CHAPTER FIVE
Countess of Montesquiou:So much for the Congress!Only a few blank nobodies remain,And they seem terror-stricken. . . . Blackly endSuch fair festivities. The red god WarStalks Europe’s plains anew!Thomas Hardy:The Dynasts.
Countess of Montesquiou:So much for the Congress!Only a few blank nobodies remain,And they seem terror-stricken. . . . Blackly endSuch fair festivities. The red god WarStalks Europe’s plains anew!Thomas Hardy:The Dynasts.
Countess of Montesquiou:
Countess of Montesquiou:
So much for the Congress!Only a few blank nobodies remain,And they seem terror-stricken. . . . Blackly endSuch fair festivities. The red god WarStalks Europe’s plains anew!Thomas Hardy:The Dynasts.
So much for the Congress!Only a few blank nobodies remain,And they seem terror-stricken. . . . Blackly endSuch fair festivities. The red god WarStalks Europe’s plains anew!Thomas Hardy:The Dynasts.
So much for the Congress!
Only a few blank nobodies remain,
And they seem terror-stricken. . . . Blackly end
Such fair festivities. The red god War
Stalks Europe’s plains anew!
Thomas Hardy:The Dynasts.
Those who had never before heard of Sir Aylmer Lancing or of Deryk are no more likely than I am to forget the excitement of the week that followed Raymond Stornaway’s death. That it lasted no more than a week was due to the number of competing claims on the public attention; but, between the Bloomsbury cocaine-prosecution and the Dawlish murder, half the papers were calling O’Rane’s heritage “romantic” and the other half “sensational”, while the conversation at every dinner-party that I attended came by divers ways to the unanimous conclusion that Sonia would now spend twelve hundred thousand pounds a year on feeding her friends. Before she had recovered from her first shock, I observed that she was considering bigger houses in other parts of London; on the morrow, when I dined—for the last time, as I vowed to myself—in Rutland Gate, Lady Dainton told me that she had never entertained any idea of selling Crowley Court; and, when I visited O’Rane to enquire if he needed help, he shewed me a pile, waist-high, of begging letters.
It was my first visit to the offices of the Lancing Trust; and I retain the memory of a vast, wind-swept barn on the edge of Hampstead Heath, with an old red-brick cottage and pent-houses of tarred wood attached. There were a great many box-files, a gigantic set of loose-leaf ledgers, a fair-sized reference library and a large number of typewriters. On one wall I recognized the map which Aylmer Lancing used to keep in his study to remind him of the stages by which his grip had spread over the earth’s surface. In all other respects, the building might have belonged to a poor-law relieving-officer; and Sonia, who obviously expected to find a double row of bankers smoking long cigars at a gleaming mahogany table, was no less obviously disappointed.
“I came to see if I could help you in any way,” I told O’Rane, who had rather frightened me the night before by his air of physical exhaustion.
We found him now with one of his secretaries in Raymond Stornaway’s private office, fidgeting with the will. I learned that the money was to be spent “for the good of humanity”; and in the construction of that clause he had already received so much contradictory advice that he had closed his office to chance callers.
“I didn’t expect Stornaway to die so soon,” was all he would say when I asked him his plans.
“I doubt if time will make your problem any easier,” I answered, as I joined Sonia in front of the tattered wall-map.
There, from the centre of what Lancing had bought as a burnt-out town-site, the Lancing influence spread in extending circles. A name and date in faded ink marked the advance of his railroads, the acquisition of his forests and mines, the linking of lake to ocean for the transportation of his grain. Dotted lines, leading to vague infinity, shewed where Lancing had splashed out of the union into the Atlantic, the Pacific and the Gulf of Mexico.
“You must move to a decent office,” Sonia put in. “And we can’t go on at The Sanctuary if you want to entertain properly. People will expect us to live up to our position, you know.”
O’Rane smiled grimly as he ushered us compellingly to the door.
“Whether that’s for the good of humanity . . .,” he murmured.
After this single meeting I resolved not to break in on his contemplation until I was invited. Very soon my attention was to be claimed by troubles of my own, for I was not satisfied with the state of Barbara’s mind or body; I, too, wanted to think; and, though I treated O’Rane to an unsolicited misgiving whenever I remembered his new estate, I will not pretend that I thought of him much after the feverish seven days in which every one I met said: “You’ve heard about it, of course? That’s the sort of thing thatwouldhappen to Sonia. What d’you suppose they’ll do with it?” . . .
It was in these days that the last touches were being given to the great peace-treaty which was to make an end of war; and, but for that, I should have handed Bertrand my resignation and taken Barbara abroad. Until we saw the terms, however, we could not tell how far his gloomy predictions at Cannes would be fulfilled nor how far any one could undo the mischief that was reported from Paris. If we could believe a quarter of all we heard, the butchery for which Sanguszko and Boscarelli clamoured in Lucien’s verandah-parliament was taking place in one country after another; as I warned Saltash, three discontented Alsace-Lorraines were being created for one that was pacified; and the mood of the December election seemed to return as the public realized the helplessness of the defeated enemy. Outside the now notorious “Oakleigh gang” I found few to admit that any country but Germany had been responsible for the war; and on that foundation each man erected his own standard of retribution. My father-in-law went the length of collecting a party at the Eclectic Club to reason with me and to check the wrong-headed doctrines that poured forth, week after week, from Fetter Lane.
“You really seem to live in a world of your own,” he explained wearily. “Idon’t hope to convince you; but, if you take a poll of your friends, on a question like indemnities . . .”
Before he had time to finish or I to answer, John Carstairs put his own case with alluring brevity:
“The Boche made the war. The Boche must pay for it.”
“What would have happened to our colonies if we’d lost?,” pursued Crawleigh, who seemed to regard the empire as a dumping-ground for the viceregally-inclined members of his family. German West Africa was below his dignity, but he had three sons. “These people mustn’t complain if they’re served in the same way.”
I recalled and quoted Bertrand’s dictum that no lasting peace could be established on a sense of grievance.
“I feel no tenderness towards Germany,” I said, “but aren’t we making another war inevitable?”
