Ascher’s servant followed me into the study. He placed a little table beside the chair on which I sat. He set a decanter of whisky, a syphon of soda water and a box of cigars at my elbow. He brought a reading lamp and put it behind me, switching on the electric current so that the light fell brightly over my shoulder. He turned off the other lights in the room. He asked me if there were anything else he could do for me. Then he left me.
A clock, somewhere behind me, chimed. It was a quarter to twelve. I poured out some whisky and lit a cigar. I sat wondering what Ascher was doing. The clock chimed again and then it struck. It was twelve o’clock. It was a clock with a singularly mellow gong. The sounds it made were soft and unaggressive. There was no rude challenge in its assertion that time was passing on, but the very gentleness of its warnings, a gentleness deeply tinged with melancholy, infected me with a strange restlessness. When for the third time its chiming broke the heavy silence of the room, I rose from my chair. The gloom which surrounded the circle of light in which I sat weighed on my spirits. I touched a switch and set the lights above the fireplace shining.
Over the mantelpiece hung a picture, a landscape painting. A flock of sheep wandered through a misty valley. There were great mountains in the background, their slopes and tops dimly, discernible through a haze. The haze and the mist wreaths would certainly soon clear away, dispersed by a rising sun. The whole scene would be stripped of its mystery. The mountain sides, the valley stream and the grazing sheep would be seen clear and bare in the merciless light of a summer morning. The painter had chosen the moment while the mystery of dawn endured. I felt that he feared the passing of it, that he shrank from the inevitable coming of the hour when everything would be clear and all the outlines sharp, when the searching sun would tear away the compassionate coverings, when nature would appear less beautiful than his heart hoped it was. It was with this picture, with this and one other, that Ascher chose to live.
I moved round the room, turning on yet other lights. Over Ascher’s writing desk hung a full length portrait of a woman, of Mrs. Ascher, but painted many years ago. I have no idea who the artist was but he had seen his sitter in no common way. The girl, she was no more than a girl when the picture was painted, stood facing me from the canvas. She was dressed in a long, trailing, pale green robe. Her hands were folded in front of her. Her head was a little thrown back, so that her neck was visible. Her skin, even then in the early days of her womanhood, was almost colourless. The red colour of her hair saved the picture from deathly coldness, contrasting sharply with the mass of pale green drapery and the pallid skin.
I have never thought of Mrs. Ascher as a beautiful woman or one who at any time of her life could have been beautiful. But the artist, whoever he was, had seen in her a singular alluring charm. I cannot imagine that I could ever have been affected by her even if I had seen her as the artist did, as no doubt Ascher did. I like normal people and common things. I should have been afraid of the woman in the picture. I am in no way like Keats’ “Knight at Arms.” I should simply have run away from the “Belle Dame sans merci,” and no amount of fairy songs or manna dew would have enabled her to have me in thrall. But I could understand how Ascher, who evidently has a taste for that kind of thing, might have been fascinated by the morbid beauty of the girl in the picture. I could understand how the fascination might become an enduring thing; a great love; how Ascher would still be drawn to the woman long after the elfishness of girlhood passed away. The soul would still remain gleaming out of those narrow eyes.
The clock chimed close beside me. It was a quarter to one. I sat down again, poured out more whisky and lit a fresh cigar. I left all the lights in the room shining. I was determined to drag myself back to the commonplace and to cheerfulness.
I took a book from the table beside me. It was evidently a book which Ascher had been reading. A thin ivory blade lay between the pages, marking the place he had reached. The book was a prophetic forecast of the State of the future, a record of one of those dreams of better, calmer times, which haunt the spirits of brave and good men, to which cowards turn when they are made faint by the contemplation of present evil things. I read a page or two in one part of the book and a page or two in another. I read in one place a whole chapter. I discerned in the author an underlying faith in the natural goodness of man. He believed, his whole argument was based on the belief, that all men, but especially common men, the manual workers, would gladly turn away from greed and lust and envy, would live in beauty and peace, naturally, without effort, if only they were set free from the pressure of want and the threat of hunger. The evil which troubles us, so this dreamer seemed to hold, is not in ourselves or of our nature. It is the result of the conditions in which we live, conditions created by our mistakes, not by our vices. I wondered if Ascher, with his wide knowledge of the world, believed in such a creed or even cherished a hope that it might be true. Do men, in fact, become saints straightway when their bellies are full?
