Now that my leg has been smashed up hopelessly, by that wretched German shell, I shall never ride or shoot again. I have to content myself with writing books to occupy my time, a very poor form of amusement compared to tramping the fields after partridge. I suppose it is inevitable that a man in my position should indulge in regretful memories. My mind goes back now and then to certain days in my boyhood and I find myself picturing scenes through which I shall not move again.
There are fields stretching back from the demesne which used to be mine. In the autumn many of them were stubble fields and among them were gorse covered hills. I used to go through them with my gun and dogs in early October mornings. There were—no doubt there still are—though I shall not see them—very fine threads of gossamer stretching across astonishingly wide spaces. The dew hung on them in tiny drops and glittered when the sun rose clear of the light mist and shone on them. Sometimes the threads floated free in the air, attached to some object at one end, the rest borne about by faint breaths of wind, waved to and fro, seeking other attachment elsewhere. Some threads reached from tufts of grass to little hummocks or to the twigs which form the boles of elm trees. Others still, with less ambitious span, went only from one blade of grass to another or united the thorns of whin bushes. The lower air, near the earth, was full of these threads. They formed an indescribably delicate net cast right over the fields and hills. I used to see them glistening, rainbow coloured when the sun rays struck them. Oftener I was aware of their presence only when my hands had touched and broken them or when they clung to my clothes, dragged from their fastenings by my passing through them.
I have no idea what place these gossamer threads occupy in the economy of nature. I find it difficult to believe that the life of the fields and gorsy hills and young plantations would be either better or worse if there were no such thing as gossamer. But I am no longer contented with my ignorance. I mean to find out all that is known about gossamer, and satisfy myself of the truth of the tradition that the threads are spun by tiny spiders, though surely with very little hope of snaring flies.
I spent six months making the tour which Ascher planned for me. I returned to London in the spring of 1914, full of interest in what I had seen and learned. I intend some day to write a book of travels, to give an account of my experiences. I shall describe the long strip of the world over which I wandered as a landscape on a quiet autumn morning, netted over with gossamer. That is the way it strikes me now, looking back on it all. Ascher and men like him have spun fine threads, covering every civilised land with a web of credit, infinitely complex, so delicate that a child’s hand could tear it.
A storm, even a strong breeze comes, and the threads are dragged from their holdings and waved in wild confusion through the air. A man, brutal as war, goes striding through the land, and, without knowing what he does, bursts the filaments and destroys the shimmering beauty which was before he came. That, I suppose, is what happens. But the passing of a man, however violent he is, is the passing of a man and no more. Even if a troop of men marches across the land their marching is over and done with soon. They have their day, but afterwards there are other days. Nature is infinitely persistent and gossamer is spun again.
I remember meeting, quite by chance, on a coasting steamer on which I travelled, a bishop. He was not, judged by strict ecclesiastical standards, quite entitled to that rank. He belonged to some American religious organisation of which I had no knowledge, but he called himself, on the passenger list, Bishop Zacchary Brown. He was apostolic in his devotion to the Gospel as he understood it. His particular field of work lay in the northern part of South America. He ranged, so I understood, through Ecuador, Colombia and Venezuela. He was full of hope for the future of these lands, their spiritual future. I had long talks with him and discovered that he regarded education, the American form of it, and commerce, the fruit of American enterprise, as the enemies of superstition and consequently the handmaids of the Gospel.
He wanted to see schools and colleges scattered over the republic in which he was interested. He wanted to see these lands heavily fertilised with capital.
“If you have any spare money,” he said, “put it into——”
I think he said fruit farming in Colombia. Whatever the business was—I forgot at the time to make a note of the particulars—he promised that it would develop enormously when the Panama Canal was opened. The advice may have been perfectly sound; but I do not think it was disinterested. Bishop Zacchary Brown was not anxious about my future or my fortune. He did not care, cannot have cared, whether the Panama Canal made me rich or not. Nor did it seem to him an important thing that the fruit trade of South America should develop. What he cared for was his conception of religion. He saw in the inflow of capital the way of triumph for his Gospel, the means of breaking up old careless, lazy creeds, the infusion of energy and love of freedom. Ascher, so I conceived the situation, was to stretch his threads from Calvary to the grapefruit trees of Cartagena.
At Bahia I was introduced to a Brazilian statesman. I met him first at the house of one of Ascher’s banker friends. We talked to each other in French, and, as we both spoke the language badly, understood each other without much difficulty. It is one of the peculiarities of the French language that the worse it is spoken the easier it is to understand. A real Parisian baffles me completely. My Brazilian statesman was almost always intelligible.
