirit moving on
the face of the waters. When I reached Fetter Lane next morning, I was
greeted by Spence-Atkins with news which made Saltash’s predictions
obsolete and O’Rane’s researches premature. With or without our reminder
that the business of a government was to govern, ministers were hatching
a new Irish policy. Like most Irish policies, it could be guaranteed to
divide England even if it failed to unite Ireland; and I felt then and
later that the decay of the coalition set in on this day. Like all new
moves in the Irish game at this time, it was certain to keep me in
London when I wanted to take Barbara to Scotland.
The result of the new negotiations has passed into history; and from
first to last I was narrowly preoccupied with their effect on my own
fortunes. If the south-west of Ireland became habitable again, I was
resolved to make it my home; and, at the end of many months’ parleying,
I was wakened by a telephone-message from my uncle to say that a
settlement had been reached. After threatening reconquest, the
government had ascertained that to “reconquer” Ireland would cost as
much and take as long as the last South African war; those who had
preached coercion changed their text to conciliation; and, as I passed
through Inverness, the king’s ministers were meeting the ministers of
President de Valera on equal terms.
“The treaty,” Bertrand’s message ran, “was signed in the small hours.
Outside a portion of Ulster, Ireland is to be a Free State.”
“And now,” I answered, “and now . . . now perhaps we may see home-rule
for England.” In 1906 I had brought a young man’s ideals to Westminster;
thirty years before me, my father had done the same; and ten years
before him, though he might now call his ideals illusions, Bertrand had
entered parliament with hope and vision. One after another, each in our
generation, we had seen our vision clouded and our hope deferred by the
shadow of Ireland. “May I go home now?,” I asked.
“I can’t spare you yet,” Bertrand sighed. “The trouble’s not over. There
are thousands of Irishmen who’ve taken a solemn oath of allegiance to
the republic for which their fathers and brothers laid down their lives.
There are thousands of English who will say in every passing difficulty:
‘I _told_ you so! Ireland is unfit for self-government.’ We must preach
patience, George. We must try to sweeten the bitter taste that all this
blood has left on our lips. Lake House can get along without you for the
present.”
“I was only thinking Barbara and I should be the better for a change,” I
answered with deliberate vagueness.
If I kept my disappointment to myself, I could not help being
disappointed. This talk of peace had suddenly opened an unexpected vista
of escape from the “gilded cage”; and my single glimpse of freedom
convinced me that I could not continue the armed neutrality which
Barbara had been imposing on me for a twelvemonth. We must be reconciled
or divorced. If we could separate even for a short time, we might be
able to decide what we wanted. I therefore told Bertrand that he must
not count on me indefinitely; and the old man shewed the wisdom to give
me my change by sending me to America for the Washington Conference.
“One of us ought to be there; and I’m too old,” he explained. “I don’t
know what stuffing the new president has inside him; but this is the
first serious effort to undo the harm of the Versailles treaty, and
Harding is the first responsible statesman to say frankly that we’re all
committing financial suicide. You’ll go?”
“I will,” I promised.
“And you’ll take Barbara?”
“I’ll talk to her about it.”
And that night I told her of my decision.
“Are you expecting me to come with you?,” she asked.
“It will be better for us both if I go alone. When I come back, you’ll
have had time to think quietly . . .”
“I can picture you talking to your clerks like this,” Barbara mocked.
“‘Your last chance, remember!’ . . .”
“To think quietly,” I repeated, “whether you would prefer me to live in
Ireland. Conditions are becoming normal there . . .”
“You must _really_ decide for yourself where you want to live,” she
answered, without hinting whether she wished me to live alone.
A week later I sailed from Southampton.
If I had expected to find any striking change on my return, I should
have been disappointed; but I fancy that I had by now ceased to look for
the romantic reconciliations of the film-world. There was little enough
change anywhere. My father-in-law had given me a farewell dinner on the
night before I sailed; he gave me a dinner of welcome on the night that
I returned. Tempers, I thought, were a little shorter; nerves a little
thinner. The vague feeling that something decisive must soon happen
reminded me of 1914, when the world expected a cataclysm and almost
hoped for it.
“And certainly the conference has done nothing to avert it,” I told
Bertrand at the end of dinner.
“Not the French show-down?,” he asked. “After this, we can talk frankly
instead of gushing about our gallant allies. We all made grievous
mistakes at the peace conference, George, but it’s the French who are
keeping us from repairing them.”
“Which will coerce which?,” I asked.
The question, I could see, was not palatable.
“They’ve the best air-force in the world and could lay London in ruins
within a week,” Bertrand growled. “It’s immeasurably superior to
anything we saw in the war. They can hold Germany down with aeroplanes
and niggers; and, when you ask them why they won’t reduce their
submarines, you don’t get a satisfactory answer. I can give it to you.
They’re going to make themselves masters of Europe before any one has
time to stop them. They worked against us in Poland, they’re working
against us in the near east.”
“How do you propose to make use of this knowledge?”
“It may lead to clear thinking. Why _we_ should pay six shillings in the
pound to relieve them of an income-tax, when they’re amassing armaments
. . .”
There was very little change anywhere. Lady John Carstairs hoped vaguely
that we were not going to desert our late allies; Violet Loring
whispered that it was all very well for dear Phyllis to preach at us,
but America had deserted every one. I provoked a passing storm by
asserting that all international debts would have ultimately to be
forgiven; and, had any one asked wherein the world was safer or happier
than in 1914, he must have waited long for an answer.
An hour later, as we drove home, Barbara enquired expressionlessly
whether I had enjoyed my holiday from her.
“I wanted _you_ to have a holiday from me,” I answered. “No, I missed
you horribly. I should like to think you missed me.”
“Oh, why say that?,” she exclaimed with sudden petulance. “If I could
have a holiday from myself so that I didn’t see how my life has been
wasted, if I could lose my memory . . . Dear God, if I could only die!”
There was no change in her; and I was driven to issue my ultimatum:
“If you’d like me to go away again, I will. And this time I shouldn’t
upset you by coming back. I’ve done my best; and I’ve failed. We can
part friends. If you want a divorce, you can have it now.”. . .
“Somehow, I don’t see you in the divorce-court,” Barbara murmured half
to herself. “I feel you’d bungle it. When I wrote and begged you to come
back, you _would_ . . . by special train.”
“Well, the matter is now in your hands,” I said.
“I think you’ve a finer collection of worn-out phrases than any man I
know,” she cried, again without answering my question.
5
“No change of any kind!,” I told my cousin Violet when we dined with her
a fortnight after my return to England.
Barbara had not mentioned divorce again; and I believe we were summoned
to Loring House with a view to mending the latest breach between Sonia
and her husband. He, unchanging in stubbornness, had published the
article which I rejected and was threatening to follow it with others;
Sonia, unchanging in tactics, had announced that she would walk out of
the house unless he yielded. Bertrand, unchanging in the beloved formula
which he applied indiscriminately to cigarette-smoking, Christianity,
_vers libre_, welfare-work, side-whiskers and “self-determination”,
explained that this was only a phase, which one or other or both would
outgrow. And Violet, whose kindness of heart nothing could change, was
playing counsellor and friend of all parties.
“We, I suppose,” said Barbara, “are to be the object-lesson in domestic
felicity. When women have married the wrong men, as Sonia and I did,
it’s rather a waste of time for any one to patch it up.”
“If there’s been a fair trial,” I said, “you should end what you can’t
mend. Armed neutrality is intolerable.”
From Barbara’s thoughtful look I fancied she was wondering whether I
wanted a divorce in order to marry some one else.
“The trouble is,” she continued, “you never know who is the right man
till you’ve married him. I always thought you had more perfect
understanding than any man I knew . . . Funny!,” she added, as I made no
answer.
No answer seemed possible. There was now no change in our rare private
passages, though I thought the reference to my want of understanding was
dragged in to close the subject of divorce. There was no change in the
atmosphere of this party. Nearly seven years had passed since Violet and
I last dined together at Loring House. The noble line of portraits had
been reinforced by a black-and-white sketch of Jim in uniform; Sandy was
old enough for his mother to consult me about schools; but we were
arguing now in the very mood and terms that we had used in 1914.
“I wish people wouldn’t talk so much about ‘the next war’,” Violet
muttered with a frown in the direction of Philip Hornbeck. “I’ve lost my
husband; I’m not going to lose my son if I can help it.”
The big, softly-lighted room reminded me of my interminable discussions
with Jim and of his own admission on the outbreak of war that the old
governing classes were played out. I was reminded, too, of the question
that had haunted me in the first weeks of the armistice: if the order
that was represented at this table could not keep peace or make peace,
would it have to give way?
“We talk about the next war,” I said, “because the combined wisdom of
the world has done nothing in the last three years to prevent it.”
“I suppose the prime minister _is_ the only man . . .?” she hazarded.
“Every prime minister is indispensable,” I answered, “till he finds
himself on an opposition bench, watching his successor taking command.
Five minutes after George goes, every one will ask why he didn’t go
before. Every one will discover then the vice of all coalitions: which
is that there’s no one to oppose them. You don’t expect Curzon to admit
that Lloyd-George’s foreign policy is dangerous?”
“Can nobody do anything from outside?”
“The press does its best, but this government is stronger than the
press. Otherwise, Woburn and his combine would have had George out in
the street a year ago. Your best hope is an intrigue from inside. Ll-G.
was at least equally responsible for the shortage of high explosives in
’15; yet he put the blame on the others and broke the Asquith
government. It may be done again.”
My voice carried to Bertrand’s side of the table and roused him from one
of his now periodical lapses into slumber.
“If the House of Commons contained anybody one half as clever, Ll-G.
would not now be prime minister,” he answered.
No change; and no prospect of a change until it was forced upon us by
another cataclysm. It was the public temper that alarmed me more than
any concrete problem of unemployment or proved blunders of policy. On my
first appearance in Fetter Lane I asked young Triskett for a sketch of
the political position; and the tone of his reply reminded me
disquietingly of the recklessness and exasperation of 1914.
“The prime ministers of the allies,” proclaimed Triskett with the pomp
of a toast-master, “have been meeting in discord and parting in harmony,
without settling anything. The public, however, me lords, ladies _and_
gentlemen, has by now ceased to expect settlements. We have had a new
policy once a week to bring Russia back into what the poet so
felicitously calls ‘the comity of nations’; a protest once a fortnight
against bolshevist propaganda in the far east; and winged words from the
labour party once a month, when it thinks Winston has a new scheme for
invading Russia. Reparations, my dear Oakleigh, are rather _vieux jeu_:
we don’t remind Ll-G. of his promises to hang the kaiser or ‘make the
Huns pay’; if we did, the French might try to catch us up for an
invasion of the Ruhr. We’re rather short with the French since the
Washington Conference. At home, you’ll find the prime minister has got a
new wind, but everybody’s very sick of him. Gawd, and I’m sick of
everything!,” he added with his first approach to sincerity.
The bitter, neurotic voice reminded me of a night, some eight years
earlier, in my old room, a quarter of a mile away in Bouverie Street.
Van Arden and Jack Summertown then burst in with the announcement that
they were bored beyond endurance; we must break windows or light a
bonfire in Trafalgar Square. “Sick of everything!,” they repeated at
short intervals. I could not join in whatever debauch they arranged: it
was press-night, for one reason; and, for another—unless my memory be
at fault—, this was the Thursday following the Serajevo assassinations,
when universal dissatisfaction sought practical expression. Arden and
Summertown were now dead; but Triskett stood in their place. And
Trisketts, multiplied to infinity, furnished the atmosphere, the fuel
and the spark whereby the world was periodically set ablaze. The
Triskett of an earlier generation had told his friends in Paris that a
bit of a revolution would at least liven things; he had urged Lafayette
to fire on the mob at Versailles “just to see what would happen”.
I mentioned this fancy to Bertrand and O’Rane at the end of dinner.
“It’s the revolt against peace, after the incessant excitement of war,”
said my uncle, who had been loudly regaled with private mutinies for the
last hour. Ivy Gaymer was now in the precarious legal region “between
the _nisi_ and the absolute”; Sam Dainton had scandalized his parents by
opening a cocktail-bar in Swallow Street; and Barbara was contemplating
a volume of autobiography. “I’m afraid we’re drifting . . .”
“We’re refusing to admit there’s been a war,” Raney struck in. “You
can’t expect anything to be the same; and it’s because I’m afraid to
drift that I’m carrying out a new idea with this money.”
We were not encouraged by O’Rane’s tone to break the rather embarrassing
silence that followed. I had noticed before dinner that he and his wife
had not merely—in the language of stage directions—“come into the
room”; they had “entered, conversing with animation”. As we drove home,
I asked Barbara whether Violet had effected a reconciliation.
“If he publishes any more articles, Sonia will repudiate them,” she
answered.
“And if he repudiates her repudiation?”
“She’ll repudiate him.”
“Um. I rather hoped, when I saw them together . . .”
“Husbands and wives who get on well in public always arouse my worst
suspicions,” said Barbara. “No, there’s no change.”
I was still pondering our hard-worked phrase when we re-entered our
“gilded cage”; and Barbara had slipped away to bed before I could ask
her whether a man erred more grievously by doing everything that his
wife demanded or nothing.
CHAPTER FIVE
“UN SACRIFICE INUTILE”
“. . . They say, the tongues of dying men
Enforce attention, like deep harmony;
Where words are scarce, they are seldom spent in vain;
For they breathe truth, that breathe their words in pain.” . . .
SHAKESPEARE: _King Richard II_.
1
“On the turf,” expounded my uncle Bertrand, “races are won by the
intelligence of the individual backer. It is only when you lose that you
divide the responsibility between the breeder, the trainer, the jockey
and the horse. That is why the sporting tipster is the happiest of men.
Why shouldn’t we call ourselves ‘the Brigadier’ and run a sporting
column in _Peace_? You and I, George, get neither pleasure nor profit
from seeing our political forecasts being fulfilled.” . . .
“Perhaps, if we’d backed our fancy . . .” I began.
“I’ve backed _Peace_,” said my uncle grimly, “to a tune that would make
an unsuccessful racing-stable seem like a safe investment. I pay tens of
thousands a year for the privilege of casting myself for the part of
Cassandra. We _can’t_ be so much cleverer than other people . . .”
“If we were,” I interrupted, “we might make them believe what we tell
them.”
“The world believes what it wants to believe,” said Bertrand.
“And is quite unabashed when it’s proved wrong,” I added, as I pocketed
the article which I had brought to Princes Gardens for my uncle’s
_imprimatur_.
Many months had slipped away since we discussed the day of reckoning
that awaited an opportunist government and an indifferent country. In
the last four months of 1921 and the first eight of 1922 every storm
that we had foretold blew against our doors or broke through our roofs.
By the time that the peace coalition fell, the great powers were at
loggerheads, war was at a day’s remove and the mutter of social
revolution was heard in England for the first time since the Chartist
riots. No one heeded our jeremiads; and there is little satisfaction now
in recalling our prescience. Indeed, before presuming to lecture the
public, I might well ask myself what hearing I won from my friends and
what attention I paid to my own warnings. Did O’Rane listen when I told
him that his stubbornness had already alienated his wife and would, as
likely as not, encourage the unemployed to break his windows? Did I
listen when I told myself that, though I had sworn to have no scene with
Barbara, the armed neutrality could not last?
Did I really believe that the conditions created by the Versailles
conference could only be changed by another war?
2
I am writing so near to the times which I am trying to describe that I
must occasionally invoke the judgement of posterity. I may be told that
my facts are wrong, that I have distorted them by unintended omissions,
above all that I worked in a false perspective. My only answer must be
that I have written the truth as I saw it, that I have no thesis to
maintain and that my conclusions have been reached without bias. At the
armistice I believed that we had done with war; when peace was signed, I
believed that another war was being made inevitable; and, when the
peace-coalition fell, I believe that the sense and conscience of the
country rose in revolt against a system that threatened it with another
war. From this standpoint, the general election of 1922 closed the
chapter that began in 1918 and the book that opened in 1914. If it did
not answer my question whether the old governing classes could make
peace, it gave an unmistakable answer to those who demonstrated that
they could not. So far as the people of England are concerned, I feel
that the diplomatic moves and counter-moves of this period, the division
and regrouping of political parties, the influence of the party and
press managers and the historical significance of the Irish settlement
or the unemployment problem were all leading to the upheaval of 1922. If
history admit of beginnings and ends, a system ended with the end of the
1918 parliament. In using the word “revolt”, which Louis XVI favoured, I
wonder whether I should not use the word “revolution”, which de
Liancourt substituted.
According to my uncle, the first responsible attack on the peace-treaty
was delivered by President Harding; a counter-attack was opened by the
French, when they stultified the Washington Conference; and an attack,
in reply to the counter-attack, was launched by the Balfour Note on
inter-allied indebtedness.
On the day after it was published, Clifford van Oss called in Fetter
Lane to enquire whether the note was an overture to repudiation.
“I should rather call it our reply to the French _non possumus_ at
Washington,” said Bertrand. “If we pay our debts to you, the French must
pay their debts to us instead of building submarines against us.”
“From what I know of the French,” said Clifford, with the detachment
that some of us found irritating in a country which had so
disconcertingly washed its hands of European problems, “they won’t take
it lying down.”
The assertion was so intrinsically probable that I did not contest it;
but, if I spent little time wondering what the French reply would be,
that was chiefly because I was watching the fulfilment of another
prophecy. The controversy that raged for six months over O’Rane’s
articles in the _Democratic Review_ is now public, if not ancient,
history; and my chief memory is of his victory by silence. If one of his
million critics had troubled to study his argument, he would have seen
that the flamboyant gifts of embarrassed millionaires were attacked for
their demoralizing effect on the recipients. Those who wrote to the
papers or passed unanimous resolutions of protest laid emphasis on the
crying needs of hospitals and the like; they assumed an almost
impertinent right to tell other people how they should spend their
money; but they did not meet O’Rane’s contention that every university
could be endowed, every laboratory subsidized and every great work of
art purchased for the nation from the money that was spent on luxuries.
I paid less attention to those who lectured O’Rane from expensive
addresses than to those who heard, on the authority of a millionaire,
that a great many people had a great deal too much money.
“Any windows broken?,” I asked him on one of the rare occasions when we
met in these months.
“Not yet,” he laughed.
I did not dare to enquire whether any wives had been running away
lately. Sonia’s threatened repudiation had not yet been published; but
this, Barbara told me, was only because he had not yet stated in public
that he would renounce his inheritance. The controversy imparted a
transient heat to the chilly summer of 1922; and no doubt I should still
be printing letters of protest if O’Rane’s theories of property had not
been drowned in the thunder of a more urgent conflict. In August I took
Barbara to stay with the Knightriders; and I had only reached
Northumberland when my uncle recalled me to London with a telegram that
revived for many days the agonizing fears and uncertainties of 1914.
I returned alone to find Bertrand breakfasting in bed.
“You’ve asked me more than once what we’ve done to prevent another war,”
he began. “Here’s your answer: nothing.”
In the last week I had seen but a few provincial papers; I had almost
forgotten the diplomatic moves that led to this check. With all the
suddenness of those August days eight years before, however, I stepped
out of the train at King’s Cross to learn that Great Britain was being
left to fight, single-handed, for the freedom of the Straits, against a
restored and rejuvenated Turkey.
“This is the French reply to the Balfour note,” I said; “their revenge
for our refusing to accompany them into the Ruhr.”
“If you’ll be good enough to tell me what it’s all about . . .” Bertrand
thundered; then he lay back, spent and very old, until I suggested
calling in Fetter Lane to see the latest telegrams.