It is strange how childish memories awaken in us suddenly. As I laid down Ascher’s book there came to me a picture of a scene in my old home. We were at prayers in the dining-room. My father sat at a little table with a great heavy Bible before him. Ranged along the wall in front of him was the long line of servants, the butler a little apart from the others as befitted the chief of the staff. My governess and I sat together in a corner near the fire. My father read, in a flat, unemotional voice, read words which he absolutely believed to be the words of God. “Except a man be born again he cannot see the Kingdom of God.”
Well, that is a different creed. To me it seems more consonant with the facts of life. Man as he is can neither enter into nor create a great society nor enjoy peace which comes of love. Hitherto the new birth of the Spirit, which bloweth where it listeth, has been for a few in every generation. The hour of rebirth for the mass of men still lingers. Will it ever come—the time when all the young men see visions and all the old men dream dreams?
I stirred uneasily in my chair and looked up. I had not heard him enter the room, but Ascher stood beside me.
“I am glad you are here,” he said. “I hoped you would be; but I am very late.”
“Yes,” I said, “you are very late. It is long after midnight. Where have you been? What have you been doing?”
Ascher sat down opposite to me, and for some time he did not speak. I made no attempt to press my questions. If Ascher wanted to talk to me he would do so in his own time and in the way he chose. I supposed that he did want to talk to me. He had asked me to his house. He had bidden me wait for him.
“I have no right,” said Ascher at last, “to trouble you with my difficulties. I ought to think them out and fight them out for myself; but it will be a help to me if I can put them into words and feel that you are listening to me.”
He paused for so long that I felt I must make some reply to him, though I did not know what to say.
“I don’t suppose I can be of any use to you,” I said, “but if I can——”
“Perhaps you can,” said Ascher. “You can listen to me at least. Perhaps you can do more. It is a large call to make upon your friendship to treat you in this manner, but—I am in some ways a lonely man.”
I have always, since the day I first met him, liked and respected Ascher. When he spoke about his loneliness I felt a sudden wave of pity for him. It seems a strange thing to say, but at that moment I had a strong affection for the man.
“What I partly foresaw and greatly dreaded has come,” he said. “I am certain now that war is inevitable, a great war, almost perhaps in the end quite worldwide.”
“And England?” I said, “is England, too——?”
“Almost inevitably.”
“Germany?” I said.
Ascher nodded.
I was throbbing with excitement. For the moment I felt nothing but a sense of exultation, strangely out of harmony with the grave melancholy with which Ascher spoke. I suppose the soldier instinct survives in me, an inheritance from generations of my forefathers, all of whom have worn swords, many of whom have fought. We have done our part in building up the British Empire, we Irish gentlemen, fighting, as Virgil’s bees worked, ourselves in our own persons, but not for our own gain. There is surely not one battlefield of all where the flag of England has flown on which we have not led men, willing to fall at the head of them. It seems strange now, looking back on it, that such an emotion should have been possible; but at the moment I felt an overmastering sense of awful joy at Ascher’s news.
“I cannot tell you where I have been to-night,” said Ascher, “nor with whom I have been talking. Still less must I repeat what I have heard, but this much I think I may say. I was sent for to give my advice on certain matters connected with finance, to express an opinion about what will happen, what dangers threaten in that world, my world, the world of money.”
“There’ll be an infernal flurry on the Stock Exchange,” I said. “Prices will come tumbling down about men’s ears. Fellows will go smash in every direction.”
“There will be much more than that,” said Ascher. “The declaration of war will not simply mean the ruin of a few speculators here and there. You know enough about the modern system of credit to realise something of what we have to face. There will be a sudden paralysis of the nerves and muscles of the whole world-wide body of commercial and industrial life. The heart will stop beating for a short time—only for a short time I hope—and no blood will go through the veins and arteries.”
Ascher spoke very gravely. Yet, though I had spent months watching the workings of his machine, I could not at the moment share his mood. The war fever was in my blood.
“I should change my metaphor,” said Ascher. “It is not a case of a body where the heart pumps blood into the arteries, but of springs which make brooks, brooks which flow into streams, which in their turn feed great rivers. Now those springs will be frozen. In a million places of which you and I do not even know the names, credit will be frozen suddenly. There will be no water in the brooks and streams. The rivers will run dry.”
Ascher had asked for my sympathy. I did my best to give it.
“It’s a tremendous responsibility for you,” I said, “and men like you. But you’ll pull through. The whole thing can’t collapse, simply can’t. It’s too big.”
“Perhaps,” said Ascher, “perhaps. But it is not that side of the matter which I wish to speak to you about. You will forgive me if I say that you can hardly understand or appreciate it. What I want to say to you is something more personal. I want”—Ascher smiled wanly—“to talk about myself.”