He was interested in international politics, the international politics of the western hemisphere. I found that he was distrustful of the growing power of the United States. He suspected a policy of Empire, a far-reaching scheme of influence, if not actual dominion, centred in Washington. He regarded the Monroe Doctrine as the root from which such an extension of power might grow. It was no business of mine to argue with him, though I am convinced that the citizens of the United States are of all peoples the least obsessed by the imperial idea. I tried, by looking sympathetic, to induce him to develop his theory. In the end I gathered that he hoped for security from the imperial peril through the increase of wealth and therefore power in the South American republics.
“Our natural resources,” he said, “are enormous, but undeveloped. We cannot become strong in a military sense. We cannot possess fleets with which to negotiate——”
I should have said “threaten” instead of “negotiate” for that was plainly what he meant. But statesmen have to be careful in their use of words.
“—Unless we can obtain capital with which to develop our wealth. The great money-lending countries, England and France, ought in their own interests to pour capital into our republics. The return, in the end, would be enormous. But more important still, they would establish a balance of power in the western world. Why do not your financiers understand?”
Again Ascher. Battleships are to be towed across the ocean, from the ship yards of the Clyde to these far-off seas, at the ends of the gossamer threads which Ascher spins. The Gospel and international politics are caught in the same web. I seemed to see Diocletian the Emperor and Saint John, who said, “Love not the world,” doing homage together to the power of capital, leading each other by the hand through the mazes of the system of credit.
I saw beautiful scenes, wide harbours where stately ships lay anchored, through whose shining gates fleets of steamers trudged. I never escaped from the knowledge that the gossamer threads stretched from mast to mast, a rigging more essential than the ropes of hemp and wire. I saw the lines of steel on which trains go, stretched out across vast prairies, and knew that they were not in reality lines of steel at all but gossamer threads. I saw torrents made the slaves of man, the weight of falling water transmuted into light and heat and force to drive cars swiftly through city streets; but all the wheels and giant masses of forged steel were tied together by these same slender threads which Ascher spun in the shrine of that Greek temple of his, Ascher and his fellow bankers.
Always the desire was for more capital. There was room for thousands of ships instead of hundreds. There were whole territories over which no trains ran. There was potentiality of wealth so great that, if it were realised, men everywhere would be raised above the fear of want. A whole continent was crying out to Ascher that he should fling his web across it, join point to point with gossamer, in Amazonian jungles, Peruvian mountain heights, Argentine plains and tropical fruit gardens.
I met and talked with many men whose outlook upon life was profoundly interesting to me. Those whom I came to know best were Englishmen or men of English origin. Some of them had built up flourishing businesses, selling the products of English factories. Some acted as the agents of steamboat companies, arranging for freights and settling the destinations of ships which went voyaging. Some grew wheat or bred cattle. Like all Englishmen whose lot is cast in far countries they retained their feeling for England as a home and became conscious as Englishmen in England seldom are, of love for their own land. Like all Englishmen they grumbled ceaselessly at what they loved.
They spoke with contempt of everything English. They abused English business methods and complained that Germans were ousting Englishmen from the markets of the world. They derided English Government and English statesmanship, ignoring party loyalties with a fine impartiality. They decried English social customs, contrasting the freedom of life in the land of their adoption with the convention-bound ways of their home. Yet it always was their home. I felt that, even when their contempt expressed itself in the bitterest words.
Whatever their opinions were or their affectations, however widely their various activities were separated, these men were all consciously dependent on the smooth working of the system of world-wide credit.
They were Ascher’s clients, or if not Ascher’s, the clients of others like Ascher. They were in a sense Ascher’s dependents. They were united to England, to Europe, to each other, by Ascher’s threads. Whether they bred cattle and sold them, whether they grew corn, whether they shipped cargoes or imported merchandise, the gossamer net was over them.
I returned to London with these impressions vivid in my mind, perhaps—I tried to persuade myself of this—too vivid. I had travelled, so I argued, under the shadow of a great banker. I had gone among bankers. It was natural, inevitable, that I should see the world through bankers’ eyes. Perhaps credit was not after all the life blood of our civilisation. I failed to convince myself. The very fact that I could go so far under the shadow of a bank proves how large a shadow a bank throws. The fact that Ascher’s correspondents brought me into touch with every kind of man, goes to show that banking has permeated, leavened life, that human society is saturated with finance.
In a very few months, before the end of the summer which followed my home-coming, I was to see the whole machine stop working suddenly. The war god stalked across the world and brushed aside, broke, tore, tangled up, the gossamer threads. Then, long before his march was done, while awe-struck men and weeping women still listened to the strident clamour of his arms, the spinners of the webs were at work again, patiently joining broken threads, flinging fresh filaments across unbridged gulfs, refastening to their points of attachment the gossamer which seemed so frail, which yet the storm of violence failed to destroy utterly.