There was nothing to be learned there; almost nothing to be learned when
I invited myself to dine with the Crawleighs, though I remember this
night with pleasure as the only one on which my father-in-law and I
looked on any political problem with the same eyes. Halfway through
dinner, Neave entered in service-uniform. His battalion had received its
orders for Chanak; he did not know why he was going; we could not tell
him.
“Harington’s a cool-headed fellow,” said Crawleigh to keep his own
courage up. “If he _can_ avoid a conflict . . .”
I remembered the days eight years before when Jim Loring and I kept our
courage up by telling each other that Sir Edward Grey would prevent war
if war could be prevented.
“I _still_ don’t understand,” muttered Lady Crawleigh, as though we were
conspiring to keep some discreditable secret for her.
“No one does, ma,” Neave snapped and then left his father to reach the
same conclusion in less few words.
War was again at our gates; and we had not willed it, we did not want
it. Stalking across Europe from that country which had been most
completely vanquished, it hammered at our gates within four years of the
war that was to have ended war. Whenever in the last three years I had
urged that the incorrigible and blighting Turk should be forced into the
hinterland of Asia Minor, Crawleigh had annotated my articles with the
red-ink comment that we should pay for a peaceful Europe with a hostile
India. Now, though he knew better than most men that Mohammedan India
was not bound to us by ties of love, we awoke to find that, while the
victorious allies were quarrelling at a distance, Turkey had set herself
quietly to recover all that she had lost in the war. When British troops
went unsupported to uphold the Treaty of Sèvres, they were to find their
old enemies equipped with the arms which we had shipped to Russia and
restored to fighting form by officers of the French army.
“But . . . but _why_ . . .?,” Lady Crawleigh kept repeating with
pathetic helplessness.
Parliament, as represented by Crawleigh, the services, as represented by
his son, the press, as represented by me, were not allowed to know all
that was involved in this apparently aimless squabble about distant
waterways.
“Nobody knows and nobody cares,” Neave cried in ungovernable
exasperation.
And this was all that I could report in answer to Bertrand’s request for
news.
“The first shot fires the magazine,” he predicted; “and we know from the
Balkan wars that people can fight when they’ve no food and no money.
Russia and Hungary will come in search of pickings. One will bring in
another.” . . .
For once, however, my uncle was at fault. The political instinct of a
somnolent people was again expressed by my butler in his favourite
formula that another European war would be beyond a joke.
“If they can’t do better than that,” he decided, of the coalition
ministers, “they’d better let some one else have a try.”
I handed on this opinion to Bertrand next day, with the rider that he
looked like winning an old bet on the life of the coalition. Before I
went north again to bring Barbara back to London, the Lloyd-George
government was under sentence; and, had Bertrand been at hand in October
to claim his wager, I should have had to entertain him at dinner.
3
Mindful of Lord Saltash’s invitation, I called without delay at the Turf
and Stage to hear the latest movements of political parties. Now, as
before, there was no one to turn the prime minister out if he could hold
his cabinet together; now, as before, the insurgents were thrown into
confusion by their cross-divisions. While Rupert Foreditch ran up and
down in search of a conservative leader, the centre party counted its
big guns.
“_It is hard_,” the Lingfield press stated, “_to imagine a conservative
administration without Lord Birkenhead, Sir Robert Horne and Mr.
Chamberlain, all of whom, it is well known, have promised their
allegiance to Mr. Lloyd-George_.”. . .
“_Recent events in the near east_,” retorted the Wister papers, “_have
signed the death-warrant of the coalition_.”. . .
The organs of both parties combined to ignore the existence of liberal
ministers; and I judged that the political wire-pullers on all sides
were estimating whether the old but awkward conservative organization or
the new but efficient coalition would be the harder to split.
As I failed to see Saltash, I deduced that the tocsin was either not to
ring yet or else had rung already in some other place; and my nearest
approach to a party-manager was the trim and ill-informed Frank Jellaby,
who demanded without preamble what line my paper would take in the
election.
“What line are the independent liberals taking?,” I asked in my turn.
“And how many seats can you be sure of winning? I’d support the devil
himself if he promised a homogeneous majority.”
“_Our_ line . . .” he began eagerly; and, as I turned from the things he
had forgotten to the things he had never learned, I classed him
unhesitatingly with those who—in O’Rane’s phrase—would not admit that
a war had taken place.
“I suppose a political whip can’t live without an abnormal endowment of
optimism,” I said, more to myself than to him.
Jellaby forged ahead with growing enthusiasm. The local associations
were solidly in support of the Asquith wing, solidly opposed to the
Lloyd-George renegades. Much capital could be made out of the
Safeguarding of Industries Bill (“which is pure protection; you’d have
thought the tories had had enough protection in 1906”); more from the
Black-and-Tan reprisals in Ireland; most of all from the unpopularity of
the coalition.
“But have you considered why it’s unpopular?,” I broke in at last. “Not
because its policy is faintly protectionist—the electors to-day don’t
care tuppence about free trade—; not because it tried to put down
murder with more murder. What people care about is taxation and the cost
of living and unemployment and, above all else, my dear Frank, security.
We’re in sight of another and a bloodier war.”
“With a man like Lloyd-George . . .,” he began with a kindling eye.
I did not wait, however, for the end of the tirade. No one beyond
Jellaby’s immediate circle of colleagues cared about the internecine
feuds of exasperated factionaries; and I look back on this night as the
time when so temperamental, congenital and impenitent a liberal as
myself had to realize that there was at present no hope for liberalism
in the liberal party. So far as the roar of his indignant rhetoric
allowed me, I tried to formulate the demands of all who shared my own
feeling of insecurity. The country was demoralized by the war and by the
paralysis of government that followed it; instinctively the country
wanted to be put into training, to have its muscles hardened and—still
more—its nerves steadied. Though the heat of civil war had died down in
Ireland, it had been replaced by the fitful blaze of individual
assassination; the chief of the imperial general staff was done to death
this summer on the steps of his house in London; the commander-in-chief
of the Free State army was ambushed in Ireland. It was idle to bandy
figures of murders and reprisals, when the country demanded a cure for
its own demoralization.
“People feel it’s time to pull up, take stock, overhaul,” I said. “It’s
the spirit of 1914, when the war did for us what we could not do for
ourselves.”
“And that security is just what the liberal party offers,” said Jellaby.
“Standing midway between a tory reaction and socialism . . .”
“If you’re going to be the safe, middle party,” I interrupted, “go
all-out for that. In 1918 you had no policy; you have no living policy
now. The only thing you’ve learnt since 1914 is that you have a score to
settle with the coalition-liberals. While you’re settling that, the
country will look for a government that will tackle unemployment before
the unemployed get out of hand, a government that doesn’t bring us as
near war as we are to-night.”
We argued inconclusively until the theatres emptied. As there was still
no sign of Saltash, I judged that—in his favourite phrase—he must be
troubling the waters to some purpose; and I was preparing to leave when
Sam Dainton hurried up to demand why I had not yet patronized his
cocktail-bar. He was followed—at an interval of time and space
calculated to disarm the king’s proctor—by Ivy Gaymer, who told me that
she expected her decree to be made absolute the following week.
“These six months have been hell,” she cried viciously, as she danced
away with Sam.
Marking her difference of outlook and appearance since she first sought
from me an introduction to journalism, I felt that we were threatened by
a worse spirit than that of 1914 and that we stood in need of harder
moral training. Ivy’s reputation was hanging by a thread; her fingers
and Sam Dainton’s were itching equally to snap it.
“A mad world,” I said, as I parted from Jellaby. “A mad world,” I
repeated, two days later, when I went north to bring Barbara home. “A
mad world face to face with its madness,” I thought to myself, on
reading an announcement, sandwiched between news of now greater moment,
that Mr. David O’Rane was withdrawing the funds of the Lancing Trust
from England.
On reaching Seymour Street I found a telephone-message from Sonia,
begging me to see her at once. I replied that I would come; but, as I
walked to Westminster that afternoon, I felt—as in the similar
atmosphere of eight years before—that the individual had shrunk in
importance. Barbara, shaken out of her usual aloofness, now only cared
to know what chance of life I would give her brother; and, though I felt
for Sonia as I should feel for a popular actress who married a country
curate, I was mildly aggrieved that she should absorb my time when I
wanted to explore the last frantic hopes of peace.
The case which I prepared for O’Rane was, I fancy, not unpersuasive; but
I had no chance of putting it forward. If the inheritance three years
before had been a nine-days’-wonder, the news of the renunciation seemed
likely to cause, in some quarters at least, a nine weeks’ consternation.
I blundered into the wake of a deputation and entered the library in
time to hear the venerable Bishop of Poplar pleading for men and women
whom O’Rane had kept alive for more than two years. Thousands, the
bishop asserted, were on the verge of starvation; before the winter,
they would be reckoned by tens of thousands. While Mr. O’Rane’s
arguments might be unassailable in normal times, the aftermath of an
unprecedented war demanded abnormal remedies.
“From half-a-dozen abnormally long purses?,” O’Rane enquired wearily. “I
want _every one_ to give and _every one_ to feel it. If your few rich
men go on strike, what will happen?”
The bishop was too old a controversialist to be trapped:
“You would like me to say that some one will come forward in their
place. I wish I could believe it. When the pinch becomes unbearable, the
government will provide relief out of the taxpayer’s pocket. But, before
that relief comes, many people will be dead; there will be rioting
. . .”
“It’s a nice question already how long we can keep ’em sweet,”
interposed an anxious voice on behalf of the National Unemployment
Committee.
“It’s a nice question whether you’ll get anything done till they turn
nasty,” retorted a small man with a Cardiff accent.
The bishop smiled and explained that, to make his deputation
representative, he had included his friend Mr. Griffiths, with whose
well-known bolshevist views we were no doubt already acquainted.
“What would you think, Mr. O’Rane,” he continued, “if I threw the bread
of London into the Thames on the plea that it would be better for the
people to eat cake? You are pronouncing sentence of death on the weakest
section of the community.”
In the silence that followed I turned from O’Rane’s tortured eyes to the
apostle of “bolshevism”. This was certainly my first, though not my
last, meeting with the organizer and leader of “Griffiths’ Heroes”. I
had expected a figure cast in the heroic mould, for there was a touch of
the genius in the originality of his ideas and a hint of the commander
in the obedience which he secured in carrying them out. Most strongly
marked, however, was the fanatic; and his blended passion and cruelty
made him something less than human. In thinking of him after all these
months I am always reminded of an angry ferret. He was very small, very
hirsute, very quick; though his eyes were brown, they seemed to shine
red; and, as he looked scornfully round O’Rane’s warm library, I felt
that his little teeth were seeking a hand to bite.
“There’d be less talk of bolshevism, if people knew what they were
talking about,” he announced with a bluntness that was in painful
contrast to the bishop’s courtly patience. “The government says it
doesn’t know what to do; let’s see if any one else does. When folk are
starving, they know what to do.”
There was a threat in his tone; but he did not explain it, as Sonia came
in at this moment and motioned me into the corner by the tea-table.
Griffiths, to the credit of his consistency, refused tea: the men whom
he represented had been out of work for eleven months; he lived as they
lived and, if need be, would starve as they starved.
“We’re first on the list for looting, when the revolution comes,” she
whispered cheerfully, while he examined her clothes as though he would
have liked to strip her. Then, for a moment, she forgot to think of
herself. “Oh, George! Babs has just telephoned for you. I’m so sorry,
I’m afraid there’s bad news. Your uncle . . .” I stood up; but she
pulled me back, as the deputation filed out. “She’s sending the car
here; she thinks you ought to go to him at once. If there’s anything we
can do . . .”
I shook my head. At Bertrand’s age, there was little that any one could
do.
“Have you told Raney?,” I asked.
“I hadn’t a chance. This deputation . . . Oh, David, what did you tell
them?”
O’Rane dropped into a chair and pressed his fists against his temples:
“I said . . . I’d think the thing over. It was really out of politeness
to the poor old bishop. Nothing can make any difference.”. . .
“Even when everybody tells you you’re wrong? People simply won’t believe
it. I had four reporters within half-an-hour.”
“I don’t know what they want to worry us for,” he broke out. “What did
you tell them?”
Sonia weighed each word of her answer before launching it:
“I said you hadn’t made up your mind. If you want to shew that you care
for me . . .”
O’Rane walked to her with his hands outstretched in an attitude of
entreaty:
“If this accursed money had never come to me, you couldn’t have said
that.”
The attitude of entreaty won no hint of yielding.
“Of course, if you _won’t_ be warned . . .” Sonia muttered, as she
walked with me to the door.
4
As I got into the car, I was first frightened and then touched to find
Barbara sitting half-hidden in her corner.
“I’m afraid he’s very bad,” she whispered. “It’s not a stroke this time;
but something’s broken inside him and he’s had terrible hæmorrhages. If
he has another . . . I’m so sorry, George.”
“It was good of you to come.”
In the darkness I heard a sigh; and Barbara laid her hand on mine:
“We’ve always been good friends, even if we _have_ made rather a mess of
our lives.” . . .
I could not hear what she said after that, for I had been caught
unprepared by Sonia and was realizing now for the first time that it was
a toss-up whether I saw Bertrand alive. My uncle was a man of almost
fifty when I was born. For ten years I was frightened out of my wits by
his huge stature and bellowing voice; for another ten I was humiliated
by his brutal jests and blasting disparagement; then, as a young man, I
rose in exasperation and trounced him till he roared with delight at my
beating. From that unlikely beginning sprang a friendship in which
Bertrand played the part of father, elder brother, political mentor and
fellow-conspirator in my most impressionable years.
“I . . simply can’t imagine life without Bertrand,” I told Barbara.
“If you want me . . .”, she whispered.
Did even she know how the sentence would have ended? I was stunned by
the thought of losing Bertrand; I clutched at any one who would take his
place, clutching literally with both my hands about Barbara’s wrists.
And she, for the first time in my acquaintance, was frightened.
“Does this mean . . .?,” I began.
“I won’t come into his room, of course,” she continued, in a superb
recovery. “If you want me to fetch some one for a second opinion . . .”
“Does this mean that we’re going to make a new start?,” I persisted.
“I’ll do all I _can_ . . .”
Though it was Bertrand’s imminent death that broke my self-control, I
forgot him and forgot that we were driving to his death-bed:
“The only good you can do is to tell me this ghastly farce is played
out! Two years!”
“We all make mistakes,” she answered with composure, though she had
winced at that word “farce”. “I can’t help you _much_. In these two
years I’ve grown used to doing without love. I’ve lost everything,
thrown everything away.” The silence that followed seemed to daunt her;
and I felt my hand being pressed. “You know as well as I do all you’ve
done for me. I’ll be your wife, I’ll bear you children if I can; but I
can’t give you a love I don’t feel.”
As though I had stepped aside, I saw myself lurching forward to demand
satisfaction for the unuttered reproaches and contemptuous suspicions
that had masqueraded so long as patience.
“Did you ever feel it?,” I heard myself asking. “Have you _ever_ loved
_any one_? You’ve been curious about many people; but it’s always been
in your head and not in your heart.”
“I don’t let _myself_ off!,” she moaned.
“I wonder! You have tragic scenes; but, when other people are broken,
you survive. If your heart had been brought into the play . . .”
I broke off in stark horror. Never before had we held such language; and
we were almost within earshot of Bertrand. Barbara was dumbfoundered at
first; then she rallied and threw herself into the duel as though I were
at last giving her an opportunity of which she had been unfairly
deprived ever since our marriage.
“I never pretended to be in love with you,” she taunted me.
“You’ve never been in love with any one. If you’d ever known the meaning
of the word, you wouldn’t have married me on those terms.”
Barbara turned away and covered her face with her hands.
“That’s the way Eric said good-bye to me!,” she gasped. “George, I asked
you to divorce me two years ago.”
“And I wanted to make sure, for your sake. Well, let’s face reality for
once! Imagine me to be dead.” . . .
With another unexpected turn, Barbara clung to me convulsively and laid
her hand over my mouth:
“Don’t talk of death!,” she whispered. “I’m so frightened of it! And
it’s very near at hand now. I’ve been ill so often, I’ve had to fight it
so often. My dear, my dear, if I ever heard you were ill, it would bring
back all my love: I’d nurse you; I’d shew you I _could_ sacrifice
myself. Never say that again!,” she cried hysterically.
My fit of bitterness passed as quickly as it had come; and I tried to
apologize. Then it returned; and I asked myself whether this talk of
“sacrifice” meant more than that Barbara was living, as ever, in a world
of emotional romance. Then the car stopped; and I stumbled up the steps
of my uncle’s house.
In the hall Violet Loring told me there had been no further hæmorrhages.
Only a few more hours of life could be expected, however; and this
Bertrand realized.
“I didn’t bother you before,” he began in his normal voice, “because I
didn’t know whether I was going to live or die. I’m going to die, it
seems; and I can tell you, George, it’s the most interesting experience
I’ve ever had.”
His grim chuckles rumbled till the vast Victorian brass-bed creaked.
Involuntarily Violet shivered; but I felt that the last and least
service I could do was to make my mood chime with my uncle’s.
“I’m glad I’m in time to thank you, Bertrand,” I said. “You’ve been my
best friend ever since we first set up house here together, nearly
twenty years ago.”
Though I knew the room of old, I was struck for the first time by the
uncouth masculinity of a vanished era.
“Odd business,” he grunted. “I always dropped a generation. I’m your
_great_-uncle; but I always put you in your father’s place. You’ve kept
me young. . . . And now this is the end, the moment we wait for all our
lives. The heart’s weak, thank goodness, so I shan’t make a fight; but I
swear to you I expect to wake up again to-morrow morning! I’m not afraid
of going out, but I can’t believe it. That’s why people persist in
fabricating a future life. I’ll tell you one thing, George, that’ll
comfort you: death’s only a terrible thing if it comes before you’re
ready, and you’re only ready when you’re worn out. That was the terrible
part of the war.” The leonine head turned with an effort that left him
breathless. “Violet my dear, I bow humbly at the thought of boys like
Jim who were killed before they had time to find the grasshopper a
burden. I can’t believe I shan’t wake up to-morrow, but I don’t want to
. . . here or anywhere. A silly old woman of a parson came here
yesterday. . . . It cost me a hæmorrhage to get rid of him. Good God,
I’ve outgrown _that_ phase! Life eternal. . . . I’m much more interested
in the brief life that is our portion here. I’ve had nigh on a century
of it; and I know less about it than I did when I was born.”
He paused as the nurse came in to say that O’Rane was waiting
downstairs.
“Good of the boy,” he murmured. “Ask him to come up.” Then his eyes
shone with their last gleam of mischief:
“‘_Never seen death yet, Dickie? . . . Well, now is your time to
learn!_’”
5
The fit of coughing that followed caused my uncle to examine himself for
injuries. The nurse made signs to Violet, who slipped noiselessly from
the room; O’Rane came in, and I guided him to the bedside. Bertrand
shook hands with difficulty; and his heavy eyes lightened.
“You’re another of them,” he panted. “Always think of your father when I
see you. I wonder what he’d have made of it all if he’d lived. . . .
George there?”
“I’m here,” I answered, as I pulled a chair to the bedside.
“I’ve been thinking over what you said the other day about our
prototypes in history. Triskett’s great-grandfather firing on the
Versailles mob just to see what would happen. . . . I’ve known a good
few historic figures: O’Connell; Mazzini; Lassalle. The great
unspeakables. I believe I went to them for fear of being told by boys
like you that I and my spiritual forefathers had been on the wrong side.
Dam’ conceit! I hope I’ve outgrown that phase now; but, when that ass
Crawleigh spluttered about rounding up conscientious objectors in the
war, I felt that his ancestors had burnt heretics. Your friend Maitland
sentenced a man to the cat the other day: he said it was the only remedy
for crimes of violence. I asked him why he didn’t break the fellow on a
wheel, as his forebears had done. Damn it, I gave up shooting for fear
of finding myself in the same dock as the old cock-fighters. Conceit, if
you like. I’ve been a radical because I couldn’t let posterity charge me
with the savagery and intolerance which we throw up against our
conservative predecessors. Time was on my side. I recorded my protest.