“You stand to lose heavily,” I said. “I see that.”
“I do not know,” said Ascher, “whether at the end of a week I shall own one single penny in the world. I may very well have lost everything. But if that were all I should not trouble much. Merely to lose money—but——”
He stopped speaking, and for a long while sat silent The clock behind me chimed again. It was half past two.
“I suppose,” said Ascher, “that you have always thought of me as an Englishman.”
“To tell you the truth,” I said, “I’ve never thought whether you are an Englishman or not. I wasn’t interested. I suppose I took it for granted that you were English.”
“I am a German,” said Ascher. “I was born in Hamburg, of German parents. All my relations are Germans. I came over to England as a young man and went into business here. My business—I do not know why—is one to which Englishmen do not take readily. There are English bankers of course, but not very many English financiers. Yet my particular kind of banking, international banking, can best be carried on in England. That is why I am here, why my business is centred in London, though I myself am not an Englishman. I am a German. Please understand that. My brother is a general in the German Army. My sister’s sons are in the German Army and Navy. My blood ties are with the people from whom I came.”
I realised that Ascher was stating a case of conscience, was perhaps asking my advice. It seemed to me that there was only one thing which I could advise, only one possible course for Ascher to take. Whatever happened to his business or his private fortune he must be true to his own people. I was about to say this when Ascher raised his hand slightly and stopped me.
“I want you to understand,” he said, “my blood ties are with the people from whom I came; but I am now wholly English in my sympathies. I see things from the English point of view, not from the German. I am sure that it will be a good thing for the world if England and her Allies win, a bad thing if Germany is victorious in the war before us. Yet the blood tie remains. Who was the Englishman who said, ‘My country, may she always be right, but my country right or wrong’? It seems to me a mean thing to desert my country now, even although I have become a stranger to her. Is it not a kind of disloyalty to range myself with her enemies?”
Again Ascher paused. This time I was less ready to answer him.
“I have also to consider this,” he went on, “and here I get to the very heart of my difficulty. I have lived most of my life here, and I have built up my business on an English foundation. I have been able to build it up because I had ready made for me that foundation of integrity which your English merchants have established by centuries of honest dealing. Without that—if the world had not believed that my business was English, and therefore stable, I could not have built at all or should have built with much greater difficulty. My bank is English, though I, who control it, am not. If I go back to my own people now, now when it seems treachery to desert them, the whole machinery of the vast system of credit which I guide will cease to work, will break to fragments. Of my own loss I say nothing, indeed I think nothing. But what of the other men, thousands of them who are involved with me, whose affairs are inextricably mixed with mine, who have trusted not me, but my bank, trusted it because it is an English institution? And it is English. Have I the right to ruin them and to break up my bank, which belongs to your nation, of which in a sense I am no more than a trustee for England? You understand, do you not? My bank is just as certainly of English birth as I am of German birth. Yet it and I are one. We cannot be divided. What am I to do?”
Ascher was asking questions; but I did not think that he was asking them of me. I felt that it was my part to listen, not to answer. Besides what could I answer? Ascher had given me a glimpse of one of those intolerable dilemmas from which there is no way of escape. The choice between right and wrong, when the nobler and baser parts of our nature are in conflict, is often very difficult and painful. But there are times—this was one of them—when two of the nobler, two of the very noblest of our instincts, are set against each other. When we can only do right by doing wrong at the same time, when to be loyal we must turn traitors.
When Ascher spoke again he seemed to have drifted away from the subject of the coming war, the financial catastrophe and his own trouble. I did not, for some time, guess where his words were leading.
“I have been a very careful observer of English life,” he said, “ever since I first came to this country, and no class in your nation has interested me more than you minor gentry, the second grade of your aristocracy.”
“Often spoken of as the squirearchy,” I said. “It is generally supposed to be the most useless and the least intelligent part of the community. It is rapidly disappearing, which, I daresay, is a fortunate thing.”
“Your greater nobility,” said Ascher, “is modernised, is necessarily more or less cosmopolitan. It has international interests and is occupied with great affairs. It has been forced to accept the standard of ethics in accordance with which great affairs are managed. Your merchants and manufacturers have their own code, by no means a low one, and their theory of right and wrong. Between these two classes come the men with lesser titles or no titles at all, families which spring from roots centuries deep in the soil of England, men of some wealth, but not of great riches. They have their own standard, their code, their peculiar touchstone for distinguishing fine conduct from its imitation, their ethic.”