“You will make it inevitable,” said Mr. Justice Maitland, “if you let the last war go unpunished. No one will deny that the Germans broke a treaty, that they robbed, tortured, violated and murdered, not in the heat of fighting but as part of a terrorizing campaign ordered from headquarters. If acts like these go unpunished, every nation will know that it can take ‘frightfulness’ as its starting-point. Rape and mutilation will become sanctified usages of war. There will be a precedent.”
“That’s unanswerable,” I told the judge. “But, if this war proves anything, it proves that war doesn’t pay. I want to make that the great contribution of this war to history. If we impose a peace so unendurable that even war is no worse . . .”
Maitland interrupted me with a smiling head-shake:
“I have to try murderers in the course of my duties. Their state would be no better than that of their victims, if vendettas were permitted. You might say truly enough that murder doesn’t pay. I should be sorry to see the death-penalty abolished on that reasoning.”
“If you could hang every German,” I said, as I left to dress for the opera, “I might accept your argument. As it is, a punitive peace will set them thinking of revenge; and, the moment they’re strong enough, they’ll take it.”
“A good reason for keeping them weak,” said Carstairs, “which—quite rightly—is all Clemenceau cares about.”
I might have multiplied, almost to infinity, the number of similar opinions, held by the most dissimilar people. I heard them at the club, I was inundated by them at my office and I wrestled with them at Barbara’s parties.
“I wonder whether Bertrand thinks we’re making any headway?,” I asked that night at dinner, after venting my despondency on my wife.
I am not sure whether she heard me; her only answer was to look at her watch and to ask which opera was being played.
“Louise?” she repeated. “Then we can miss the first two acts. I suppose you wouldn’t care to go alone?”
“Aren’t you feeling up to it?,” I asked.
Barbara turned her back on me and busied herself with the wad of her cigarette-holder:
“Oh, I don’t know! Yes, I’m all right! And, anyway, I shan’t do any good . . . I don’t know what I’m talking about!,” she cried with sudden loss of control. “I’m going to lie down till we start.”
“I’ll take you up,” I said.
“No!,” she answered, with what I can only call a suppressed scream.
Her look and tone took me aback as though she had struck me in the face. For some weeks I had fancied that her nerves were disordered; but, as I finished my cigar in solitude, I felt that this night marked a subtle change in my relations with her. To this day I cannot tell when it began. We had been married little more than a year; before that, for ten years, we had been excellent friends. At first I believe she told me every thought in her heart; and there were times when I wished for both our sakes that she would think less and say less about what could not be mended. As though I had put my wish into words, her manner changed at the armistice: we were to make a new start, she was to forget her love for Eric Lane; and, after that, an onlooker would have said that she belonged to me, soul and body. She and I alone knew that, in some way, we were becoming strangers. Though she was bored with Cannes after the first week, she never told me; she might be bored with the life of a political hostess, but loyalty or lack of confidence kept her silent. She would not admit that she was ill or unhappy; but something now tortured her beyond bearing.
And I was afraid to ask her. In all that touched her soul, I was a stranger, an amateur and a bungler. Something of this must have revealed itself in my expression, for on her return to the dining-room she put her arms round my neck and told me not to look so worried.
“I’m worried about you,” I said.
“But I swear to you I’ve never felt better in my life! Come on; or we shall miss the only act worth hearing!”
I followed her, more worried than ever. If I said nothing, I should seem callous; if I said anything, I might inflame her misery. I knew her too little for any idea what she wanted of me; and she trusted me too little to help by a hint. At this rate, she would become every day more uncommunicative; and each unanswered appeal for understanding would separate her farther from me.
“Ifeverthere’s anything the matter,” I said, as we got into the car, “I hope you’ll tell me, Babs.”
“Everything’sperfect,” she answered. “A darling house, a darling husband.” . . . Her voice suddenly lost its false ring of assurance. “No, the fault’s inmesomewhere. There’s something missing. Don’t let’s talk about it.”
At the unexpected quaver, I caught her fingers in mine; and she brushed away a tear with the back of my hand. Though no more was said, I felt that something more ought to have been said and that I was a moral coward for not saying it. In the silence and darkness of the car, I wondered whether Barbara was unhappy because she had been given no sign that she was to bear children. For all I knew, she did not want them or was afraid; for all I knew, she wanted them and could not bear them and was afraid to tell me. And we were both afraid to confess our fear.
When we reached the opera-house, the second act was over; and, on the way to our box, we ran the gauntlet of a dozen friends, who invited us to meals, and of a hundred staring strangers, who turned to their neighbours and whispered: “There’s Lady Barbara!” with the mingled triumph and awe which the English display when they recognize any idol of the illustrated papers.
“One gets used to anything, even the manners of the well-bred,” I murmured, as we struggled towards the stairs.
“If any one else asks us to lunch, I shall say we’ve given up eating. . . . Oh, Imustspeak to Marion! You go on.”
I ploughed slowly into an open space by the entrance to the pit-tier boxes, then came to an involuntary standstill. Face to face, too near for either of us to escape, I found Eric Lane smoking a cigarette and looking over my shoulder to the place where Barbara was talking to Mrs. Shelley. Unless she had already seen him and was lingering behind till I had made myself a screen, they must meet in another moment. Eric never had much colour to lose, but even his lips now seemed bloodless. When our eyes met, I could not have said which was the more uncomfortable. I enquired after his father, I believe; and he asked me, as he had been in Japan at the time of our wedding, to accept his belated good wishes now.
“When are we to have another play?,” I asked.
“This autumn, I hope,” he answered.
“Good for that. Well, Eric, I little thought in the old Phoenix Club days that we were entertaining a genius unawares.”
“They were g-good days,” he sighed.
Then there was a pause; and the cordiality which old habit had brought to life wilted. As he glanced in Barbara’s direction, I fancy he was charging her with making our friendship impossible; this second sight of her seemed to incapacitate him; and we stood stockishly silent. When she joined us, there was, indeed, a smile on either side, a high and rather breathless “Oh, how do you do?” Then we hurried to our box; and Eric strolled across the hall. His hand was shaking as he tried to relight his cigarette; and the hollow eyes and cadaverous cheeks seemed ten years older for the ten seconds’ encounter.