What _good_ it’s done . . .? That’s why you’d better keep the paper on,
George. It’ll shew the next generation how superior you were to this.”
The advice was rounded with a cynical, deep chuckle; and he lay long
without speaking.
“The world’s a gentler place than when you were a boy, sir,” O’Rane put
in.
Bertrand looked at him in silence for a moment and then shook his head
slowly:
“You say that, with your experience of the late war? _Does_ human nature
change? . . . We shan’t have that dinner, George, but I wasn’t far out
in my date. The present government is falling to pieces.”
“And what’s going to take its place?,” I asked.
Bertrand ruminated in silence for some time; then his face lighted for
the last time in a reflective smile:
“A restoration government! We’ve given a million men and heaven knows
how many thousand million pounds to keep things . . . _just as they
were_. Nurse says we’re shipping troops again to the Straits: to defend
the graves we’ve already filled there, I suppose. In ten years the great
powers will be balanced as they were ten years ago; there’ll be the same
competition in armaments, the same scares, ultimately the same universal
war . . . on a vastly different scale. At home we’ve fallen back into
our old social and financial grooves.” Bertrand’s eyes turned fixedly to
the ceiling in a strained effort of concentration. He was speaking very
slowly now and studying his articulation. “We’re . . . going on . . .
from 1914 . . . without break of thought . . . or mend of heart.”
As he paused, O’Rane stood up and walked cautiously to the bed.
“I’ll leave you now, sir, unless you want me,” he said. “I expect you’d
like to talk to George. I . . . want to thank you.” . . .
“You’ve nothing to thank me for. Don’t go unless I’m depressing you.”
“It’s not encouraging,” O’Rane laughed. “You remember Anatole France’s
story of the woman who tried to save her lover in the Terror? She gave
herself to one of the judges and was told afterwards that she had . . .
rather misunderstood his assurances. _On fera le nécessaire_, yes; but
what then? ‘_Je t’ai dit, citoyenne, qu’on ferait le nécessaire,
c’est-à-dire qu’on appliquerait la loi, rien de plus, rien de moins_.’
Most unfortunate misunderstanding! ‘_Elle sentit aussitôt_’,” he quoted
slowly, “‘_qu’elle avait fait_ . . . _un sacrifice inutile_’.”
As Bertrand looked from O’Rane’s scarred hands to his sightless eyes, I
saw that he had no answer ready. I do not know what answer either of us
could have given such a man at such a moment.
Until the nurse came in with the doctor, my uncle lay silent and, I
think, half-asleep. Towards midnight he roused with a start and seemed
at a loss to explain why we were there. Then he remembered that he was
dying; and, with the slow effort of failing strength, one hand was
dragged painfully from under the bed-clothes. I led O’Rane to him and
then shook hands myself.
“That place of yours . . .” he muttered.
“Yes?”
“Lake House. I heard you were selling it. Don’t . . . unless you must. I
was brought up there. Your grandfather and I . . . You’re too young to
remember the orangery . . . When I was twenty, our nearest neighbour was
a girl called Cathleen Nolan . . .” He paused for breath, and I tried to
find out if he wanted to send her a message. “She’s been dead for more
than sixty years,” said Bertrand with a twisted smile.
If that was his romance, he could tell me no more of it; and the smile
gave place to a quick contortion of pain. I sent O’Rane for the nurse;
but, before he reached the door, my uncle gave one long sigh and the
slight movement of his breathing ended.
O’Rane carried the news to Barbara and with it a note to say that I
should stay at Princes Gardens until the funeral. On the heels of the
first letter I sent a second to beg her forgiveness for my mad words in
the car. She replied that she had forgotten everything.
PART THREE
CHAPTER ONE
TO-MORROW AND TO-MORROW . . .
. . . In the dark there careers—
As if Death astride came
To numb all with his knock—
A horse at mad rate
Over rut and stone.
No figure appears,
No call of my name,
No sound but “Tic-toc”
Without check. Past the gate
It clatters—is gone. . . .
Maybe that “More Tears!—
More Famine and Flame—
More Severance and Shock!”
Is the order from Fate
That the Rider speeds on
To pale Europe; and tiredly the pines intone.
THOMAS HARDY: _A New Year’s Eve in War Time._
1
The days that followed my uncle’s death stand out in my memory as a
vivid and wholly disconnected dream between two normal periods of
waking-life. At one moment I was living in the midst of vast,
conflicting noises; there followed complete calm, during which I was
indeed as busy as ever—as busy as one seems to be in a dream—; then
the tumult broke out afresh. Though nothing had in fact been suspended,
though nothing had greatly progressed in my short spell of
unconsciousness, I felt at the time that I had two personalities, one on
either bank of the dividing stream.
2
I believe Bertrand’s death saved my life or at least my reason. I
remember feeling almost bitterly that I could not support his illness in
addition to my work for our paper, the hourly exasperation of my life at
home and the storm of calamities that were bursting on us from the four
corners of heaven at the same moment. The shock of losing him gave me
the break I needed. When I awoke in an unfamiliar bed, I recalled that
we were overshadowed by a new war, that a general election was imminent
and that unemployment was a problem which we could not solve “by pulling
long faces”. Then I recollected the venomous, red-eyed author of that
phrase; and the scene in O’Rane’s library was flashed on my brain like a
scene in a film. I remembered Sonia’s jejune sympathy. I remembered
finding Barbara in the car. I wondered dully how we stood after that
bitter, mad outpouring; and, despite her note, I was thankful that we
should not meet for a few days. Then I realized that for a few days I
should have a respite enforced: from the paper, from war and
unemployment, from everything that seemed at the moment more than I
could bear.
My first duty was to arrange for the memorial service at St. Margaret’s;
and, as I watched the congregation arriving, I felt that the respite was
extending, for an hour, to all of us. The obituary notices, the memoir
which I was writing for one of the quarterly reviews, most of all this
solemn tribute to a man, perhaps great, of an undeniably great past
turned our thoughts backward to a time when France lived under a
citizen-king and disunited Germany declaimed ineffectually at Frankfurt.
Of the two former prime ministers who attended the service, both were
hardly more than boys when my uncle first entered the House; the oldest
head of a foreign mission had found “old Bertrand Oakleigh” an
established institution when he was first accredited to the Court of St.
James; and the journalists, the lawyers, the men of business, the bees
and butterflies of society who moved sombrely to their places could not
remember a time when the truculent Johnsonian figure had not been one of
the familiar sights of London.
“A great landmark gone,” whispered Dainton, as I waited for Barbara to
arrive with the Crawleighs. “I didn’t always agree with him. Indeed, if
you took a poll of the people here he _hadn’t_ quarrelled with . . .”
I turned to watch the cars emptying and the new arrivals dodging or
seeking out the reporters. My mother had come over from Cannes; my
sister and her husband, Violet Loring and Laurence represented the
family; and, if we had all tingled from the old man’s lash, that was
long ago and inextricably in the part he chose to play. The older
generation in the House of Commons and the younger generation in Fleet
Street—men who won his respect by standing squarely up to him—came
unurged to prove their regard for his fighting qualities and his
generosity.
“I deplore his politics,” said Crawleigh, “but he was a great public
servant.”
At such a time I refrained from suggesting that Crawleigh’s father had
deplored the politics of Bright and Cobden. It is one curse of the
party-system that an opponent must be dead before we admit that he may
possibly not be damned. I was brought up to regard Lord Salisbury as a
monster wherewith to frighten naughty children; my father, if he had
been required to expose the Antichrist, would have pointed his finger
unhesitatingly at Lord Beacons field.
I thought over Crawleigh’s belated tribute as I took Barbara to our
places. This imminent election might purge the House of those to whom
the war—as Saltash told me frankly—had come as a god-send; but, if the
adventurers into public life were not sent back to their counting-houses
and newspaper-offices and bucket-shops, I feared that, with Bertrand,
there would die an unparalleled tradition of integrity and devotion. My
uncle had prepared himself for politics by half a lifetime of study, as
Gladstone and Salisbury, Morley and Rosebery prepared themselves; of the
men under thirty who entered the House with me in 1906, hardly one had
not tried to equip himself by travel, by settlement-work, by experience
in business or by the management of an estate. There seemed to be fewer
servants of the public in 1918.
“If he had scoffed less,” said Lady Dainton, “he would have done more.”
I agreed privately, though I think his cynicism covered a disappointment
of soul: he had come to England, as a brilliant, ambitious and sanguine
boy, to reform the world; and the sluggish-witted, slow-speaking English
had worn him down. To begin as an O’Connell and to end as “a great
public servant” would have roused him to savage merriment.
“How he would have despised all this!,” I whispered to Barbara, as the
people whom he would not admit to his house hurried importantly into the
more prominent seats.
Ministers of the present and past, divines and pressmen, authors and
diplomats poured in till every place seemed to be taken. A crowd began
to collect at the doors; there was rather more noise than I thought
seemly; and I was glad when the organ began to play.
Sixty years of public life. I was trying to remember whether Bertrand
had known Westminster before the new Houses of Parliament were built,
when Spence-Atkins, who was acting as an usher, touched my arm and asked
if we had room in our pew for two more. I made way for Sonia, who
crushed past me with scarlet cheeks, and for O’Rane, who allowed himself
to be guided by a verger. His face, I thought, was white and set, with a
suppressed anger which I had seen more often at school than in later
years. I asked if anything was amiss; but he would only reply
“Afterwards.” Then I relapsed into the past and forgot my surroundings
until the last notes of the Dead March throbbed into silence.
Outside I was surrounded by sympathetic friends; but, in the complete
detachment of my anæsthesia, I was thinking only that I had time to see
my solicitors before luncheon, when I found Sonia the centre of an
agitated little group which O’Rane was trying alternately to soothe and
to disperse.
“No, I insist on telling George,” she proclaimed. “Did you hear what
happened when we arrived? I don’t like being called a murderer!”
The word—and, still more, the tone in which it was uttered—disturbed
my dream of past days.
“Who . . .?” I began.
Then O’Rane, with mounting irritation as some queer sense warned him
that a crowd was collecting, felt for my arm and led me away.
“We don’t want a scene,” he whispered. “I’m sorry, George: I wouldn’t
have come if I’d thought for a moment. . . . Our excellent friendship
the Bishop of Poplar is unintentionally at the bottom of this. You
remember his saying something about my condemning innocent people to
death if I stopped the money I’ve been giving him the last few years?
Well, that’s been taken up by Griffiths’ gang. We’ve had sandwichmen
patrolling The Sanctuary all this week: O’RANE’S SENTENCE OF DEATH or
something of the kind. I didn’t care; I wasn’t going to be blackmailed.
Then, to-day, one of the reporters at the door asked my name; and
somebody in the crowd overheard it. A few idiots thought it would be
amusing to shout ‘murderer’. . . . Where’s Sonia? It’s time we got
back.”
As I led him to his wife, I observed that her cheeks were no longer
flushed; she looked, indeed, unpleasantly scared, and her eyes were
fixed on the avenue of loiterers between whom she must pass on her way
home.
“We’ll drop you,” Barbara suggested, with a quick movement towards the
car.
Sonia hurried gratefully to her side.
“Thanks, Babs, I’ll walk,” said O’Rane obstinately.
“Then I’ll walk with you,” I said. “This business is frightening your
wife,” I added when we were alone. “Why don’t you tell the police to
clear these sandwichmen away?”
“I really haven’t had time. This is going to be the worst winter of all,
George; we must raise every penny we can.” His lip curled contemptuously
at the booing which greeted us in Palace Yard. “I’m free to beg now; if
people want to know what I’m doing myself, I can say I’m giving every
last shilling I can spare and they must do the same. We’re _all_
responsible for relieving this distress; it’s part of the war, and we
must volunteer as freely as we volunteered in ’14. And, if that doesn’t
bring the money, we must try other means. The smug, secure people were
glad enough to have conscription of men. Their money’s less than a man’s
life; we must have conscription of wealth if they won’t volunteer. If it
amuses the people I’m working for to call me murderer . . . Will you
come in?” he asked, as we reached The Sanctuary.
“I’m already overdue at my solicitors’,” I answered, though I made time
to call at the Admiralty on my way to the City.
I thought that Philip Hornbeck, who amassed “intelligence” of all kinds,
should have a first-hand account of this ugly little scene; and I wanted
to hear his opinion of Griffiths. Though he promised to keep on eye open
for the O’Ranes, he clearly considered the temper of the country less
dangerous than in the big strikes after the war. The unemployed were
numerous enough, but they were kept scattered; Griffiths had the ability
and the will to make mischief, but he was disowned by the official
labour-leaders.
“The people of this country have no experience in revolutions,” said
Hornbeck. “When you have a riot, it’s always the rioters who need
police-protection.”
3
The tumult, which had seemed to be so mysteriously suspended, broke out
anew on the day when I sent my memoir of Bertrand to the printers and
walked out of Princes Gardens into the traffic of Knightsbridge.
Clamorous contents-bills at the street-corners reminded me that I was
come back to a world where new wars were imminent; the Guards had sailed
for Chanak; a general election could no longer be averted.
My ultimate duty to Bertrand was fulfilled when I persuaded my staff to
carry out his last wishes for _Peace_. Though he mocked the empty
conceits of recording protests and demonstrating moral superiority, he
was not scheming to stand well with enlightened posterity when he lay
murmuring: “_Un sacrifice inutile? Un sacrifice inutile?_” O’Rane’s
question was an affront to him; he was wishing himself fifty years
younger, to make an answer that would satisfy him; and we must take up
the burden which his hands could no longer hold.
As soon as I had their promise of support, I left my colleagues and set
out for Berkeley Square to learn the secret history of the
long-threatened conservative revolt.
This menace of war had done what the grotesque treaty of Versailles, the
organized anarchy in Ireland, the paralysis of government in every limb
had so far failed to do. Others, besides my butler, were saying that the
long record of misrule was beyond a joke; and the party-managers, in
concert with the independent wire-pullers who were now an established
part of our public life, had decided to wreck the coalition. ‘Blob’
Wister had already spoken; and Saltash told me that Woburn and the Press
Combine would speak next day.
I found my father-in-law engaged on a letter to _The Times_, protesting
against the exclusion of peers from the Carlton Club meeting; and for a
long spell he reiterated like a sulky child that he could tell me
nothing because he was allowed to know nothing. Then he relaxed and
informed me that the fight was taking place over foreign policy in
general and, in particular, over the prime minister’s dictatorial habit
of conducting his foreign relationships through his own secretariat over
the head of the Foreign Office.
“If I’d been Curzon, I’d have thrown the whole thing up years ago,” said
Crawleigh with that eagerness for resignation so often exhibited by men
who have not been invited to hold cabinet office.
“He may feel he’s more useful as a brake on the prime minister,” I
suggested.
“If the prime minister goes, the foreign secretary must follow . . .
unless he precedes him, when he sees how the cat’s jumping,” said
Crawleigh with ill-concealed malice. “Well, it’s quite simple;
Chamberlain has pledged himself to support the coalition; Birkenhead and
Horne are with him; and the rump is meeting to see if it can overthrow
Chamberlain.”
“Who’s to be put in Chamberlain’s place?,” I asked.
“No one knows yet. No one has the least idea how the meeting will turn
out. If I were in the confidence of my party . . . Nowadays the unhappy
accident of being a peer . . .”
Feeling that I should hear no more, I drifted to the Turf and Stage,
where Frank Jellaby thickened the mist in which Crawleigh had enveloped
the Carlton Club. After a denunciation of the coalition-liberals which
reminded me of Cato’s punctual fulminations against Carthage, he
explained that the new crisis had been engineered by ‘Blob’ Wister and
that its outcome depended on Wister’s success in finding a leader:
“He had no difficulty in persuading people like Dean and Lingfield to
come out for an all-tory government when his papers were marching ahead
to cover their advance. If he can get Bonar Law to stampede the meeting
. . .”
“I hear Lingfield and the rest of George’s tory ministers are swearing
allegiance to him with one hand,” I said, “and writing him letters of
resignation with the other.”
“_They_ don’t know anything . . . except that some of them will be badly
left.”
“But no one,” I encouraged him, “will be left quite so completely as
your coalition-liberal friends.”
Jellaby’s face darkened:
“They sold the pass in ’16, they’ve had their reward; if there were
another pass to sell, they’d sell it; and they mustn’t complain if they
can’t find one.”
“You won’t join forces,” I asked, “to keep the tories out?”
“After 1916 I could never trust a coaly-lib again,” he answered. “Now,
if your paper would help us into a position where we could hold the
balance . . .”
“That,” I said, “is simply overturning one coalition to make way for
another. And you’ve no more programme to-day than you had in 1918, when
you let Ll-G.’s mad promises pass without a protest. We’re paying for
your silence to-day, at Chanak and wherever the French can hit us.”
Before Jellaby had time to answer, we were hurried one stage farther
along the ever unfinished road of contemporary politics. Lord Saltash,
whom I had observed moving from table to table with the manner of a
conspirator rather far gone in wine, raised his eyebrows suddenly as
‘Blob’ Wister hacked his way across the dancing-floor. There was a quick
nod; and Saltash lurched towards the telephone-boxes, only pausing to
whisper thickly in my ear:
“He’s going! Bonar, I mean. Meeting to-morrow.”
“Are you betting on the result?” I asked.
“He’s not coming back politics sake being losing side,” Saltash answered
telegraphically, laying a squat index-finger against one side of his
nose. “Last kick dying lion. Wash-out George. Number up.”
Jellaby was silent for a few minutes; then he smiled as one who had
waited patiently by the mills of the gods.
“Had Zimri peace, who slew his master?,” he demanded at large.
“This is the end of the liberal party for a generation,” I said; which
was not the answer expected of me.
And then I stood up to say good-by. There is little difference of age
between Jellaby and myself; but he has been nurtured more strictly on
the official hatreds of a whips’ office. I was born and bred a liberal,
whereas Jellaby embraced that faith as he embraced agnosticism, the
poetry of Arthur Hugh Clough, the painting of Manet, the æsthetics of
Pater and, for a time, total abstinence. They were all fashionable among
the members of one coterie at Balliol in his day.
“For some years . . .” he conceded with regretful solemnity.
“And,” I pursued, “what happens to liberalism, which is more important
to me than the liberal party?”
Jellaby had no answer ready; and, if he had not been my host, I should
have asked him whether a liberal whips’ office cared for these things.
Next day the conservative wing of the coalition seceded, after a brief
debate, on the strength of a single, brief speech. The prime minister
resigned; and the king invited Mr. Bonar Law to form a government. As
soon as the conservative party had accepted its new leader, the date of
the election was announced. Those of my friends who were nursing
constituencies became, of a sudden, very important and excited; I
received invitations to speak from people who must have forgotten, if
they ever knew, how bad a speaker I am; wagers were offered freely; and
all parties predicted confidently that they would return with increased
numbers.
I spent much time at the Eclectic Club in these days, wondering what
line my paper should follow in the election. No new policy was being put
forward; and, if the old policy stood condemned, I did not understand
why ministers who were responsible for it were kept in office. Nor, at a
season when everybody speculated how long the patience of the unemployed
would endure, did I understand why the order of the county was entrusted
to a man who had preached the sacred right of rebellion so few years
before in Ulster. I wondered, too, what would happen to the floating
wreckage of the coalition; and, more bitterly than ever before, I missed
old Bertrand’s caustic humour in the hours when he sat with me here in a
window of the smoking-room, defaming the passers-by and pretending that
we were studying trends of opinion and “the great movement of men”.