I reached home early in May and underwent an experience common, I suppose, to all travellers.
The city clerk, returning after a glorious week in Paris, finds that his family is still interested in the peculiarities of the housemaid, the Maud, or Ethel of the hour. To him, with his heart enlarged by nightly visits to the Folies Bergères, it seems at first almost impossible that any one can care to talk for hours about the misdeeds of Maud. He knows that he himself was once excited over these domestic problems, but it seems impossible that he ever can be again. Yet he is. A week passes, a week of the old familiar life. The voluptuous joys of Parisian music halls fade into dim memories. The realities of life, the things on which his mind works, are the new lace curtains for the drawing-room window, the ridiculous “swank” of young Jones in the office, and the question of the dismissal of Maud the housemaid.
I found London humming with excitement over Irish affairs and for a while I wondered how any one could think that Irish affairs mattered in the least. Fresh from my wanderings over a huge continent Ireland seemed to me a small place. It took me a week to get my mind into focus again. Then I began once more to see the Home Rule question as it should be seen. South America and Ascher’s web of international credit sank into their proper insignificance.
I met Malcolmson in my club a week after my return. He very nearly pulled the buttons off my waistcoat in his eagerness to explain the situation to me. Malcolmson has a vile habit of grabbing the clothes of any one he particularly wants to speak to. If the subject is only moderately interesting he pulls a sleeve or a lappet of a coat. When he has something very important to say, he inserts two fingers between the buttons of your waistcoat and pulls. I knew I was in for something thrilling when he towed me into a quiet corner of the smoking room by my two top buttons.
I have known Malcolmson for nearly twenty years. He was adjutant of my old regiment when I joined. He was senior Major when I resigned my commission. He became colonel a few years later and then retired to his place near Belfast, where he has practised political Protestanism ever since. I have never met any one more sincere than Malcolmson. He believes in civil and religious liberty. He is prepared at any moment to do battle for his faith. I do not know that he really deserves much credit for this, because he is the sort of man who would do battle for the love of it, even if there were no faith to be fought for. Still the fact remains that he has a faith, rather a rare possession.
When he had me cornered near the window of the smoking room, he told me that the hour of battle had almost come. Ulster was drilled, more or less armed, and absolutely united. Rather than endure Home Rule Malcolmson and, I think, a hundred thousand other men were going to lay down their lives. It took Malcolmson more than an hour to tell me that because he kept wandering from the main point in order to abuse the Government and the Irish Party. Of the two he seemed to dislike the Government more.
Irish politics are of all subjects the most wearisome to me; but I must admit that Malcolmson interested me before he stopped talking. I began to wish to hear what Gorman had to say about the matter. I could not imagine that he and his friends contemplated a siege of Belfast, to rank in history alongside of the famous attempt to starve Derry.
There was no difficulty about getting hold of Gorman. In times of furious political excitement he is sure to be found at the post of duty, that is to say, in the smoking room of the House of Commons. I wrote to him and invited him to dine with me in my rooms. It would have been much more convenient to give him dinner at one of my clubs. But I was afraid to do that. I belonged to two clubs in London and unfortunately Malcolmson is a member of both of them. I do not know what would have happened if he had found himself in the same room with Gorman. The threatened civil war might have begun prematurely, and Malcolmson is such a determined warrior that a table fork might easily have become a lethal weapon in his hands. I did not want to have Gorman killed before I heard his opinion about the Ulster situation and I disliked the thought of having to explain the circumstances of his death to the club committee afterwards. There is always an uncertainty about the view which a club committee will take of any unusual event. I might very easily have been asked to resign my membership.
Gorman accepted my invitation, but said he would have to be back in the House of Commons at 9 o’clock. I fixed dinner for half past seven, which gave me nearly an hour and a half with Gorman, more time than Malcolmson had required to state his side of the case.
But Gorman was very much more difficult to deal with. He was not inclined to discuss Home Rule or the Ulster situation. He wanted to talk about Tim’s cash register, and, later on, about the new way of putting cinematograph pictures on the stage.
“I have been wandering about since I saw you last,” I said, “and I’ve been in all sorts of strange places. I’ve lost touch with things at home. Hardly ever saw an English newspaper. I want you to tell me——”
“Interesting time you must have had,” said Gorman. “Run across the trail of our friend Ascher much? I expect you did.”
Gorman very nearly sidetracked me there. I was strongly tempted to tell him about the impression which Ascher’s gossamer had made on me.