“Yes,” I said, “I can understand your being interested in that. It is a survival of a certain antiquarian value. It is the quaintest standard of conduct imaginable, totally unreasonable and inconsistent. But it exists. There are some things which a gentleman of that class will not do.”
“Exactly. These men—may I say you, for it is you I am thinking of. You have your sense of honour.”
I never was more surprised in my life than I was when Ascher said that to me. Nothing that I have ever said or done in his company could possibly have led him to suppose that I am a victim of that outworn superstition known as the honour of a gentleman.
“You have an instinct,” said Ascher, “inherited through many generations, a highly specialised sense, now nearly infallible, for knowing what is honourable and what is base. I do not know that any of my countrymen have that sense. I am sure that the class to which I belong has not. We look at things in a different way.”
“A much better way,” I said, “more practical.”
“Yes, more practical. Better perhaps in the sense of being wiser. But I have a wish, an odd fancy if you like, to see things your way, to guide my conduct according to your standard of honour.”
As well as I could make out Ascher was asking me to decide for him on which horn of his infernal dilemma he was to impale himself, and to base my decision on a perfectly absurd and arbitrary set of rules for conduct, none of which could by any possibility be made to apply to a situation like his.
“My dear Ascher,” I said, “I can’t possibly judge for you.”
“You could judge if it were your own case,” he said. “You could certainly judge then. Have you ever in your life been in the smallest doubt, even for a moment, about the way of honour, which it is?”
“That is all very well,” I said; “I quite admit I do know that. I generally do the other thing, but I know what I ought to do according to the ridiculous standard of my class. But I don’t know what you ought to do. That’s a different thing altogether.”
“Because I am not of your class? not a gentleman?”
“Don’t talk nonsense,” I said. “There aren’t any gentlemen left. The species is extinct. The very name of it is vulgarised. You’re as near being one as anybody I know. And that has nothing to do with it. Gentleman or not, you’ve go to decide for yourself. No man living can do it for you.”
“Your class would decide for me if I belonged to it,” said Ascher. “The collective wisdom of your class, the class instinct. It would make me certain, leave me in no doubt at all, if only I belonged to it, were one of you. The choice I have to make——”
Ascher paused.
“It’s a nasty choice to have to make. You’ve got to be disloyal either way you go. That’s what it comes to.”
“There is no other way,” said Ascher sadly, “no third way.”
“Not that I can see.”
There was, in fact, a third way, though I did not see it at the time. Mrs. Ascher discovered it. I heard of it two days later.
No one has greater respect and admiration for Ascher than I have. I respect his ability. I admire his cool detachment of mind and his unfailing feeling for justice. I recognise in him a magnanimity, a certain knightliness which is very rare. But it is vain to pretend that I can ever regard Ascher as an intimate friend. I am never quite comfortable in his company. He lacks something, something essential. He lacks a sense of humour.
No one in England—no one I suppose in Europe—wanted to make jokes during that critical week which followed my interview with Ascher. The most abandoned buffoon shrank from jesting when every morning brought a fresh declaration of war by one great power on another. But even under such circumstances the sense of the ridiculous survives—a thing to be carefully concealed—in those who are fortunate enough to possess it. Ascher has no sense of the ridiculous. He sees men and women clad in long, stately robes moving through life with grave dignity like Arab chiefs or caliphs of Bagdad. He sees their actions conditioned and to some extent controlled by the influences of majestic inhuman powers, the genii of eastern tales, huge, cloud-girt spirits of oppressive solemnity. In reality most people wear motley all day long and the fairy powers are leprechauns, tricksy, irresponsible sprites, willing enough to make merry with those who can laugh with them; but players of all Puck’s tricks on “wisest aunts telling saddest tales.”
I sometimes think that it is Ascher’s chivalry, his fine knightliness, which has killed his sense of humour. I cannot suppose that Sir Galahad found any delight in the quips of fools. His owl-like eyes, large with the wonder of Holy Grails, looked stupidly on faces wrinkled with merriment. King Arthur could never have talked as he did to Guinevere—Tennyson is my authority for the things he said—if he had not had in him the soul of an earnest member of a league for the sympathetic study of social problems. Ascher is as chivalrous as any member of King Arthur’s fellowship, and humour, if he ever had the sense of it, is dead in him. But perhaps he was born without it and is by nature hopelessly serious because he is a German. For the Germans never seem to be able to appreciate the fact that the grandiose is invariably comic, and that nothing in the world is more difficult than to stand toes to the line of the high heroic without stepping across it into the region of the ridiculous. I think of Wagner’s “Parsifal,” of Nietzsche’s “Zara-thrusta,” of the Kaiser Wilhelm’s amazing “Weltauf-fassung,” and it seems to me that such things could not be in any nation where one single man knew how to laugh.