He it was who said that politics were desocialized when Mr. Asquith left
Downing Street. For six years the political stage had been occupied by
statesmen, demagogues, shy scholars, blatant adventurers,
advertising-agents, unemployed millionaires, newspaper-proprietors,
dukes, international Jews and merchant-princes. Cabinet control had been
replaced by the personal domination of one man who miraculously held
this heterogeneous company together; considered policy had yielded to a
succession of brilliant and incongruous improvisations. On no day could
an outsider foretell who next would pull a wire; and, as I looked round
the crowded rooms of the Eclectic, I wondered what all these long-faced,
out-of-work pressmen and financiers, these confidential secretaries and
hangers-on would now do for a living or a career.
Then, as the ministry was completed and the first election-addresses
appeared, I recalled Bertrand’s last verdict.
“_Without break of thought or mend of heart . . ._”
_Were_ we going on from 1914? Had the war, in which most of my
generation perished, really achieved nothing?
4
As we slid noiselessly into the least passionate general election of my
experience, I wondered whether we were going on from anything so good
even as 1914. If the German peril was at an end, no man could say what
new trouble might come out of the east, when demoralized Russia and
Austria joined hands with resentful Turkey and Prussia. The mark had
collapsed; and, unless it could be rehabilitated, the trade of central
Europe must come to a standstill.
After that, it was a toss-up whether famine or revolution came first.
Against this tidal wave of hunger, disease and the reckless savagery of
hopeless millions, the only powers with strength and means to build a
rampart were France, America and Great Britain.
If Lucien de Grammont and Clifford van Oss fairly represented the first
two, the simple faith of the French—embodied in M. Clemenceau—was
being betrayed by every one else at the very moment when M. Clemenceau
was betraying the simple faith of President Wilson. Recalling that the
world was to have been made safe for democracy, I wondered if another
war must be fought before democracy was made safe for the world.
According to one or other of us, it was the greed and bad faith of Great
Britain, America and France which was wholly and solely responsible for
our present perils.
In these days of misgiving the most persistent optimist of my
acquaintance was my father-in-law. To him—in common with most of my
conservative friends—public life had been a bad dream from the moment
when Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman and his _sansculottes_ usurped power.
Crawleigh was genuinely convinced that all electors, at all times and in
all places, were conservative born and bred; and, to him, a liberal
victory could only come by low cunning. Now that the spell had been
broken, he looked forward to “going on from 1906”; and, in listening to
him, I understood, as Saltash had never made me understand, the
all-conservative movement in the late coalition, the Carlton Club
meeting and the loathing of the party for those who still tried to keep
it in bondage to its old associates. So a Bourbon might have felt
towards a legitimist who took office under Napoleon.
Sir Roger Dainton, when I dined with him on the night after the polling,
was even more outspoken. Some one had taught him the word “impeachment”;
and he was for impeaching the fallen members of the old cabinet as
light-heartedly as his wife, in other days, had consigned “agitators” to
the nearest firing-party.
“You think there are further depths they can still reach?,” I asked. The
brush of a professional moralist would be needed to paint the difference
between this election and the last, between the power of a prime
minister in being and that of the member for Carnarvon Boroughs. “Come
and see the results.”
By its rules the Eclectic Club is constituted a “place of social
intercourse for officers and gentlemen, irrespective of politics”. Any
demonstration, other than occasional groans when a labour victory was
announced, would have been ill-received; but I was struck chiefly by the
absence of all desire to demonstrate except when objects of personal
venom appeared at the bottom of the poll. Dainton thumped my back with
furtive violence when two rich and rather questionable private
secretaries, from his own party, were at last “put out of harm’s way”,
as he expressed it; and Jellaby became almost hysterical as one
coalition-liberal after another was edged into the cold; but it was left
to my father-in-law to express the rapture of his associates in a series
of satisfied grunts. Without looking at the board, I could recognize a
conservative gain by Crawleigh’s long “A-a-ah!”
“The entry of the first French troops into their recovered provinces,” I
murmured to Jellaby.
“And yet . . . they don’t seem as much pleased about it as I should have
expected.”
“Perhaps these fellows feel that it’s the same board, the same problem,
and that it becomes no easier by a shuffle of the pieces. Perhaps
they’re wondering what more they can do than the coalition to prevent a
world-revolution or a new world-war.”
Jellaby looked contemptuously at the lengthening tale of ministerial
successes:
“Perhaps they realize that these results don’t represent the true
strength of parties.”
“You mean it’s a moral victory for you?,” I asked. “I said the same
thing to you when I was beaten at Cranborne in 1910. With respect I
think the feeling of the country is admirably represented in this club
to-night: nobody cares.”
With that I left him. Seven men, I think, said good-night to me as I
crossed the hall; six of them added: “Well, thank God _that’s_ over.”
There was a further spasm of excitement as the new parliament met; and
for me, though I was preoccupied with Barbara’s return, a stab of regret
when the liberal party had to surrender its historic claim to lead the
opposition. Then one of the shortest sessions on record opened and
closed; the foreign secretary set out for Lausanne to find an escape
from the threatened war in the near east; and the country gave its
undivided attention to the most popular murder-trial of the year.
Save for a moment after Bertrand’s memorial service, I had not been
alone with Barbara since our scene in the car. I fancied that she was
hardly less embarrassed than I was, though she talked easily enough of
her plans for being painted by Edmund Wace and of my work on Bertrand’s
papers. We both felt that nothing could be quite the same after that
explosion; but I at least had no idea what she wanted.
“There was a touch of brutality about your uncle,” she said after dinner
the first night, in criticism of my sketch. “I’m not sure that you bring
it out. Any one who disagreed with him was treated with such obvious
contempt.”
“Unless he happened to like the person,” I said. “I can’t imagine a
single point on which he agreed with you or Violet or Amy, but he was
devoted to you all. On the other hand, I’ve heard him trouncing poor
Sonia for holding exactly the same views, simply because he thought her
second-rate.”
“He thought all women second-rate. So do you, George,” she rejoined
without malice.
So sweeping a misstatement I could not allow to pass unchallenged.
“I’ll leave you out for fear of embarrassing you . . .,” I began.
Barbara laughed sadly and turned, with a shrug, to the fire:
“No, my dear, you’re leaving me out because you despise me. Not
_cruelly_, but just in the Oakleigh way: as a tolerant Turk would
despise me. In your eyes, we’ve never grown up; and sometimes you shew
us the tenderness you’d shew to a child. You think we’re creatures
who’ve failed to be men; you don’t imagine that we’ve never tried to be
men. . . . You smile benignly on our little foibles and follies and
frailties just as I smile at a kitten chasing its own tail. ‘Kittens
will be kittens,’ I say; ‘women will be women,’ you murmur to yourself.”
“The trouble is that you speak the same language . . .”
“But we don’t think the same thoughts. D’you remember my telling you I’d
forgotten certain things you’d said?”
As her eyes turned slowly to meet mine, I thought I could see a gentle
new light of friendship.
“I wished at the time you’d said you had forgiven them,” I answered.
“There was nothing to forgive. You were right, from your point of view.
May I speak of it?”
“If it will help us.”
Barbara turned once more to the fire and sat with her cheek resting
against her hand:
“It’s just two years since Eric died. You think I’m not in love with him
and never was. Well, I’m not now, but I was once; and the _whole_ of my
heart went into it, George. Do men ever realize that women can be in
love with them and yet know all the time that it’s a mistake? When he
left me, Eric thought I’d been taking all his love for my own selfish,
greedy enjoyment. I hadn’t. I took it because I couldn’t help myself;
but I always knew it would be a mistake for us to marry. We were too
much alike, too highly-strung. If you can imagine two great musicians
marrying . . . If only I’d been strong enough to refuse his love! I
couldn’t help myself . . . It was wrong of me, by any standard, to do
what I did at Croxton. If I’d told you at the time . . .”
“I should have thought nothing of it, I hope.”
Barbara laughed mirthlessly and crossed to my chair, where she seated
herself on the arm.
“That’s what I feared,” she whispered. “I knew I was wrong, I knew it
would have been hell for us all if Eric had agreed, I’d had the worst
rebuff that can come to a woman, I was still in love with him. All that,
you’d have said, was nothing. A perfect Oakleighism! . . . Yet I wish
now I _had_ told you. Eric’s letter must have been a cruel shock.”
Her hand stole timidly to mine; and I raised it to my lips:
“That’s all over now; but, Babs, I did _not_ spend twelve days wondering
whether you would run away with any one else. What hurt was that you’d
pretended to love me when you didn’t.”
“And that’s what you’ve been urging me to do for the last two years.”
Silence fell between us. Then I said:
“I’ve been hoping that you could love me without pretending. I forgot
those twelve days the moment I set eyes on you.”
“Yes. You were as much in love with me as I was with Eric. But love
didn’t give you much understanding, dear. For two years you’ve been
waiting for me to confess that I did something very wrong: you’d then be
able to commit another Oakleighism by forgiving me. You’ve been waiting
for me to say I’ve outgrown my love for Eric, so that you could tell
me—Oakleigh-fashion—that you’d always known time would cure all
things. Well, I _was_ wrong; and I _have_ outgrown my love. Does it help
you to know that? The difficulty is, George, that I don’t want to be
forgiven. I’m not a child, I’m not an unsuccessful attempt to be a man;
I’m a woman.”
“And being a woman . . .”
Barbara laid her hand over my lips:
“Shall I say it for you? ‘Being a woman, you don’t know what you _do_
want.’ It’s quite true, even though all the Oakleighs in history have
said it. I know you so much better than you know me.”
“And better than you know yourself?”
“I know myself better than I can explain myself. Women feel so much more
and express so much less than men. Words are clumsy. When a man frames a
sentence, he imagines he is shewing a thought to the world; a woman
feels that the thought is being imprisoned, perhaps mutilated.” . . .
“Do you know why you married me?,” I asked.
Before she could answer, Barbara stared long at the fire.
“Yes. But I’ve never put it in words. I couldn’t now. I wasn’t in love
with you, but you gave me something that I needed. . . . Women marry
sometimes because they’re frightened of themselves. Sonia did. And I
remember how my beloved aunts gloated over Jack Waring, as the one man
who could keep me in order. Strange to say, I didn’t want to be kept in
order; and I wasn’t frightened of myself. I’m only frightened of death
and of waste: a wasted life, with all the love and the beauty left out
of it. You gave me the feeling that you had something I needed to keep
my life from being wasted.”
“And do you feel that no longer?”
“Have I needed you these last two years? I’ve ceased to look for
happiness.”
“And you’re not yet thirty!,” I groaned.
Barbara glanced at her watch and stood up:
“It’s time for me to go to bed. I’m afraid I’ve talked a great deal
about myself. It was thinking about Bertrand that started it. The world
is divided into men, women and Oakleighs.”
“I believe you’ll find, as you go on, that every husband begins as a man
and ends as an Oakleigh. That is one of the major tragedies of life.”
For the first time in eighteen months, Barbara bent to kiss my cheek.
“To marry an Oakleigh and find him a man would be the greatest romance
life could offer,” she laughed.
“Then I’m afraid you must look elsewhere for your romance,” I sighed.
“You can only give out what’s in you. I’m sorry our marriage has been a
failure. I’ve honestly done my best.” . . .
Turning at the door, Barbara came slowly back and kissed me again:
“I know you have. And I’ll do mine. I told you the day poor old Bertrand
died that I’d be your wife, I’d bear you children if I could . . .”
In spite of her kisses, in spite of the strange new light in her eyes, I
had to be told in words that our two years’ tragedy was over:
“My dear one, you said we should be dishonoured if we put anything in
the place of love . . .”
I waited to hear that terrible verdict reversed. Barbara looked at me in
amazement and then gave a single tearless sob. She regained her
composure immediately and walked again to the door.
“You have a good memory, George,” she threw back. “Have you saved that
up for two years? Do you want me to say that I’ve suddenly found you
irresistible? The Oakleighs are very true to their own type.”
5
As the door closed, I saw my last chance being shut from me. The house
was in darkness when I went into the hall; there was no answer when I
called to Barbara, though I could see a light in her room. I came
downstairs again to brood of men, women and Oakleighs.
I tried next day to explain, but Barbara refused with cold courtesy to
understand what I was trying to explain. I had been patient, too
patient; in her turn she was trying to meet me. She was ready to give
anything I asked, if she had it to give; and the false sweetness of her
complaisance was a deadlier bar than any refusal.
“I feel I was ungracious,” I said.
“Ungracious? You?,” she mocked. “I must go now, or I shall be late for
Mr. Wace.”
“Shall I see you after the opening of parliament?”
“But of course! For another eternity! Good-bye.”
The rest of that morning I spent in Fetter Lane, reviewing the
achievements of the peace-administration. The only visible traces of the
war, when I walked down to Westminster, were the cenotaph in Whitehall
and the long army of unemployed that was trying to get past it to the
precincts of parliament. While I waited for the crowd to disperse, I
heard a familiar voice asking my neighbour what was happening.
“Raney! Here, you’d better let me see you home,” I said. “There’s an
appalling mob everywhere.”
“Thanks, I’ve had to acquire a sixth sense,” he answered. “What are you
doing here?”
“Looking on and thinking of that week-end in August when the
Anti-Intervention people pursued me down to Loring Castle. I’ve been
wondering if we shouldn’t have done better to keep out of the war at all
costs.”
“We should have been dishonoured if we’d let Belgium down,” he answered.
“If we’d told the Germans we would stop the moment Belgium was
evacuated, the war would have been over in ’14. And we shouldn’t have an
unemployed army marching through London to-day,” I added savagely.
We squeezed our way forward till a sudden thinning of the crowd enabled
us to escape into the park.
“I think we’re individually the better for the sacrifices we all of us
made,” he answered slowly. “For one moment there was a real spirit of
fraternity; and, when the reaction has run its course, I hope to see
that again. I’m recruiting people now, with quite fair success:
reminding them what they did once and asking them to give up everything
for one month or six or a year for the service of their country. I’m
only asking them to do what I’ve done myself. I tell them, as I tell
you, _that’s_ the new idea that we must capture from the war. Fraternity
. . .”
“Your new idea is at least as old as Christ and Buddha,” I objected.
“Will you succeed where they failed?”
“Had they ever such a chance as we have? We’ve seen the quality of
modern war. We know that, if there’s another, it will bury civilization
under a sea of lava. Men, women, sheep, cattle, the very blades of
grass. Another war is synonymous with the end of the world.”
“But how does one set about being fraternal?,” I asked.
O’Rane walked for some distance without answering; and I thought he had
not heard my question. Then he laughed and gave my arm a squeeze:
“By realizing the alternative, as every one’s had every chance of doing
in this war. By seeing that, if we trample on people weaker than
ourselves, there’ll be people stronger than ourselves to trample on us.
When I first saw ‘fraternity’ shining in front of me like Constantine’s
Cross, I was a very small, very young, very miserable boy. I went
through hell till I learnt how to defend myself. And then . . . many
years afterwards . . . I began to think . . . about the poor devils who
couldn’t defend _themselves_. I saw that we must make a world in which
man wasn’t always measuring his strength. Yes, I admit Christ had made
the discovery before me,” he ended with another laugh.
I forebore to ask whether the second discovery was likely to change the
hearts of men more than the first. The rule of force, I pointed out, had
to be repudiated by every one at the same time:
“If we’d been fraternal when the Germans were marching on Calais . . .”
“If we’d been fraternal rather earlier, perhaps they’d never have
marched there. Some one has to make a beginning. That’s one reason I had
to give up this money. Fraternity can’t exist side by side with vast
differences of wealth, among nations or individuals. It’s our sense of
possession, George, that stands between us and our souls.”
“Unfortunately, ever since man appeared on this planet, it’s been the
instinct that keeps soul and body together. Will you be the first to
strip for the plunge?”
“_I’m_ ready.”
“If you take that dive, Raney, your wife and children won’t follow. They
also are a part of humanity, which I think you sometimes forget.”
“‘Who is my mother?’,” he murmured. . . .
CHAPTER TWO
THE TEST
_King Henry_:
The sum of all our answer is but this:
We would not seek a battle, as we are;
Nor, as we are, we say we will not shun it . . .
SHAKESPEARE: _King Henry V._
1
Since the first tragedy cast its shadow on the first man, philosophers
have taught, in the jargon of their choice, that the past is
unalterable, that it is no use crying over spilt milk and that it is a
waste of time to job backwards. Unphilosophic man has then returned to
the twilit dreamland of might-have-beens.
Daily, since the tragedy that darkened my life in the last weeks of
1922, I have asked myself whether I could have done anything to prevent
it. I am sane enough to realize that I contributed nothing by what I
did; the philosopher blandly assures me that questioning comes too late;
and, in spite of all, I continue to wonder what would have happened if I
had made a firm stand here or a graceful surrender there. If only, as I
walked with O’Rane to The Sanctuary after the opening of parliament, I
had thrown my weight into one scale or the other . . . If only, at any
time subsequently, I had shewn myself to be what nature failed to make
me, a man of action, strong and silent, rapping out decisions like
Napoleon disposing an army . . .
2
I had not intended to come into The Sanctuary, but O’Rane insisted that
Sonia would be disappointed if I turned back at the door. We found her
in the nursery, playing with her elder boy, while the baby was packed
protesting to bed in the next room. I had not often been privileged to
catch Sonia in a domestic attitude and was ill-prepared for her
efficiency. This child in her lap was a beautiful creature, in radiant
health and exuberant spirits, with his mother’s brown hair and eyes.
There was a lusty crow of delight when O’Rane came into the room; and,
as I shook hands with Sonia, the child demanded shrilly that the
interrupted tale of the day before should be resumed.
“Will you say good-night to David junior?,” she asked me, as Daniel
surrendered to the spell of O’Rane’s story.
“If he’s not asleep,” I said; and she conducted me into the presence of
a wide-awake and fierce Japanese doll, who gripped two of my fingers and
demanded truculently what I was doing in his nursery.
At three years old, the child had his father’s flashing black eyes and
imperious manner. Sonia added that he had also more than his father’s
indomitable obstinacy.
“Is he equally fearless?,” I asked.
For answer she pointed from a green bruise on the child’s forehead to a
padlocked grille over the window:
“David had a fire-escape fitted the other day. He went down it himself
just to learn the way; and this infant must needs follow. He’d never
been on a ladder in his life, but he climbed cheerfully out of the
window . . .”
“Trusting to the special providence that looks after all O’Ranes,” I put
in.
“By the mercy of heaven a policeman caught him; but if he behaves like
that now . . .”
“He looks like keeping you fully occupied.”
“I can do what I like with him at present,” she answered, “because he
realizes I’m only a woman, and I can get on the soft side of him. When
he’s old enough to see that women can be more easily bullied than men,
more easily hurt . . . I don’t envy his wife. I don’t envy any wife.”
“Yet if all marriages were dissolved by act of parliament . . .,” I
began, as she led me downstairs.
“Should I take David on again? I wonder! He’s the only man I’ve ever
loved. . . . What fools we women are! And what fools men are! They don’t
want a woman to have a will of her own; and, when she echoes their will,
they find her insipid. And what a fool I’ve always been! Once I thought
it would be wonderful to run away . . . as I did. But that was only a
wonderful fit of bad temper,” she added with the candour that she always
employed in discussing herself.
“And one that you’ll never repeat.”
“No. In those days I was so hungry for children that I thought myself
quite immodest: if I’d had my first one earlier, we should never have
had our great tragedy. Now that I’ve got two, you need never be afraid I
shall run away again even if David ties me to the bed and beats me. I
honestly, honestly don’t think of myself any longer except through them.