“The slime of the financier,” said Gorman, “lies pretty thick over the world. You’ve seen those large black slugs which come out in summer after rain, big juicy fellows which crawl along and leave a shiny track on the grass. They’re financiers.”
“Yes,” I said, “quite so. But tell me about Home Rule.”
“It’s all right. Can’t help becoming law. We have it in our pockets.”
“This time next year,” I said, “you’ll be sitting in a Parliament in Dublin.”
“There’ll be a Parliament in Dublin all right this time next year; but I’m not sure that I’ll be in it. After all, you know, Dublin’s rather a one-horse place. I don’t see how I could very well live there. I might run over for an important debate now and then, but—— You see I’ve a lot of interests in London. I suppose you’ve heard about the new Cash Register Company and what Ascher’s done.”
“Not a word. Do I still hold those shares of mine?”
“Unless you’ve sold them you do, but they’ll be very little good to you. Ascher has simply thrown away a sure thing. We might have had—well, I needn’t mention the sum, but it was a pretty big one. I had the whole business arranged. Those fellows would have paid up. But nothing would do Ascher except to put in his spoon. I’m blest if I see what his game is. He has one of course; but I don’t see it.”
“Perhaps,” I said, “he wants to have your brother’s invention worked for what it’s worth.”
“Rot,” said Gorman. “Why should he? I expect he has some dodge for squeezing us out and then getting a bigger price all for himself; but I’m damned if I see how he means to work it. These financial men are as cunning as Satan and they all hang together. We outsiders don’t have a chance.”
“What about Ulster?” I said. “I was talking to a man last week who told me——”
“All bluff,” said Gorman. “Nothing in it. How can they do anything? What Ascher says is that he wants the old company to take up Tim’s invention and work it. There’s to be additional capital raised and we’re to come in as shareholders. Ascher, Stutz & Co. will underwrite the new issues and take three and one-half per cent. That’s what he says. But, of course, that’s not the real game. There’s something behind.”
“Doesn’t it occur to you that there may be something behind the Ulster movement too?”
“No. What can they do? The Bill will be law before the end of July.”
“They say they’ll fight.”
“Oh,” said Gorman, “we’ve heard all about that till we’re sick of the sound of it. There’s nothing in it. The thing’s as plain as anything can be. We have a majority in Parliament and the bill will be passed. That’s all there is to say. I wish to goodness I saw my way as plainly in the cash register affair.”
Gorman’s faith in parliamentary majorities is extremely touching. I suppose that only politicians believe that the voting of men who are paid to vote really affects things. I doubt whether men of any other profession have the same whole-hearted faith in the efficacy of their own craft. Doctors are often a little sceptical about the value of medicines and operations. No barrister, that I ever met, thinks he achieves justice by arguing points of law. But politicians, even quite intelligent politicians like Gorman, seem really to hold that human life will be altered in some way because they walk round the lobbies of a particular building in London and have their heads counted three or four times an hour. To me it seemed quite plain that Malcolmson would not bate an ounce of his devotion to civil and religious liberty even if Gorman’s head were counted every five minutes for ten years and Gorman were paid a thousand a year instead of four hundred a year for letting out his head for the purpose. Why should Malcolmson care how often Gorman is counted? There is in the end only the original Gorman with his single head.
“Anyhow,” said Gorman, “I’m keeping in with Mrs. Ascher.”
He winked at me as he said this. I like Gorman’s way of adding explanatory winks to his remarks. I should frequently miss the meaning, the full meaning of what he says if he did not help out his words with these expressive winks. This time he made me understand that he had no great affection for Mrs. Ascher, regarded her rather as a joke which had worn thin; but hoped to pick up from her some information about her husband’s subtle schemes. I knew his hopes were vain. In the first place the Aschers do not talk business to each other and she knows nothing of what he is doing. In the next place Ascher had no underhand plot with regard to the cash register. He was acting in a perfectly open and straightforward way. But Gorman cannot believe that any one is straightforward. That is one of the drawbacks to the profession of politics. The practice of it destroys a man’s faith in human honesty.
“How’s Tim?” I asked. “Last time I saw him he was in great trouble because Mrs. Ascher said he was committing blasphemy.”
“Tim’s in England,” said Gorman. “I was rather angry with him myself for a while. If he had followed my advice about the cash register——. But Tim always was a fool about money, though he has brains of a sort, lots of them.”
“Still working with that circus?”
“Oh, dear no. Left that months ago. He got some money. No, I didn’t give it to him. I fancy it must have been Ascher. Anyhow he’s got it. He’s down in Hertfordshire now, living in a barn.”