Was it a presentiment of this meeting that had unnerved Barbara? I had no time to speak before we were surrounded by a new throng. It was her first appearance at Covent Garden; and from the boxes and stalls we had opera-glasses trained upon us until I seemed to be looking at a tank of lobsters; a queue formed outside our door and we were flattened against the side of the box. The acclamation was not confined within a ring of our friends: I felt the atmosphere of the whole house warming in the greatest tribute to personality that I have ever seen.
“I watched you coming in to-night,” Dr. Gaisford told her at the end. “It was like the sun breaking through. . . . How are you, my dear child? As you don’t come to see me professionally, I hope that means you’re well and happy?”
“Everything’sperfect,” Barbara cried, with a conviction that had been lacking when she used the same words earlier. As we settled ourselves in the car, she added joyously: “How sweet every one is! Marion wants us to choose a night for dining with her next week. And I’ve committed you to the Pinto de Vasconcellos the week after. And Bobbie Pentyre wants us to go to Croxton one week-end. Can you remember all that? And will you come?”
“Anywhere you like,” I promised. “You seem to have had rather a success to-night, Babs.”
“It’s a good world! I’ve got back my grip on life. . . . I feelfree,” she went on with a note of wonder; and her hand stole shyly into mine as though we were composing a quarrel: “George dear, I’m sorry to have been unsatisfactory, sorry to have worried you. I promised on Armistice Day that I wouldn’t speak of certain people. You can’t help thinking of them, but since to-night I’m not . . . haunted.SeeingEric has broken the spell. . . . I can meet him now. I’m going to. Madame Pinto said he was coming to her party.”
Remembering Eric’s look of anguish when he caught sight of Barbara, I felt that the greatest kindness she could shew him would be to prevent further meetings. It was folly, I thought, for her to invite him to our first reception, it was madness to expect that he would come; and, if I said nothing at the time, it was for fear she would imagine that I was jealous.
“Make things as easy as you can for him,” I recommended.
“We can give him the opportunity of being friends again.”
“And don’t be hurt if he doesn’t take it. Men of that kind, imaginative and highly-strung . . . In his way, he is a bit of a genius.” . . .
“I gave him that,” she murmured with a pride which I thought ill-timed. “He had only talent before.”
To judge by appearances, Eric had paid dearly for his goddess’ kiss.
“They feel things more intensely,” I continued, “than dull, matter-of-fact people like me.”
Barbara made no answer for several minutes; then she looked straight ahead and asked:
“Wouldn’t you feel it as much if you lost me?”
“I should feel it more than anything in the world.”
“It’s broken Eric. He’ll never be mended. But it wouldn’t break you?”
Faint though the challenge was, I fancied, for the first time in my life, that Barbara was trying to drag me into a ‘scene’.
“We won’t talk about it,” I said.
“I don’t think anything would break you. And you may take that how you like.”
The words may have been her tribute to flint-like resolution or her criticism of wooden insensibility. The way that I decided to take them was in silence. Barbara hid her face in the great nosegay of carnations which she always carried, then held them out, like an impulsive child, for me to smell. As she walked, slender, tall and radiant, into the house, I felt that this was the day which I had waited fourteen months to see dawning.
“Yes, I had quite a success,” she murmured to her reflection, when we paused in front of a mirror halfway up the stairs. “You seem surprised, George.”
“I don’t know how any one could hope to resist you,” I said. “Inever can.”
The South American dinner to which Barbara had committed me marked our grudging surrender to a lady whose hospitality was rapidly breaking themoraleof London. Madame Pinto de Vasconcellos, if her ambitions had been examined before the judgement-seat, must have confessed a resolution to force free wine, food and tobacco on a larger number of victims than had fallen to any other Brazilian. Setting out with an introduction to the Duchess of Ross and a system of snowball terrorization for every one else, she secured B for her parties by playing on his fear of hurting A’s feelings.
“She is a stranger to London,” the duchess explained to Lady Crawleigh in a tone that hid natural exultation under less natural pity. “I should like to shew her a little hospitality.”
Lady Crawleigh had been caught too often in similar traps to forget that, while Herrig Castle and Ross House remained unlet, no one was secure; but, like every one else, she tried to shelter herself behind a substitute. Madame Pinto, she told Barbara, had heard so much of her “beautiful daughter”; it would be only a kindness to accept one of her many invitations.
When I pointed out that the whole English-speaking world had heard so much of Barbara, my mother-in-law rejoined wistfully that it was a small thing to ask, that she did not ask much and that she would not have asked now if she had imagined we should make difficulties. Remembering the unsteady concordat which was the best that a heretic and a radical could ever hope to establish with the Crawleighs, I urged Barbara to capitulate before I knew that Eric Lane was to be our fellow-guest. Had I now urged her to refuse, Lady Crawleigh would have had a grievance; and Barbara might have thought that I had a personal interest in preventing another encounter.
Though the dinner passed off pleasantly enough, it had one wholly unexpected result which changed the course of history for two or three of Madame Pinto’s guests. Had we refused this invitation, I might not have seen John Carstairs for another month; had I not seen him, I should not have asked him to tell me about his recent tour of the Ross estates in Connemara; had he not told me, I might have contentedly played my part of absentee landlord for years to come. Carstairs, however, succeeded in frightening me with his stories of impending Irish trouble. The precarious peace, he said, might break down at any moment. As trustee for his half-witted brother, he was anxious to sell at any sacrifice and advised me to do the same. Whether I sold or not, I should be a fool if I did not at least visit an estate which I had neglected since the Easter rising of 1916.