I want them to have the best chance in life: all that you and Jim and my
brothers had. They must go to the best schools, the best universities;
they must never be driven down the wrong road like so many boys because
they haven’t the money to go by the right one. They must be _secure_.”
. . . Her face darkened; and she turned to the fire. “David won’t
promise me that. My father can’t afford it.” . . .
I believe that, if her husband could have seen Sonia at that moment as I
saw her, he would have compromised with his insurgent conscience. Once
before, when he came back from France, I had seen her, as now, on her
knees; pleading, as now, for the privilege of serving him and, as now,
wholly forgetful of her too insistent self.
“He’s not easy to move when he’s made up his mind,” I said, with
memories of our conversation earlier in the afternoon.
Sonia shook her head ruefully:
“Don’t I know that? You remember when that unemployment deputation came
to see him? We’ve had about three a day ever since. Does that influence
him? The press camps on our doorstep. He’s besieged in his office. This
afternoon that man Griffiths came here again.”
“What did you do with him?”
Her patience suddenly deserted her:
“I sent him to Hampstead. This _is_ a private house, when all’s said and
done. I don’t suppose he got any satisfaction there, but I thought the
walk would be good for him. Odious little creature!”
It was now that I feel I might have done some good by speaking strongly.
Neither Griffiths nor any other grown man deserved to be sent on a
fool’s errand; in cooler moments Sonia would have been ashamed to play
such a trick. Her answer, I suppose, would have been that Griffiths and
her husband were too much for any one’s coolness; and I feared—no
doubt, weakly—that I should lose my slight influence over her if I
sided with her husband. When he came down from the nursery, she was
still indignant enough to retail Griffiths’ visit and to ask O’Rane
whether the deputation had reached Hampstead in time to find him.
“I had to say I could do nothing for them,” he answered a little
wearily. “I’ve given all I can spare of my own money; and I’ve collected
as much as I can from other people. If they come again, you might tell
them that.”
“You must tell them yourself,” Sonia replied stiffly. “_I’m_ not going
to make myself responsible.”
“I only wanted you to save them a useless journey. When you sent them to
me, you gave them some sort of hope; and that makes it so much harder
when I have to turn them down.”
“Perhaps in time you’ll find it so hard . . .” she muttered.
“I can’t go back on what I’ve said. It’s only unkind to give them a long
walk for nothing. Promise me you won’t do it again, Sonia.”
“Let’s hope they won’t come again. If they do, I shall _again_ send them
to you.” Then, without disguise, her temper broke. “I’m not consulted
about what you do with this money, so I wash my hands of it. This is not
your office; and you can’t blame me if you refuse to give them anything
for their trouble.”
“I can only repeat that you make my task more difficult,” O’Rane
answered patiently.
“Before I’ve done, I hope to make it impossible,” Sonia retorted
defiantly, as she hurried out of the library and up the stairs.
I had a second opportunity of speaking strongly, this time to O’Rane;
and I failed to press it. The papers that night gave long accounts of
the opening of parliament and longer, less hackneyed descriptions of the
demonstration by the unemployed. I detected for the first time a note of
uneasiness as, for the first time, unemployment passed out of the realm
of abstract statistics and incarnated itself in ragged armies of hungry
men. I remembered Philip Hornbeck’s blithe assurance that Griffiths
could do little harm so long as the armies were scattered; well, their
banners shewed that they were scattered no longer. One nervous
leader-writer compared this march with the advance of the Marseillais on
Paris and asked angrily how the police had allowed it; another, more
valiant, rehearsed the history of the Fascismo movement in Italy and
warned the proletariat at large—without considering whether the
proletariat was likely to read such a paper—that England would never
yield to mob-violence. A third, mentioning O’Rane by name, exhumed the
controversy of the summer and enquired whether those who had voluntarily
undertaken a national responsibility could abandon it at such a time in
satisfaction of a “doctrinaire whim”. In less blunt terms than the
sandwichman had displayed, O’Rane’s ‘sentence of death’ was brought up
against him; and it was with some muddled, premonitory feeling of an
isolated conflict between Griffiths and the O’Ranes that I uttered my
warning.
“Suspend your sentence,” I said, “until the new government has declared
its unemployment policy.”
O’Rane replied with the entirely logical and utterly irrelevant thesis
that unemployment was a consequence of the war, that the community had
called the tune and must pay the piper, that one government had imposed
conscription of men’s lives and that another could impose conscription
of their wealth. The state had turned prosperous civilians into
soldiers; the state must turn these soldiers back into prosperous
civilians.
His cold reasoning and neat phrasing reminded me of a speech at some
undergraduate debating-society.
“I can only hope,” I said, “that you won’t have to say ‘no’ again.”
Hungry men had no time for debating-society arguments. I hoped, too,
that Sonia would not be forced to say ‘no’ again. Hungry men had no
taste for being ordered to walk from Westminster to Hampstead as a move
in the game with her husband. I said no more. And, amid my
self-reproaches, I find a barren comfort in the knowledge that neither
Sonia nor her husband would have listened, though one rose from the dead
to warn them.
3
Thereafter, like every one else, I waited to see the policy of the
government proclaimed. The debate on the address gave rise to some
acrimonious passages between the two front benches; a programme of
rather remote public-relief work was fluttered in the face of the labour
party; and the prime minister ostentatiously reestablished departmental
responsibility and dissociated himself from the improvisations of his
predecessor by refusing to receive a deputation of the unemployed.
Then the interest of the public sought a new stimulus.
I am inclined to think that modern journalism, with its craving for
daily excitement and its acquiescence in the superficial, has
incapacitated us for patient study. Few subjects unconnected with sex or
bloodshed can hold the attention of a newspaper-reader for more than
three days; and, when the men with schemes for employment had been
photographed as they walked to Downing Street and when a popular
novelist had protested passionately that the unemployed were not really
bolshevists, the eyes of the nation were allured by pictures of Lord
Curzon entering his train for the Lausanne conference, and
controversialists with uncertain memories enquired rhetorically the name
of the last woman to be hanged in England for complicity in murder. Like
the peace negotiations, like the war, like the domestic and
international unrest before the war, like the Irish problem, this
unemployment business became a bore: the public was accustomed to the
variety of a “continuous performance” in its cinematograph theatres, it
expected a “new programme weekly” for its political stage.
I myself was compelled for professional reasons to study problems of
public policy even after they had ceased to be fashionable. The only
excuse for continuing our paper was to be found in my uncle’s warning
that, after four years of peace, we were in at least no better position
than at the outbreak of war; at his death, we had cut our last
party-ties and were standing behind the government as friendly critic.
If the new administration shewed no improvement on the old, we should
have to consider—as I told my colleagues—whether we were to throw in
our lot with labour, whether we should lay our paper in its overdue
grave or whether we must extend to our own country the verdict of
revolutionary Russia that the old machine of national and international
government had broken down.
That verdict was pronounced in my private hearing by Griffiths himself,
with a warning that he would repeat it publicly if the government failed
to give him instant satisfaction. Our second interview was no more of my
seeking than the first. When the House rose without curing unemployment
then and there, he made it known—first of all at a mass-meeting in
Trafalgar Square and then in handbills which were distributed about the
streets—that he would instruct ministers in the meaning of unemployment
by confronting them with the unemployed. This, in the vague phrase which
he favoured, would “put things to the test”. The demonstrations at the
opening of parliament had been hardly more than a parade. “Hunger
marches” were now to be organized in every part of the country,
converging on London at the same moment. After that . . .? I noticed
that Griffiths carefully refrained from saying what would happen when
fifty, or a hundred, thousand disappointed men found themselves
empty-handed, empty-bellied, foot-sore and resentful at the closed door
of an impotent office. And I pointed out this sinister omission in the
next number of _Peace_.
There was nothing, Hornbeck told me at this time, in the speech or the
manifesto to justify police interference; but any one who remembered
Griffiths’ share in organizing the land-grabbing campaign could imagine
how this new demonstration would be conducted and how it was likely to
end. I went farther than most of my _confrères_ and denounced the
manifesto as deliberately provocative. Griffiths called to inform me
that, if I chose to print lies, he could not stop me, but that, if I was
interested in the truth, I might perhaps be not too proud to hear it
from him.
I professed a prompt eagerness for truth in any form, though I was more
interested to know what amusement or instruction he derived from so
painfully academic a journal as _Peace_. I wondered how he came to
associate me with its direction and why he visited me in Seymour Street
rather than in Fetter Lane. My curiosity on this last point was
satisfied when he ran a practised eye over the dimensions of the house
and asked me how many the establishment comprised.
“You? And your wife? And six servants?,” he recapitulated. “No kids? A
car and a man to drive it? Four meals a day? You don’t call _that_
provocative?”
“If we had fewer servants, you’d have more unemployed,” I pointed out.
“It takes three men and four women to keep the two of you alive. The
house is half empty. You waste more food in a day than my people eat in
a week. You drive about in your jewels and fine clothes among people
who’ve been cold and hungry for months. And then you tell me not to be
. . . ‘provocative’!”
I reminded him that we were supposed to be discussing unemployment.
“I shan’t remedy that by going about in rags,” I said, “or by shutting
up half the house.”
“If you were in Germany, you wouldn’t be allowed to have empty rooms.
And, if you were in Russia, you wouldn’t be allowed twenty coats when
the next man has nothing but a shirt between him and the rain.”
I reminded him that we were in England and that he had called to
demonstrate how little provocation his manifesto contained.
“If the government orders me to find accommodation for people without
homes,” I said, “if I have to clothe them and feed them, I’ll do it to
the best of my ability. I put obedience to the law above all things.”
The little red eyes glowed in anticipation of an attack. “My criticism
of you is the criticism I’ve brought before now against the people who
preach a general strike for political objects. That’s not the way to
proceed in a constitutional country. There’s no end to it short of
revolution. You object to the word ‘provocative’. . .”
“Did you _read_ what I said?,” he interrupted.
“Every word. It was admirably phrased. A single letter more would have
had you prosecuted. You’re careful not to provoke anybody in words; but
I tell you that you’re inciting people to violence by your actions. You
know their temper far better than I do. You know what you’ve taught them
to regard as the minimum standard of housing, feeding, wages and
out-of-work pay. Do you believe you’ll get it by bringing a hundred
thousand men to London?”
Griffiths hesitated perceptibly. If he said “no”, he condemned himself
for inflating his followers with false hopes; if he said “yes”, he was
confessing himself the prophet of intimidation in its crudest form.
“In time,” he answered at length.
“Do your men realize that they’ll have to wait?” He hesitated again for
fear of admitting that he had taught them too well or not well enough.
“No government in the world can submit to the dictation of a
mass-meeting. You know that. If it surrendered to-morrow, you’d have
another mass-meeting the day after. I think you know that too.”
“And still they wouldn’t have all they’re entitled to,” he murmured.
“That’s another question. My charge is that you’re bringing thousands of
men to London on false pretences. They’re probably not in the sweetest
of moods; and small blame to them. They won’t get what you’re promising
them; and they’ll turn on you.”
The red eyes flashed defiantly:
“I can look after myself.”
So far, we had kept fairly free from personal attacks, but something in
Griffiths’ manner or voice exasperated me. I had not admitted him in
order to be lectured about the number of servants who were needed to
keep me alive; the angry, ferret’s eyes gave me a curious feeling that I
must bite before I was bitten; and, seeing him—perhaps quite
unjustifiably as a vindictive, treacherous little animal, I fixed a
quality of untrustworthiness on the man.
“You will look after yourself,” I prophesied, “by putting the blame on
the government and rousing your people against law and order instead of
telling them there was never a hope of their getting any of the things
you promised.”
Though my antagonist betrayed his feelings in an angry flush, he
affected to dismiss my prediction as something unworthy of his notice:
“They said that at Woolhampton,” he answered, “when we seized the Town
Hall. I’m always stirring people up, it seems . . . Provocative . . .
because I put the blame where the blame should go! You haven’t called me
a paid agitator yet.”
“I’ve no intention of doing so. I say to your face, as I said in print,
that you’re provoking something which may end in a revolution. I take
the purity of your motives for granted. You’ve volunteered to tell me
the truth and to shew that you’re not organizing constructive
revolution.” . . .
Despite the dislike which I could not help feeling, there was no
doubting the man’s passionate sincerity. He felt for the people he
championed the same frenzied protectiveness and lust for revenge that I
should have felt if my sister had been hacked to pieces before my eyes.
Argument was out of the question; warnings were idle. I reconsidered the
phrase I had used in likening him to a spiteful ferret, for he was
touched with the greatness that is inseparable from fanaticism.
Self-advancement and self-advertising had no place in his thoughts,
though he was arrogantly confident of his authority as a popular leader
and of his power to cut knots that had baffled every other hand. In a
conversation that extended over two hours I learned nothing of his
private history; at the end I realized no better than at the beginning
why he had singled me out for his aggressive apologia. The resonant
blows of our blunt swords echoed emptily on our impenetrable harness;
and, when I saw him to the door, I was saying for the fiftieth time:
“You’re trying to stir up a revolution”; and for the fiftieth time he
was retorting: “If your precious government can’t do anything, some one
else had better have a try.”
As we crossed swords for the last time, Barbara drove up to the door.
She had been giving another sitting to Wace; and her appearance, in an
ermine coat and a diamond star, was not wasted on Griffiths, who bowed
ironically and looked her up and down as though he were assessing her in
terms of daily meat-meals.
“Well, I must be off,” he said; and I know he was recapitulating again:
“_You. And your wife. And six servants . . ._”
“I’m glad to have had this talk,” I said, “even though we’ve not
convinced each other. If you think I’ve misrepresented you, I can only
offer you equal space in our columns to put yourself right with our
readers.”
“I shan’t have time,” he answered.
“You can do it in two lines. If you’ll answer my charge that you’re
working, consciously or unconsciously, for a revolution . . .”
“I’m answering it now,” he interrupted. “From here I go to King’s Cross
and from King’s Cross to the north. Putting things to the test. I shall
be back again in just the time that it takes us to walk here.”
As he disappeared from sight, Barbara commented admiringly on his exit:
“For a third curtain, it was unsurpassed. I _do_ want to know what’s
going to happen in the last act.”
4
If I did not know then, I had a strength of conviction that amounted
almost to knowledge. There was going to be public excitement; there was
going to be loose speaking; there was going to be bad blood. And, after
that, there might well be rioting.
I have replayed the game a hundred times since that day and asked myself
what I could have done to change the issue. Before the war I should have
talked to Bertrand; and, if he had shared my apprehensions, he would
have spoken a word to the responsible ministers. With this new
government of men unknown to me, with this new House no longer even in
session, there was no one I could approach. During the war, when we
broke down most of the interdepartmental walls, a telephone message from
the Admiralty would have stirred sympathetic chords in Scotland Yard or
the Home Office. Now I had long severed my connection with the public
service; Philip Hornbeck was my one remaining link; and, if I bothered
him again, I ran the risk of being told that Griffiths was become a bee
in my bonnet.
This notwithstanding, I did ask Barbara to arrange a dinner; and I am
only sorry that I did not make the invitation more urgent.
“Is anything the matter?,” she asked in some surprise, for Hornbeck had
dined with us only two or three nights before.
“Not at the moment; but there may be trouble if some one doesn’t spike
that fellow Griffiths’ guns. In his way, the man’s right: as the
government _has_ no remedy, you can’t find an answer to people who say
they’ll take the remedy into their own hands. But the common sense of
the world won’t allow that. Griffiths will be refused a hearing; the mob
may break a few windows; and then the police will clear the streets.
It’s not worth marching an army three hundred miles to learn that old
lesson.”
“Until they’ve learnt it, they’ll go on believing in men like
Griffiths,” said Barbara.
“But it will be a more costly lesson than they realize. With the best
intentions in the world, he’s marching them into a trap. I want Hornbeck
to stop the march and break up the units before they can collect in
force.”
We telephoned to the Admiralty; but Hornbeck had left. When I got in
touch with him next day, he was engaged for several nights ahead. Rather
shamefacedly, I told him my fears; and he promised to enquire what steps
were being taken, though I felt I had wholly failed to communicate my
dread of the wasted little fanatic Griffiths. In the middle of the
following week I read that the great “hunger-march” had begun; and, when
Hornbeck dined with us, he explained that Griffiths was being given
enough rope to hang himself, but no more. One army had reached
Nottingham, a second was on the outskirts of Coventry and a third was
halting on the east side of Newbury; but they would not be allowed to
reach London. Since my interview with him, the leader and spokesman had
abandoned his former caution; and Hornbeck told me that the police were
waiting to prosecute him for inciting to crime.
“It’s a pity to wait,” I said.
“What else can one do?,” asked Hornbeck.
Perhaps my memory is biased by the events of the following week, perhaps
my instinct was right in warning me that Griffiths was one of the most
dangerous firebrands that I had ever met. He haunted me, as the shadow
of Marat must have haunted the well-to-do citizens of Paris; and I felt
an equal, unreasoning impatience with the departments that ignored him
and with the papers that advertised him. For two or three days the great
march was reported mile by mile, with a list of the victories won by
“Griffiths’ armies” over the powerless custodians of such county halls,
municipal libraries and public baths as they occupied on their way. For
the same period the government maintained a calm and dignified silence.
Then new interests demanded attention and space.
By the time that the various units joined forces in the open country
beyond Neasden, hunger-marching commanded no price in the ever-changing
tariff of news-items. London was shopping for Christmas; the Lausanne
conference was becoming every day more firm and ineffectual; Signor
Mussolini was in England; Germany had defaulted again; and the prime
ministers of the late allies were discussing with their financial
experts new and final methods of settling the problem of reparations.
I only learned that the army was at hand when I read that the government
policy for combating unemployment had been fully explained and that, in
the opinion of one private secretary, “_no useful purpose would be
served by a meeting between the Minister and the leaders of the
unemployed now collected in Wembley Park_.”
“This is the moment I’ve been dreading,” I told Barbara. “Griffiths has
made fools of these people; and he can only recover his authority by
fighting the government.”
I read next day that the leaders of the unemployed insisted upon sending
a deputation to the minister of labour. A public demonstration was
announced later; and from an evening paper I learned that, while the
police would not interfere with an orderly march through the streets, it
must not be conducted in the neighbourhood of Westminster. As I walked
home that night, I was given a handbill in which I read, over the
signature of Griffiths, that the hunger-march would be resumed next
morning and would be directed first to Buckingham Palace, then—as a
concession to constitutionalism—to the Home Office and finally—for a
reason I could not guess, since parliament was no longer sitting—to the
House of Commons. It was not for Scotland Yard to say who might or might
not have access to the king or his responsible ministers; and the
problem that chiefly vexed the spirit of Griffiths was to discover who
in fact was responsible.
“Now,” I told my colleagues when I reached Fetter Lane through a double
line of police, “there’s going to be trouble. The only thing that can
stop it will be a downpour of rain.”
“And there is in fact a hard frost,” yawned Triskett.
“This fog may do as well,” said Jefferson Wright.
“It’s pretty serious,” we all agreed.
Did any of us believe in the warnings and predictions which we uttered?
I cannot say. Everything that happened in these days is coloured by the
memory of what happened afterwards. I may conceivably take credit for
explaining before other people that these demonstrations were on a
different plane from the coal strikes and railway strikes that aroused
our uneasiness after the war; on the other hand, I may only have been
suffering from disordered nerves. It was the end of the year; I wanted a
holiday; and the self-control which I had to exercise at home sometimes
deserted me when I was at my office. Accordingly I claim no praise and
feel no shame in saying that I was nervous. The long lines of
police-pickets had not been stationed about the streets without some
purpose; and the news that trickled in throughout the morning was not of
a kind to allay anxiety.