“Why? A barn seems an odd place to live in. Draughty, I should think.”
“He wanted space,” said Gorman, “a great deal of space to work at his experiments. I’m inclined to think there may be something in this new idea of his.”
“The living picture idea? Making real ghosts of the figures?”
“That’s it. And, do you know, he’s getting at it. He showed me some perfectly astonishing results the other day. If he pulls it off——”
“You won’t let Ascher get hold of it this time,” I said.
Gorman frowned.
“I wouldn’t let Ascher touch it if I could help it, but what the devil can I do? We shall want capital and I suppose Ascher is no worse than the rest of them.”
By “them” Gorman evidently meant capitalists in general and financiers in particular.
“That’s the way,” he said. “Not only do these scoundrels control politics, reducing the whole system of democracy to a farce——”
“Come now,” I said, “don’t blame the capitalists for that. Democracy would be a farce if there never was such a thing as a capitalist.”
“Not content with that,” said Gorman, “they keep an iron grip upon industry. They fatten on the fruits of other men’s brains. They hold the working man in thrall, exploiting his energy for their own selfish greed, starving his women and children——”
Gorman ought to keep that sort of thing for public meetings. It is thoroughly bad form to make speeches to an audience of one. I must say that he seldom does. I suppose that his intimate association with Mrs. Ascher had spoiled his manners in this respect. She encouraged him to be oratorical. But I am not Mrs. Ascher, and I saw no reason why I should stand that kind of thing at my own dinner table.
“But the day is coming,” I said, “when organised labour will rise in its might and claim its heritage in the fair world which lies bathed in the sunlight of a nobler age.”
Gorman looked at me doubtfully for an instant, only for a single instant. Almost immediately his eyes twinkled and he smiled good-humouredly.
“You ought to go in for politics,” he said. “You really ought. I apologise. Can’t think what came over me to talk like that.”
I cannot resist Gorman when he smiles. I felt that I too owed an apology.
“After all,” I said, “you must practise somewhere. I don’t blame you in the least; though I don’t profess to like it. No one can do that sort of thing extempore and if it happens to suit you to rehearse at dinner——”
“Nonsense,” said Gorman. “There’s not the slightest necessity for practice. I could do it by the hour and work sums in my head at the same time. Any one could.”
Gorman is modest. Very few people can make speeches like his, fortunately for the world.
“All the same,” he said, reverting abruptly to the starting point of his speech, “it’s a pity we have to let Ascher into this new cinematograph racket; but we can’t help it. In fact I expect he’s in already.”
“Lending money to Tim for experiments?”
“He wouldn’t do that,” said Gorman, “unless he’d made sure of his share of the spoil afterwards.”
“Gorman,” I said, “why don’t you make a law to suppress Ascher. You believe in making laws, and, according to your own showing, that would be a very useful one.”
Gorman gave me no answer. I knew he could not, because there is no answer to give. If laws had any effect on life, as Gorman pretends to believe, he would make one which would do away with Ascher. But he knows in his heart that he might just as well make a law forbidding the wind to blow from the east. Instead of taking any notice of my question he pulled out his watch and looked at it.
“Nine o’clock,” he said. “I must be off to the House at once. An important division has been arranged for a quarter past. Just ask your man to call a taxi, will you?”
“Why go?” I said. “If the division is arranged the result will be arranged too.”
“Of course it is,” said Gorman. “You don’t suppose the Whips leave that to chance.”
“I must say you manage these things very badly. Here you are smoking comfortably after dinner, not in the least inclined to stir, and yet you say you have to go. Why don’t you introduce a system of writing cheques? ‘Pay the Whip of my Party or bearer 150 votes. Signed Michael Gorman, M. P.’”
“That’s rather a good idea,” said Gorman. “It would save a lot of trouble.”
“The cheque could be passed in to some sort of clearing house where a competent clerk, after going over all the cheques, would strike a balance and place it to the credit of your side or the other. That would be the Government’s Majority, and you wouldn’t have to go near the House of Commons at all except when you wanted to make a speech. I don’t think you need go even then. You might make your speeches quietly in your own home to a couple of reporters.”
“It would simplify parliamentary life enormously,” said Gorman, “there’s no doubt of that. But I don’t think it would do. I don’t really. The people wouldn’t stand it.”
“If the people stand the way you go on at present they’ll stand anything.”
“I wish,” said Gorman, “that you’d ring for a taxi.” I rang the bell and five minutes later Gorman left me. He had not told me anything about Home Rule, or how his party meant to deal with a recalcitrant Ulster. He seemed very little interested in Ulster. Yet Malcolmson was indubitably in earnest. I felt perfectly sure about that.
