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 wehavemade 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 Ican. . .”
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 youmuch. 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 youeverlovedany one? You’ve been curious about many people; but it’s always been in your head and not in your heart.”
“I don’t letmyselfoff!,” 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 Icouldsacrifice 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 yourgreat-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 outgrownthatphase! 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!’ ”
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. Whatgoodit’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?Doeshuman 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.
CHAPTER ONE
. . . In the dark there careers—As if Death astride cameTo numb all with his knock—A horse at mad rateOver rut and stone.No figure appears,No call of my name,No sound but “Tic-toc”Without check. Past the gateIt clatters—is gone. . . .Maybe that “More Tears!—More Famine and Flame—More Severance and Shock!”Is the order from FateThat the Rider speeds onTo pale Europe; and tiredly the pines intone.Thomas Hardy:A New Year’s Eve in War Time.
. . . In the dark there careers—As if Death astride cameTo numb all with his knock—A horse at mad rateOver rut and stone.No figure appears,No call of my name,No sound but “Tic-toc”Without check. Past the gateIt clatters—is gone. . . .Maybe that “More Tears!—More Famine and Flame—More Severance and Shock!”Is the order from FateThat the Rider speeds onTo pale Europe; and tiredly the pines intone.Thomas Hardy:A New Year’s Eve in War Time.
. . . In the dark there careers—As if Death astride cameTo numb all with his knock—A horse at mad rateOver rut and stone.
. . . 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 gateIt clatters—is gone. . . .
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 FateThat the Rider speeds onTo pale Europe; and tiredly the pines intone.Thomas Hardy:A New Year’s Eve in War Time.
Maybe that “More Tears!—More Famine and Flame—More Severance and Shock!”Is the order from FateThat the Rider speeds onTo pale Europe; and tiredly the pines intone.Thomas Hardy:A New Year’s Eve in War Time.
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.
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.
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 hehadn’tquarrelled 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’reallresponsible 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.”
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 forPeace. 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 toThe 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.”
“Theydon’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 . . .”
Werewe going on from 1914? Had the war, in which most of my generation perished, really achieved nothing?
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 hissansculottesusurped 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 Godthat’sover.”
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. Notcruelly, 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 thewholeof 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 Ihadtold 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 didnotspend 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, Iwaswrong; and Ihaveoutgrown 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 youdowant.’ 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.”
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’sthe 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 defendthemselves. 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’mready.”
“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. . . .