Philip Hornbeck did indeed repeat by telephone his customary assurance
that Griffiths could be discounted. When the marchers entered Regent’s
Park, they were warned that they would not be allowed to approach
Downing Street; and, as Hornbeck walked to the Admiralty, he passed
half-a-dozen columns of dejected, leaderless men who were standing easy
or trudging slowly under banners of ineffectual protest. Even the bands,
he said, were dispirited. After one glance, the passers-by paid no heed
to a sight that was now wearisomely familiar; and, in Hornbeck’s eyes,
the gaunt, ragged army found its best friends among the constables who
tramped in a protective and restraining cordon.
“Did these fellows seem disappointed?,” I asked.
“I think they were too tired, poor devils, to feel anything. If it
hadn’t been for the bobbies, you might have thought it was another
retreat from Moscow. I believe there _was_ some plain speaking when they
found their Napoleon had left them, but I hear he’s only gone to see
about billets. The police are helping him all they can. That’s the way
we stop revolutions in England,” he chuckled.
I was reminded again of the day now long distant when O’Rane and I had
stood in a crowd of many thousands to watch the body of Terence McSwiney
drawing through the respectfully silent streets of London. The English,
I felt, behaved sometimes like characters in a comic opera: consistent
only in their inconsistency, they could not rise to a revolution. With a
longer leap into the past, my memory fastened on a moment in O’Rane’s
first year at Melton, when he watched a half-hearted attempt at a May
Day demonstration and, in disgust at the apathy of the demonstrators,
instructed them in the Marseillaise. I wondered if he recalled that day,
which was also nearly his last as a scholar of Melton. I wondered if he
and Hornbeck were right in discounting this threat of revolution.
Then I thought of the weary crowds that were pouring into London.
“If you’d put a spoke in his wheel at the beginning . . .,” I began.
“You can’t stop peaceful pedestrians from walking along the king’s
highway,” Hornbeck rejoined, “and Griffiths arranged that the armies
should only _become_ armies when they were too big to turn back.”
5
I had intended to lunch at the Eclectic in the hopes of hearing what
steps the government was taking to house and feed the hunger-marchers,
but, when I was halfway to St. James’ Street, I turned north and walked
home with a vague feeling that I must see how Barbara was getting on.
When Spence-Atkins asked me point-blank if I thought there would be any
outbreak, I had replied with conviction that I did not. That, however,
was in the office; and, as I walked west, I was disquieted by the sight
of these silent columns, marching aimlessly, halting and dissolving into
little knots of stragglers too weary to march longer. In Waterloo Place
and Regent Street, the police imposed an order which the men themselves
had been unable to maintain; but from Hanover Square to Park Lane the
army split into its elements. Through the settling fog I saw men sitting
on the kerbs and clustering on the island-refuges; they dropped in a
shapeless heap on the first convenient doorstep; and the good-humoured
constables who said “Now then, you must move along” found themselves
addressing ears that were already deaf with sleep.
“Half of them are no more than boys, sir,” one policeman pointed out to
me. “Tired out, that’s what they are. They don’t mean no harm.”
By a damnable irony, the men had chosen for their collapse a moment when
Brook Street offered a tantalizing blend of warm, savoury smells. I, who
had never known the meaning of hunger, found my appetite quickening.
“They’re tired out and _hungry_,” I said. So far as I am a judge of
accents, some of these boys had come from the Black Country, others from
Lancashire, others again from Northumberland. “I live near here. Is it
any good trying to raise some soup . . .?”
The constable shrugged his shoulders and waited while an old man, who
had fainted, was lifted on to an ambulance.
“If once you begin, sir, you’ll have the whole lot of them at your door.
It’s more than one man can tackle.”
I walked on to Seymour Street with a growing sense of despair. All this
had been prophesied to Griffiths in forcible language ten days before;
but my meagre powers of imagination and description never came within
miles of actuality. I had not realized the dishonour to humanity which a
man commits when he no longer hides a broken spirit; I had forgotten the
disfigurements of starvation and the sickly stench of neglect. The
policeman was entirely right: half these fellows were only boys; and I
felt the blood mounting to my head when I thought of the way they were
victimized and their ignorance exploited. During the war I had seen them
and their elder brothers trotting obediently to the slaughter-house and
bemusedly offering their lives for a cause that was never explained and
for objects that they never understood. Now, no less obediently, they
trotted in answer to a voice that promised them a quick millennium.
I should have caught some hope, for all my denunciation of violence, if
they had torn Griffiths limb from limb; but the patient credulity that
collected them under his leadership accepted uncomplainingly the fate to
which he led them. Griffiths, as he had boasted to me, could look after
himself; providence, the police or the devil might look after his
followers, who sprawled about the misty streets like slumbering cattle.
If I had expected to find Barbara sharing my own anxiety, I might have
known better than to expect any sign of it. She greeted me with faint
surprise because I had not warned her that I should be lunching at home;
then the surprise turned to relief as she recollected that she was a man
short.
“It’s a family party,” she explained. “Father and mother and Charles. I
asked the O’Ranes; but David can’t get away, so you must take his
place. . . . You’re not ill or anything are you, George?”
“Oh, no, thanks. _Depressed_, if you like. London’s a horrible sight
with all these hunger-marchers dropping down on every side from sheer
exhaustion. I don’t know what’s to be done about them. I only hope there
won’t be a scrap.”
Barbara looked out of window; but the fog was now so thick that she
could not see across the street.
“Was that why you came back?,” she asked with her head averted.
“I wanted to see that you were all right.”
“Thank you.” . . . As though afraid that I might take advantage of her
curt gratitude, she broke into a laugh. “Some one—I think it was
Jim—once said that, when the revolution came, there’d be keen
competition between Sonia and me for a place in the first tumbril. If it
begins to-day, we shall be able to drive down together. I suppose we
_are_ two of the most useless human beings in creation. . . . I hope the
mob doesn’t break in while father’s here: I know he’d struggle with the
executioner, and I think it’s unfair to hinder a man who’s simply trying
to do his duty.”
“I feel Robson would probably save us,” I answered. “He’d tell the mob,
very patiently, that it was out of the question for them to have a
revolution in Seymour Street.” . . .
“You don’t really expect any trouble, do you?”
As I believed Barbara to be entirely fearless, I did not mind speaking
frankly:
“It all turns on what’s likely to happen in the next few hours. The men
are too tired at present even to feel hungry. When they wake up, they’ll
be like ravening wolves.”
On Crawleigh’s arrival, I was distantly comforted to find that he shared
my own view and had indeed spent an hour trying to get it accepted in
Downing Street. During his viceroyalty he had been ultimately
responsible for the relief-works in two famines; and, for once, I found
him pregnant with constructive proposals. Three or four of the biggest
catering-firms, he urged, should set up kitchens in the London parks;
every public hall should be turned into a dormitory; and, if supplies
ran short in the shops, there must be a house-to-house visitation to
collect bread and blankets.
“I’d punish the ring-leaders without mercy,” he added, “but we must do
one thing at a time. This is December, these men are starving; and for
the next forty-eight hours we must simply suspend our ordinary laws. Why
the government ever _allowed_ such madness . . .”
We were still discussing emergency measures when Sonia came in very late
and apologetic. Every approach to Westminster, she reported, was barred
with lines of mounted police; St. James’ Park was closed, Whitehall and
Victoria Street were barricaded. She herself had crossed the river at
Lambeth and come by tube from Waterloo.
“Are things still quiet?,” Lady Crawleigh enquired nervously.
“I should think so; but the fog’s so thick that you can’t tell. . . .
Did David find you?,” Sonia asked me. “He wanted to talk to you about
soup-kitchens or something.”
“He hadn’t come when I left the office,” I answered.
As we went in to luncheon, Charles Neave, who had come up from the
country the day before, contributed some first-hand observations on the
march from Cumberland. It had been peaceful and orderly from the moment
when the marchers convinced their potential antagonists that they meant
to have what they wanted. Private property was scrupulously respected;
but, on the principle that churches and public buildings belonged to the
community, Griffiths’ ‘armies’ took possession of them as lodgings for a
night. I was given to understand that there had been one or two sharp
conflicts; but Crawleigh was expressing more than his own opinion when
he reminded us that this was December and that the men were starving.
Barns and warehouses were offered voluntarily as soon as their owners
were satisfied that they would not be damaged.
“How did they manage for food?,” I asked.
“The workhouse people did what they could. I think the rest was voted by
the different town-councils. There wasn’t enough to go round anywhere,
but a whole lot was given privately.”
“Were there any speeches or demonstrations?,” asked Crawleigh.
“I didn’t hear any. Everybody seemed to be on the side of the marchers.
They felt it was jolly hard lines and something ought to be done. Any
ass who calls it bolshevism doesn’t know what he’s talking about.”
“If we can only get them back as quietly as they’ve come . . .”
Crawleigh began and left his sentence unfinished.
I wondered whether he too was reflecting that the most dangerous
revolution is the one in which popular sympathy goes out to the
revolutionaries. In the last years of the eighteenth century the history
of the world would have been changed if Louis had not forbidden the
Swiss Guard to fire from the windows of the Tuileries; it was in fact
changed—and revolution died in giving birth to Bonapartism—when
Napoleon cleared the streets of Paris with a whiff of grapeshot. I would
more readily have turned a machine-gun on my own dining-room than have
harassed the spent men whom I saw collapsing on the doorsteps of Brook
Street; but I wondered how far the sympathy of the onlookers and the
kindliness of the police would paralyse vigorous action if the spent men
rose and had to be coerced.
“Is anybody in _fact_ taking any steps?,” I asked Crawleigh. “We’ve food
in the house, we can buy more.” . . .
“They’re collecting food and money as it is,” added Sonia. “Just before
I came here, that little red-eyed Welshman called to see David . . .”
“D’you mean Griffiths?,” I asked in surprise.
“Yes. That’s another reason why I was so late. He wouldn’t go. I told
him I’d nothing to give him.”
“Did he come alone?”
“Oh, no! There was a queue stretching farther than I could see. He told
me he was sure Mr. O’Rane wouldn’t refuse to help when he realized what
these men had been through to bring their grievances before the
government.” Sonia’s expression grew suddenly hard. “I told him we
weren’t the government; and I should be very glad if he’d take his army
to Hampstead and let me get to my taxi.”
Before I had time to warn her against such trifling, I was called to the
telephone and informed that O’Rane himself was in Fetter Lane and wished
to see me at once.
“Hullo? This is a private wire, isn’t it?,” he began. “Good! I came to
see you on quite other business. Then one of your people came in with
the latest news, and I felt I should have to borrow your eyes for the
afternoon. I’m afraid Griffiths’ people are getting out of hand. There’s
a certain amount of damage being done . . .”
“Whereabouts?,” I interrupted.
“In Hampstead. I’ve warned the police; and, of course, Hampstead is a
big place; but I couldn’t help wondering if they’d taken it into their
heads to loot my office. I’m afraid they won’t find more than about five
pounds in the till; but there are a lot of young clerks there, and I
don’t want them to have a scare. If you could pick me up here and come
to inspect the field of battle . . .”
“I’ll be with you as soon as I can get across London,” I answered.
6
As I hung up the receiver, I saw Barbara standing in the doorway. One
hand gripped the moulding of the frame; the other was pressed to her
side. I jumped up in sudden alarm and helped her to a chair, for her
lips were moving without giving forth any sound.
“Babs! Darling heart, what’s the matter?,” I asked.
“That’s what I came to find out,” she answered with an effort that
almost choked her. “George, you’re not going!”
“Not till you’re all right,” I promised. “Are you feeling faint? I shall
have to go out for a bit: a man who’s waiting to see me at the office
. . .”
“But you’re not going!,” she repeated frantically.
“It’ll only be for an hour or so . . .”
“It’ll be for all eternity! George, if you go, you won’t come back!
Can’t you _feel_ it? I know when death’s at hand! Have I ever been
wrong? Uncle Bertrand. Eric . . . Oh, before the war! Jack Summertown
and the other boys in Jim’s last party! I know, I _know_! You think I’m
mad . . .”
“But, my dear, who’s going to kill me?,” I asked. “I’ve been in too many
London fogs to fear them much; and, if you’re thinking of the
hunger-marchers, I’m afraid the poor devils couldn’t do any mischief
even if they wanted to. I made an appointment with a man . . .”
“With David. You put him before me?”
I was at a loss to think of anything that would calm her.
“He is my best and oldest friend,” I said.
“You always _have_ put him before me,” she cried.
“My dear, you speak as if you were jealous! It’s absurd . . .”
“I heard what you said to him.”
“Then you couldn’t have heard more than about six words. I said I’d be
with him . . .”
“And wasn’t that enough? Wasn’t it enough when I knew he wanted you? I’m
not jealous; I’m terrified! Don’t I know what he said to you? He’s in
trouble and he wants to drag you into it. But he shan’t, he shan’t!”
I sat down by Barbara’s side and told her, so far as I could remember,
word for word all that O’Rane had said to me.
“You know what Fleet Street rumours are,” I ended, though I felt it was
unfortunate that this rumour of rioting in Hampstead had followed so
disquieting soon on Sonia’s jaunty account of her meeting with
Griffiths.
“If there weren’t danger, you wouldn’t think it necessary to go. It’s no
good lying to me, George. I’ve lived with you too long not to know
something about you. I ask you to stay.”
“If Raney could see for himself . . .,” I began.
“Let some one _else_ go!”
Though I could not tell Barbara, I remembered vividly the night when I
had sat alone in that room, begging O’Rane to come and keep me company.
I remembered, too, his characteristic promise that he would see me
through to the grave and beyond.
“He’s never asked me to do anything for him before. I’ve promised; and
I’m afraid I can’t go back on it.”
Barbara stood up as though she were going to rejoin her guests.
Physically she was in control of herself and could walk without
difficulty or apparent pain; mentally she seemed to be on the verge of a
collapse.
“Four and a half,” she muttered at the door.
“Four and a half what?,” I asked.
“Four and a half years since _you_ made certain promises to _me_. Four
and a half years since we were married. David has only to raise his
little finger . . .”
“This is hardly the time to hold a _post mortem_ on our marriage,” I
said.
“And I’m hardly the person?,” she taunted.
“I didn’t say that.”
“You wouldn’t! You made up your mind to be patient with me at all costs.
You just _wouldn’t_ lose your temper! Dear God, why didn’t you, George?
I deserved it. We could have been friends if you’d dropped your hateful
superiority for a moment, if you’d ever become human! You _can_ be! You
were marvellously sympathetic when all was going well; but, after the
crash, you behaved like a stone god. I was wrong. I _told_ you I was
wrong. You didn’t blame me. You know I’m jealous through and through,
but you wouldn’t punish me by falling in love with some one else. You
didn’t even complain of this ghastly two years’ imprisonment. Won’t you
ever meet me half way? I told you my love for Eric was dead; you know I
never loved any one else. What more do you want? Must I apologize? I
will! I’m sorry. I love you, I need you! I wouldn’t say it the other
night, because I was trying to hold together the rags of my pride. Isn’t
that enough? If you’ll stay, I’ll make up for all my wickedness and
cruelty. You’re all I have in the world. I didn’t know it before; but
now I can feel death hovering over you like some great black bird. If
you go . . . If you go . . .”
Suddenly turning, she clung to me, laughing and crying. I stood without
speaking because her intensity of feeling overwhelmed me. I remember
stroking her hands. I believe I told her that I should be back before
she had time to miss me.
“But you’re not going _now_?,” she cried.
“Darling, I must. I shan’t be in any more danger than I am now; but, if
it were a question of bombs and machine-guns, you wouldn’t ask me to let
Raney down. He wouldn’t have asked me if he didn’t need me.”
Barbara’s hands disengaged themselves from mine and rose to draw me into
her embrace. As our lips met, I felt that she belonged to me, at last,
heart and soul; but, when I looked into her eyes, I read her frantic
certainty that we should never kiss again.
“I’m coming back, sweetheart,” I promised her.
“Good-bye,” she whispered. Then, still gripping my shoulders, she looked
wildly about the room as though to face and drive away this black
presence of death that was haunting her. “It’s . . . come too late.
Good-bye . . . and forgive me.”
“I’m coming back,” I told her again; but Barbara was now kneeling with
eyes closed and folded hands.
If she heard me, she made no sign; I fancy she heard nothing but her own
passionate prayers. As I stumbled into the choking fog, the door slammed
behind me; and for the first time in these bewildering five minutes I
realized that I was awake.
CHAPTER THREE
TWO IN THE FIELD
“The one shall be taken, and the other left.”
_S. Matthew_: XXIV, 40.
1
In Seymour Street I could not distinguish the houses on the far side of
the road; at the Marble Arch I was unable to see from the one side of
the pavement to the other; and I made my cautious way to the tube
station chiefly by sense of touch.
A London fog can be the completest insulator in the world. Paralysing
sight and muffling sound, it separates the individual from his fellows
in the densest part of a crowded street. As I walked up Great Cumberland
Place, there was no sound but my own faint footsteps; the whole city
belonged to me.
“‘_Dear God, the very houses seem asleep_’;” I murmured involuntarily:
“‘_And all that mighty heart is lying still._’”
Then, I am not ashamed to confess, I felt suddenly frightened, for I
knew that the mighty heart was beating, the houses which seemed asleep
were full of people peering into the darkness of the street as I peered
through the darkness at their windows. The street was full; at any
moment I might trample on the unseen; and the unseen that watched and
listened for my faint footsteps might spring out on me. I walked on
tiptoe . . . and could have sworn that some one or something laughed at
my futile caution.
At an unattainable distance, a haze of dirty-lemon light smeared the
darkness. I hurried forward six paces and bruised my knees against a
lamp-post. Pausing to pick up my hat, I saw a knot of motionless bodies
tangled on the doorstep at my feet. There was no word, no more laughter;
perhaps I had imagined that earlier laugh. The fog insulated me again as
though I had been thrust under an airless bell-glass with a pile of
dead. I dared not move for fear of treading on one of them. The lemon
light grew dim, as a thicker wave of fog floated silently from the
unplumbed reservoir in the park. I felt my fingers tightening round my
stick. Then one of the crumpled bodies moved in its sleep and broke the
spell. I walked on—slowly, because I was out of breath—and steadied my
nerves by speaking to the policeman on duty at the corner.
He too, I found, was insulated by the fog. Some one should have relieved
him hours ago; but every man in the force was required to regulate the
traffic and to shepherd the hunger-marchers. What had happened to them
he could not tell me. Whenever the fog lifted, he saw groups of them
drifting aimlessly about or camping wearily in the first resting-place
that they could find. As armies, they had either ceased to exist or had
transferred themselves to another part of London. I asked whether he had
heard of any trouble.
“Haven’t heard nothing, sir,” he answered. “Wish I had. No, there won’t
be no trouble. These chaps are too tired; and they’re all of them
strange to London.”
2
When I reached the light and warmth of the tube, I could analyse calmly
my curious surrender to panic on my way up Great Cumberland Place. A
London fog, as I had told Barbara, was no new phenomenon to me; apart
from its dirt, I rather enjoyed one for its mystery and romance. If the
order of interrogation had been reversed, I should have assured the
policeman that I anticipated no trouble and that the hunger-marchers
were too tired, too ill-acquainted with London to provoke a riot. I
believed every word that I had said to my wife; I am not more nervous
than most short-sighted and unadventurous men of forty; and yet for a
moment I had entirely lost my head. Was this due to Barbara’s sudden
collapse? Were my own nerves cracking?
In the familiar long car, staring up at the well-known advertisements, I
was myself again. I could dismiss all thoughts of imminent death,
hanging over the house like a bird of doom, as lightly as they would
have been dismissed by my stolid neighbours in the train. Barbara, for
some reason, was overexcited. In my uncle’s last illness she had
felt—or said she felt—the presence of death; she added then, with
something of the same terror, that, if she ever heard my life was in
danger, she would be dragged out of her indifference. We had been
talking, throughout luncheon, of possible riots; I had arrived
unexpectedly because I was anxious for her safety; a cell in her
unconscious mind might well have retained our conversation as I drove to
my uncle’s death-bed. Was it necessary to probe deeper than that?