I intended to call on the Aschers as soon as I could after I returned to London. I owed Ascher some thanks for his kindness in providing me with letters of introduction for my tour. However, they heard that I was home again before I managed to pay my visit. I daresay Gorman told them. He sees Mrs. Ascher two or three times a week and he must get tired talking about Ireland. A little item of gossip, like the news of my return, would come as a relief to Gorman, and perhaps even to Mrs. Ascher, after a long course of poetic politics mixed with art.
I had a note from Mrs. Ascher, in which she invited me to dinner.
“Very quietly,” she said. “I know my husband would like to have a talk with you, so I shall not ask any one to meet you. Please fix your own night. We have no engagements this week.”
I got the note on Monday and fixed Wednesday for our dinner. I could not think that Ascher really wanted to talk to me. I did not see what he had to talk to me about; but I wanted to talk to him. I wanted to tell him about my tour and to give him some idea of the effect which my glimpse at his business had produced on my mind. I also wanted to find out what he thought about Irish affairs. I had heard a good deal more talk about the Ulster situation. Malcolmson got at me nearly every day, and several other men, much more level-headed than Malcolmson, seemed to regard the situation as serious. I heard it hinted that the Army would not relish the idea of shooting the Ulstermen. I understood the feeling. If I were still in the Army I should not like to be told to kill Malcolmson. He was my brother officer at one time, and I found him a good comrade. The same feeling must exist among the rank and file. Northeast Ulster was, at one time, a favourite recruiting ground for the Guards. Malcolmson’s volunteer army was leavened with old Guardsmen, reservists, many of them quite well known to the men still serving in the Brigade.
I could not, of course, expect Ascher to be much interested in Irish affairs. Ireland is the one country in the world over which financiers have not cast their net, possibly because they would catch next to nothing there. So we, who escaped the civilisation of Roman law, almost escaped the philosophy of the mediaeval church, were entirely untouched by the culture of the Renaissance, remained a kind of Gideon’s fleece when the dew of the industrial system of the 19th century was moistening Europe, are now left untouched by the new civilisation of international finance. Yet Ascher, if not personally interested in our destiny, has a cool and unprejudiced mind. His opinion on Irish affairs would be of the greatest interest to me. I was not satisfied with Gorman’s reading of the situation. Nor did I feel sure that Malcolmson, though he was certainly in earnest, quite understood what a big thing he was letting himself in for.
The Aschers live near Golders Hill, a part of London totally unknown to me. They have a large old-fashioned house with a considerable amount of ground round it. Some day when Ascher is dead the house will be pulled down and the grounds cut up into building plots. In the meanwhile Ascher holds it. I suppose it suits him. Neither he nor Mrs. Ascher cares for fashionable life, and a Mayfair address has no attraction for them. The few artistic and musical people whom they wish to know are quite willing to go to Hampstead. Every one else who wants to see Ascher, and a good many people do, calls at his office or dines with him in a club. Ascher knows most of the chief men in the political world, for instance, but even Prime Ministers are not often invited to the house at Golders Hill. If Ascher really controls them, as Gorman says, he does so without allowing them to interfere with his private life.
The house and its appointments impressed me greatly. The architecture was Georgian, a style familiar to any one who has lived much in Dublin. It gave me a feeling of spaciousness and dignity. The men who built these houses knew what it was to live like gentlemen. I can imagine them guilty of various offences against the code of Christian morality, but I do not think they can ever have been either fussy or mean. There is a restlessness about our fashionable imitations of the older kinds of English domestic architecture. Our picturesque gables, dormer windows and rooms with all sorts of odd angles, our finicky windows stuck high up in unexpected parts of walls, our absurd leaded diamond panes and crooked metal fastenings, all make for fussiness of soul. Nor can I believe that people who live under ceilings which they can almost touch ever attain a great and calm outlook upon life.
There was nothing “artistic” about Ascher’s house. This surprised me at first. I did not, of course, expect that Mrs. Ascher would have surrounded herself with the maddening kind of furniture which is distinguished by its crookedness and is designed by men who find their inspiration by remembering the things which they see in nightmares. Nor did I think it likely that she would have crammed her rooms with those products of the east which are imported into this country by house furnishers with reputations for aestheticism. I knew that she had passed that stage of culture. But I did expect to find the house full of heavily embroidered copes of mediaeval bishops, hung on screens; candlesticks looted from Spanish monasteries, standing on curiously carved shelves; chairs and cabinets which were genuine relics of the age of Louis XV.; and pictures by artists who lived in Italy before the days when Italians learned to paint.