If Ascher had in him the faintest glimmering of a sense of humour he would never have appealed to me, choosing the silent and ghostly middle of the night for the performance, to decide his point of honour for him. What am I that he should imagine me capable of settling high questions of that kind? An expatriated Irishman, a dispossessed landlord, a man without one high ambition, a mere mocker of enthusiasm of every kind. No one, unless he were absolutely blind to the ridiculous, would have consulted me on such a subject as the honour of a gentleman.
Yet, in her total lack of humour, Mrs. Ascher is as bad as her husband is. If such a thing were possible I should say that she is worse. There is, at all events, less excuse for her. She is not knightly, not very knightly, though she did champion the cause of poor, oppressed Ireland. She is an American, not a German, and the Americans pay high honour to their humourists. Perhaps she has lived too long with Ascher. Perhaps she has devoted herself too much to art and her steady contemplation of the sublime has killed her sense of the ridiculous. At all events it is dead. She has no humour now.
It is almost impossible to imagine that any woman would have been capable of calling in Gorman and me as advisers and helpers at a critical moment of her life. Yet that is what Mrs. Ascher did.
We obeyed the summons of course, both of us.
Gorman got there first. I found him seated opposite Mrs. Ascher in the large drawing-room of the house in Hampstead. Mrs. Ascher is lacking in humour, but she has a fine sense of dramatic propriety. Great decisions can only be come to fittingly, mighty spiritual tragedies can only be satisfactorily enacted, in spacious rooms. And there must be emptiness. Knicknacks and pretty ornaments kill high emotion. The chamber of a dainty woman, the room which delicate feminity has made its own, will suit a light flirtation, the love-making of a summer afternoon, but deep passion is out of place in it.
I walked cautiously across a wide space of slippery floor in order to shake hands with Mrs. Ascher. I saw that Gorman was sitting in a huge straight-backed chair with heavily carved elbow rests. It was the sort of chair which would have suited a bishop—in the chancel of his cathedral, not in his private room—and a major excommunication might very suitably have been delivered from it.
“I am in great trouble,” said Mrs. Ascher, “and I have asked you two to come to me because you are my friends. I was right to call you, was I not?”
She looked at Gorman and then at me, evidently expecting us to make a confession of friendship for her. Gorman wriggled in a way that made me think the carving of the chair must be sticking into him somewhere. But he did not fail Mrs. Ascher.
“You were right,” he said with deep feeling, “altogether right.”
I was not going to be outdone by Gorman.
“‘A friend,’” I said, “‘must bear a friend’s infirmities.’”
The quotation was not wholly happy, but Mrs. Ascher seemed to like it. She smiled gratefully.
“My husband,” she said.
I knew it must be her husband’s affairs which were troubling her.
“He is in a very difficult position,” I said. “I had a long talk with him the other night. It seems to me that he has to choose between——”
Gorman interrupted me.
“He’s in an infernally awkward hole,” he said. “The English people will lose their tempers to a certainty, not at first perhaps, but as soon as anything goes against them. When they do they’ll make things damnably unpleasant for any one who’s suspected of being German or even remotely connected with Germany. That’s the sort of people the English are. And Ascher is just the man they’ll fasten on at once. They’ll hunt him down.”
Mrs. Ascher looked at Gorman while he spoke. Her face expressed a quiet dignity.
“That is not the difficulty,” she said. “What people say or think of us or do to us does not matter. We live our own lives. We can always live them, apart from, above the bitter voices of the crowd.”
“All the same,” said Gorman, “it will be unpleasant. It will be a great deal worse than merely unpleasant. If I were Ascher I should get on the safe side at once. I should give a thumping big subscription—£50,000 or something that will attract attention—to some popular fund. I should offer to present the War Office with half a dozen aeroplanes to be called ‘The Ascher Flying Fleet’; or a first-rate cannon of the largest size. A good deal can be done to shut people’s mouths in that sort of way.”
“You do not understand,” said Mrs. Ascher.
She turned to me, evidently hoping that I would explain Ascher’s real difficulty to Gorman. I hesitated for a moment. It was plain to me that though Gorman did not appreciate the reality of the spiritual crisis, he did understand something which had escaped me and, so far as I knew, had escaped Ascher also. I had a vivid recollection of the unenviable position of men suspected of lukewarm patriotism during the Boer War. In the struggle we were then entering upon popular passion would be far more highly excited. The position of the Aschers in England might become impossible.