Our chance conversation was the cause of my first serious disagreement with Barbara. Before parting with a property that had been in the family for three hundred years, I told her that we must explore the conditions of the County Kerry for ourselves. In my suggestion that we should go to Lake House for Whitsuntide she acquiesced at once, only stipulating that she should be allowed to stay behind at the last moment if the crossing threatened to be very rough. Next morning I reserved our sleepers and arranged with Spence-Atkins to postpone his own holiday and to take charge of our paper till my return; in the evening she warned me, rather fretfully, that she might not feel well enough to come. I asked if she would care for me to send for Gaisford; but, after a night’s rest, she assured me buoyantly that she was all right. I telegraphed to warn my agent of our coming; and, when I read out his reply, Barbara exclaimed with almost hysterical passion that, well or ill, in fine weather or foul, nothing would induce her to come with me to Ireland.
“Well, do you mind my leaving you alone here?,” I asked, when I had recovered my breath.
“No. Bobbie Pentyre has arranged his Croxton party for Whitsuntide.”
“But why didn’t you tell me that before? I could have gone another week. Now I’ve made Spence-Atkins cancel his own plans . . .”
“Oh, you’d better stick to your present arrangement,” she answered. Then, for some reason that I could not guess, she broke into wild weeping. “I’m so miserable! I’m mad! I don’t know what I’m saying! George, I’m sorry I was rude.”
“You weren’t rude,” I assured her.
“I’ve not slept for nights and nights,” she gasped. “You’ve been very patient with me. Go on being patient, go on loving me! I’m so miserable.” . . .
This time I determined to be a moral coward no longer:
“But why?”
“Oh, I’ve told you! Because I’m a damned soul. I told you that when you asked me to marry you.”
“And I told you that I’d make you happy or die in the attempt. There’s nothing I won’t do . . .”
In her first convulsion of grief, Barbara had allowed me to take her into my arms; but, as she became more composed, I felt her struggling gently to be free.
“You really mean that?,” she asked, with her head averted. “If it meant your honour, your life, your happiness, you’d give all that to see me happy?” I fancied again that she was challenging me and that, if I made unguarded reservations, I should be told that I did not love her as Jack Waring and Eric Lane had loved her. The second, as she believed, was paying with his life; the first had already paid with his soul. “I don’t know what I’m saying!” she cried, with her hands pressed to her temples. “I’m worried . . . No, I won’t see a doctor. You go off as you arranged. I’ll go to Croxton if I feel in the mood. When you come back, I may be all right; if not . . .”
She stared distractedly round the room in a way that reminded me of the sad, mad time when Eric first went out of her life.
“But youwillbe all right,” I assured her.
“If I’m not, remember you married a lost soul, George; I warned you. I kill whatever I touch.” . . .
It is hardly to be imagined that I carried a light heart to Ireland. And the state of the country at this time was not of a kind to cure any private depression. In 1916 I entered Dublin as an academic nationalist, who had voted year after year with the staunch, self-effacing Redmondites; I left as a perfervid Sinn Feiner, when the men who had played with me as boys five-and-twenty years before were shot off their crazy barricades or done to death by a mockery of legal forms. Then for the first time, face to face with a people cheated of its promised independence, I too said that no trust was to be reposed in English honour and no sane leadership expected from men who believed in English pledges. Through weary years we liberals had fought constitutionally for our Home Rule Bill; it was inscribed on the Statute Book in spite of intrigues and intimidation; but treason triumphed over constitutionalism on the day when Germany made war in the belief that an Irish guerilla would keep Great Britain from taking part.
Melancholy memories and uneasy forebodings were my companions on the familiar road to Holyhead. I was dining with my uncle Bertrand on the night when the Home Rule Act was suspended; he at least had protested and perhaps he was a little self-righteous, but in 1916 I was to remember his grim prediction that from the breach of that undertaking, which every party in parliament helped to repudiate, would follow inevitably the discredit of the simpleton nationalists and the rise of Sinn Fein. The rebellion, which he foretold so accurately, was succeeded by a repression, which he and every one else knew would continue until the next rebellion. Sinn Fein, in these first months of the armistice, was penetrating the country peacefully; but even John Carstairs, who usually advocated the use of machine-guns and aeroplanes against political opponents, recognized that there would be war if the present army of occupation interfered. As yet there were only sporadic outrages on both sides, followed by reprisals, followed by counter-reprisals. As always happens, the non-combatants, squeezed by both sides, suffered most.
On this score, when at last I reached Lake House, I had no personal complaint to make. My agent told me that certain Sinn Feiners had been billeted on me and certain stores of food commandeered; my gun-room had been emptied; but both my cars, after a short period of detention, were returned with a permit from republican headquarters. This, I believe, made them liable to seizure by the forces of the crown; but my agent warned me that any license which recognized the authority of Dublin Castle would cause the cars to be taken and not restored. And nothing in Kerry tempted the Castle to send its emissaries so far into hostile territory. If I abstained from provocative acts or speeches, I should be left in peace.
“They like you,” my agent was good enough to tell me; “and it’s what they’re all saying, that you should be living here.”
“Are the tenants paying me any rent?,” I asked.
“They are.”
I drifted away by myself to see how well the house would suit Barbara. The lake was like a sheet of glass, in a frame of dense green wood, hanging from the gardens by the red ribands of the fuchsia hedges. Here and there I saw thin spirals of smoke: it was turf smoke, though I could not smell it. From Castlemaine, in the west, the air blew soft and salt from the Atlantic. I cursed the malevolence of man that disturbed such peace and desecrated such beauty. I cursed, too, the fate that had sent me to an English school, because there was none good enough in Ireland, so robbing me of one home without giving me another.
“I’m a married man,” I told my agent, “since last I was here. I don’t care to bring my wife over till things are more settled.”
That, he assured me regretfully, was what every one said; but I should be comfortable enough if I did not make trouble. He was himself an avowed republican, not from any hostility to the king, whom he admired, nor from devotion to the forms and spirit of republicanism: he wanted peace; and, whether Sinn Fein would achieve it or not, no other party had succeeded. Sinn Fein was feared, if not respected; and the English only remembered Ireland when they were frightened. If Redmond and his lot had put the fear of God into the English one half as well as the others, they would be lords and ministers and the rest now, like Mr. Law and the man who prosecuted Roger Casement. My agent disapproved of Sir Edward Carson’s politics but admired him as the Irishman who had put more fear of God into the English than any one since Parnell.