I found myself in a house which was curiously bare of furniture. There were a few pictures in each of the rooms I entered, modern pictures, and I suppose good, but I am no judge of such things. There were scarcely any ornaments to be seen and very few tables and chairs. My own feeling is that a house should be furnished in such a way as to be thoroughly comfortable. I like deep soft chairs and sofas to sit on. I like to have many small tables on which to lay down books, newspapers and pipes. I like thick carpets and curtains which keep out draughts. I would not live in Ascher’s house, even if I were paid for doing so by being given Ascher’s fortune. But I would rather live in Ascher’s house than in one of those overcrowded museums which are the delight of very wealthy New York Jews. I should, in some moods, find a pleasure in the fine proportions of the rooms which Ascher refuses to spoil. I could never, I know, be happy in a place where I ran the risk of dropping tobacco ashes on thirteenth century tapestry and dared not move suddenly lest I should knock over some priceless piece of china.
We ate at a small table set at one end of a big dining-room, a dining-room in which, I suppose, thirty people could have sat down together comfortably. There was no affectation of shaded lights and gloomy, mysterious spaces. Ascher had aimed at and achieved something like a subdued daylight by means of electric lamps, shaded underneath, which shone on the ceiling. I could see all the corners of the room, the walls with their pictures and the broad floor across which the servants passed. The dinner itself was very short and simple. If I had been actually hungry, as I am in the country after shooting, I should have called the dinner meagre. For a London appetite there was enough, but not more than enough. I might, a younger and more vigorous man would, have got up from the table hungry. But the food was exquisite. The cook must be a descendant of one of those artists whom Lord Beaconsfield described in “Tancred,” and he has found in Ascher’s house a situation which ought to satisfy him. Ascher does not care for sumptuousness or abundance; but he knows how to eat well. We had one wine, a very delicately flavoured white Italian wine, perhaps from Capri, the juice of some rare crops of grapes in that sunny island.
“We found ourselves in a little difficulty,” said Ascher, “when you fixed on to-night for your visit to us.”
“I hope,” I said, “that I haven’t lit on an inconvenient evening. Had you any other engagement?”
I was eating a very small piece of fish when he spoke to me, and was trying to guess what the sauce was flavoured with. It occurred to me suddenly that I might have broken in upon some sort of private anniversary, a day which Ascher and his wife observed as one of abstinence. There was, I could scarcely fail to notice it, a sense of subdued melancholy about our proceedings.
“Oh, no,” said Ascher, “but on Wednesdays we always have some music. I was inclined to think that you might have preferred to spend the evening talking, but my wife——”
He looked at Mrs. Ascher. I should very much have preferred talk to music. It was chiefly in order to hear Ascher talk that I had accepted the invitation.
“I know,” said Mrs. Ascher, “that Sir James likes music.”
She laid a strong emphasis on the word “know,” and I felt that she was paying me a nice compliment. What she said was true enough. I do like music, some kinds of music. I had heard for the first time the night before a song, then very popular, with a particularly attractive chorus. It began to run through my head the moment Ascher mentioned music. “I didn’t want to do it. I didn’t want to do it.” I liked that song. I was not sure that I should like the Aschers’ music equally well. However, I had no intention of contradicting Mrs. Ascher.
“I’m passionately fond of music,” I said.
Ascher is a singularly guileless man. I cannot imagine how any one so unsuspicious as he is can ever have succeeded as a financier, unless indeed people are far honester about money than they are about anything else. I do not think Mrs. Ascher believed that I am passionately fond of music. Her husband did. The little shadow of anxiety which had rested on his face cleared away. He became almost cheerful.
“To-night,” he said, “we are going to hear some of the work of——”
He said a name, but I utterly failed to catch it. I had never heard it before, and it sounded foreign, very foreign indeed, possibly Kurdish.
“———,” said Ascher, “is one of the new Russian composers.”
I heard the name that time, but I can make no attempt, phonetic or other, to spell it. I suppose it can be spelled, but the letters must be given values quite new to me. The alphabet I am accustomed to is incapable of representing that man’s name.
“I daresay you know him,” said Mrs. Ascher.
I strongly suspected that she was trying to entrap me. I have never been quite sure of Mrs. Ascher since the day she discovered that I was talking nonsense about the statuette of Psyche. Sometimes she appears to be the kind of foolish woman to whom anything may be said without fear. Sometimes she displays most unexpected intelligence. I looked at her before I answered. Her narrow, pale-green eyes expressed nothing but innocent inquiry. She might conceivably think that I had already made a careful study of the music of the new Russian composer. On the other hand, she might be luring me on to say that I knew music which was to be played in her house that night for the first time. I made up my mind to be safe.