Gorman with his highly developed faculty for gauging the force and direction of popular opinion understood at once and thoroughly the difficulties that lay before Ascher. What he did not understand was the peculiar difficulty which Ascher felt. I responded to Mrs. Ascher’s glance of appeal and tried to explain things to Gorman.
“Ascher,” I said, “is pulled two ways. His country is pulling him. That’s the call of patriotism. You ought to understand that, Gorman. You’re a tremendous patriot yourself. But if he goes back to his country now he absolutely ruins his business. That means a lot more than merely losing his money. It means more even than losing other people’s money, the money of the men who trusted him. It means that he must be false to his commercial honour. You see that, don’t you, Gorman? And there doesn’t seem any way out of the dilemma. He has got to go back on his patriotism or on his honour. There is no other course.”
I looked at Mrs. Ascher for approval. I had stated her husband’s dilemma clearly, I believed fairly. Gorman could hardly fail to understand. I thought Mrs. Ascher would have been pleased with me. To my amazement she acknowledged my efforts with a burst of indignation.
“Oh,” she cried, “you do not understand, either of you. You do not even begin to understand. I suppose you cannot, because you are men and not women. You men! All of you, my husband, too, though he is far above the rest of you—but even he! You concern yourselves about things which are nothing. You argue about phantoms and discuss them as if they were realities. And all the time you miss the things which are. You think”—she spoke directly to Gorman and her voice expressed the utmost scorn—“you think about reputation, the way men babble about each other and will babble about us. Why should we care? Even if we were afraid of what men say there are places in the world to which the voices of Europe cannot reach. There are islands in the sea where the sun shines and palm trees grow, to which the talk of men who dwell in cities never comes.”
I recollected the desire which Mrs. Ascher had once expressed to me of getting “far, far away from everywhere.” She evidently hoped to be able to try that experiment.
She turned from Gorman and faced me.
“You talk,” she said, “about honour and patriotism. What are they? Words, just words. It is only you men, slaves of your own conventions, who take them for realities. We women know better. You go about life imagining that your limbs are bound with fetters. They are bound with delusions. We women know. Love and beauty are real. Nothing else is. All your fine words are like the flags under which your dupes go out to die; fluttering rags to us whose eyes are open. You talk—oh, so finely you talk—about the shadows your own imaginings cast, and you end in being afraid of them. You talk—you dare to talk to me of money——”
This was a totally unjust accusation. I had not talked about money. I had more sense than to mention money to a woman in Mrs. Ascher’s frame of mind.
“I have money enough of my own,” she said. “He and I want very little. What do we care for except just to love each other and to see beautiful things and to escape from all this nightmare of blood and hate and horror and hideousness?”
I felt helpless. Mrs. Ascher had undoubtedly hit on a new solution of the problem. She proposed that Ascher should impale himself not on one or other, but on both horns of the dilemma, be false to every kind of honour and loyalty. It was, I suppose, possible for Ascher to pack a bag and take to flight, simply to disappear, leaving everything behind him. He and she might go to some valley in the Rocky Mountains, to some unknown creek on the Californian coast, to some island in the South Pacific. If she were right about honour and faithfulness and patriotism, if these are, after all, only idols of the tribe, then she and Ascher might be very happy. They would have all that either of them required.
I looked at Gorman. He shrugged his shoulders, helpless as I was. Mrs. Ascher began to plead with us in a way that was very strange to listen to.
“Life is so short,” she said. “Already most of it is gone from us. We have only a few years more, he and I. Why should we be miserable? There is happiness waiting for us. There is nothing between us and happiness except words, honor, patriotism, right, wrong. These are words, only words. They are gossamer threads which we break as we go, break without feeling them if only we go boldly. Will you not help me? Tell him that what I say is true. He will listen to you because you are men; and you know in your hearts that I speak what is true, that I have hold upon reality.”
There was a moment’s silence after she stopped speaking. Before either Gorman or I attempted to make any answer Ascher himself came into the room. I certainly did not expect to see him. Mrs. Ascher was, I am sure, as much surprised as I was. It was about twelve o’clock and at that hour Ascher is always in his office. He crossed the room quietly. He greeted Gorman and me without a sign that our presence was unexpected or unwelcome. He went to his wife and took her hand in his. She clung to him, looking up into his face. She knew at once that he had something very important to say to her.
“You have decided?” she said.
Ascher’s eyes met hers. His face seemed to me full of tenderness and pity. He held her hand tightly. He bowed his head, a silent “yes” to the question she asked.
“To leave it all and come with me?” she said; “away, away.”