The one sentimental relaxation that this hard-headed, soft-spoken man allowed himself was that Parnell was still alive and would come back to lead Ireland.
“If I could find a purchaser . . .” I began.
“An Englishman? The house would be burnt over your honour’s head if the whisper of it ran round!”
“Then,” I said, “I may as well be getting back to London.”
My agent protested with touching fervour, but I was uneasy at being separated from Barbara. Two days after I landed at Kingston, she telegraphed: “Missing you dreadfully hope you arrived safely and are coming back immediately all my love bless you”; and, if her language seemed still a trifle neurotic, she had almost recovered her tranquillity by the time she wrote to describe the Whitsuntide party at Croxton Hall. The week-end had been uneventful; and, though Eric Lane was in the house, I could not read any embarrassment between the lines that described their meeting. The nervous excitability, however, of which I had seen too much evidence in London, betrayed itself once in a comment on a rumour: “You remember the Miss Maitland you met with the O’Ranes? She’s here. A pretty little thing! Obviously in love with Eric. I’d give anything to see him happily married, but I hope he’s not serious about this child. She’s too hopelessly young, she’d send him mad in a week. It’ll be too tragic if he lets another woman make a mess of his life.” The next day Barbara telegraphed again, telling me once more how much I was being missed and offering to join me at Lake House.
I returned to London as soon as I had finished my business and was met at Euston by a shivering form in a scarlet tea-gown and an ermine cloak.
“You crazy child, you’ll give yourself pneumonia!,” I cried as I hurried her into the car through a double line of smiling porters.
“That’s a pretty way to greet me when I’ve stayed up all night for you!,” Barbara laughed. “Iamglad to see you again, George, though that wasn’t why I came to meet you. It’s your little friend Ivy Maitland: she’s gone down suddenly with appendicitis.”
“Well, I’m very sorry, of course . . .” I began.
“Yes, dear, but we must do something about it. You know she was acting as Eric’s secretary while his own girl had a holiday? Yes! And this child has collapsed in his flat. Dr. Gaisford’s attending her; and he says she’s not to be moved on any consideration whatsoever. When I heard about it last night, I felt wemustoffer Eric a couple of rooms till she can return home. Things being as they are, though . . .” Barbara faltered and turned away. “It’s all such a muddle that I thought I couldn’t ask him without your permission.”
From her consulting me, I surmised that she doubted the wisdom of her impulse. From my knowledge of Eric, I imagined he would sleep on the Embankment before he accepted a bed from us. If Barbara wished to make a sign of friendship, however, I would not check her.
“You don’t need my permission,” I said. “If you think it will do any good for us to invite him . . .”
We received our answer before the invitation could be sent. At the end of breakfast, Lady John Carstairs telephoned to say that she had herself placed her house at Eric’s disposal, but that he preferred to remain in Ryder Street till the girl was out of danger. On my way to Fetter Lane, I left some flowers and a card bidding Eric to let us know if we could be of any service; but we heard nothing till a week later, when O’Rane telephoned to catch me for five minutes before I went to bed.
“I couldn’t get round before,” he apologized, “and I thought you ought to know. Poor old Eric! He’s getting all his troubles in a lump. Where’s Babs? I’m afraid she ought to hear this, too.”
I was under the impression that she had gone to bed half an hour before; but I heard sounds in the drawing-room, almost as though she had expected news of Eric and was staying up because it was bad news.
“What’s happened to him now?,” I asked, as we went upstairs.
“He’s been ordered abroad immediately,” O’Rane answered. “California. Lungs.”
I do not know whether Barbara heard more than the last word; but she seemed to rise from her chair and cross the room in a single movement. O’Rane’s expression changed to wonder and then softened to pity as she caught and gripped his hand. No name had been mentioned in her hearing; but I think we both realized that he and I and all the world—with one exception—might be ordered to California for our lungs without striking an equal terror into her heart. In that moment I knew how far I had always been from winning her love.
O’Rane, I feel, atoned for want of sight by keenness of hearing. I fancied that a little of the pity in his expression might be intended for me.
“Is he . . . dying?,” Barbara whispered.
“Not yet awhile.” O’Rane withdrew his hand to feel for a chair. I thought I saw his expression changing again, this time hardening slightly as though to keep the flash-point of her emotions low or, perhaps, to douse them with a single chilling jet. “He can get all right if he wants to. You may imagine, he’s rather bowled over at present.” As he turned to me, I felt that he wanted Barbara to hear his next announcement without being watched. “It came quite suddenly,” he told me; “and, but for this, you’d have seen him happily married to Ivy Maitland.” If Barbara gave any sign of interest, I saw and heard nothing. O’Rane took time to let his announcement sink in; and I fancied again that he was tacitly advising her to close her side of an account which Eric had already closed against her. If she chose to think that he was still in love with her and that his engagement to Ivy was an act of despair, no argument would cure her; at least there was now no reason why this shadow should force its way between us any longer. “It’s rather a facer,” O’Rane continued, “when you lose your wife and your health on the same day. I’ve been telling him all evening that no woman in the world is big enough to spoil a man’s life, but at the moment he’s in the mood to creep into a corner and die. He’s too good for that. I want you to see him before he starts, George; and write to him while he’s away.”
Naturally, I promised without hesitation. If Barbara sent a letter of farewell, she said nothing to me about it; when I told her next day that I was going to Ryder Street on my way to the office, she nodded abstractedly but made no suggestion of accompanying me; and, on my return, she sat like a spirit of tragedy, refusing to ask me the result of my mission, till I volunteered to tell her.
“By the way, I missed Eric this morning,” I said.
“Oh? Had he gone already?,” she asked.
“The maid said he was not at home,” I answered; and, mercifully for me, Barbara did not enquire further.