What mattered, what I could not yet begin to realize was that Barbara
and I were at last one flesh and spirit. When I returned to her . . .
I wondered whether I had done wisely in leaving her. When I remembered
the last poignant attitude in which I had seen her, kneeling upright
with closed eyes and praying distractedly, I felt unforgivably callous.
“For a casual promise to a friend,” I told myself indignantly; “when
I’ve assured her he’s in no danger . . .”
As the train ran in to Oxford Circus, I rose from my seat. Then I sat
down again; rose again; sat down again . . . till the conductor called
sharply:
“Now, make up your mind, sir.”
I made up my mind and went on to Chancery Lane. I must keep my word to
O’Rane. Had I wished to break it, I could not; and, with this sense of
impotence, something of my old anxiety returned. Raney would not have
summoned me for a trifle; if he needed me, there was danger; yet I had
told Barbara that I should be as safe with him as if I stayed in Seymour
Street. . . .
From Chancery Lane I stumbled to my office at a pace that left no time
for morbid fancies. O’Rane was in my room, sitting by the fire and
slapping a stick lazily against his boot. I have never seen any one less
like a figure of destiny, urging me to an unknown doom. At the vaguest
hint, he would have insisted on my going back to Barbara.
“Is there any more news?,” I asked. “I came as soon as I could.”
“It’s very good of you. No, I’ve heard nothing since that first rumour,”
he answered. “If I had, I wouldn’t have bothered you; but I’ve been
trying for two hours to get through to my secretary, and the girl at the
exchange tells me every time that there’s no answer. I expect the
hunger-march has disorganized everything; and I can smell a pretty thick
fog even if I can’t see it. . . . Shall we start, or is there anything
you want to do here first?”
As we set out, I realized that in the darkness of night or the greater
darkness of a fog the blind man has an advantage over those who are
guided by their eyes. With a murmured “Chancery Lane Tube; and then
change at Tottenham Court Road”, O’Rane piloted me more surely and far
more quickly than I could have found my way unaided. The contents-bills
outside the station proclaimed—rather superfluously—“_Fog-Pall over
London_”; but, beyond one or two collisions and an accident with a
runaway horse on the Embankment, I could find no news. “_Griffiths’
Armies_” were given a headline of no more than medium size; and their
progress had been followed less far than Philip Hornbeck had carried it
that morning. The peaceful encounter with the police in Regent’s Park
was briefly described; but of the barricades which Sonia had seen at
Westminster there was no mention.
“By the way, you know Griffiths has turned up again?,” I said. “Your
wife was lunching with us; and I gathered that he’d called on you at The
Sanctuary. That was just before lunch.”
“What’s happened to him?,” O’Rane asked.
“Sonia told him you weren’t at home.”
“Did she send him to the office?”
“I believe she did.”
O’Rane’s face grew grave; but he only muttered a hope that he would be
in time to meet the deputation.
“This is a moment for desperate remedies,” he explained. “That’s why I
came to see you in the first place. Most of these fellows will starve,
and a fair number will go berserk if we don’t do something for them.
I’ve had leave to turn Millbank Gardens into a canteen; so we can look
after any one who comes to The Sanctuary. Only a few, though, will
penetrate into the heart of London; the main armies are still in the
suburbs; and if we can set up relief-camps at Wimbledon, Hounslow,
Hampstead, Epping . . . I wanted you to help me with the plans . . . Are
we nearly there yet?,” he enquired with sudden impatience.
“It’s the next station,” I answered.
On the high ground of Hampstead, the fog lay whiter, with a tantalizing
promise that it would clear at any moment. As we came out of the lift, I
could read without difficulty the shop-signs on the opposite side of the
street, though the higher ground of the Heath alternated patches of
afternoon light with pockets of mist as impenetrable as anything I had
seen at the Marble Arch. Of hunger-marchers I could find no trace; but
here, as everywhere in London, the police seemed to have been multiplied
a hundredfold.
“Take my arm,” O’Rane ordered. “I can shew you a short cut.”
Leaving the main road, I followed him through devious alleys until a
sense of open spaces hinted that we must be near the Heath. After the
noise of the train, the silence of these empty lanes was unearthly;
after the thronged street by the station, we seemed to be alone in the
world.
“This reminds me of a raid-night in the war,” I said, as we plunged into
a belt of fog. “Pitch-dark. Deserted. And all the time you feel there
are thousands of people within touching-distance of you.”
Before he could answer, we had come again into a broad street and were
within touching-distance of a crowd that seemed to number thousands,
though I could only see the first three or four ranks.
“Is this one of the armies?,” O’Rane asked, as he turned, almost without
checking, down a footway between two villas.
“Spectators, I think. It was more like a football crowd than a
demonstration.”
“What the devil’s a crowd doing here?,” he asked with the first note of
anxiety that I had heard in his voice. “There’s nothing to see, except
my office. . . . Hold on a minute while I find the key. I’m going to
take you in the back way.”
As we halted, I observed that the footway had brought us to a high brick
wall with a wooden door in the middle. O’Rane was fitting the key into
the lock when the door opened from the inside and a constable flashed
his bull’s-eye into our faces.
“Now then, what are you up to?,” he demanded truculently.
“This is my office,” O’Rane answered.
“Sorry, sir. My orders are not to let any one in.”
“But you can’t keep me out of my own house. Where’s the inspector?”
The constable levelled the beam of his lamp on us again, this time with
marked indecision. O’Rane’s voice had a ring of authority; and the key
which he held was superficial evidence of good faith.
“Are you Mr. O’Rane, sir?,” asked the constable. “The inspector’s been
trying to get hold of you. Maybe . . . you haven’t heard, sir?”
“Haven’t heard what?”
“The place has been smashed about, sir. Them hunger-marchers . . .”
“Any one hurt?”
“None of your people, sir; but we had to take our truncheons to the
others. If you’ll see the inspector, sir . . .”
O’Rane bent his head and passed through the doorway, dragging me behind
him by the wrist. Our path lay through an overgrown clump of evergreens;
and, when we came into the open, on a strip of blighted lawn, it was my
turn to catch O’Rane’s wrist while I surveyed the damage. So far as I
could see in the uncertain light, there was not one whole pane of glass
in the place; a door, torn from its hinges, lay athwart one of the
trampled flower-beds; and under the boarding of the penthouse that did
duty for a waiting-room there trickled a thin stream of black water. The
lawn was carpeted with files and ledgers; the doorways were blocked with
broken chairs; and the air was heavy with the smell of wet ashes.
“The place is wrecked?,” O’Rane broke in on my description. “That’s
enough for the present. Find me the man in charge.”
In a corner of the main office we came upon a group of three constables,
one inspector and two unexplained men in plain-clothes. They were
talking in undertones round a table on which O’Rane’s secretary lay in a
dead faint. Another clerk, white-faced and tremulous, sat in another
corner with a telephone; a third wandered distractedly about the room,
tidying books into place and sobbing gently to herself.
“This is Mr. O’Rane,” I told the inspector. “We understand no one’s been
killed. That’s all we know.”
“It’s not the fault of those others that some one _wasn’t_ killed.
Excuse me, sir, she’s coming to,” he added in an undertone. “Don’t hurry
her! Stand back there and give her room.”
3
Five minutes later we began to build up a composite explanation from the
inspector’s report and the evidence of the three eye-witnesses. Shortly
after one o’clock a man had called to see Mr. O’Rane; he gave no name,
but said that he had been sent to the office from Westminster. On
hearing that Mr. O’Rane was not yet arrived, he explained that he was
spokesman of a deputation and would like to wait for an interview. The
one clerk who was on duty during the luncheon-hour then tried to make an
appointment for the next morning on the ground that Mr. O’Rane had said
he would not be at the office until late, if indeed he came at all that
day. The spokesman of the deputation replied that he had heard that
story before and enquired sarcastically if he should lead his men back
to Westminster.
“He said he’d come all the way from the north,” interposed O’Rane’s
secretary. “I guessed then he was one of the hunger-marchers; and I
. . . didn’t like the way he spoke. So, when he turned to call the
others, I gave him a push and slammed the door behind him. Then . . .
then . . . then . . .”
O’Rane patted the girl’s hand while the inspector resumed his narrative.
Barred from one entrance, the rioters attacked the other and succeeded
in wrenching the door down. Inside, their conduct at first was orderly:
some stretched themselves on the floor, others collected round the
fires; when the police arrived, however, one or two got out of hand:
tables were overturned, drawers ransacked and the safe bombarded,
ineffectually enough, with sticks and stones. Then two arrests were
made; and the crowd settled down to fight in earnest. Those who were
outside shattered the windows with every missile that came to hand;
those within overturned the furniture, flung the books from their
shelves and kicked burning coals into the midst of the wreckage. When
the truncheons came into place, the attack collapsed; but, with
half-a-dozen exceptions, the invaders had made good their escape.
“Which way did they go?,” asked O’Rane.
“Every way, sir, as far as we could see. They were lost in the fog
before they were out of the garden.”
“I understand. Well, they’re not likely to come back, but I suppose
you’ll leave some one to look after the place. I shall be here first
thing to-morrow morning, but I’ve rather a lot to do now. Can you
arrange for some one to take these ladies home? I don’t like them to
wander about unprotected. George, I want you.”
As I followed him into the ruins of his private office, he asked me if
Sonia had mentioned where she was going that afternoon.
“I imagine, to The Sanctuary,” I answered. “She had tickets for a
private view, but I heard her say it was too dark to do anything except
go to bed.”
“And the best place too. Will you get hold of the other telephone and
tell her to bar the door and put the shutters up in the library? All the
ground-floor rooms without shutters must be locked on the outside. She’s
not to go to the door on any pretext; and there must be no lights in any
window. If I want to get in, I’ll use the fire-escape; so she must leave
the nursery-window open. Tell her—without frightening her, if
possible—that I’m asking the police to draft some additional men into
the neighbourhood . . .”
“You think this gang has gone back?,” I interrupted.
This was the first time that I had engaged in any adventure with O’Rane;
and I began to appreciate some of his qualities of leadership. Always
knowing what he wanted, he made his followers want it with equal
intensity; fearless himself, he subdued fear in others. I felt that he
would stand back to back with me against an army corps; and it was only
natural that I should wish to stand back to back with him.
“It’s more than likely. They’re out for blood now . . . thanks to
Sonia’s damned folly in sending them here when I told her I shouldn’t be
near the place. I should want somebody’s blood myself if I’d had a trick
like that played on me.”
I sent O’Rane’s message in his own words, not caring greatly whether I
frightened Sonia so long as she obeyed to the letter. Then I telephoned
to Seymour Street to give a similar warning. I would not speak to
Barbara for fear she should try to argue; but I instructed Robson to put
the house in preparation for a siege. Griffiths had honoured me with one
call; in his mind I was intimately associated with O’Rane; I did not
want him to call a second time until I had prepared a suitable reception
for him.
“Tell her ladyship that there’s a certain amount of rioting,” I said,
“and it is my urgent wish that she shall not go out of doors. Mr.
O’Rane’s office has been damaged, though—fortunately—no one has been
injured. I’m going with him to his house in Westminster, just to see
that everything’s all right there. Then I shall come straight home.”
As I finished speaking, O’Rane came into the room and asked if I had
sent his message.
“Then I needn’t keep you, old man,” he added. “It was good of you to see
me through. One’s sometimes extraordinarily helpless without one’s
eyes.”
“I’m coming back with you,” I said.
“Why?”
“Because . . . one is sometimes extraordinarily helpless without one’s
eyes.”
“But this isn’t your show. Sonia set the match to the fire; and I must
put it out.”
“I may be able to lend a hand.”
O’Rane stood silent for a moment. Then he shook his head and turned to
the door:
“I’m not going to let you in for this. You have . . . other
responsibilities.”
“It’s as bad as that?”
“It may be. You’ve never seen a mob out of temper.” . . .
“If you’re right, I may see one to-day. I’m not going to let you go
alone, Raney.”
“It’s . . . good of you; but I think you’re a fool.”
“Well, that’s as may be,” I answered. “Come on.”
4
As we hurried to the station, I told O’Rane that the approaches to
Westminster had been barricaded earlier in the day and suggested that we
should make for The Sanctuary by way of Waterloo and Lambeth. He nodded
without speaking; and, after that, I left him undisturbed. I am not, I
never have been, anything that could be called “a man of action”; I did
not know whether we were hastening into the vortex of a revolution; and,
if I had known, I should have had no idea what to do.
“I’m simply waiting for your orders,” I reminded him, as we struggled
out of the lift.
“And I’m waiting for you to tell me what’s happening. How’s the fog?”
“I really believe it’s thicker than ever.”
“Good. Take my arm and come for all you’re worth. There’s no difference
to me between night and day or fog and sunshine; but there’s all the
difference in the world to these other fellows. I figure out that
Griffiths’ gang ought to be arriving just about now, if they’ve come on
foot. And if they’ve come at all. The police ought to be there before
them, with luck. We’ve no idea of numbers on either side; but one
policeman, attacking or defending, is a match for quite a few people who
haven’t made up their minds how far they want to go. And it’s a trained
against an untrained force. On the other hand, the police can’t go to
extremes until they’re driven.”
“And in pitch darkness,” I added, “numbers and training and the majesty
of the law don’t count for much.”
“I’m banking on that. This may be a one-man show. Me. The fog’s still
holding everywhere? Good again. We’re all blind for this evening, but
I’ve had more than seven years’ start of the others. I haven’t bumped
you once so far? I can _feel_ when people are near. And I’m coming to
know London like my own bedroom. There’s a crossing here, with rather a
high kerb. Left incline to the refuge! There’s a lorry feeling his way
along . . . and getting tied up with a south-bound tram. We can go on
now. People aren’t frightened of a fog nearly as much as I should have
expected. When I remember the agony of fear I went through when I was
blinded . . . The helplessness . . . Here’s Westminster Bridge, but I
don’t think it’s the least use trying that.”
We hurried along the south bank of the river and only crossed when we
were safely in the rear of all possible pickets.
“What happens if we get separated?,” I asked.
“Look after yourself as best you can, but don’t call me by name. D’you
know _Lilliburlero_? Well, pretend you’re Uncle Toby and whistle that
when you get a chance, just to shew me where you are. If you want help,
whistle _John Peel_. I’ll get to you if I can . . . Of course, we _may_
find everything as peaceful as the grave. If we do, I think I shall
still take the precaution of moving Sonia and the boys to some other
part of London.”
“Bring them to Seymour Street,” I suggested.
“I will, thankfully. If we find there’s a scrap in progress, we must
arrange a retreat. There’ll be nobody on the west side of the house,
because there are no windows for any one to break on the ground floor;
and there’s a fairly high wall round the stable-yard. If you’ll keep
_cavé_, I’ll slip in there and go up the fire-escape. I’ll give you the
first line of _The Campbells Are Coming_ to know if the coast’s clear;
if you’ll reply with _Over the Hills and Far Away_, I shall know I can
unlock the door. From there, the way is by Smith Square, Great College
Street and Dean’s Yard. The gates will be shut against us; but the
police will open them. . . . Are you feeling at all nervous?”
“A bit keyed-up. This damned fog . . .”
“You may live to bless it. If for any reason we don’t both get through,
we’ll say good-bye now. Slow down a bit; we can’t be more than fifty
yards from the corner.”
Though I fancied we were still half a mile away, I discovered—by the
abrupt change from stucco to brick—that we had indeed reached the south
side of the house. So far as I could see or hear, the neighbourhood was
deserted; but a single distant thud, followed by a sharp tinkle, told me
that some one on the other side of the house had broken a window and
that the missile had been stopped by a shutter. I heard hurried
footsteps and pulled up within an inch of colliding with a young
policeman. His truncheon was drawn; and he had lost his helmet.
“You gentlemen had best keep out of this,” he warned us.
“What’s happening?,” I asked. “Are these the hunger-marchers?”
“I reckon so. And they’re out for mischief. If you could see them, it
wouldn’t be so bad . . .”
He broke off as a fusillade of stones rattled against the house. A
hollow ‘plump’, like the sound of a weight dropped into water, indicated
another broken window; and in the moment’s silence that followed we
heard another tinkle of glass.
“The house will stand a good deal of that,” O’Rane murmured. “They’ve
had no luck with the door?”
“Two or three got in by the area window,” stated the constable. “Now
they can’t get out again. There are two men waiting for them.”
O’Rane broke into an unexpected laugh:
“I’m afraid they’ll have a long wait. That’s the cellar; and the door’s
sure to be locked. I hope they’ll find the wine to their taste.”
“Is this your house, sir?,” asked the policeman. “You’d best not let
them see you, then. They’re after you.”
“So it seems,” O’Rane answered, as a new volley of stones rattled on to
the pavement and a series of short scuffles gave place to the sound of
running feet.
The battle, we were told, had been raging for half-an-hour. At first the
assailants had concentrated on the front door; when that refused to
yield, they began to break every window within reach until the police
scattered them. Then the attack was transferred to a distance. On the
Embankment twenty yards away, where the road was under repair, lay
miscellaneous heaps of stones and granite blocks. By these the
hunger-marchers collected and bombarded both the house and the newly
formed cordon. It was a difficult attack to meet at any time, but the
fog made it impossible. When the police charged, the assailants slipped
between and round them, to reassemble in flank and to continue their
bombardment of the house at close-quarters; when the police charged
back, the hunger-marchers returned to their ammunition-dump and reopened
a long-range fire. The present lull in the fighting was due to a change
of tactics: half the police were stationed in open order round the
house, while the other half encircled the granite piles to cut off
supplies. Their numbers, however, were insufficient to hold either
position effectively; and, though further reinforcements were reported
to be on their way, there were enough stones lying loose about the house
for a long spell of irregular practice.
“Is that fellow Griffiths in charge?,” asked O’Rane.
“I’ve heard so,” answered the constable.
“I want to get hold of him. This must be stopped, but it’s no good
breaking heads and putting people under arrest. We must stop it before
the reinforcements come up and the whole thing starts again. There’s a
lot to be said for these fellows: they’re hungry, to begin with, and
they’ve been fooled by everybody, Griffiths most of all. The first thing
they need is a meal; and I’m going to promise them that, if they’ll stop
this stone-throwing business. And after that we must find ’em a place
for the night; but I must promise them there’ll be no arrests. Where’s
the inspector?”
“He’s guarding the area window, sir.”
“I hope to God I can make my voice heard,” O’Rane muttered, as he
vanished from my side to be swallowed up in the fog.
I waited with the constable because I had been given no orders. He had
been on duty for little more than half-an-hour and could tell me nothing
of the battle’s beginning. On the other hand, he told me much about the
rest of London: my premonition of a duel between Griffiths and the
O’Ranes had come true; in every other part, the hunger-marchers were
being peacefully conducted to makeshift kitchens and dormitories;
Hampstead was quiet again; and this brawl, between unknown numbers on
either side, was the nearest approach—as Philip Hornbeck might have
said—to barricade-fighting.
Only a brawl, but an unpleasant brawl. I do not remember feeling
unusually frightened, though I was more than usually helpless. From time
to time a stone hurtled over my head or skated along the pavement at my
feet; of all futile precautions, I pulled my hat over my eyes and turned
up my coat-collar; also, I heard a sustained cursing of this Egyptian
darkness and was surprised to recognize my own voice behind it. I could
not see my watch; I have no idea how long it was before the next
fusillade was followed by the now inevitable scuffling rush. Then came
the sound of O’Rane’s voice from the front of the house. He called
several times for Griffiths; and, when no answer came, he began to talk
to the crowd and at their leader in the same breath.