Ascher did not speak; but she knew and I knew that his decision was not that.
The scene was very painful. I felt that I had no right whatever to witness it Gorman, I am sure, would have been glad to escape. But it was very difficult for us to get away. Neither Ascher nor his wife seemed, conscious of our presence. We stood helpless a little apart from them. Gorman, with that unfailing tact of his, did, or tried to do the only thing which could have relieved the intolerable tension. He made an effort to get us all back to the commonplace.
“You’re in a devil of an awkward situation, Ascher,” he said. “A good deal seems to me to depend on whether you are a naturalised British subject or not. If you have been naturalised you ought to be able to pull through, though it won’t be pleasant even then.”
“I have not been naturalised,” said Ascher. “I never thought of it.”
“That’s a pity,” said Gorman. “Still—in the case of a man in your position I daresay it can be managed even now. I’ll use my influence. I know most of the members of the Cabinet pretty well. I can put it to them that, from an English point of view, considering the tremendous importance of your business, considering the financial collapse which would follow—oh, we’ll be able to manage.”
“Thank you,” said Ascher, “but that purely legal aspect of the matter does not at the moment strike me as the most important or the most pressing. No doubt it is important and your kindness will be helpful. But just now I cannot speak about that. There is, you see, my country and the loyalty I owe to it. I do not seem to escape from that obligation by a process of law. I may legalise, but do I really justify, treachery to the claim of patriotism?”
I have always felt,—felt rather than known,—that there is a queer strain of mysticism in Gorman. His arid common sense, his politics, his rhetoric, his tricky money-making, are the outside, visible things about him. Behind them, deep down, seldom seen, is a strange, emotional love for his country. When Ascher spoke as he did about the claim of patriotism Gorman understood. The innermost part of the man was reached. Without hesitating for an instant, without consideration or debate, Gorman leaped to a solution of the problem.
“Loyalty to your country comes first,” he said; “it must. Everything else goes by the board. I did not know you felt that way about Germany; but since you do There is no more to be said. Go back to your own country of course. You can’t help yourself.”
I have no doubt that Gorman meant exactly what he said. If he had been in Ascher’s position, if once the issue became quite plain to him and the tangle of political alliances were swept away, he would have thrown all his interests and every other kind of honour to the wind. He would have sacrificed his business, would if necessary have parted with his wife; he would have been loyal to the land of his birth, entirely contemptuous of any other call or any claim.
Mrs. Ascher clung tightly to her husband’s arm. “Words,” she said, “words, only words. You must not listen to him.”
Ascher felt for her hands again, grasped them and held them pressed close against him. He turned from Gorman to me.
“And you,” he said, “what are you going to do?”
The question took me by surprise. I had no difficult decision to make. My course was in clear daylight. Besides, it did not matter to any one what I did.
“You, yourself,” said Ascher again. “What are you going to do?”
“Oh,” I said, “I’m going back to my regiment. I suppose they’ll take me. Anyhow I shall offer myself.”
“And fight?” said Ascher.
“Well, yes. I suppose I shall fight. This war won’t be over in a week. I’m pretty sure to get my turn. Yes, I shall almost certainly fight.”
“Why?” said Ascher. “What will you fight for?”
It was Gorman who answered the question. He had recovered from his brief outburst, and had become the normal Gorman again.
“The war,” he said, “is for the liberation of Europe. It is a vast struggle, an Armageddon in which the forces of reaction, absolutism, tyranny, a military caste are ranged against democracy. It is their last appearance upon the stage of history. Vindicated now, the principles of democracy——”
“If you think,” I said, “that I’m going out to fight for the principles of democracy, you’re making a big mistake. There’s nothing in the world I dislike more than that absurd democracy of yours.”
“Then why?” said Ascher, mildly persistent. “Why are you going to fight?”
“Well,” I said, “I don’t want to say anything offensive about your people, Ascher. The Germans have a lot of fine qualities, but if they were to win this war, if they were to succeed in imposing their civilisation and their mentality on us all, if they were to Germanise the world, the sense of humour would perish from among men. Nobody would any longer be able to laugh. We—we should find ourselves taking governments and officials seriously. Just imagine! To live under a bureaucracy and not to see that it was funny! Surely it’s worth while fighting for the right to laugh.”
“You Irish!” said Ascher. “Even in times like this your love of paradox——”
“Don’t say it,” I said. “If you can possibly help it don’t say that. I admit that I brought it on myself and deserve it. I apologise. That is not my real reason for going back to my regiment. I only gave it to you because I don’t know what my real reason is. It’s not patriotism. I haven’t got any country to be patriotic about. It’s not any silly belief in liberty or democracy. I don’t know why I’m doing it. I just have to. That’s all.”