A less diplomatic version would have recounted that, as I hurried round to Ryder Street, I saw Eric getting out of the taxi in front of me. His front-door slammed as I was halfway up the stairs; and, when I said something to the maid about being one of his older friends, I was informed that Miss Maitland was still seriously ill. Divining that Miss Maitland could not be occupying all the rooms in the flat, I scribbled a note in which I begged Eric to see me for two minutes. A verbal message apprised me that Mr. Lane was engaged; and I went away, more hurt, I believe, than ever in my life before. Since his interrupted romance with Ivy, the fellow could bear me no grudge for marrying the woman he had tried so long to win; our friendship went back, sixteen years, to Oxford and the dinners of the Phœnix. There were not too many survivors from those days; and, coming to sympathize, I had seen my sympathy flung back in my face. I made every allowance for his illness and misery; but I could not write to him, at least for the present and, when a letter from him, several months later, hurtled like a flask of vitriol from California to England, I was too nearly blinded to attempt an answer.
“Will you call again?,” asked Barbara perfunctorily.
“I don’t suppose he wants to be bothered,” I said.
There was a long silence; and Barbara’s shoulders moved in a slight shrug:
“I don’t suppose he wants to be friends. I tried, when we met at Croxton; but, when there’s been love, I don’t think you can go back to friendship.” She looked at me almost guiltily; and for an embarrassed moment I feared that I was to be drawn into yet one more unwanted confidence. Then, changing her mind, she walked slowly to the fire and stood with the dancing flames reflected in her sombre eyes. “I’m . . .gladhe’s going,” she murmured at last. “I’ve not really been myself since I met him again, whatever I told you about feeling free. When you wanted me to come with you to Ireland . . . I was mad. I’ll go with you now, if you like . . . anywhere. We’ve talked so often about a fresh start: I can make it now. Idowant our life to be a success. If there’s anything I can do . . .”
“You can’t do more than you’re doing at present,” I said.
With a sudden turn, Barbara flung her arms about my neck and hid her face against my chest.
“Is there nothing more that you want?,” she asked. “Don’t say ‘your happiness’! I know you want that, darling. Don’t you want anything for yourself? Don’t you want me to be like other women? Don’t you want me to have children?”
“Most men want children,” I said, “but women have to bear them.”
“Yes . . . I’ve always wanted children and I’ve always been afraid of them. I’m still afraid, . . . but I’m going to have one now, George, . . . for your sake. You’re pleased? Hold me tight, darling, and promise me one thing. If anything goes wrong . . .”
“But, good God . . .!,” I began.
“Itmay. If anythingdoesgo wrong and one of us has to die, promise you’ll let it be me!”
I was dispensed from answering by Barbara’s sudden surrender to hysterics. When she was recovered, I put her to bed and sent for Gaisford; as soon as he allowed her up, I took her to Crawleigh Abbey and left her to recuperate from something which the doctor described enigmatically as “a nervous breakdown that didn’t come off”.
“I’ve been expecting this for years,” he told me. “And for years I’ve felt that she’d be a healthier, happier woman when she had some brats to look after. This business about Eric Lane must have been a shock to her.”
“Well, thank Heaven, that’s all over,” I said.
“At last,” Gaisford grunted. “If you’re going down to Crawleigh . . .”
“I shall stay here, except for week-ends, unless I’m sent for,” I interrupted. “This is going to be a busy time. The peace terms are to be signed within the next few days.”
“I wonder what kind of mess they’ve been making out there,” Gaisford mused.
“You’re convinced itwillbe a mess?”
“My dear George, when two human beings get together, they always make a big mess,” he answered with more than his usual misanthropy; “and I’ve known human beings who could make a fair-sized mess with their four unaided paws.”
The peace of Versailles was celebrated in London with thanksgivings by day and fireworks at night.
“I wonder why,” said Bertrand sadly.
“Lady Dainton wants me to bring you to her party at the Excelsior,” I said, though, when he repeated: “I wonder why”, it was not easy to find a convincing answer.
“Areyougoing?” he asked suspiciously, as though I were revenging myself on him for my dinners in Rutland Gate.
“Yes,” I answered. “I wonder why myself; but I’m a bachelor at present and I must dine somewhere.”
“All right,” sighed my uncle; and, on that, we drove to the office and sat until seven o’clock considering the terms and discussing, with Spence-Atkins and any one else who drifted in, what the future policy of our paper was to be.
For several weeks the dearth of news in Fetter Lane and the claims of outside interests had brought our fragile bantling to the verge of death by starvation. Ministers, I thought, revealed a shrewd knowledge of mass-psychology in denying us all news of the conference.
“Kid asks for a thing,” explained Sir Philip Saltash, when I loosed a grumble in his hearing; “you refuse it; kid screams. Go on refusing it; kid goes on screaming. Go on refusing still; kid thinks of something else.”
By July, even the press had almost ceased to scream; parliament had long been silent; and the country was probably thinking of a prize-fight. My own record was representative of the vast majority: I went to my office six days a week, I continued the farce of exploring London to find what people were thinking, I supported a wall at the parties which my wife gave to please my uncle; but such intellectual energy as I possessed had been devoted at one moment to my private affairs in Ireland, at another to O’Rane’s inheritance and again at another to the havoc which poor Eric Lane’s return had wrought in my life with Barbara. At our editorial dinners I was chiefly concerned to see that we had enough readable matter of any kind to fill twenty-four pages. Like the child in Saltash’s parable, I was now indifferent; and, when at last the great secrets which we had screamed to know were flung to us in bulk, we were mildly bored.
“I warned you at Cannes how it would be,” said Bertrand; then he lapsed into unhelpful silence.
“You heard what they were saying in Paris?,” asked Spence-Atkins. “ ‘The seeds of a great and durable war’.”
“Meanwhile,” I said, “as our first article will be on the treaty . . .?”
We had reached no decision by the time my uncle and I adjourned for dinner with the Daintons; if seventy men out of London’s seven millions understood what kind of peace had been made, I do not believe that seven men of the seventy cared by now whether it was a good peace or a bad.
“Indifference! Indifference!,” Bertrand sighed. “If you compare this night with the day of the armistice . . . We said ‘never again!’; and we meant it. Now, though half the world’s still in mourning, we’re racing along a road that will put the other half in mourning.”
“I suppose you can never repeat your emotions,” I ventured, as I followed his gaze over the packed restaurant. “The war ended at the armistice; people say ‘All right! It’sstillended.’ ”
“And they’re not interested to see whether the present world is built on quicksand.”