“No,” I said, “I never even heard of him.”
Then Ascher began to talk about the man and his music. He became more animated than I had ever seen him. It was evident that Russian music interested Ascher far more than finance did; that it was a subject which was capable of wakening real enthusiasm in him. I listened, eating from time to time the delicate morsels of food offered to me and sipping the delicious wine. I did not understand anything Ascher said, and all the names he mentioned were new to me; but for a time I was content to sit in a kind of half-conscious state, hypnotised by the sound of his voice and the feeling that Mrs. Ascher’s eyes were fixed on me.
Not until dinner was nearly over did I make an effort to assert myself.
“I was talking to Gorman the other day,” I said, “about Irish affairs and especially about the Ulster situation. I have also been hearing Malcolmson’s views. Malcolmson is a colonel and an Ulsterman. You know the sort of views an Ulster Colonel would have.”
Ascher smiled faintly. He seemed no more than slightly amused at the turn Irish affairs were taking. After all neither international finance nor Russian music was likely to be profoundly affected by the Ulster rebellion. (Malcolmson will not use the word rebellion, but I must. There is no other word to describe the actions he contemplates.) No wonder Ascher takes small interest in the matter. On the other hand, Mrs. Ascher was profoundly moved by the mention of Ulster. I could see genuine passion in her eyes.
“Belfast,” she said, “stands for all that is vilest and most hateful in the world. It is worse than Glasgow, worse than Manchester, worse than Birmingham.”
Belfast is, no doubt, the main difficulty. If there were no Belfast the resistance of the rest of Ulster would be inconsiderable. I admired the political instinct which enabled Mrs. Ascher to go straight to the very centre of the situation. But, in all probability, Gorman gave her the hint. Gorman does not seem to understand how real the Ulster opposition is, but he has intelligence enough to grasp the importance of Belfast. What puzzled me first was the extreme bitterness with which Mrs. Ascher spoke.
“What has Belfast ever given to the world?” she asked.
“Well,” I said, “ships are built there, and of course there’s linen. I believe they manufacture tobacco, and——”
“That,” said Ascher, “is not quite what my wife means. The gifts which a city or a country give to the world must be of a more permanent kind if they are to be of real value. Ships, linen, tobacco, we use them, and in using we destroy them. They have their value, but it is not a permanent value. Ultimately a city will be judged not by its perishable products, but by——”
“Art,” said Mrs. Ascher.
I might have known it. Mrs. Ascher would be sure to judge cities, as she judges men, by their achievement in that particular line. I was bound to admit that the reputation of Belfast falls some way short of that of Athens as a centre of literature and art.
“Or thought,” said Ascher, “or criticism. It is curious that a community which is virile and fearless, which is able to look at the world and life through its own eyes, which is indifferent to the general consensus of opinion——”
“Belfast is all that,” I said. “I never knew any one who cared less what other people said and thought than Malcolmson.”
“Yet,” said Ascher, “Belfast has done nothing, thought nothing, seen nothing. But perhaps that is all to come. The future may be, indeed I think must be, very different.”
Ascher will never be a real leader of men. His habit of seeing two sides of every question is an incurable weakness in him. Mrs. Ascher does not suffer in that way. She saw no good whatever in Belfast, nor any hope for its future.
“Never,” she said, “never. A people who have given themselves over to material things, who accept frankly, without even the hypocrite’s tribute to virtue, the money standard of value, who ask ‘Does it pay?’ and ask nothing else—— Have you ever been in Belfast?”
“Yes,” I said, “often. The churches are ugly, decidedly ugly, though comfortable.”
Mrs. Ascher shuddered.
“Comfortable!” she said. “Yes. Comfortable! Think of it. Churches, comfort! Irredeemable hideousness and the comfort of congregations as a set-off to it.”
Mrs. Ascher panted. I could see the front of her dress—she wore a very floppy scarlet teagown—rising and falling rapidly in the intensity of her passion. I understood more or less what she felt. If God is at all what we think He is, sublime, then there is something a little grotesque about requiring a cushioned pew, a good system of heating and a nice fat footstool as aids to communion with Him. Yet I am not convinced that man is incapable of the highest emotion when his body is at ease. Some degree of physical comfort seems to be required if the excursions of the soul are to be successful. I cannot, for instance, enjoy the finest kinds of poetry when I am very thirsty; nor have I ever met any one who found real pleasure in a statue when he had toothache. There is something to be said for the theory of the sceptical bishop in Browning’s poem, that the soul is only free to muse of lofty things