“Noblesse oblige,” said Ascher. “Your honour as a gentleman.”
I shuddered. Ascher—there is no other way of putting it—is grossly indecent. A woman has a sense of modesty about her body. It would be considered an outrage to strip her and leave her stark naked in the middle of the room. I cannot see why a man should not be credited with some feeling of modesty about his soul. I detest having my last garments plucked from me in public. Complete spiritual nudity causes me very great embarrassment.
“You can put it that way if you like,” I said. “The plain fact is I can’t help myself. I must go back to my regiment. I have no choice.”
“I have come to see,” said Ascher, “that I have no choice either. There is such a thing, though perhaps Mr. Gorman will not believe me—there is such a thing as the honour of a banker. It compels me.”
He put his arm round his wife’s waist as he spoke. Still holding her hands in one of his, he led her from the room. Her head drooped against his shoulder as they went out.
“I suppose that means,” said Gorman, “that he’s going to stick it out and see the thing through. It will be infernally awkward for him. I don’t think he realises how nasty it will be. He hasn’t considered that side of it.”
“A man doesn’t consider that side of things,” I said, “when he’s up against it as Ascher is.”
“Well, I’ll do my best about the naturalisation papers. That’ll be some help.”
“It’s very hard to be sure,” I said, “but I’m inclined to think that Ascher is right.”
“He’s utterly wrong,” said Gorman. “A man’s country ought to come first always. You don’t understand that because you’re denationalised; because, as you say yourself, you have no country. But it’s true, whether you understand it or not.”
“When I think of that business of his,” I said, “the immense complexity of it, the confidence of thousands of men in each other, all resting at last on a faith in the integrity of one man, or rather of a firm—the existence of such a business, world-wide, international, entirely independent of all ties of race, nationality, language, religion, in a certain sense wider than any of these—it’s a great, human affair, not English nor German, not the white man’s nor the yellow man’s, not Christian nor Buddhist nor Mohammedan, just human. Ascher owes some kind of loyalty to a thing like that. It’s a frightfully complicated question; but on the whole I think he is right.”
Gorman was not listening to me. He had ceased, for the time, to be interested in Ascher’s decision. I tried to regain his attention.
“Ascher says,” I said, “that there is such a thing as the honour of a banker, of a financier.”
That ought to have roused Gorman to a contradiction; but it did not.
“Do you think,” he said, “that we could get them to take on Tim in any job connected with flying machines? This war will knock all his inventions into a cocked hat. He will simply be left, and he has a real turn for mechanics. If he got messing about with aeroplanes he might do something big, something really valuable. But I don’t know how to go about getting that sort of job for him. I’m not in with military people. Look here, you’ve a lot of influence with the War Office——”
“No,” I said. “None.”
“Nonsense. You must have. A word from you—— I’ll tell you what we’ll do. I’ll work Ascher’s naturalisation papers for him, and you get Tim taken on by the Army Flying Corps people.”
“Perhaps,” I said, “you’d like me to get you a Staff appointment while I’m at it.”
“Oh, no,” said Gorman. “I’m not a soldier, I’m a Member of Parliament. My job is——”
Gorman hesitated. For a moment I thought that he was in real doubt, was actually wondering what place he ought to take, what work he ought to do.
“Yes,” I said. “You. Now, what is your idea for yourself?”
Gorman drew himself up to his full height, squared his shoulders and puffed out his chest.
“My place,” he said, “is in the great council of the Empire.”
I gasped.
“Good Lord!” I said. “You don’t really think—youcan’tthink, that your silly old Parliament is going to matter now; that you politicians will be allowed to go on talking, that there will be divisions in the House, and elections and all that foolishness.”
Gorman, still heroically erect, still enormously swelled in chest, winked at me with careful deliberation. I was immensely relieved.
“Thank God,” I said. “For a moment I thought you really meant it—all that great-council-of-the-Empire business, you know. It would have been a horrible disappointment to me if you had. I’ve come to have a high regard for you, Gorman, and I really could not have borne it. But of course I ought to have known better. You couldn’t have believed in that stuff, simply couldn’t. Nobody with your intelligence could. But seriously, now, I should like to know—I’m sure you won’t mind telling me—— What are you going to do? Your party, I mean. It seems to me you’re in rather a hole. The Irish people will expect you to take the regular line of backing the enemy.”
“The Irish people be damned,” said Gorman; “our game is to support the Government.”