“No one can saywehaven’t done our best to warn people,” I said wearily, as the Daintons came into the lounge.
“No one but a fool would say that any one had paid the slightest attention to our warnings,” Bertrand rejoined. “The harm’s done now. That phase is over.”
As we went in to dinner, Lady Dainton told me that the scene was quite like 1914. From a long and intimate acquaintance with her no less than from the ring of pleasure in her voice, I realized that this was her return from exile: for thirty years she had lived and laboured to enter what she considered the “right” houses and to secure the “right” people in her own. The war had thrown her out of work; but she could begin again now. One of her sons had been killed, the other wounded; her daughter had disappointed the family by marrying O’Rane and shocked it by running away from him; for the Daintons, who had worked as hard as any one, it had not been a pleasant or an easy war; and now Lady Dainton was dismissing it as a regrettable incident, least said, soonest mended. She was not wanting in affection for her dead son nor for the son who would be among the first to die if another war came; but she was by now too inelastic to remodel her daily life, still less to attempt improvements on the scene of 1914 when there were no ‘profiteers’, no ‘temporary gentlemen’, no six-shilling income-tax, no bloated wages for insatiable domestic servants.
“You think it will last?,” I enquired.
“I feel sure it will,” she answered. “It’s toallour interests, don’t you know?, to keep the big houses open, to have plenty of employment, money circulating. . . . Of course, if the socialists had their way . . . but I don’t think there’s much socialism in England, George. The war has thrown people together so much. The agitators simply wouldn’t be able to make a living if they weren’t paid from abroad. There’s a little book I must send you on the Jewish peril.” . . .
A new taste for spreading scares was the only change that I could detect in my hostess. Whereas she had occupied herself before the war by sitting on endless committees, she reached a larger public now by sitting at home and inundating her friends with pamphlets on bolshevism, prohibition, the white-slave traffic, secular education and every other danger that threatened, day by day, to sap the security of England. Sir Roger, I fancy, had changed even less. Whereas he had formerly jobbed in and out of wild-cat industrial securities, he now dabbled in the more chaotic of the European exchanges. Sonia danced; Sam had left his firm of contractors in Hartlepool for a vague “agency-business” of his own in London; Tom Dainton’s widow had married again; and I believe this single family could have been reproduced, in every detail of history and circumstance, in almost every town and county throughout Great Britain and Ireland.
“George not being pessimistic, is he?,” Sir Roger enquired genially, as we settled into our places.
“I confess I don’t like the outlook,” I said; and for the life of me I could not imagine how any one enjoyed the prospect of a peace abroad that was nothing but a silent war. My volatile host had been sufficiently dissatisfied a few days before when the labour party, realizing that the government was properly contemptuous of its servile supporters in the House of Commons, threatened the “direct action” of a general strike. Dainton knew; and I knew; and every man with a smattering of economic history knew that the present boom would be followed by a disastrous slump. “Things seem too good to last.”
The flow of geniality ran suddenly dry.
“You’d be the first to complain if they did,” said Dainton; and his tone surprised me out of a reply till I noticed his flushed face and watery eyes. “My friend George has great qualities,” he continued, with malicious jocularity, to the table at large, “but he’s no great shakes as a prophet. Before the war he told us there would be no war; when it came, he said it could never end one way or the other; now that it’s ended, he says itmuststart again. Cheerful customer, George.”
I might have reminded him that in the nineties he was prophesying an inevitable war with Russia, in the nineteen-hundreds with France. I might have asked him to reconcile the treaty of Versailles with the fourteen points. I might have enquired whether he would keep his promises of the December election that the kaiser should be hanged and the whole cost of the war covered by a German indemnity. In the interests of a quiet dinner, I said nothing; Dainton, as a political barometer, was more valuable to me than Dainton as a political controversialist. I realized for the first time that the class which he represented would be our most aggressive antagonists when we worked to secure a sane peace. Thanks to the determination of the French prime minister and the vacillation of our own, he was enabled to go back impenitently to the mood of his election address. No longer speaking of “Wilson,le bienvenu”, he had discovered in the president an insidious agent for strengthening Germany and weakening France. Forgetting his earlier lip-service to the League of Nations, he paraded comparative populations and, in my hearing that night, based his hopes of enduring peace on “bleeding Germany white and keeping her white”.
I had not, for several months, mentioned the inflammatory fourteen points: had I done so, Dainton might have retorted that President Wilson had himself departed from them by throwing his lot in with M. Clemenceau and Mr. Lloyd-George. I did not discuss the equity of the peace terms. I discussed very little with Dainton; but I tried, as I had been trying all day, to envisage the new world which circumstances and the efforts of the peace conference were labouring to bear. Russia was in the grip of revolution, civil war and famine; Germany, Austria, Hungary and Italy might follow at any moment; the map of Europe was dotted with strangely named, new, self-governing republics, alike only in their complete ignorance of self-government; as we were soon to see, there was no European police to restrain the Italian who might be inspired to seize Fiume or the Rumanian who was tempted to march on Buda Pesht; the League of Nations had been invested with no power; and the world outside Europe, from India to Egypt and from Ireland to the Philippines, had been taught the magic word “self-determination” and had realized its possibilities more vividly than those who coined it.
In an unguarded moment I did ask Dainton whether he imagined that the Germans could ever pay the indemnity which he had so sternly demanded. He believed it confidently. How, I asked him; but Dainton told me that he was not in the mood to split hairs: if they could pay it, they should (and the allies would remain in occupation till the last penny had been handed over); if the Hun ruined himself in the attempt, as I seemed to think likely, it would be something to feel that he would never again menace the world.
“And if he ruins us too?,” I asked. “Economically, the whole world is knitted together. If the Russian revolution spreads to Germany?”
“It won’t spread here,” Dainton answered in happy forgetfulness of earlier speeches against the corrupting influence of those Russian and German agents who controlled British trades unions. “Our people are too sensible. You’re very gloomy, George! This won’t do at all. Drink up that cocktail and let’s begin our dinner.”