Only once before had I heard O’Rane address a mass-meeting: that was in
the early days of the war, when he came to gather recruits and wagered
light-heartedly that he would stampede the meeting in five minutes. He
won his bet; but then he had been able to see his audience, and his
audience yielded to the double hypnotism of his voice and eyes. Now he
was talking to a blind tent of darkness. I could not watch the effect; I
could not tell how many heard him nor how many were present to hear. It
was something that they listened in silence; but, until the speech was
over, neither he nor I could tell for certain whether any one was in
earshot.
There was little more in what he said now than in what he had rehearsed
to me. After telling the crowd his name—which was received in
silence—, he explained that, when the deputation called earlier in the
day and at the moment when it was marching on his office in Hampstead,
he had been taking steps to procure food for men whose only fault at
that time was that they had listened to promises which could not be
kept. If they did not know that, Griffiths did; the government had
stated a dozen times that it would not receive their leaders; and the
sympathy which the hunger-marchers had aroused on their way to London
would vanish in a moment if they destroyed houses and helped themselves
to private property. Though it was too late to undo the harm already
done, it could be overlooked. If the rioting stopped instantly, no steps
would be taken against the rioters, with the exception of Griffiths
himself, against whom the police already held a warrant for inciting to
crime. Further, immediate steps would be taken to provide shelter and
food; but the stone-throwing must stop. Those who came forward
empty-handed would be marshalled and led to Millbank Gardens, where
supplies had already been collected.
The speech was over in three minutes; but twice that time passed before
any answer came. I moved round to the front of the house, but the place
from which O’Rane’s voice had issued was occupied by a single policeman.
There was no more stone-throwing, but I could see nothing of the
besieging army. Once I whistled a few bars of _Lilliburlero_, but they
passed unacknowledged. Then I walked in a wider compass towards the
battlefield on the Embankment. Everything was silent, every one was
still; and each man suspected his neighbour. I could see neither
policemen nor rioters until I was within a yard of them; then a face
would leap at me out of the grey fog. Usually it was frightened,
sometimes it was angry; always it seemed thin, hopeless and bewildered.
The stench was oppressive; the sense of silent numbers suffocating.
As I turned back towards the house, I felt a slight tremor among the men
who surrounded me. Perhaps my own aimless movement had given them the
lead they were awaiting. Those ahead of us were pushed forward; those
behind hurried to catch up. Suspicion seemed to die down; and I heard a
hoarse murmur of conversation. Finding myself alone, I tried
_Lilliburlero_ again; and with an answering whistle O’Rane slipped like
a snake through the intervening ranks and stationed himself at my side.
“You all right?,” he whispered.
“Yes, thanks. It’s over, Raney. What d’you want me to do now?”
“Let’s be sure first that it _is_ over. . . . I don’t like the sound of
_that_.”
Taking my arm, he led me in the direction of a voice that seemed to be
answering his own speech. I could not hear the words; and, if I
suspected the voice to be Griffiths’, that was only because a curious
snarl, passed from lip to lip, was taken up as a cry.
“They’re saying it’s a trap,” I told O’Rane.
“Trap . . . Trap . . . Trap . . .” came the snarl; and those who were
nearest the house turned headlong till we were almost swept off our
feet.
“Trap be damned,” shouted a voice; and in place of the mutters and
snarls came the roar of two opposing armies.
5
It was very much as I had foreseen; very much as I had predicted to
Griffiths himself. His men were turning against him.
When hunger first became unbearable, they soothed their anger with a
dose of wholesale destruction. If Griffiths had not urged them to it, I
have never heard any one suggest that he tried to restrain them; I
should be sceptical if any one told me that he had marched them from
Hampstead to Westminster with another thought than to offer them a
further dose of the same sedative. By this time, however, the men were
realizing that broken windows brought satisfaction to no one but the
fortunate two or three who had dug themselves into the wine-cellar. I
hoped they would remain there. In a lull between two bursts of shouting
I heard a subterranean bellowing; one or two bottles were flung up and
promptly smashed by the inspector of police. I did not want our
complications to be increased by the madness that comes to starving men
who have inflamed their aching stomachs with strong liquor. O’Rane, if
he aimed at dividing the enemy, could not have chosen a happier moment
for exposing Griffiths to his followers. Their resentment of that day’s
leadership became lost in a greater resentment of the leadership that
had dragged them to London. Fear sharpened the antagonism of those who
had heard a moment before that they were being incited by Griffiths to
crime; the police were still very near; and O’Rane had promised an
amnesty to all who threw down their missiles and came forward
peacefully.
Amnesty and immediate food. The collective cry of hunger was less than
human; but, as I had predicted, the disappointed mob had vengeance to
wreak on the author of its misfortunes before it could eat in comfort of
mind. As though a barrier had fallen, there was a rush towards the
corner of the street where an excited voice could still be heard
haranguing of ‘traps’.
“That fellow will be lynched if we don’t get him away!,” O’Rane cried.
“You’ll be lynched yourself,” I answered, “if you get mixed up with his
gang.”
Even as I spoke, the tide hung and turned. As I might have foreseen, as
Griffiths himself had told me, he could look after himself. Again I
could not hear his words; for part of the time I fancy he was speaking
in Welsh; and he held his audience. The opposing clamour dwindled and
died away. The hoarse cheers of his supporters spread until they were
taken up all round us. There was a pause of perfect stillness, like the
moment when a gigantic wave gathers before breaking; then the mob turned
as one man upon the house.
Griffiths had won that round.
“I imagine this must be something like the storming of the Bastille,”
O’Rane murmured coolly.
“They’re absolutely out of hand. The police are using their truncheons,
too,” I added, as the sickening smack of hard wood on human flesh and
bone was followed by yelps of rage and whimpering moans.
“I haven’t heard anything of our precious reinforcement . . . There’s a
most awful reek of whisky.”
“They’re looting the cellar. Once _that_ begins . . .”
“If they’ll get drunk quietly, it will be the best thing in the world
for everybody. . . . D’you smell burning?”
I sniffed; but my duller senses told me nothing till I saw a distant
orange glow fainter than the reflection of a winter sunset.
“They’ve started a fire. I can’t see where.”
“Is it making any difference to the fog?”
“No, but I believe the fog’s lifting. I can see . . . oh, ten yards.
Come out of the way: I think the police are going to charge again.”
Though I dragged at his arm, O’Rane stayed motionless.
“If the fog’s lifting . . .,” he murmured slowly. Then, for the second
time that evening, he gripped my hand. “We must go while the going’s
good. The stable-door. And afterwards by Smith Square and Great College
Street.”
I found myself suddenly alone. The fog was certainly lifting, for I
could see the concerted rush of the police, though I was not in time to
get out of their way. It was a truncheon, I think, and not a stray stone
that brought me down. I remember excruciating pain at the side of my
head; I remember my knees giving slowly beneath me; and then, for a
time, I remember nothing more.
6
When I came to, the fire was invisible; but the battle was still raging.
My glasses were gone; my head ached savagely; and an ungentle foot had
trodden my left hand to a bleeding pulp. I felt overpoweringly sick; and
I wanted to crawl away from all this din till I had recovered my nerve.
I did not know why I was there at all.
Then I remembered O’Rane and the stable-door.
During the war, I was told by many of my friends that, in the first
moments after being slightly wounded, they became wholly demoralized:
they might have been facing intensive fire for several hours on end
without undue discomfort, but, when once they had been hit, they dodged
and cowered their way back to the clearing-station as though the heavens
were raining shrapnel upon them. My own demoralization, as I slunk away
and made for the stable-door by the other side of the house, was more
complete than I care to remember: I ducked, I sidestepped, I ran, I hid,
everywhere pursued by the reek and roar of struggling humanity,
convinced against all reason that I alone was visible in the darkness
and that every missile was deliberately aimed at me.
The stable-door was locked; I could see no one near it; and I sank to
the ground till I should faint again or be trampled to death. There was
some challenge, some pass-word for me to remember; but, when I heard a
whistle, I forgot my orders and called out: “Here I am! All clear.”
There was a precautionary pause before the door was opened. Then O’Rane
pushed a small, muffled figure towards me and stepped into the road with
a second figure, slightly larger and equally muffled, in his arms.
“Shut the door quietly and follow me,” he whispered. “It locks itself.”
“Where’s Sonia?,” I asked.
“I must go back for her. She’s rather rattled.”
I cannot say whether my recovery was the natural result of time or
whether I was infected by O’Rane’s unruffled calm. His companionship
meant much; his air of authority more; and, if I was still frightened, I
hope at least that I did not shew it. A very few steps, moreover,
brought us into comparative quiet; and I could forget the red-hot pain
in my head.
“The fog _is_ lifting,” I told O’Rane.
“The deuce it is!” He stopped suddenly and lowered his burden to the
ground. “You must take Daniel as well, while I go back. Sonia wouldn’t
face the fire-escape; and I must carry her down. There’s no time to
lose, because these fellows have been filling up on neat spirit; and I
came across a dud incendiary-bomb . . . which doesn’t look like clean
fighting. You’re in Smith Square now. Feel your way round the church
railings, then straight ahead, then to the left as far as you can go.
Knock up any of the Abbey people and say these children must be taken
in. Give them _your_ address and beat it for home. We shall join you as
soon as we can. Go carefully,” he added in a whisper. “There’s some one
coming. Oh, it’s only a woman. _She_ won’t hurt you.”
As he turned back to The Sanctuary, I gave Daniel my undamaged hand
while I hoisted little David half on to my shoulder. I had heard no
footsteps, but somewhere in this bewildering darkness I heard a woman’s
light cough. Then a voice said:
“Don’t look round! I’ll take the baby as soon as we’re safe, but I want
to keep my hands free just in case . . .”
Then we came into a narrow circle of lamp-light and I saw Barbara in
tweed jacket and trousers. She had tidied her hair away under one of my
hats; and the fingers of her right hand gripped a service revolver.
“When you didn’t come . . .” she began.
“You’ve no right to be here,” I exclaimed in horror.
“Just as much right as you, darling. I drove the car here in case any
one was . . . hurt. It’s in that street by the Church House.”
“Then will you shew me the way and take these infants to Seymour Street?
Raney will follow as soon as he can bring Sonia down.”
“And you?”
“I’m going back to give him a hand.”
“Must you?”
“There may be other people in the house. Servants.”
Barbara lifted the child off my shoulders into her arms and hurried down
a side street. The fog was lifting rapidly, too rapidly; I could see
across the street and I wondered how much could be seen on the
battlefield outside The Sanctuary.
“If you _must_ . . .” Barbara murmured. “George, I told Robson I was
coming to see if I could help you; but . . . I brought the car to take
back your dead body.”
“I’ve no intention of being killed,” I said, “but we can’t leave people
to be burnt alive.”
“Well, . . . take the revolver,” said Barbara helplessly.
When we had put the children inside the car, I went back at a run down
Great College Street to Smith Square. The fog lay in pockets so that I
could see thirty yards at one moment and less than three at another. I
fancied, as I neared The Sanctuary, that the noise had diminished; I
could see neither fire nor smoke; and, though my own road was deserted,
I thought I could hear the patter of running feet. It was more than time
for the reinforcements to have arrived; it was more than a likelihood
that, with the increasing light, experience and discipline were
favouring the police. I was halfway through Smith Square when I heard a
sound of crying and saw a woman’s figure cowering against the railings.
As I went forward, I was greeted with a scream of terror; the figure
turned to run, and I recognized Sonia.
Calling her by name, I started in pursuit and brought her back from the
scene of riot for which she was blindly heading. Her nerve was gone; and
I had dragged and carried her halfway to the car before she could speak
coherently. Then I learned that the battle was over, the fire out and
Griffiths’ army in full flight; but all this was nothing to the
unforgettable agony of the bombardment, and she sobbed hysterically as
she tried to describe her own sufferings from the moment when she
received my message from Hampstead to the moment when her husband
climbed through the nursery-window.
“Where _is_ Raney?,” I asked.
“He’s following. He said it was dangerous for us to go together; and I
should get along quicker without him. Oh, George, it was so awful! I
believe I’m going to faint.” . . .
Though I tried to comfort her, I should have had an easier task if she
had composed herself wholly or wholly collapsed. Though I had not shared
her ordeal, I felt that Sonia was making rather a pitiful exhibition of
herself. She was frightened, but so was I; so—under his Gasconnade—was
O’Rane; so—without disguise—had Barbara been. When, however, an
emergency wrested the direction of her daily life from her own hands,
Barbara behaved as tradition and inherited instinct taught her. Though
her body might play her false, the dauntless strength of breeding came
out in her spirit; she might break down in private; but, once on the
public scaffold, she shewed an Elizabethan daring and feared death less
than the ague which might make her enemies think she feared death. Alone
of us four, Sonia was more concerned for her personal alarms than for
the dignity of the order in which we had been brought up.
“It’s only a few yards to the car,” I told her. “Barbara will look after
you. And you’ll find the children quite safe. . . . D’you know which way
David was coming?”
“No. . . . I just ran for my life. He said he’d follow.” . . .
I handed her over to my wife’s keeping with no more comment than that
she was badly shaken in nerve. There might have been a noticeable
contraction of sympathy if Barbara, who had superfluously ventured into
this maelstrom through loyalty to me, heard that Sonia had run for her
life and left her blind husband to extricate herself from the danger in
which she had involved him.
“I’m just going to meet Raney,” I said. “He’s expecting us either in
Dean’s Yard or Seymour Street.”
“If we’ve gone before you come back, it’ll mean that he’s found us
first,” said Barbara. “Then you’ll come home independently. Take care of
yourself.”
“It’s all over now. Even the fog’s almost gone.”
7
As I returned to The Sanctuary for the last time, I could see—even
without my glasses—from one lamp-post to the next. The narrow streets
north of Smith Square were almost empty; and I could hardly blame a
routed enemy for shying from such sinister avenues of escape. There were
more and more people as I drew nearer to the Embankment, all of them
rather dazed and many wounded. I saw no dead, though stretchers were
being hurried up as I came in sight of The Sanctuary; and of the battle
there was no other sound than a rapid scurry of feet towards Westminster
Bridge and Vauxhall.
At the corner of Sanctuary Road I was challenged and stopped by a
policeman.
“I’m looking for the gentleman whose house has been attacked,” I
explained. “I’ve got his family in a car near by; but he’s unfortunately
blind, and I don’t want him to miss them.”
I was allowed through; and, a moment later, I stood in the midst of one
of the strangest scenes that I have witnessed. To see, to smell and to
touch, it was a blend of shambles and distillery under the combined
influence of earthquake and fire. The ground was in places waist-deep
with stones; for twenty feet round the house I heard the glass crackling
as I walked. More than once I slipped in an ominous pool of blood; and
the air was sickly with the smell of whisky and singed clothing.
I whistled and called O’Rane’s name, but there was no answer. Every
approach was now guarded by police; and on either side of the cordon I
heard scuffling as the last unyielding attackers were put under arrest.
In the middle of the open square, the wounded were laid out to await the
ambulances. I borrowed a lantern and flashed it down the lines, but
there was no one remotely resembling Raney.
“I’m going to try the house now,” I told the policeman nearest the
stables. “If you’ll give me a leg up, I can get over the wall and up the
fire escape.”
There was no one in the yard, no one in the house. As a last hope, I
interrogated two or three of the constables; but, if any of them had
found time to notice anything my description did not help to identify
one half-seen figure in a surging crowd of many thousands.
“Well, if he turns up,” I said to the inspector, “will you tell him that
all’s well and that his family has gone to Mr. Oakleigh’s house?”
Then, handing him a card, I bent my steps in the direction of the Church
House.
The fog had lifted; and only a faint haze remained. For the first time
in many hours I looked at my watch to explain what seemed to be stars.
It was nine o’clock; and I became suddenly conscious of great hunger,
great fatigue and almost unbearable pain in my head and hand. At the
same moment I began to see the events of the afternoon in their
perspective.
Nothing quite of this kind had happened for a hundred years. Barbara had
confirmed what the policeman told me: this outbreak was isolated and
unique. Within the next day or two I was to meet men who had driven
unsuspectingly across the battlefield from luncheon-parties an hour
before the battle; I was to meet others who drove across the same ground
an hour after the surrender and only imagined that the road was under
repair. It was local, it was brief; but it was new. Had I seen the
beginning or the end? Sardou, I remember, makes one of his characters
say: “_An_ émeute _is when the mob is conquered; then they are all_
canaille; _a revolution is when they are victorious; then they are all
heroes_.” The _émeute_ of to-day, however, becomes not infrequently the
revolution of to-morrow. I felt that, in history, this outbreak might
mark a turning-point: it would be the first active step towards a social
revolution, or it would be the last demonstration of turbulence before a
great and orderly people, with a genius for self-government, adjusted
itself slowly, pragmatically and irrationally to the new conditions.
I know now, I knew next day, that the collision which loomed so large to
me would escape the notice of the most vigilant historian. The average
headline in the average paper said no more than: =Disorderly scenes
in westminster. Feared loss of life.= Then and now I felt and feel
that what I witnessed was more than a “disorderly scene”. Little more
than eight years had passed since the threat of a European war shook us
to the foundations of our being. The ardent among us had vowed that, if
we won, we would have an order of civilization for which any man would
be proud to die. After eight years, the danger of a new war lowered more
menacingly than in the summer months of 1914. And the civilization which
we had set up to commemorate the war was to be judged on that
afternoon’s encounter. Had the association of one human being with
another, in his national and international grouping, grown so complex
that no one could control it? Had the world become like the Roman Empire
in its last days, when—for no reason that a statesman of the day or an
historian of later days could enunciate—the mighty machine ceased to
revolve? If the aim of government was to secure the life and liberty of
the governed and to lead them towards prosperity and happiness,
government had palpably failed in victorious England and France, in
defeated Germany, in revolutionary Russia. My uncle warned me on his
death-bed that we were back in 1914; had he been with me now, I must
have told him that we were sunk to something incredibly lower than 1914.
After the events of this afternoon I did not believe that even O’Rane
would dispute that.
Of all the ironies that had chequered his life, I knew of none greater
than that his should be the house to be attacked by the most downtrodden
and hopeless section of the community. If their salvation could have
been helped by his death, he would have given his life for them as
lightly as another man might toss a coin to a beggar. Now, if any one
had indeed been killed, he would be held indirectly responsible.
I had come to a halt till the pain which every step sent shooting
through my head should abate. Looking again at my watch, I saw that I
must hasten. By Great College Street, O’Rane had told me, and then into
Dean’s Yard. As I turned the corner, I had to step aside to avoid an
obstacle. Glancing back, I saw that it was a man. He lay stretched on
his back, with his arms flung out, midway between two lamp-posts; and I
could not be sure whether he was wounded or drunk. I called out to find
if he wanted help; but there was no answer. Then I struck a match.
As it flared, I saw what—in some way that I shall never understand—I
had been expecting to see. It was this that had sent me back to his side
again and again; this, maybe, that had brought Barbara with her car;
this, for all I know, that appeared to her in the semblance of black
wings beating a prophetic message over the house. O’Rane’s hands were
cold as ice; the back of his head was brutally smashed. His black eyes
stared up to heaven in mild perplexity at the insoluble enigma of death
and the eternal paradox of life.
He looked a boy of twenty.
I covered his face and mounted guard over my last and best friend. . . .
WALTHAM ST. LAWRENCE,
Berkshire, 1923.
THE END
TRANSCRIBER NOTES
Mis-spelled words and printer errors have been corrected. Where multiple
spellings occur, majority use has been employed.
Punctuation has been maintained except where obvious printer errors
occur.
Page numbers have been removed due to a non-page layout.
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