As I looked round on the scene of peace, now officially proclaimed, I reflected that five years, all but a few days, had passed since I strolled on to the valley-terrace at Chepstow, to smoke a cigarette between dances; it seemed less than five weeks since Colonel Farwell walked diffidently out of the darkness to say that, while war had not yet been declared, it was prudent for all officers to be in touch with their depots. They had gone, those first, in a spirit of routine enlivened by adventure; they were followed by men who went in a spirit of bewilderment clarified by sacrifice. The bewilderment passed; and the sacrifice turned to resignation. Soon the resignation became fatalism: every one went because every one else was going; none expected to come back, and, of those who went first, few were cheated of their expectation. Now we were celebrating the end of a war that dwarfed the campaigns of Napoleon to so many intermittent brawls.
I must have spoken the name, for my uncle caught at it eagerly:
“Seventeen-ninety-three, eighteen-fifteen,” he murmured. “Nineteen-fourteen, nineteen-nineteen. Napoleon ended the middle ages and changed the map. Have we begun anything, ended anything, changed anything? We spilt a paint-box over the atlas; but will the colours stick? Germany and Russia cancel out; the rest of us have to play for pennies instead of shillings; but have we ended war, have we ended the nineteenth century, have we done anything but lose a few pawns in the first moves?”
“We’d woneverythingat the armistice!,” I exclaimed. “The world was ready and willing to be disarmed, ready and willing to accept arbitration in place of war . . .”
“What election-cry has a chance against ‘revenge’?,” Bertrand demanded, with a glance of contempt towards the end of the table, when Dainton was arguing heatedly with the wine-waiter. “ ‘The red account is cast’; and Germany must pay. You and I know that we shall be the first to suffer. You and I know that these dolts are laying the foundations of the next war. You and I know that we have some misty world-vision and that we must work for a united states of Europe and a brotherhood of man. People won’t listen to us . . . yet. I shall be dead before you’ve cleared the first unbelievers out of the temple.Si monumentum requiris. . . George, George, this is a blacker day in the world’s history than the fourth of August.”
I have forgotten almost everything about that dinner except the sense of depression that grew deeper with every advance to gaiety on the part of my neighbours. We were spared speeches; but at the end our host called us to our feet for some toast which I did not hear. As I sat down, a kite’s-tail of coloured paper floated to us from the next table. A giant bunch of air-balloons was divided among eager hands. Crackers exploded; and a blare of tin trumpets punctuated the cheeping of wooden whistles. Perhaps I had spent too many hours that day in discussion that led nowhere: I suddenly felt that I was not in the mood for such artless merry-making.
“Si monumentum requiris. . .” Bertrand repeated.
At the table from which that tail of coloured paper had been thrown, I observed my old ally, Sir Philip Saltash, entertaining a party of friends. Dainton, in acknowledging a bow, informed us that Saltash had “done as much as any one to win the war”; and, in examining Saltash’s guests, I felt that the same tribute could be paid to each. Wilmot Dean, representing a government of new men and new methods, was resting a flushed face on the bare shoulder of a beautiful and, I should imagine, wholly brainless mannequin. Lord Lingfield, whose inclusion in the cabinet shewed that ministers were not indifferent to rank and lineage, was deep in conversation with a Balkan millionaire who had been naturalized in time to become private secretary to the needy holder of a sinecure. And any one with attention to spare had it unpityingly claimed by Mr. ‘Blob’ Wister, who had won the war by purchasing papers for the government.
I did not know the rest. I did not greatly want to know them. If I had been asked who won the war, I should have named David O’Rane rather than Wilmot Dean, Lord Loring rather than Lord Lingfield. Saltash’s guests may have given body and soul to victory; but their material position was founded on the war. After fine winnowing, we had arrived—in these ‘new men’—at the governing class of the immediate future: borrowing the name from ‘Blob’ Wister, they called themselves “realists”, and the coalitions of 1915 and 1916 had certainly intrigued the “sentimentalist” in politics to his extinction. Peace was too welcome for me to complain if it had been ushered in by ministers with more ambition than scruple. An obsolescent administration may have needed business brains to fit it for war; a democratic country cannot ignore its press-man and publicity-agent; and the rich hangers-on of a government only prove that bricks cannot be made without straw. Of the men who had won the war I only felt what Bertrand expressed bluntly:
“They look as if they’d made a damned good thing out of it.”
“Seventeen-ninety-three, eighteen-fifteen,” I replied. “Nineteen-fourteen to nineteen-nineteen. We have changed our rulers.”
“It’s about all wehavechanged,” Bertrand rejoined.
Then we stood up as a waiter begged leave to push our table away from the dancing-floor. Sir Roger, unexpectedly on his feet, exhibited symptoms of impending oratory, which was checked, at the instigation of Wilmot Dean, by a well-directed crust of bread from the hand of the mannequin. The band, for the first time in several years, played the national anthems of all the allies. Our host ordered more champagne and then called for his bill. Sonia led off the dancing with Lord Lingfield; and I invented an excuse to go home to bed.
The streets round the hotel were too crowded for driving. I told my chauffeur to get home as best he could and walked with Bertrand into the quiet backwaters north of Piccadilly. At the door of Loring House we met my cousin Violet, who insisted on our going the rest of the way in her car.
“I’ve missed all the celebrations,” she told us. “I’ve been unveiling the memorial to Jim at Chepstow.”
“You’ve not missed very much,” I answered. “Are you satisfied with the memorial?”
“Yes. It’s only a medallion in the chapel; and you can only see it from the corner where I sit. I have . . . rather a horror of the war-memorials that are being put up everywhere.”
“They’re the easiest means of forgetting the dead with a good conscience,” Bertrand suggested.
“But not the only means,” I said, as a dishevelled vagrant steadied himself against the bonnet of the car and invited us to a confession of political faith.
Its form consisted of question and answer: “What’s the matter with Lloyd-George? ’E’s orl right! And what’s the matter with Winston? ’E’s orl right. What’s the matter with Beatty?” . . .
“That fellow is surprisingly like our friend Dainton,” said my uncle.